Read A Lovesong for India Online
Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A Lovesong for India (10 page)
Moving among their inebriated guests, Abhinav and Munni seemed to be floating slightly above them – just as, in the films viewed in the screening room, a god and goddess presided over their subjects from clouds in the empyrean. It would have been blasphemous to speculate about the relationship of such a pair. There were never any signs of pregnancy, but as the years passed, Munni burgeoned into new magnificence. Her jewellery and brocades matched the splendour of her figure. She wore them openly now: as the reigning mistress of the palace, she was entitled to her adornments and had no need to lock them away like a guilty secret.
She did keep one secret – the letters she received from Switzerland. They were as private and personal to her as her own thoughts. Davy often asked her to send money, admitting that his father’s allowance had run short again. There was the time he needed to buy a piano, he thought learning to play again might be good for Mummy when she came for weekends from the sanatorium. After scanning quickly over the business part of his letters, Munni came to what was for her their true gist. Usually he ended with a quote, and sometimes she could take it as addressed to herself (‘O cypress of lovely stature’); or, more often, it was an expression of a melancholy sense of loss, the crow’s cry echoing through the ruined palace. And both – the romantic and the melancholy – were characteristic of Davy as she never ceased to think of him. It was how she had first seen him, in the restaurant in New York. Now she imagined him in another country at another café table. And here too, though surrounded by a group of friends, he would be silent and aloof, smiling to himself while sad old verses murmured in his mind.
Where? O where?
Kahan? Kahan?
School of Oriental Studies
The first time Professor Maria von R saw and heard the poetess Anuradha was on a public stage. Anuradha, huge and stout, glittered like a star – she
was
a star, in her achievement and in her person. She was wearing a bright orange sari and her hair too was turning orange, with henna; she was hung around with gifts of gold and jewels from her admirers. The hall was over-full, extra chairs had to be brought in, more carpets spread in front, more intimates allowed to sit on the stage. They breathed in her words of poetry, not silently but with little cries almost of pain; she roused them to a pitch, and when they had reached it, she smiled and let them subside – till she was ready to let them strive once more to reach those heights that she alone seemed to attain without effort.
was
a star, in her achievement and in her person. She was wearing a bright orange sari and her hair too was turning orange, with henna; she was hung around with gifts of gold and jewels from her admirers. The hall was over-full, extra chairs had to be brought in, more carpets spread in front, more intimates allowed to sit on the stage. They breathed in her words of poetry, not silently but with little cries almost of pain; she roused them to a pitch, and when they had reached it, she smiled and let them subside – till she was ready to let them strive once more to reach those heights that she alone seemed to attain without effort.
Oriental studies were a family tradition for Maria. Her Prussian father had for ten years been a professor of Sanskrit in Göttingen until, in disgust with the German regime of the 1930s, he had accepted a position at an American university. Born in America, Maria had followed in the same field and at the same university, and had become a prominent scholar in her own right.
She was also in a modest way a poet. In coming to New Delhi to meet Anuradha, it had been her dream to be allowed to translate her poetry into English. She had no idea how to begin to suggest this, but on her first visit Anuradha herself said, ‘So, where would you start?’ as though the two of them had already had a long discussion on the subject. Lighting a cigarette – raw tobacco folded in a brown leaf – Anuradha said, ‘Of course it’s all a mess.
I’m
a mess, always have been, from birth.’
I’m
a mess, always have been, from birth.’
Maria was perched on a stool near the poetess who was sprawled on her floor-height divan. She tried to explain herself, why she had come, attracted by the magnet of just that mixture in Anuradha’s poetry and in Anuradha herself, whose father had been a Hindu and her mother a Muslim. It was also there in the room where they sat, in the house that Anuradha had inherited from her father. She had turned the front room into the place where she worked, ate, slept, received, entertained and bullied. All the good pieces from her father’s time, like his bookcases crammed with Western and Indian classics, had gravitated here. The walls of this salon-bedroom held another kind of mixture – the abstract paintings by one of Anuradha’s lovers from her years in Paris, Moghul miniatures of princes in their garden palaces, bazaar oleographs of prostitutes in pearls.
Maria hardly remembered how it had happened that, only three days after her arrival, she had moved in with Anuradha, right into her home. It must have been at Anuradha’s instigation, or rather her insistence. Maria herself was shy and always afraid of imposing, a hesitant personality whom Anuradha could easily override. But Maria was glad – she had been in a hotel and was not used to being on her own. On her previous travels she had always been accompanied by her mother, a forceful German lady who made all the arrangements. Maria had been very close to her parents, who had referred to her as ‘the Child’ – ‘
das Kind
’ – even after she was forty. Now both her parents were dead, and Maria was left floundering on her own.
das Kind
’ – even after she was forty. Now both her parents were dead, and Maria was left floundering on her own.
On their first day of work together, Anuradha challenged her: ‘How do you think you can translate even one part of me, let alone the rest?’
Maria fully understood the difficulty. She knew Sanskrit very well but not its present-day derivatives; the Hindi she spoke was so stylised and archaic that no living person was able to understand her. (This both amused and irritated Anuradha.) During her father’s lifetime, Maria had deeply immersed herself in the Hindu scriptures; it was only later, when she was left alone, that she realised she needed something more personal than the Absolute of Vedanta philosophy. That was when she had begun her studies in Persian and its derivative Urdu, with their much greater emphasis on an approachable, caring Presence; and it was also how she had been drawn to Anuradha’s poetry with its combination, in language and feeling, of both the Hindu and the Muslim areas of Maria’s studies.
Maria was struggling for words – it was all so difficult to express, and to express in English! Fortunately for her, Anuradha never really listened to others. She cut across Maria in mid-sentence. ‘So he’s asked you to get him a fellowship in America. Very good. He should be doing something more than get stuck in a lecturer’s job here – so ridiculous!
My
son!’
My
son!’
Her son Som was an economist – a field far from Maria’s, but she had many contacts in the academic world where she was greatly admired for her scholarly achievements. Her inquiries on his behalf had been positive: there were several openings, and Maria discussed them with him, while Anuradha listened. Her only questions were about the location of the various universities they mentioned. One was on the East Coast, another on the West Coast. ‘Let him go to the one farther away,’ Anuradha said. Afterwards Som explained that what his mother wanted was to get him as far away as possible from his current girlfriend.
Anuradha complained to Maria about the girlfriends. It seemed they were all the same type – all academics, all doing their Ph.D. on subjects no one had ever heard of, all skeletons with nothing up in front – not that they needed it, for what was it that they and Som could possibly do together except discuss each other’s thesis? Yes, she concluded gloomily, it was right for him to go abroad, perhaps there he might at last find a proper daughter-in-law to bring home to his mother, who would welcome anyone, even a dance hostess. At that she laughed out loud and coquetted with her veil in a way she considered characteristic of a dance hostess. Maria was used to these changes of mood – they were there in the poetry she was struggling to translate, where Anuradha was now imperious like a Hindu god flinging his thunderbolt and next moment a young girl sick with longing for a lover.
Although the front of the house was imposing with Doric pillars and a verandah leading into Anuradha’s spacious salon, the back of it comprised only two cramped rooms, one of them occupied by Maria, the other by Som. Maria often had to shut the door of hers so as not to overhear the terrible rows between mother and son; but even through the closed door, Maria couldn’t help hearing how Anuradha cursed her son and her own womb that had borne him. The whole house heard her – in fact, the whole neighbourhood, for when he ran out she followed him down the street with her curses. She had rented out the property she owned at the back of her house, and if she saw the tenants leaning out to listen, she turned her fury on them. They accepted it all from her – everyone did, however outrageous her behaviour. Maria too very soon got used to it. Whenever Anuradha was displeased with Maria’s translation, she scrawled her pencil across it, impressing down so hard that she tore through the paper; sometimes she also broke the pencil and flung away the pieces.
Since all the furniture had gravitated to the salon, Maria’s room had only a rope bed and a rickety cane table and stool with the cane unwinding. This spare whitewashed space suited her; her home in Boston, now that she lived alone, was a small apartment sparsely furnished. But asceticism was not the whole of her. She may have looked spinsterish with her glasses slipping on her nose and her thin hair turning grey; but she liked dressing in silks and also wore some jewellery, modest but gold, and even her glasses were gold-rimmed. Behind these, her eyes were pale blue pools, enlarged by the correction for her extreme near-sight; they were slightly protruding, which gave her a perpetually eager look as one leaning forwards in order not to miss anything.
This was exactly her attitude from the moment she woke and feared missing the summons to the salon. Anuradha slept late into the day, while everyone walked around on tiptoe. Usually it was well past noon when the awaited cry came from the salon. Then the household flurry began, with the old man who tended the boiler carrying buckets of hot water to her bathroom, then another old man fanning up the fire in her kitchen (or cook-house, as it was called), the maid, also old, laying out her towel and the day’s freshly washed clothes. Anuradha sang as she poured water over herself from the bucket of her bath, and this morning hymn was as joyful as the sunrise.
When at last Maria was sent for, she came trembling with anticipation for their work to begin. But sometimes she found Anuradha in a very bad mood. Once she was having her feet massaged by her old maid when, in an access of temper, she kicked out one foot so that the maid fell over backwards. That made Anuradha angrier; she shouted, ‘Did you go to the eye doctor? No? Good, go blind then, you stubborn fool.’ The maid muttered what time did she have for eye doctor, running here and there for Anuradha day and night; and when Anuradha stuck out her foot again, she refused to resume her work on it, instead gathering up her paraphernalia, her oils and balms.
‘This is what I have to put up with,’ Anuradha complained to Maria. ‘No respect anywhere; the least little wish of mine ignored and trodden underfoot. Even my own son! I tell him, “You’re thirty-five years old and what is your work? What are you? Who esteems you in the very same university where your grandfather was the vice-chancellor?”’
At mention of her father, her mood improved. His portrait hung above her divan. He was in formal European dress with some sort of order on a crimson ribbon around his neck. She spoke of his nobility and courage: a high-caste Hindu, he had married a Muslim girl at a time when this was dangerous enough to cause a riot. After she died, he had devoted himself to their daughter Anuradha, educating her like a son, even sending her abroad to study in London and Paris.
‘And when I came back, I married his secretary – can you imagine?’ She laughed at herself for doing that. She had loved her late husband, who had been, like their son Som, small and slight, gentle in manner. But he had never come to anything, and it was his lack of ambition that she now saw reflected in their son Som and led to more quarrels with him.
While her father hung splendidly portrayed above her divan, she kept small snapshots of her husband in a nearby drawer. This she opened frequently, taking out a sandalwood box to show to Maria. Besides the snapshots, it contained a rosary, a bundle of yellowed papers tied with a red thread, some dried and dusty margosa leaves, and her husband’s spectacles with a crack across one lens. She handed the box to Maria. ‘Open it, smell it.’ Mingled with the sandalwood, Maria discovered a delicate scent as of evaporated incense or long-dead blossoms. The photographs had all been snapped outdoors and were so faded that Anuradha’s husband, frail in his white shirt and Gandhi cap, appeared insubstantial, ghost-like, a saintly spirit. He may have been further reduced by Anuradha’s kisses – she never shut the box without pressing his image to her lips. She described how he was the only person in the world who had ever been able to still the turmoil within her – yes, even when it was turned against himself as, God forgive her, it often was. He would put his arms around her, which was not easy since she was so stout; he murmured her name into her ear, soothingly, sweetly. How she missed that loving restraint; now there was no one to whisper ‘Anuradha, Anuradha’ and bring her back to herself, quietening the demons that made her rage against even those, especially those, whom she loved. Here she squeezed Maria’s hand, and then how willingly and gladly Maria forgave all Anuradha’s harsh words whenever she was dissatisfied with Maria’s translations.
There were times when the two of them had very intimate conversations together. Anuradha was completely outspoken about her life, including the two abortions she had had in Paris. Remembering those, and especially what had led up to them, she flung her hands before her face and rocked to and fro with laughter. ‘And you?’ she asked Maria. ‘No husband, no lovers?’ Maria smiled shyly, regretfully. Then Anuradha thought of helping her by changing her appearance. Unlike herself, whose mouth was painted a bright moist red and her eyes black with kohl, Maria only wore a very pale pink lipstick. ‘That’s not the way to make anyone fall in love with you,’ Anuradha advised her; but although she presented Maria with some potent dyes, Maria continued to use her own, applying it so sparingly that it was almost invisible. It was a part of her, along with the thin gold jewellery and the silk dresses – adornments worn not to enhance herself but to pay homage to an ideal of beauty.
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