My Aunt Maya

She was a memory of curly hair, a husky voice and the liquid flash of large dark eyes. The relatives surrounded me in a seriously hushed cluster and told me her beauty was legendary. “Ah,” they said, in awed voices, “Maya, she was so beautiful. You’ll never understand.” And they shook their heads over my failure of taste or perception or whatever they felt it was. They were right, of course, I didn’t understand, but that was neither due to my taste or eyesight. By the time I saw her she was a small awkward shape with too many chins. Perhaps the dark eyes still retained their famous sparkle but a divorce and a ruffled fledgling daughter, who showed not a trace of her charm, dragged at her skirts and blunted the magic.

What they told me about her life, when they were in the mood, was like a series of sepia pictures, someone’s brittle leather-bound album flipping past your eyes. I would sit on my great aunt’s Italian marble floor and take it in as if it was a fairytale. Elephants, maharajahs in jewelled turbans, tents and champagne breakfasts... She had all of that from her grandfather. I had a vague memory of his leathery library, and the dark, heavy pictures that hung around it. Everyone called him my Picture Grandfather to distinguish him from my other, more immediate grandfathers. He was a once upon a time figure with a title, a Sir to add to the orotund syllables of his name Raghuvendra Roychowdhury, and a place at the Viceroy’s table. Stories came back to my grandmother and aunts, dimly filtered by inept recounting, of gilt-edged banquets in Delhi and white-gloved lords and ladies. Rolls Royce Roychowdhury, they called him because he steamrollered his way through the polite society of the British Raj in a kind of triumphal swathe, leaving crushed bodies in his wake. 

His money came from his aunt, the childless widow of a landlord from the border estate of Taki that has since vanished into Bangladesh. She adopted him, made him her heir and started him on the extravagant progress of his life. She found him a wife who was famed for her ugliness and her temper across three states. A wife they called Lady Kali after the Goddess of Destruction. Somehow, between them, they produced a son and a daughter. When the son was old enough to marry they chose a pretty, blushing girl with an impeccable pedigree. But though Lady Kali selected her, she was threatened by her beauty and banished her behind the veils of purdah. For their daughter, on the other hand, Lady Kali assembled an all pink trousseau to complement her fair skin, something unheard of in those days. “Bad taste,” sniffed my mother. “She was a woman who came from a very ordinary background.” The girl with the rose coloured trousseau went on to become Maya’s mother.

Maya was born on a blindingly bright summer morning, with an anxious English doctor in attendance. Her grandfather cracked some many bottles of French champagne that the air was loud with the popping of corks. She was promptly given one of those punning English-Bengali nicknames that were so popular in the 1930s: May for the month of her birth and May because it was close enough in pronunciation to “meyeh”, the Bengali for “daughter”. Her real name, Maya, was forgotten after her mother died. The girl with the rose pink saris and blouses died young, leaving her daughter to the mercy of a succession of governesses. I imagined them heavily made up and powdered into a generation of Merle Oberons, since that was as close as I could get to the real thing. Perhaps the Merle Oberons were responsible for what May became, seducing her with eyeshadow and experienced charm.

“What beauty,” asked my Aunt Rita irritably as we stared into the depths of one of her sepia portraits. “She looks quite ordinary to me.” 

Heads shook all around and people launched into their, “You cannot hope to understand” explanations all over again. Aunt May belonged to the days of seven stranded pearl necklaces that reached down to the knee — “Basra pearls, every one of them, worth a Shah’s ransom.” Careless extravagant days of sooty kajol-lined eyes and slow, shrugged off stoles — even though she had caught the kajol from the Russian Ballet and not concocted the look at home over a slow burning leaf doctored with oil-like decent girls had their maids do for them. Aunt May do that? Never! The only time I ventured into a long conversation with her was when she told me about how she used to loll on a long leather sofa and listen to the Armed Forces radio instead of doing her homework, secretly so her grandfather wouldn’t hear. And then she would pick up a bottle of something called Durogloss and set her nails blazing with crimson. That was far more effective, she said, then a convent education. Though she caught herself up on a wary smile after that and advised me not to repeat it.

“May,” everyone cooed, with that indulgent note creeping into their voices. “She was such a bad girl!” She went to the races with the Anglo Indian governesses wearing 8 denier stockings, if such things were available in those days, no, that’s me exaggerating — what would it matter if she wore stockings under her sari, anyway. She gambled. She waved cigarettes in long ivory holders and veiled her sloe eyes in their blue smoke, trying desperately to look like Edna May or any other currently popular swoon queens, in the attire at her disposal. The aunts and the grandmothers fainted at the thought of the cigarettes. In fact, they assembled in knots of hissing coils to number and denounce Maya’s excesses: the cigarettes, the chiffon saris worn instead of homespun weaves and, later, the alcohol.

Aunt May progressed far beyond the Durogloss and Armed Forces radio. The spiky heels and the float of chiffon saris proclaimed her intent as clearly as her collection of compacts. She had a collection of the variety that would nowadays be called important: flashy squares of mother of pearl, discs of gold, tortoise shell with a little line of diamonds let in. They were meant to be held. They signalled significantly every time they were produced, whether in the darkness of boites, or by chandelier light. Sliding out of velvet and leather pouches. Her daughter showed them to me on a hushed afternoon when the house was veiled in sleep. They glinted softly in the perfumed depths of a drawer and I could imagine them opening and shutting like slow bursts of applause in my aunt’s hands. “Don’t tell anyone I showed you,” the daughter whispered. “She doesn’t know where they are. If she did, she’d sell them.”

Aunt May drank. No woman who was less than fifty and had not attained dowager status was allowed to drink. 

Crystal glasses weighed down with amber liquid were seen in her hand. My mother said that she was always blasé when you asked her what she was drinking — gin rickeys, champagne, sometimes scotch in winter. 

You could say that it went with the French perfume and high heeled lifestyle. Calcutta was still the most exciting city east of the Suez. It was fast, glamorous and incredibly sophisticated. The P&O would deliver letters from England to those unfortunate enough to be stranded at the Venetian Bar in Firpo’s. People would stagger in from the Strand and sink themselves in tall glasses filled with enough ice to sink a battleship and cold enough to help them forget how far away they were from home. Though the British had gone, their worldliness lingered. And Aunt May was one of the vibrant centres of that fast, glittering world.

What Aunt May chose, out of all the wit and sophistication at her feet, was a young Army officer. Bengali, of course, everyone was relieved at that, but after they had finished heaving their sighs they collected themselves again to point out that he was penniless and as erratic as she was. Why didn’t she wait a little, they urged, until her grandfather and her aunt chose someone more suitable? Arranged a marriage, which would meet social requirements as well as May’s romantic ones? They said that with their fingers crossed behind their back because everyone knew that an arranged marriage would probably fail in the romantic respect. If she had had a mother it might have made all the difference, but she wore everyone else down through a combination of obstinacy and charm. After all, they said finally, when they gave in, it could have been much worse.

Inevitably and, shockingly for those days, there was a divorce. All Maya gained out of it was a small round-eyed daughter who, as far as people could tell, had none of her looks.

May’s glamorous life could not survive the disgrace. An audible hush would fall on parties when she walked into them. Her father, for once, took a hand in matters and packed her off to London. A few months or years there would give people time to forget. She could return with a whitewashed reputation — at least so he thought.

Her life began to run downhill very fast, as if she were whizzing on a roller coaster through a hall of distorting mirrors. Swinging London in the ’60s with Mary Quant and mini skirts was the stuff to go wrong with. The image shifted from the jade cigarette holders and the floated chiffons to the lipstick and leather dollybird. She smoked grass, drank and passed out at parties. Some people said she did it on purpose to be picked up, but they weren’t the people she partied with.

The news, inevitably, reached her grandfather. Despite the fact that the British had packed up their imperial shop in 1947, he still had his contacts. They advised him to remove his granddaughter from the country before British Immigration removed her forcibly.

By the time I met Aunt May, she had a dull little teaching job and increasingly brittle bones. Her once husband had remarried, a rich, sober widow, and showed every sign of reforming, so perhaps the only thing wrong with him had been May herself. The daughter clung sadly in her fading shadow, a wisp in the trail of her cigarette smoke. 

Then, one summer, like a flicker of lightning, she was gone. She died of a cold; shrugging her life off as casually as a chiffon stole. “She was very talented you know,” her family said sadly, while her daughter struggled with the obituary. Perhaps, after all, what she couldn’t tolerate was the pity.