Out of India

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  She clapped her hands and laughed and laughed, and then she burst out singing in her thin old voice some hymn all about how great God was and how lucky for her that she was his beloved. She was dancing with joy in front of all the people. And she was just a little shriveled old woman, very ugly with her teeth gone and a growth on her chin: but the way she carried on it was as if she had all the looks and glamour anyone ever had in the world and was in love a million times over. I thought, well whatever it was she had, obviously it was the one thing worth having and I had better try for it.

  I went to stay with a guru in a holy city. He had a house on the river in which he lived with his disciples. They lived in a nice way: they meditated a lot and went out for boat rides on the river and in the evenings they all sat around in the guru’s room and had a good time. There were quite a few foreigners among the disciples, and it was the guru’s greatest wish to go abroad and spread his message there and bring back more disciples. When he heard that Henry was a journalist, he became specially interested in me. He talked to me about the importance of introducing the leaven of Indian spirituality into the lump of Western materialism. To achieve this end, his own presence in the West was urgently required, and to ensure the widest dissemination of his message he would also need the full support of the mass media. He said that since we live in the modern age, we must avail ourselves of all its resources. He was very keen for me to bring Henry into the ashram, and when I was vague in my answers—I certainly didn’t want Henry here nor would he in the least want to come—he became very pressing and even quite annoyed and kept returning to the subject.

  He didn’t seem a very spiritual type of person to me. He was a hefty man with big shoulders and a big head. He wore his hair long but his jaw was clean-shaven and stuck out very large and prominent and gave him a powerful look like a bull. All he ever wore was a saffron robe and this left a good part of his body bare so that it could be seen at once how strong his legs and shoulders were. He had huge eyes, which he used constantly and apparently to tremendous effect, fixing people with them and penetrating them with a steady beam. He used them on me when he wanted Henry to come, but they never did anything to me. But the other disciples were very strongly affected by them. There was one girl, Jean, who said they were like the sun, so strong that if she tried to look back at them something terrible would happen to her like being blinded or burned up completely.

  Jean had made herself everything an Indian guru expects his disciples to be. She was absolutely humble and submissive. She touched the guru’s feet when she came into or went out of his presence, she ran eagerly on any errand he sent her on. She said she gloried in being nothing in herself and living only by his will. And she looked like nothing too, sort of drained of everything she might once have been. At home her cheeks were probably pink but now she was quite white, waxen, and her hair too was completely faded and colorless. She always wore a plain white cotton sari and that made her look paler than ever, and thinner too, it seemed to bring out the fact that she had no hips and was utterly flat-chested. But she was happy—at least she said she was—she said she had never known such happiness and hadn’t thought it was possible for human beings to feel like that. And when she said that, there was a sort of sparkle in her pale eyes, and at such moments I envied her because she seemed to have found what I was looking for. But at the same time I wondered whether she really had found what she thought she had, or whether it wasn’t something else and she was cheating herself, and one day she’d wake up to that fact and then she’d feel terrible.

  She was shocked by my attitude to the guru—not touching his feet or anything, and talking back to him as if he were just an ordinary person. Sometimes I thought perhaps there was something wrong with me because everyone else, all the other disciples and people from outside too who came to see him, they all treated him with this great reverence and their faces lit up in his presence as if there really was something special. Only I couldn’t see it. But all the same I was quite happy there—not because of him, but because I liked the atmosphere of the place and the way they all lived. Everyone seemed very contented and as if they were living for something high and beautiful. I thought perhaps if I waited and was patient, I’d also come to be like that. I tried to meditate the way they all did, sitting cross-legged in one spot and concentrating on the holy word that had been given to me. I wasn’t ever very successful and kept thinking of other things. But there were times when I went up to sit on the roof and looked out over the river, the way it stretched so calm and broad to the opposite bank and the boats going up and down it and the light changing and being reflected back on the water: and then, though I wasn’t trying to meditate or come to any higher thoughts, I did feel very peaceful and was glad to be there.

  The guru was patient with me for a long time, explaining about the importance of his mission and how Henry ought to come here and write about it for his paper. But as the days passed and Henry didn’t show up, his attitude changed and he began to ask me questions. Why hadn’t Henry come? Hadn’t I written to him? Wasn’t I going to write to him? Didn’t I think what was being done in the ashram would interest him? Didn’t I agree that it deserved to be brought to the notice of the world and that to this end no stone should be left unturned? While he said all this, he fixed me with his great eyes and I squirmed—not because of the way he was looking at me, but because I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to answer. Then he became very gentle and said never mind, he didn’t want to force me, that was not his way, he wanted people slowly to turn toward him of their own accord, to open up to him as a flower opens up and unfurls its petals and its leaves to the sun. But next day he would start again, asking the same questions, urging me, forcing me, and when this had gone on for some time and we weren’t getting anywhere, he even got angry once or twice and shouted at me that I was obstinate and closed and had fenced in my heart with seven hoops of iron. When he shouted, everyone in the ashram trembled and afterward they looked at me in a strange way. But an hour later the guru always had me called back to his room and then he was very gentle with me again and made me sit near him and insisted that it should be I who handed him his glass of milk in preference to one of the others, all of whom were a lot keener to be selected for this honor than I was.

  Jean often came to talk to me. At night I spread my bedding in a tiny cubbyhole that was a disused storeroom, and just as I was falling asleep, she would come in and lie down beside me and talk to me very softly and intimately. I didn’t like it much, to have her so close to me and whispering in a voice that wasn’t more than a breath and which I could feel, slightly warm, on my neck; sometimes she touched me, putting her hand on mine ever so gently so that she hardly was touching me but all the same I could feel that her hand was a bit moist and it gave me an unpleasant sensation down my spine. She spoke about the beauty of surrender, of not having a will and not having thoughts of your own. She said she too had been like me once, stubborn and ego-centered, but now she had learned the joy of yielding, and if she could only give me some inkling of the infinite bliss to be tasted in this process—here her breath would give out for a moment and she couldn’t speak for ecstasy. I would take the opportunity to pretend to fall asleep, even snoring a bit to make it more convincing; after calling my name a few times in the hope of waking me up again, she crept away disappointed. But next night she’d be back again, and during the day too she would attach herself to me as much as possible and continue talking in the same way.

  It got so that even when she wasn’t there, I could still hear her voice and feel her breath on my neck. I no longer enjoyed anything, not even going on the river or looking out over it from the top of the house. Although they hadn’t bothered me before, I kept thinking of the funeral pyres burning on the bank, and it seemed to me that the smoke they gave out was spreading all over the sky and the river and covering them with a dirty yellowish haze. I realized that nothing good could come to me from this place now. But when I told the guru th
at I was leaving, he got into a great fury. His head and neck swelled out and his eyes became two coal-black demons rolling around in rage. In a voice like drums and cymbals, he forbade me to go. I didn’t say anything but I made up my mind to leave next morning. I went to pack my things. The whole ashram was silent and stricken, no one dared speak. No one dared come near me either till late at night when Jean came as usual to lie next to me. She lay there completely still and crying to herself. I didn’t know she was crying at first because she didn’t make a sound, but slowly her tears seeped into her side of the pillow and a sensation of dampness came creeping over to my side of it. I pretended not to notice anything.

  Suddenly the guru stood in the doorway. The room faced an open courtyard and this was full of moonlight that illumined him and made him look enormous and eerie. Jean and I sat up. I felt scared, my heart beat fast. After looking at us in silence for a while, he ordered Jean to go away. She got up to do so at once. I said “No, stay,” and clung to her hand but she disengaged herself from me and, touching the guru’s feet in reverence, she went away. She seemed to dissolve in the moonlight outside, leaving no trace. The guru sat beside me on my bedding spread on the floor. He said I was under a delusion, that I didn’t really want to leave; my inmost nature was craving to stay by him—he knew, he could hear it calling out to him. But because I was afraid, I was attempting to smother this craving and to run away. “Look how you’re trembling,” he said. “See how afraid you are.” It was true, I was trembling and cowering against the wall as far away from him as I could get. Only it was impossible to get very far because he was so huge and seemed to spread and fill the tiny closet. I could feel him close against me, and his pungent male smell, spiced with garlic, overpowered me.

  “You’re right to be afraid,” he said: because it was his intention, he said, to batter and beat me, to smash my ego till it broke and flew apart into a million pieces and was scattered into the dust. Yes, it would be a painful process and I would often cry out and plead for mercy, but in the end—ah, with what joy I would step out of the prison of my own self, remade and reborn! I would fling myself to the ground and bathe his feet in tears of gratitude. Then I would be truly his. As he spoke, I became more and more afraid because I felt, so huge and close and strong he was, that perhaps he really had the power to do to me all that he said and that in the end he would make me like Jean.

  I now lay completely flattened against the wall, and he had moved up and was squashing me against it. One great hand traveled up and down my stomach, but its activity seemed apart from the rest of him and from what he was saying. His voice became lower and lower, more and more intense. He said he would teach me to obey, to submit myself completely, that would be the first step and a very necessary one. For he knew what we were like, all of us who came from Western countries: we were self-willed, obstinate, licentious. On the last word his voice cracked with emotion, his hand went further and deeper. Licentious, he repeated, and then, rolling himself across the bed so that he now lay completely pressed against me, he asked “How many men have you slept with?” He took my hand and made me hold him: how huge and hot he was! He pushed hard against me. “How many? Answer me!” he commanded, urgent and dangerous. But I was no longer afraid: now he was not an unknown quantity nor was the situation any longer new or strange. “Answer me, answer me!” he cried, riding on top of me, and then he cried “Bitch!” and I laughed in relief.

  I quite liked being back in Delhi with Henry. I had lots of baths in our marble bathroom, soaking in the tub for hours and making myself smell nice with bath salts. I stopped wearing Indian clothes and took out all the dresses I’d brought with me. We entertained quite a bit, and Ramu scurried around in his white coat, emptying ashtrays. It wasn’t a bad time. I stayed around all day in the apartment with the air-conditioner on and the curtains drawn to keep out the glare. At night we drove over to other people’s apartments for buffet suppers of boiled ham and potato salad; we sat around drinking in their living rooms, which were done up more or less like ours, and talked about things like the price of whiskey, what was the best hill station to go to in the summer, and servants. This last subject often led to other related ones like how unreliable Indians were and how it was impossible ever to get anything done. Usually this subject was treated in a humorous way, with lots of funny anecdotes to illustrate, but occasionally someone got quite passionate; this happened usually if they were a bit drunk, and then they went off into a long thing about how dirty India was and backward, riddled with vile superstitions—evil, they said—corrupt—corrupting.

  Henry never spoke like that—maybe because he never got drunk enough—but I know he didn’t disagree with it. He disliked the place very much and was in fact thinking of asking for an assignment elsewhere. When I asked where, he said the cleanest place he could think of. He asked how would I like to go to Geneva. I knew I wouldn’t like it one bit, but I said all right. I didn’t really care where I was. I didn’t care much about anything these days. The only positive feeling I had was for Henry. He was so sweet and good to me. I had a lot of bad dreams nowadays and was afraid of sleeping alone, so he let me come into his bed even though he dislikes having his sheets disarranged and I always kick and toss about a lot. I lay close beside him, clinging to him, and for the first time I was glad that he had never been all that keen on sex. On Sundays we stayed in bed all day reading the papers and Ramu brought us nice English meals on trays. Sometimes we put on a record and danced together in our pajamas. I kissed Henry’s cheeks, which were always smooth—he didn’t need to shave very often—and sometimes his lips, which tasted of toothpaste.

  Then I got jaundice. It’s funny, all that time I spent traveling about and eating anything anywhere, nothing happened to me, and now that I was living such a clean life with boiled food and boiled water, I got sick. Henry was horrified. He immediately segregated all his and my things, and anything that I touched had to be sterilized a hundred times over. He was forever running into the kitchen to check up whether Ramu was doing this properly. He said jaundice was the most catching thing there was, and though he went in for a whole course of precautionary inoculations that had to be specially flown in from the States, he still remained in a very nervous state. He tried to be sympathetic to me, but couldn’t help sounding reproachful most of the time. He had sealed himself off so carefully, and now I had let this in. I knew how he felt, but I was too ill and miserable to care. I don’t remember ever feeling so ill. I didn’t have any high temperature or anything, but all the time there was this terrible nausea. First my eyes went yellow, then the rest of me as if I’d been dyed in the color of nausea, inside and out. The whole world went yellow and sick. I couldn’t bear anything: any noise, any person near me, worst of all any smell. They couldn’t cook in the kitchen anymore because the smell of cooking made me scream. Henry had to live on boiled eggs and bread. I begged him not to let Ramu into my bedroom for, although Ramu always wore nicely laundered clothes, he gave out a smell of perspiration that was both sweetish and foul and filled me with disgust. I was convinced that under his clean shirt he wore a cotton vest, black with sweat and dirt, which he never took off but slept in at night in the one-room servant quarter where he lived crowded together with all his family in a dense smell of cheap food and bad drains and unclean bodies.

  I knew these smells so well—I thought of them as the smells of India, and had never minded them; but now I couldn’t get rid of them, they were like some evil flood soaking through the walls of my air-conditioned bedroom. And other things I hadn’t minded, had hardly bothered to think about, now came back to me in a terrible way so that waking and sleeping I saw them. What I remembered most often was the disused well in the Rajasthan fort out of which I had drunk water. I was sure now that there had been a corpse at the bottom of it, and I saw this corpse with the flesh swollen and blown but the eyes intact: they were huge like the guru’s eyes and they stared, glazed and jellied, into the darkness of the well. And worse than seeing
this corpse, I could taste it in the water that I had drunk—that I was still drinking—yes, it was now, at this very moment, that I was raising my cupped hands to my mouth and feeling the dank water lap around my tongue. I screamed out loud at the taste of the dead man and I called to Henry and clutched his hand and begged him to get us sent to Geneva quickly, quickly. He disengaged his hand—he didn’t like me to touch him at this time—but he promised. Then I grew calmer, I shut my eyes and tried to think of Geneva and of washing out my mouth with Swiss milk.

  I got better, but I was very weak. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I started to cry. My face had a yellow tint, my hair was limp and faded; I didn’t look old but I didn’t look young anymore either. There was no flesh left, and no color. I was drained, hollowed out. I was wearing a white nightdress and that increased the impression. Actually, I reminded myself of Jean. I thought, so this is what it does to you (I didn’t quite know at that time what I meant by it—jaundice in my case, a guru in hers; but it seemed to come to the same). When Henry told me that his new assignment had come through, I burst into tears again; only now it was with relief. I said let’s go now, let’s go quickly. I became quite hysterical so Henry said all right; he too was impatient to get away before any more of those bugs he dreaded so much caught up with us. The only thing that bothered him was that the rent had been paid for three months and the landlord refused to refund. Henry had a fight with him about it but the landlord won. Henry was furious but I said never mind, let’s just get away and forget all about all of them. We packed up some of our belongings and sold the rest; the last few days we lived in an empty apartment with only a couple of kitchen chairs and a bed. Ramu was very worried about finding a new job.