Susanna's Seven Husbands Read online

  ‘Well done! You’ll make a good detective!’

  And DSP Keemat Lal set about examining the feet of everyone on the premises—including mine.

  None of them matched the six-toed footprint. Shah Rukh had normal feet. Goonga, the jockey, was pigeon-toed, but there were only five of them. The syces also passed muster.

  ‘Perhaps it was a thief who came over the wall,’ I said.

  ‘Possibly,’ said Keemat Lal, but he wasn’t satisfied.

  During the next few days he made several visits to the house, questioning the servants and drinking innumerable cups of tea with Susanna on her front veranda. She showed him around the grounds and parts of the house. He admired her horses, her garden, her family heirlooms; but he felt that she had not shown him everything. Where did her wealth come from, he wondered. Was it only from racehorses? Or did she have assets that no one knew about? There were limits to his prying. She was not under suspicion of a crime. She did not mind talking to him, and he enjoyed being in her company.

  And I, too, found myself spending more time with Susanna. I was now going on fifteen, an age at which an adolescent is susceptible to the attentions of a beautiful woman.

  I can still see her clearly in my mind’s eye—slender and dark-haired, with a smile so warm that it could have melted a Himalayan glacier. She did not use make-up, but I can recall her delicate perfume—a flowery garden fragrance. And I’ll never forget the gold bracelet she always wore, whether she was in slacks or skirt or sari. Her father had given her a string of pearls—real pearls—on her sixteenth birthday, and she wore them on most occasions: at the Club, or at the races, or on social occasions which she could not avoid. Nor can I forget her laughter. Sometimes it had a mocking quality; at other times it expressed her sensuality and joy in being alive.

  I was to attend a boarding school in the hills for the final year of my schooling, but before I left I paid a visit to the nearby town of Sardhana in the company of two of my cricket-playing friends.

  It rained all day and the match was cancelled, so we passed the time by looking around the palace and the cathedral built by the Begum Samru, the lady who had ruled over the rich agricultural province for half a century.

  The widow of Sombre, a German soldier of fortune, she had inherited the Jagir of Sardhana gifted to her husband by the Mughal Emperor for ‘services rendered’. Some said the begum was of noble lineage; others, that she was a Kashmiri dancing-girl. Beautiful in her youth, she had lived to the age of ninety, going through a succession of lovers and husbands before becoming a devout Catholic and leaving her fortune to various religious and charitable institutions. Childless all her life, she had adopted her young nephew who had helped her to look after the estate and keep some of her fortune-hunting lovers in check.

  My friends and I visited the fine old church and admired the statue of the begum, seated on her ‘throne’. She looked a bit like Queen Victoria, but not as plump. In the nearby cemetery we came across the neglected and broken tombs of the many European mercenaries who had served under the begum, training her small standing army and occasionally leading it into battle against neighbouring rajas and warlords. These officers of the begum—French, German, Irish—were an ill-educated lot whose only aim was to get rich. Some found favour with the begum. She went through several husbands, all of whom came to sticky ends, if not on the field of battle then in their beds. The begum tired quickly of her many lovers, who proved to be unsatisfactory in more ways than one. Had she been blessed with a child of her own, things might have been different …

  All this I had learned from my history teacher, and I was eager to tell him that I had seen the begum’s statue and portrait.

  The portrait hung in the office of the old palace, now a school. The nun in charge allowed us to see it. It was a large portrait, the head life-size, and it must have been painted when the begum was about forty. She had just the suggestion of a smile, and a cruel one at that; but her eyes were large and lustrous, and she had a strong, rather determined chin, finely arched eyebrows, and full, sensuous lips.

  I had a feeling that I had seen her before. Where? When?

  ‘What do you think of her?’ I asked my friend.

  ‘I prefer Rekha,’ said Siddharth.

  ‘She reminds me of one of my aunts,’ said Rahul.

  ‘She reminds me of someone too,’ I said.

  And then it struck me. The begum bore a close resemblance to Susanna. Or to be precise—Susanna resembled the begum. The same forehead, the same eyes, the same full lips and lustrous hair.

  It made me wonder. Could Susanna have been a descendant of Begum Samru—descended from her adopted nephew or some other relative?

  Or perhaps the resemblance was just coincidence.

  And then another thought struck me. Was there, after all, something in the belief in reincarnation? And did the soul of the begum reside in Susanna?

  Episode Four

  Farewell to a Prince

  I was away for over a year, completing my schooling in Simla. I came home with some fluff on my cheeks and the beginnings of a moustache. I was tall for my age, and I had developed into a fast bowler.

  I had expected to see Susanna, but several days passed without any sign of her. Then I encountered Shah Rukh on the footpath outside their gate.

  ‘Where is Miss Susanna?’ I asked.

  ‘Mrs Susanna, you mean. No, it’s Princess Susanna. Or Susanna Rani. I call her Rani Ma!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why, hadn’t you heard? Our lady has married the Prince of Purkazi. They have gone up to Mussoorie for their honeymoon.’

  ‘Well, that was quick. It’s just over a year since the Beetle passed away.’

  ‘Well, he’s a fast worker, our Prince. And our lady was getting restless.’

  ‘Is the Prince handsome?’ (I have to admit I felt a twinge of jealousy.) ‘He must be very rich.’

  ‘I don’t know about being rich, but he is handsome. A bit like Dev Anand.’

  ‘Oh. And otherwise what is he like?’

  ‘Akru-type. Nose in the air. Thinks too much of himself. Don’t know why she married him.’

  ‘Maybe she likes Dev Anand.’

  ‘Then she should have married a film star. And we could all have gone to Bombay.’

  ‘The Goonga will be in demand there,’ I said. ‘They are short of dwarfs. By the way, where is he?’

  ‘He has gone up with them. He has to look after the cars. There are two cars now. And Maggie has gone too.’

  Maggie was Susanna’s maidservant—middle-aged, grumpy, ugly, and a great gossip. But very efficient.

  Shah Rukh told me that Susanna had met the Prince on one of her trips to the Delhi Races. He had won some money on one of her horses and had gone over to the stalls to congratulate the jockey. As the jockey was the Goonga, the only response was a grin that was more like a grimace. The Prince turned away, only to find himself face-to-face with Susanna.

  The attraction was mutual. He invited her out to dinner. Then to a musical soirée. They went to a recital of ghazals sung by one of the country’s top ghazal singers, and Susanna decided that she preferred ghazals to the Beatles. Towards the end of the recital the Prince proposed marriage to Susanna. Under the heady influence of the music, she accepted.

  They were married a month later, but did not spend much time at Susanna’s ancestral home. The Prince had an old house, or ‘palace’ as he called it, in Mussoorie, and it was there that they spent their honeymoon.

  It turned out to be a long honeymoon, and a disastrous one at that.

  The monsoon had broken, and it had been raining heavily for several days. Having finished with school, I was now the proud owner of a scooter, but it did not prevent me from getting drenched, as I rode home from the bazaar. I was almost home when I saw Susanna’s car turn in at the main gate. The Goonga was at the wheel, and Maggie sat beside him. In the back seat sat Susanna, looking very pale and tired. Of the Prince there was no si
gn, nor did another car arrive.

  Susanna saw me, but she did not wave to me, as was her custom. Instead, she looked straight ahead, her face expressionless.

  Next day, when the weather cleared, I called out to Shah Rukh and asked him what had happened. Where was the Prince? Why had Susanna returned alone?

  Shah Rukh was only too anxious to bring me up to date.

  ‘The Prince is dead,’ he announced quite casually.

  He lost no time in telling me all that he knew, and it was quite a lot, since he had got all the details from Maggie. And according to her, it was good riddance of a bad prince.

  The honeymoon had started off well enough, with drives down to the Jumna, or to Rishikesh and Hardwar. There was a picnic at Kempty Falls and a moonlight party at Hathi Paon. But as a lover the Prince left much to be desired. If he tried to be loving and romantic, he was ineffective, impotent. He could only get excited if he became rough and violent. Susanna found this tiresome, not to say humiliating. After two or three nights of being knocked around, she refused to sleep with the Prince and shut herself up in her own room.

  He tried various remedies for his inadequacy—ayurvedic, yunani, allopathic—but nothing seemed to work. His condition, after all, was psychological. Maggie had guessed the truth and did her best to help matters by sending for a country hakim who guaranteed success with his pure and costly saand-ka-tel—the oil of a certain rock lizard that was found in the hills.

  ‘Not only will your pleasure increase,’ he promised, ‘but you will find yourself equipped with a veritable hamaam-dasta.’

  The combination of saand-ka-tel and the Prince’s own sadistic nature resulted in a nightmarish experience for Susanna. Having—in his most charming manner—persuaded her to sleep in his room, he started off by being tender and passionate, but his brain would not send the right message to his loins, and he found himself as ineffective as before.

  ‘It’s all your fault!’ he swore at Susanna. ‘You’re as cold as a marble statue.’

  And he proceeded to beat her, first with his open hands and then with his fists. Only then was he able to perform.

  Next morning Susanna appeared alone at the breakfast table, the bruises on her face and arms visible to all. Maggie saw them, the Goonga saw them, and so did the Prince’s attendants. Susanna confided in Maggie. Maggie used sign language to convey a message to the Goonga. He slunk off, his face dark as thunder.

  The Prince did not emerge till noon. He could not face Susanna. He told one of his servants that he was going for a drive, and he took his own car and drove off by himself.

  The road to Dhanolti winds round several steep mountains, with cliffs and precipices along the way. The road twists and turns, and there are sudden dips and rises which test the skills of the best drivers. There are no parapets, only a whitewashed drum here and there to mark the edge of the road.

  The Prince was in a terrible temper. He was angry with his wife, with himself, with the world. Here he was—a handsome young Prince, the envy of all. But he didn’t have the one thing that would make him happy—a normal sex drive. He cursed the cars on the road, he cursed the mules and the drivers, he cursed the day he was born.

  There was a sudden descent near Dhanolti. The car gathered speed. A mule stood in the middle of the road. The Prince pressed hard on the brake, but there was no let-up in the speed of the car.

  ‘Damn!’ he cursed. ‘Someone’s been fiddling with the brakes.’

  Someone had indeed tampered with the brakes.

  The car swerved to avoid the mule. But its momentum took it off the road and over the edge. There were no trees here to break its fall. It sailed into space like a beautiful toy spacecraft, and then it fell. And, like a toy, it was smashed to pieces on the rocks over a hundred feet below.

  Hours later, when the villagers reached the wreck, they found the driver slumped on the broken bonnet, himself a broken doll.

  Episode Five

  Enter The Diplomat

  That spider on my wall was getting restless. It was some time since she’d dined off a fat, juicy male. Now she was thinking of moving her web elsewhere …

  Not immediately, though.

  A few years were to pass before Susanna took up the challenge of another husband. She did not seem to age. Although thirty, she could have passed for twenty-five. Being childless might have had something to do with it. As for me, I was now twenty-one, pursuing a BA in History from Delhi University.

  As I was in and out of Meerut quite a lot, I saw Susanna quite often during those years. She had even invited me into the house on two or three occasions, had shown me the family heirlooms—period furniture, old Chinese vases, Mughal miniatures, family portraits, shikar trophies from the time of the Raj—but she did not show me her jewellery, and there were one or two locked rooms which were always locked, according to Shah Rukh.

  It was difficult to be alone with Susanna. Maggie was always hovering nearby. After the experience of the prince, she suspected all men of being monsters, and her suspicious glances gave me to understand that she wasn’t going to be fooled by my innocent good looks. Even though I was many years younger than Susanna, Maggie suspected my intentions!

  Not that she was above suspicion.

  She usually wore slippers, but on one occasion, when it was raining heavily, she ran out of the house to bring in some clothes that had been left outside to dry. I was standing in the veranda, waiting to see Susanna, when Maggie came running back with the clothes. She happened to be barefoot, and as she stood at the top of the steps, recovering from her exertions, I looked at her wide, splayed feet—and saw that there were six toes on her left foot!

  Immediately my mind went back to that morning when I had discovered Jimmy’s body hanging in the guava orchard. DSP Keemat Lal had arrived on the scene, and had observed that a footprint nearby clearly showed six toes. He had examined everyone’s feet, but where had Maggie been that day? Obviously she had made herself scarce.

  Of course it was possible that she had been in the orchard the previous evening. Then why disappear during the investigation? She knew something, even if she was not the culprit.

  But it was a long time ago, and there seemed no point in pursuing the matter now. Even DSP Keemat Lal had moved on to another district. And there was much else to occupy our minds.

  The diplomat was Signor Eduardo Romero, chargé d’affaires at a South American embassy. He was thirty-five, tall and handsome, though inclined to be diabetic. It was said that he had been a bullfighter once, then a cattle rancher, before entering his country’s diplomatic service. In his leisure time he liked to carry a whip and to demonstrate his skill with it. He was a part-time artist, and it was at an exhibition of his paintings in Delhi that he met Susanna.

  Whenever Susanna was in Delhi she visited one or two of the art galleries. She did not buy paintings—her home was cluttered with old paintings, most of them English hunting scenes collected by her father—but she liked to look at what was new in the art world, and she particularly liked Signor Romero’s studies of horses. One painting in particular pleased her—a charming study of a mare with her foal.

  She had been standing before the picture for some time when someone behind her said, ‘You like this picture, mademoiselle?’

  Standing before her was the artist himself, Signor Romero, sporting a short French beard and a rakish-looking hat.

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ said Susanna. ‘I love horses, and you have captured the grace of the adult and the awkwardness of the colt … Are you the artist?’

  ‘At your service! Would you like to have the picture?’

  ‘Normally I don’t buy pictures, but I love this one.’

  ‘Then it is yours. A gift from the artist to a beautiful woman who can appreciate beauty in a beast. But on one condition.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That you have lunch with me. There’s an Italian restaurant just opened in one of the new hotels. Please be my guest. And the picture will be
delivered to you next week, as soon as my exhibition is over.’

  A week later the picture was delivered by Signor Romero himself, who drove down to Meerut in his imported sports car, bringing with him not only the painting (which was hung in Susanna’s study, above her desk) but also a hamper packed with chocolates, cheese, salami and other delicacies, and several bottles of the choicest wines.

  A picnic was held in the orchard. It was November, just the right month for a picnic.

  ‘Would you like to join us?’ Susanna called out to me from across the wall.

  ‘Another time,’ I said. ‘I have to finish writing a dissertation.’ It looked like a very private picnic, and I did not think the Signor would have welcomed my presence.

  Over the next two or three months those picnics became a regular feature, the Signor driving down from Delhi every weekend. He attended one of the races, admired Susanna’s horses—‘Now I know why you liked my paintings!’—and took an instant dislike to Susanna’s little jockey, the Goonga. He seemed to dislike dwarfs in general and dumb ones in particular.

  Signor Romero had a wife and children tucked away in Peru or Bolivia—something that Susanna only discovered much later. A little bigamy did not bother the good Signor. He took Susanna on a holiday to Goa, and he proposed to her while they were swimming together in a little cove along the coast. They made love in the pool. As a lover the Signor had no shortcomings, and Susanna was happy to accompany him to the altar.

  They returned to Meerut very briefly, and then were off on an extended honeymoon to Mauritius, Capri, the Canary Islands and the Bahamas. Obviously the Signor had a ‘thing’ about islands.

  He also had diabetes, although you wouldn’t have thought so from looking at him. He looked the picture of rude health, a horseman and an athlete, but he had blacked out more than once, and he complained at times of pain and tiredness in his legs.

  It had become necessary for him to be given an insulin injection every day, and this was administered by Susanna, who became quite expert at filling the syringe and then inserting the needle without causing any discomfort or pain.