Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Though Victor’s fever abated as soon as we boarded the train to Delhi, we had not been able to continue the journey from Delhi to Bombay by rail and had to fly instead, because the Maharaja suffered from complete nervous prostration and could hardly walk ten yards through sheer weakness and exhaustion. The journey by the ‘Malabar Princess’ from Santa Cruz to London airport had seemed to us all, who were taking such an air trip for the first time, miraculous; though Captain Partap Singh felt that the seats were too small and cramped for his tall frame and rough bottom. The vista of the lovely Italian and Swiss Alps, after the stretch of the blue Mediterranean, seemed to exhilarate Victor, and the bottles of red wine which we drank at the Geneva airport expanded the Maharaja’s spirit a little. But post-war London seemed a dull place for the congealed soul of our love-sick bird, even though the suite we had booked in Mayfair left nothing to be desired.

  He was like an idiot in the Greek sense of that word, going round and round the same thought, and his hollow eyes and sunken cheeks and withering body portended disaster. He just would not believe that Ganga Dasi could leave him: that fact he could not accept or acknowledge. For he seemed to have some uncanny illusory assurance inside him that since he had been completely fulfilled in her, she too had been completely fulfilled in him, not accepting that she was a nymphomaniac. At times, when I talked to him and reminded him of the all-embracing possessiveness with which she had enveloped his life for the year or two during which I had known them together, he seemed to understand what a demon she was and how she had sucked his life-blood. But Victor had also known her in the moods when she had given and given, with a servility bordering upon abjectness, and he could not see the subtle sense in which a person of such apparent charm could also be a kind of human vampire. My inability to use strong words in defining her character, and my temperamental disability to indulge in moral condemnation when I could see ‘immorality’ mostly as social derangement and mental disease, made for a vagueness in which Victor could emphasize some aspect of her niceness to him. And, ignoring his own ultimate sense of the irresponsible, untrustworthy, small-minded, greedy, libidinous jungli in her, he had exalted her as a goddess in his feverish imagination and fixed this image of her in his mind to worship and long for. I had never known such an obsession. Now, it began to appear to me that I was adopting a sentimental approach in accepting the sickness of these two lovers and was unconsciously accepting the unconscious to be a kind of reservoir of all the perversities of human nature, from the most primitive trauma of birth to the most complex wishes and fantasies. In this sense, I seemed to be adopting a pessimistic view of human nature, the idealistic conception that the patient’s wish to do nothing but wish is the strongest urge, because the neurotic can revert back to an easier and more primitive psychological condition, and that thus there is really no strong wish for a cure at all. And so I had begun to concede that Ganga Dasi was a harlot according to her psychological type, and Victor a libidinous hound, who found himself fixated upon a woman with a kind of primary fixation, like a spoilt child who wanted his mother and was inconsolable without her, and I was despairing of the tangle and leaving it at that. Once a harlot, always a harlot, once a decadent libertine, always a decadent libertine—that seemed the logical outcome of my acceptance of tangles in their personal relationships which could not be disentangled.

  But it dawned upon me suddenly one day, while I was walking down Piccadilly and saw a well-dressed young middle-class woman talking to herself, even as she stared idiotically at the dresses in a window by Burlington Arcade, that neuroses seemed so widespread a phenomenon in our age that it must have a great deal more to do with the corrupt social system in which we were living than the healers accepted.

  And from that moment onwards I felt that whether I could help Victor or not the fact was that if he was sick, it was because this sickness was inevitable to him, not merely through the wide range of his potentialities at birth but rather through his upbringing in the social set-up to which he had belonged. It was not extraordinary that his personal debacle with Ganga Dasi had coincided with his dethronement from the Sham Pur gaddi, and his virtual externment from the state. So that what had happened was not a calamity overtaking an unfortunate individual, but the concentration of all the social ‘fates’ in a Greek tragedy, which were bearing down on him relentlessly and might crush him, but which, given an enlightened will, he could have fought or could even now fight.

  I knew that in general the social aspect of the problem which Victor presented had been in my mind, but I had been thinking too much in terms of his and Ganga Dasi’s mental and emotional disorder as springing from their first failures and misunderstandings in adjusting themselves to their family relationships. For I had not emphasized that their family relationships, whatever else they may be as well, were themselves social creations, based on certain political and economic dispositions which I had seen change in Sham Pur before my eyes and which might be transformed more completely in the next few years.

  I pondered deeply over this. I realized that the commonsensical materialist view would certainly help me to get rid of my obsession with Victor’s obsession and see things much more objectively than I had done all this time in Sham Pur. It also occurred to me that now that Victor was free of all responsibility to the state and could do more or less what he liked, he might have a chance of recovery, unless his disease had become a complex within a complex.

  I would then have to proceed on the hypothesis that he belonged to his order and was involved in the closed mental system of neurosis, bound up in the vicious circles of associations, fears and wishes which could not find direct expression because they arose from some infantile emotional situation which had not been developed and exorcized in his adult life. The symptom of his difficulty, of course, was his preoccupation with Gangi. And it had not been possible to remove it, because we had pampered him and made it seem a nice kind of feeling to indulge in under the guise of love, and he had even won sympathy from us in his invalid’s privileged position.

  I would, therefore, try and track his illness into a fully developed fantasy and childishness of which it was formed and try to show him that his whole obsession was founded on fantasy and was no use to him.

  I found in the next few days that my optimism was ill-founded. The healing of Victor’s schism was difficult, because he was still part of the diseased world of Sham Pur, involved in a closed mental atmosphere. I realized, from the kana-phusi, ‘I whisper in your ear and you whisper in mine’, kind of consultation that he had with Captain Partap Singh every day, that there was some secret between them, to have Gangi brought out here. And, apart from the fact that he was carrying on the intrigues of the Sham Pur palace from the suite in Mayfair, both of us were pampering him and making him feel that it was extraordinarily romantic for him to indulge in this passion for his mistress. Thus, disconsolate, he lay outstretched, staring at the ceiling as usual, or at his own image in the lovely tall mirrors of the Curzon Street bedroom.

  I took him to the various restful places which had been the haunts of my student days in London, in order to distract his attention. We visited Hampton Court, Kew Gardens, the Regent’s Park Zoo, the British Museum in Great Russell Street and the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. But as he had become physically very feeble, we could not enjoy these places, which required athletic English feet, and we would get back into the hired Daimler and return through crowded streets to the suite and to his bedroom.

  And again, there were the same wearisome questions: ‘What shall I do? Why hasn’t she written? How can she do it to me? What did I not give her? . . . I will show that swine Bool Chand a thing or two one day—do you think she is really with him?’, etc.

  I answered by saying that those were not the questions he should ask, but rather: ‘How can one become oneself? And what does one really want to make of life? What is to be done?’

  Inured, like most Indians, to a philosophical bent of mind, he would in
terrogate me very pertinently by subverting the logic of my propositions: ‘How can one talk of becoming oneself when one doesn’t know what one is?’ Or when one is merely an unstable something, a half-stated truth, trying to be the complete truth and nothing but the truth? Isn’t one very undefined? What is one?’

  I told him that he knew that his love for Gangi was real, but that, though undefined, and perhaps impossible to state, it put him, as a human being, in a unique relationship with her.

  And vaguely feeling the truth of what I said, he would then integrate enough in the background of his disintegration to become aware of himself, that he was not a separate entity in all the confusion that surrounded him, that he must do something, become himself in relation to other people. And yet he was in a torment because of that in him which had become separated from him, the usual privileges of Maharajahood. And he was so split that he began increasingly to talk to himself in his sleep, and also, when we left him alone, awake. And he turned to certain visions and far-off spoken words, till he seemed at times, in spite of his general lucidity, to border upon madness.

  I dexterously arranged that we should all go out at least to one meal a day. And, saying that I thought it would be a good thing to taste the cooking of the various countries, I booked tables variously at the Spanish Restaurant in Swallow Street, at the Turkish Restaurant in Dean Street, at the Chinese Restaurant in Denmark Street, at the Hungaria, at Ciro’s, etc. But, apart from the endless jokes we had at the expense of the diabetic Munshi Mithan Lal, whom he remembered at mealtimes especially for the large belchings he indulged in after good food, we returned from these fashionable eating-places as morbid as we were before our visits. Except when Victor asked me to invite some old English friend of his. And then he would freely unburden himself before the guest about the unfair way in which he had been deprived of his throne and at the same time of his wife. The guests usually listened from the outside and remained politely non-interventionist in the familiar English liberal tradition, an occasional friend recommending calm acceptance.

  A visit to the Old Vic was as fruitless, though Victor liked the Swan Lake ballet as performed by the Sadler’s Wells Company, because he recognized the red-haired Moira Shearer, whom he had seen in the film Red Shoes in India.

  We did an occasional picture, but my taste was a little too highbrow, and I preferred to go to the Curzon, the Academy, or Studio One, and this bored the others.

  I soon realized that Victor was not really interested in all these things, that he was too unhappy and enfeebled to enjoy himself, and that perhaps it was best not to strain his nerves, and to let him recover slowly in his own way.

  So I encouraged him to have a siesta after lunch every day and then took him for a short stroll in Hyde Park after tea. The weakening October sun fell nimbly on the copper-coloured autumn leaves of the streets by the Park Lane entrance, where we left the car, and there was a slight nip in the air, and we would take two chairs and sit down to look at the discreet glory of the homely landscape.

  The air of London was so crowded with talk of financial crisis, the Third World War and the menace of Communism, that Victor joined the chorus of newspaper-talk saying that the Reds in Sham Pur had been his undoing. He wondered whether the Administrator, Popatlal Shah, had been able to arrest the advance of the guerillas outside the capital after all.

  I startled him by casually dropping the bombshell that it was an ever-present possibility that, chivvied from the positions they had conquered, to one jungle hide-out after another, the Reds might carve out a free territory in the areas bordering on the USSR. And I regaled him with a brief analysis of how even some of the Lamas in the fastnesses of the Himalayas had gone Red since the victory of the Chinese Communists against Chiang-kai-Shek.

  Whereupon he surprised me by saying what a fool he had been in not following up the programme, implicit in the odd remark he had made on the way back from Panna hunting lodge that he should have joined the Communists when it came to a showdown between him and Sardar Patel, or, later, when Popatlal Shah asked him to quit the state. ‘For, after all,’ he said, ‘I could have maintained the independence of Sham Pur from the Bania Raj!’

  And then, after prolonged silence, he talked nostalgically of the free, expansive life of Sham Pur, of polo and shooting and the bliss of having Gangi with him.

  And at this he would repeat like a child:

  ‘I want her. I want her.’

  And as though, through the repetition of this mantra, all his passion and yearning returned to him, he would say:

  ‘You know Majnu loved Laila as I love Gangi. When people say “What do you find in her that is so wonderful?” I always want to repeat the words of Majnu when someone asked him, “How can you love Laila, she is so ugly and black—”’

  ‘What did Majnu say?’ I asked, to keep the conversation going, though I knew the legend.

  ‘Majnu said, “You must look at Laila with Majnu’s eyes”.’

  After a pause he continued:

  ‘I want to be a lover like Majnu, because through such a love one can become one with God. The devotee, Chandi Das, attained sainthood by loving his washerwoman. How is Gangi inferior to that washerwoman? My heart calls to her wherever I go: my body aches for her; my soul reaches out to her wherever she is. . . .’

  ‘You can’t revive the age of romance and chivalry, Victor,’ I said. ‘I think you are sick.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed blandly, ‘I am sick. My soul is sick.’

  We got up and began to walk towards the Serpentine. And I asked myself for the thousandth time how it was possible to cure him short of restoring Gangi to him, or rooting out the image of her in his desire, where she really had her being, for I knew that, even if she came back to him, she would only play him up again and destroy him.

  One day early in October, Victor suddenly asked me, after we had had breakfast in bed, what I thought of an idea which had struck him that he should renounce life and retire to Benaras as a yogi.

  ‘According to the fourfold scheme of life enjoined in our Hindu math,’ he said, ‘one has to retire one day and spend one’s time in meditation and prayer, to attain union with Brahman, the Supreme. I had graduated from the Brahmacharya student stage already into Grahast, the family life. Since I have been deprived of the chance of living in Grahast, and of even doing good works in ruling my state, I will skip this stage and become a sanyasi.’

  ‘This is very sudden!’ I said good humouredly. But as he seemed hurt at the sceptical look in my eyes, I asked: ‘Do you really, seriously mean it? And what about the “Queen Bee”?’

  ‘You yourself said one must discover oneself. Well, I will set my heart in the direction of God.’

  ‘I was talking of one’s need to find a direction in the obscurity, uncertainty and pathlessness of this world. But if you find the torment of the responsibility of living the ordinary life too much and know your goal in God, do certainly retire. . . . Though I am not sure that you have rid yourself of your desires.’

  ‘The Buddha has said,’ he began quietly:

  ‘Desire engenders sorrow, desire engenders fear,

  Desire one who is freed from desire,

  For there is no sorrow where there is no fear.’

  ‘Of course. The Buddha was right. Certainly, the athlete of the spirit can aspire to this ideal.’

  ‘You don’t seem sure of my capacity to do anything,’ he said, raising his head from the pillow.

  ‘No, no, Victor,’ I assured him, lest he should think that I really had no confidence in him. ‘I only feel that it is difficult in life to know what to do, where to go and how to become oneself in relation to other people.’

  ‘My great-grandfather, Maharaja Hanumant Singh, renounced his wealth and position and became an ascetic,’ Victor said, sitting up. ‘His wife was a very devoted woman and she took him to Benaras. Perhaps I could appeal to Ganga Dasi to renounce the pleasures of the body and come with me and live in Benaras and we could together be
come dedicated to the worship of God. I still have a house on the banks of the Ganges by Assighat.’

  I saw the meaning of his urge for renunciation. He would have Ganga Dasi with him at any price, even at the cost of giving up the marital life, so long as he could have her by him—or was this really a ruse to bring her back by offering the bait of holiness with a view to reviving the conjugal felicities? I did not know what had led to his great-grandfather’s renunciation. I could only beckon in my mind a background of some sinister palace intrigue in which Maharaja Hanumant Singh had got involved and from which there seemed no way out, as, indeed, was the case with Victor.

  ‘My great-grandfather had always been a pious man from his youth,’ Victor said, with half-closed eyes and a meek manner. ‘And his wife was a strong-willed woman. When she found that he could not rule the state with a firm hand, but was always busy with his puja-path worship, she decided to take him to Benaras. And she continued to rule the state as well as to . . .’

  He was stuck for words. So I added:

  ‘As well as to rule him!’

  ‘You may laugh at this with your European learning,’ Victor said, rather hurt, ‘but in our country this can happen. Gautama Buddha also left his kingdom.’

  I am afraid my imagination was straying from the subtlety of the miraculous conversion of Maharaja Hanumant Singh to the picture of him which I had seen executed by a Kangra painter: he had appeared, even in that abstract, conventionalized portrait, done by a court artist, to be a feeble, undersized man, with a grisly beard and a wicked look in his eyes, swathed in a magnificent robe of rich coloured silk, bedecked with jewels, and a nattily tied turban on his head, which told his story. And behind the Rajput painter’s portrayal was, at the back of my mind, the vague figure of a Cleopatra-like queen or a harlot like Gangi, who had wanted the husband out of the way, so that she could take other lovers. And perhaps there were other more powerful forces behind the Maharani—the swarms of miracle-making, money-grabbing, unscrupulous Brahmin priests, wrapping all the violence and infamy of the court in the habiliments of words and chants from the holy books. And behind these again there were nobles, feudal lords, governors and palace servants, all intriguing within the sanctums, enclosed by the high walls and the towers and the dungeons, in a manner which seemed fantastic and incredible in the comparative light of this bedroom.