Rajmahal Read Online Free Page B

slightly ajar hiding behind it to speak to her son, and Martin was jostled out of the way by the others craning their necks and yearning for forbidden ephemera. This yielded nothing more than an impression of perfumed and shadowed pinkness in a distant mirror. It created a bond between
them and they would often remember this, their first glimpse of a naked adult woman, and then each other, and a softness would enter them for old associations in the security of the Rajmahal. The gang would hang around in the Strachey apartment, waiting to see Myrna emerging from her room in a mist of scent, her face flushed with makeup. She would hug her little boy, and sometimes one or other of his fortunate friends, and run down the stairs on confident high heels.
    Jack Strachey adored his wife. He was a large, square, blonde Scotsman with an accent countered by English and Indian influences, an effect cultivated by him to put him on par with the superior English up at the head office. “They’re ridiculous!” he would say defensively offensive against both Scots and Indians striving to get the right accent. “I had to interpret between Chatterjee and Mackintosh again, and they were both speaking English!” Myrna, English by birth, kept judiciously silent.
    When Jack Strachey moved on to the head office in Calcutta to become one of the youngest directors, it was commonly expected he would end as chairman and managing director of Sharp and Co. This would lead to the presidentship of the Bengal Chamber and a knighthood. But Jack had to face the ultimate dishonor of being superseded by an Indian. Peculiarly, he used this failure to justify his staying on in India after retirement. In reality, he had never intended to return to the stifling suburbia of his background. His father, a carpenter, though a superior one with his own furniture business in the end, was originally “Skiddaw,” not the regal sounding “Strachey.” Jack had no hesitation in changing his surname when he was of age. Myrna, with her upper-class background, tilted the balance in his favor among the Calcutta British, who were mainly English. But trends in post-independence India added to the convolutions and Jack was right for the job at the wrong time.
    The Stracheys spent seven years in the jute mill out in Nagarpara before moving to Calcutta. During this time, Myrna was submitted to the exaggerated pampering of her ayahs. They massaged her with creams and kept her cool with delicious iced drinks and seasonal summer fruits, laying out fresh cotton dresses lovingly laundered, and sheltering her from the extreme heat. But this bored and sickened her in the end. The savage, squalid country, the digs at her as an alien in the predominantly Scottish compound, were at first less relevant than the growing ties between her and Jack. But being kept out of the big bad world outside, cramped, created a resistance in her to having children. It was only after five years into her
marriage that she gave in and had Martin. And then, the life instilled a stupor in her, till one day it seemed she was trapped in a shrinking glass bubble. She lay inertly on deck chairs, staring across the muddy Hooghly at scenes she had once observed with such fascination. The changing moods of the river, the magnificent sunsets, bloated half-burnt carcasses floating by after nominal cremations, tidal bores knocking the small craft about, capsizing a ferry once and drowning its passengers before her very eyes. When the war came, amphibian planes landed on the water and khaki amphibian tanks droned across the river and crawled miraculously ashore as if earth and water were one element. But she was simply a viewer, not a participant, and the scenes remained what they had always been, vignettes framed between the veranda pillars of her prison.
    When a trio of British air force officers was billeted on them Myrna was astonished to hear herself say, “Eenie, meenie, mynee, mo,