A Lovesong for India (11 page)
Read A Lovesong for India Online
Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
One day Anuradha said, ‘You’ve done so much for me. I would like to give you something. What can I give you?’ She looked at her critically, from head to toe. ‘When I first saw you, I thought – her dress is pretty, she has fine taste – but see here, the hem is uneven, the waist is dragging where the hip should be.’
She decided that she would have new dresses made for her and that they would go together to the bazaar to order them. At once she told her tenants to send around their car and driver, and at their mild reminder that these were needed to bring their children from school, she advised them to hire a motor rickshaw.
Although Anuradha’s poetry was full of imagery taken from nature, nowadays she rarely left her house. She said everything was inside her, the earth, the oceans and rivers, the heavens above, and the hell below trying to push up through every available rift. But when she did go out, as now with Maria in the tenants’ car, she was excited by all the sights on the way. Impatiently pushing aside the satin curtains shielding the passengers from view, she pointed out well-known landmarks of this city that was hers. Here was where the Emperor Humayun had fallen to his death from the steps of his library (some said after an overdose of opium); here the ‘Gate of Blood’ where the Persian invader Nadir Shah had ordered the massacre of the citizens of Delhi; there the convent school Anuradha had attended, just like the girls they passed now in oiled pigtails and white socks; and there the lane where in 1938 a Hindu-Muslim riot had had to be suppressed when her father married her mother.
On arrival at their destination in the cloth market, Maria discovered that Anuradha was herself a popular landmark. Although she was a classical and highly sophisticated poet, some of her lyrics had reached a much wider audience through being sung in popular Bombay films. Anuradha was recognised the moment they left their car and walked the few steps to the shop she patronised. People sang out lines of hers that everyone knew by heart: ‘How many petals has the lotus – are they One, are they Four, or are they Seven?’ She sang back: ‘What fool would count the Stars of Heaven?’ before entering the open front of the shop. Here, welcomed as the empress, the star she was, she was enthroned on a special chair brought for her, while Maria perched on the narrow bench meant for ordinary customers. Anuradha made the shopkeeper and his assistants bring down bolt after bolt of silk cloth. Nothing pleased her, she kept pointing to new ones further up, beyond reach so that a ladder had to be brought. Maria was embarrassed, she hated giving trouble to anyone and usually bought the first thing she was shown. Now, with the sea of silk spread on the platform before them, she was too bewildered to make a choice; but finally and without hesitation, Anuradha extracted from those billowing waves the exact pattern she had had in mind for her friend. This was not the dazzling colours she favoured for herself but tiny buds ingrained in the silk and entwined with the delicate glitter of gold thread. Maria engrossed herself in admiring and stroking the soft texture and tried not to hear Anuradha’s robust bargaining with the shopkeeper. But she blushed again when the tailor, summoned from a nearby shop, had to take her measurements, which were so pitifully inadequate that the tailor shook his head in disbelief and Anuradha stifled a smile.
It was the tailor’s fault that Maria had to postpone her departure. Her six-month sabbatical was coming to an end, and she was to leave at the end of July. Although Som’s fellowship wasn’t due to start until a few months later, he had been planning to go on the same plane; and until he got settled, she had invited him to stay with her in her apartment in Boston. But when the tailor came to fit the first of Maria’s new dresses, Anuradha was so dissatisfied that she ordered him to take it back. The same happened at the next fitting; and when Maria, always reluctant to give trouble, was ready to accept them, Anuradha turned on her: ‘Just see! You’re ready to take the first clumsy piece of bad work, whereas I – I aim only for Perfection.’ Then Maria too had to reject the dresses. After several more tries, she informed Som that they would have to change their date of departure; she could not leave without his mother’s gift.
He at once recognised his mother’s stratagem. Although at first Anuradha had welcomed and encouraged the fellowship, once she found that his current girlfriend was no longer a danger, she changed her mind. ‘To leave your mother’s house,’ she accused him, ‘for some stupid Ph.D. that’s no use to anyone. This is all Maria’s doing.’
At the sound of her name, Maria had emerged from her room. She did something of which she would not have thought herself capable: she crept to the door of the salon to hear what was said between mother and son.
‘I should never have let her into the house,’ Anuradha was telling Som. ‘These foreign women are very wily.’
‘She only wants to be helpful to you, and to me. She’s said I can stay in her place in Boston till I get settled.’
‘
Stay
with her?
Live
with her?’
Stay
with her?
Live
with her?’
Maria heard Som shout, ‘Now what’s on your mind!’ and then a deep sigh from Anuradha: ‘She’s stealing you from me.’
‘Everyone’s always stealing me – if it’s not my girlfriend, it’s Maria. She’s your age, for God’s sake. She’s like my mother; like you.’
‘That’s how it is with these women who have never lived. When their age is past, they no longer want lovers, they want sons. Other women’s sons. Call her! Call her in here, talk to her in my presence!’
Maria had sunk to her knees to look through the keyhole. She saw Anuradha point to the space in front of her where Som and Maria were to stand and speak. Maria quickly got up and scuttled off to her room. She thought of her parents, who had lived up to a strict code of moral dignity; she herself too had followed the same code. Yet now she had eavesdropped on others, peered at them through a keyhole. A shudder passed through her – not of shame but of fear and helplessness against these new feelings, which were so hard for her nature to bear that they seemed to her to be unnatural.
But next day, when she came to work with Anuradha, she found her in a very good mood. That was a happy day for Maria. Anuradha was at her best: stern and passionate, she laid bare every nuance of meaning while Maria stumbled after her, labouring to come up with a not entirely inadequate parallel. Again and again she failed and was rejected, but she liked it, being made to reach for perfection. After a few hours they were both exhausted – Maria tried to hold out but Anuradha fell on to her divan with a great exhalation of breath. She was pleased with herself and with Maria, and she patted the place beside her for Maria to join her. At first Maria was shy, also afraid of discomfiting Anuradha who was taking up most of the divan, with no indication of yielding an inch of it; but finally Maria, making herself as small as possible, squeezed in sideways to lie beside her. She heard her own heart beating – or was it two hearts beating, though she didn’t dare think that Anuradha was as deeply affected as she was. The poetess, a huge mound rising, pressed against her with her fat hot flesh, suffusing her with the by now so familiar, so beloved smell of rose-scented oil, garlic and perspiration. Just as in that day’s work, Maria had never felt herself so ecstatically close to her. One of Anuradha’s hands with its many rings pressed Maria even closer, may even have groped a little under her dress, though by that time Maria had shut her eyes and was no longer sure of what was happening.
She woke, feeling Anuradha’s breath in her ear, whispering, ‘Promise me something’; then, more insistently, ‘You mustn’t say no. You must promise to say yes.’
‘Yes,’ Maria murmured drowsily.
‘All right, you’ve promised. Sit up.’
They both sat up. Anuradha said, ‘You must tell him the fellowship is cancelled. Or given to someone else. You can think of
some
thing. I leave it to you, and surely you’d be happy to do this for me. For a mother. And remember,’ she ended up in irritated warning, ‘you said yes.’
some
thing. I leave it to you, and surely you’d be happy to do this for me. For a mother. And remember,’ she ended up in irritated warning, ‘you said yes.’
Telling a lie was a sin Maria’s parents had taught her to be unforgivable, so she had had no practice at it. She had also been brought up never to break a promise – and especially, she felt now, one that had been given under such intimate circumstances. Som, on the other hand, had lived all his life with his mother and had quickly learned how to detect a lie – and moreover, whose lie it was. His reply to Maria was, ‘
She
told you to say that.’
She
told you to say that.’
Maria was incapable of a second lie. She lowered her eyes and said, ‘I couldn’t refuse her.’
‘Please come with me.’
He took her to the salon where Anuradha was already waiting and ready for a confrontation. With a face of surpassing innocence, she said, ‘I don’t tell her what to say and what not to say, so how would I know what she’s told you?’
Som was a gentle, peace-loving person in all his relations except with his mother. He shouted, ‘You don’t know, you never know anything! You don’t even know who it was that told my girlfriends all those lies about me.’
‘Your girlfriends.’ Anuradha made a sound with her lips as contemptuous as spitting. ‘You should be thanking me on your knees that I got rid of them for you.’
‘Oh yes, thank you! Thank you thank you!’ He was beside himself. ‘But this is the last time, I tell you – the last time you interfere with me.’ She turned away her face and he grasped it and turned it back again: ‘Do you hear me? The last time!’
‘Oh my God, help me!’ She put up her arm to shield herself. ‘My son is striking me!’
Maria also cried out, but Som said in disgust, ‘As if I would.’
‘Now you see with your own eyes,’ the stricken mother told Maria.
‘See what?’ Som demanded. ‘What’s she to see with her own eyes?’
‘The kind of son I have who would strike his mother, may God forgive him!’
She burst into a storm of sobs and Maria tried to comfort her. She would not be comforted; she shook her head, she flung her hands before her face – though with one eye kept free, she saw Som leaving the salon. She told Maria: ‘Call him back.’ When Maria didn’t move quickly enough, she reproached her: ‘You’re not helping me.’
Som had left the house and Maria had to pursue him down the street. Unlike his mother, she gave no entertainment to the neighbourhood by making a scene but remained her usual sedate self. When she caught up with him, she said quietly, ‘You mustn’t hurt her.’
‘Of course. Everything I want to do for myself hurts her.’
Maria would have liked to say something like ‘Because she loves you so much’. But although she had lately learned to know such feelings, using words for them did not yet come easily to her. Instead she said, ‘Please come back. She’s there alone waiting for you. She just wants to see you.’
She was pleading as though for herself. Som was amused; he said, ‘How she makes everyone dance to her tune.’ He was still amused when he returned to the salon with her, so Anuradha felt relieved and glad. ‘Come here,’ she said. When he joined her on the divan, she kissed him and ruffled his hair, which was thinning. She said she would rub it with an ayurvedic ointment to make it grow again, and when he joked that this might make his scalp fall off, she said in loving reproach, ‘As if a mother could do anything to harm her son.’ She kissed him again, at the same time glancing towards Maria in some sort of triumph that said ‘You see how my son loves me’.
Maria found herself experiencing another new sensation for which she had no name. Vaguely she realised that it was something to do with Som and his mother – the way they were together, excluding everyone. Yet, in their collaboration, Anuradha had begun to draw Maria more and more intimately to herself. In order not to interrupt the work, she even insisted that they should spend their nights together in the salon. Then she opened up for her each of her words, subtly extracting, as from the seeds of an exotic fruit, its most piquant scent and flavour. If Maria was slow to follow, as she often was, Anuradha checked her anger and became patient and loving, as though only the most delicate touch could be brought to the work in hand. Maria no longer thought of her departure, and neither apparently did Anuradha.
It was Som who reminded them both.
Anuradha sighed deeply. ‘Yes, we shall miss her very much,’ she said, fondling Maria’s face.
Som smiled. ‘And me? You won’t miss me?’
Anuradha stopped fondling Maria and Som stopped smiling. ‘You knew it,’ he said. ‘You knew I was leaving.’ Anuradha said nothing.
Afterwards Som told Maria, ‘This is her way. She pretends that something she doesn’t want to happen is not happening.’
Maria said, ‘If we both go, she would be left alone.’
Next day Maria came to Som with a new suggestion. She prefaced it with, ‘No, of course you have to go, you can’t give up your fellowship. Absolutely not.’
Then she said that, while it wouldn’t be possible for him to postpone his fellowship, she might be able to extend her leave again. He accepted this proposal gratefully, and on the same day Maria cancelled her ticket and confirmed his. Although this new arrangement was made for Anuradha’s sake, each failed to mention it to her. When Som was uneasy at leaving her to face his mother alone, Maria assured him it was all right, that she would manage. She was herself astonished at the way she
was
managing, to the extent of packing her suitcase to convince Anuradha of her departure. She also helped Som to make his preparations in secret, and to deposit his luggage with a friend.
was
managing, to the extent of packing her suitcase to convince Anuradha of her departure. She also helped Som to make his preparations in secret, and to deposit his luggage with a friend.
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