Maree and the Prince: Prince with a Resident Ghost

By Chander Malhotra

Chandigarh is a city that represents the India born in 1947 after independence from the British Raj. The protagonist is a prince of an old royal family of the Punjab. He has been brought up like a prince but is out of sync with his royal heritage. He is democratic to an excessive degree.
The novel is his journey through a haze of drinking, through atheism, to a certain faith in some God. On the way he meets his secretary, Bible Maree; his faithful servant, Bhader; and the healing religious leader, Peer Baba.
The book is also a statement about the sexual mores of India. One of the princes friend advocates the establishment of legal brothels for the frustrated males of India. He also offers it as a solution to the high number of rapes in India.
Maree keeps company to the debauched prince, who is a writer. She decodes his drunken writing and types it into a computer. The novel is also a journey of Prince Ravee through the world of ghosts that reside in and around his penthouse in Turail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781482817133

Book preview

Chapter 1—Martyr Maree

Maree:Sister Angela has this desire to be a Mother Teresa but sadly she expects me to do the martyrdom bit for her. Perhaps they will make me a saint when I die but right now I am in the middle of a Driving Miss Daisy in reverse. I am driving around this seedy old man who was once a poet in Punjabi and now has been captured by an English ghost. He has gone back to what he says is his mother tongue—English. He is writing the ultimate novel in long hand and has registers of ruled paper filled with jottings. My duty is to decipher these scrawled papers and transfer the words to his computer by typing them out. I am sure the English ghost is dictating all that drivel. How else can a Punjabi poet turn suddenly into a writer in English?

I hardly get any time for the typing. All my time is spent as a sort of secretary/driver / companion (at the behest of Sister Angela, otherwise I would run away this very moment.) I realize now one should leave well enough alone. I was happy at the orphanage, no but I had to do a stupid Maria and get out of the cloister to the Sound of Music. 

It is the damned movies and television. Who knew about love before the movies came along? Of course there were romance novels but not everyone can read even now in this twenty first century. These movies, they fill us with such desires. They make people do the craziest unexpected things emulating fabulous movie characters. Unfortunately or fortunately, Ravee this old author has the same Hollywood and Bollywood hang-up. Mostly he is trying to be a decrepit John Wayne who is a learned Casanova and a lecher and an oversexed Nero or something.

Let me see I have already typed into his computer this thing he has about the West, yes here, Sometimes I think I am John Wayne. Sometimes I think I am a cockney, cor blimey and all. Sometimes I think why does a novel have to be coherent? Life is not coherent. It is so haphazard and sudden.

This John Wayne fixation I got cured when I met real life white men in Canada. White men only want one thing or rather two things—money and sex. They have Scrooge dollars shining in their eyes. They have even less of humanity than us. They can only donate to distant charities. They cannot interact with the lower and other classes (Maree: look who’s talking). They are too supercilious about other races and creeds and colors. (Maree: That I can tell you is a turncoat English Ghost talking; maybe this spirit died in India during the Raj?) They definitely cannot be friendly to a colored stranger (Maree: for a long time he called me Kali(black) when he thought I was out of earshot and then when I confronted him with a color prejudice accusation he said— I was calling you a goddess in other words-.

Ravee has this friend with a schoolboy name, G-1 and they are forever drinking and smoking and calling whores on their mobiles and sending for them or going to them. Sometimes I feel like an innocent pimp while they do unimaginable things to these giggling painted girls. These old guys have some gland over-function. They seem always to have an erection. G-1 and Bhader whom you will meet later know about this English Ghost and are not very perturbed by it.

In the beginning they would make me drive them to what they said were seminars for poets. But I noticed they always stopped at a Chemist and Druggist before proceeding. The same shop every time. One day out of curiosity I went to the shopkeeper and asked him to reveal what the two of them bought when they went to the poets’ seminar. He looked sheepish but eventually confessed, Condoms and Viagra!

Prince Ravee keeps me busy on his nonsense errands. His frivolous disregard for my eight hours of duty makes work time drag on into twelve hours and nobody pays overtime to the domestic help as in his precious Canada. Let him try that in Toronto and soon he will have no money to spend on his rum and chicken diet.

Why cannot Sister Angela be more of a mother to me? Mother Superior, hardly? No one knows how lonely it is to be a girl without a mother.

Why should I even get one iota of happiness really? I was born and then thrown on a pile of garbage. On rotting cabbage, onion peels and cardboard boxes near a dumpster. Who abandoned me? Who came and left me close to the rotting vegetables and soiled sanitary pads? My mother? My father? Who then picked me up and left me at the doorstep of the orphanage? It must have been a kind soul who knew that this dumpster attracted dogs and hyenas from the protected wild life forest near Chandigarh. How can I ever find one of these three creatures, my mother, father or my savior? Was it Jesus’ work? Or Krishna’s or Bajrangbali’s? Whom should I believe? I am surrounded by religious people of various creeds and I love them all. Still why does every orphan have a Salmonic desire to seek its origins?

I told Sister Angela that I was quitting but she said it was not for me to judge anyone. She said (like in the movies) perhaps God had an answer hidden for me here somewhere.

Chapter 2—Bible Quote

Prince Ravee:I shaved and showered and gargled with a mouth wash and popped in a wad of chewing gum to absorb the rum fumes. Then I sat like a good boy waiting for Maree to come. Today I have to meet Gigi Mom (Great Grand Mom, which is what the tiny tots and the extended family call her now.) and present to her the accounts for Jahaj rentals. 

Some time later Maree is driving and she is in a bad sulky mood. It’s because she can smell the rum on my breath. The chewing gum did not work. She is always in a mad sulky mood nowadays. I know it is my fault, but she should realize that I am her employer and master and as a prince I can do whatever I feel like doing. Her black cover paperback Bible sits next to her as always and bobs up and down as she changes the ancient eccentric unsynchronized floor gears.

The camera is watching us.

Aside from Maree—"He has this delusion of grandeur that makes him behave like a celebrity always under the public eye. He imagines there is a camera about ten yards away and a little above always watching him. Perhaps he imagines he is a famous football or cricket player whose every move including scratching private parts and nose-picking is followed by numerous cameras. I think he got this in the Palace, living with the appreciative Queens. He knew the many lovers the Queens had as a necessity because the old Maharaja could not really perform his magic upon his harem of a hundred ladies. Poor man died of various concoctions he imbibed just to get it on.

Meeting the beautiful Queens everyday Prince Ravee learned how to be cute. That habit has hung on. He is being cute forever even though he is (ahem) around forty. He cannot tell you his real age because that would rob him of his cuteness .I can put in all the asides I want because in the end it is going to be me who has to type all the diary stuff he writes Shamelessly (without a care for my sensibilities, like his blatant page on how he lusts for my young body and only resists the urge to woo me because I am an employee) on loose sheets without dates or page numbers. So it is a big jig saw puzzle later to sequence them together and here is an example of what I have to decipher when he writes on his laptop or even longhand when he

is drunk—‘Let me shay here that i am wirtin forgive me now i am drund and i forghot what i hand to sy. Tihis book is absicalloy how w2e shoud control our drinding evn f riden by a ghst.’ That translated to the computer becomes, ‘Let me say here that I am writing forgive me now I am drunk and I forgot what I had to say. This book is absolutely how we should control our drinking even if ridden by a ghost.’

Prince Ravee: ‘Someone is always watching. Maree here will testify that God is always watching us. I remember the palace Padre, Gonzalvez come all the way from Portugal in response to an advertisement by the Maharaja’s agent in a London daily. Catholic. There for the European Queens. Daily confessions that made him blush for the entire day. He drilled in this Big Brother God Watching dread into me. He made me read a subject called moral science. All the lessons of course were in English. I really do not know what this brouhaha is about my writing in English. I wrote my songs in Punjabi but of course I know my English. I have had a better education than most people. First it was moral science one. Then the next year it was moral science two and so on every year. The book showed a boy in shorts with his shirt untucked forever making mistakes and then at the end of each chapter he would beg for forgiveness and pray to God and a ray of light would appear from Jesus Christ’s bosom and all would be forgiven. Christian missionaries trying to convert from an ancient religion older than their own. I did not believe much in the book because the Christian Brother who came to distribute the books in the Palace was later defrocked for Buggery at a famous school in Chandigarh. I sometimes wonder at all the present ruckus about sexual abuse by Catholic priests in America. In India it had been going on for years and everyone then seemed to take it in their stride.’

‘Right now perhaps this Godly camera is a little ahead of us keeping a careful watch on our drive to Grandma’s fort. We are inside this old steel- bodied Willys Station-wagon which is my travelling work station. It is full of equipment which I feel I might need anytime including my camera, tripods, music equipment, folding sofa-cum-bed and ice box full of beer bottles and cans for instant parties.’ 

Maree, can you give me an apt Bible quote for right now- for this moment? I look at the tree images rolling on the windscreen. It is early January and very cool. There is a fear of a cold wave in the North West, which is where we are in Chandigarh going on the highway towards Fort Qarzana. Four degrees centigrade? Celsius? One whiff of cloud stands hesitating above the hills in the distance as if sending a smoke signal to the army of dark clouds that must follow and attack us with bitter chilly winds. I open the triangular side window to eject my rum breath which is gathering in the hot heated Station-wagon. I angle it correctly so that some cool air hits my face as the Station-wagon moves along. Maree stays concentrating on the road; mouth clamped shut, thinking perhaps about a bible quote. I wonder why Grandma never offered to buy me a new car. I wonder why she does not keep me in better style considering the royal status of her family. It is the damned drinking. When I was younger no one could tell that I had been drinking; now I seem to sway when I walk and stumble upon my words when I speak. Oh forgotten youth, wherefore art thou?

The tree images run faster inside the windscreen as Maree angrily speeds up. She hates being joshed about the Bible. I see the sign from the distance—Ahaata/Tavern. Can you please stop there for some time I will just have a small beer. It’s my hangover.

She screeches to a halt and looks at me.—He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man; he that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich. I look at her and nod in thankful acknowledgement for the apt quote. Wine and oil? You mean wine and ale? Would you care to join me? 

No, thanks, I am fine here; I will park near that tree and wait. Please hurry because as you tell me Gigi Mom does not like to be kept waiting.

Aye aye sir! I salute and go into the welcome precincts of the Ahaata. I remember my ancient mentor Omar Khayyam—

‘those who stood before

The Tavern shouted— "Open then the Door!

You know how little time we have to stay.’

Only a few drifters with continuation drinks. Continuation of the night before. Thus was I. I buy a quarter of rum and sit down. Hey, Charlie! I wave at the thin waiter talking to the cook at the back end of the ‘Tavern.’ 

Soda and ice!

Yes boss!

This first drink holds so much promise for the day.’

Chapter 3—Descendant of the One F-ck Prince

Maree—‘I will take over here because he is going to be in there a long time and besides I don’t think there is a camera hanging over my head. I don’t have to talk as if I am a movie director explaining a scene to an actor which in this case is always my Boss – His Royal Highness, Prince Ravee Singhjee. Paranoid and schizophrenic and many other things rolled into one frivolous, pampered and flirtatious ghost ridden self.

Me? Oh I am a happy soul. What else can I be? I am lucky to be alive. An orphan educated by a procession of American, European and Indian nuns a bit like his royal highness but only in my own poverty stricken way. I always touch my Bible to ward off bad luck and thank my stars. I would have been a rag-picker or a prostitute if my unknown benefactor had not left me wisely at the footsteps of the orphanage. I have a core of Christianity encapsulated by all the religious influences in the orphanage. The Hindu gardener. The Muslim cook. The Sikh bus driver.’

‘Sister Angela knowing my bookish inclinations thought she was doing me a favour by sending me off as a secretary who later also became a driver for this royal personage who calls himself a writer. He did indeed become famous for a short time when he wrote lyrics for Punjabi songs when he lived in Lipatia as a young man. He shifted to Chandigarh where an English Ghost grabbed him. Bhader blames Ravee and says, ‘you must have piddled under a banyan tree.’ Ravee has been protesting his innocence and denies having done any such sacrilege. He lost his Punjabi art and went haywire and began writing in English. He is writing the ultimate novel but does not get time from his constant day of drinking and visiting and whoring and rejoicing followed by sentimental crying sessions for the long lost Royal days. I would go mad if I still did not have that small room at the orphanage I escape to every night. I read stories from the Bible to the children early in the morning. That’s it. It pays for my lodging and the meager boarding there is? I also am the private driver for Sister Angela, but she never goes anywhere. I have risen to a pay of 5000 rupees with the Prince. I started at 2000. I save the majority of the money for my further education. I buy my clothes from the Janta markets in sector 19 and sector 22 full of rejects from the export garment industry in Delhi.

Every morning after the regulation breakfast at the orphanage of one banana and a cup of milk I reach the big triangular building in Turail village stepping carefully between the large blobs of buffalo dung. It is not far from our Christian Mission and Orphanage. He lives up there in the presumptuously called penthouse. This triangular building is his domain. Surrounded by the village filth and attacked constantly by flies and mosquitoes from the big garbage dump created by the city of Chandigarh near Turail to teach it an imperial lesson, but he loves it. All that is left for this poor prince of the House of Lipatia. He calls himself ‘the one fuck prince regent when he gets drunk. Or the heir apparent of the one- fuck- prince.’

His grandmother Gigi Mom, his father’s mother was bedded once when she was a commoner by his grandfather the Great Hunter the August Presence and Maharaja of Lipatia and husband of a hundred queens of assorted lineage and foreign citizenships. It was on a hunting trip. They got lost in the forest and had to camp in the wilderness for the night. His hunting party was made up of a great horde of drum beaters, guests, elephants, horses, cooks, waiters and soldiers of his private army. Alas there were no women. They killed a wild boar and began to cook in the open. A temporary tandoor was set up for the breads. The soldiers went in search of chickens, salads, rice and fresh vegetables. All this while the Maharaja was getting drunker and drunker with his guests and everyone knew that he like the giant in Jack and the beanstalk would ask for a favourite toy. In this case it would be a demand for a woman. He was a great fornicator he was, they tell me. The poor girl who came to deliver the vegetables caught the Maharaja’s drunken fancy.

A deal was reached with her parents and she was married there and then by the royal army chaplain or pundit or whatever. She never saw the Maharaja again but was bestowed palaces and land and jewels and a place in the family tree of the great house of Lipatia. The great Maharaja had no intention of abandoning his new found wife but the poor fellow died a few months later (a victim of his own aphrodisiac concoctions) even while a new suite was being readied in the Palace for the fresh queen. The queen gave birth to a healthy boy exactly nine months after that night in the forest. That was Ravee’s father Pratinder, the original one-fuck prince and naturally called the Pretender because of the unfortunate name bestowed upon him by the royal pundit. Ravee’s father was so bullied in the Palace that he grew up with a bad stammer and became almost stupid with fear and awe of the other princes. He was married off to a small princely family girl of Rajasthan. Pratinder died when Ravee Singhjee was six years old. Pratinder’s wife went into widowed seclusion and was never heard of again. No one knew if she was dead or alive. Gigi Mom (the one fuck bride) did not despair. She built a new life for herself, the life of a rich princess. She made herself wealthy by investing wisely all over Lipatia and Chandigarh. She was horrified by the profligate ways of the royal family and realized that soon they would fritter away their wealth if new sources of income were not created. She used the Palace tutors and taught herself English, math and account keeping. The palace was a great place for learning because the Lipatia Maharajas loved to emulate the styles of European Royalty.

Slowly and steadily she became richer than the other princes and consorts. The other queens envied her when she drove around in fancy cars and did her business from a swanky office inside the Palace. Ravee Singhjee was spared a fate similar to his father’s because Gigi Mom always gave money to the other princes who thus were nicer to Ravee in front of her. Alas fearing for her own life in the palace intrigues she decided to shift herself to Fort Qarzana and Ravee to Turail. She lived a very comfortable life with her small army of private bodyguards and servants in this vast Fort, which she bought from a down at luck prince of some other royal family.

This rankled with him, Ravee Singhjee; he was a prince but the descendant of a one fuck prince. A royal joke. The lowest in the princely ranks. This hundredth and one ranking was a sore point with him. He was never sent to the best boarding schools like the other princes or to the best overseas colleges. He never got to speak ‘proper Bada Sahib English’ till the Ghost took over. He was taught and raised entirely in Lipatia with private European tutors and the padre for moral science and after that it was the egalitarian colleges and hostels for him in Chandigarh. He roamed the vast palace skidding on the shiny imported marble floors; becoming a ladies man with the queens. He was forever carrying messages from one queen to another and getting kissed by all of them in the process. Thus he knew the real stories of the six hundred roomed palace. He was of course invited to all major royal events, treated like a prince, but at official receptions he squirmed and sweated uncomfortably in his satin and gold embroidered suits and his sequined turban. The other princes guffawed and treated him like a country cousin. They were so well mannered and boarding school educated. They tested his English and laughed when he replied in Punjabi couplets. He was just the day-school prince and thus a bit lower class and too democratic for the liking of the hoity-toity princes. 

As a result of this massive chip on his shoulder he turned, with a lot of help from the future Chairman of the FSP, to drink and poetry. Drinking heavily and holding it was a big macho thing in the Punjab and Chandigarh. It was supposed to be a virtue in itself and many young men lost their simple souls in the pubs of Lipatia and Chandigarh.

He soon could drink everyone under the table. He worked on his English too and could quote from Ghalib to Shakespeare and from Wordsworth to Sheikh Farid. When it became unbearable for Ravee in Lipatia, Gigi Mom gave him the top storey of this building in Turail and he loved it here but resented the implied fall in status as a prince. In the rest of the floors she had built shops and rented them out at good prices.

Gigi Mom kept track of the other princes. She was diplomatic and treated the princes with equal respect and charity. The Princes loved to visit her. They received fantastic presents. Cartier watches, diamond rings, gold chains, platinum cuff links. Gigi Mom’s wealth knew no bounds. She loved to visit Prince Partap who had a large mansion in a northern sector of Chandigarh. Price Partap threw lavish parties and imagined himself a Gatsby. He had built himself a liquor empire and was suspected of smuggling trucks of liquor from one state to another to get a price advantage in taxation. He was very rich and had hopes of inheriting the business empire of Gigi Mom. There was no one else. All the other princes had the same pursuits of drinking, socializing and womanizing. They felt their wealth would last forever. Alas, some had already been reduced to penury and were constant visitors at the gates of Gigi Mom and Prince Partap seeking financial help.

The children of Turail loved this building. They thought it looked like a Ship and thus called it Jahaj. Ravee Singhjee a secret rebel loved the independence of these people from the bureaucratic historically British spidery web of licensing rules of the Chandigarh Authorities, which could not interfere on old village grounds that were within the Laal Dora or the Red Thread markings. Any inspector who dared to appear within the village was threatened with such dire consequences that he never dared to venture forth towards this sanctuary of freedom. Thus the Turail people built as they pleased and had an entirely independent government inside the precincts of Chandigarh. Their slim buildings with numerous little windows like port holes went up precariously uncoordinated like leaning towers to seven stories and seemed to be chatting with heads together defying gravity and the ban on buildings above six stories. They opened schools and then leased out beer bars and

cigarette shops right next to the school gates. They said everyone became a drunkard anyway in Chandigarh and the region around it at a radius of a hundred kilometers. Drinking and smoking were macho here. Opium could be bought on credit from the paanwallahs sitting cross legged in their pretty tiny cubicles on cycle wheels on the roadside. These little mobile shops had small cigarette packet sized shelves lined on all possible sides and these were arranged beautifully with cigarettes Indian and American. A folding shelf in front of the paanwallah held little brass pots of lime and katha. The paans and the paan leaves were kept on a shining brass platter under a wet clean cloth gone red from the drops of katha and betel nut paste falling on it. The paanwallah rubbed layers of diluted lime and katha with the panache of a painter. Life was pretty casual and relaxed here. Black opium pills were used to cure hangovers by the residents of Turail.

Chapter 4—Deadline

Gigi Mom was now a thin wisp of a woman, everyone said almost a hundred years old. She scurried about the fort admonishing the gardeners inspecting the bodyguards’ uniforms and checking the kitchen and the pantry. She had a fleet of cars and a small garage with trained mechanics to keep them up to the mark. Hers was a modern village economy. She had a blacksmith and a carpenter on her staff. They were kept busy doing some repair or other. 

She was constantly in the news because of her growing business empire, run by professional directors and managers. She was honorary director of at least a hundred company boards but she refused to go anywhere far away from Fort Qarzana. She had bought a lot of industrial land all around Qarzana and some of her new projects were coming up here right next to the fort. The lands she had bought rocketed sky-high with people following her lead and trying to set up other industrial units near her.

It was the fourth of January. Ravee was taking the rent from all the shops in the Jahaj building to GGMom. The fourth was a deadline for all the tenants. After that date Gigi Mom sends her huge six foot six bouncer Gomal to abuse the tardy tenants with swear words that would singe even the ears of his ex-army buddies. They cough up the rent pretty fast then.

We were off to a relatively early start this fourth. If only that tavern had not been open at this early hour we would have reached Gigi Mom by now. And the day would perhaps have gone in a different direction. We were parked near this make shift Jhuggi village. A Jhuggi is made up of stolen or borrowed bricks cardboard packing, plastic sheets, roofed with corrugated tin from scrap dealers. A village comes up pretty soon and the authorities turn a blind eye to it because it is a future vote bank. The migratory population thus becomes settled here and eventually they are allotted small one room flats as compensation when the occupied land needs to be vacated for a road project or a multiplex. People with various sized empty coke, edible oil or beer bottles in their hands were trekking to their favourite shit-spot on the uninhabited land which was still covered by trees and thick foliage. I smiled wryly thinking of the smart ladies in the city carrying their fashionable little bottles of branded mineral water. If they were seen here everyone would think they were going for a shit and the water was for cleaning their pretty fat arses. Toilets were not a luxury enjoyed by these people. In fact I saw groups of children and women going together for a social shit. If I ever became minister, toilets for the poor, schools in every slum and clean water for drinking would be my only agenda for years. Perhaps I would ask G-1 to add this to his manifesto.

I opened the thick heavy