Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘she went on calling me “Vicky, Vicky” for months, and even encouraged me with all kinds of blandishments. But when I came to the point, she shrieked and wept—the sali, bahinchod!’

  ‘And in spite of that her father is making all this fuss!’ said Captain Partap Singh. ‘Sali! She-ass! Deceitful bitch! And the way she used to come here, dressed up like a doll!’

  ‘You mean like a gypsy,’ I said. ‘Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, rings in her ears and rings in her nose.’

  ‘The whore!’ said Partap Singh.

  ‘Chup raho, Captain Ooloo Singh!’ His Highness burst out in a rage, evidently because he considered that he alone was entitled to abuse her.

  And, for a moment, the pale wheat blonde of his face flushed a vivid pink, his large brown eyes spat fire, the nostrils of his aquiline nose trembled, the sleek, well-oiled hair fell on the lobes of his ears, the Adam’s apple of his long, syphon-like neck thrust forward. It seemed as if he would burst with rage. But the ADC retired and, as I brought the thermometer towards his mouth, he lay back docilely and smiled.

  While I waited for the mercury to register to the timing of my wrist-watch, Munshi Mithan Lal came in and, touching His Highness’s feet, began to fuss:

  ‘Oh Maharaj! You gave me such a fright! I didn’t know what to do! Where to look for you! Your hair is still wet. I hope you haven’t caught a chill. . . . It is all the fault of that bahinchod girl! . . .’

  His Highness was going to burst out again at the reference to the girl, but, as that would have meant chewing up the thermometer, he abstained from speaking, though he raised his torso impatiently. I immediately sat down on the bed and held him back. Then I turned to Munshi Mithan Lal and asked him to withdraw from the room till I could take the temperature without His Highness getting too excited. His Highness nodded approvingly. But, of course, Munshi Mithan Lal’s solicitude about his monarch was always prone to express itself through the servile ministerings of his lumpy hands rather than through any sensitiveness to the Maharaja’s moods. And he was not to be shifted now that he sat pressing His Highness’s feet.

  ‘You gave me such a fright, son,’ he continued. ‘I have had dyspepsia all the afternoon. You can ask Doctor Sahib if you don’t believe me. . . . And what are we to do about the authorities—the police and the Sarkar? . . . Mrs Russell has rung up Colonel Jevons of the Civil Hospital to come and see the girl. And the news will spread. Hai, what shall we do? Why did your Highness? But you are our mother-father—what right have we to say anything? . . .’

  I could see the blood mounting to His Highness’s face, and now I was really afraid for the thermometer. So I snatched it out of his mouth.

  ‘Has he got high fever?’ the Munshi asked, overshadowing me like a clawing bear.

  ‘Please go out, Munshiji!’ His Highness ordered.

  ‘Only a hundred point one,’ I said, speaking aloud to myself but so that the others could hear. Then I turned to His Highness and advised him to rest after he had taken a sleeping draught which I would send him by the bearer Bhagirath.

  ‘But what are we going to do about the authorities?’ Munshi Mithan Lal insisted. ‘I wonder if I should go down to see the Deputy Commissioner about removing the police from the bungalow.’

  ‘Munshiji,’ I said, ‘if the police want a statement from us we can give them one. As for the rest, I presume they have already got Bunti’s story.’

  At that instant, Captain Partap Singh came in and said:

  ‘Colonel Jevons Sahib is downstairs and wants to see a responsible person.’

  ‘Tell him to go to his mother’s!’ His Highness roared. ‘Who does he think he is! Sala! Monkey-face! Doesn’t he realize who I am? Ask him to get out of my house. . . . Get out! Get out! . . .’ And now he was hysterical, his voice rising to a shrill querulous height, his face livid and tense and contorted into an ugly expression, his lithe, bony body waving like that of a viper.

  We all rushed towards him, whispering hoarsely:

  ‘Highness! Highness!’

  He lay down frothing and struggling, his eyes looking upwards with a look which was distant and forbidding.

  ‘Arré, son, calm yourself!’ Munshi Mithan Lal begged him with joined hands, not realizing that his servility was only exasperating His Highness the more.

  ‘Come, come, Highness, you are a Rajput Surma Bahadur!’ Captain Partap Singh was saying. ‘Come, don’t you care for anyone?’

  I stood by the Maharaja’s bed for a moment. Then I was disgusted by the whole business and turned to go.

  ‘Oh, Hari, Hari, don’t go,’ His Highness cried in a voice that seemed to be woodenly artificial in its sentimentality. And then he uttered a weird rasping howl and began to weep, beating his head with his hands and burying his face in his bed-clothes and whimpering mawkishly and quoting a mixture of Hindustani and English lines: ‘Oh, Bunti, why have you dragged me into the dust? . . . Oh, I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden. . . .’

  ‘Highness, Highness, calm yourself!’ I almost shouted, as a certain hardness came over me at the sight of his desperate grovelling. ‘Calm yourself, otherwise I won’t be responsible for your health. . . . I will go and see Colonel Jevons. That may prevent him wanting to see you. But if he hears you, he might do anything—“certify” you or anything. . . . Now, please keep calm and go to sleep . . . I shall come and see you in a moment.’

  As I came down to the ground floor, Bhagirath, the bearer, and Badri Nath, the Brahmin cook, and the other servants stretched out their joined hands to me with a special servility, obviously eager to know the news and yet not daring to ask for it. I had been very embarrassed by their servility when I first joined His Highness’s service, but had later come to accept it as part of the ritual of the prince’s court, except when men seemed to crawl abjectly before the Maharaja or members of his entourage.

  The sub-inspector of police was still standing in the veranda of the ground-floor flat with his bevy of constables, and the atmosphere was charged with a greater sense of gravity than when I had come up the drive with Munshi Mithan Lal. The faces of the policemen, hard and mute with that disciplined brutishness which characterizes the Indian police, depressed me. It was as if they were saying to us: ‘You preened yourself on being members of the Maharaja of Sham Pur’s entourage and we had to salute you, but now your Maharaja’s fate itself is in jeopardy, and you must grovel before us.’

  As Colonel Jevons was still in Captain Russell’s flat, I had to wait about in the veranda. I felt small and self-conscious and forlorn when I came to a standstill by a carved wooden pillar. For, in spite of my deliberate cultivation for years of a feeling of self-respect, I could not help considering the police constables as superior beings. I suppose the first fears of childhood are indelible, and I can never forget having seen the swaggering state police of Sham Pur beat up a servant of our household for alleged stealing. In the present circumstance, my fear of the police was mixed up with a vague horror of having to meet Colonel Jevons in this awkward situation. For the fear of the Englishman on the minds of us Indians, ingrained through generations of kicks and pricks, is more obsessive than the fear of an Indian official. The Englishman in India had always remained, in his role as the superior white sahib, an unknown quantity. He was silent, remote, non-human, and his behaviour in any given situation was unpredictable, being inalienably mixed up with the hauteur of authority. Also, he was for so long the symbol of the unlimited power of the Sarkar. Besides, he possessed that incredibly anaemic complexion, which in the tropics exudes, at its pinkest, none of the mellow charm of the brown face with its tincture of the malenim pigment, but oozes instead, to the people of India, the strange, parched, dry-as-dust indifference of contempt as well as the uncanny touch-me-not of a leper’s wound, frightening in all its malignant potencies.

  I shook my head and looked out before me. The hollows above Annandale were clearing. The wisps of cloud and fog had lifted. And a soft breeze stirred the dark bou
ghs of the pines and deodars, across the rhododendrons and the other deciduous plants, above the mountain slopes towards Constitution Hill, aptly called the ‘Roof of the World’. The nullahs in the deep valleys and khuds seemed to rush down through little waterfalls towards the nether worlds of the plains, where the fires of hell would be raging on mid-summer days.

  The lovely fresh greenery ahead of me did not take my mind away from the anxiety about the consequences to all of us if Colonel Jevons found evidence of rape on Bunti Russell’s body. So I kept looking towards the dressing-room of Captain Russell, tensely waiting for the surgeon to emerge. I had not long to wait, however, before he came, his round face beaming with a smile while his almost Scandinavian blue eyes twinkled with a knowing mischievous look under the platinum blonde eyebrows, his heavy torso surprisingly agile over the stumpy legs, modelled into smartness with tall boots and breeches.

  ‘Mr Harry Shankar,’ he said cordially, shaking hands with me as he evidently recognized me from the time I had gone with His Highness to consult him a few days ago.

  ‘I am the doctor to His Highness of Sham Pur,’ I said just to confirm his recognition of me and to get over that first tense moment which I always feel in meeting people with whom I am not familiar.

  ‘How is Maharaja Sahib?’ Colonel Jevons asked me in a tone which was friendly but patronizing.

  ‘He is very good, sir,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think he is very good,’ Colonel Jevons said, leaning conspiratorially over to me and giving me a broad smile and a wink. I was in a panic now.

  ‘I meant . . . he is quite well, Colonel,’ I hurriedly put in. ‘He has a slight temperature and is suffering from exposure. Otherwise, he is all right.’

  ‘His Highness doesn’t seem to take much care of his health, does he?’ Jevons said with a pout. And he gave me another sly side-glance, before assuming a confidential manner. ‘Too much of this kind of thing,’ he continued, shaking his head to emphasize his words, ‘isn’t good for him, you know!’

  I surmised at once that ‘too much of this kind of thing’ referred to the Bunti Russell incident as well as the question of the constant love dreams that the Maharaja Sahib had been having and about which he had gone with me to consult Colonel Jevons recently. I wished the surgeon would put me out of my misery and tell me straightforwardly whether he had found evidence of rape on Miss Russell’s body or not.

  But before I could screw up courage enough to ask him he adjusted his stethoscope in the pocket of his jacket and began to walk towards the drive. I followed him disconcertedly.

  ‘Er, how much truth is there in these rumours about His Highness?’

  ‘There has been some difficulty,’ I said, ‘in his relations with the Tikyali Rani on account of the woman Ganga Dasi, who seems to have a hold on His Highness. . . . The Tikyali Rani has, I think, petitioned the States Department about herself and her son. . . .’

  After I had said this, I was torn between my sense of loyalty to His Highness and objective truth. So I began to rationalize the Maharaja’s role by invoking a comparison. ‘It is like the love of the Emperor Jehangir for Nur Jehan, Colonel Jevons. . . . His Highness is an intelligent man as maharajas go, but his development has been very uneven. And he seems to have an obsession about this woman. . . .’

  ‘Now, this Miss Russell,’ Colonel Jevons said. ‘Well, you know, this matter is serious. . . . Of course, I have found no evidence of rape, but there has been an attempt at penetration!’ And he pursed his lips, paled and stared straight ahead of him as if he was too embarrassed and angry to bring himself to speak about such things.

  I was immensely relieved that Colonel Jevons had found no evidence of rape. Immediately I felt easier and more assured.

  ‘Would you care to look at His Highness?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘I must rush away. . . . You say there is nothing much wrong with him. Give him my compliments. And . . . well, I know you will look after him.’

  This refusal of Colonel Jevons did not surprise me because, ostensibly, the incident about Bunti Russell had thrown him back on the defensive. The girl was, after all, possessed of a white skin, though she was a Eurasian. I was surprised that he was not tempted by the consultation fee, for he could have extorted any money he liked from His Highness, especially after this affair. But maybe he sacrificed the possible gain because he didn’t know how far Captain Russell would go in order to redress the wrong done to his daughter. I was sure, however, that when he expressed the wish for me to convey his compliments to His Highness, Colonel Jevons’s mouth must have watered with the lasciviousness he had displayed during His Highness’s consultation with him, for he had been very eager to listen to all about the private life of the Maharaja.

  ‘Rickshaw!’ Colonel Jevons called.

  But, before he had stepped into the beautiful vehicle, which the uniformed men-horses brought up from the drive, Mrs Russell could be heard shrieking:

  ‘Bunti dear! Bunti! Don’t be a silly girl!’

  And then she could be seen chasing her daughter up the wooden stairs towards the balcony.

  ‘Oh, Mummy, leave me alone, I want to see Vicky,’ the girl shrilled as she ran, her dark, almost Eton-crop hair glistening, her face with its regular, well-chiselled features lit up, as though through her adventure she had suddenly blossomed into a pink carnation.

  ‘Come back, Bunti! What will your father say?’ Mrs Russell cried.

  But the girl seemed to be unheeding.

  ‘Now then, Miss Russell,’ said Colonel Jevons, turning round from where he sat in his rickshaw. ‘Now then, this won’t do! . . . You are to obey your mother, young lady, and stay in bed. . . . Come on, then, down you come!’

  There was something very fatherly and peremptory in Colonel Jevons’s voice. The girl slipped back like a child, reluctant and yet hypnotically obedient to the paternal command.

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ said Colonel Jevons sternly, and looked away, his face red, his platinum eyebrows sharp like daggers, and his whole manner charged with confusion.

  The rickshaw coolies gave a call and began to heave the carriage up the drive.

  His Highness was pacing agitatedly around in his bedroom, dressed in a loose tunic and tehmet, when I came upstairs. He preferred this style of dress in bed to the English striped pyjama suit. His face seemed to be wrought by the high tension of his nerves, knit like a violin of which the strings are ready to burst. For a moment he ignored me, and only paced up and down the room more studiedly, the tremor of a smile on the corners of his mouth, which betrayed the histrionic nature of his wrath. I had often suspected that a great many of His Highness’s rages were deliberately assumed because of an innate exhibitionism, a strong desire to show off at all costs, though I should have thought that being a prince and a high personage and thus the centre of all interest he would have had no need to attract attention by his posturings. But Vicky was a complex personality, and it was only towards the end of my association with him that I succeeded to any extent in disentangling those elements in his nature which were deliberate play-acting from the neuroses which possessed him.

  ‘I am a naughty boy who ought to be whipped,’ he said, lifting his head towards me supplicatingly. But then, as though he had realized that he was losing his rigidity, he turned defiantly and snapped, ‘What did Jevons say?’

  I hadn’t even begun to answer when he continued:

  ‘Why did you go to see Jevons?’ And his face twisted as though he had just swallowed a bitter pill, like one of those which Colonel Jevons often prescribed to him. ‘What does he think? I could buy off twenty of these Jevonses if I cared to! . . . Only the other day he was hinting about an invitation to visit Sham Pur. He asked me how I proposed to spend the hunting season! . . . What do I care about what Jevons says? Where have they sprung up from, the sweepers of somewhere! . . . And what is their status anyhow? . . . My father never shook hands with these outcastes without gloves on. And even then he had a bath
in Ganges water afterwards. I am not afraid of him. . . . What did he say?’

  I knew that in spite of his assertions to the contrary he was afraid. Always, before the transfer of power from the British to Indian hands, His Highness had paid encomiums to the Britishers he met, and to the Angrezi Sarkar which was the paramount power, rather than abused them. He had spent pitcherfuls of money on giving lavish banquets to the Viceroy and the other English officials when they came to shoot in the hunter’s paradise which is Sham Pur. And he had loaded the various vicereines with presents of jewellery and precious stones; given gifts, in fact, to any Englishwoman with whom he came into contact. In his speeches he had always paid the conventional glowing tributes which the Indian princes were addicted to paying to their masters, though it is true that in private, when the Resident was hostile, or things did not go his own way, he had talked of the courage of Netaji Subhash Bose, the Rani of Jhansi and Raja Mahendra Pratap. After the transfer of power he leaned more and more towards nationalism, though his reluctance to accede to the Indian Union, in spite of Sardar Patel’s exhortations, showed that he preferred the British Paramountcy.

  I hesitated to answer his question. So he began again:

  ‘I didn’t like the bitch, anyhow! I don’t like these white girls.’ And he made a wry face. ‘They nauseate me with their silly talk. And they stink because they don’t bathe. That Bunti is a tomboy rather than a girl. Give me an Indian woman every time.’

  ‘I suppose because we can take advantage of our own women more easily,’ I put in.

  ‘Aji, you have been spoiled by Europe,’ His Highness said impatiently as he sometimes did when he was angry. ‘You know how much I respect my mother!’

  I wanted to add, ‘and how much you humiliate your wife, and how much you really despise your mistress Ganga Dasi.’ But I was afraid that the rage, which was directed against Englishmen and Englishwomen, might be turned against me if I dared to question his conduct in any way. So I held my tongue.