Rajmahal (36 page)

But the Ranji Talwar phase was to end soon too. The doctor would have looked after Surjeet Shona like a queen, and indulged Gurdeep in every way, but he was work-conditioned long before the liaison. The demands of the taxing and specialized world of medicine with its frequent travel for conferences and seminars snatched away the advantages of eminence, and a heart attack killed him within two years of Surjeet Shona's move. She wasn't yet forty, and a twice-married woman, once widowed, once divorced, isolated yet again.

“There's some accursed fate chasing me,” she wept at the funeral. Gurdeep was with her, and though she held on to him she worried at his stoical behavior. She was convinced the Rajmahal was her only faithful ally, her stability, and she went back, bereaved a second time, into its embrace. The house and the ghosts were overjoyed, but it was a dismal homecoming, and the charm of the Rajmahal failed to comfort Surjeet Shona this time around. Perversely, pictures of her life with the doctor kept interfering with her settling down and she was glad Gurdeep was out
of this circle of gloom in his boarding school. But he was soon to become a difficult teenager and his visits home were filled with fractiousness and fights with his mother.

It was Ali Mallik who convinced Surjeet Shona she should think of a change in the pattern. He knew of the difficulties with Gurdeep and saw Surjeet Shona wilting under the pressure.

“He misses a father,” she confided to him and Saira. “I was sure I could deal with the problem, but it's gone out of my hands.”

“We had the same kind of trouble with Mumtaz,” said Ali. “Although I was always here. Things normalized only when we sent him out to boarding school.”

“I didn't agree with Ali at first,” said Saira. “I thought Mumtaz was going through the usual teenage problems. But it was the right thing, wasn't it? The boy's turned out a darling.”

“But Gurdeep's already in boarding school, a good boarding school. I sent him there because he didn't get on with Neel. Now he says he detests the place and can't wait to get out. And he says he hates Calcutta and the Rajmahal too. Sometimes I think he hates
me
!”

“It's the hormones,” said Saira.

“You have a brother in the US,” persisted Ali. “ W hy don't you send him to school there. It might work. Try it out!” The ghosts could come to no conclusion about the wisest course of action, and in their usual manner kept arguing in circles, while the house watched with impatience.

Gurdeep accepted the new move well and the relief of his agreeing with her for once readily convinced Surjeet Shona. She hoped her sibling would play the missing father role, and her sister-in-law would have to make up for her absence. There was also a twosome of cousins.

The arrangement worked well and this compensated partly for Surjeet Shona's loneliness and nagging feeling of guilt. She threw herself into activity and joined a group busy reviving traditional skills among silk weavers in the state. In time, the projects she started expanded successfully and she became fully absorbed in her work, drawn to other areas of the country. Some of the journeys would bring back the Neel period, and the contrast, without the old excitement, depressed her. But there was nothing to be done for it, and her work was her compensation. She joined into the countrywide movement to keep traditional handicrafts alive and met powerful people involved in it. She became prominent in the field and was called to organize exhibitions and festivals abroad. Gurdeep continued to
flourish in the States, and graduated to university. Surjeet Shona visited him often. But she could sense the underlying instability on his India visits, especially when the old hostility flared up as the visits extended. She tried her best, mixing these visits with travels and gatherings of Gurdeep's age group. But it was a losing battle. The ghosts, who were getting more and more disembodied and increasingly disinterested in the far away Gurdeep, were finding him a bit of a nuisance.

Surjeet Shona's worst fears were realized some years later when the Punjab cataclysm loomed and she learned that Gurdeep, now in his late teens, was involving himself with a separatist-funding group in the US, in complete sympathy with the demand for a Sikh homeland.

“You don't understand, Ma,” he said arrogantly. “ You have the taint of Bengali blood. You should hear the stories of discrimination against us poor Sikhs, then you may think again! I tell you, Khalistan's the only answer!”

“What taint? You have my Bengali blood too!” Surjeet Shona shouted back, during stormy conversations on the phone. “What discrimination? What Khalistan?!”

“Have you heard the Sikh jokes?”

“The Sikh jokes? You take them seriously? They're only jokes! I'm also Sikh and we tell the same jokes. We are proud of our sense of humor!”

“If I hear one more time that twelve o'clock has struck I will kill someone with my own hands!” stormed the boy. “I tell you, Khalistan's the only answer!”

“Again Khalistan . . . !”

“I am what my Father was, Mother. I'm all Sikh! I'm ashamed of my Bengali blood! Have you forgotten the great Neel, your Bengali husband? Hindu bastard! And your other Hindu doctor!”

“Shut up! How dare you talk of them like that? Even if you didn't like Neel, Ranji was always so kind to you! I thought you liked him! And what is all this about Hindus?”

“They're all bastards I tell you!”

“How can you speak like that Gurdeep!” Surjeet Shona wept. “Think of me at least! I'm your mother! You are all I have! And have
you
forgotten your grandmother?” She could hardly believe what she was hearing.

After a short pause, Gurdeep banged down the phone. But Surjeet Shona couldn't accept this without a fight, and immediately called back. She calmed down to an extent when her brother spoke to her instead of
Gurdeep. “Leave him to me, SS. Remember we love him. The other kids are here too. We are doing our best.”

But she couldn't help fretting. “Is that same fate chasing my son too?” she worried.

 

When the Golden Temple was stormed and the bloodbath between militant Sikhs and the army turned the pool of nectar crimson, the tearing inside her astonished her. The Sikh ghosts were too agitated to see sense, and the other ghosts and the house could do nothing to calm them.

“I didn't know my Sikhness was so much in my gut! W hat's happening? What happened to Ma's side of things?” thought Surjeet Shona.

She couldn't stop the wrenching inside her, the feeling that the world was slipping away while the unperceived ghoul chortled and danced over a pool of blood. Visions flickered behind her eyelids when she slept and she woke up with starts, seeing Gurdeep sinking in that crimson pool with a
kirpan
in his raised hand. In a frenzy she booked a flight to New York, yet realized its futility even as she and Gurdeep continued their violent confrontation face to face. She came back after being assured by her brother that Gurdeep would get over it, but her crisis continued. She walked compulsively up and down the veranda with surges of revulsion going through her. Thoughts of the endless and ruthless militant killings preceding the excoriating attack in the Holy of Holies exploded inside her like her fists on the furniture and walls. Her mind went through reruns of her love life. “Doomed or disastrous,” she would moan. “Nothing in between!” Sometimes the inner violence would recede, and she would dwell on her Bengali family's history, on its
swadeshi
activity a century ago. Raja Sheetanath's involvement in setting up a National Bengali College, in organizing a
mela
for the sale of purely Indian goods, and the fiery speeches he made in the countryside to arouse the villagers of Bengal to their heritage. “How can I tear myself away from this fabulous history?” she would think. “How can I separate my Sikhness from my Hinduness or my Brahmo Bengaliness or my Indianness? How can Gurdeep lose all that to narrow himself down to only one of them?” She was split, like her name was split sometimes. “Split, reduced, downscaled,” she thought, to “Shona,” the Bengali component of her name by Neel, and “Surjeet,” the Punjabi component by Ranji Talwar, to “Shona-Baby” by the Bengali servants, and “Surjeet-
ji
” by the
bhaiji
. “What should I, as a hybrid, then do?” she had asked Petrov long ago. And he had answered, “Nothing, dear
child, nothing. You are an important manifestation of what will inevitably happen after a hundred years, when every Indian is a hybrid like you and all the cultures fade out, and the not-this-not-that hybrid shines out like an arc lamp!”

 

This was one of the few times the ghost of the great Sardar Bahadur came over to visit his “fifth rung,” dragged by Inderjeet Kaur.

“You have to come!” she implored. “I told you this mixing with Hindus would create trouble. As if she hasn't suffered enough already!”

“At that time you spoke of Bengalis, not Hindus. But yes, it is terrible what has been done to the Golden Temple and to us, shameful and terrible!”

“What she needs is a good loving caring Sikh husband!”

Inderjeet Kaur's ghost had forgotten her husband's version of “loving caring” for the moment.

They hovered anxiously over Surjeet Shona, trying their best to cast soothing emanations over her. After a time, the Sardar Bahadur's ghost was impatient to get back to the Golden Temple. It is a matter of patience and time! What is the point of our hanging on here? It will blow over.” And seeing Surjeet Shona calming down he managed to persuade his wife's ghost to go wafting back to Amritsar with him.

But scant months later, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination by her Sikh bodyguards, and the bloody reprisals against Sikhs in Delhi, even the Sardar Bahadur's ghost was disturbed.

“Are You Listening? Is this your blowing over?” said his violently agitated wife's ghost. “You call this a blowing over?”

Surjeet Shona was frantically worried about her parents, who were in Delhi. She took the first flight out to find them sheltering in a Sheetanath relative's house.

The ancestor-ghosts who had hurried to Delhi, subsided with relief. “And who is giving them shelter for the present, tell me. Tell me. W ho?”

“I agree it is the Bengali side . . . ”

“Not the Hindu side . . . ?”

“But ... ”

“But what? Aren't they also part of our Surjeet Shona's blood . . . ? Anyway, her father is there. What can you and I, poor ghosts do for the child compared to a good, strong living Ohri?”

Gurdeep broke all communication with his mother, and Surjeet Shona
had to get news of him through her brother. She heard that his soft young beard grew fiercer by the day, that he wore a saffron turban and attended Sikh gatherings with a
kirpan
slung over his shoulder, that he made heroic speeches. But she also found herself able to take stock.

Mumtaz Mallik was stationed in Delhi, and spending time with him and his wife, Lalitha, her old Rajmahal friends and with her parents, she could find her bearings again.

“Tell me,” she queried, “if it isn't better to have this richness of parts, this, this . . . ” She was trying to put into words her dread of losing even a bit of her heritage, and with it, her son.

Mumtaz interrupted her. “SS,” he said sympathetically. “Your Sikh side must be in agony. And your feelings as a mother. But in the end, we know, all of us hybrids or non-believers if you like . . . ”

“Non-believer in what?” interrupted Satinder, Surjeet Shona's father. “I belong to a single, strong culture, and I married outside it. But I am a believer in my religion after all, and the storming of the Temple is deeply hurtful to me . . . ”

“To me too,” said Surjeet Shona, surprising herself.

“Isn't that beside the point?” said her mother. “What my daughter is saying is so clear to me.”

“The richness, none of the threads of the weave that makes us up, none, should be lost!” said Mumtaz with vehemence. “Do you realize you are not only talking of us, more importantly, our children, but of our whole society . . . ”

“I remember Uncle Osheem saying that we hybrids were ‘not-this-not-that', but what you've said is just the opposite . . . ”

“Yes! We are both this and that! We are all of it!”

“And my son, my son, what do I do about
that
?” Surjeet Shona thought.

But this wasn't the only time they had such discussions, and Surjeet Shona felt if she hadn't been able to restore herself in the comfortable downy basket of this drawing room eclecticism, this active membership of the chattering classes, she could have lost her mind. “I have this tendency to go berserk,” she thought.

 

She would only later come across Petrov's extended jottings on his “hybrid” theory, his reverse-view on the “inevitable and total miscegenation” of the subcontinent.
The multifarious cultures will never lose their deep roots,
he wrote
now.
Though they may shift and change and even cheapen. This will mean a loss in another direction, that is all too clear. It will mean the continued acceptance of imbalances. If the sheltered fortresses of the communities are infiltrated, it will be seen that they are never irrevocably breached, even if trapdoors are forced open or drawbridges let down for a moment. In this country, the unique bastion of a thriving, kicking archaic religion, and by ‘archaic' I do not mean ‘out-dated' but ‘ancient, original,
adi'
, it is unlikely even with all the forces of uniformization, harmburgarization, and globalization that a weakening will take place. Only a few flashes, only a top dressing of hybrids, sometimes more, sometimes less, but never enough for a final mix-up . . . ”