Heat and Dust

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  “It’s lovely here,” Olivia said, feeling terribly relieved: not only because she was cooler and more comfortable but because he was being nice again.

  “It is a very special place,” the Nawab said. “Wait, I will tell you, only first I think we must look after him: just see,” he said, indicating Harry who had flopped down on a rug with his arms extended and breathing rapidly in exhaustion. The Nawab laughed: “What a state he is in. He is a very weak person. Because he is so flabby in his body I think. He is not a proper Englishman at all. No – shall I tell you – I think he is a very improper Englishman.” He laughed at his joke and his eyes and teeth flashed; but at the same time he quite tenderly slipped a cushion under Harry’s head. Harry groaned with his eyes shut: “It’s killing me.”

  “What is killing you? This beautiful spot, sacred to my ancestors? Or perhaps it is our company?” He smiled at Olivia, then asked her “Do you like it here? You don’t mind I brought you? I wish Mr. Rivers would have come with us also. But I think Mr. Rivers must be very busy.” He darted the tip of his tongue over his lips, then equally rapidly darted a look at Olivia: “Mr. Rivers is a proper Englishman,” he declared.

  “I know you like him,” Harry said from his prone position.

  “Go to sleep! We are not talking with you but with each other . . . I think Mr. Rivers went to one of the English public schools? Eton or Rugby? Unfortunately I myself did not have this chance. If I have a son, I think I shall send him. What do you think? A very good education is to be obtained and also excellent discipline. Of course Harry did not like it at all, he says it is – what did you say it is, Harry?”

  “Savage,” Harry said with feeling.

  “What nonsense. Only for someone like you because you are improper. Let us try and make him a little bit proper, what do you think, Mrs. Rivers?” he said with another smile at her. He called to the young men who came running up and, at the Nawab’s invitation, they threw themselves on Harry, and one massaged his legs and another his neck and a third tickled the soles of his feet. They all, including Harry, seemed to enjoy this game. The Nawab watched them, smiling indulgently, but when he saw Olivia was feeling left out, he turned to her and now he was again the way he had been with his guests at his dinner party: attentive, full of courtesy and consideration, making her feel that she was the only person there who mattered to him.

  He invited her to see the shrine with him. It was a small plain whitewashed structure with a striped dome on top. Inside there were latticed windows to which people had tied bits of red thread, praying for fulfilment of their wishes. They had also laid strings of flowers – now wilted – on a little whitewashed mound that stood alone in the centre of the shrine. The Nawab explained that the shrine had been built by an ancestor of his in gratitude to Baba Firdaus who had lived on this spot. Baba Firdaus had been a devout soul devoted to prayer and solitude; the Nawab’s ancestor – Amanullah Khan – had been a freebooter riding around the country with his own band of desperadoes to find what pickings they could in the free-for-all between Moghuls, Afghans, Mahrattas, and the East India Company. In the course of a long career, he had had a lot of ups and downs. Once he had sought refuge in this grove – all his men had been killed in an engagement, and he himself had only just escaped with his life, though badly wounded. Baba Firdaus had kept him hidden from his pursuers and also tended his wounds and nursed him back to health. Years later, when fortune smiled on him again, Amanullah Khan had returned; but by then the place was deserted and no one knew what had happened to the Baba, or even whether he was dead or alive. So all Amanullah Khan could do was to build this little shrine in the holy man’s honour.

  “Because he never forgot friend or foe”, the Nawab said about his ancestor. “Where there was a score to be settled for good or bad, he did not forget. He was only a rough soldier but very straight and honourable. And a great fighter. The British liked him very much. I think you always like such people?” He looked enquiringly at Olivia. She laughed – it seemed strange to her to be nominated as a spokesman for the British. Then he smiled too: “Yes you like rough people who fight well and are mostly on a horse. Best of all you like the horse. But I think you don’t like others so much?”

  “What others?” Olivia asked, laughing.

  “For instance,” he said, also laughing, “myself.” But then he grew serious and said “But you are a different type of person. You don’t like horses, I think? No. Come here please, I will show you something.”

  He led her out of the shrine. There was a little spring which came freshly bubbling out of a cleft between some stones. It was the sound of this spring that, together with the bird-song, filled that green grove. The Nawab squatted down and dabbled his fingers in the water and invited Olivia to do the same: “How cold it is. It is always like that. People think it is a miracle that there should be this green grove and this cold water here in this place where there is only desert. Why is it so? Some say it is because of Baba Firdaus and his holy life, others say because Amanullah Khan paid his debt of gratitude. Do you believe that it could be so? That there is a miracle?”

  They were side by side. He looked at her intensely and she looked down at her hands which she was dabbling in the water. It was fresh and fast running but so shallow that it just trickled over her fingers. She said “Perhaps a very small miracle.”

  Then he slapped his knee and laughed loudly: “Oh Mrs. Rivers, you have a good sense of humour!” He got up and held out his hand solicitously though she managed without him. “Do you know,” he said then, very serious again, “that as soon as I saw you I knew you would be this type of person? Shall I tell you something? It is very funny: I feel I can tell you anything, anything at all, and you will understand. It is very rare to have this feeling with another person. But with you I have it. And something else also: I’m not someone who believes very much in miracles, not at all. I’m too scientific to have such beliefs. But also I think that there are things that could be, even if they are miracles. Don’t you think so? That this could be? Ah, you see: I knew. You are much more the same type like myself than like – for instance – for instance – Mrs. Crawford.” He laughed, she laughed. He looked into her eyes. “You are not at all like Mrs. Crawford,” he said while doing this; but next moment he saw he was embarrassing her so he smilingly released her from his intense gaze and, very gently just touching her elbow, propelled her back to where the others were.

  Now he was in an excellent mood and the party began to go with a swing. The servants had unpacked the picnic hampers, filling the sacred grove with roasted chickens, quails, and potted shrimps. The young men were very lively and entertained sometimes with practical jokes which they played on each other, and sometimes with songs and Urdu verses. One of them had brought a lute-like instrument out of which he plucked some bittersweet notes. The lute also provided the music for the game of musical chairs they played, with cushions laid in a row. It happened – whether by accident or design Olivia didn’t know – that she and the Nawab were the last two players left. Very, very slowly they circled around the one remaining cushion, keeping their eyes on each other, each alert to what the other might do next. Everyone watched, the lute played. For a moment she thought that, as an act of courtesy, he was going to let her win; but quite suddenly – he heard the music stop before she did – he flung himself on the one remaining cushion. He had won! He laughed out loud and threw up both his arms in triumph. He was really tremendously pleased.

  8 March. It is from this time on that Olivia’s letters to Marcia really begin. She had been writing to her before that, but infrequently and not in great detail: and it is only from the day of the Nawab’s picnic that she began to write as if it were a relief to have someone to confide in.

  Olivia never told Douglas about the Nawab’s picnic. She had meant to as soon as she got home, but it so happened that he had been held up by a stabbing incident in the bazaar that day and was even later than usual. She asked him many questions, and as he loved
talking about his work (she wasn’t always all that interested), the time just went and she never did get round to telling him about her day. And when he left next morning, she was still asleep. So instead she wrote the first of her long letters to Marcia. I wonder what Marcia can have made of these letters: she was living in France at the time – she had married a Frenchman but they had separated and Marcia was on her own, living in a series of hotel rooms and getting involved with some rather difficult people. Olivia’s life in India must have seemed strange and far-off.

  I have laid Olivia’s letters out on my little desk and work on them and on this journal throughout the morning. My day in Satipur has taken on a steady routine. It starts early because the town wakes early. First there are the temple bells – I lie in bed and listen to them – and then the fire is lit and the kettle put on in the tea-stall opposite. The air is fresh at this hour of the morning, the sky tender and pale. Everything seems as harmonious as the temple bells. I go down to the bazaar to buy curds and fresh green vegetables, and after cooking my meal, I settle down crosslegged on the floor to work on my papers.

  Towards evening I sometimes go to the post office which is situated in what used to be Olivia’s breakfast room. If it is about the time when the offices close, I walk over to the Crawfords’ house to wait for Inder Lal. Both houses – the Crawfords’ and Olivia’s – once so different in their interiors, are now furnished with the same ramshackle office furniture, and also have the same red betel stains on their walls. Their gardens too are identical now – that is, they are no longer gardens but patches of open ground where the clerks congregate in the shade of whatever trees have been left. Peddlers have obtained licences to sell peanuts and grams. There are rows of cycle stands with a cycle jammed into every notch.

  It used to embarrass Inder Lal to find me waiting for him. Perhaps he was even a little ashamed to be seen with me. I suppose we do make a strange couple – I’m so much taller than he is, and I walk with long strides and keep forgetting that this makes it difficult for him to keep up with me. But I think by now he has got used to me and perhaps is even rather proud to be seen walking with his English friend. I also think he quite likes my company now. At first he welcomed it mainly to practise his English – he said it was a very good chance for him – but now he also seems to enjoy our conversations. I certainly do. He is very frank with me and tells me all sorts of personal things: not only about his life but also about his feelings. He has told me that the only other person he can talk to freely is his mother but even with her – well, he said, with the mother there are certain things one cannot speak as with the friend.

  Once I asked “What about your wife?”

  He said she was not intelligent. Also she had not had much education – his mother had not wanted him to marry a very educated girl; she said there was nothing but trouble to be expected from such a quarter. Ritu had been chosen on account of her suitable family background and her fair complexion. His mother had told him she was pretty, but he never could make up his mind about that. Sometimes he thought yes, sometimes no. He asked my opinion. I said yes. She must have been so when young, though now she is thin and worn and her face, like his, always anxious.

  He told me that during the first years of her marriage she had been so homesick that she had never stopped crying. “It was very injurious to her health,” he said, “especially when she got in family way. Mother and I tried to explain matters to her, how it was necessary for her to eat and be happy, but she did not understand. Naturally her health suffered and the child also was born weak. It was her fault. An intelligent person would have understood and taken care.”

  He frowned and looked unhappy. By this time we had reached the lake. (This is about as far as Olivia would have got if she ever ventured to this side: because beyond this point the Indian part of the town began, the crowded lanes and bazaar where I now live.)

  Inder Lal said “How is it possible for me to talk with her the way I am now talking with you? It is not possible. She would understand nothing.” He added: “Her health also has remained very weak.”

  There were some boys swimming in the lake. They seemed to be having a very good time. We could see the water rising in sprays as they jumped up and down and splashed one another. Inder Lal watched them wistfully. Perhaps he wished he were one of them; or he may have been remembering summer evenings of his own when he too had gone swimming with his friends.

  It could not have been all that long ago – he is still a young man, a few years younger than I am, about 25 or 26. When you look closer, you can see that his face really is young, only he seems older because of his careworn expression. When I first saw him, he seemed to me a typical Indian clerk, meek and bowed down with many cares. But now I see that he is not meek and bowed at all – or only outwardly – that really inside himself he is alive and yearning for all sorts of things beyond his reach. It shows mainly in his eyes, which are beautiful – full of melancholy and liquid with longing.

  10 March. I work hard at my Hindi and am beginning to have conversations with people which is a great advantage. I wish I could talk more with Ritu, Inder Lal’s wife, but she is so shy that my improved Hindi doesn’t help me with her at all. Although I’m quite a shy person myself, I try not to be with her. I feel it is my responsibility to get us going since I’m older and (I think) stronger. There is something frail, weak about her. Physically she is very thin, with thin arms on which her bangles slip about; but not only physically – I have the impression that her mind, or do I mean her will, is not strong either, that she is the sort of person who would give way quickly. Sometimes she tries to overcome her shyness and pays me a visit in my room; but though I talk away desperately in my appalling Hindi just so she will stay, quite soon she jumps up and runs away. The same happens when I try to visit her – I’ve seen her at my approach run to hide in the bathroom and, though it is not very salubrious (the little sweeper girl is not too good at her job), stay locked up in there till I go away again.

  The days – and nights – are really heating up now. It is unpleasant to sleep indoors and everyone pulls out their beds at night. The town has become a communal dormitory. There are string-beds in front of all the stalls, and on the roofs, and in the courtyards: wherever there is an open space. I kept on sleeping indoors for a while since I was embarrassed to go to bed in public. But it just got too hot, so now I too have dragged my bed out into the courtyard and have joined it on to the Inder Lals’ line. The family of the shop downstairs also sleep in this courtyard, and so does their little servant boy, and some others I haven’t been able to identify. So we’re quite a crowd. I no longer change into a nightie but sleep, like an Indian woman, in a sari.

  It’s amazing how still everything is. When Indians sleep, they really do sleep. Neither adults nor children have a regular bed-time – when they’re tired they just drop, fully clothed, on to their beds, or the ground if they have no beds, and don’t stir again till the next day begins. All one hears is occasionally someone crying out in their sleep, or a dog – maybe a jackal – baying at the moon. I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space – though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my own walls to look at and my books to read.

  A few nights ago there was such a strange sound – for a moment I didn’t react but lay there just hearing it: a high-pitched wail piercing through the night. It didn’t seem like a human sound. But it was. By the time I had sat up, Inder Lal’s mother had got to Ritu’s bed and was holding her hand over the girl’s mouth. Ritu struggled but the mother was stronger. No one else had stirred yet-and the mother was desperately holding on. I helped her get Ritu into the house, and when I turned on the light, I saw Ritu’s eyes stretched wide in fear above the mother’s hand still laid over her
mouth. When those strange sounds had completely stopped, the mother released her and she sank at once to the floor and remained hunched up there with her face buried in her knees. Now she was quite still except for occasional spasms that twitched through her little bird body. The mother went to the jars where the rice was stored and scattered a handful over Ritu’s head. The grains bounced off the girl’s hair though one or two got stuck there. She still didn’t move. The mother opened and closed her hand and circled it over that bowed head, cracking her knuckles, and she was also murmuring some incantation. Quite soon Ritu got up, looking tear-stained and exhausted but otherwise normal. The three of us went out again and lay back on our beds next to the others, who hadn’t moved. Next day neither the mother nor Ritu mentioned the incident, so that it might just not have been except that there were some rice grains stuck in Ritu’s hair.

  20 March. After that night the mother and I have drawn closer together. We have become friends. Now she often accompanies me to the bazaar and bullies the shopkeeper if he is not giving me the best vegetables. She has seen to it that everyone charges me the right price. I understand her Hindi much better now, and she some of mine though it still makes her laugh. But she does most of the talking and I like listening to her, especially when she tells me about herself. I have the impression that, although she is a widow, the best part of her life is now. She does not seem to have a high opinion of married life. She has told me that the first years are always difficult because of being so homesick and thinking only of the father’s house: and it is difficult to get used to the new family and to the rule of the mother-in-law. She rarely mentions her late husband so I presume he didn’t make up for much. But she seems to be very close to her son – it is she, not Ritu, who does everything for him like serving his food and laying his clothes out. She is very proud of him for being a government servant and working in an office instead of sitting in a shop like his father used to do (he was a grocer). It is a great step up for him and so for her too. She certainly holds her head high when she walks through the town. She is about fifty but strong and healthy and full of feminine vigour. Unlike Ritu, she doesn’t spend all her time at home but has outings with her friends who are mostly healthy widows like herself. They roam around town quite freely and don’t care at all if their saris slip down from their heads or even from their breasts. They gossip and joke and giggle like schoolgirls: very different from their daughters-in-law who are sometimes seen shuffling behind them, heavily veiled and silent and with the downcast eyes of prisoners under guard.