MAHARAJA by Eugene Datta We were quite young then. Most of us friends were in our early teens, some were even younger; and all of us worshiped Sikandar Khan. He was different from everyone we knew. There was nothing about him that was run-of-the-mill, including his name. Unlike the others he was no one's uncle or chacha or bhaia or anything of that sort. He was, simply, Sikandar Khan. There was talk of him having been to Bombay and having acted in a film, although no one seemed to know for sure in which. Sikandar Khan, of course, never talked about it himself. He went about his business as though the world around him did not exist. The only time he acknowledged people's existence, so to speak,

Eugene Datta Enchanment 2002, crayon on board, 10" x 9.6" (Courtesy of the artist)

Chandni Chawk Street was a curious tangle of shops and homes. The buildings, slack and ugly as they were, housed families and businesses that flowed into one another like muddy runnels in the rain. Loudspeakers blared every Eid, Puja, and Christmas, and on every other lesser pretext. And in that giant dormitory-cum-marketplace everyone seemed to know everyone else, including the man who sold syrupy red and green soft drinks on that bustling stretch of the road and his distant cousin from Bihar who poured water tirelessly on slivers of coconut arrayed on his rattletrap wooden barrow. Only the fruit sellers on the pavement, the sugarcane juice men, the traveling vendors, and a handful of others were outside of this fraternity. Gossip hummed like obstinate fruit flies on mounds of mango. And the topics ranged from everyone's young daughter, sister, and wife (and their affairs, illegitimate or otherwise), to their swelling or dwindling fortunes (depending on what they deserved). In the midst of this mundane mixture, the one subject that always stood out was Sikandar Khan.

Almost everyone in the neighborhood, including those who worked at shops in Chandni Chawk or owned them and spent most of their waking hours there, claimed to know something or the other about the man. And, interestingly, even the most incredible anecdotes about him seemed plausible. Like the one Anil told us after one of his uncles had returned from Bombay. The story was that his uncle's friend in Bombay worked in the movies and knew all the actors and actresses personally. Some even came to his house, and Anil's uncle apparently shook hands with Dharmendra one day. Anyway, so this man allegedly told Anil's uncle that Sikandar Khan had affairs with a number of famous actresses, and that one of them (I forget who) would certainly have married him had he not left Bombay all of a sudden.

Somehow, we didn't doubt Anil's story. After all, it was Sikandar Khan, who belonged in a different world altogether, some place far from this shabby, stifling, lackluster reality of Chandni Chawk Street where he was our neighbor. His place was somewhere in the wondrous realm of filmswhether we ever saw him in one or notwhere everything was possible. Besides, he'd been to Bombayat least that's what they said.

Then there was this other story about Mansoor Khairullah's widowed daughter, Salma, having eloped with him. This had really caught our fancy, because Salma Khairullah was the prettiest woman we had ever seen. So whenever we heard anyone talk about it, we would sidle up to them and prick our ears for fresh details. We couldn't hide our gluttonous appetite for news about Sikandar Khan's affairs, romantic or otherwise, and were often scolded by the elders because of that.

Mansoor Khairullah was an influential bohra businessman from Jaan Bazaar and owned several shops in that area. His family was quite educatedone of his sons worked for an English newspaper, and Salma, the only sister of four brothers, had graduated from Loreto House, which was quite rare in those days for a Muslim girl. Sikandar Khan's family knew them well, and there was a fair amount of social interaction between the two families.

We used to hear stories about how Salma was missing for months the year after her husband died in a car accident. This was sometime in the late sixties, or maybe the early seventies, when we were too young to have firsthand information on such matters. Some people believed that Sikandar Khan, who had already run away to Bombay, had arranged for Salma to go there on her own so that they could get married. Others said he had come to Calcutta secretly to take her to Bombay with him. Several other versions of the story circulated among the people of Chandni Chawk Street. And there were still other stories, each one a little wilder than the next. But nothing quite touched Sikandar Khan's image. Rumors and scandals only seemed to add to his enigma.

There was always someone or another claiming to have seen him in the latest release, which would prompt others to go see that film only to come back disappointed and angry. It happened many times, and yet the release of every new Bombay flick stoked the fire of anticipation. Who knows? Maybe he is really there in this one, people would think. Strangely, though, no one ever asked him if he had really acted in a film, or, if he had, what it was called. No one dared to cross the distance that lay between him and the rest of humanity. We, of course, were not allowed to go to the movies on our own, although sometimes we would cut school and sneak into a noon show at Elite or Paradise. For news on Sikandar Khan's film career, we depended on those who seemed to know more about things than we did.

People talked about how Sikandar Khan had a bright future in Bombay. With a little luck, they said, he could easily surpass Shashi Kapoor or Rajesh Khanna because he was more handsome than both and had more style. And his voice was much better than Amitabh Bachchan's. Some of my older friends, who lived on Hindi cinema, used to look for Sikandar Khan's picture in the film magazines. That they never found it anywhere didn't seem to dent their enthusiasm.

In the meantime, Sikandar Khan's father passed away. For days after the funeral no one saw him on the road. Khansahb, which is how his father, a once prosperous furniture dealer, was known in the business community of Chandni Chawk, had lost both his wives and two other sons. People said Sikandar Khan was forced to come back from Bombay because there was no one to look after the old man and his business. But as everyone in the neighborhood knew, he hardly looked after his father's business. Khan Furniture, one of Jaan Bazaar's oldest establishments, was now run by one of their old employees, Salim something. The man himself was too old to manage the business, and the shop remained closed most days of the week. People gossiped about how Sikandar Khan was being fleeced by old Salim's sons, who were not only siphoning off the rentals, but also selling off the furniture on their own. Yet whenever someone tried telling him this, he would smile his famous cinematic smile and with a wave of his hand say, "Oh, I know. But what can I tell them, they're so poor."

Once I saw him rescue a thief who had stolen some cash from someone in Ram Laha's crockery store. It was a summer afternoon; I was on my way back from school. The man lay on the pavement surrounded by an angry crowd; he was whimpering and bleeding from the nose. Ram Laha's son was screaming at the top of his voice. "Harami, how dare you do this?" he said and kicked the man, when Sikandar Khan appeared out of the blue and grabbed his arm from behind. "What's the matter, beta?" he said, and for the first time I caught a hint of exasperation in his voice. "What has he done?" he asked, scowling. Ram Laha's son told him what had happened.

Everyone in the crowd had their eyes on Sikandar Khan as he listened to Ram Laha's son and his employees. It was a very hot day, and there were beads of perspiration all over his smooth brown face. A lock of his thick, kohl-black hair, which always hung over his right brow, was stuck to his forehead. His kameez was soaked in sweat. No matter what time of the day it was, one always found Sikandar Khan in white cotton salwar kameez, and he always smelled of foreign perfume. Anyway, so he listened to whoever had anything to say about the theft, standing straight, his hands behind him, towering over the crowd. Then he turned to the man whose money was stolen and asked, "How much did he steal?"

"One hundred and twenty-five rupees, babu," the man said.

"Did you get it back?"

"Yes, he'd hidden it under his lungi."

Meanwhile, the thief had sat up on the pavement; he was still weeping. "Why do you do this?" Sikandar Khan said to him. The man tried to say something, but all anyone could hear was a groan that seemed to come out of the hollow of his belly. He was badly hurt. Sikandar Khan turned to Ram Laha's son and said, "You shouldn't have hit him so badly." Then he asked one of the fruit vendors, a nice old man named Jagannath, to take the man to his house and ask his servant to give him something to eat. "Don't let him go until I'm back," he said to Jagannath and went away. We learned later that he had given the man a job somewhere.

That was Sikandar Khan. He would let people get away with murder, so to speak, if they happened to do it because they were poor. So he condoned what Salim's sons did to his family business and didn't do anything about it. "They need it more than I do," he once told my father. There were very few small-time businessmen on Chandni Chawk Street who hadn't borrowed money from him; fewer still ever paid him back. But that didn't seem to bother Sikandar Khan at all. Instead of trying to retrieve his loans or salvaging the furniture business, he invested all that he was left with in a few rickshaws, fifteen or sixteen of them or maybe more, which he rented daily for a few hundred rupees.

We often heard our elders discuss his financial affairs with serious concern. My father and some of his Muslim and Hindu friends, who loved and respected Khansahb and admired his charismatic son, talked about the Khans' dwindling fortunes over tea. Soon it became common knowledge that Sikandar Khan had exhausted all his family savings and now he depended entirely on the money his rickshaw-pullers fetched him, which, of course, wasn't enough for someone like him. Then it turned out some of the rickshaw-pullers were cheating him. One day my father invited him for tea and asked him if he knew what was going on. "I wonder if you know that most of your men are being dishonest," my father told him. "They have been making much more than what they say they do."

"Oh, let it be, Davidbhai," he told my father. "They are so poor, and they have such big families. Most have five or six mouths to feed. They can barely survive with what they make."

There wasn't much my father could say after that. Sikandar Khan always had the last word. "I appreciate your concern for me, Davidbhai," he said on his way out of our house. "But don't worry, I'm just going through a bad phase. It will pass, insha Allah."

"Insha Allah," my father had said.

After that, I think I saw him only once or twice. Things went from bad to worse, and he sold off his rickshaws one after another until he was left with just two or three. He was no longer seen on the street. We were told that he was unwell and was advised by the doctor not to get out of the house. This was the winter of 1978 or 1979. One day, I received a postcard from my friend Ajay Chawdhury, who had gone to Bombay for Christmas holiday, saying that he had seen Sikandar Khan in Maharaja which had just been released there. "I saw the film four times to make sure I was not wrong," he wrote. I showed the letter to whoever I could. Some were as excited as I was, while others passed it as just another hoax. But when Maharaja came to Calcutta some time later, almost all of Chandni Chawk went to see it at Paradise. And, sure enough, Sikandar Khan was there in the film. He appeared only once, for just about a minute or so, or maybe a little longer, as a doorman saluting Rajesh Khanna and holding the palace door for him. That was all.

About a month later, Dr. Lama, our house physician, who also treated Sikandar Khan, called on my father late one evening and gave him the news of Sikandar Khan's death. He hadn't had anything to eat for days, we were told.

The next day, while the rest of Dharamtalla buzzed with weekday activity, all was quiet on Chandni Chawk Street.