Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Somehow, it was only the reserved, tall, slim Mr Gibson who could go near him and subdue him with his gentle, firm look. And I was surprised at this, because he had reacted so violently to another Englishman at Heathrow aerodrome. But I fancied that there was a difference between a full-moustached and a clean-shaven Englishman for Victor’s divided mind, the subtler dialectic of the differentiation being buried in the intergrown abysses of his bowels, the seat of his experience.

  He lay silent as though listening to some far-off voice when Mr Gibson stroked him gently and said, ‘Now, you go to sleep for a while.’

  At that suddenly, however, the all-encompassing army of demons seemed to return with all their violences, and even Mr Gibson could not soothe him. We felt that it was futile to stay any longer in the unchangeable Saturnalian realm over which the mad Maharaja established his new dread kingdom. So we came out of the room quietly, leaving Victor involved in the infinite fight of his fragile and decadent body for attainment of his personality. And we were dumb with amazement, or rather with an amazed curiosity, the avid desire of our minds to know, to grasp the meaning of the multifarious images of his distorted speech.

  As we drove away, the horror of Victor’s madness was still on us and we brooded, self-constrained for whiles, and contemplated the expanse of the Yervada countryside from which the earthy breath flew into our nostrils, fresh and clear.

  ‘Nullus amor medicabilis est herbis!’ said Mr Gibson with a rather pompously learned accent.

  ‘My Latin is poor,’ said I.

  ‘No love can be cured by herbs,’ he translated. And then Mr Gibson looked vacantly ahead of him as though he was embarrassed at the way in which he had seemed to be embarrassed when I had told Captain Bhagwat Victor’s case history the previous day.

  I fancied I caught a look in his face which showed that he was very taut. I put it down at first to the inhibitions which are characteristic of most middle-class Englishmen. But then the thought occurred to me that he himself might be slightly neurotic and had, apart from his generosity, interested himself in Victor with a view to learning something about the split mind. I recalled the question he had asked Captain Bhagwat the previous day about whether one could be present at an examination. And yet I felt that I was being very ungrateful in thinking of him as a case when, ostensibly, he had looked and behaved with such magnanimity.

  ‘Don’t you believe in Fate?’ Mr Gibson asked me suddenly.

  I guessed that Mr Gibson was fascinated and drawn towards the typical Indian fatalist attitude of mind. I answered:

  ‘If you mean by Fate the accidental circumstances which seem to make important differences to one’s life just because they coincide with a possible temperamental change, then you can use the word Fate; otherwise, it is meaningless.’

  ‘So you consider the arrival of the news of Mr Bool Chand’s murder as only a coincidental event and not the cause of the Maharaja Sahib’s madness?’

  ‘Of course, the Maharaja had a split mind and was going crazy anyhow. Lunacy is a kind of refuge for him. He was preparing for it for a long time and any accident might have brought it on.’

  I thought that Mr Gibson looked disappointed and slightly peeved at what I had said.

  We remained silent for a while. The car was crossing the bridge across the Sangam river which connects Yervada with Poona proper; and the lovely scene compelled one’s senses to burst open and go beyond the boundaries of debate into a fleeting sense of the obvious universe. The sheer physical immediacy of the low hills and the broad valley of the dry river soothed me, and I began to feel that it would not be a bad idea to luxuriate and bask in the nimble sunshine of Poona.

  Something seemed to be happening to Mr Gibson, however, for his colour changed from transparent pink to an unhealthy pallor, even as, in the silence that spread between us, he seemed to be listening to what he saw outside the car and seeing what he heard. His breath came and went a little faster and his lips were twisted into an inscrutably shy smile, the harbinger of the struggle to say something which he could not easily say.

  ‘You Indian modernists,’ he said after all, in a slightly challenging tone, ‘put too much faith in science. India had such a rich anthropocentric culture. . . .’

  ‘A way of life approved for centuries and millenniums may not be acceptable today,’ I said. ‘One can take the vitality of impulse from the past; one can’t take the dead routine of an old culture. The guardians of tradition often kill the new by repeating the old, old mantras.’

  Again Mr Gibson became tensely silent, and his face became pink as though he was now almost hostile. I surmised that he was one of those rootless cosmopolitan young English intellectuals who had been reacting like Maugham, Huxley and Heard and the Quakers to the impact of science and believed, like our own God-intoxicated professors, in the ‘spiritualism of the East’ against the ‘materialism of the West’. They did not believe with Darwin that man had developed from the monkey stage to a semblance of humanity, but put their faith in yoga, astrology, mumbo-jumbo and everything uncanny, except that the common-sense of their inheritance asserted itself often enough in worldly life and money matters. I have not yet come across any European yogi who hasn’t got a good bank balance. And they could not see that they were merely escaping out of despair from the narrow, neurotic, hidebound cash-nexus world of Western civilization, where the struggle for existence pitted brother against brother, father against son, and mother against daughter, to a fancied utopia of the ‘spirit’ called the East, with the pagan quick. Whereas in Asia the young, rising on the curves of their hopes for a better life for vast sections of wretched humanity, were prone to turn their backs on superstition, black magic, spiritualism and divining and embrace such libertarian ideas as had been promoted by the great European thinkers from Voltaire and Diderot and Bentham and Mill and Spencer and Comte to Marx.

  ‘The bifurcation of soul and body is a vulgar heresy of conversational speech,’ I continued, to ease the strain between the Englishman and myself. ‘The emphasis on the first leads to idealistic views of life and to passive acceptance, isolation, agony and death; while the emphasis on the other leads to its own excesses. The truth is that man is both body and soul and a great many other things besides. And the whole man cannot admit of the stupid dualism between “spirit” and “matter”.’

  ‘Perhaps it is the comprehensive approach of the ancient Hindus I like,’ said Mr Gibson tentatively. ‘A kind of Hindu humanism: “The purpose of the sea is to provide fish for men to eat; the purpose of the rain is to give man water to drink; the purpose of the stars is to lighten the darkness”.’

  ‘I am afraid Hinduism was seldom humanist in the modern sense,’ I said. ‘It mostly regarded man as a speck in the dust, a servile creature living in the warp and woof of maya, whose illusory reality was only a remote reflection of God, the Supreme Brahman.’

  ‘Hinduism may not have been humanitarian, but it was humanist all right!’ Mr Gibson asserted dogmatically, apparently wanting to settle the argument in his own favour.

  I did not answer, but looked out of the car to see how far we were from the Napier Hotel. As though to symbolize our mood of the moment the driver seemed to have lost his way in the maze of Poona Road and turned up near the railway station. I asked a policeman near the compound for the way. And our driver, a Maratha, supplemented the information which the constable, also a Maratha, gave me with more precise details in Marathi.

  The parting from the liberal die-hard Mr Gibson was affected by our argument. The Englishman seemed to dry up and become more reserved than ever, fancying perhaps that what I had said to him about his El Dorado made his deep sense of frustration more frustrated and confirmed him in the belief that he was doomed to extinction.

  ‘I think, Doctor Shankar,’ he said, brightening up with an artificial smile as I descended from the car, ‘you must set up as a psychoanalyst in Bombay and I shall become one of your patients.’

  I could not help laughing a
t the half-serious, half-jocular suggestion he had made.

  ‘I will think it over,’ I said. ‘But we must meet, anyhow, when I come to Bombay.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am staying at the Taj. Come and have lunch one day.’

  ‘Thank you, I will,’ I said. ‘And, really, thank you very much for all the trouble you have taken.’

  Mr Gibson seemed to be embarrassed by the excessive warmth of my gratitude. He waved his hand in a gesture of farewell, blushed, and turned his face away to avoid seeing me, even as he directed the driver with the staccato utterance:

  ‘Bombay.’

  I ordered some coffee as I entered the hotel and sat in the empty lounge to recapitulate the morning’s experiences. Unfortunately, when one sits down deliberately to do a little thinking, one can never think consecutively. In the diaphanous world of one’s silence, one goes on inhaling and exhaling, resting, waiting and watching, drifting from one thought to another with prolonged lapses, in the shadows from which one’s senses awake, for brief moments, to the nearest excitation without being aware of very much in the floating stream of changing awareness. Then some intense reality forces itself upon one’s notice out of the humus of existence. I recall that I only felt generally relaxed and easy in my mind after I saw Mr Gibson’s car move out of the compound, a sense of release from the trammels, as it were. And time and space seemed to stretch themselves now before me endlessly.

  The waiter brought the coffee, and the obsequiousness of his approach irritated me, for it reminded me of the complete joined-hands and bent-forehead servility of the servants in the Sham Pur State. On my previous return from Europe I had always felt that the relationship of master and servant in India was most humiliating to both parties, almost like that of the master and slave relationship in Roman times. I assuaged my guilt by looking away into the garden of the Napier Hotel and concentrating on the pellucid sunshine as it embraced the lovely red bougainvillaeas.

  But no one can quite escape. Everyone is captured. And I felt a kind of bell ringing in my soul, at first softly, then loudly, shattering in its oppressive dithyramb, engulfing me with its tone and almost drowning the perception in me that was seeking to become knowledge, that I had been part of a life which was rotten, where all the energy I had put into small decencies was entirely wasted, for all the elements of that society were crashing and falling and dying. Darkly, clumsily, stupidly, wantonly they were falling into the pit of madness or despair, into the grave of all despotisms. I tried to get hold of my instinctive recoil against the petty, obscene, lawless world of the Sham Pur court, with its disgusting vices and its manoeuvrings, its hellish, hysterical, tempting, lewd and irresistibly luxurious orbits. I sought to fix my inner gaze on my own hypocrisy and on my prolonged acceptance of the life of riches, of the clamorous uproar of confused voices, of a narrow circle of power-mad and privilege-loving obscurantists.

  For a moment, I sought to be kind to myself with that natural kindness for oneself that always makes one accept one’s own bad smells more easily than those of others. I told myself for the thousandth time that I had no reason to feel guilty because I had owed money to the Maharaja and had had to work off my debt by service. But then I realized that I could have walked off from the court at one stage or another when I felt intense revulsions against continuing, without any moral scruples about the debt which had ultimately come from money derived from the dumb peasants, and that I could have gone and served the state as a doctor more usefully in some village dispensary and thus appeased my conscience about what I owed to Victor. And I decided that if I did not feel guilty, I ought to feel guilty. I wanted to rebel, to rage and to fight against the whole system which had enveloped me in its poisonous, fungus growth and kept me rooted in the shadowy, bestial world of tyranny, cowardice, ennui and sloth.

  I glanced at the morning paper and lighted on the news that His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad was to be honoured soon with his appointment as Raj Pramukh of his state.

  Strange, indeed, were the ways of the Congress democrats in our country! The man who financed the fanatical Muslim storm troopers, Razvi’s Razakars, and refused to accede to the Indian Union until the Union Army marched in, was now taken up in partnership by those who had only recently protested against his ambition to be an independent king, against his infamous rule based on the exploitation of the peasantry, his personal greed and arrogance. This old fox was then still the highest in Hyderabad when his erstwhile friend Razvi was on trial! Treachery, betrayal, nepotism, complacency and corruption were the order of the day.

  Another news item in the paper reported that some of the politicals in Yervada, Nasik and Sabarmati jails had gone on hunger strike, because they had been divided into A class, B class and C class prisoners and because their families were not being given any allowances and because of sundry other grievances.

  Suddenly from the back of my mind arose the memory of the letter from that peasant leader détenu in Sham Pur jail, about which I had done nothing. Had he and his friends called off the hunger strike? It was inconceivable that he could have been released or his demands met. Was he then still languishing in jail?

  Slowly the dying embers of my conscience smouldered within me, glowing red hot here and there but covered thickly with the ashes of my self-contempt and helplessness. The inner reactions seldom match the outer excitations uniformly. And I felt self-contained as though frightened of my own weaknesses. And yet the guilts in me about my neglects persisted.

  Slowly, through self-disgust, the question arose in me: Why should a man’s personal preferment matter so much? Was I afraid of starving? I knew that I could never go without a meal, considering the advantages I had been vouchsafed by my education as a doctor. Had I then cloaked my ambitions for power with the excuse that I owed money to Victor? If the truth had to be acknowledged, it was so. I was myself corrupt, wanting power and privilege and a leisurely life. I had refused to break the boundaries of a personal life and, in spite of all my kicking against the pricks, I had ignored the fact that I was only one small part of the great social fabric which was in decay. My personal comforts seemed so petty and small and subsidiary in the face of the existence to which the peasants of Sham Pur had been reduced, the so-called patient, seemingly stupid yokels, malaria ridden, sore-eyed, rickety, prey to all the diseases, trembling as though they were afraid of their own breath. Generations of maharajas and jagirdars had broken them with their taxes. The officials of the state never spoke to them except to the accompaniment of foul abuse and in the most contemptuous language. The police terrorized them with lathi blows. The army trampled over their fields and looted their granaries. Their lives were crumbling about them, even as the mud huts in which they lived were falling to pieces. And yet we lived in palaces, ignorant of what happened in the country barns. What about these ‘jewels’ of the earth, as they were called in the perorations of politicians? It was no longer a question of fine titles and names, the common man whom everyone was supposed to love. We may invoke them in our talk to show our sentimental love for them, but in fact we disdained contact with them and thought of them as crude, rough people who stank no better than their own oxen, and sometimes worse than that. Jungli animals! And now if we thought of them at all, it was because they were compelling our attention. They may still join hands in obeisance to the sahibs and the officials, and even touch their feet. But from the spontaneous way in which Buta had defied Victor and from the way the peasants had pelted stones at the convoy of the hunting party, they did not love or respect their masters very much—they who had been full of fear of the rich were now beginning to hate them and fight them.

  I began vaguely to feel that I must do something to help these people which might make me a little more useful than I had been to them while I was in the pay of the Maharaja. Only in healing the poor could I live an intrinsic life, which had been dead in me while I had been living only for the gratification of my five senses. Something for myself but also something for oth
er people, as they said. I would go and start a dispensary in a small village in Sham Pur State. I had a little money saved up and I would start just like that, simply.

  As I felt this awareness creeping into me, I also felt a certain sense of oppression settle over me. I sat still and looked ahead of me at the ugly heavy furniture of the hotel drawing-room, with its Victorian carved dressers, chairs and settees. Was it the furniture which was weighing me down? Perhaps. Because all these heavy habiliments of a tawdry existence were associated with my past, with the errors of my past, in which I seemed to be inescapably held.