Rajmahal by Kamalini Sengupta Read Free Book Online

Come on, Pro. This is India!”
    â€œNo, but seriously . . . ”
    â€œBut I am being serious. Don’t you understand? Neel Dorpon ’s from my area of specialization, nineteenth century colonial Bengal. I never dreamed I’d get a chance to see it. And Reema Devi’s acting at the Petrovs’ own theater! It’s too exciting.” He spoke of their neighboring tenant, the Russian, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, who was married to the celebrated actress of the Bengali stage, Reema Devi.
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    The ghosts were excited. “I wish I could see it too,” enthused a grandmother ghost from the Sheetanath family. “I remember what an uproar it caused when it was launched! In the early days of our wonderful theater . . . ”
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    â€œThese Bengalis are always showing off about literature and drama and art!” said the tart Sikh. “As if they are the only ones who are cultured! What do they know of a good robust Heer , or a manly bhangra. Hunh!”
    Finally, Proshanto Mojumdar gave in. “Very well,” he said glumly. “The evening is in honor of your bride, and it is, after all, your choice.”
    Martin was being partly dishonest. Neel Dorpon per se wasn’t as exciting to him as testing his bride’s reactions, and even more exciting, indulging in
the erotic prospect of teasing her. His mischievous intellect at work. “It must provoke her, one way or the other,” he thought.
    Neel Dorpon , in its English version, was brilliantly done and the audience watched Reema Devi’s rendition with hushed awe. Reema Devi Petrov was in her fifties, yet as the young victim of rape her bulky body was transformed in effortless illusion. Her small, mysterious smile, hardly visible to the audience, seemed enlarged by a nonexistent projector onto a nonexistent screen, and each member of the mesmerized audience felt its quality. When the dastardly English planter, played with a combination of bombast and lasciviousness, threatened to rape her, the labored breathing of the audience turned the hall steamy.
    â€œTo speak to me is like throwing pearls before swine!” spewed the planter, convulsed with laughter and brutally flailing the victim of his lust with a whip. “We indigo planters are the companions of death! We can beat ten women with a whip!”
    While the swooning Reema Devi—the victim—lay face down awaiting the lashing leather thongs of the whip, Martin felt his arm gripped by Petrov, at the very moment the would-be rapist shouted, dropped his whip and fell. The cause was a black object which had gone arcing through the air to strike him on the head with an audible clunk. The audience roared, and Martin, jerked out of his trance, said to Petrov, “My god, they’ll lynch him!” But the lights came on, the curtain dropped and the roar diminished as suddenly to a loud murmur. Petrov had vanished and Martin turned to find Gwen glowering at him.
    â€œHow can you sit and watch this, this . . . !” She couldn’t finish her hissing sentence and turned toward poor Proshanto Mojumdar. Brilliantly and smoothly, Martin hustled her out of her seat. Every time she turned to him to speak, he silenced her by urging her forward. As the Rajmahal party inched its way out, it caught the announcement that the play was indefinitely postponed. A shoe had been thrown at him, and Planter Rogue had “suffered an injury to his person which had caused concussion and incapacitation.”
    Proshanto Mojumdar squirmed at this post-Independence rudeness to his British guests, so abhorrent to his exaggerated notions of politeness. Though it was only a few weeks earlier that he had helped break the “whites only” taboo of a swimming club, his sensitivity was far from contradictory. At the swimming club it had been the righting of an anachronism, when racism (surely the very antithesis of politeness!) was supposedly justified
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