Rajmahal by Kamalini Sengupta Page A

Myrna in his arms. “I love you,” he said, repeatedly, while Myrna sobbed her soft, pretty little sobs.
    Sitting apart again, Jack stroked his wife and held the usual evening panacea, a weak whiskey, out to her.
    â€œThey say it’s good for the heart.”
    â€œThe same words she repeats every evening, every single evening without fail!” thought Jack.
    â€œI do look forward to it, I really do. It’s just the thing for my angina.”
    â€œBut you don’t have angina, dear. The doctor just said . . . ” Jack realized too late he had set Myrna off yet again. He consoled himself that most things said, or not said, would set her off . . .
    â€œYou’ll believe how bad it is when I’m gone.” Myrna swallowed the pretty little sobs. “The doctor said I had angina, he said it just last week. It’s serious , angina, and it’s so painful. I could go just like that, in a second . . . ”
    Jack breathed hard to hide the deep distress he always felt when Myrna talked of death. He took his whiskey glass with him and walked over to
the balcony. He leaned over, not seeing the pale orange sunset, not seeing the smoke hovering in its evening pall. “Why does her death bother me so much?” he thought. And then, while listening to Myrna’s complaints, his heart thudded loud and fast. He had remembered the pact suggested by him not so long ago. Jack shivered from the descending cool. Was he afraid of dying, of death, for himself? He remembered incidents of violence in this city, when he was the victim.
    There was the “white monkey” street attack. Once, when he was visiting a Sharp’s jute mill, the workers had kept him gheraoed for forty-eight hours. He had used his waste paper bin as a urinal, and somehow refrained from doing the other thing. No harm done in the end. When things had gone back to normal, and he was back at the Rajmahal, the workers had again become the anonymous nonentities they had always been. Strange. Neither of these incidents recurred much in Jack’s memories during those sightless lookouts over the maidan . It was other remembrances, of the many times pedestrians had banged on his car hood angrily with umbrella, briefcase, or bare hands, to tell the man in the car to stop for him, the righteous pedestrian-citizen. For a while, Jack had thought this behavior was reserved for the whites. It was in a way justified they should feel, “Simply because you have a fine car and I cannot, oh foreign upstart, you do not have priority over me in my own country!” While in that helpless position, looking on meekly at the militant pedestrian, he would think, “If he attacks me, he’ll be joined by all the others, and they will kill me, an intrusive white man milking them in their poverty.” It was with the deepest shock that he witnessed the same violence done to a car driven by an Indian.
    â€œLook, look!” he exclaimed to his chauffeur. “They are attacking an Indian man’s car?”
    â€œBangali babu ,” the up-country chauffeur laughed, missing the point. “He doing it everyone. Sahib not remembering, he doing it us too many time?”
    But that memory, of frustrated, aggressive faces and reverberating hoods stuck in Jack’s mind. Its association with death, his own possible death. He felt no fear, felt none even the very first time. It was the phenomenon of Death, with a capital “D,” that was frightening, not his own death.
    Jack had always been proud of his physical courage, his fearlessness in the face of danger. Death when deeply feared was of others: the death of Myrna, or Martin, or Gwen, his grandchildren. He brought his mind back
to the “pact” with an effort. Myrna was surely well into the dreaded state. Jack looked at his hand as he raised the glass to his lips and tried to stop it from shaking. He was afraid. He physically lacked the courage to carry out his