Rajmahal (23 page)

“What are you afraid of?” says Petrov gently, settling down cross-legged on his divan. “Come on, dear. We all go into that unknown space. And even,” he smiles so very kindly that a halo seems to surround his beatifically pale head, like a modern-day Choitonyo. “Even if our old friend Yama, with his noose and his net and his hook, the Lord of Death, finally gathers me to him followed by that beautiful and necessary bird,
you
will continue for the present . . . I have nothing to teach you. You have had the solution always. And with that solution fear has no place.”

Surjeet Shona prepares herself for something momentous. It has to be momentous, with the sky gently glowing pale aqua among gray and white clouds, with the vultures draping the raintree in increasing numbers as they swish noisily and gracefully about their legitimate work.

After Petrov is helped to lie down, he says, “I must sleep.”

Surjeet Shona speaks out strongly to Robi. “Your
shaheb
has to go. Allow him! It is you who are holding him back!” She is angry. “Let him go, Robi! He's old! Let go!”

“Tomorrow, Shona baby. Tomorrow itself, in the morning, I will see to the lowering of Osheem
shaheb
to his own proper abode, where he will end his life's earned span in dignity.”

Robi feels very strongly that exposure to the open sky lays one bare to its birds and insects and naturally thrown up marauders. They stay at bay only if one is protected by four walls and a roof. The vulnerability of his early village years, where the air burned and shimmered and spat at them, destroying their homes, their crops and taking away their livelihood could only be combated by well-being, wealth, and the armor of a good house. He has made a connection between the extreme age of his
shaheb
and the outsized beak of the vulture and he is deadly afraid.

The Rajmahal too is disturbed by its emptying premises, apartments imbued with the scent of stale incense and decayed flowers. It imagines the pillars of its verandas cracking up and sprouting rooted weeds, providing no protection against the vultures, and it longs for the invulnerability of its youth here on the roof, where there are not even the fragile
chiks
of the lower verandas.

Robi rolls the portable shelter over his Osheem
shaheb
and lies down next to him with a protective arm about him.

“No vulture,” he says to his wife who watches shivering with superstitious fear from her room, as do other roof-dwellers, “No vulture will be allowed to get near
shaheb
as long as he lives!”

 

Just as it is dawning, a piercing chorus of cries and moans from the roof, followed by a drumming sound above his head, wake Junior up.

“What the hell!” he curses. “Tea, tea!” he calls as if any servant will be on duty at this hour.

Petrov has disappeared, vanished.

“That's it. He just vanished. Hey
bhogoban
, oh God,
Hori-bole, Hori-bole, Hori-bole
. . . ”

That drumming and chorus were caused by the servants calling and running back and forth, a frightened flock not knowing which way to turn, only some brave enough to peek over the balcony. Certain of discovering the white, slight body of Petrov
shaheb
lying smashed on the ground below. But Petrov is nowhere to be seen. Not even later and through the day. With Junior and the police swarming about, searching every room and cranny, to the insides of the four water tanks hoisted on platforms at each corner of the roof, and in each and every apartment of the Rajmahal, the garages, the garden, the godowns.

“I told you!” mutters a furious Junior to Robi, “I told you something ghastly would happen.”

“Take it easy, Junior,” says Surjeet Shona. “Don't excite yourself. Remember your blood pressure.”

But Junior isn't listening. Seeing Robi swaying back and forth on his haunches with his head in his hands he dances with fury, “Bloody fucking idiot!” he shouts. And Robi sways even more frantically and beats at his forehead with his palms.

“Yes,” says Surjeet Shona clearly, looking out at the raintree, mysteriously divested of its vultures. “What is the need for them any more? He's gone, the ephemerally light Uncle Osheem, a mere snack for them, returned to dust, to ether, to the elements . . . Does it matter how?”

The Rajmahal is getting lonely, one of its floors echoing emptily and its ghost population vanished. It isn't just the ghosts of the tenants who died after the lemming-rush begun by Myrna and Jack Strachey, Rover the dog, Mohini and Proshanto Mojumdar, and Reema Devi and Petrov. They are
not the only ghost-deserters, as the mansion glooms. The other ghosts have left too, in a startling whoosh with Anatoly Sergeivich “Osheem” Petrov.

 

It had taken the brief time of abandonment by Robi, when he went on that automatic necessity of a call of nature, for Petrov's heart to stop beating. For the waiting vultures to swoop, unseen, silent in the dawn dimness, on his carcass. And as they carried on with their pecking and prizing open of his body with their fearsome beaks, squabbling and snatching at it, the body lifted up and down in its extreme feathery brittle lightness, tossed up and down between vulture rushes.

Jarred awake by the agitated Rajmahal, the sleeping ghosts were made to instantly manifest above the roof to start a spirited fight for Petrov's body.

“Why did Osheem become so harsh in the end?” the ghosts asked.

“These Westerners are like that,” the
swadeshi
ghost shouted. “Where do they have our tenderness? Did Reema Devi have a chance?”

“As if our men are kind to their wives . . . ”

“Don't they take all the rights and powers to themselves . . . ?”

“Yes, yes, that's enough!” one of the few sober ghosts said. “Reema Devi had to leave, just as she had to die on the fateful day of Osheem's ascension!”

In the sudden vacuum caused by the ghosts' challenge, a wind swirled up and Petrov's carcass lifted higher and higher with the vultures' beaks and flapping wings. Astonished, the birds transferred to an air squabble over the remains, wafting up and up in swirls of warm air with the body till they reached impossible heights away above city lights. The ghosts swarmed with the vultures, and chasing and swooping, this macabre host raced above the Hooghly toward its confluence with the unending ocean. And there, where the many-headed Ganga lay dynamically sprawled, its mouths fanged with mangrove and crocodile, the vultures succumbed to their gibbering-prodding pursuers, and finally lost hold of their prize. So Petrov had the grandest end of all, with air and river and sea for his interment, the ghosts cushioning his fall, letting him gently down into the Goddess's multiple maw.

Having come so far and seen such wondrous expanses and the scope of the silver-gold glittering universe, who could hold those ghosts back? The fear of the unknown which had confined them to the Rajmahal and their pasts, dissolved, and swift and eager at last they disappeared in currents of changing air.

WHEN POLO-WIDOW MAUDIE JESSOP MOVED IN WITH HER BROTHER David Norman, the Rajmahal was neither pleased nor dismayed. Uneasy, it was uneasy about the widow who spent so much of her time prettifying herself yet with a clothes pin on her tongue. The house was sorry for her, recognizing the incipient weakness in her will, knowing in its bricks she would take to drink and be quickly seduced, both possible during one of the Norman's rambunctious parties. Too much drama around any inhabitant disturbed the house.

Maudie's husband Anthony Jessop was a member of the Indian Police. While on district postings, they visited the Rajmahal often. Maudie would then replenish her wardrobe at “Right Away and Paid For,” Whiteaway and Laidlaw's alias, or Hall and Anderson, or the New Market, and bask in the warmth of her brother's household and ready parties. Her arrival was an excuse for these parties. Maudie didn't unpin her tongue to blossom into the belle of the ball but she relished dancing and picking out tunes on the piano. The traditional Anglo-Indian fare lasted as long as their generation. Meats, curries, wines, cakes and confectioneries of which Maudie was the specialist in the rosy cocade, a rose-shaped candy finished in a dip of boiling syrup. They belonged to the top end of Calcutta society, accepted by British as well as native circles. Most Anglo-Indians would be shocked to hear themselves branded by the pejorative “native,” but that, as recognized by an outstanding member of their community who led them well into Independent India, was what they were. Even if the leader didn't use the despised word itself, he recognized his community as Indian, first and last, whatever their color. Some of the community understood this, keener on adjusting to their difficult place in India than flaunting a superiority based on unreliable British patronage. Or claiming
as their own an unknown, unseen country. The Jessops recognized this, and with Anthony's successes in the Indian Police, stayed on without question. The first body blow to Maudie's sense of a perfect life was her only child Eric's death, when he was barely an adult. Independence had come and receded and Anthony's climb in the police continued. But Eric hankered for the glamour of foreign lands. He, like many fellow students, and as expounded by Petrov in his diary passage on post-independent India, was sure Valhalla could exist nowhere but in the West. India held little immediate attraction. While some of his wealthy friends, mostly fully Indian, could afford a university education in England the rest stayed back, giving vent to their frustration through verbal tirades. But they stabilized in a few years. Those who became leftists and held lasting convictions, and that wasn't just a pose but a solemn matter in Calcutta, entered into the violent politics of the state. The Jessops could afford to send Eric abroad too, but he couldn't pass the entrance exams. Stuck in Calcutta, he tingled with sensitivity at what he imagined was his friends' scorn toward Anglo-Indians. He decided to become a deck hand and head ostentatiously East, not West. This was his shallow defiance when all he wanted was to end down in Australia, the Eastern West. After exploring the non-Anglo-Saxon countries on the way, he planned to integrate with help from his cousins in Perth whose address he surreptitiously copied from his parents' address book. He succeeded in the first part of his plan. But this time class became his enemy, and when the other ship hands discovered this sahib in their midst, they took to taunting him without mercy. He acquired a hard veneer and built up a reputation as a debauch in the exotic ports at which his ship docked, including Colombo, Rangoon, Chittagong, Arracan, and Penang. Maudie and Anthony's worried attempts to keep contact through the ship's wireless, with letters waiting at the ports, and through the BISN Co. on whose ship, the
Clan McBride
, he was sailing, only fueled his mates' taunts. Finally, at one of the ports, Eric, a handsome, strong boy with light coloring and honey blonde hair, got into a brawl with a sailor over a flattered prostitute, both were drunk, and Eric ended up with a knife in his heart. The knife reached all the way to Calcutta deep into Maudie and Anthony's hearts, and the ultimate knife-thrust for Maudie was Anthony's death.

Anthony was fascinated by cars. The morning of his death, he gave Maudie a driving lesson on “Lover's Lane,” the wide, quiet road skirting the race course and polo ground. They were using the Pram, an Austin 7
which Anthony cherished for its vintage value. Both knew Maudie would never be able to drive and the
Pram
was just a safe toy. Its playroom status had struck Anthony when, as a child, he sometimes saw another Calcutta
Pram
driving by with chauffeur and owner squeezed into the constricted front seat, two uniformed orderlies squeezed on the back seat, and a brace of mounted police toweringly clip-clopping alongside. This playroom-toy-soldier image went with the exaggerated trappings of the British Empire as it lost its sense of reality. It was also in direct contrast to the other Pram he had seen in the Bengali area of town. A pliable bamboo arched over the passengers, dangling a lantern in front in lieu of the broken headlights. Anthony's stable of cars, which included an Armstrong-Siddeley, a Humber and a Regal, names forgotten in the Calcutta of his last days, had been emptied and the Pram was all that remained, apart from a Hindustan 14, the ancestor of the Ambassador. That day, the Pram nearly brought about Anthony's doom.

“Fate was after him. Look at the narrow shave he had just seconds before the polo game!” people said.

Maudie found herself grappling with a jammed steering wheel, and in her panic made the clichéd mistake of putting her foot down hard on the accelerator instead of the brake. Anthony's side of the Pram crashed into a tree and a sharp broken branch just missed spearing his forehead.