Out of India

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Shammi went home the next day. We did not mention the subject any more, but when he left he knew that I would not break my promise. And indeed that very day I went to Boekelman’s room and told him that he must leave. It was a very quiet scene. I spoke calmly, looking not at B. but over his head, and he answered me calmly, saying very well, he would go. He asked only that I should give him time to find alternative accommodation, and of course to this I agreed readily, and we even had a quiet little discussion about what type of place he should look for. We spoke like two acquaintances, and everything seemed very nice till I noticed that, although his voice was quite firm and he was talking so reasonably, his hands were slightly trembling. Then my feelings changed, and I had quickly to leave the room in order not to give way to them.

  From now on he got up earlier than usual in the mornings and went out to look for a place to rent. He would raise his hat to me as he passed me sitting on the veranda, and sometimes we would have a little talk together, mainly about the weather, before he passed on, raising his hat again and with Susi on the lead walking behind him, her tail in the air. The first few days he seemed very cheerful, but after about a week I could see he was tired of going out so early and never finding anything, and Susi too seemed tired and her tail was no longer so high. I hardened my heart against them. I could guess what was happening—how he went from place to place and found everywhere that rents were very high and the accommodation very small compared with the large rooms he had had in my house all these years for almost nothing. Let him learn, I thought to myself and said nothing except “Good morning” and “The weather is changing fast, soon it will be winter” as I watched him going with slower and slower footsteps day after day out of the gate.

  At last one day he confessed to me that, in spite of all his efforts, he had not yet succeeded in finding anything suitable. He had some hard things to say about rapacious landlords. I listened patiently but did not offer to extend his stay. My silence prompted him to stand on his pride and say that I need not worry, that very shortly he would definitely be vacating the rooms. And indeed only two days later he informed me that although he had not yet found any suitable place, he did not want to inconvenience me any further and had therefore made an alternative arrangement, which would enable him to leave in a day or two. Of course I should have answered only “Very well” and inclined my head in a stately manner, but like a fool instead I asked, “What alternative arrangement?” This gave him the opportunity to be stately with me; he looked at me in silence for a moment and then gave a little bow and, raising his hat, proceeded toward the gate with Susi. I bit my lip in anger. I would have liked to run after him and shout as in the old days, but instead I had to sit there by myself and brood. All day I brooded what alternative arrangement he could have made. Perhaps he was going to a hotel, but I didn’t think so, because hotels nowadays are very costly, and although he is not poor, the older he gets the less he likes to spend.

  In the evening his friend Lina came to see him. There was a lot of noise from his rooms and also some thumping, as of suitcases being taken down; Lina shouted and laughed at the top of her voice, as she always does. I crept halfway down the stairs and tried to hear what they were saying. I was very agitated. As soon as she had gone, I walked into his room—without knocking, which was against his strict orders—and at once demanded, standing facing him with my hands at my waist, “You are not moving in with Lina?” Some of his pictures had already been removed from the walls and his rugs rolled up; his suitcases stood open and ready.

  Although I was very heated, he remained calm. “Why not Lina?” he asked, and looked at me in a mocking way.

  I made a sound of contempt. Words failed me. To think of him living with Lina, in her two furnished rooms that were already overcrowded with her own things and always untidy! And Lina herself, also always untidy, her hair blond when she remembered to dye it, her swollen ankles, and her loud voice and laugh! She had first come to India in the 1930s to marry an Indian, a boy from a very good family, but he left her quite soon—of course, how could a boy like that put up with her ways? She is very free with men, even now though she is old and ugly, and I know she has liked B. for a long time. I was quite determined on one thing; never would I allow him to move to her place, even if it meant keeping him here in the house with me for some time longer.

  But when I told him that where was the hurry, he could wait till he found a good place of his own, then he said thank you, he had made his arrangements, and as I could see with my own eyes he had already begun to pack up his things; and after he had said that, he turned away and began to open and shut various drawers and take out clothes, just to show me how busy he was with packing. He had his back to me, and I stood looking at it and longed to thump it.

  The next day too Lina came to the house and again I heard her talking and laughing very loudly, and there was some banging about as if they were moving the suitcases. She left very late at night, but even after she had gone I could not sleep and tossed this side and that on my bed. I no longer thought of Shammi but only of B. Hours passed, one o’clock, two o’clock, three, still I could not sleep. I walked up and down my bedroom, then I opened the door and walked up and down the landing. After a while it seemed to me I could hear sounds from downstairs, so I crept halfway down the stairs to listen. There was some movement in his room, and then he coughed also, a very weak cough, and he cleared his throat as if it were hurting him. I put my ear to the door of his room; I held my breath, but I could not hear anything further. Very slowly I opened the door. He was sitting in a chair with his head down and his arms hanging loose between his legs, like a sick person. The room was in disorder, with the rugs rolled up and the suitcases half packed, and there were glasses and an empty bottle, as if he and Lina had been having a party. There was also the stale smoke of her cigarettes; she never stops smoking and then throws the stubs, red with lipstick, anywhere she likes.

  He looked up for a moment at the sound of the door opening, but when he saw it was I he looked down again without saying anything. I tiptoed over to his armchair and sat at his feet on the floor. My hand slowly and soothingly stroked his leg, and he allowed me to do this and did not stir. He stared in front of him with dull eyes; he had his teeth out and looked an old, old man. There was no need for us to say anything, to ask questions and give answers. I knew what he was thinking as he stared in front of him in this way, and I too thought of the same thing. I thought of him gone away from here and living with Lina, or alone with his dog in some rented room; no contact with India or Indians, no words to communicate with except achchha (all right) and pani (water); no one to care for him as he grew older and older, and perhaps sick, and his only companions people just like himself—as old, as lonely, as disappointed, and as far from home.

  He sighed, and I said, “Is your indigestion troubling you?” although I knew it was something worse than only indigestion. But he said yes, and added, “It was the spinach you made them cook for my supper. How often do I have to tell you I can’t digest spinach at night.” After a while he allowed me to help him into bed. When I had covered him and settled his pillows the way he liked them, I threw myself on the bed and begged, “Please don’t leave me.”

  “I’ve made my arrangements,” he said in a firm voice. Susi, at the end of the bed, looked at me with her running eyes and wagged her tail as if she were asking for something.

  “Stay,” I pleaded with him. “Please stay.”

  There was a pause. At last he said, as if he were doing me a big favor, “Well, we’ll see”; and added, “Get off my bed now, you’re crushing my legs—don’t you know what a big heavy lump you are?”

  None of my children ever comes to stay with me now. I know they are sad and disappointed with me. They want me to be what an old widowed mother should be, devoted entirely to prayer and self-sacrifice; I too know it is the only state fitting to this last stage of life that I have now reached. But that great all-devouring love that I should have f
or God, I have for B. Sometimes I think: perhaps this is the path for weak women like me? Perhaps B. is a substitute for God whom I should be loving, the way the little brass image of Vishnu in my prayer room is a substitute for that great god himself? These are stupid thoughts that sometimes come to me when I am lying next to B. on his bed and looking at him and feeling so full of peace and joy that I wonder how I came to be so, when I am living against all right rules and the wishes of my children. How do I deserve the great happiness that I find in that old man? It is a riddle.

  AN EXPERIENCE OF INDIA

  Today Ramu left. He came to ask for money and I gave him as much as I could. He counted it and asked for more, but I didn’t have it to give him. He said some insulting things, which I pretended not to hear. Really I couldn’t blame him. I knew he was anxious and afraid, not having another job to go to. But I also couldn’t help contrasting the way he spoke now with what he had been like in the past: so polite always, and eager to please, and always smiling, saying “Yes sir,” “Yes madam please.” He used to look very different too, very spruce in his white uniform and his white canvas shoes. When guests came, he put on a special white coat he had made us buy him. He was always happy when there were guests—serving, mixing drinks, emptying ashtrays—and I think he was disappointed that more didn’t come. The Ford Foundation people next door had a round of buffet suppers and Sunday brunches, and perhaps Ramu suffered in status before their servants because we didn’t have much of that. Actually, coming to think of it, perhaps he suffered in status anyhow because we weren’t like the others. I mean, I wasn’t. I didn’t look like a proper memsahib or dress like one—I wore Indian clothes right from the start—or ever behave like one. I think perhaps Ramu didn’t care for that. I think servants want their employers to be conventional and put up a good front so that other people’s servants can respect them. Some of the nasty things Ramu told me this morning were about how everyone said I was just someone from a very low sweeper caste in my own country and how sorry they were for him that he had to serve such a person.

  He also said it was no wonder Sahib had run away from me. Henry didn’t actually run away, but it’s true that things had changed between us. I suppose India made us see how fundamentally different we were from each other. Though when we first came, we both came we thought with the same ideas. We were both happy that Henry’s paper had sent him out to India. We both thought it was a marvelous opportunity not only for him professionally but for both of us spiritually. Here was our escape from that Western materialism with which we were both so terribly fed up. But once he got here and the first enthusiasm had worn off, Henry seemed not to mind going back to just the sort of life we’d run away from. He even didn’t seem to care about meeting Indians anymore, though in the beginning he had made a great point of doing so; now it seemed to him all right to go only to parties given by other foreign correspondents and sit around there and eat and drink and talk just the way they would at home. After a while, I couldn’t stand going with him anymore, so we’d have a fight and then he’d go off by himself. That was a relief. I didn’t want to be with any of those people and talk about inane things in their tastefully appointed air-conditioned apartments.

  I had come to India to be in India. I wanted to be changed. Henry didn’t—he wanted a change, that’s all, but not to be changed. After a while because of that he was a stranger to me and I felt I was alone, the way I’m really alone now. Henry had to travel a lot around the country to write his pieces, and in the beginning I used to go with him. But I didn’t like the way he traveled, always by plane and staying in expensive hotels and drinking in the bar with the other correspondents. So I would leave him and go off by myself. I traveled the way everyone travels in India, just with a bundle and a roll of bedding that I could spread out anywhere and go to sleep. I went in third-class railway carriages and in those old lumbering buses that go from one small dusty town to another and are loaded with too many people inside and with too much scruffy baggage on top. At the end of my journeys, I emerged soaked in perspiration, soot, and dirt. I ate anything anywhere and always like everyone else with my fingers (I became good at that)—thick, half-raw chapatis from wayside stalls and little messes of lentils and vegetables served on a leaf, all the food the poor eat; sometimes if I didn’t have anything, other people would share with me from out of their bundles. Henry, who had the usual phobia about bugs, said I would kill myself eating that way. But nothing ever happened. Once, in a desert fort in Rajasthan, I got very thirsty and asked the old caretaker to pull some water out of an ancient disused well for me. It was brown and sort of foul-smelling, and maybe there was a corpse in the well, who knows. But I was thirsty so I drank it, and still nothing happened.

  People always speak to you in India, in buses and trains and on the streets, they want to know all about you and ask you a lot of personal questions. I didn’t speak much Hindi, but somehow we always managed, and I didn’t mind answering all those questions when I could. Women quite often used to touch me, run their hands over my skin just to feel what it was like I suppose, and they specially liked to touch my hair which is long and blond. Sometimes I had several of them lifting up strands of it at the same time, one pulling this way and another that way and they would exchange excited comments and laugh and scream a lot; but in a nice way, so I couldn’t help but laugh and scream with them. And people in India are so hospitable. They’re always saying “Please come and stay in my house,” perfect strangers that happen to be sitting near you on the train. Sometimes, if I didn’t have any plans or if it sounded as if they might be living in an interesting place, I’d say “All right thanks,” and I’d go along with them. I had some interesting adventures that way.

  I might as well say straight off that many of these adventures were sexual. Indian men are very, very keen to sleep with foreign girls. Of course men in other countries are also keen to sleep with girls, but there’s something specially frenzied about Indian men when they approach you. Frenzied and at the same time shy. You’d think that with all those ancient traditions they have—like the Kama Sutra, and the sculptures showing couples in every kind of position—you’d think that with all that behind them they’d be very highly skilled, but they’re not. Just the opposite. Middle-aged men get as excited as a fifteen-year-old boy, and then of course they can’t wait, they jump, and before you know where you are, in a great rush, it’s all over. And when it’s over, it’s over, there’s nothing left. Then they’re only concerned with getting away as soon as possible before anyone can find them out (they’re always scared of being found out). There’s no tenderness, no interest at all in the other person as a person; only the same kind of curiosity that there is on the buses and the same sort of questions are asked, like are you married, any children, why no children, do you like wearing our Indian dress . . . There’s one question though that’s not asked on the buses but that always inevitably comes up during sex, so that you learn to wait for it: always, at the moment of mounting excitement, they ask “How many men have you slept with?” and it’s repeated over and over: “How many? How many?” and then they shout “Aren’t you ashamed?” and “Bitch!”—always that one word, which seems to excite them more than any other, to call you that is the height of their lovemaking, it’s the last frenzy, the final outrage: “Bitch!” Sometimes I couldn’t stop myself but had to burst out laughing.

  I didn’t like sleeping with all these people, but I felt I had to. I felt I was doing good, though I don’t know why, I couldn’t explain it to myself. Only one of all those men ever spoke to me: I mean the way people having sex together are supposed to speak, coming near each other not only physically but also wanting to show each other what’s deep inside them. He was a middle-aged man, a fellow passenger on a bus, and we got talking at one of the stops the bus made at a wayside tea stall. When he found I was on my way to X and didn’t have anywhere to stay, he said, as so many have said before him, “Please come and stay in my house.” And I said, as I had
often said before, “All right.” Only when we got there he didn’t take me to his house but to a hotel. It was a very poky place in the bazaar and we had to grope our way up a steep smelly stone staircase and then there was a tiny room with just one string cot and an earthenware water jug in it. He made a joke about there being only one bed. I was too tired to care much about anything. I only wanted to get it over with quickly and go to sleep. But afterward I found it wasn’t possible to go to sleep because there was a lot of noise coming up from the street where all the shops were still open though it was nearly midnight. People seemed to be having a good time and there was even a phonograph playing some cracked old love song. My companion also couldn’t get to sleep: he left the bed and sat down on the floor by the window and smoked one cigarette after the other. His face was lit up by the light coming in from the street outside and I saw he was looking sort of thoughtful and sad, sitting there smoking. He had rather a good face, strong bones but quite a feminine mouth and of course those feminine suffering eyes that most Indians have.