Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  The inner glow in me subsided as soon as we were in the hall, because His Highness, tense and preoccupied as he was, began to shout at the retainers to clear out of his way until one of them out of sheer fright fell across the head of a tiger skin which lay near the entrance. I was always aware of the influence of the jungle in this atmosphere, because of the silly association of ideas which the many tiger skins and the other trophies of the hunt, that hung from the walls or lay about on the floors, started in my mind, evasive and impalpable and yet strong enough to confuse me with unknown fears. And this confusion was worse confounded by the irritations set up through my awareness of an incongruous array of mechanical birds which used once to twitter when they were wound up but now stood in two large cages in the veranda, silent because their inner springs had broken, mocking at the droves of beautiful green parrots which flew from tree to tree, shrieking their song across the ochre-coloured buildings. We had fallen with a bang from the heights of Himalayan splendour to the sordid modernity of the bazaar, filled with cheap American gadgets.

  As we entered the hall, we were aware of a presence which could neither be seen nor heard, but whose impress could be felt in the shifting, anxious eyes of the retainers. Then two female attendants darted in, their faces covered with their dupattas, and fell down and touched the feet of His Highness.

  ‘Maharani Sahiba,’ they whispered, and pointed in the direction of the living-room.

  We realized that His Highness’s mistress, Ganga Dasi, was waiting for him. Although she was not a maharani, she was styled as such under orders given by His Highness two years ago when she had made scenes in order to achieve this recognition. Anyhow, the other two maharanis, as well as the Queen Mother, known as Raj Mata, lived in the old Fort Palace of Sham Pur, three miles away. So it could be no other than Ganga Dasi. We discreetly withdrew to our various suites.

  As I passed by the living-room, I caught a glimpse of Ganga Dasi through the slightly drawn curtains. She was dressed in a muslin kurta and salwar, according to the Punjabi style which had become fashionable, with her dupatta thrown carelessly across her neck over the shoulders. And her vivid, small wheat-blonde face, with the high cheek-bones, shone with good health, though there was an anxious glint in her heavy-browed big eyes, which, in the flashing moment of my vision, seemed to suggest the usual hysteria which I associated with her. She averted her face from me coyly, though she did not keep purdah before me. And, as I passed by another door on my way to the left wing of the palace, I saw her withdrawing towards the mirror over the magnificent carved dresser on which stood personal photographs of His Highness, his family and his friends.

  About half an hour later, while I was in my bath, Jai Singh, the chief chowkidar of the palace, came and knocked at the door.

  ‘Maharaj has called you urgently,’ he said.

  I was irritated at the summons and yet, if the truth be spoken, I glowed within me with excitement at the thought that he depended so much on me. Immediately beneath this reflection there was an inordinate curiosity welling up in me about how the drama of His Highness’s life, which had suddenly come to a head in Simla, would develop.

  ‘Acha, I am coming,’ I answered. And I hurriedly lifted myself from the comfort of the lukewarm water in the beautiful green-coloured Roman bath and turned on the cold shower. The gentle rain from the jet soothed my spirit, till I felt calm enough for any disaster.

  I dressed in an embroidered muslin kurta and baggy, long-cloth pyjamas, several pairs of which His Highness had brought me from Lucknow, and which Francis, my bearer, had put out for me. And I proceeded towards the Maharaja’s suite, taking my own time about it.

  ‘My life is lapsing and you indulge in blandishments!’ His Highness repeated a hackneyed Hindustani phrase to see me come ambling along.

  As I entered, I heard a significant cough from behind the curtain which separated the bedroom from the drawing-room. I instinctively lifted my eyes towards the curtain, and saw a pair of eyes peeping through the slits. Ordinarily, Ganga Dasi did not keep purdah from me, but I realized that she might want to envelop her new quarrel with His Highness with secrecy, although she knew that I knew everything about the Maharaja’s past and present life, that I was his special confidant.

  ‘I told you I am a rat in a hole,’ His Highness said, deliberately. ‘Well, I am a rat in a hole!’

  His face was flushed and though he had cast off his serge jacket and his necktie he still had his warm trousers on.

  Before I could make a comment, Ganga Dasi’s black, middle-aged maidservant, Rupa, entered and, joining hands with His Highness, said:

  ‘Maharaj, you are wanted inside.’

  ‘I think I am in the way,’ I said.

  ‘Nahin, you wait and take my temperature,’ His Highness said. And he waved Rupa aside with a flourish of his hand, saying, ‘I shall come in a while.’

  I took the thermometer from among the pens and pencils on His Highness’s table and began to attend to him.

  There was now a furious rustling behind the curtains, whispers, then one or two more coughs. Now my nerves, too, were on edge, because I felt that I would be courting Ganga Dasi’s displeasure if I did not clear out at once.

  ‘Vicky, come inside, I want to talk to you,’ Ganga Dasi said in a stern, hurt voice, emerging from behind the curtain. Her round face was livid with rage and the heavy eyebrows above her green eyes were twisted into a frown, exaggerated in its severity by the straight, black hair which lay tightly plastered on the two sides of her forehead.

  His Highness kept his face averted.

  ‘Victor,’ I said, ‘they want you inside.’

  The whole situation seemed to have come to boiling point in him. ‘Get out. Go away, Gangi!’ he shouted as he turned towards Ganga Dasi. ‘Get out!. . .’

  ‘Acha!’ she snarled, her face twitching with fury at this insult. And she rushed out, her whole body quivering with impatience and chagrin.

  ‘Highness, you are tired and should rest,’ I said sheepishly.

  I took his hand in mine to soothe him and muttered in my embarrassment:

  ‘Your temperature is normal, but you should calm down and rest.’ ‘The bitch!’ he shouted. ‘After having encouraged me to go to other bitches, she is—’

  ‘Highness! Highness!’ I whispered.

  But he was shaking with anger and weakness, his face torn with the contrary emotions which seemed to go through him; the anger he felt and the fear of the consequences of defying his mistress.

  I turned to go almost on tiptoes, hoping that my absence would make him retrace his steps towards the bedroom.

  ‘Don’t go, Hari,’ he implored even as he sank into an armchair, and sat holding his forehead in his hands. ‘Please wait, I want to talk to you.’

  During this talk His Highness admitted me more deeply into the orbit of his private life with Ganga Dasi than he had ever done before. As, however, most of what he said confirmed the vague guesses that I had made about his association with the Brahmin woman, I listened with sympathy. Of course, he was finding it difficult to begin. His head hung down and his lower lip trembled a little before he could muster the courage to take me into confidence. So I tried to make it easier for him by making a beginning myself:

  ‘Why do you feel so attached to her, Vicky?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered, his face assuming a grimace. And he writhed silently for a while. Then he said: ‘Somehow she is bound up with my entrails. . . . I suppose it is sex. . . . And she was very devoted to me at times. It is awful, but my heart drums to think of her past lovers.’

  ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘It might be jealousy, but I long for her when she is not there.’

  ‘What does she want now?’

  ‘Oh, nothing new. She wants to marry me and get her son recognized as Tika and heir to the gaddi.’ He said this with sighing whispers. ‘And she wants me more completely in her grip without promising that—’

  He couldn’t go on, an
d I understood what he was referring to, though my curiosity about her past was aroused and I probed him:

  ‘You seem to know all her subterfuges.’

  Victor got up from the settee and walked towards the bedroom door to see if Gangi was eavesdropping. He adopted a casual gait as he did this. He did not want to arouse the suspicion that he was spying on her in case she should be inside. But he came back in a moment, moving his head to signify satisfaction.

  ‘She is a consummate actress!’ he said as he began to walk to and from the bedroom door.

  ‘I don’t think that she is deliberate,’ I ventured. I wanted to say that I did not think she had a mind with which she could contrive designs to serve her diabolical genius. For she had seemed to me neither devilish nor angelic, but just a bundle of ill-assorted nerves, impulses and fancies bound up into a knot, as is the peasant woman’s bundle, the knot being symbolic of the sharp, instinctive sense of mastery she had of all situations.

  ‘You are nearly right, Dr Shankar,’ Victor said. ‘She is without design, except that she has always had an instinct for getting her way. She pretends to be a child, wanting protection, but she knows what she wants. She is clever. . . .’

  ‘That is the way with some women who preserve their “babyness” to get what they want,’ I said. ‘But, apart from her put-on helpless girlishness, she has charm.’

  I was afraid that the tone of irreverence in my voice might annoy him. But he must have been feeling very bitter that day. For he burst out and said the most intimate things about his relations with her.

  ‘The bitch!’ he exclaimed. ‘She comes to me with so many love words, shrieks and hisses that I—well, I like to sleep with her, you see! And she has got me. . . . I am trapped, I tell you, I am like a rat in a hole! . . . Sometimes she is so wonderful. And yet for periods she drifts away from me and is quite separate, and I feel she is not with me, though she is living in the same house with me. You see, she wants other men. Even while I am having her, she is often telling me of the sexual feats of my cousin Raghbir Singh or someone else. She has never been satiated, although she has had so many men.’

  After saying this he peeped into the bedroom again to make sure that we were still alone.

  ‘I think she will not come here now,’ I said to assure him. ‘She must have taken umbrage and gone into the “dark room” to sulk.’

  ‘There will be hell to pay, I know.’

  ‘Where did you pick her up?’

  ‘Oh, she comes from Hoshiarpur district. Her father was a priest in the 41st Dogras Regiment and her mother a whore. Pandit Piara Lal, the father, lived mostly in the Frontier with his regiment and could not take his wife and daughter to the cantonments with him. And he suspected his wife. He used to beat her up when he came home on furlough. . . . Gangi told me she liked her father, because he brought her fruit and clothes when he came, but began to be frightened of his voice when she heard him shouting at her mother. As the whole village knew that her mother was a prostitute, and the children teased her, she became attached to her mother, did not play with the children and wandered about alone. And several of the village herdsmen had her in the hills before she was fourteen. And then she became addicted to self-abuse and pleasure and matured beyond her years.’

  I could understand the pattern. Gangi must have been torn between the fascination for her father, the hero, and abhorrence for him, the tyrant. And perhaps each man in her later career came to symbolize these two aspects of Pandit Piara Lal.

  ‘In spite of the relations she had with men,’ continued Victor, ‘she is a very lonely person, unhappy at heart and very frightened of what the world would say. She is secretive. Also, she tells lies as easily as most people tell the truth.’

  I could imagine that she had always had to turn in upon herself and indulge in dreams and fantasies.

  ‘There is something private I can’t tell you,’ Victor said with effort, ‘but she is not normal in sex—she abuses her body and also—’

  I did not force him to reveal what he could not tell me easily. And I tried to shift the ground for him.

  ‘I hear she was married.’

  ‘Han, she was sold in marriage to a Brahmin peon in the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Hoshiarpur. His name was Shiv Ram. She told me that she was very lovely at that age and everyone admired her green eyes, though the neighbouring women called her a “green-eyed witch”. Shiv Ram was a drunkard. And, though she has been wild in her sex adventures, for some curious reason she still dislikes drink. She nagged him about it and he turned into the most highhanded of wife-beaters in a land in which this species abounds. She seems not to have liked him in sex either, because he took her as and when he pleased and then left her without saying a kind word to her. So she ran away with a professional wrestler and gambler, named Motilal, to Amritsar. After a few months, when Motilal became bankrupt, she lived with an accountant of the Imperial Bank, named Kishen Chand, who had been Moti’s friend till the wrestler lost his money. As Kishen Chand has a wife and did not want to take full responsibility for her, he shared her with a few gallants from the Amritsar business and professional world: lawyer Balmukand, Professor Advani, export-import merchant Mulraj and the cloth merchant Munilal. Her fame as a courtesan, with the green eyes and a hill-woman’s body, spread. And, as she had a good voice and sang hill songs, a film magnate of Lahore, Seth Ranchod Das, gave her a part in a Punjabi film based on the story of Heer and Ranja—’

  ‘And thus she became an actress!’ I said, fascinated by the story.

  ‘Han, and after this she went from one lover to another,’ Victor said, now almost worked up to a frenzy, hurting himself with the truth, his face pale but taut with hysteria. ‘And she learnt all the tricks of the trade. But there was still a little innocent charm left in her, I suppose, and the babyish helplessness. And she longed for someone to protect her. So she got hold of an old Parsi gentleman called Homi Mehta, a retired sixty-year-old confectioner, who had made money in Lahore cantonment, but whose wife had run away with an army officer. Mr Mehta had met her at the house of Seth Ranchod Das, while she had been engaged in an offensive against the film magnate. And this Parsi idiot took pity on her because Ranchod Das, who was afraid of his wife, seemed not to be yielding to her tantrums. She turned her X-ray eyes, which penetrate right through the nerves, tendons, fibres and the marrow of men, to their bones, on poor Homi. The old man softened to her and took her under his care. He bought some land on the Canal Bank in Lahore and built a house for her, hoping that she would marry him and settle down. But just then she met a film writer, Indar Nath, who had written the songs for a picture called Maya and made a hit. Now she became part of the arty crowd in Lahore and took English lessons and became fashionable. At this stage the old Parsi proposed marriage to her. But Gangi pretended that she was in love with Indar Nath. The Parsi contented himself by accepting the platonic friendship she offered him and did not withdraw the gift of house and land he had given her.’

  ‘I am surprised,’ I said, ‘that if you know so much about her past, you—’

  ‘So am I surprised!’ Victor exclaimed, pausing by the door to listen before uttering the next words with a bitter deliberation in his voice. ‘She is a bitch, but I can’t do without her!’

  ‘Did you know her in her Lahore days?’

  ‘No, no, I met her later, here in Sham Pur. You see, her father had retired from the head priesthood of his regiment and taken up residence in Sham Pur. She came to see him. And once she had entered the precincts of this city, she never looked back towards Lahore again.’

  ‘I suppose she had the scarcity value of a film star in the provincial atmosphere of the state capital!’

  But Victor did not interrupt his confession:

  ‘She enraptured the sardars and officials of Sham Pur with her charm. And she began to frequent the palace as a saheli of my second Rani. And then, well, the mischief began.’

  After saying this Victor suddenly stopped. I waited for him
to go on. But his lips were sealed and the look of frenzy on his face disappeared.

  ‘What about the Badaun affair?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you know about that?’ Victor asked me, turning angrily from the writing table to which he had paced up.

  ‘I am afraid everyone knows these things,’ I said. ‘If you imagine that these things remain secret, you are mistaken.’

  ‘I don’t know why I am telling you all this if you know already,’ said Victor haughtily.

  ‘I am sorry, Highness, if I am intruding on your secrets,’ I replied. ‘I only want to help. After all, who else can you tell all this to? If I know the details, I may be able to offer some advice.’

  ‘Well, she went with my second Rani to Badaun and had an affair with the Raja Sahib of Badaun, who is my Rani’s brother. There was a scandal and she had to leave Badaun for Sham Pur. On her return here she met me. . . .’ Victor paused for a moment, fixed me with a glare and then said: ‘This is a secret I am entrusting only to you. I don’t know if her son is by the Raja Sahib of Badaun or by me. That is why I have hesitated in acknowledging him as the Tika. She was probably pregnant before I met her. Though I don’t think so. She fell in love with me after the very first moment she saw me in the zenana. And she was so warm and became so devoted that I could not go back to Chief’s College after that. And when I ascended the gaddi she appeared at the durbar and I nearly acknowledged her son as heir on that day, but my mother was against it and, of course, Indira was very angry.’

  ‘I still can’t understand how you can trust her and live with her.’

  ‘I had behaved badly to my wives, and she had been bad,’ he answered, coming to sit on the arm of the settee. ‘So I thought that two bad people might make a good pair.’ He smiled, and then, turning very serious, said: ‘She understands me in a strange kind of way. And sex. . . .’