East Into Upper East (4 page)

The next moment—well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image—there she was, holy under a tree. It was only natural that on his daily visits he should continue to look at her with the same cynical, not-to-be-fooled expression—with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, in a most unreverential posture. She didn't seem to mind. The eyes she raised to him were absolutely clear, inviting him to read what he would in them. Meanwhile, her other visitors, the pilgrims, came and went, touching her feet and taking her blessings. As they drew near, their faces became radiant, and they appeared to retain this glow as they departed. Farida's handmaidens glided about, and now and then one of them sang a song of spiritual love while another accompanied her, plucking a slow, droning sound out of a lutelike instrument. If Farida felt the song was too low-spirited—and her handmaidens, so gentle and good, did have a tendency to droop—then she herself would chime in, giving more of a swing and lift to it, and snapping her fingers as if to say, “Come on, let's get going!” Then everybody responded; voices rose, the drone hastened and took on melody, gentle smiles shook off melancholy, and at the end, when the women had
finished in unison on their top notes, Farida said, “
That's
better,” so that everyone laughed out loud, and this sound mingled with the last joyful notes still vibrating in the air.

At home, in her youth and heyday, Farida had always had this ability to make a party go. When things got too slow for her, she would turn up the record-player or replace the LP on it with a faster one to dance to. If her partner couldn't keep up with her, she would discard him and try another and another, and if none of them could come up to the mark—“What a bunch of dummies!”—she simply danced by herself, with her slippers kicked off and her hair and gossamer veil flying, while everyone stood around her and applauded. In London, too, at the beginning of their life there, she and Farid had given terrific parties, cramming the flat with more people than it could hold, so that the guests spilled into the kitchen, where Farida was boldly throwing spices together. She was always experimenting with curries she remembered from her grandmother's cuisine, and these usually turned out extremely well, filling the flat with their rich aromas. Everyone sat on the floor, eating with their fingers Indian style, while Farida picked her way among her friends, putting more delicious things on their already overflowing plates while Farid refilled their glasses, and both of them—Farid and Farida—talking in their high, excited voices, which could always be heard above the hubbub of their guests.

At that time it had been easy for them to enjoy themselves and make everyone else happy too. It was all done with no more effort than the way Farida made herself look beautiful; he never saw her do more than glance over her shoulder in the mirror, twisting her hair quickly into a coil on top of her head, or else deciding to leave it loose down her back, with a rose stuck in it. Later, however, this changed. It irritated him to watch the painstaking way she got herself ready to go to other people's parties—by then, they could no longer afford to give them—painting larger lips and darker eyelids over her own; she had begun to wear curlers at night, and she got up with them in the morning, looking cross and ugly. And, just as she had to take pains over her appearance, she had to work harder to be successful at these parties. Now when she cried, “Come on, let's get going!” no one seemed to hear her or pay attention. Her voice had become shrill, her laugh harsher and louder. When she had decided who was worth her attention at a party, she would hang
on to his arm with her skinny hands. Often it was Sunil on whom she concentrated at parties. He was getting to be the richest and most successful of their circle. Once he had mooned after Farida in a dogged, hopeless way, but now he liked plump Scandinavian blondes, who sometimes perched on his lap. Farida, ignoring them, would bring some tidbit for him from the buffet table and dangle it above him until he opened his mouth to receive it; she cried, “Good boy!” and clapped her hands, while he chewed with indifferent relish. It sickened Farid to watch this, and perhaps it sickened Farida too, because when they got home she was in a rotten mood and turned her back on him and went to sleep as if she never wanted to get up again.

Somehow she did get up, every morning, and although all their projects failed, one after the other, she was always starting new ones. Elegantly dressed, meticulously made up, her jaw somewhat set, she went out each day in pursuit of some business she had just thought up that was certain to pull them out of their predicament. When they had been in London for about ten years (she was well into her thirties by this time), she decided to organize a line of Indian cocktail delicacies—samosas, pakoras, kebabs—to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores. She dealt with the very fanciest places, and only with their top directors; it was taken for granted that no secretary or any other underling could stand in her way when she presented herself, without an appointment but emanating an almost royal authority, and quickly sailed right into the innermost sanctum of these offices. And when she came out again she was invariably escorted by the director himself, smiling and flattered by her direct approach to him. She gave the impression that she was conducting the affairs of her own exclusive catering firm—which was true, in a way. What the directors did not realize was that she made all the delicacies herself, working alone in the makeshift kitchen of their flat, while Farid lay in bed and complained about the smell of her deep-fat frying.

She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes, which stood piled in their living room. She packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores, going from one to the other in a taxi. By the third week of this, she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, from her slow and expensive delivery rounds, and from the complaints that were
beginning to come in. Also, it was becoming evident that the cost of the ingredients, the packaging, and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected, and one night when Farid again complained about the smell she marched into the bedroom with a pan of hot oil and threatened to pour it on him. He locked himself in the bathroom, and when at last he emerged he found her sitting on the floor with the deep-fry pan beside her. Her knees were hunched up and her head was laid on them; her hair was half uncoiled, and she was wearing an old cotton sari spattered with grease. He grew angry at the sight of her. “What are you—a cook or something?” he shouted, and when she didn't answer or stir he worked himself up further. “No one asked you to do this kind of work. Tcha—what would your parents say, what would my parents say, if they knew?”

Still with her head on her knees, she murmured, “Then what are we going to do?”

“We'll find something,” he said, her defeat making him strong. “We don't have to put up with this nonsense. Get rid of all that filthy stuff.” He seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet. When she heard the firm way in which he flushed it away, she raised her head and wiped her eyes with the end of her sari and felt better.

But then it was his responsibility to raise some money to keep them going, and the only way he knew was to borrow from Sunil, as he had done so often over the years. Sunil received him in his Mayfair flat, and Farid looked severely around the place, which was sumptuously furnished with everything that money and bad taste could buy. “What's
that
picture?” he said. “Is it new? Oh, my God.”

“Listen, Farid, it's from a very ritzy gallery in Brook Street,” Sunil said calmly. “It cost me a packet, I can tell you.”

“A fool and his money are soon parted. Except of course when it comes to his friends—then it's a different story.”

“When have I ever said no?” Sunil said in dull resignation.

It was true, he didn't often turn down his old friends, but that did not improve Farid's feelings toward him.

Matters grew worse as the years passed and Sunil went up and Farid down. Farida began to go away for weekends. Farid suspected that she went to meet Sunil, but when he accused her of this she just laughed. What made him think that she would go to Sunil for anything but money, she said. And what made him think Sunil had
any time left for her, now that Sunil was what he was and she was—well, she said with a shrug, anyone could see what she was now. Farid stared at her. She was now in her late thirties—they had been struggling along in London for a good fifteen years—and she had grown very thin. Her face, under her lacquered hair, was heavily made up. But beneath it all she was still Farida—just as, he realized, beneath all his bad feeling, and all his anger against her, there remained still the heart, the flower, of love. He kissed her hand and then her wrist, and then the soft skin of her inner arm.

She took advantage of his good mood to murmur that they would have to sell some more jewelry. “I need the money,” she urged. “For a new business—no, no, this one's going to make it for sure, you'll see. It's in taxis for tourists.”

“What's left to sell?” he asked.

She got out her jewel box, which was empty except for the one piece they had agreed never to sell. This was a single large and lustrous pearl in a gold setting. It was said to have been given by the last of the great Mogul emperors to Farida's great-great-great-grandfather, who had been a nobleman at his court, and it had always been coveted by Sunil, whose own great-great-great-grandfather had been a moneylender's clerk at the same court. Farida had worn the pearl on her forehead at her wedding, but that time only the bridegroom, Farid, had seen it, for only he was allowed to look under her veil. It was years later, in London, when Sunil caught his first sight of it. This was at a reception he was giving for an American buyer of table linen, to which Farida had come all dressed up. She was trying to start a business in batik table mats with matching napkins, and so was out to make an impression. Sunil had eyed the ornament, which was on a chain around her neck. When he tried to touch it, she put her hand over it and said, “Not for sale.”

“Let me know when it is,” he said in his phlegmatic voice, which he made even more phlegmatic when he was eager to acquire something at a bargain price.

Farid never knew at what price Sunil finally did acquire this ornament—the money soon vanished anyway in the tourist taxi business. He often wondered what Sunil had done with it. Had he sold it? Kept it? Hung it around the neck of a girl? Sometimes he asked him, but Sunil never let on. Actually, Farid was almost sure that Sunil had locked it away in the deepest and most secret of all
his safe-deposit vaults, for Sunil—one had to admit it—recognized a thing of value when he saw it. It was greed, of course, but Farid knew that when it was a question of making money Sunil's greed could be as subtle and unerring as anyone else's taste and wisdom.

After several weeks at the holy place, during which he faced her every day, Farid had still not arrived at the expected showdown with Farida. He was even beginning to enjoy his visits to her for their own sake. They became the high point of his day. At first he had stood in line with all the other pilgrims awaiting their turn, but then he noticed that there was a time, just after the midday meal, when no one else was there and even the handmaidens had lain themselves to sleep. Although Farid enjoyed a siesta as much as anyone, one day he spruced himself up a bit, making the most of the strands of hair that lay across the top of his head and smoothing his bush shirt over his stomach. He looked down at his stomach and decided he had seen worse on men his age. Then he hurried—yes, hurried—across the empty compound that separated his quarters from her tree. The sun beat down on him from a fierce white sky, the paving stones burned underfoot, and a hot glare as tangible as glass permeated the air, but Farid hardly noticed. Once he reached his destination, the air felt absolutely different. The shade spread by the tree was as wide and cool as the interior of a shuttered house. The handmaidens lay asleep off to one side of the thick tree trunk, on the other Farida sat reading some ancient text. She was wearing big spectacles to read with but took them off quickly when he arrived. They had begun to have little conversations now.

“Look at you, how hot you are,” she said now, watching him wipe the perspiration from his face and neck.

“Naturally, a person gets hot,” he answered irritably. “Not everyone has the opportunity to sit under a tree all day.”

“At least you should wear a hat.”

“You know I never wear a hat,” he said still impatiently, though he didn't feel that way at all. It was cool and peaceful under her roof of foliage.

The next day, he set out to find a hat in the little bazaar at the foot of the mountain. He was a well-known figure there by now—he
always made friends quickly—and his quest for a solar hat made the shopkeepers smile. They said that only English-style sahibs like himself needed to protect their brains from the good Indian sun. It was not until he came to the end of the row of narrow booths that he discovered what he was looking for among a stock of cotton undervests, bottles of hair oil, and oleographs of gods and saints. As he put on the hat and looked at himself in a little metal mirror, his attention was caught by one of the highly colored pictures—a portrait of a saint that featured its subject against a traditional background of shrines, forests, rivers, and mountain caves. Farid would not have noticed this one except that it bore some resemblance to Farida. He looked closer and then realized that the saint in the picture actually
was
Farida. He stared at her, and it seemed to him that out of her painted background she stared back at him in the same way she did every day under the tree.