Read A Lovesong for India Online
Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A Lovesong for India (3 page)
In his novel (in the character of D), he admitted that he had never met anyone like her, any kind of emancipated girl from her class. The only women he had ever been close to were his mother and his sisters. There was a constant exchange of letters between them, and it was easy to tell when there was bad news. Paradoxically, he became even more cheerful, except that his teeth seemed set in a grimace rather than his usual smile. Later in the day he announced he had taken leave from the radio station and would be departing on the evening train. When he returned after a few days, he appeared to have settled whatever trouble he had found at home, or at least to have accepted it.
When Dinesh was away, Bibiji did not sing to her harmonium. But the day he came back, she took it out again and accompanied herself to one of her ambiguous songs of love, human or divine. Sometimes Sahib stood behind her, with his fingers in his ears and playfully grimacing at us. But Dinesh, who was a great lover of Indian music and could tell each raga from the first few notes played, listened respectfully. If she made a mistake, he played or hummed the right notes for her. He hated the pop songs Kay presented on her programme; and if he saw the Malhotras listening to it, he made a disgusted face. ‘Why are you listening to that stuff? It’s for idiots by idiots.’
Once Sahib answered him: ‘I love it. It’s the music for young people. Don’t you like young people?’ He became coy, the way he did when he was on the brink of something he called spicy. ‘I know one young person you like.’
Perhaps we should have guessed Bibiji’s feelings from her explosion of anger at that moment. But how could we, how could anyone? In the novel, D blames himself for his ignorance – but that was years after the events described in it. There is a scene where D talks to Elisabeth about Indian women. ‘What do you know about that – how our women have to live? No, how can you – you who are free to run around the world like wild cats.’ He continued, more bitter, more angry: ‘We won’t even talk about the widow – but the wife: when the husband drinks, gambles, goes to women, beats her for the insufficient dowry she brought . . . Fortunately,’ D says, ‘my sisters have a brother – not much of a brother but at least someone to write to so that he can sit on a train and be there.’ From his earliest years, Dinesh’s attitude towards women had always been a protective one; and that was how he felt towards Bibiji. He accepted her description of him as her brother. It was the only relationship he knew.
With Kay, he thought of himself as a detached observer, analysing her as a type. Probably he made notes about her, as did D in the novel. She had far less time to think about him than he about her. Often she didn’t come home from the radio station but went with her friends to fashionable places he had never seen. Some of her girlfriends were fugitives from arranged marriages, or like Kay herself had simply raised the flag of independence and made their families salute it. For the first time away from their mothers and their ayahs, they were untidy and scatterbrained and gave parties at night, with music and dancing and drinks. Dinesh of course was not invited to these parties, but Kay told him, ‘They all want to meet you.’
‘Who wants to meet me?’
‘My friends.’
‘What an honour,’ he said. He knew some of these girls from the radio station; they ignored him, as they did all the others who worked there for a living. But now Kay had told them he was a writer, and this raised his status with them, for writers had articles written about them in the magazines, with photographs of their foreign girlfriends who had followed them to India. Dinesh quite fiercely denied being a writer – he said he hadn’t published anything yet and maybe never would.
‘Then what is it you’re scribbling all night?’ I heard her challenge him, for however late she returned from her outings, the light was on in his room.
She was standing looking into his room where he sat crosslegged on his bed, writing in a notebook. She had let her hair fall loose – this too was in the novel – and, winding a strand around her finger: ‘Are you writing a novel? Am I in it?’ It didn’t bother her that he ignored her. ‘What are you writing about me? . . . Let me see – or is it too horrible and mean?’
Then he did look up – only to drop his eyes again immediately, for she hadn’t noticed, or just didn’t care, that the upper part of her sari had dropped down, revealing her breasts in their inadequate little blouse. He said, ‘Kindly shut the door and don’t ever open it again.’
‘Listen to Mr Grumpy . . . What’s wrong with you? Did a monkey bite you?’
That night D wrote in his notebook: ‘If she weren’t stupid and a fool, she’d be a whore.’ But elsewhere in the novel it was himself he called stupid and a fool.
It was not long before she left us. This happened the day after her father, the Brigadier, had come to visit us – or rather, to look us over. His army jeep, standing outside, seemed as large as the house; and he himself overflowed the chair he occupied, with one stout leg laid across the thigh of the other. Sahib could not stop making conversation. He spoke of golf, the latest cricket test matches, other topics that should have been of interest to his visitor. But the Brigadier kept studying the watch on his hairy wrist, while asking when Kay was expected back. No one liked to tell him that her hours were as unpredictable as she was.
He had plenty of time to sum us up and evidently we did not pass his scrutiny. I was the sort of foreigner he had no respect for (a ‘hippie type’); and the way he looked at Dinesh, in his much-laundered shirt and his glasses mended with tape, made Sahib quickly explain, ‘Mr Dinesh is a writer.’ When the Brigadier just went on grimly tapping his boot with his army baton, Bibiji added, ‘He is writing a novel.’
‘Where is she?’ was the Brigadier’s only reaction; and when we told him that she was out with friends: ‘What friends? Who are they?’
But actually he knew very well where a girl like his daughter on the sort of allowance he sent her (out of his love for her) could be found amusing herself with friends. He had no objection to these friends – the children of other army officers, or of high-ranking bureaucrats. What he did object to was her living in the house with us.
When he returned next day, he stayed outside in the jeep with his batman driver while Kay was packing up her belongings. Silent in shock, we stood and watched her. She was in tears but not disconsolate. It seemed her father had wasted no time finding a more suitable place for her: a room in the house of a colonel’s widow. ‘Those are the only sort of people Daddy knows. Dodos like himself and boring bourgeois.’ But it was close to where some of her other friends lived and gave parties. ‘I’ll come to see you,’ she consoled us. ‘We had so much fun.’ But she said it a bit absently, while shutting her suitcase and biting her lip the way people do when they are just leaving and hoping they haven’t forgotten anything.
The days after Kay left were intensely hot – it was the middle of June – and as always at such times the atmosphere in the city was exceptionally charged. That was also the atmosphere in the Malhotra house. There seemed to be a change in the relationship between husband and wife – or perhaps this was the way they always were once their bedroom door was shut and they were alone. Now they didn’t wait to be alone, they were bitter and angry with each other and didn’t care who heard them. They fought about Kay’s departure, for which they did not blame her father but themselves, for letting him receive a wrong impression.
Bibiji said, ‘You should have told him you’re a lawyer who has studied abroad instead of all that nonsense about golf. And I didn’t like the way he was looking at Dineshji.’
Sahib explained, ‘You can be a famous writer, an MA from Oxford University, but if you can’t talk about whisky and golf, then you’re not fit to lick their boots. But with me, he knew he was dealing with a person like himself. A gentleman.’
‘Yes and what else do you think he knew?’
‘Nothing! He knew nothing!’
‘And when you walk in the street, no one knows anything?’ She lowered her voice to the whisper she used behind the bedroom door: ‘No one says, “He’s been inside.”’
He came up closer, in threat: ‘You put me there.’
She didn’t retreat one inch. ‘It’s my fault. Everything is my fault. This is my fault – ’ and here she shook her arms with the thin glass bangles on them – ‘like a sweeper woman. That’s what he thought: “My poor daughter, to live in the house of a sweeper woman.”’
He stepped back, lowered his voice: ‘No one thinks that. They wouldn’t dare.’
‘When you’re poor, they all dare. They push you in the street.’ She had begun to shed little tears. ‘The milkman who hasn’t been paid calls you bad names.’
He whispered: ‘I’ll pay him tomorrow. They’ll all be paid. Don’t. You’re still my princess.’
I was not there to witness the beginning of their next fight, and neither was Dinesh. This fight was actually about him, and he reconstructed it in his novel. The scene, in my translation, goes like this:
‘What he didn’t like was D living in the same house with his daughter.
Looking
at her.’
Looking
at her.’
‘He never looks at her,’ Bibiji said.
‘Is it my fault you have no eyes to see?’
‘He has never in his life looked at her!’
‘Not even when she is combing her hair?’ Smiling, he made the slow sensual gesture of a woman drawing a comb through her hair, each strand alive, tumbling over her shoulders, down her back. ‘I wouldn’t like you to know what happens to him then.’ He came closer to whisper in her ear: ‘Like a dog. You’ve seen a dog?’
It was at this moment that D in the novel – and perhaps also Dinesh in real life – came home. Full of fun, Sahib turned to him: ‘Don’t you miss her?’ repeating the motion of the comb through waves of hair. D couldn’t even pretend not to understand, and without looking at him, Bibiji fled into the kitchen. Her hands trembling, she began to peel potatoes.
Sahib was glad to be alone with D. He chuckled, man-toman: ‘These girls, they’re sent by the devil to drive us poor devils mad. But isn’t it a nice way to become a raving lunatic?’
‘She’s gone now,’ D said, ‘so you can relax.’
‘Who wants to relax? That’s for dead men. Who do you think she liked – you or me?’
D went to his room. His landlord eagerly followed him. He sat on D’s bed and watched him change the shirt he wore at work for the one that was too frayed for outside. D’s shoulders, now revealed by his undershirt, were not broad or manly, but Sahib said, ‘At least you’re young, you have a chance. Perhaps she liked you. Perhaps she is saying to her daddy at this moment, “Take me back to him!” . . . Don’t you think I have a good imagination? I should be writing the books, not you.’ He laughed loud enough for Bibiji to hear so that she came out of the kitchen with the potato she was peeling. ‘Did you hear that?’ Sahib asked her. ‘He thinks I should write books and become a famous author.’
‘Why are you sitting on his bed? Get up.’
‘And when I’m a famous author all the girls will run after me, and it is for me she will say, “Daddy, why did you take me away from him?”’
‘Oh my friend,’ D said, ‘you’re talking such nonsense.’
Sahib winked at his wife. ‘Did you hear that? What sort of books can a person write who thinks love and romance are nonsense?’
D was struggling into his shirt, for he was both shy and ashamed of his undervest, which was torn. ‘Yes, put on your clothes, man,’ Sahib urged him. ‘Don’t show yourself before my wife. She imagines things.’
‘It’s he,’ she desperately told D. ‘He’s been imagining things – about you and her. All lies. You’re a liar – ’ she turned on Sahib – ‘and come out of his room. You shouldn’t be here with your
thoughts
.’
thoughts
.’
‘And what about
your
thoughts?’ Sahib said, enjoying the mischief rising in him. ‘Don’t I know you have them? Haven’t I been married to you for twenty years, lying next to you in bed while you had your thoughts? . . . Oh, not about me, what am I, a ruined wreck, but others – like your guest, your paying guest, a guest who pays you, what luck . . .’
your
thoughts?’ Sahib said, enjoying the mischief rising in him. ‘Don’t I know you have them? Haven’t I been married to you for twenty years, lying next to you in bed while you had your thoughts? . . . Oh, not about me, what am I, a ruined wreck, but others – like your guest, your paying guest, a guest who pays you, what luck . . .’
Was there, as described in the novel, a dust storm blowing that day? It was the season of such storms – day after day of furnace heat, and then, suddenly, wildly, winds laden with the dust of the desert whirling through the city. I seem to remember returning from my teacher’s house in such a storm, but it may have been that Dinesh’s novel suggested it to me, and he in turn may have invented it as a pathetic fallacy (for he was getting skilled at such effects). Wherever it came from, my memory of that scene in the Malhotra house is set within swirling columns of dust that lashed the tree outside, bending its sickly trunk and stripping it down to the last of its dying leaves. Dust thick in my mouth, dust stinging my eyes, I groped my way inside. The first thing I noticed was that the windows had not been shut, so that the storm whistled and shrieked around the room as freely as it did outside. It was only when I had managed to shut each window in the house that I became aware of the people in it.
They were a group in the living room: Bibiji on the floor, on her carpet, not as she usually sat there, singing to her harmonium, but with her knees drawn up and her face hidden in her hands. Dinesh was bending over the sofa, and he turned to me and said, ‘Get a doctor.’ I heard Sahib groan, ‘Let me die,’ before I actually saw him laid out on the sofa.
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