My Nine Lives

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  My grandmother, no doubt because of her royal style, was known to everyone as the Begum. Every evening she held court in her drawing room, surrounded by male admirers who competed with one another to amuse her and light the cigarettes she endlessly smoked. Her friends had all been at Oxford or Cambridge and spoke English more fluently than their own language. Some of them had wives whom they kept mostly at home; one or two had remained bachelors—for her sake, it was rumored. She was long divorced and lived alone except for her many servants, who were crammed with their families into a row of quarters at the rear of the property. They too vied with each other to be the closest and most important to her, but none of them ever captured this position from her old nurse, known as Amma. It was Amma who had learned to mix the Begum’s vodka and tonic and to serve their favorite drinks to the visitors. During the hot summer months the household moved up into the mountains where there was a similar large sprawling villa and another set of admirers—though they may have been the same ones, except that here they wore flannel trousers and handknitted cardigans and came whistling down the mountainside carrying walking sticks over their shoulders like rifles.

  There was one visitor who was different from the rest. His name was Muktesh, and when he was expected, she always gave notice to the others to stay away. He had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, and though his English was fluent, it sounded as if he had read rather than heard it. But his Hindi was colloquial, racy, like a language used for one’s most intimate concerns. He was known to be a first-class orator and addressed mammoth rallies all over the country. He was already an important politician when I was a child, and he could never visit the Begum without a guard or two in attendance (later there was a whole posse of them). He was considerate of his escort, and Amma had to serve them tea, which was a nuisance for her. Tea was all he himself ever drank, pouring it in the saucer to cool it. He had simple habits and was also dressed simply in a cotton dhoti that showed his stout calves. His features were broad and articulated like those of a Hindu sculpture; his lips were full, sensual, and his complexion was considerably darker than my grandmother’s or any of her visitors’.

  He was definitely not the Begum’s type yet she appeared to need him. She was very much alone and had been so for years. At the time of Partition she was the only one of her family to stay behind in India while the rest of them migrated to Pakistan; including her husband, who became an important army general there and also the butt of many of the jokes she shared with her friends. They had been separated since the birth of my mother, one year after their marriage. He took another wife in Pakistan, but the Begum never remarried. She preferred the company of her servants and friends to that of a husband.

  And Muktesh continued to visit her. He made no attempt to be entertaining but just sat sucking up his tea out of the saucer; solid, stolid, with his thighs apart inside the folds of his dhoti. There were times when he warned her to make arrangements to go to London; and shortly after she left, it usually happened that some situation arose that would have been uncomfortable for her. It is said that Hindu-Muslim riots arise spontaneously, due to some spark that no one can foresee; but Muktesh always appeared to have foreseen it—I don’t know whether this was because he was so highly placed, or that he was exceptionally percipient.

  I always enjoyed my grandmother’s visits to London. She stayed at the Ritz and I had tea with her there after school. Sometimes she had tickets for a theatre matinee, but she was usually bored by the interval and we left. Amma accompanied her on her London visits and splashed around in the rain in rubber sandals, the end of her sari trailing in puddles. She grumbled all the time so that the Begum became irritated with her. But actually she herself tired of London very quickly, though she had many admirers here too, including most of the Indian embassy staff. After a time she refused to leave Delhi, in spite of Muktesh’s warnings. “Let them come and cut my throat, if that’s what they want,” she told him with her characteristic laugh, raucous from her constant smoking. And instead of coming to London, she insisted on having me sent to her in India for the whole of my school holidays.

  If it had not been that I missed my father so much, I would have been happy to stay in India for ever. I felt it to be a tremendous privilege to be so close to my grandmother, especially as I knew that, except for me, she really didn’t like children. I learned to light her cigarettes and to spray eau-de-toilette behind her ears. In the evenings when the friends came I helped Amma serve their drinks, and then I would sit with them, on the floor at the Begum’s feet, and listen to the conversation. When she thought something unfit for me to hear, she would cover my ears with her long hands full of rings.

  I felt totally at home in Delhi. I had learned to speak the Begum’s refined Urdu as well as the mixture of Hindustani and Punjabi that most people use. All this came in very useful in my later career as a student and translator of Indian literature. I ought to explain that my appearance is entirely Indian, with no trace of my English connections at all. None of them ever commented on this but accepted it completely—accepted me completely, just as I was. And so did the Begum, though I bore no resemblance to her either, or to anyone in her family of Muslim aristocrats. Both she and my mother were slender, with narrow fine limbs, whereas I have a rather chunky build and broad hands and feet. My features are Hindu rather than Muslim—I have the same broad nose and full lips as Muktesh. My complexion too is as dark as his.

  I always took it for granted that it was me whom Muktesh came to visit. It was to me that he mostly spoke, not to the Begum. When I was small, he always brought me some toy he had picked up from a street vendor, or made the figure of a man with a turban out of a handkerchief wound around his thumb to waggle at me. At least once during my stay, he would ask for me to be brought to him, and the Begum sent me accompanied by Amma, who became very haughty as if she were slumming. At that time Muktesh had the downstairs part of a two-storey whitewashed structure with bars on the windows. He had three rooms, two of them turned into offices where his personal assistant and a clerk sat with cabinets full of files and a large, very noisy typewriter. The remaining room, where he ate and slept, had the same kind of government-issue furniture standing around on the bare cement floor. The walls were whitewashed, and only the office had some pictures of gods hung up and garlanded by the personal assistant. Muktesh himself didn’t believe in anything like that.

  However, he did have a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi in his own room, as well as that of another Indian leader—I believe it was an early Communist who looked rather like Karl Marx. Muktesh explained to me that, though he had never met them, these two had been his political inspiration. At the age of sixteen he had joined the Quit India movement and had gone to jail. That was how he had missed out on his higher education and had had to catch up by himself; first in jail, where other political prisoners had guided him, and afterward by himself with all these books—these books, he said, indicating them crammed on the shelves and spilling over on to the floor from his table and his narrow cot: tomes of history, economics, and political science.

  It was through his interest in these subjects that he first developed a friendship with my mother. Since I only knew her through the memories of other people, it has been difficult for me to grasp the dichotomy between my mother’s appearance—her prettiness, her love of dress and good taste in it—and the fact that she was a serious student of economics and political science. Even after her marriage to an Englishman, the development and progress of India remained her most passionate concern. Outwardly, she became more Indian while living in England; she wore only saris or salwarkameez and her Indian jewelry. She often attended functions at the Indian embassy in London, and it was there that she first met Muktesh. He was a member of a parliamentary delegation—I don’t know the exact purpose of their mission, something to do with tariffs and economic reform, anyway it was a subject on which she had many ideas. Perhaps her ideas interested him, perhaps she did, and he invited her to discuss them with
him when she next came to Delhi. Since she was there at least once and usually several times a year to be with the Begum, she was soon able to take him up on his invitation.

  They must have had long, intense discussions—about public versus private ownership, economic reform and the expansion of social opportunities. From what I have heard of her, I imagine her doing most of the talking, eager to impart all her theories. She walks up and down with her gold bangles jingling. Getting excited, she strikes her fist into her palm, then laughs and turns around and accuses him of laughing at her. And perhaps Muktesh really does smile—his rare, sweet smile with slightly protruding teeth—but mostly he remains massively still, like a stone sculpture, and only his eyes move under his bushy brows to watch her. This is the way I imagine them together.

  I must have been seventeen or eighteen when the Begum first spoke to me about my mother and Muktesh. She came out with it suddenly, one day when he had just left us—as usual with all his security personnel and the convoy of jeeps that accompanied him everywhere (there had been too many assassinations). “In those days,” the Begum said, “he didn’t need to have all those idiots hanging around drinking tea at our expense. He and she could just meet somewhere—in the Lodhi tombs, by the fort in Tughlakabad: God only knows where it was they went to be together.” This was my first intimation of the affair—I had had no suspicion of it, but now the Begum spoke as if I had known or should have known all along:

  “One day I cornered him—after all he’s a sensible person, not like your poor mother . . . I told him, ‘You know how we live here: how everywhere there are a thousand eyes to see, especially when it’s someone like you . . .’ He waved his hand the way he does when he doesn’t want to hear something, like you’re a fly he’s waving away . . . ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s fine for you, but what about her? And her husband, the poor chump? And this one—’ meaning you, for you had been born by that time (a very ugly baby, by the way) . . .”

  After this warning, Muktesh seemed to have made some attempt to stay away from my mother. It was hopeless, for when he didn’t show up on the morning of our arrival from England, she commandeered the Begum’s car and drove to his flat and made a scene there in front of his staff. So even if he had been serious about ending the relationship, he never had a chance, and they went on even more recklessly. When he gave a speech in Parliament, she was up in the public gallery, leaning forward to listen to him. She gatecrashed several important diplomatic parties, and if she had difficulty getting in somewhere, she had herself taken there by the Begum, for whom all doors always opened. Consequently, the Begum told me with amusement, a new set of rumors began to float around that it was she, the Begum, who was having an affair with Muktesh. There were all sorts of allegations, which were taken up and embellished by the gossip magazines; and not only those published in Delhi but also in Bombay and Calcutta, for he had already begun to be a national figure. His appearance in these pages was an anomaly—especially in the role of lover, at least to anyone who didn’t know him.

  One year, when my mother had come to India with me, my father took leave for a week or two to join us. He gave no notice of his impending arrival beyond a sudden cable announcing it. My mother took it straightaway to her mother: “Do you think he’s heard something?” The Begum shrugged: “How could he not? The way you’ve been carrying on.”

  But if he had, it seemed he gave no sign of it. I have tried to give an impression of Muktesh, and now I must try to do the same for my father. If you think of the traditional Englishman—not of this but of a previous era—then you would have some idea of my father. He was tall, upright, and athletic (he had been a rowing blue), with an impassive expression but an alert and piercing look in his light blue eyes. During weekdays in London he wore a dark suit and his old school tie and always carried a rolled umbrella against the weather; in the country, where we spent most weekends, he had a baggy old tweed jacket with leather elbow patches. He smoked a pipe, which he did not take out of his mouth when he cracked one of his puns or jokes, at which he never smiled. He wanted people to think he had no sense of humor. Otherwise he did not care what anyone thought of him. He cared for his duty, for his work, for his country—for these he had, as did Muktesh, a silent deep-seated passion; as he had, of course, again like Muktesh, for my mother.

  His time in Delhi was largely spent playing cards with the Begum or doing crosswords with her, finishing them even more quickly than she did. Unfortunately it was the middle of the hot season and, perspiring heavily, he suffered horribly from prickly heat. Like myself in later years, my mother loved the Delhi heat—the mangoes, the scent of fresh jasmine wound around one’s hair and wrists, and sleeping on string cots up on the Begum’s terrace under a velvet sky of blazing stars. My father was very interested in early Hindu architecture, like the amphitheater at Suraj Khund, but on this visit it was much too hot for him to go out there. Since this was a private visit, he did not think it proper to call on any of the senior government officials—his opposite numbers here, whom he knew quite well from their visits to London. I think he himself was relieved when the two weeks were up and he could return home. The Begum said she certainly was; as for my mother and Muktesh, they never told anyone anything, but no doubt they were glad to have these last few weeks of her stay to themselves. She and I followed my father to England in September, after the monsoon, but we were back again the following January. She could never stay away for long.

  During the months in between her visits to India, my mother led a very conventional life at home. I have this information from my father’s two sisters (“your boring aunts,” the Begum called them). My mother seemed to have charmed them, and they gave the impression that she too had been charmed—by England, by their way of life: the family Christmases, fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, the village pageant of medieval English history. In her country garden she gathered plums and apples from her trees and bottled jams and chutneys; although in India she had, like her mother, hardly been inside a kitchen, she learned to roast, to baste, to bake, with a rattle of the gold bangles that she never took off. Both my aunts had very happy marriages and took their devotion to their husbands too much for granted to feel the need to demonstrate it. But my mother couldn’t do enough to show her love for my father. When he came home from his long day at Whitehall, she would make him sit by the fire, she would light his pipe, and bring his slippers and whatever else she had heard or read that English wives did for their husbands. “No, let me,” she would say, “let me,” when he protested, embarrassed at having such a fuss made over him.

  Yet her visits to India became more frequent, and longer. He made no objection, perfectly understood that she wanted to see her mother, was homesick for India. How could she not be? And he was grateful that, while she was with him in England, she gave no indication of her longing for that other, different place. During her absence, he wrote her long letters—which she did not open. The Begum kept them, also without opening them, so I have been the first person ever to read them.

  And having read them, I can understand my mother’s reluctance to do so. They express him completely, his personality shining through the small neat civil service script and his longing for her through his deadpan account of domestic trifles: how Mrs. Parrot the housekeeper and the milkman had got into a fight over some cream that had prematurely gone off; how he had tried to have a quiet dinner at his club but had been caught by a very tiresome chap who knew all about India; how he had rescued a sparrow from the jaws of next door’s cat and had given it water and a worm till it was calm enough to fly away . . . Each letter said not once but several times that everything was fine, he was muddling through, and yes of course not to think of coming home till the Begum had perfectly recovered from her bout of flu.

  My mother died of cholera—not in India but in England, where this disease had been wiped out so long ago that English doctors failed to identify it in time. One of my aunts took me away to her house and kept me for several months un
til my father was able to have me back. Although my aunts loved to talk about my father’s happy marriage to my mother, they never spoke of her death and how it affected him. It was as if they didn’t want to remember their brother—so calm, so anchored—as he was during that year. They were reluctant to return me to him but he insisted. He never remarried. My mother’s portrait, painted by an Indian woman artist, hung in our living room in the country, an enlarged photograph in the flat in town. In the former she is pensive, with sad eyes, in the latter she is smiling. Perhaps the painter wasn’t very good but, to me, the portrait conveys less of her than does the photograph. Or it may be that to smile—to be lively and alive—was more characteristic of her, of the way that people told me that she was.

  Muktesh never married, which is very unusual for an Indian. He spent his days and nights—he rarely slept more than a few hours—in the service of his party, of parliament, of politics. When he said he had no time to get married, it was true. He rarely managed to get to see his old mother in Bikaner. He used to tell me how she despaired at his lack of a wife: “And when you’re sick, who will look after you?” He would smile and point upward in a direction he didn’t believe in but she did. He didn’t get sick but he didn’t get married either. Year after year, more and more desperately, she found brides for him—girls of their own caste, modest, domesticated. But he was used to my mother who argued with him about subjects of vital concern to them both. When they took long car rides together, he whiled away the time composing poetry; she worked on her PhD thesis that she didn’t live to present.