The impressionist, p.4
The Impressionist, page 4
There he first makes sure the floor is free of dirt, with special reference to the drain in the far corner. He checks that no insects or small animals are lurking in or near any of the water vessels or furniture, then stands on the low wooden platform by the tub and pours seven lotas of water on his head, then a further seven over his body. Next he squats to pour a lota-full very carefully over his genitals, assisting with his fingers in areas of folding or supplementary hair. A fresh cake of soap is always placed, still in its paper wrapper, within reach of the platform. He discards the wrapper neatly to one side and soaps and sluices his body in a series of moves as precise and as solemn as the progress of a military funeral.
Shaving requires the arrival of hot water at precisely the right moment, and his servant considers this his most important duty of the day. The razor is stropped for no less than two minutes and the lather whipped for another two as the master, naked, bends and stretches his body into a series of post-bath postures which are fully described in his seminal ‘Next to Cleanliness and Godliness Third Let Us Put Correct Circulation of the Blood’.
This duty attended to, the razor is handed over, handle first, and shaving can commence. The operation is very delicate, and requires no small nerve on Pandit Razdan’s part. There are no circumstances in which he will trust the servant to shave him. The blade is so sharp, his ear so close, the floor always potentially treacherous despite his care to move to an area away from the tub. He feels he can barely trust himself to do the job. Sometimes he fantasizes that he has lost control of his hand, that it is swiping uncontrollably at his throat. Once the thought is broached, it takes an iron effort of will to carry on shaving.
Just before the outbreak of the war he solved the worst of this problem by growing a beard. Nevertheless, trimming is still required, and even this is fraught with danger. Each morning the difficulty of shaving nearly reduces him to tears, but each morning he accomplishes it. It is only one of a hundred such tiny battles he fights during an average day.
Dressing involves shaking shoes to dislodge scorpions and calling for fresh linen should a garment fall on the floor or get contaminated by a drop of hair oil, interspersed by attempts to control his breathing and quell his racing heart. At intervals during this routine, he may detect some trace of illness in his body, and order his servant to call a doctor. The servant will rush convincingly out of the room and spend a few minutes smoking a bidi on the steps outside. Pandit Razdan never questions the doctor’s non-appearance, and the symptoms invariably subside as soon as his attention is diverted elsewhere.
At the courts, Pandit Razdan makes sure a supply of soap, water and towels is always available. He also takes care to provide himself with a spare set of clothes. Mealtimes are conducted with immense formality, and should the pleader be unfortunate enough to find himself travelling, he makes stern inquiries about the caste status of any potential cook. ‘In this debased age,’ he writes in his well-received commentary on ‘The Perils of the Modern Kitchen’, ‘it is sadly necessary to don the hat of a policeman in ascertaining the fitness of a cook, should one wish not to jeopardize one’s spiritual welfare.’
Pandit Razdan avoids shaking hands with the English Circuit Judge, and has thus acquired a reputation as something of a radical. However, the real reason has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with his horror of touching a casteless beefeater with suspect personal habits. Once an eager young English lawyer strode forward and clasped Razdan’s hand in his, before he could do anything to prevent it. Proceedings were held up by almost three quarters of an hour while the shocked pandit, who had locked himself in the men’s cloakroom, obsessively washed his hands to get rid of the taint.
When the influenza epidemic comes, it is as if the universe has personally challenged Amar Nath Razdan to a duel. No greater terror could have been devised. The first victim he sees is a street-dweller, laid out by the side of the road, surrounded by weeping relatives. The corpse’s face is distorted, blue-black and swollen. Later, when ordinary systems of propriety have broken down, he sees a dying Englishwoman being carried out of one of the houses in the Civil Lines. Her face is the same blue-black colour, all distinction of race erased by the disease. The collapse of categories appals him almost as much as the fact of death itself.
Within a week of the first cases of ‘Spanish Flu’ being reported in the city, thousands are ill or dying. In America and Europe millions have already succumbed, and it is known that little can be done for the afflicted. It is rumoured that troopships crossing the Atlantic have been arriving half empty, their human cargo decimated by the disease. Panic sets in and the bazaars empty of people. Stories filter in from remote districts about ghost villages and bullock trains found by the roadside with all the drivers dead in their seats. When the hospitals and zenanas can no longer cope, rich families start opening their houses as temporary wards. Despite his membership of various benevolent societies, Pandit Razdan refuses to do this. He starts to pen an article provisionally entitled ‘Twenty Prophylactic Measures in the Struggle Against Airborne Maladies’ but before a first draft is complete, his confidence has evaporated. He no longer believes that ‘superhuman acts of cleanliness’, well-ventilated rooms or the wearing of a cotton face mask will be enough to protect him.
It is generally held that the influenza is a ground-dwelling organism, so for a while the pandit takes to conducting all his business on horseback. He has his borrowed mare saddled in the front courtyard of the house, so that when he goes out on to the street he is already out of harm’s way. Unable actually to ride into the law courts, he writes down his pleas and sends them in by hand, his servant running up and down the steps while he sits in splendour outside, watched by children and an unamused British police sergeant. Forced by a fire to visit tenants in a slum quarter of the city, Pandit Razdan refuses to enter their low-roofed houses, and conducts meetings from his saddle, a handkerchief pressed to his face. This lasts a week, until an urchin hits the horse with a stone, and it bucks its rider into a muddy puddle, a body of water almost certainly teeming with disease of every kind. After marathon washing, Pandit Razdan decides to rely on other measures, like taking regular mustard foot baths and gargling with a variety of foul-smelling tonics based, for the most part, on chlorinated soda water, bhang and boric acid. He determines that his house should be fumigated, and instructs the servants to sprinkle sulphur and molasses on hot coals, which creates a thick blue-green smoke that makes everyone choke and leaves a disgusting smell in the rooms.
At night he dreams about the contagion. Bloated faces and the sound of coughing follow him through streets where the very houses and shops seem to melt into one another, losing their integrity, invaded by their own unstoppable architectural diseases. The dream people are horrific and indistinct. At a look or a touch they blur into one another – woman into man, black into white, low into high. It seems the epidemic will obliterate all conceivable distinctions, hybridizing his whole world into one awful undifferentiated mass.
From his locked bedroom, Pandit Razdan calls for the doctor, and keeps calling until one is brought. The man wears a face mask and will come no further than the threshold. He sells the pandit some expensive medicine, and advises him to stay clear of foul air and crowded spaces. The warning is unnecessary. Most public meetings and processions have been banned. The work of the law courts is suspended by general order of the District Health Officer. A junior clerk is dispatched to inform the pandit, but Razdan refuses to admit him into the house.
One morning, during the hour-long extended bath routine he has adopted to combat the crisis, Pandit Razdan feels light-headed. He tries to fight the tide of panic which grips his chest, but the more he fights the worse it gets. Eventually he is obliged to return to bed and wait for the feeling to subside. It worsens. After an hour he has a headache, painful and unmistakable, a throbbing between his eyes which seems to rap out news of his imminent death in a skeletal tattoo. After two hours, despite drinking several glasses of water, he feels hot and feverish. When he draws a finger across his top lip, it comes away wet.
His terror deepens as the morning wears on. The ache in his head spreads out to envelop his arms and legs, and he feels the beginnings of a new drum-throb of pain at the base of his spine. The whitewashed walls and open shutters of his bedroom seem to reflect the crisis, shifting tauntingly at the threshold of his perception as if they too are animated by the fever. Around midday he begins to scream for his servants.
Pandit Razdan has one final anti-flu remedy, a measure he has been saving in case things came to this sort of head. An hour or so later he admits a line of people with baskets of onions and an enamelled tin bath. Heedless of modesty, the master strips off and jumps in. One of the younger girls runs outside and has to be coaxed back in to do her work. The onions are chopped and poured into the bathtub. Every onion available in the sabzi mandi is here, and nearly the whole household is employed in dicing them. Gradually Pandit Razdan’s thin limbs are covered over, until only his head and the tops of his knees remain exposed. The onions are packed down firmly, so that his entire body is slathered in flesh and juice. Finally white cloths are wrapped tightly around the bath and folded under his head, making him into a kind of onion-mummy, swaddled tight and sweating. Eyes streaming, the servants file out and shut the door, leaving the cure to work its magic.
The theoretical basis of the onion cure is straightforward. Onions are a notoriously hot and fiery vegetable, which induce the body to cry and sweat to counteract their influence. The power of a single raw onion is enough to repel unwanted interlocutors and clean the eater’s insides of all manner of damp or bilious humours. Spanish flu is one of the dampest diseases ever known, which makes the onion a potent weapon. Pandit Razdan hopes to draw the illness out of his body, immolating the parasite in the vegetable’s cleansing fire. For good measure, he munches handfuls of his remedy as he lies, desperately fighting the panic building up inside his shivery frame.
This is how Amar Nath chooses to face his illness. For it is real: this particular hypochondriac is facing the skull-necklaced embodiment of his worst fears. He picks at his chest, imagining in his increasingly disordered mind that he can pluck flu organisms off his body like mites. He sweats and the walls shimmer and the fever vibrates his body like a hammer hitting a metal string.
Distantly he hears screaming, the sound of a bedstead being turned over. His son’s voice, Anjali’s voice, cursing each other roundly. He turns his head, trying to make out what they are saying to each other. But it comes from the other side of the world. In his bath of onions, Pandit Amar Nath Razdan is pleading the ultimate case.
Gita runs crying down the stairs to the courtyard, as her mother (personifying fate, doom, justice, karma and all manner of other vast impersonal forces given to crushing ant-like mortals underfoot) jabs Pran in the kidneys with a monkey stick. He doubles up, and she brings her weapon smartly down on his knees and elbow joints, each well-aimed blow producing sudden and excruciating pain.
Anjali’s victory is swift and total. Hampered by his pyjamas, which are twisted around his ankles, Pran is unable to resist. As he tries to crawl underneath the protective frame of the charpai, she sprinkles his squirming body with a few choice curses, pincers his ear between fingers made vice-like by years of pea-shelling and okra-chopping, and drags him off to see his father.
She raps on the door. An ominous squelching sound comes from the other side.
‘Master? Master, are you there?’
There is no response. Impatiently, she tries the catch, and the door swings open into an onion stench of such ferocity that her eyes begin to stream. Pandit Razdan is in the thirtieth hour of his bath. Now he is definitely, conclusively ill, sweating and shivering like a man having a fit. His head protrudes over the white swaddling like that of a premature baby, his eyes red-raw, his skin flushed and unpleasantly puckered. He looks as if he has been pickled, which is more or less the case.
‘I am dying,’ he says in a tiny voice.
‘Maybe so,’ raps Anjali brutally, gathering the palla of her sari over her face. ‘However, I think I know the reason.’ Pandit Razdan’s expression becomes urgent, and he wags his head, indicating that she should continue. Filled with the gravity of the moment, she raises a hand in the direction of the heavens. ‘This household,’ she intones, ‘is under a curse.’
The master succumbs to a violent fit of coughing.
How does one tell a sick man that his only son, the son he has cherished for fifteen long years, is in fact the bastard child of a casteless, filth-eating, left-and-right-hand-confusing Englishman? The gifts of tact and sensitivity are given to very few, and Anjali is not among the blessed. She spares nothing; no surmise is left unfloated, no nasty insinuation unslithered into the long grass of the master’s mind. She besmirches Amrita’s memory with delicate indirectness, avoiding anything which might tempt the cuckolded husband to defend his dead wife. Then she paints a lurid (though admittedly not too far exaggerated) picture of Pran’s faults, drawing the incontrovertible conclusion that the boy exhibits all the signs of tainted blood.
This would be enough for most people, but Anjali is only beginning. She expounds on the theme of miscegenation, and all its terrible consequences. Impurities, blendings, pollutions, smearings and muckings-up of all kinds are bound to flow from such a blend of blood, which offends against every tenet of orthodox religion. Small wonder the city of Agra is suffering a plague. She, for one, would not be surprised to discover that the entire influenza epidemic, all twenty million global deaths of it, was down to Pran. The boy is bad through and through. Finally she produces her trump card: the battered photograph. Ronald Forrester, IFS.
‘Now tell me who he looks like.’
Razdan turns the snapshot over in his onion-encrusted hands. Forrester’s sepia face stares back at him. The nose, the fine lines of the mouth. But for the skin it could be an Indian face. The photograph-man seems to smile at him, a distant, water-damaged smile which cuts through his fever like acid etching a metal plate. For the first time since Anjali dragged him into the room, he turns to look at Pran Nath.
The boy is kneeling on the floor, blood flowing from a wound on his temple. Dishevelled and snivelling, he looks faintly revolting. At last Razdan realizes why he avoids him. He always thought it was because of the mother. She would whisper to herself. When he entered a room he would feel he was interrupting. Yet despite his public campaigns for purity, since her death he has made secret visits to the lamplit rooms upstairs in the bazaar. There he tells the women to behave in a certain way, to touch him in places he finds embarrassing to name. The son has always been an unwelcome reminder of the mother who planted that guilty seed in his consciousness, a sign of his enslavement to carnality.
No. It is simpler than that.
With a feeling like drowning, he realizes that the servant-woman is telling the truth. Pran Nath and the photograph are two versions of the same image. This is not his son. With that, something snaps. His orderly life scatters like an up-ended wooden tray of letters at a printing press. His breath leaves his body in a drawn-out sigh of disappointment.
‘Father?’ asks Pran Nath plaintively. There is no response.
They do not even wait for the corpse to cool before they throw him out. The servants drag him straight to the front door and sling him into the street.
Pran lies in the dust, smelling the onion-stink on his clothes. A crowd gathers, fascinated by the unprecedented events unfolding before their fortunate eyes. The chowkidar brandishes a lathi and Anjali gives a reprise of her miscegenation speech, adding that the evil boy has, to cap it all, just caused Pandit Razdan’s untimely death. Then the door is slammed shut, the bolt drawing across it with a heavy metallic rasp.
Pran gets up and hammers on the door, the familiar door with its iron studs and hinges, its scuffed blue paint. The crowd scrutinizes him eagerly for signs of Englishness, pointing out to each other the alien features which suddenly seem so obvious.
‘Please!’ he begs. ‘Let me in!’
From the other side, the chowkidar growls at him to clear off.
‘Please! Open up!’ There is no response. ‘My uncle,’ he shouts tremulously, ‘will come and flog you. Then you’ll be sorry.’
To his delight, the bolt scrapes back, and the blue door opens a chink. A hand appears briefly and drops a little sepia square in the dust. Then the door slams shut again. Pran picks up the photograph and carries on pounding with his fists, crying and pleading. In his confusion he turns to the crowd, only to be faced with a ring of people who have no reason to like him. The sweet-seller, the old woman from next door, the man who sells dry goods, the druggist’s boy – all are smiling the same wolfish, unsympathetic smile. He starts to wish he had not played quite so many practical jokes.
Out of the crowd arcs a lump of dung, which hits him, hot and wet, on the back of the neck. As he scrapes it off, another missile splats into his face. He lunges forward, and a gaggle of little boys scatter, howling with mock alarm. The adults laugh indulgently. Then he goes sprawling on to the ground, tripped by an unseen foot.
He spends the afternoon skulking around outside his house, his mind as blank as one of his school notebooks. A string of people knock at the blue door, members of the community who have heard about Pandit Razdan’s tragic death, and have come to pay their respects. They all seem to know about Pran’s disgrace. Though he rushes up to them, begging for help, most will not even make eye contact. One by one they are admitted, the door thudding behind them. He cannot understand it. He is Pran Nath Razdan: the beautiful, the son and heir. It is like a bad dream.
