My Nine Lives

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  In spite of their respect for my studies, my parents regarded me as very naive. “The child knows nothing about Life,” they would tell each other. It was true that life at first hand only began for me with my visits to India, and this would not have qualified as Life for Otto and Nina. In the earlier years, I usually stayed with my friend Somnath’s family, sleeping on a mat in a corner of their verandah, which was also a general passage. Somnath was a sales clerk in an old established firm of drapers and outfitters in Connaught Place, at that time a fashionable shopping center. I don’t think he could ever have been a forceful salesman, he was much too reticent for that; but he was courteous and obliging and spoke nice English, so that customers sought him out. He had a large family to support and from time to time was forced to ask his bosses for a raise. This was always an embarrassing task for him, for he respected his bosses and could not bear to see the disappointed look that came over their kindly faces while he stated his request. Finally his wife, a more forceful character and also responsible for balancing the family budget, would put on her good sari and shoes and come to the shop to clinch the matter.

  Somnath and I had met in the park in the center of Connaught Place where clerks from surrounding shops and businesses came for their lunch break. It was not a beauty spot—the grass was worn away, the benches broken—but it was somewhere to sit in the shade of trees. Most people were in groups and were quite jolly, but he was alone and so was I. Neither of us was good at striking up conversation with strangers, but he overcame his shyness when he saw that I was reading a Sanskrit text. I gladly showed it to him—he could read it but admitted he couldn’t understand it: he had forgotten the lessons in Sanskrit he had had at school, long ago. He smiled when he said it, showing a row of splendid teeth rather too large for his face. His smile did not enter his eyes but seemed to make them even more melancholy. He smiled often, with a sudden flash of those large white teeth, but it was always as if he were apologizing—for what? Later I thought that perhaps it was for a lack he felt in himself, for not being more than he was. Or—and this too came to me during the years I got to know him—it may have been for a lack he felt not only in his own life but in life in general, that it could be better for everyone. He loved poetry and wrote some himself. He took me to symposia held in the courtyards and small rooms where his friends lived, all of them poor and all of them intoxicated with poetry. When a particularly poignant line was sounded, a cry of ecstasy rose from all their throats.

  My excuse for my prolonged and frequent visits to India was the research I was doing for my PhD thesis. My subject was a woman poet—I guess she could be called a poet-saint—whom I had found through one of Somnath’s friends. He was her grandson and himself a poet, though earning his living as a clerk in the Income Tax Office. He hadn’t even known that she had written poetry till after her death when he rescued a batch of what everyone else thought was useless scribblings. Before that he, like the rest of the family, had thought her almost a madwoman because she kept running away and had to be brought back from distant temple sites and caves and even mosques and graves of Sufi saints. Her subject was the same as that of earlier poet-saints—the search for the Lover, the Friend—so I really don’t know why my PhD advisers were so sceptical about her except that she had been dead only ten and not five hundred years. But that was what attracted me to her—that I felt I could put out my hand and almost touch her.

  I was taken to the house where she had lived with her family—they were still there, at the end of an alley, across a courtyard, in a tenement not so different from Somnath’s. I was shown the corner where she used to sit, singing and combing her white hair—which was long, for though a widow she refused to let it be cut off, wanting to be beautiful for when the Friend at last would come. I saw a photograph of her taken at a granddaughter’s wedding, where she didn’t look very different from other widowed grandmothers, skinny and wizened and already a ghost in the shroud of her white cotton sari. I also traveled to the places she had run away to: these were never well-known pilgrim spots but deserted, inaccessible sites outside anonymous villages, ruined piles of brick hidden in overgrown thickets of shrubs or exposed on barren land under a burning sky of white heat. Since my long vacations came in the summer, my visits always coincided with the hottest time of the year; but heat never really bothered me, maybe because I had ancestors who had wandered forty years in the desert. At noon I would cool my head under a wet handkerchief knotted at the corners, which probably made me look as mad as everyone thought she had been.

  My parents considered India an unsuitable, dangerous place. Otto even had firsthand reports from relatives who in the 1930s had emigrated to Bombay, that being the only place where they could get an entrance permit. Although they had done well there, establishing a successful confectionery business, they never got used to the alien atmosphere. In long letters to their relatives—all the family wrote long letters to each other, it was a characteristic of the Diaspora, going right back to the Levy who had been sent to Smyrna to check up on the Messiah—they reported on conditions of squalor and ignorance that made the country completely impossible for cultured Europeans like themselves (after the war, they sold the confectionery business and returned to Germany). I could never convince my parents of my own, very different experience. Anyway, almost every time I was in India, there was an emergency that made it necessary for me to return home. Once it was because of Otto’s heart attack, which Susie declared was brought on by worry about me; another time Nina took pills that Susie said I should have been there to hide from her. Even when the emergency was over, I couldn’t return to India because they needed me in New York, their nerves having been shattered by the crisis and my absence. Susie’s nerves were shattered the most—she was psychologically frailer than Otto and Nina; and physically too, she appeared frailer, for unlike Nina, who was dark and heavy, Susie was pale, sandy, and so slight that it seemed any breeze might blow her away.

  Then one year Nina said she wanted to go with me to India, to see for herself what it was all about. Otto opposed the idea—he said it was absolutely impossible and that he would definitely put his foot down. In their confrontations, he was always putting his foot down, and when he said it, he looked stern and strong, though perfectly aware that Nina would always do what she wanted. But this time, for her trip to India, she needed Otto’s cooperation, in the form of financial assistance. My own visits to India didn’t cost much, but she could not be expected to travel or live there the way I did. She sent me off to explain this to Otto—“Be nice to him,” she told me, as always when something had to be wheedled out of him. I knew from experience that he found it hard to refuse her anything, especially money, with which he was so generous to her that Susie often warned we would all end up in the gutter. But he was genuinely worried about Nina. What if she fell sick in India with one of those diseases people got there? “Yes, and if she does something silly again?” Susie said. “You can hardly expect Otto to go running after her, not with his—” and she tapped her chest to indicate his heart condition. I myself was ambivalent about her proposed trip. I did want her to see the place that meant so much to me, but what if she didn’t like it, found it abhorrent as others had? Nevertheless, I persuaded Otto with promises to take good care of her until finally he wrote out a check—“with a heavy heart,” he said as he did so, while shielding the figure from Susie, who was craning forward anxiously to see it.

  I realized that this time my stay in India would be very different. Instead of living with Somnath’s family, I joined Nina in her suite in an enormous Moghul-style hotel. It was built of sandstone like the Red Fort, though in salmon pink and with great domes stuck on at every available corner. Inside, it had marble walls and crystal chandeliers and bearers tall as maharajas in turbans and scarlet cummerbunds. Reproductions of Persian and Moghul miniatures lined the corridors, with the same scenes of princes hunting tigers woven into the carpets that lay thick as moss in the suites and staterooms and were be
ginning to smell from the damp that had seeped in during the rainy season. Nina only left her airconditioned rooms to go shopping—until she discovered that it was not necessary to go out at all, because the hotel had its own shops of precious merchandise. Moreover, the bearers were always ready to introduce salesmen into her suite; they came like magicians with humble cloth bundles out of which they poured torrents of silk and jewels on to her carpets.

  My Indian family—I thought of Somnath and his family as my own—were very excited to hear that this time I had come with my mother, and of course I had to bring her to see them. This was not a success, though everyone pretended it was. To reach their house, it was necessary to turn off the main thoroughfare and, leaving the car behind, to walk through a series of intertwining alleys. I had been here so often that everyone had gotten used to me; but Europeans and Americans were rare enough to attract attention, and of course someone like Nina was a sensation. Everyone stared and commented; children came running from all directions, and the more daring touched her clothes (she was in a black and white moiré outfit) and related to the others what they had felt. So even before we had made our way up the narrow staircase that it was no one’s particular business to keep clean, Nina had set her face in a fixed smile; and this never relaxed throughout her visit. Somnath’s wife and old mother and sisters and sisters-in-law and a few neighbors were all in their best saris, which were the same colors as the sweets they had set out. They also brought platters of fritters fried in mustard oil and milky tea in crockery cups they had borrowed to supplement their own meager stock. Nina, fortified with her fixed smile and super-gracious manner, accepted everything like a ceremonial offering and merely touched it with her fingertips. Afterward she said what fun it had been and so colorful, but from then on she stayed exclusively in the hotel; and Somnath’s family thanked me for bringing her and praised her beauty and graciousness but neither she nor they suggested a second visit.

  When her funds were exhausted, Nina returned to New York, and I moved back to Somnath’s for a few days before setting off on one of my long bus and train journeys across India, this time to Vinaynagar. It was there that Otto’s telegram reached me and I set off immediately for New York where he met me at the airport and took me home to where Nina was dying. I didn’t reproach him for not calling me earlier: my presence would probably have made no difference, although I might have suspected what doctors in New York, familiar only with the more advanced diseases, no longer knew how to diagnose. I had seen cases of typhoid fever in India, in the tenement where Somnath lived, in one of the little whitewashed rooms with niches for gods, where first a cadaverous old widow and then her granddaughter lay moaning on a string cot. Everyone there knew what it was, and the granddaughter was saved with modern medicines though the old woman died. But now to see this fever ravaging the pampered body of my film-star mother, tossing in her satin-backed, gold-crenellated bed, was too incongruous to be accepted.

  We moved her to a hospital, to a private room where I could stay with her day and night. The right medicines were by now being injected into her, but already the fever had taken on a life and rage of its own. Not that she didn’t struggle hard; she wanted to live, there was too much she was required to give up. But she was no longer on the same level of consciousness as Otto and myself who sat by her bed, or as Susie, who sat silent and frightened in a corner. Nina was calling out names I had never heard—though Otto knew them—and recalling places she didn’t want to leave (again it was only Otto who had known them). Once, at night when she and I were alone together within the vast stillness of the hospital where not clocks but life-supporting machines clicked out the seconds, she suddenly opened her beautiful eyes and asked, “But where did I catch this?” It was a question I had already asked myself, and one I had had to answer for Otto too: when I had assured him that she had not eaten outside the hotel—unlike myself, who freely ate at wayside stalls whatever was cheap and available. Then Nina said, “It was that green sweet,” and I recalled the bright green pistachio sweetmeat—more expensive than anything the family could have afforded for themselves—that had been offered to her at Somnath’s. But she hadn’t eaten it; she had only touched it with her fingertips in symbolic acceptance—I tried to remind her of that, calling out to her urgently but unable to reach her where she had already returned to times and places I didn’t know.

  The question of the green sweet remained unsettled. Nina died—even now, after all these years, I write the words in disbelief, unable to fit the subject to the predicate. Her funeral too had nothing to do with her—as always at funerals, there was a dull, depressing drizzle—and it was only the cluster of her women friends in their furs and designer hats who could be connected with Nina. But afterward, when I had to clear out our apartment which the landlords were waiting to repossess, she sometimes came alive for me again among her possessions: so that when I ran a scintillating necklace through my fingers, it seemed to be she herself who came sparkling back to life. Susie often stood watching me, and her eyes too lit up—“Oh isn’t that pretty!” She took the necklace and ran it through her fingers. But then it became just a piece of jewelry again; and since Susie liked it so much, I said, “Why don’t you take it.” “No really? No, Rosemary, I couldn’t!” so that I had to insist. Then she let me help her fasten it while she stood before the mirror, her eyes and the jewels both glittering, and she kissed me and said thank you like a sweet little girl.

  Otto shrank into a querulous, quarrelsome old man. It was Susie he quarreled with now—not the way he used to fight with Nina, but in niggling, spiteful arguments. They often made separate appointments with me, so that each could complain about the other. After I had cleared out Nina’s apartment and Otto had given up the lease, he had wanted me to move in with himself and Susie; but she said it would be difficult because she had turned one of the bedrooms into her studio—she had begun to paint watercolors, mainly as therapy—and the other was needed for guests (though, so far as I knew, she never had any). So I rented a room in some old lady’s apartment—on a temporary basis, I thought, because soon I would be going back to India. However, week by week, month by month, I had to postpone this return because of the situation between Susie and Otto; and in the end I had to move into their apartment because Susie moved out of it. She checked herself into a hotel; staying with Otto, she said, had ruined her nerves and she was heading straight for a nervous breakdown.

  After he died—he did not survive a second heart attack—she moved back to the Madison Avenue apartment. By this time I had a tutoring job at Columbia, so she thought it would be more convenient for me to live uptown, nearer my work. She phoned me every day and often I had to go visit her, if she had a cold or the pain in her back was bad. But she appeared to thrive on her own in the apartment with the fine furniture that Otto had inherited from his family. Some of it came from hers, for she was from the same sort of prosperous German-Jewish family as Otto’s. Susie used to refer to Nina as “from the wrong side of the tracks” (she liked using these phrases—of my unmarried state she would say, for instance, “You’ve missed the boat, Rosemary”). Susie was always very tense about Nina, which I suppose was only natural, especially as Nina had never really bothered to hide her opinion of Susie. “That mouse,” she called her—she even nicknamed her “Mousie.” It was true that, in comparison with Nina, Susie was quite insignificant, in looks and personality. But later, when she was alone and in sole possession of Otto’s apartment, she came into her own. From being sandy, mousy, she became as pastel as the watercolors she painted. Wearing a pale blue-and-pink smock, she sat in her studio, which was also pastel-colored, and grew serene. All her nervousness dropped away; she painted not for therapy now but for fulfillment.

  I was around thirty at this time and Susie in her fifties, but we were like sisters and I the elder. We were also united by our financial interests, Otto having left half his estate to each of us. Although he had not, as she had predicted, ended in the gutter, he had in h
is last years lost all interest in his business and had finally sold it for much less than expected. There was enough left for Susie and me to live on, but every now and again it struck her that our money might be running out. Then I had to reassure her and also make some financial adjustments. As she rightly pointed out, I didn’t need much whereas she had all those expenses. These worries, as well as her constant difficulties with domestic help, so wore her out that the doctor had often to prescribe a cruise or a vacation in Europe. And it was true that, when she returned, she was serene again and very affectionate and charming to me. One year she came back with her face smooth as glass, and when I congratulated her on the beneficial effect of her holiday, she smiled, though painfully as though afraid something might crack.

  As the years passed—and not just two or three years, for she survived my parents by over twenty—Susie became more and more opposed to my going to India. I had already given up my winter trips because, as she said, I could hardly expect her to be alone for Christmas. Then she began to fret when the summer vacations came around; and if she didn’t fall ill before I left, then it happened more than once that I had to be recalled for some medical or other emergency of hers.

  Even when I did manage to get away, I could never recapture the complete ease, the freedom, the irresponsibility of my earlier Indian years. In Delhi, I still stayed with Somnath’s family, but here too circumstances had changed in the course of the years. There had been a number of deaths—I was there for his mother’s funeral, which was treated as a joyful occasion since it was an old person who had died, rich in years and offspring. I saw Somnath dance in that procession, laughing and spinning around, though with tears of grief rolling down his cheeks. And there were other deaths—that of a brother-in-law who died suddenly after a hernia operation, leaving his widow and three young children with no one to provide for them except Somnath. His own children were growing up—especially his eldest daughter, Priti, of whom he was very proud because she had won a scholarship to go to college. There she met girls from very advanced homes and became scornful of her own family’s oldfashioned ways. She cut off her hair and also brought home some very modern ideas, which made Somnath smile with pride in her, whom he loved most deeply. But the women shook their heads, taking her advanced opinions as a sign of worse to come. And worse did come, when she was discovered in secret meetings with a college boy who was not only not of their caste, he wasn’t even a Hindu but from a family of Christian converts who ate beef and pig.