A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  I suggested there could be more income by way of a third tenant for the empty room. So that was how Karuna – or Kay, as she told us to call her – came to us. I had met her in the Tibetan Colony, where impecunious foreigners like myself ate delicious messes that sometimes made us sick. We were joined there by a new kind of young Indian – modern enough to drop out of school, leave home and family to discover (using the same terminology as ours) their own identity. Kay had not exactly run away from home, but she had staked her claim for self-expression – which her father may not have understood but had tolerantly indulged. He was a brigadier in the army, in charge of a hill station cantonment. She often spoke of him and seemed to admire him, though laughing at what she called his dodo ways. He supported her with cheques sent regularly and frequent calls and letters that she only sometimes answered.

  When I met her, she was living in a YWCA hostel. She made scornful jokes about this place, and when I told her about our empty room, she was ready to move in at once. I have to say here that the three rooms for rent in the house were no more than cubicles, each furnished with a string cot, a commercial calendar and a water jug on a stand. This spartan interior was what Dinesh was used to – he had never known anything else – and it suited me perfectly, asceticism being what I had come to India for. It suited Kay too, mainly for being different from her home. Anyway, she soon had a rug on the cement floor and had replaced the calendar with a poster of a dead rock star.

  Bibiji liked her immediately and admired her, which Kay seemed to find natural. She was used to people wanting to be in her company, and she chattered away to Bibiji and to Sahib, who was also fascinated by her. I don’t think she ever told them anything new or interesting – it was she herself who was so for them, in the way she spoke and laughed at nothing in particular, unless it was the YWCA or her hopelessly bourgeois family.

  Dinesh got her hired in the English section of All India Radio. She became the disc jockey of a request programme called Yours, with Love. She played recent pop songs from England or America, selected by listeners, with fond messages for their loved ones. She read these messages in a very seductive voice – ‘This is for Bunny and a million billion thanks, darling, for the fabulous times’ – which made Sahib nod and smile in some sort of recognition, and Bibiji look down shyly as if she were the one being addressed.

  To get Kay to work on time, Dinesh often had to wake her. He shouted from outside her door and then, too shy to see a girl asleep in bed, he sent me in. She lay on her stomach, one hot flushed cheek pressed into the pillow, moaning for coffee. Sahib had bought a tin of Nescafé specially for her, and it gave him great pleasure to rush into the kitchen, where he otherwise never set foot, and to pour water over the powder and stir it before handing it over to Bibiji or me to deliver. Dinesh stood outside the door, looking up at the ceiling in simulated disgust.

  But he too seemed to enjoy Kay’s company. He spoke to her in his usual torrent of often disconnected ideas – and although she kept saying ‘Fantastic’, she wasn’t really listening and interrupted him at intervals, usually with something so far removed from what he was saying that he stopped short in astonishment. I suppose her head was full of thoughts of her own that left little room for anything else.

  But one evening she asked Dinesh, ‘What about them? . . . You know.’ She gestured in the direction of the Malhotra bedroom where presumably they were already asleep, or talking together in voices so low that no sound could be heard.

  The three of us – their ‘paying guests’, as they called us – were in the little courtyard from which all the rooms opened up. It was like a well with the sun pouring in all day, but at night some cool air descended from the sky, of which we could see only a patch with a star or two. There was no need of further illumination – anyway, there was nothing to see except a bed with the strings broken, and Gochi’s broom of twigs leaning against a wall.

  ‘Their case,’ she went on.

  Dinesh waved his hand impatiently. ‘That was twelve years ago.’

  ‘Twelve years! I was only eight.’

  ‘You must have been a very nasty little brat.’

  ‘I looked like an angel and I was one. Everyone said so.’ She ignored his exaggerated laughter. She was combing her hair, which fell around her in dark waves with auburn glints.

  Dinesh had been watching her. I could see neither of them clearly in that dim starlight, but I was aware of his eyes gleaming – or maybe I was only aware of his stifled excitement. We could hear the comb as she slowly, lovingly drew it through all that silken luxury; at the same time she said, ‘Shall I cut it off? It’s such a nuisance.’

  ‘If you cut it off, it might get you to work on time and not be fired, which will happen any day now.’

  ‘Nobody is going to fire me. They love me too much. But seriously: were they both in jail?’

  ‘Who’s been talking to you?’

  ‘Oh, everyone talks. As soon as anyone hears where I’m living – aren’t those the people in the gold-smuggling case? . . . I suppose no one ever forgets.’

  ‘I suppose no one ever learns to mind their own business,’ Dinesh said.

  ‘Do you think they’re listening?’ She lowered her voice. ‘The two of them with their ears glued to the door?’

  It was easy to imagine – the small couple crouching behind their closed bedroom door, their hearts beating, wondering, what are they saying? Are they talking – about us? What do they know? The thought seemed to make Dinesh angry and ashamed and he turned on Kay: ‘So you sit gossiping with your friends – my landlords did this, my landlords did that – ’

  ‘Well, did they? Both of them?’

  Now he didn’t trust himself to speak but turned away and left us, so that Kay wondered, ‘But why’s he mad at me?’

  She was truly puzzled by his attitude. She was used to being admired by men and took it as her due. There was Sahib every morning lingering in wait for the cry for coffee, and in the evenings he came home earlier. Already part of a lively social set, Kay was often on the point of going out – curses could be heard from her room, where she kept discarding one outfit for another. Sahib hovered smiling around the door, clutching a book, and as soon as she emerged, he held it up for her. ‘Are you acquainted with this book? What is your opinion of the writing?’ Mostly she had no time to answer; she would brush past him on a wave of energy and fresh perfume that drowned his disappointment in sheer pleasure.

  When she was home, she wandered all over the house, talking to anyone who was around. If she had to write a letter home – with much underlining and many exclamation points – she preferred to do it in the living room where we could keep her company. This was Sahib’s opportunity. He had found a tattered old copy of a novel by Françoise Sagan and it fascinated him. He questioned Kay: ‘Is it true? Is this how modern girls behave, so free and knowing so much about sex?’ The word sex – enticing, expectant – sat on his lips, waiting for her to take it up. Her laugh hinted at kingdoms hidden from him. He lowered the book. ‘And you? Do you have someone for your friend? A cavalier?’ He shut one eye. ‘A boyfriend?’ More laughter from her and he laughed too, enjoying the conversation, enjoying being teased by her, enjoying her. At such moments his true nature – spry, humorous – seemed to shine out from under its eclipse of disgrace and humiliation. When Dinesh heard Sahib question Kay about books, he would say, ‘What makes you think she’s ever read one?’

  ‘That’s all you know!’ she cried, adding, ‘Dinesh hates me,’ but with a smile that showed she suspected this was not quite true.

  In his novel (in the character of D), he admitted that he had never met anyone like her, any kind of emancipated girl from her class. The only women he had ever been close to were his mother and his sisters. There was a constant exchange of letters between them, and it was easy to tell when there was bad news. Paradoxically, he became even more cheerful, except that his teeth seemed set in a grimace rather than his usual smile. Later in the day he announ
ced he had taken leave from the radio station and would be departing on the evening train. When he returned after a few days, he appeared to have settled whatever trouble he had found at home, or at least to have accepted it.

  When Dinesh was away, Bibiji did not sing to her harmonium. But the day he came back, she took it out again and accompanied herself to one of her ambiguous songs of love, human or divine. Sometimes Sahib stood behind her, with his fingers in his ears and playfully grimacing at us. But Dinesh, who was a great lover of Indian music and could tell each raga from the first few notes played, listened respectfully. If she made a mistake, he played or hummed the right notes for her. He hated the pop songs Kay presented on her programme; and if he saw the Malhotras listening to it, he made a disgusted face. ‘Why are you listening to that stuff? It’s for idiots by idiots.’

  Once Sahib answered him: ‘I love it. It’s the music for young people. Don’t you like young people?’ He became coy, the way he did when he was on the brink of something he called spicy. ‘I know one young person you like.’

  Perhaps we should have guessed Bibiji’s feelings from her explosion of anger at that moment. But how could we, how could anyone? In the novel, D blames himself for his ignorance – but that was years after the events described in it. There is a scene where D talks to Elisabeth about Indian women. ‘What do you know about that – how our women have to live? No, how can you – you who are free to run around the world like wild cats.’ He continued, more bitter, more angry: ‘We won’t even talk about the widow – but the wife: when the husband drinks, gambles, goes to women, beats her for the insufficient dowry she brought . . . Fortunately,’ D says, ‘my sisters have a brother – not much of a brother but at least someone to write to so that he can sit on a train and be there.’ From his earliest years, Dinesh’s attitude towards women had always been a protective one; and that was how he felt towards Bibiji. He accepted her description of him as her brother. It was the only relationship he knew.

  With Kay, he thought of himself as a detached observer, analysing her as a type. Probably he made notes about her, as did D in the novel. She had far less time to think about him than he about her. Often she didn’t come home from the radio station but went with her friends to fashionable places he had never seen. Some of her girlfriends were fugitives from arranged marriages, or like Kay herself had simply raised the flag of independence and made their families salute it. For the first time away from their mothers and their ayahs, they were untidy and scatterbrained and gave parties at night, with music and dancing and drinks. Dinesh of course was not invited to these parties, but Kay told him, ‘They all want to meet you.’

  ‘Who wants to meet me?’

  ‘My friends.’

  ‘What an honour,’ he said. He knew some of these girls from the radio station; they ignored him, as they did all the others who worked there for a living. But now Kay had told them he was a writer, and this raised his status with them, for writers had articles written about them in the magazines, with photographs of their foreign girlfriends who had followed them to India. Dinesh quite fiercely denied being a writer – he said he hadn’t published anything yet and maybe never would.

  ‘Then what is it you’re scribbling all night?’ I heard her challenge him, for however late she returned from her outings, the light was on in his room.

  She was standing looking into his room where he sat crosslegged on his bed, writing in a notebook. She had let her hair fall loose – this too was in the novel – and, winding a strand around her finger: ‘Are you writing a novel? Am I in it?’ It didn’t bother her that he ignored her. ‘What are you writing about me? . . . Let me see – or is it too horrible and mean?’

  Then he did look up – only to drop his eyes again immediately, for she hadn’t noticed, or just didn’t care, that the upper part of her sari had dropped down, revealing her breasts in their inadequate little blouse. He said, ‘Kindly shut the door and don’t ever open it again.’

  ‘Listen to Mr Grumpy . . . What’s wrong with you? Did a monkey bite you?’

  That night D wrote in his notebook: ‘If she weren’t stupid and a fool, she’d be a whore.’ But elsewhere in the novel it was himself he called stupid and a fool.

  It was not long before she left us. This happened the day after her father, the Brigadier, had come to visit us – or rather, to look us over. His army jeep, standing outside, seemed as large as the house; and he himself overflowed the chair he occupied, with one stout leg laid across the thigh of the other. Sahib could not stop making conversation. He spoke of golf, the latest cricket test matches, other topics that should have been of interest to his visitor. But the Brigadier kept studying the watch on his hairy wrist, while asking when Kay was expected back. No one liked to tell him that her hours were as unpredictable as she was.

  He had plenty of time to sum us up and evidently we did not pass his scrutiny. I was the sort of foreigner he had no respect for (a ‘hippie type’); and the way he looked at Dinesh, in his much-laundered shirt and his glasses mended with tape, made Sahib quickly explain, ‘Mr Dinesh is a writer.’ When the Brigadier just went on grimly tapping his boot with his army baton, Bibiji added, ‘He is writing a novel.’

  ‘Where is she?’ was the Brigadier’s only reaction; and when we told him that she was out with friends: ‘What friends? Who are they?’

  But actually he knew very well where a girl like his daughter on the sort of allowance he sent her (out of his love for her) could be found amusing herself with friends. He had no objection to these friends – the children of other army officers, or of high-ranking bureaucrats. What he did object to was her living in the house with us.

  When he returned next day, he stayed outside in the jeep with his batman driver while Kay was packing up her belongings. Silent in shock, we stood and watched her. She was in tears but not disconsolate. It seemed her father had wasted no time finding a more suitable place for her: a room in the house of a colonel’s widow. ‘Those are the only sort of people Daddy knows. Dodos like himself and boring bourgeois.’ But it was close to where some of her other friends lived and gave parties. ‘I’ll come to see you,’ she consoled us. ‘We had so much fun.’ But she said it a bit absently, while shutting her suitcase and biting her lip the way people do when they are just leaving and hoping they haven’t forgotten anything.

  The days after Kay left were intensely hot – it was the middle of June – and as always at such times the atmosphere in the city was exceptionally charged. That was also the atmosphere in the Malhotra house. There seemed to be a change in the relationship between husband and wife – or perhaps this was the way they always were once their bedroom door was shut and they were alone. Now they didn’t wait to be alone, they were bitter and angry with each other and didn’t care who heard them. They fought about Kay’s departure, for which they did not blame her father but themselves, for letting him receive a wrong impression.

  Bibiji said, ‘You should have told him you’re a lawyer who has studied abroad instead of all that nonsense about golf. And I didn’t like the way he was looking at Dineshji.’

  Sahib explained, ‘You can be a famous writer, an MA from Oxford University, but if you can’t talk about whisky and golf, then you’re not fit to lick their boots. But with me, he knew he was dealing with a person like himself. A gentleman.’

  ‘Yes and what else do you think he knew?’

  ‘Nothing! He knew nothing!’

  ‘And when you walk in the street, no one knows anything?’ She lowered her voice to the whisper she used behind the bedroom door: ‘No one says, “He’s been inside.”’

  He came up closer, in threat: ‘You put me there.’

  She didn’t retreat one inch. ‘It’s my fault. Everything is my fault. This is my fault – ’ and here she shook her arms with the thin glass bangles on them – ‘like a sweeper woman. That’s what he thought: “My poor daughter, to live in the house of a sweeper woman.”’

  He stepped back, lowered his v
oice: ‘No one thinks that. They wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘When you’re poor, they all dare. They push you in the street.’ She had begun to shed little tears. ‘The milkman who hasn’t been paid calls you bad names.’

  He whispered: ‘I’ll pay him tomorrow. They’ll all be paid. Don’t. You’re still my princess.’

  I was not there to witness the beginning of their next fight, and neither was Dinesh. This fight was actually about him, and he reconstructed it in his novel. The scene, in my translation, goes like this:

  ‘What he didn’t like was D living in the same house with his daughter. Looking at her.’

  ‘He never looks at her,’ Bibiji said.

  ‘Is it my fault you have no eyes to see?’

  ‘He has never in his life looked at her!’

  ‘Not even when she is combing her hair?’ Smiling, he made the slow sensual gesture of a woman drawing a comb through her hair, each strand alive, tumbling over her shoulders, down her back. ‘I wouldn’t like you to know what happens to him then.’ He came closer to whisper in her ear: ‘Like a dog. You’ve seen a dog?’

  It was at this moment that D in the novel – and perhaps also Dinesh in real life – came home. Full of fun, Sahib turned to him: ‘Don’t you miss her?’ repeating the motion of the comb through waves of hair. D couldn’t even pretend not to understand, and without looking at him, Bibiji fled into the kitchen. Her hands trembling, she began to peel potatoes.

  Sahib was glad to be alone with D. He chuckled, man-toman: ‘These girls, they’re sent by the devil to drive us poor devils mad. But isn’t it a nice way to become a raving lunatic?’

  ‘She’s gone now,’ D said, ‘so you can relax.’

  ‘Who wants to relax? That’s for dead men. Who do you think she liked – you or me?’

  D went to his room. His landlord eagerly followed him. He sat on D’s bed and watched him change the shirt he wore at work for the one that was too frayed for outside. D’s shoulders, now revealed by his undershirt, were not broad or manly, but Sahib said, ‘At least you’re young, you have a chance. Perhaps she liked you. Perhaps she is saying to her daddy at this moment, “Take me back to him!” . . . Don’t you think I have a good imagination? I should be writing the books, not you.’ He laughed loud enough for Bibiji to hear so that she came out of the kitchen with the potato she was peeling. ‘Did you hear that?’ Sahib asked her. ‘He thinks I should write books and become a famous author.’