Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Francis, who had been waiting to fetch me my tea, came and adjusted the end of the net to the pole above.

  I saw that Gangi’s eyes were swollen with sleeplessness and tears, and I felt rather sorry for her as she was obviously distressed. On the other hand, I knew that her sorrow was merely skin deep, the surface index of a feeling for Victor which was genuine enough, even though it was the sugar coating on the bitter poison of opportunistic possessiveness which was underneath. Therefore, I felt curiously detached, an attitude encouraged by the fear that her presence in my rooms might excite unnecessary suspicions in the exacerbated mind of His Highness.

  ‘Bring tea for the Maharani Sahiba, Francis,’ I called out to the bearer, who was disappearing.

  ‘Have you any brandy?’ Gangi asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ I said. And I called out to the servant, ‘Francis, fetch some brandy, also.’

  It was obvious that her distress was acute enough for her to feel the need to drown it. I knew she was an insidious creature who tried to hide much of the disruption in her nature, probably from the habit of her early childhood, when she had been left alone so much and had developed secretiveness to conceal her wild and uncontrolled desires and impulses against her own better nature and the taboos of the elders of the village. And I realized that even though she had come to seek my advice, she was not going to confide in me any more than she thought suitable in order to win my sympathy and support.

  ‘Have you a cigarette?’ she asked.

  ‘Han, han,’ I said, fumbling eagerly for my cigarette case under the pillow. ‘Please forgive me for not offering you one. I must be still sleepy.’

  I sat up, offered her a cigarette and lit it for her with my lighter. I knew that, like most hill-women, she smoked, but I did not expect from her the sophistication which tries to cover the gaps with the incandescence of rolled tobacco.

  She puffed at the cigarette and dramatically ejected smoke from out of her nostrils. Usually, I am always the first to speak, so that ease can prevail, but this morning I felt constrained to wait, because I did not want to say something, anything, so that she could retain the pride of her secrets and only tell me what was strictly necessary to her purpose. I had begun to feel lately that only by going deep down and tracking the surface emotions to the ultimate motivations can people become clearer with themselves and each other, and that whereas, in spite of many hindrances, the process of revelation had started in Victor, Gangi’s inner world was full of too many sores to be exposed either to her own view or to the gaze of other people. I believed that it would do her good to let a little fresh air in.

  Unfortunately, however, the pride of her putrid emotions was too blind to even prepare a declension, and I waited in the yawning emptiness between us in vain for her to say something. Her nostrils quivered and she turned on the light of her green eyes at me with a slant obviously calculated to soften me. I felt scared of the temptress in her and began to squeal.

  ‘After the incidents of yesterday, we have probably all slept badly,’ I said. ‘I wonder whether the Maharaja Sahib had any sleep at all.’

  ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said. ‘He was drunk by the time he went to bed and you yourself gave him a sleeping draught. He is still asleep. At least, I left him asleep.’

  ‘I am worried about him, though,’ I said. ‘He is not at all well. And ever since our return from Simla he is surrounded by a sea of troubles.’

  ‘He will float,’ she said with a cruel smirk on her face.

  ‘I don’t think he is such a strong swimmer as to weather the storms that are mounting.’

  ‘You don’t know him,’ she said. ‘He is very clever and—very cruel. . . .’ At that moment, Francis came in with the tea-tray and she stopped, her round hill-woman’s face, with the small flattish nose, knotting up into a scowl of suppressed fury.

  I helped her to a cup of tea.

  ‘The brandy!’ she said.

  ‘Oh, forgive me—of course, the brandy,’ I said. ‘Will you have it in your tea or shall I order coffee?’

  ‘Neat,’ she said in English.

  I poured the brandy for her into a rather inelegant tumbler which Francis had brought on the tray. But I was not too ashamed of the tumbler, for it seemed to suit the strain of vulgarity that was obvious in the leer on her mouth as she looked at me pouring the liquor.

  She drank the brandy in a gulp and made a wry face.

  ‘You were telling me about Vicky,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ she began. ‘He is so incalculable. He may do any of a hundred different things, and he says anything that comes into his mouth. And all the time he is so jealous of me, while he goes off and does what he did in Simla—eats the ashes!’

  ‘Maharani Sahiba, he may do a hundred different things because he has so much nervous energy,’ I said, ‘but he is devoted to you and you can’t give any other meanings to his actions than those which arise from his love for you.’

  This seemed to flatter her, and she picked up the cup of tea and sipped it with lowered eyes which reflected a half-complacent light and the seductive manner.

  ‘Then why doesn’t he make a will and settle some money and houses on me?’ she said with lips pursed to give finality to her utterance.

  I felt a wave of anger sweep over me, and I tried to swallow the bad taste in my mouth with copious draughts of tea. It made me mad to feel that she was so obvious in her opportunism and the attempts to win me over to her side. And yet I was surprised at her plain speaking, at the kind of brutal honesty about her selfishness, unrelieved by anything except the sanctions of sentiment with which she covered it, and the genuine fear of being left alone and bereft in her old age. She had lived so many lives, and covered these lives with so many lies, that I felt that this frankness on her part might be the beginning of a process of regeneration. But I only had to look at the furtive green eyes to realize that my last surmise was erroneous in the extreme. For she was looking for something she could not find, and even wanted to make me her prey because she did not know what to find. And the spiritual void in her was only compelled by the hectic blaze of each transient desire, which fell like rose petals, faded and discoloured, away from her, leaving the gaps in her nature yawning like pits where nothing can grow, and covered on the sides by the fungus growth of coiling manoeuvres which could never be uncoiled.

  ‘I think Vicky feels cornered,’ I said. ‘He is being attacked on all sides. And he needs sympathy.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t he come to me and open his heart out to me?’ she said with a blandishment of her head. ‘Why doesn’t he?’

  Now, I could not help marvelling at the basic downrightness of her instinct, the woman’s instinct which had spotted the fundamental weakness in his nature. She had put her finger on the ventricals of his heart, as it were, and felt the essential feebleness of his inner pulse, the source of cowardice in his nature.

  ‘Maharani Sahiba, he is in the grip of his mother. He has not cut the navel string which binds him to her. And he cannot surrender to any woman completely. And the people are against him.’

  Put in this way, my explanation was beyond her. She could not comprehend the meaning of the words I had used, and looked blankly at me.

  ‘He is very weak-willed,’ I said to help her, ‘and he is easily dominated.’

  ‘He is very cruel,’ she said. ‘I am frightened of him.’ And as she talked, tears came into her eyes, and she sobbed: ‘He gets drunk and he is so hard, so hostile to me. And no one understands me!’

  What she said only proved my point about him. It was because he was weak that he was cruel, for a strong man reserves his strength; and the fact that he was drinking heavily and beating her showed that his nerves were bad and his patience was easily exhausted. At any rate, I was sure that in all this he was reacting to her actions, and what was true about him was more than true about her. For they were very similar in their temperaments, both highly emotional and eas
ily inflammable. She too was essentially weak-willed and cruel in consequence, with the added ruthlessness of the woman always able to take her revenge on man for all the hereditary wrongs done to her; and if she did not get drunk, she resented his attempt to dominate her because of an inordinate love of power in her own being. But as all this would have been difficult to explain to her without imputing blame to her, for which she might have reacted against me, I kept my own counsel.

  ‘I am sorry to hear this, Maharani Sahiba,’ I said consolingly, though her tears were hardening me against her from my knowledge of her hypocrisy. ‘Please have a good cry. You will feel better.’

  ‘You are a strange doctor,’ she said, crying and smiling at the same time. ‘You want me to cry so that I can feel better!’

  At this I felt that, in spite of her apparent worldliness and instinctive manoeuvring skill, she was innocent like a child in many ways, and I softened to her and even contemplated her face with desire. Ultimately, her worldliness and cunning were the worldliness and cunning of a child, or of a completely ungrown-up person, so obvious and patent that the desperate liar and cheat in her was likely to be found out all the time. And she seemed very lovable.

  ‘You see, you are already smiling,’ I said lightly.

  And she coyly turned on the bent-head charm of her face at me again and repeated the words ‘Strange Doctor!’ significantly.

  Now I was in a panic. I did not want to get involved or entangled in this complex any more than was necessitated by my official duties and my natural sympathies for all the actors in the tragi-comic play that was being enacted before my eyes. And I knew that, so far as she was concerned, her way of getting sympathy or friendship was to absorb one to herself sexually, not necessarily by giving herself but by captivating and surrounding one in the aura of the warmth that she exuded, until one was her willing slave and did her bidding. But how was I to get rid of her from this embarrassing contiguity?

  ‘Sometimes I feel,’ she said, demurely wiping her tears with the end of her dupatta, ‘I shall end my life. I am so unhappy, Doctor Shankar. I think Vicky despises me, because I am an illiterate hill-woman and because I deceived him once or twice. And he won’t trust me. And I feel that he really prefers that woman Indira just because she is a BA. He has recognized her son as Tika, and my son has no chance because I am not even his wedded wife. And I have done so much for him. While his mother and his Ranis have only spat poison all around. And still he won’t recognize me or my son. Why can’t he marry me? There is no other way out for me—is there, than to get rid of myself?’

  She put such an intensity into her utterance that, for a moment, I believed that these words represented the deepest urges in her. And yet, as I reflected on the speech, I knew that it was a mixture of half-honest impulses with a histrionic attempt at martyrdom, a sentimentally tragic declaration which arose from a temporary weariness that did not blot out the dominant obsession with the will to conquer that underlay her simulation of defeat.

  ‘I have some arsenic,’ she said.

  ‘Maharani Sahiba!’ I protested, as I was suddenly shaken out of my complacency by the feeling that an ignorant hill-woman, with the rudimentary sensations and blind impulses of an upstart, without any sanctions on her mind higher than the guile and the lies with which she sought to win her way to power and possession, may, in a moment of aberration, really take her life. And then Victor would be sunk indeed!

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ she said. ‘I won’t tell anyone that you gave me the arsenic!’

  If this was intended as a joke, it arose from a cruel kind of wit. And my head throbbed with the momentary fear that she was quite capable of blackmailing me with the imputation that I had procured the arsenic for her. I tried to control the hysteria which was working in me by a deliberate attempt to laugh.

  ‘You must help me, Doctor,’ she said, thrusting the knife into my divided spirit at last. ‘You must take my side. Please advise Vicky, without telling him that I have said anything. He is a child and he doesn’t even know what is good for him. I could help him so much in settling his difficulties in the state.’

  ‘I am sure His Highness appreciates you,’ I assured her.

  I think she expected me to say more to comfort her and to give her confidence, because she seemed, from the emptiness in her own nature, not to believe in others mainly because she did not believe in herself. But I could not say any more than I knew.

  ‘Has he said anything to you, lately?’ she asked, grabbing at the remnants of reassurance with mellow, sad eyes.

  ‘No, but as His Highness’s doctor, I know what he really feels,’ I said. ‘He is devoted to you.’

  ‘Did he say so?’

  I smiled. I wished I had had more true words to wave before her greedy senses. But as I knew that not only was he attached to her with the maximum degree of finality that is possible in so unfinal a thing as love, but suspicious of her and frightened of her, I did not wish to say anything which, in its truthfulness, would make a treachery of some words of mine against the others. Then, on the impulse of the moment, I thought I would extract from her what she really felt about him.

  ‘Tell me, Ganga Dasiji, why do you torture him so by making him jealous and by making scenes about little things?’

  ‘Doctor!’ she said indignantly, ‘how can you say such a thing, when you know that for seven long years I have loved him and have borne him two children? He does not see that I am a warm and affectionate person, and I can’t stir an eyelid without exciting wild rages of jealousy in him! I don’t even mind how many women he has! And it is he who likes scenes! He is always making little things into big things. I think he likes being unhappy really. Whereas, I am happy-natured and never want rows. How can you accuse me of torturing him?’

  This eloquent plea of self-justification convinced me of the complete impossibility of ever convincing her that there could be anything wrong with her. The facts about her several affairs of the last seven years were known to me, and here she was covering up her defaults by a disingenuous show of warmhearted innocence, not knowing that I knew the facts. Somehow, she believed that she could bluff everyone into a credulous acceptance of her integrity. And I was now in despair about advising her or advising Vicky on her behalf. For her pride would not allow her to admit anything about the nature of her bias for herself, and she was merely using her sex appeal to excite pity in me to force me on to her side in a quarrel which she seemed to regard as the curse of a cruel fate.

  ‘You must help me,’ she pleaded finally, bringing pathos into her voice.

  I got up from my bed in order to shake her off.

  She took the hint and got up.

  ‘I will do my best,’ I said conventionally. Then I felt a violent urge to be honest about the whole thing and really try to help them both if I could. ‘Acha, I think it will be best if all of us three have a talk and thrash out the differences between you two. Only, you will have to accept my advice. . . .’

  ‘Try and persuade him to do what I want,’ she said like a child wanting the moon.

  I smiled.

  Immediately, her face went pale with desperation, and I knew that she knew that I was biased in Vicky’s favour.

  ‘You are all ranged against me!’ she cried.

  And now her face was blank as if she was bereft of all confidence, and her eyes glared into the emptiness blindly with a dazed look of horror, such as I had seen before when she was in a tight corner.

  There is something compelling about Monday morning, with its serious and straight face, compelling even to a Maharaja. About eight o’clock on Monday morning, Vicky sent orders for the whole entourage to get ready to go to the office with him at 10 a.m.

  When I went to the hall at the appointed time, surprisingly enough, he, who was always late through his procrastinations, was there on the tick of time. This very alacrity imported that he was tense. His eyes, too, were bloodshot, obviously from sleeplessness and, I suspected, tears. He seemed
to be trying to offset the evidence of his inner discord by a histrionic smartness of manner, for he was dressed in the uniform of Honorary Major-General of the British Indian Army. But though this ostentatious display of military grandeur seemed to impress Captain Partap Singh, Mr Bool Chand and Munshi Mithan Lal, I could see that, behind the façade of smartness, there were disturbances bordering upon panic. At no time during the past few days, when he had been saying to me that he felt ‘cornered like a rat’, did this phrase seem to apply more aptly than on that day. For he was encircled on all sides, besides being involved in a series of vicious circles inside himself.

  As we got to the deohri, I found that there was an armoured car standing ahead of the caravan of cars. I realized that this was a necessary precaution taken by His Highness after the arrest of the Praja Mandal leaders yesterday. For it was likely that there might be demonstrations by the angry people, in spite of the increased precautionary measures that had been ordered immediately after the dispersal of the crowd by the shooting in the air and the club-work of Captain Partap Singh.

  ‘You come into the armoured car with me, Hari Shankar,’ His Highness said. ‘Also Partap Singh. And let Mian Mithu and Bool Chand travel in the Rolls.’

  I saw Bool Chand’s face fall.

  ‘Highness, I want to report to you on the negotiations which you ordered me to carry out,’ Mr Bool Chand said. And then he snorted involuntarily.

  ‘Don’t snort!’ His Highness said sharply. ‘I shall hear you later.’

  Apparently, the negotiations with which he had been charged were some parleys with Indira, to see if she could be persuaded to withdraw her petitions against His Highness from the States Department at New Delhi, and the feeler to Srijut Popatlal J. Shah to see how much conscience money he would want to come over to the side of the Maharaja. As a shrewd, greasy bania, Bool Chand was the ideal agent for such negotiations. And, from his eagerness to report back to His Highness, he seemed to have had some luck. However, the coward in him was frightened of travelling in the Rolls rather than in the armoured car. Still, he joined his hands in obeisance to the Maharaja and, with a ghastly pallor on his dark face, turned towards the unprotected car behind Munshi Mithan Lal.