Rajmahal Read Online Free PDF Page B

smitten by . . . Yet he seemed to have expressed only true warmth and friendship for the ever-so-romantic Nehru, providing no hint of the sexual leanings suspected by the Freud-seekers.
    Mountbatten came to a sticky end, an extremely sticky end, but that was caused by an outside agency unconnected, to date, to Freudian patterns. So, blessedly, Jack Strachey was absolved of the endless pain his wife should normally have caused him. In retrospect he would classify these rare mental outbursts as spiteful objectivity rather than anything baser. And never would he express these thoughts out loud. But he recognized he was lucky not to suffer from jealousy.
    At fifty, Myrna still continued with her curvets. She still had a slender figure, though it was getting harder and harder to trim the thickening waist. Her last affair had bored her and for the first time she asked herself the question, “Why do I do it?” And then she corrected herself, “Why do I have to do it?” But she couldn’t get beyond the simple question. She couldn’t ask if it was an inherent urge to power or pure sensuality, and the corollary that no one and nothing should stand in the way of its impulses. The more she continued, the more compulsive those impulses, all the classic signs of an addiction. She would continue her aberrant behavior, a pure hedonist one moment, a loving wife the next, like a yo-yo in a typhoon, up down, whirling, out of control, but attached with that string to Jack’s strong finger.

    The first turning point was when the British Raj was taken over by the historical compulsions of an ancient and humiliated people. When the transformation had been heralded by an unprecedented year’s carnage, abruptly ending on the eve of Independence, “a miracle” as Chief Minister Surahwardy had whispered to the fasting Gandhi. When death and deepest degradation had raged in and around Calcutta during the great famine four years earlier. When a flood of refugees had poured across the new partition line between the two halves of the country. As if the terrible reluctance of the colonial power in withdrawing had left as its reaction, a vacuum so fierce it had sucked in the world around it, whipping itself around and around into the spiral of a potent tornado. And yet, researchers would be dejected to find so little in the personal records of the Rajmahal tenants and their ilk to reflect those cataclysmic events. They would eagerly scan the pages of the dusty, browned diaries of the Stracheys flipping to August 15, 1947 and finding nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to reflect the banner headlines screaming, “INDEPENDENCE! FREEDOM!” in the newspapers.
    â€œBut they weren’t official chroniclers,” you may say, “or self-conscious celebrities hoping their private papers would one day be published.” For instance, Myrna Strachey’s diary said “Coffee, 11:00 a.m. Lady Bannerjea” August 14, and it also said, “Dinner, Roys, 8:00 p.m.” Was that dinner party organized specially to usher in Independence? At midnight Pandit Nehru was to hoist the flag in salute to that long-awaited day. Did the Roys, who were the hosts that night, wait with the string of the furled new flag in their hands, radio on, for the signal to pull that string? And did the Indian guests go crazy, their tears dropping with the flower petals from the unfurling flag? But then, why wasn’t it mentioned in their diaries? They would have to be content with the records of the great, such as Pandit Nehru, whose pocket diary said, “The appointed day!” Pandit Nehru must have known his destiny and diary would be eagerly scanned by future generations. But, whether noted or not in their diaries, the Stracheys must have recognized that the changes had to come. That the tortuously built-up bastions on which their empire had rested couldn’t bolster the new India forever. The changes would take