Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  The Rawul, keeping his dignity, went back to it: “It’s our emblem and we have to display it wherever we are—literally keep our colors flying.”

  “And quite apart from anything else,” Bari Rani retorted, “it looks so silly. Poor Daisy, she’s dating her first boy (I want to talk to you about that), and when he saw that thing, he just laughed and laughed. She didn’t know where to look, she said. She absolutely begged me, ‘Please, Mummy, please ask Papa to take it down.’ Naturally, it’s embarrassing for the child.”

  “She ought to be proud of her father’s colors displayed in his house.”

  “His house? Well, hardly—any more than this one.” She half-shut her eyes in an insinuating way and pulled her sari closer around her shoulders. There was a pause—she seemed to be debating whether to go further or not and then decided yes: “I don’t think this is quite what Daddy expected when he bought these properties for me. But of course there are other things he didn’t expect either, and sometimes I’m almost glad he is no longer here to see everything I have to see.” Suddenly she turned to me. I had come downstairs to see if Crishi was there—he wasn’t—and had got trapped when she entered and stood between me and the door. I felt even more trapped when she spoke to me: “You’ll find out that everything is not what you expected. Perhaps you’ve found out already. . . . I’m used to it by now but—oh what a pity when young people are disappointed.”

  I felt as if from behind me the Rawul and Renée were pushing me to answer her. They and I were standing on one side of the room, Bari Rani on the other; so when I said “I’m not disappointed,” it was as though I were replying to an adversary.

  “Let’s hope you never will be,” Bari Rani said, not at all like an adversary but sighing as one who wished me well.

  “We’re here to see to that,” said Renée, very energetically, and she came and stood beside me, with her arm laid around my shoulders. Now I felt like a pawn between them, but Bari Rani was not playing—I don’t know for whose sake she gave up and turned with a last “Just get that thing out of my house!” and swept from the room.

  Renée was indignant: “Coming here, making a scene—and in front of Harriet.” She dropped her arm from my shoulder: “I can’t think why she should start in on you, unless of course you’ve been talking to her. Complaining or something.” Her indignation was now directed at me, and it was about me she said to the Rawul: “After everything we’ve given her, and given up for her. Everything we’ve done to make her welcome. I hope you feel that,” she challenged me, narrowing her eyes. “How we’ve welcomed you with open arms. Like a daughter.”

  “She is a daughter,” said the Rawul, shifting from foot to foot in embarrassment.

  “Of course she is; who says she’s not? My goodness, how much more could we possibly do for her than we’ve done already!”

  Afterward I brooded about what she meant: Was it that they had given me Crishi? If so, even she had to admit that they hadn’t given me all that much of him. When he was home, he was mostly with them downstairs while I was upstairs with Michael, if he was there, or usually alone. Even when Crishi came to me at night, by the time I woke up in the morning, he was gone. I argued, I yelled, I fought with him—he smiled, and it was as though he had only to put out one hand and brush me aside. The truth was, he couldn’t lose with me. For those few hours he sometimes spent with me, I was willing to put up with all the waiting and frustration. I had no alternative. He had aroused me so completely that the sex he gave me—rationed out to me—was absolutely essential to me. Deprived of it, I was as if without breath and air. Really sometimes I lay there in such an agony of unfulfilled longing, I was fighting for breath. I was hardly a person anymore but just this fearful need. It is shaming to write this—to have allowed myself to be so overcome. I was furious with him when he didn’t turn up, but when he did I flung myself on him in a fury of desire. I tore at him, I literally did. I was a starved animal and he laughed and liked it. I had no defenses at all—against him, against myself, against this sex. I don’t want to say any more. Yes I blame myself but even now, looking back, I can see I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes I think it would be better if people could have their full force of sexual desire when they are older and have learned some control to deal with it; but in youth, there is nothing between you and it, so it can become the devouring hunger it was for me at that time.

  I wondered often about Michael. I knew Crishi had a strong effect on him—I had seen that current pass through him in Crishi’s presence—but I couldn’t imagine that he went through the same agonies I did. While I had never been sure whether Crishi went to Michael’s room at Propinquity or on the Island, here in London I was sure he didn’t. He came up to me for a few hours and then returned to the Rawul and Renée, while Michael remained alone in his room. But they were often together during the day—Michael had become Crishi’s closest aide—and they could have gone anywhere and done anything. I don’t know. That way Michael was a complete mystery to me. I knew he was homosexual and had met him with boyfriends, but I knew nothing about his true relations with them and with many others I did not meet. For me, in my thoughts, he was always alone—whether he was traveling the way he used to all over the world, or just living in a place and moving around in it: He was alone and aloof, walking with his head held high and not looking right or left, as if nothing concerned him. He looked pure and untouched; yet perhaps he did, like others, spend hours in men’s toilets or went to the baths or whatever other places there are. The knowledge of it was there in my consciousness but unconnected with him as he was, not only in his essence but also physically—slender, upright, clean, and fair.

  It was a strange time for me in London. Although everyone else was very busy working for the movement, I had nothing to do except wait for those few hours when Crishi came to be with me; if he came, that is. I went around on my own, traveling on the tops of buses, walking through the parks in the rain. I went to museums and looked at pictures and antiquities, and went to see films in multiple cinemas, and when one was finished, I went in another one. I was so crazy with sex at the time, I went to some porno ones too, and that was strange, with all those men in raincoats, sitting very still and concentrated. Altogether London was strange to me—very different from the way I had known it on my previous stays there. The streets, the stores, and especially the museums seemed to be full of tourists, busloads of them with camera equipment and foreign languages I didn’t always recognize. Sometimes it seemed to me that the only English people I saw were museum attendants and policemen directing the flow of travelers into the right channels. When I look back on that time it was very often Saturday afternoon with everything in our neighborhood of tall Edwardian houses shut tight, except for a little general store run by an Indian family who kept open late into the night though not many customers came, everyone having gone away for the weekend.

  I could always visit the other house, where Bari Rani and the girls lived on a permanent note of high-pitched excitement. Usually they were getting ready to go out, and the baths were running and girls shrieking and charging into each other’s bedrooms to exchange articles of clothing, perfumes, and makeup. Sometimes I went along with them, but I contributed nothing to their shopping expeditions, not buying anything for myself and unable to give sound advice on their purchases; nor to their parties, where they never noticed that I wasn’t having as fabulous a time as they were. Their phones rang a lot, very often from Bombay, and the Bari Rani would talk for hours and had no difficulty hearing above the noise of the LPs the girls were playing. She often said to me, “We must have a long talk, Harriet,” and I think she meant to, but it couldn’t happen because she was continually being called away to the phone or to advise on an outfit; or she was fighting with Teresa, the Indian Christian girl they had brought with them, who had been their nanny and now was their companion and help. Teresa had an Indian boyfriend, and so did all the girls. I had difficulty keeping the girls’ boyfriends apart because they
were all handsome and polite and exquisitely dressed, and fantastic dancers, as were the girls. Everyone talked in a lilting English with Hindi phrases thrown in—they talked constantly but no one had to listen and in fact it all sounded the same, all on one high note, more like singing than talking.

  The girls were a few years younger than I—the eldest, Priti, had her seventeenth birthday around this time—and I knew that, like everyone I had gone to school with, they were very interested in sex. They talked and read about it and discussed it, with each other and their friends; but here too I couldn’t contribute, for although by this time I thought of nothing else either, it was in a different way. They knew nothing about the kind of sex I was going through, and I didn’t want them to know; it was as though I were protecting them. Probably they thought I was frigid, as everyone usually did, and I preferred a hundred times to have them think that than to know the reality. Only Crishi knew the reality, and it amused him no end. “What would Aunt Harriet say?” was his standard crack whenever he involved me in some act he knew about. Aunt Harriet was one of his favorite jokes—he had seen her only that one time at Grandfather’s funeral, but he made her into this sort of archetypal figure to which he claimed I would revert. Whenever I hesitated to perform some new thing he wanted me to do, he said “There, see, you’ve reverted already.” He had many Aunt Harriet stories. He said she always had to wear a brooch on her blouse so people could tell which was front Harriet and which was back; and once he came with a very serious face, saying a dead woman had been found and they were about to carry her off to the mortuary when he saw her and cried “No wait stop! That’s no corpse, that’s my Aunt Harriet.” And so on. The frigidity of Anglo-Saxon women was a favorite subject with him, and the more we did at night the more jokes he made by day.

  Unable to stay another minute alone in the flat, or cope with the romantic-girl atmosphere in the other house, I would walk miles in the hope of tiring myself out and dropping off to sleep till Crishi came. It was getting into fall, damp and chilly, and though the leaves were still on the trees and still green for the most part, they kept being blown off and lay on the paths and were trodden into mulch. Sometimes I sat on a wet bench in Hyde Park and got even more wet from the leaves dripping down on me. Lonely men wandering by stopped, and some sat with me to talk but I didn’t answer them much, so they soon wandered off again, sadder than ever. One man—quite an old man with a hat on that he didn’t take off—lay down on the grass near me, and it took me awhile before I realized he was masturbating, so I moved. I thought it was terrible that people, and even old people, should have these sensations, and be tortured by them. Another man must have witnessed this and he followed me and offered to call the police. He said it was disgusting and such persons must be stopped. I said no it’s all right, and walked faster and he walked faster too, and then it seemed he had to protect me and wouldn’t leave me. He said London was a very dangerous place, very bad people around, and a girl like me shouldn’t be walking in the park. He said in his own country no girl ever walked alone, and if she did, she was picked up by the police and sent back to her family. He didn’t say which his country was but referred to it constantly, so that practically every sentence started with “In my country . . .” He was short, muscular, dark in a Middle Eastern way. His clothes were quite clean and whole but looked as though he might have bought them secondhand, maybe found them hanging in a market on a Sunday morning. After a while, walking with me, he took my hand, very nicely and respectfully, so that I felt I had to leave it there. His hand was very very warm, even hot, as if the climate of his country were stored in it. The rain kept on squeezing down the way it does in London, out of spongy colorless clouds. All around us in the park were these magnificent tall old trees, and when we came out there were these magnificent tall old buildings looming up into the wet air. He kept on talking, about his country and other general topics, still holding my hand very respectfully; sometimes he tickled my palm but stopped at once when he saw I didn’t like it. We went down a tube station, and since he had only enough money for one ticket, I bought my own. It was a long underground ride, anonymous and ghostlike, as though I had just died and didn’t know where I was bound for and neither did the other people who got in and out as the doors slid open at the stations; there was an unending stream of them, all smelling damp as if in their grave clothes. I felt completely passive and had stopped noticing that he was holding my hand.

  When we got off and emerged up a long escalator, it was still raining from the same drained sky and over streets and streets and streets of identical houses. They were smaller houses than the ones where we lived, and grimier, and there were more gaps where some had been torn down and weeds grew in their foundations. There were also more shops—laundromats, a few supermarkets, a few very small shops going out of business and others already gone and boarded up; every block had at least one Pakistani or Bangladeshi restaurant and a donna-kebab place. We turned in to a doorway beside one of these places and walked up a very dark staircase. On the first landing he stopped and kissed me and his lips were as hot as his hand. He said his name was Salim. There was a dense smell of kebabs and the oil in which they had been fried many times. We walked up one flight more and he unlocked a door and invited me into his room. It was poorly furnished but he kept it nice with a tablecloth and photographs. He had made his bed before going out and there was a blue cotton cover on it. A pair of dark trousers was folded over the only chair. He hung them in the wardrobe so I could sit down. There was an awkward silence, for it was difficult to find anything to say. He had a clock, ticking with a tinny sound, and this seemed the most prominent object in the room except for the wardrobe, which was a very bulky piece of furniture and leaned forward slightly as though about to crash down.

  He made tea on a tiny portable stove he had by the open fireplace. The tea was very good, very strong with creamy milk and much sugar and some other taste that may have been cloves. I wished I could have drunk it and said thank you and good-bye, but of course that was not what we had come for on that long underground ride. I looked at the photographs that stood on the tablecloth as on a little altar. There were some old people, some children, some young men in military uniform; when I looked at them, he explained who they were and at the same time he put his hand on my knee. I moved this knee slightly and in my embarrassment asked more questions in fast succession. He answered them and put his hand back on my knee. I picked up a studio photograph of a young man—I thought it was he but he said no, it was his brother. “Dead,” he said, and I had hardly made sounds of regret, when he added “Shot.” He slid his hand farther up my thigh, and feeling shocked and sorry about his brother, I didn’t like to stop him. He leaned forward from the bed and pressed his lips on mine. His chin felt rough and stubbly—he may have shaved in the morning but probably needed to do so at least twice a day. He smelled like a person who tried to keep himself clean but did not have adequate bathing facilities. He was now breathing hard and tried to make me get off the chair and join him on the bed. I said “I must go. My husband’s waiting.” I’m sure I sounded like Aunt Harriet. If I had had gloves, at this point I would have put them on.

  I had forgotten how much stronger men are than women. It wasn’t that he was a rough or brutal man—on the contrary—but that his need was great. After all, he was away from his wife, his family, and lived alone in this little room in a rainy city of endless row houses. He even tried to argue with me—he said, quite reasonably, “Then why did you come?” I couldn’t say for the tea; I couldn’t say anything. I felt I had to go through with it. But anyway there was no choice anymore. Lying under him on the lumpy bed onto which he had thrown me, watching his contorted, sweating face, I stroked his cheek because I felt sorry to have roused him so far. He didn’t take long and afterward appeared to feel satisfied and grateful. I also felt grateful—that it was over, for one thing, and for another that I hadn’t enjoyed it: not at all, there had been no gratification of any kind for me. I r
ealized that my ravenous need was not that of one physical animal for another but for one particular human being—for Crishi, for my husband, whom I loved.

  If only I could have seen him more often! But some days he was only a voice on the other end of the telephone—I didn’t even know where he was calling from, and often it sounded like a pay phone. He was always cheerful and charming but always in a hurry, and when I called, desperately sometimes, “Where are you? When am I going to see you?” he would say “I have to go now” and hang up. I was reminded of what I had read about the Lord Krishna, when Michael was in his Indian period: how Krishna had all these girls in love with him but he would tease them, hiding himself from them, just showing a glimpse of himself every now and again to keep them in line, while they would be staggering around day and night calling for him—“Where are you? Can’t you see how I’m longing and waiting for you?” All they heard was his laughter from behind some trees, but when they followed it, he was gone.