A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  ‘Whose corpse are you cremating there?’

  She saw her son approaching; he had just come from the cantonment and was in his army uniform. She didn’t answer him, she saw him smile.

  ‘Is it something very secret and private?’

  ‘Oh my darling, what could there be secret and private now?’

  The fire was dying down, the last of the letters had crumbled into ash. She tucked her arm into her son’s and they walked together towards the house. He told her he would be spending the night at home, and the whole of the next day, but then he would be leaving, for an unknown destination. His destinations were always unknown and always made her fearful: ‘There’s not going to be a war, is there?’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ he said. She loved his solemn patriotism. He had recently been promoted and his new stars glittered on his shoulders. How handsome he was, how tall and brave; and how romantic to walk together arm in arm, and the air sweet with the flowering scent of Queen of the Night.

  ‘You won’t do anything dangerous, will you?’ she begged him.

  He laughed as though at flying bullets. ‘I can look after myself. It’s you I worry about.’ He looked severe – quite often he took on the part of father with her. ‘You haven’t been smoking again, have you?’

  She assured him no – he had always hated her smoking, though he had never seen her with the cigars she had smoked with Paul.

  ‘And chocolates?’ he asked. She lied that she never ate them, and he warned: ‘You know what the doctor said about your cholesterol. So you’ll be careful, promise? Even when I’m not here.’

  She promised. There were tears in her eyes, and she reached up to kiss his cheek. ‘My star. My hero. My Indian hero.’

  The Teacher

  It was the girls who first brought him here. I call them girls because of their girlish temperaments, though they were almost middle-aged. Maeve was by far the more emotional of the two, with a habit of turning her pale blue eyes upwards like a saint or a martyr. Betty was sturdier, with a square muscular body to anchor both of them. They shared an old house in the town, one of those run-down peeling places that smell of mould inside. During the two or three years I had known them, their goodness made them take up needy causes in the town: pregnant teens, deserted families, boys stealing for drugs. One time they had sheltered a sex offender, which had made them very unpopular; when he turned out to be guilty, they remained unrepentant, unshaken in their faith of having done the right thing.

  They worked at home to make their living; Maeve copied scripts on a computer, Betty read manuscripts for a publisher. That was how they had met Dr Chacko, by way of his manuscript, which he had submitted for publication. Betty’s own publishers had been too conventional to understand it, and so were several others whom she tried. She decided that the appearance of the manuscript may have been at fault – it seemed the product of a very old typewriter, with some letters too faded to be read. In her spare time, Maeve put the entire work on her computer; it was over seven hundred pages when printed out, but she was as inspired as Betty, and it became their cause, along with Dr Chacko himself.

  They tried to explain his work to me, and it made them laugh when I didn’t understand it. To them it was so simple – it was life itself, they said, life and death, which I said didn’t sound all that simple to me. For them, they admitted, it was not the work but Dr Chacko himself who was difficult to understand. But wasn’t it always like that, with rare human beings? They tried to describe him to me but they couldn’t even say what nationality he was. At first they had taken him for an Italian, a Sicilian, until they discovered that he was partly Indian, the name Chacko from a Syrian Christian community in the south of India. They thought he was also partly Russian – or had he only said he had lived in Russia? He had travelled in many far places, but it was in England that he had started his first workshop. This had been dissolved, and so had some subsequent ones elsewhere; now they had high hopes for the workshop they had started for him in New York City, about two hours away from our upstate town.

  They were searching for a suitable place for him to live. Accommodation had been found in a partly converted loft in the city, but he longed for trees, open sky, water if possible, and so did the girls for him. Of course I knew what they had in mind, and not only for him. I lived by myself in my house; it was set in several acres of ground and with a separate cottage, which was unoccupied. The girls knew I had been left alone here after ten years of what I had considered a satisfactory marriage, and in proposing Dr Chacko for my cottage they also thought of relieving my loneliness. What they didn’t know was that solitude had become natural and pleasant to me. Of course it had been different once, when my husband and I came here at weekends with car-loads of guests. That was before a cluster of modest homes had been built at the back of the property – not for visitors from the city but for residents with jobs in town, which itself had crept nearer with a diner and a realtor’s office. It was really no longer suitable for the people who had been our friends, and maybe still were his and his young wife’s.

  I’m not sure now how it happened that Dr Chacko moved into the cottage. I have a memory of him riding past on his bicycle, but there are so many later memories of him and his bicycle, which remained his only mode of transport. It was a very old model tied here and there with string and not quite big enough for him so that it wobbled underneath him. I think it was this sight – of this thin grey-haired man mounted on an inadequate nag – that made me offer him the cottage. He moved in the same afternoon. I had been keeping it as a sort of storage dump so there were some old pieces of furniture in there, which the girls helped him rearrange. Afterwards they came up to the house to assure me that I had done a good deed for which I would receive a great reward. I assumed they meant that Dr Chacko’s proximity itself would be rewarding. But I had already begun to worry that he might visit me more often than I would have wished, and also impose his philosophy or his mission on me, or whatever it was that made the girls admire him so extravagantly.

  This fear turned out to be unfounded. I only saw him when he rode past on his bicycle, presumably on his way to the station. The girls had told me that he travelled to New York for his work with a group who paid his fare and a small fee. That appeared to be his only source of income while everyone waited for his manuscript to be published and make him famous. Meanwhile the girls came every day to bring meals for him in little covered dishes, only waving to me as they drove past in their pick-up. So his presence really should not have disturbed me – except that it did. Maybe because I had become used to being there all by myself; or the thought of him working in the cottage, as the girls told me he did, refining and extending his ideas, gave the place a sort of potency. It was at some distance from the house and shielded from it by a mass of old trees, and the fact that it was invisible increased its hold on my imagination.

  I drove myself to the city to attend one of his workshops. New York held too many memories of the sort of life I used to live, so the only times I went there now were to visit my doctor or the salon for my hair. However, the place for which I was bound was very different from those I had known before. The house was in midtown, in a row of brownstones from the 1870s, now run-down and in the last stage of their existence. The only signs of life were here and there an air conditioner dripping into the street, or a windowbox planted with modest flowers that had not flourished. When I found the right number, it looked like a house that had lost all its tenants, for there was only one name beside the cluster of bells. I had to press it twice before a woman came down to open the door. She informed me that Dr Chacko had begun his work; cutting short my apology, she sold me a fifteen-dollar ticket and told me to follow her. The stairs were worn and steep, but it was not too long a climb before she opened a door and ushered me inside.

  There were about twenty people in that small room, more women than men. Most of them were squatting on the floor, but I was given a folding chair beside two elde
rly people and a cripple. With so many people crowded together, the room was very hot and the air somewhat fetid – partly maybe because of the indifference to health and hygiene of those who have gone beyond worldly satisfactions. The women there reminded me of Betty and Maeve: the same age, the same homespun dresses and their hair in a fringe or a bun; and also, shining under this plain appearance, the same glow of aspiration. This was shared even by the one young person there, a teenaged girl with long blonde unkempt hair, who kept her eyes upturned in the same way as Maeve. What was he telling them that left them all so breathless, in fear of missing a word? He spoke for several stretches of five or ten minutes, and when he paused, everyone shut their eyes to concentrate. When they opened them again, he asked them to explain what they had understood. Some of them seemed to have understood better than others. The blonde girl had got it all wrong, and laughed along with the rest on having her error exposed; the cripple had understood so well that he went into a lengthy exegesis that made Dr Chacko invite him to take charge of the class. This too made everyone laugh – altogether there was a friendly atmosphere, emanating from Dr Chacko himself, who behaved the way a very good teacher does with his favourite students. Although for some of them it might not have been easy to spare the fifteen-dollar entrance fee, they all contributed another four dollars for the mug of herbal tea and the cookie that allowed them to stay in his presence for a half-hour longer. I couldn’t help feeling out of place, partly because I had kept my shoes on, my high-heeled summer sandals, while everyone else’s were left outside the door – a heap of shoes like those of pilgrims who had walked many dusty miles to reach their destination.

  He accepted my offer of a ride back home. He was mostly asleep, slumped in the front seat with his legs stretched out as far as they would go. Only sometimes he briefly woke up, not to talk but to sing snatches of song, gesturing with one hand as though scooping out some beautiful melody that hovered above him. When I asked him what it was he was singing, his answer was to linger around a particularly lovely passage, making me a gift of it.

  After that, I only saw him when he wobbled past on his bicycle. Until one day, at the height of that first summer, I almost literally stumbled across him. I had spent the day in my cooled house, venturing out only into the evening air when the sky was veiled in its dying light and the remains of a yellowed heat-haze. It was almost eight o’clock, but even the birds were still stirring uncomfortably in their nests, like sleepers tossing to find rest. It was in looking up to sight these restless birds in a tree that I stumbled on Dr Chacko lying underneath it. I had a shock but he did not; he remained stretched out full-length with his arms under his head. ‘It’s cool here,’ he said. ‘Cool and beautiful.’ And he patted the place beside him for me to join him.

  Well, he was not young, and neither was I, and I should have thought nothing of it. And actually, when I did lie down, there was no awkwardness. Like him, I looked up into the roof of leaves; though thick, it had holes in it to let in what from here didn’t look like a heat-exhausted sky but stretches of pure cool silver. And the birds were not restless but glad to have our company, and one of them began to sing before being reminded that it was still far from dawn. Dr Chacko and I lay side by side, both of us gazing upwards with the innocent pleasure of children or even angels – he seemed to think more of the latter, for he said, ‘Yes, this is my evening paradise.’ When he added, ‘Especially after a day like we’ve had,’ I realised that this didn’t refer to mine in my air conditioned house but to his in the cottage where there wasn’t even a fan.

  I didn’t stay long under the tree but went home to search out a table fan for him. At first I thought of returning to give it to him, but I felt shy or embarrassed to do so, in case my return might be misinterpreted. (By whom? By him? Or, more likely, by myself.) Instead I waited for the next day and for the girls to take it to him. They thanked me so profusely that I realised that it was less for the fan than for what they took as a hopeful sign of my increased admiration for him.

  So far they hadn’t succeeded in placing his manuscript, and they had now decided that the only way was to publish it themselves. They had brought me a copy of it, together with a flyer they had put together to send to people who might be able to afford the book; and since there weren’t many of these in their own acquaintance, they had come to ask me for a list of possible subscribers. This request made, the girls left to deliver their little cooked dishes to him before they grew cold. I took out my old address book with all the names I had thought never to contact or need again. And now when I saw those names – and thought of the life I had spent for so many years, the fundraiser banquets in hotel ballrooms, the catered dinners and the ladies’ lunches – and then looked at the handbill designed on Maeve’s computer with a passport-like photograph of him, I was struck by the incompatibility of that past with this present. At the same time, I couldn’t help being amused by the idea of the recipients of the flyer, or their social secretaries, who would be discarding it in the waste basket along with other crazy mail. And if they were to read the text, what would they make of it? No more than I could. Here I stopped transcribing names to leaf through the manuscript itself, which the girls had left with me. I looked through it in the hope of some glimmer of understanding. There was none; it remained turgid and incomprehensible and in no way reflected the man I had seen lying indolently under a tree.

  I put the list in an envelope with a note to say I hoped this would be useful to him. I knocked on his door and, receiving no answer, pushed it open. The cottage was empty, not only of him but of any presence whatsoever. There was nothing except the few pieces of my abandoned furniture and the fan I had given him – no photographs, no pictures, nothing personal. I put the envelope on the table and left quickly, as though I had done something I didn’t wish to be detected.

  My instinct turned out to be correct. Next day Betty came to see me, looking grave and holding the list in her hand. ‘Where’s Maeve?’ I asked, for it was unusual for one to come without the other. Betty smiled at me, though sadly: ‘Maeve is as grateful to you as I am, for the list. But she’s hurt . . . She so loves to do things for him. Sometimes at night she makes me drive her here, only so she can leave a little gift for him.’

  I said, ‘And now she’s hurt because the gift of the list is mine and not hers?’

  ‘Poor Maeve, her heart’s too full of love. She’s an orphan, you know, she was found on the steps of one of the Sister Marie-Jo Homes. She has no idea who left her there. And after the orphanage, foster homes; I won’t tell you about those, why should you hear such things . . . Maeve has these strong feelings, maybe they’re wrong, probably they are. What she’s always loved best is to leave anonymous gifts for him, it was the sweetest thought for her that he wouldn’t know – ’

  ‘That you’re helping him with the manuscript?’

  ‘But now he does know. He’s seen your list so he knows we’re looking for subscribers.’

  She appeared to accept my apology, but it was from that time that something changed between me and the two girls. This was true principally of Maeve, who seemed no longer quite to trust me – or was it trust me with him? It was on the evening of that same day that I entered into a new relationship with Dr Chacko. For the first time, he came to the porch where I sat with my evening drink. When I invited him to join me, he did so at once. He settled into a porch chair, and when I offered him a lemonade, he indicated my silver cocktail shaker. When I told him what was in it, he said he’d have that. It was quite a potent martini but seemed nothing new to him. And I was again surprised when he thanked me for the list I had compiled.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know about the subscription,’ I said. ‘They think you don’t know.’

  ‘Like those chocolate bars they leave? . . . But it’s different with the manuscript.’

  ‘Won’t you like having it published?’ He made a vague gesture – of an indifference that seemed to express something of his personality. I asked, ‘D
on’t you think it ought to be published?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He had turned fully towards me. If he was, as I had been told, part Indian and part Russian, I couldn’t see anything to suggest either. He was too dark to be Anglo-Saxon, and his teeth were not Anglo-Saxon, they were very strong and very white, the most alive thing in his lean face. He spoke English fluently – more than fluently. Under the layers acquired through much moving around in the world, there remained – like a canal still alive in the oldest part of a city – the flat accent of the English Midlands. I had only noticed this at his lecture in the workshop where he had deliberately stressed it – as though its homely and provincial sound would bring his message closer to the earth.

  When he felt he had waited long enough for my opinion of his manuscript, he interpreted my silence as unfavourable. He admitted that it was hard labour for him to write, like birth pangs – ‘Thoughts trying to get themselves born – except I don’t have many thoughts.’

  He laughed with those magnificent teeth, at himself and at me, as if I might not believe him. But I did believe him. I’d seen him at his workshop, where he seemed to operate not by thoughts or words or ideas but just by being as he was.

  For the rest of that summer, he joined me several times more for drinks on the porch. When the season changed, we sat by the fireplace in my living room, and we carried on this practice throughout that year and the beginning of the next. But it wasn’t until the second summer that he joined me for a meal. Unlike the girls and probably many others I had seen in the workshop, he wasn’t a vegetarian but thoroughly enjoyed a veal cutlet and the wine to drink with it; also the candles in my silver candelabra and their reflection on the mahogany table.