In Search of Love and Beauty

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Sujata loved it that the three boys were such wonderful friends together, staying out all night while the women sat at home and talked and cooked till they fell asleep on a bed or a mat, with a child curled up beside them. But Marietta lay awake in her hotel room and waited for Mark to come in. Beneath the sound of her air conditioner, she imagined she heard all sorts of noises seeping in from the streets; and while on previous visits she had been thrilled to think of everything that went on, now she could only think of Mark out there and was frightened. When he came back at last—sometimes it was dawn—he didn’t like it that she was awake; waiting to trap him, it seemed to him, and he answered her questions laconically or not at all. He was soon asleep in the twin bed next to hers. It was one of the things she loved about traveling with him, that they always shared a room the way they had done when he was a little boy. While he slept, she could look her fill into his face, and it seemed to her as tender and pure as the dawn light by which it was illumined.

  By noon next day, and before he was up, his friends came surging into the hotel suite. They walked through the outer room, past Marietta—whom they greeted politely, even obsequiously—and straight into the bedroom. She heard jovial shouts and sometimes playful thumps as they tried to get Mark out of bed; and then jokes and laughter as they talked about what they had done the night before and what they were going to do the night following. When Marietta, feeling indignant, left out, superseded, went in there, she saw Mark sitting up in bed in his pajamas with his hair tousled, his face rosy, his eyes clear; and the other boys sat around him, on his bed and on hers, and once when she came in she saw Ravi with his arm around Mark’s shoulder and the hand of that arm playing with Mark’s ear; and Mark, so freshly awake, keeping quite still and apparently liking it.

  Of course, she had got used to seeing boys and men everywhere strolling around with their hands intertwined, and interpreted it as a friendship more high and lofty than anything known in the West. Besides, Ravi was not in the least inclined that way, as Marietta well knew from her conversations with Sujata. Sujata loved to confess everything, and what she confessed was astonishing to Marietta, especially as she never saw the least flicker of anything between her and Ravi—who indeed called her Auntie and comported himself toward her with the respect due to the mother of his friend. But when Sujata spoke of him to Marietta, she was sometimes sly and sometimes shy, and she looked down to play with her bangles and then up again to laugh. She managed to make Marietta understand that, in spite of his youth, Ravi was a cunning and a daring lover. Sujata thought that she would probably burn in hell for what she did with him, but for the time being it was worth it.

  Marietta told Mark that they were leaving, that she had to go to New Delhi on a business trip. (She had begun to export Indian materials for her fashion house.) As she had expected, Mark protested, but he didn’t say, as she had feared, that he would stay behind. For at that time—in spite of his considerable independence and show of strength—some childishness remained in him, some dependency; and also, though he was struggling hard against it and by the next year would have overcome it, she was at that time still first with him. So he went with her to New Delhi and was even cheerful about it, and as soon as they arrived he contacted friends he had made there and began his usual round of activities with them.

  She, meanwhile, had business appointments with officials of the Ministry of Commerce and with the directors of textile mills. But for the first time, after all these years and all these visits, she suffered some of the irritations that India holds for its visitors. She didn’t even have the excuse of heat, for it was winter and the days were cool with a mountain freshness infused into the mild Delhi sunshine. One day she was invited to lunch at one of the luxury hotels by a business contact. Her host was a rich mill owner, not self-made but second generation, had studied at Berkeley and went abroad several times a year. His interests were music and films, and they discussed these while he tried to caress her thigh and was not inhibited from continuing their conversation when she shook him off. The setting was brilliant. The hotel specialized in outdoor buffet lunches for which little white tables and chairs were set up all over lawns kept emerald-green by a team of gardeners using gallons of scarce water. The sky formed a wonderful canopy of unmarred November blue with the bulbous dome of a fifteenth-century mausoleum rising against it. Apart from a scattering of foreign tourists, the company assembled on the lawn consisted of upper-class Indians and their ladies in gorgeous saris. Everyone was enjoying their meal, the ladies as much as the men, tearing the legs off skinny oven-baked chickens and bringing their heads forward to bite into them. They talked and laughed a lot, opening their mouths wide and showing the food and their healthy teeth within.

  Above this scene, birds floated in the crystal air like lazy swimmers letting themselves be carried on their backs in water. An erroneous impression, Marietta discovered—as one of these birds swooped down and tore a piece of chapati out of her hand. She gave a cry, both of fright and of pain, for the kite’s beak had scratched her. Her companion got to his feet and flapped his napkin in the direction of the birds so far above him. People at the other tables turned around, frozen in surprise with their chicken legs held in the air. Marietta brought the scratch to her mouth, but next moment spat in horror as she thought of what disease the bird might have transmitted into her blood. “Do I have to have shots?” were her first words. “No, no, no,” and “Let me see,” said her companion. She gave him her wrist to hold and look at, only to snatch it away again at once as though his touch filled her with the same horror she felt for the bird. Waiters and the headwaiter came hurrying up, all full of protestations, all wanting to examine her wrist, so that she held it behind her back. She felt a rising hysteria, and everyone else felt it too. They gave her strange, guarded looks, and her companion became distant, a stranger disowning her. “I’ll get rabies,” she kept on saying. “Are you sure I won’t get rabies?” When she wouldn’t be reassured but looked around at their faces with scared eyes—the people at the other tables were saying things about her now to each other with amusement—her host gave some curt Hindi command to the headwaiter. Medicine was brought; it was one of the waiters and not her host nor even the headwaiter who had to dab red Mercurochrome on the scratch. He did this very gingerly with a piece of cotton, taking the best possible care not to touch her with his fingers, not for her sake but his own.

  Her companion was now only anxious to get rid of her. They were to have done business together, and although she did later place orders from his mills, he never again made any personal approach; and even on his visits to New York, he carefully kept their contacts to the telephone. He had no time or taste for hysterical women. That day, he dropped her off in the street of open stalls which sold Tibetan jewelry and monks’ robes converted into housecoats. She had planned a shopping tour after lunch, and not wanting to admit how upset she was, she stuck to it. She continually looked at her wrist, now bright red with Mercurochrome; she fought down her thoughts of where that bird’s beak had been, what rotting carcasses it had torn before it grazed her skin. She made her purchases in quick, nervous agitation, ending up with a great many little parcels. While she was looking for a taxi to take her to her hotel, two little boys descended on her, shouting cheerfully how they were hungry—starving—hadn’t eaten since Tuesday. Marietta managed to fumble out a note to give them but they asked for more, making a sport of it as if they had bet each other how much they could get. Other little boys came running, and a somewhat bigger girl with a very old face and someone’s baby on her hip. They pressed Marietta so close that she began to run; and running, she dropped some parcels and stooped to pick them up again. When she did that, they pushed against her and laughed the way the people in the hotel holding chicken legs had laughed. Only the girl with the baby kept right on whining in a grown-up way how hungry she was, and the baby, which had a growth on its shaved head, looked on with great beautiful eyes full of solemnity.

 
A taxi drew up, and its driver, a Sikh, strong, bearded, and turbaned, got out to put the children to flight. They stood laughing and watching from a safe distance while he deposited Marietta and her parcels into the taxi. She quickly put up the window, for the girl with the baby was still standing there, repeating her whine with imperturbable monotony; and when Marietta could not bear to look in her direction but only at the sturdy neck of the driver, the girl let out a stream of spittle on the taxi window before turning away in search of another client. The spittle trickled very slowly down the glass. The driver didn’t notice—he was telling Marietta how these children were no good, that they had been trained to beg and make a nuisance of themselves to nice people. The hotel was not far off and soon they were driving up under its portico, and there was the doorman, dear old Muta Singh, so beloved of all the guests with his stately figure and his scarlet uniform modeled on that of the President’s bodyguard. Muta Singh helped her out—he helped her with her parcels—how well he knew to do all that without ever touching her. She was already feeling much better as she went up in the elevator to her suite; all she needed now, she felt, was a shower and a long hot bath to wash everything off her and out of her.

  “Mark!” she called as she entered, but the living room was empty. He was off on one of his excursions—well, let him make the most of it, for in a day or two she was going to take them both back to New York. She was even glad he wasn’t there so she could get herself clean, hygienic again before he returned and came near her. But when she opened the bedroom door, he was there and Ravi was with him. They were both on the bed, sitting up rather stiffly as if they had just shot up from a different position.

  “Surprise!” cried Ravi, smiling at her with his bold charm. “Auntie sent me, she said go to Delhi and have a nice time with your friend Mark. And with his mother,” he added politely, and politely doubled his charm; while Mark, his eyes lowered, his hands in his lap, sat dangling his feet over the side of the bed.

  Marietta’s relationship with her son reached its lowest ebb when he was in his early twenties. This was the time when he was always taking off on trips and was even absent on important occasions such as Louise’s birthday and Louise’s Christmas. So was Regi—especially at Christmastime when she chose to be in a warmer climate. Mark didn’t necessarily depart to a warmer place but just anywhere he felt like going. It might be Texas, it might be Italy. He was always accompanied by friends—or perhaps only one friend, they none of them really knew. He managed to telephone on Christmas Day, but that was as far as it went. Leo didn’t even do that. He had no regard for Christmas at all, in fact, it irritated him.

  One year Mark was there unexpectedly. He arrived on Christmas Eve with all the suitcases with which he had set out the day before. Louise, who was at the climax of her Christmas preparations, embraced him with ardor. She could make out with one glance into his loved face that something was wrong, but she kept her own counsel. So did Natasha, but she could not refrain from throwing constant anxious looks at him. She hovered near him though she knew he wanted to be left alone; she suffered because he did; and it was only his coolness toward her, his stiff silence acting as a warning not to ask questions, that kept her quiet.

  Marietta arrived with her current young man, but she completely forgot about him in her delight and amazement at seeing Mark. Fortunately, the young man had too good an opinion of himself to feel neglected. He attached himself to Louise and followed her around while she moved between her kitchen and dining room. The apartment blazed with lights and festivity and was saturated with rich cooking smells. While Louise opened her oven door to baste her oozing goose, the young man, who was a surgeon, told her about a kidney transplant he had helped perform on an oil sheikh.

  But by the time Louise was ready to serve, Mark had locked himself in his bedroom and Marietta was trying to get him out. “Can you believe it?” she said to Natasha who had been sent to call them both. “Locking himself in on Christmas Eve.” She knocked imperiously.

  “He’s talking on the phone,” Natasha said. She could hear his voice, though she could also hear that he was trying to keep it low.

  “Who’s he talking to? Come on, Natasha, you must know. He must have told you something. People don’t just come back after you’ve said good-bye to them and not say anything.”

  “He didn’t,” Natasha pleaded. She was trying not to listen to sounds from inside, but nevertheless it was clear to her that he was arguing painfully with someone he loved.

  “He’s had a fight with someone,” Marietta went on relentlessly. “Whoever it was he went with. Whom did he go with? Some girl, I suppose.” She shot a probing glance at Natasha—entirely unnecessary, Natasha’s face needed no probing, each emotion she had was displayed there in full, flagrant view.

  “Oh, surely you know he’s got a girl friend,” Marietta said. “What else could it be, all those phone calls and sulks and all the rest of it?” She shrugged: “I don’t know why everyone has to be so secretive. As if it’s some great and unusual thing to have an affair. I seem to be the only one who’s open and aboveboard—I mean, look at me, bringing him to Mother’s Christmas Eve.” She made a face toward the dining room. Now that Mark had come, she had no need of her lover’s company and heartily wished he would disappear.

  But he was a large and solid presence and was there to enjoy a good family meal. He was leaning back in his chair, anticipating this pleasure, and still entertaining Louise with the story of the transplanted kidney while the two of them sat alone at the sumptuously laid table. Louise was listening to him with a strained smile, her attention on the door, waiting for them to appear. But only Natasha entered, and she slipped silently into her chair, avoiding her grandmother’s eye.

  Louise said, “I’m ready with my goose, but I need Mark to carve.”

  “I guess I can do that better than anyone,” the young doctor said with a jokey wink. Of course he realized that something was wrong, but regarded it as the price to be paid for partaking of these wonderfully well-cooked family meals. As long as it wasn’t his own family, he wasn’t perturbed and was even good-naturedly willing to help keep everything going. He had spent last Thanksgiving in an even tenser situation with a family in Connecticut, and then too he had helped out with stories taken from his professional experience. He found that people were always interested in learning about what went on behind the scenes.

  But here things were getting more serious. They heard Marietta begin to pound on her son’s door, and then that door opened and shut again. Louise jumped up to get her goose. The doctor heard Marietta’s hysterical voice mingling with her son’s. The young man felt sorry for her and would have liked to intervene. She was at least ten years older than he was, but he felt protective of her. Her nervousness—the sense she gave of exposed nerves—made him want to give her the support of his manly strength. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around to give her any. That daughter of hers sitting opposite him at the table—by the way, how could such a good-looking mother have such a homely daughter?—just sat there playing with a knife, which she then dropped; and the old mother came in from the kitchen carrying her goddamn goose, which was so outsized that her face was scarlet from exertion. As for the son—well, one look at that boy and the doctor had known what he was all about: amply confirmed now, for his voice could be heard as shrill and high as his mother’s and as hysterical.

  And indeed—if the doctor could have seen them—Mark and Marietta did at that moment look like two women locked together in a fight. Or rather, two girls, for both were slim and fair and almost the same height (Marietta was slightly taller). They stood face to face and glared into each other’s beautiful light-green eyes—he with his hands clutching her upper arms, she pounding her fists against his chest. Both were yelling, but each so loud that neither could hear the other. He was calling her bitch and she—irrationally but instinctively—used the same word for him. Their contorted faces mirrored each other. At the exact same moment they both r
ealized what they were doing and stopped doing it, but continued to stand there, frozen in an embrace and still looking into each other’s eyes. He let go first and turned away and muttered, “Now will you leave me alone?” And she did; she let herself out—she didn’t even slam the door—and went quietly into her room.

  Now it was Natasha standing outside his door and urgently whispering through it, “You have to let me in.” She went in anyway and found him weeping on his bed. She sat near him, frowning over his head at the chart on his wall and holding her hands clasped tightly in her lap, determined not to touch him.

  “Why couldn’t she leave me alone?” he said at last.

  “She was upset.”

  “Oh, when isn’t she.”

  “She only wanted to know—”

  “Whom I went with?” he quickly took her up. “I’d gladly tell her, if only she weren’t so hysterical. . . . The big joke is, she’d be equally hysterical if it were a girl.” He laughed drily, then wiped his eyes—but next moment they brimmed again, with other thoughts. “Like a fool, I fought with him at the airport. It was my fault, entirely. It was just the stupidest thing—about who had the tickets—and now he’s sulking and alone on Christmas Eve when we should have been in London together. We’ve never been there together. He’s never been at all—he’s hardly been out of Oklahoma; it was to have been his big treat, from me. He’s only seventeen and so dumb, so sweet. . .”