Rajmahal Read Online Free Page A

innocently. The ceiling above held a silken canopy with mosquito netting which could be pulled up and down by a cord. At the center of the canopy was a ceiling fan, which sometimes caught and tore the netting to shreds and this was one aspect of its original fittings which the Rajmahal wished could be replaced. But the Stracheys appreciated the antique value of the fan and had the wooden blades shortened rather than replace it with a modern version. Their bathroom held another beauty from the original Rajmahal, a marble shower shaped like an open oyster shell in which the bather was sprayed deliciously from neck to foot through rungs of perforated pipes. In those days, Calcutta had centrally supplied gas from the Oriental Gas Co. and gleaming copper water heaters were installed for the supply of hot water during the chilly winter.
    Jack Strachey worked for Sharp and Co., a managing agency with offices on Clive Street. Sharp’s imposing block stood close to the grandiloquently pillared Royal Exchange, which housed the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an offshoot of the old Calcutta Chamber started by the traders of the East India Company. Sharp-owned jute mills stretched along the Hooghly, and Jack spent his early years in the Sharp’s mill at Nagarpara. Most of the mills were run by Scottish engineers from Dundee. And “Little Dundees,” with nostalgically named pubs, like “Honey Bee,” were set up inside their well-insulated compounds, essential for the game of pretend.
At the right time of year, haggis and other Scottish delicacies appeared, and Highland flings were danced by unhealthily ruddy women and their sometimes-kilted husbands. So India was warded off, allowed to impinge only from a remove, riverine images framed by veranda pillars. Semi-naked coolies chanted and spat and loaded bales on to barges which swarmed to the jetties at the factories’ sides, scenes which the memsahib, or mems, could snootily ignore, as they idled along the river banks of their secure compounds with their ayahs and strollers. But in another world were the hot and humid spindle and loom-filled factories, sweat amidst hanks of the golden fiber, flying particles settling like threshings of locust wings on every surface. Here Jack and the rest of the white management were forced out of their chastity belts into sweaty intimacy with the country’s private parts. But locks hastily clicked shut against one last nightmare, the living quarters of the workers and their families, the “lines,” which existed across the road and away from the river.
    Myrna Strachey, like the other mems, made rare forays out of the magnificent residential compound of Nagarpara Jute Mill. She was careful not to look beyond the back of her chauffeur’s neck while the black walls and slimy drains of the mills and “lines” passed by. And she held her breath when they passed the stinking raw jute which lay drying by the roadside ditches in the retting season. These forays could be to neighboring white residences or to Calcutta to British friends’ houses or to clubs with all white memberships. When the Stracheys moved to Calcutta, they were the ones visited by these doughty Scottish families at their Rajmahal apartment. Here they would gather around the piano while corseted matrons sang Scottish ditties and pressed tins of shortbread into their hands.
    Myrna Strachey was a long-limbed, dark-haired English beauty. She liked to spend endless moments in the nude before a full-length mirror, examining her figure for flaws and curvetting to maintain the perfection. The children of the Rajmahal felt a rising excitement every time the Strachey’s son, Martin, came back from boarding school for his holidays. They would find excuses to make Martin speak to her and crowd around him when he knocked on her bedroom door. This stratagem was used after the one time luck had favored them. Myrna was holding her door