Out of India

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  I got Daddy’s pills and Sudha got water and Rajee ran for pillows. Daddy lay on the sofa, with his eyes shut. He looked quite exhausted, as if he didn’t want to say or think anything more. Rajee kept fussing over him, but after a time there was nothing more to be done. Daddy was all right and fast asleep. Rajee said to me, “Sit with him.” I took a cane stool and sat by the sofa holding Daddy’s hand.

  But I wasn’t thinking of him, I was watching the other two. There was going to be a big scene between them, I knew. Rajee also knew it, and he was very uncomfortable. Sudha lounged in a chair in the middle of the room, with her legs stretched out before her under her sari. She was wearing a brilliant emerald silk sari and gold-and-diamond earrings. She seemed too large and too splendid for our little room. Everything in the room appeared very shabby—the old black oilcloth sofa with the white cotton stuffing bulging out where the material has split; the rickety little table with the cane unwinding like apple peel from the legs; last year’s free calendar hanging from a nail on the wall, which hasn’t been whitewashed for a long time. I only notice these things when she is here. She makes everything look shabby—me included. Only Rajee matches up to her. Even now, after a night in jail, he looked plump and prosperous, and he shone the way she did.

  He was waiting for her to say something, but she only looked at him from under her big lids, half lowered over her big eyes. It seemed she was waiting for him to speak first. He started telling her about Daddy’s heart—about the attack last year and how careful we have had to be since then and how we always keep his pills handy. Suddenly she interrupted him. She did this in a strange way—by clutching the top part of her sari and pulling it down from her breasts. She commanded, “Look!”

  What was he to look at? At her big breasts that swelled from out of her low-cut blouse? Modestly—because of Daddy and me being in the room—he lowered his eyes, but she repeated, “Look, look,” in an impatient voice. She struck her hand against her bared throat.

  “Your necklace,” he murmured uncomfortably.

  She threw a savage look in my direction, so that I felt I had to defend myself. I said to Rajee, “Where else could I get it from? Five thousand!”

  He shook his head, as if rebuking me. This infuriated her, and she began to shout at me. She cried, “Yes, you should have left him there in jail where he belongs!”

  “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h,” said Rajee, afraid she might wake up Daddy.

  She lowered her voice but went on with the same fury. “It’s the place where you belong. Because you are not only a cheat but a thief also. Can you deny it? Try. Say, ‘No, I’m not a thief.’ No? Then what about that time in my house?” She turned to me. “I never told you, but now I will show you what sort of a person you are married to.”

  I didn’t look at her but stared straight in front of me.

  “I’ll make him tell you himself. Tell her!” she ordered him, but the next moment she was shouting, “The servant caught him! He called me, ‘Quick, quick, come quick, Memsahib,’ and when I went into the room, yes, there he was with his hand right inside my purse. Oh, how he looked then! I will never, never, never forget as long as I live his face at that moment!” She flung her hands before her face like someone who didn’t want to see.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Ask him!”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Our clock ticked. It is a round battered old metal clock, and it ticks with a loud metal sound. Usually, when I am alone here sitting quietly at the table waiting for him, I like that sound; it is soothing and homely to me. But now, in the silence that had fallen between us, it was like a sick heart beating.

  When Sudha spoke again, it was in quite a different voice. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t care at all.” Then she said, “Whatever you need, you think I wouldn’t give? Would I ever say no to you? If you want, take these too. Here—” She put up her hands to her earrings. “No, take them. Take,” she said as he held out his hand to restrain her, though she did not go any farther in unhooking them. “That’s all nothing. I don’t care one jot. I only care that you haven’t come. For so long you haven’t come to me. Every Tuesday afternoon, every Thursday, I got ready for you and I waited and waited—Why are you looking at her!” she cried, for Rajee had glanced nervously in my direction. “Who is she to grudge me those few hours with you, when she has taken everything else!”

  She got up from where she had been sprawled in the chair. I didn’t know what she was going to do. She looked capable of anything; the room seemed too small for all she seemed capable of doing. I think Rajee felt the same, and that is why he took her away.

  We have one more room besides this one, but we have to cross an open passage to get to it. This is a nuisance during the rains, when sometimes we have to use an umbrella to go from our bedroom to our sitting room. We run across the passage under the umbrella, holding each other close. Now he was taking Sudha through our passage. I heard him shut the door and draw the big metal bolt from inside.

  I was left alone with Daddy, who was sleeping with his mouth dropped open. He looked an old, old man. The clock ticked, loud as a hammer. I tried not to think of Rajee and Sudha in our bedroom, just as I always tried not to think of them in her house on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons (the days her husband goes to visit his factory at Saharanpur). Sometimes it is not good to think too much. Why dwell on things that can’t be helped? Or on those that are over and done with? That is why I also don’t look back on the past very much. There was a time when I didn’t know Rajee but Sudha did. Of course she often spoke to me about him—I was her best friends—but I didn’t meet him till I had to start taking letters between them. That was the time her family was arranging her marriage, and she and Rajee were planning to elope together. Well, it all turned out differently, so what is the use of thinking back now to what was then?

  Daddy woke up. He looked around the room and asked where the other two were. I said Sudha had gone home and Rajee was sleeping in the bedroom because he was very tired after last night. Daddy groaned at the mention of last night. He said, “Do you know what it could mean? Seven years rigorous imprisonment.”

  “No, no, Daddy,” I said. I wasn’t a bit frightened; I didn’t believe it for a moment.

  “You may look in the penal code. Cheating and impersonation, Section four twenty.”

  “It was all a mistake, Daddy. While you were sleeping, he explained everything to me.”

  I didn’t want to hear anything more, and there was only one way I knew to keep him quiet. Although I couldn’t find anything except one rather soft banana, he was glad to have even that. I watched him peeling it and chewing slowly, mulling it around in his mouth to make the most of every bite. Whenever I watch him eat nowadays, I feel he is not going to live much longer. I feel the same when I see him looking at the leaves moving on a tree. He enjoys these things like a person for whom they are not going to be there much longer.

  He said, “How will you stay alone for seven years?”

  I said, “No, Daddy.”

  I was saying no, it wouldn’t happen, Rajee wouldn’t be away for seven years, and also I was saying no, Daddy, I won’t be alone, you won’t die.

  But he went on. “Yes, alone. You will be alone. I won’t be here.”

  He turned away his face from me. I strained my ears toward the bedroom. But of course it was too far away, with the passage in between, to hear anything.

  Daddy said, “These government regulations are very unfair. If there is a widow, the pension is paid to her, but otherwise it stops. Often I think if I had saved, but how was it possible? With high rent and college fees and other expenses?”

  Daddy used to spend a lot of money on me. He sent me to the best school and college, where girls from much richer families went. He also tried to buy me the same sort of clothes that those girls had, so that I should not feel inferior to them.

  I said, “I’m all right. I have my job.”

  �
�Your job!”

  Daddy has always hated it that I work as cashier in a shop. Of course, from his point of view, and after all that expense and education, it isn’t very much, but it is enough for Rajee and me to live on.

  “They wanted a graduate. I couldn’t have got it if I weren’t a graduate.” I said this to make him feel better and show him his efforts had not been wasted. “And sometimes there are some quite difficult calculations, so it’s good I did all that maths at college.”

  “For this?” Daddy said, making the grubbing movement of counting coins with which he always refers to my job.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Whenever we speak about this subject, we end up in the same way. Daddy used to have very high hopes for me. There were only the two of us, because my mother had died when I was born and Daddy didn’t care for the rest of the family and had broken off relations with them. He cared only for me. He was proud because I did well at school and always stood first in arithmetic and English composition. At that time he used to read a lot. It’s funny: nowadays he doesn’t read at all; you would think in his retirement he would be reading all the time, but he doesn’t—not even the newspaper. But at that time he was particularly fond of reading H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, and was keen for me to become like the women in their books. He said there was no need for me to get married; he said why should I be like the common run of girls. No, I must be free and independent and the equal of men in everything. He wanted me to smoke cigarettes, and even began to smoke himself so as to encourage me. (I didn’t like the taste, so we both stopped.)

  Now he said, “If he has to go, it would be better to give up this place and stay somewhere as paying guest.”

  “He doesn’t have to go!”

  “Or perhaps you can stay with a friend. What about her? What is her name?”

  “Sudha? You want me to go and stay with her?”

  I laughed and laughed; only at some point I stopped. I don’t know if he noticed the difference. He may not have, because I was sitting on the floor with my knees drawn up and my face buried in them. All he would be able to see was my shoulders shaking, and that could be laughing or crying.

  But I think he wasn’t taking much notice of me. I think he was more interested in his own thoughts. He has a lot of thoughts always; I can tell because I can see him sunk into them and mumbling to himself and sometimes mumbling out loud. Perhaps that’s the reason he doesn’t read anymore. I looked at him; he was shaking his head and smiling to himself. Well, at least he was thinking something pleasant that made him happy.

  And I could think only of Sudha and Rajee in there in our bedroom! You would have said—anyone would have said—that I had the right to go and bang on the door and shout, “What are you doing! Come out of there!” I should have done it.

  Daddy said, “The time I liked best was the exams. I watched you go in with the others and I knew you would do better than any of them. I was sure of it.”

  He chuckled to himself in the triumphant way he used to when the results came out and I had done well. He had always accompanied me right up to the door of the examination hall, and as I went in he shouted after me, “Remember! First Class first!” flexing the muscles of his arm as if to give me strength. It used to be rather embarrassing—everyone stared—and I hurried in, pretending not to be the person addressed. But I was glad to see him when I came out again and he was standing there waiting, always with some special thing he knew I liked, such as a bag of chili chips.

  He had stopped chuckling. Now his face was sad. He turned up his hand and held it out empty. “In the end, what is there?” he said. “Nothing. Ashes.”

  Well, I couldn’t sit there listening to such depressing talk! I jumped up. I went straight through the passage, and now I did bang on the door. The bolt was drawn back and Rajee opened the door. He said, “One minute. She is going now.”

  I said, “I told Daddy she has gone home.”

  Rajee understood the problem at once. We have only one entrance door, and to get to that Sudha would have to pass through the sitting room and walk past Daddy. He would be surprised to see her back again.

  Rajee told me to wait till he called. He went into the sitting room. I heard him talk to Daddy in a loud, cheerful voice. I went into the bedroom. Sudha was buttoning up her blouse. She didn’t take much notice of me but only glanced at me over her shoulder and went on straightening her sari and fixing her hair. She did not look happy or satisfied; on the contrary, her eyes and cheeks were swollen with tears, and I think she was still crying, without making any sound.

  At last Rajee called. Sudha and I walked through the passage and into the sitting room. I made her walk on the far side of Daddy, along the wall, and Rajee had also got between us and Daddy to shield us from view. He was stirring something in a cup. “Just wait till you taste this, Daddy,” he was saying. “It is called Rajee’s Special. Once tasted, never forgotten.” Daddy’s attention was all on this cup, and he had even stretched out his hands for it. Sudha walked along the wall with her sari pulled over her head, not looking right or left. I think she was still crying. I took her as far as the stairs and I said, “Be careful,” because there was no light on the stairs. She managed to grope her way down, though I didn’t wait to see. I was in a hurry to get back into the room.

  I said, “Daddy had better go home now, before it gets too late.”

  “How can he go?” Rajee said. “He is not well; he must stay here with us.”

  Suddenly I became terribly angry with Rajee. Perhaps I had been angry all the time—only now it came out. I began to shout at him. I shouted about the disgrace of getting arrested, but it wasn’t only that; in fact, that was the least of it. Once I get angry, I find it very difficult to stop. New thoughts keep coming up, making me more angry, and I feel shaken through and through. I said many things I didn’t mean.

  Daddy joined in from time to time, saying what a disgrace it was to the family. The worse things I said the better pleased he was. When I showed signs of running down, he encouraged me to start up again. He listened attentively with his head to one side, so as not to miss anything, and whenever he thought I had scored a good point he thrust his forefinger up into the air and shouted, “Right! Correct!” He had become quite bright and perky again.

  But Rajee sat there hunched together and with his head bowed, letting me say whatever I wanted, even when I called him a cheat and a liar and a thief. He sat there quiet and looking guilty. Then I wished that he would speak and rouse himself and perhaps get angry in return. I stopped every time I had said something very bad, so that he might defend himself. But it was always Daddy who spoke. “Right,” he said. “Correct,” till at last I cried, “Oh, please be quiet, Daddy!”

  “No,” Rajee said. “He is right. I deserve everything you say, all the names you are calling me, for having worried you so much.”

  “Worried me about what?”

  Rajee looked up in surprise. He made a vague gesture, as if too ashamed to mention what had happened.

  “About what?”

  Rajee lowered his eyes again.

  “Oh, you think that’s all,” I said. “That you have been in jail. You think that’s the worst thing you have done. Ha.”

  He looked quite blank. The idiot! Did he think that was nothing—to have been in our bedroom alone with Sudha? Was it so small a thing? Then I longed to do more than only shout at him. I longed really to strike and beat him. If only Daddy would go away!

  Daddy said, “I’m very tired. I will stay here tonight.”

  “Yes, yes, quite right.” Rajee jumped up. He got sheets and pillows and made up Daddy’s bed on the sofa. Afterward he turned down the sheet like a professional nurse and helped Daddy undress and arranged him comfortably. He spent rather a long time on all this, and appeared quite engrossed in it. I realized he was putting off being alone with me.

  But I could wait. Soon Daddy would be asleep and then we would be alone. He would n
ot be able to get away from me. I crossed the passage into our bedroom. I looked around carefully. It was as usual. There seemed to be no trace of Sudha left. It is strange: she has a very strong smell—partly because she is heavy and perspires heavily and partly because of the strong perfumes she wears—but though I sniffed and sniffed the air, I found that nothing of her remained.

  I stepped up close to the mirror to look at myself. I often do it—not so much because I’m interested in myself but because of a desire to check up on how I look to Rajee. I haven’t changed much from the time he first knew me. I think small, skinny girls like me don’t change as fast as big ones like Sudha. If it weren’t for my long hair, I still could be taken either for a boy or a girl. When I was a child, people had difficulty in telling which I was because Daddy always had my hair cut short. He had a theory that it was a woman’s long hair that was to blame for her lack of freedom. But later, when I grew bigger, I envied the other girls their thick, long hair, in which they wore ornaments and flowers, and I would no longer allow mine to be cut. It never grew very thick, though. Sometimes I try to wear a flower, but my hair is too thin to hold it and the flower droops and looks odd, so that sooner or later I snatch it out and throw it away.

  Rajee called to ask if I wanted tea. I called back no. I realized he only wanted to put off the moment for us to be alone together. I felt angry and grim. But when he did come I stopped feeling like that. He stood in the door, trying to scan my face to see my mood. He tried to smile at me. He looked terribly tired, with rings under his eyes.

  “Lie down,” I said. “Go to sleep now.” My voice shook, I had such deep feeling for him at that moment.

  He was very much relieved that I had stopped being angry. He flung himself on the bed like a person truly exhausted. I squatted on the bed beside him and rubbed my fingers to and fro in his soft hair. He had his eyes shut and looked at peace.