A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Bobby sat as always near TC at the end of the table. To relieve their boredom, they were in the habit of exchanging cryptic remarks or glances to express their feelings about the guests at the superior end. But today Bobby did not notice TC any more than Googa did, engaging himself in conversation with his neighbours at the table. Once TC called across to him with their own kind of banter and, while not completely ignoring him, Bobby gave the puzzled half-smile of one who failed to understand the reference. Then TC looked down at his golden plate and again a wave of shame welled up in him.

  One evening Diana surprised her husband and her son in the middle of a talk that appeared to be difficult for both of them. But they were united in their determination that she should know nothing, and it was not until she was alone with TC in their bedroom that she could ask anything. Brushing her hair, she could see him in the mirror, and the expression on his face made her turn around quickly before he could change it. Then she did challenge him, though only with: ‘Romesh still hasn’t packed properly – I think he’s just waiting for me to do it for him.’

  A flippant white lie on his lips, TC looked into her eyes. It made him say quietly, ‘He’s not leaving.’

  They sat side by side on the edge of their bed. Even when she put her arms around him, his back remained stiff and straight. He said, ‘They’ve impounded his passport. He can’t leave because he’s wanted here for questioning.’

  She tried to speak lightly: ‘What’s he supposed to have done? They can’t just hold him for nothing. If he’s done nothing.’

  ‘He says he hasn’t. Or only what everyone else does.’ He almost lost his patience. ‘That’s what they all say: “Everyone does it – what’s wrong with it when everyone does it?” That’s supposed to be the excuse; not the shameful admission but the excuse.’

  She had never seen him like this, so bitter and hurt. ‘Let’s lie down,’ she whispered. It did seem a relief to him to lie with her in their bed, the same they had had in all the years of their marriage. The way they lay entwined was the same too, so that for a few hours they could sleep as if there were only the two of them – two lovers alone with each other and safe from all the world.

  Next morning, when she went into Romesh’s room, she found him asleep with his face pressed deep in the pillow, not wanting to see or hear. His suitcases stood open, the clothes tumbling out of them. She unpacked and put everything back in the closet. When he opened his eyes, there was the momentary look of relief of one waking from a nightmare and realising it was not real. Then he realised it was real; also, from the way his mother was looking at him, that she knew what it was.

  At once he rushed to his own defence. ‘Dad doesn’t understand that it’s the way business is done. If you want your motor to run, you have to oil it. Grease it. Grease their goddamn palms. Dad has his job, his little salary, no hassle – you two have no idea what’s going on, what I have to do. My God, if only you knew!’

  ‘I don’t know anything because you never tell me anything. If you did, I’d try and understand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even want you to. You’re so English, you’ve stayed English though you’ve been here donkey’s years. You even think that the English don’t do it – that they’re all like you and Dad. That’s just baloney! They do exactly what we do. Exactly . . . Let me get up now. I can’t stay in bed all day.’ But she kept on sitting there, waiting for him to say more, take advantage of her presence.

  He said, ‘I guess that’s why they’ve sent Sheila away. Isn’t it? . . . So she wouldn’t be in a dirty country like this with a dirty person like me. God, they’re all so innocent, such babies. Bobby – what a dumb name, but it suits him. Sheila-Baby. Pushpa-Baby. Baba Bobby.’ Suddenly he collapsed; his face was puffed, tears ran down it. ‘Dad could help me. Ask him. He’s not listening to me. If you tell him, he’ll listen.’

  She put her arms around him; he laid his head in her lap, his face hidden against her. She stroked his hair – already it was thinning – she didn’t know what she could promise though he was begging her, the same sentence several times: ‘He’ll listen to you.’

  Whenever she couldn’t talk freely to anyone, Diana felt a need to confide in Margaret; but when it came to the point, she never could. It happened again that day. At the mission, she found Margaret out on the verandah, surrounded by her usual crowd of petitioners and upbraiding a milkman for watering the milk he sold her. She overrode his protests until he had to admit his fault, while bystanders murmured approval of the scolding he received.

  Margaret’s anger was assumed. She told Diana that she had already dismissed this milkman once before, but what to do? He had a family to support, four children of his own and two of his dead brother’s. Anyway, she still had to find a milkman who did not water his milk; when finally caught, their excuse was always the same – ‘“Everyone does it, so why not I?”’ Her big shoulders shook with laughter. ‘I’ve heard it a thousand times: “Everyone does it” – it’s not an excuse but a perfectly valid explanation.’

  Diana smiled with her. Today she refused the mug of tea she usually drank with Margaret, she said she had to drive back, that TC was waiting for the car.

  Margaret dealt all day with people in need, and it was easy for her to sense anyone’s trouble. Walking with Diana to her car, Margaret asked her, ‘Can I do anything for you?’ Diana shook her head; she thanked her friend and drove away.

  The only person Diana had ever asked for help or ever would was TC, and she did so that night. She knew he was awake beside her and in distress; his back was turned to her and at last she clung to it, whispering, ‘Won’t you try – for him?’ He turned and held her against his chest. She said it again, but when he was silent, she said nothing more, and neither did he, though he could feel her tears seeping through his nightshirt.

  The arraignment for Romesh came at the same time as the one for Googa. While TC resigned his post immediately, Googa showed no inclination to relinquish his. He had many supporters who accompanied him to court, loudly shouting slogans in his favour. He made the most of the presence of journalists and TV cameras to declare his innocence, his forgiveness of his enemies and his determination to continue serving his country, to the last drop of his blood if this should be required of him. His well-wishers followed him inside, so that the small courtroom was soon overcrowded and fetid with their sweat and eructations. Romesh, accompanied only by his father and his lawyers, took care to appear in court newly shaved and in a suit and tie; he listened intently to the proceedings and passed notes of instruction to his lawyers. His fortunes appeared linked to Googa’s, and both of them were usually granted bail. Once they were remanded in jail, and even there Romesh extracted special privileges from the wardens and the convicts he knew had the power to grant them. When he was released, he showed no signs of depression but was very busy consulting with his lawyers, whom he changed twice. His energy and pluck reminded Diana of the time when he was a schoolboy, always in trouble, up to all sorts of mischief and defiant when caught at it.

  For the first time in their married life, TC and Diana discussed money. It had never been an important subject for either of them. They had not invested anything, nor built a house. Now, with his resignation, they had six months to give up their official residence. They assured each other that they would manage. Since TC no longer had to attend an office, they could sell their car. They had also stopped going out socially. Diana continued to visit the mission and Margaret had arranged for her to be transported by one of her protégés on his bicycle rickshaw. Diana felt ashamed to be sitting behind his emaciated back while he pushed the pedals down with all his feeble strength; but Margaret, aware of her feelings, said, ‘You can hardly ask this boy to stop making a living because you feel bad about it.’ She was also impatient with TC and Diana when she found that they hadn’t yet tried to find another house. To discuss their problems, she often came to see them. She sat in their largest chair with her legs apart and her voice cheerfully booming; h
er only comment on the situation was once to TC when he saw her out. Seating herself voluminously on her pro-tégé’s frail rickshaw, ‘It’s a mess,’ she said, ‘but anyway, you did the right thing.’

  Romesh did not think that his father had done the right thing. In resigning his office, TC was giving up the chance of exerting pressure on behalf of his son. It might also be taken as an admission of guilt, which Romesh himself was far from making. Instead he worked energetically to extricate himself. With the help of his lawyers, he discovered the weak links obstructing his case – a chain stretching from the lower ranks up to the occupants of some top positions. He knew whom to avoid – Bobby for instance, whom he shrugged off as useless; so were most of his father’s former colleagues, though with some surprising exceptions. Romesh found himself frequently on the same track as Googa, whom he learned to respect for his ruthless energy and ability to make things work for him. ‘Not a bad chap,’ he said. And it was Googa who finally resolved matters for both of them. This was during a parliamentary crisis when Googa, with his command over a substantial block of votes, could make himself very helpful; and after that it was not long before it was decided that the charges against him and his co-defendants were completely baseless.

  Romesh’s passport was returned to him, and he was left free to continue his business. He now shifted his base of operations to Bombay, which he said was a much livelier city, geared to modern business practices, and also with even wilder girls in it. He wanted to move his parents with him, but they were now well settled in the little flat Margaret had found for them. It was far from official New Delhi, in a bazaar area that Diana soon came to know well. Over the years she witnessed many changes in their new neighbourhood. An alley that had once been occupied by vegetable stalls and cooked-meat shops was now given over to motor parts. The site of a rotted old textile mill had become a propane-gas plant; and there was a brand-new charitable eye hospital under the patronage of a cabinet minister whose face – it happened to be Googa’s – loomed on a poster encircled by little coloured bulbs. Margaret’s mission was nearby, and here everything remained unchanged. Her helpers were still orphan girls in cotton saris, and shoes and socks to save their feet from ringworm. Out on the verandah the petitioners still stood waiting for Margaret to help solve their problems, which never seemed to grow different or less.

  Diana tremendously admired Margaret’s selfless devotion to India, which she couldn’t help contrasting with her own selfish devotion to only two Indians, her husband and her son. But her sense of guilt left her as soon as she got home to where TC was writing his memoirs and waiting to read his day’s work to her. His style had been honed for official reports: ‘In November we moved to Sitapur where we encountered a variety of incidents, some of them of a humorous nature, others rather more serious.’ She knew all the incidents and was able to flood his spare prose with her memories. Often, while he read, it was not the city noises outside that she heard but the jackals and peacocks surrounding the bungalow of their early districts. She didn’t need to look out of the window of their cramped little flat to know that the sun setting over the city streets was the same that she had watched over the unbroken plains of their first postings. The moon too would be the same, spreading a net of silver over the people asleep outside the shuttered shops.

  Romesh came to Delhi to visit his parents. Stout, middle-aged, shining in a silk jacket and some gold jewellery, he burst in on them: ‘So what’s new!’ Of course he knew there never could be anything new for them, washed up in all their innocence, their total ignorance of life in the world. What he couldn’t account for was their happiness, though he was aware that it included him, all the years of his existence as their son.

  Bombay (pre-Mumbai)

  If it hadn’t been for her grace and beauty, Munni might have become like any other unhappy Indian woman whose arranged marriage had turned out badly. As it was, her family – from a provincial town in the Punjab, her father a small subcontractor – urged her to adjust to her circumstances and the brutal husband they had found for her. But she knew, had known since puberty, that there were many people out in the world willing to help her, and she had learned to take advantage of their good intentions without indulging their bad ones. So it was that a friend in Air India arranged for a ticket to New York, and another friend for a place to stay there, and yet another to find her a hostess job in an upscale Indian restaurant. This place was as luxuriantly oriental as she herself was. It was decorated with erotic Rajasthani miniatures and niches holding plaster-cast statues of burgeoning Hindu goddesses. Munni might herself have been one of those goddesses, stepped out of a niche to welcome the guests. She had to use all her charm and tact to put off the many men – including the proprietor and his several sons – who wanted to establish some relationship with her beyond her professional duties. Some of them persisted and kept coming again and again and followed her with their eyes as she glided in her sari and smiled and greeted everyone in the low sweet murmur of a highly cultivated courtesan.

  At first Davy, who became her husband, was part of a group of loud, rich and confident Americans and Americanised Indians. She noticed him even then, if only because he was different from the others. He was neither loud nor confident and probably not as rich, for it was never he who picked up the cheque. He seemed apart from his companions – there was a sort of melancholy abstraction about him, as if he were not really present with them but elsewhere. She was soon aware that he was elsewhere, was in fact with her. Even when she wasn’t looking in his direction, she felt his attention following her; and when she did look – which she couldn’t help doing more often than she wanted – his eyes lit up and he smiled. His smile was charming but, even with her, aloof. Soon he was coming on his own; he simply showed up, knowing a place would be found for him. If he suspected that she had kept it waiting for him – perhaps that she herself was waiting for him – he took it for granted as his due.

  One day he turned up at her apartment. He may have followed her – she could imagine him doing that, in his shy persistent way – or he could have simply inquired about her within their compact Indo-American Manhattan circuit. She shared a small East Side flat in a jerry-built, whitewashed block with two other Indian girls who had more or less the same stories as her own. She had never mentioned Davy to her room-mates, but the girl who let him in gasped and ran to Munni: ‘It’s Davy! He’s asking for you!’ It turned out she was the only one ignorant of his identity. ‘Where have you been? You mean you didn’t know who his father is?’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Munni said when they told her, holding her hand in front of her mouth in shock, delight, amazement. His father was Abhinav, the legendary film star, the king, the emperor of Bombay talkies, even now when he was in his sixties and hadn’t made a film in years.

  Davy – his real name was Dev Kumar – was made so welcome in her apartment that he soon became part of the household. He stopped going to the restaurant and instead waited for Munni to come home. When he followed her into the bedroom, she made him turn around while she changed her clothes, though after some time he was allowed to unhook her bra, and after some more time to catch hold of the two magnificent breasts that came tumbling out. But when he asked her to marry him, she laughed in his face: ‘No way!’ She treasured her job, her girlfriends, her wonderful freedom; and she had had enough of marriage – more, more than enough – it was the last thing, she assured him, she wanted, now and forever.

  Nevertheless, she married him. It was not his proposal she accepted but his father’s, who had come to New York for the purpose of making it. She learned at once that it was not possible to say no to Abhinav – how could anyone? He was a huge and hugely powerful man, physically and in his renown. When Munni got to Bombay, she found that even now, years after his retirement, a permanent cluster of spectators stood outside his mansion in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. As the tall gilt gates were thrown open, the porter – a dragoman in his scarlet and gold uniform – ordered
the crowd surging forward to retreat before the advent of the automobile, a silver Mercedes of royal size. And Abhinav, royally seated behind his chauffeur, raised his hand in acknowledgement of the reverence paid to him – children were held up – and inclined his head in stately humility before the acclaim of the millions who had adored him for generations, not only in India but over vast areas of the world. He was always in Indian dress, always in white, the cloth as sparkling as the diamond buttons in his high-collared coat.

  Inside the palace too he was a king – even a god, in the loose muslin robes he wore at home; these wafted around his frame and gave him the appearance of the mythological figures descending from clouds he had famously portrayed on the screen. Many people were waiting for him in a special room set aside for them: producers still begging for a comeback appearance, financiers with underworld ties in the Middle East. Then there was an inner ring of associates – ageing actors and playback singers, the new big stars eager to inherit his mantle (none ever did), even a few quite humble people who had helped him in his own humble days. Often feasts and entertainments were laid on for his guests – music, poetry and food, and always a showing of his famous old films in the soundproof screening room installed in the basement. Munni moved among his guests with the same sinuous grace as in the New York restaurant. Only now no one dared raise their eyes to her, for she was no longer an employee in a commercial establishment but the hostess in the great house of her great father-in-law.

  Yet there was Shirin – his wife, his consort, who should have been the hostess. It was a role she had abdicated long ago, maybe right from the start of her marriage to Abhinav. Her part of the house was completely separate, and she did not allow her husband or any of his friends to enter it. She herself sometimes wandered into the main halls – it amused her to appear at one of his sumptuous parties, to make her way among his guests. She was like a ghost among them, for they glittered, men and women alike, in brocades and gold and precious gems whereas she wore only her rope of pearls and her pale pastel chiffons imported from Paris. And whereas they were dusky and shiny and plump, she was frail, bird-like, with the sallow complexion of her Parsi ancestors. Everyone drew aside to let her pass, their hands joined in respectful greeting, which she did not return. Her silent contempt took in not only the guests but the ambience in which they moved – in which her husband moved – the over-ornate furnishing and the excessive banquet set out in silver and gold dishes and the bottles of black-market liquor (it was the 1950s, the years of Prohibition). Her only words were of complaint addressed to her husband, always in an angry undertone; then she turned and tripped back on her high heels to her own quarters to collapse there in relief. There was the same relief among the party she had left – they gave each other significant nods and spiralled their forefingers against their temples. Abhinav pretended not to notice; probably he had long since known that she was referred to as the Madwoman, which was maybe the best interpretation of his unfortunate marriage.