Rajmahal (31 page)

“Soorjeet! Soorjeet! Soorjeet Sona!” chimed Martin mockingly in time with the evening bells of St. Paul's.

“Shona, not SSSSona. Look, it's easy, SSsurjeet Shshona! Go on! Try it!”

“Sona, the golden, Soorjeet, Conqueror of the Gods, Conqueror of the Sun! How does such a very feminine girl have such a manly name, Conqueror of the Gods, the Sun?”

“Sikhs do that,” said Surjeet Shona. “Sikh women are as brave as men! But go on, say it together . . . SSsurjeet Shshona . . . ”

“Shshsh, SSSSs,” tried Martin valiantly. “Ess Ess. That's what I'll call you,” he said firmly. “SS. Much simpler . . . ” Thus it was Martin who set the trend for Surjeet Shona's name form among Rajmahalians, the grandiloquent words shortened to a repeated letter of the alphabet.

In the heat of the car and in the midst of their laughter, Surjeet Shona could smell her fear again, and in the unbearable edge of excitement emanating from that fear, she put a hand on Martin's shoulder, the spontaneous outcome of their shared laughter, and felt him grip it and press it so hard to his chest she thought her fingers would snap. “This isn't the way to Firpo's,” she managed to say. The car rolled to a stop on an isolated road on the
maidan
and the answer never came, because Surjeet Shona responded without reserve, and mad with lust, she and Martin clung to each other, kissing and tearing at each other's clothes. Every time Martin uttered the incoherent words of love, he sounded to Surjeet Shona so very romantically British, like her favorite film stars, James Mason, Peter O'Toole, that they sent more shivers through her. For Martin too, this was his first time with an Indian woman, and he would live consciously within the pages of the
Kama Sutra
, which he had read in college. Restarting the engine frenziedly he swerved the car back on to the road.

“Where to?” choked Surjeet Shona, trembling and holding herself together.

“Somewhere,” said Martin, continuing to caress her through her clothes with his free arm. “Not Firpo's.”

Eventually, with the car skidding to each embrace as if they were in an obstacle-strewn tunnel of love, they drove through an open gate. It was almost dark and stumbling out Martin pulled Surjeet Shona into an old musty smelling house through a door which opened magically to a key produced by him. Behind the closed door and in that semidarkness, just
as Surjeet Shona had done with Guru countless times, she and Martin fell on each other hungrily till every shred of clothing was off and they were wildly copulating.

Martin's excitement mounted when he realized the shamelessness of this Indian girl. Had he not been told again and again, both that Indian women were overwhelmingly prudish and that one must at all times be circumspect with them?

Surjeet Shona could sense Martin's astonishment. She felt again the fear which had receded temporarily in the heat of their encounter. Inside her, it was spreading its poison and she knew her frank submission would in some way turn him away. She was sure his excitement was mainly due to new lust.

They writhed their way into a large room and onto a dustcloth covered sofa. Martin struck a match revealing a romantically translucent curtain of cobwebs and looked fully at Surjeet Shona, caressing her, making her shiver in the heat and arousing her again. He was convinced this was the belle of the
Kama Sutra
come alive for him. She lay there in front of him, naked, the exotic, oriental, female principal representing the primal yoni, with him the primal lingam ever the lord of universal desire. While he went through the rites of passion his academic mind waited to find out if Surjeet Shona was not the type of the highly accomplished
Kama Sutra
courtesan. With this trysting place available to them, the two continued their meetings, but Martin kept doubly busy checking back on classical references, visiting the treasure trove of the Asiatic Society on the corner of Park Street, or the National Library at the old Viceregal Palace, trying to ferret out paintings, poetics, and ideals of erotic Indian womanhood. Was their supposed prudery merely a thin veneer covering a depthless erotic fervor? he excitedly ferreted. And ever a reductionist ad absurdum, he sought out the red light area. But when he drove through the narrow lanes of Shonagachi, “Shona again,” he thought, “Ah, delicious gold!” he found himself retreating from the beckoning pimps and painted prostitutes, fearful of a repugnant lack of hygiene. “Karaya Lane wouldn't have been like this,” he thought as he cruised along. “Surely not!” He had read of the gardens and bungalows of Karaya lane and its now vanished ladies, who had come from Singapore, Hong Kong, French Indochina, “and add Russia,” Petrov could have told him. Here, in Shonagachi, Martin was certain the local ladies would pass on the very worst types of venereal disease, little
realizing that, decades earlier, Petrov had contracted an infection passed on by a Russian “aristocrat” from a superior Karaya Lane establishment, and had to undertake a humiliating cure.

 

In the meantime, this was a crazed period Surjeet Shona and Martin went through, with all the signs of a great love affair, yet fatally marred by Surjeet Shona's fear. And she wondered briefly that first time, at the bizarre fact that Martin's scent was already there on the dust cover of the sofa on which they lay. The next time, and later, she would forget this fact, thus canceling the cautionary effect it might have had, yet underlining her fear.

The Rajmahal knew of these goings-on, easily given away when Martin's hand wandered over Surjeet Shona at brief meetings, or when they whispered about the next tryst, or when others, including the servants, gossiped about them. It allowed the ghosts some inklings too, trying to inure them, to allow Surjeet Shona her freedom without interfering emanations. It was not this which troubled the house, but the sensing of a rival. Where were the lovers trysting, within the walls of what house? It sometimes heard the whisperings between them about “the house on Ronaldshay Road.” But where was Ronaldshay Road, and what other house could be worthy of this conjunction of the Rajmahal's pedigreed inhabitants? It wasn't to know the house on Ronaldshay Road belonged simply to friends who had left the keys with the Stracheys, and Martin had used it before for the same purpose.

Nothing could stop the blinding affair between Jack and Myrna Strachey's son Martin, and Surjeet Shona, direct descendant of the Sardar Bahadur and Raja Sheetanath. Their frenzy would reach new heights each time they betrayed the Rajmahal by using the Ronaldshay Road house. And forgetting the original, Martin and Surjeet Shona invented their own
Kama Sutra
, sometimes twisting an ankle and pulling a hamstring, as they knotted themselves into intricate configurations. It was magic for them, any thought of any moment of which would make Surjeet Shona's breasts overflow, so that little Gurdeep never wanted for his mother's milk and would grow into a buxom lad with no pretensions to spirituality. They were completely unaware that from the very first night, the gardener and his entire family who lived in the outhouses of the Ronaldshay Road house and guarded it, would desperately batten on the windows, peering into the gloom and trying to figure out the activities of Martin and his latest paramour. Surjeet Shona knew she was inviting outrage by her scandalous
behavior, but she didn't waste time agonizing over it. Even when her mother threatened to come back after hearing rumors.

 

There was controversy over the affair between the Rajmahal and its ghosts. The Rajmahal favored an unconditional happiness for its inhabitants, without too much interference by tradition. Most of the ghosts, on the other hand, belonged to the most hidebound vintage of that tradition.

“It's shocking, a disgrace!” they whispered. “She's not observing the smallest of the requirements, just look at her!”

“It's the Sikh business, the crossing with Sikh blood,” sniffed Raja Sheetanath's mother's ghost. “Didn't I tell you?”

Though they recognized that Surjeet Shona was half Sikh and therefore not expected to rise to
full
Bengali refinements, they expected at least some circumspection in her situation. But they shut up when they felt the constricting disapproval of the Rajmahal. “Hushshsh!” the Rajmahal seemed to scold. “How can you be so prudish when she has gone through such pain?”

When the Sardar Bahadur's wife, Inderjeet Kaur's ghost sometimes drifted over from Amritsar to see how “Fifth Rung” was doing, the house ghosts would simmer down. The Sardar Bahadur was too remote an ancestor to try to understand a modern woman, but Inderjeet Kaur's ghost urged Surjeet Shona to be happy and live her life without reservation. The late widow couldn't forgive herself for her useless fidelity to the Sardar Bahadur.

 

It was a middle-aged man, Proshanto Mojumdar, who precipitated the dousing of the fire of that lust. The Mojumdars, who lived just above her apartment, had known Surjeet Shona from her childhood, when they had voyaged aboard the same liner to Europe. Surjeet Shona was struck by a feeling of recall when she saw the mirrored bedroom of the Mojumdars' apartment. “It looks so familiar,” she said. “I think I saw something like it in a film, or...

“It was the
Hong Kong
, my dear,” said Mohini Mojumdar. “The lounge of the
Hong Kong
. Don't you remember? That's why we chose this apartment, wasn't it Pro?”

Proshanto Mojumdar remembered perfectly their honeymoon on board the
Hong Kong
. But at the moment, he didn't want to dwell on unpromising marital mementos in front of the young beauty. His face had
taken on the bright yet foolish expression easily recognized by his wife. Proshanto's idea, “brilliant only to himself,” thought Mohini, was to invite all the younger generation of the Rajmahal to a lengthy entertainment lasting the whole day. “Everyone's here,” he said. “All the young people are visiting the Rajmahal. They must be bored.”

 

But as Surjeet Shona grew more engrossed in herself and her biological processes, Proshanto Mojumdar fell out of infatuation with her. After her delivery, the temporary loosening of her figure and the imagined aroma of milk militated against his sensibilities, the opposite reaction to Martin's. The outing was shelved. But some time later Proshanto was feverishly involved in organizing a river picnic. “There's that English girl. A fetching girl, most fetching. She must be bored . . . ” He was referring to Antonia, the current girlfriend of the landlord's middle son, Mumtaz Mallik.

“He's off again,” thought Mohini Mojumdar.

Proshanto had stylish invitation cards engraved. “Mr. and Mrs. Proshanto Kumar Mojumdar have the pleasure of inviting x to a riverine excursion and lunch on board the
Brahmaputra
, followed by dinner and dancing at the 300 Club, 10:30 a.m. at Prinsep Ghat, Sunday . . . ”

The guests showed a concerted social zealotry in the outing. While caviar on thin rounds of buttered bread was served on silver platters, Arnie Aratoon mixed genteel Pim's Number one, its pale amber lightened with lemonade and decorated with delectable slices of orange and mint leaves, pastel colors bobbing with ice and elegance. As the
Brahmaputra
moved onto the broader stretches of the Hooghly, Antonia was seen with Martin, kissing behind a capstan. It was a kiss which achieved an undeserved resonance, because the
Brahmaputra
couldn't provide it privacy. Surjeet Shona stumbled on them while evading the especially tipsy Arny Aratoon, with Proshanto Mojumdar in bleeding Madras shorts bringing up the rear. She felt stabs of a nightmare at being forced to view so closely that sensual betrayal, and the triumphant gleam of Antonia's green eyes framed in satanic red hair. This was followed by confusion when she faced Martin's shrugs and innocent wide-eyed look. Mumtaz, up on the bridge, would have had the clearest view of his girlfriend's brazenness. He watched the romantic, erotic group breaking up to disperse on the main deck, while Martin's mother, Myrna Strachey, lay blissfully at peace, in scanty white shorts and pink halter top, sunning herself on a deck chair. And then they
watched a passing barge piled high with bales of jute with its men standing up tall to get a better view of the naked mem. Mumtaz came down and joined Surjeet Shona, both tight faced. But Antonia was made of stern stuff, her giggling and flirting creating a frivolous whirlwind around the permissive Martin. The saving moment came at the end as they were steaming back, and the sun was about to set. The party was assembled on the main deck, and Mohini and Proshanto Mojumdar spontaneously began to sing. They sang an asexual Tagore song about sentiments deeply embedded in Bengal's country and river life.

Proshanto was looking at Mohini's glowing face with such admiration, and both were singing in such mellifluous cadences as if they had always been meant to sing together, that the earlier farcical happenings seemed inconceivable.

Most couldn't understand the words but the folk tune and lilt were catchy and sad at the same time. Tears came to Maudie Jessop, then a willowy wispy forty-five, Myrna Strachey stopped adjusting her halter neck, Petrov was composed in the lotus posture with his eyes closed, and the others were humming and tapping their feet. Arny Aratoon, wearing his riding
gear out of sheer force of habit, leaned forward over his jodhpured knees to hide his emotions, though everyone could see his bald head turning red in sharp contrast to his very white fringe of hair.