“It's beautiful.”
“Isn't it? One of the few things that didn't get carted off to the British Museum. In any case, I don't, as I say, want you to say anything now. Mum's the word. Just take the image back to the hotel, join me for dinner, and you can look at it properly in the morning.”
The whole thing was a charade, of course: he recalled Sefadhi's advice to authenticate nothing, however impressive it looked. His job was only to give the man a little time. “It doesn't really matter what he has”—the professor's final words. “These old palaces in India are full of everything. The important thing is that the awareness that he has something does not get out. That we keep it to ourselves.”
Bearing this in mind, he checked into his hotel and lay out in the sun. Outside the walls, the desert wind blew, and at dusk the lights came on as in a miniature. For all the otherworldliness of the setting, he ran a long bath in his cabana, and thought of her; he called, once it was late enough, but all he could hear—this was still India—was her tentative “Hello? Hello?” and then a startled putting down of the receiver: she must have deemed it an intruder, or someone from her past.
He dined with his generous host, heard about Mountbatten and the Travellers' Club, pulled out such pieces of his past— Oxford, Wodehouse—as were part of the local currency, and, in the morning, returned early to spend all day with the text. Whatever it was, it was beautiful—he thought of the dome of the mosque in Damascus, of Persian carpets he had seen, and the Qurans so small they fit inside an earlobe. Not all the script was intelligible to him, but it didn't matter: he was walking through another world, of cool courtyards and the sound of water, and above everything there was a patterning of gold and peacock blue.
The book might have been drawn up by some loyal retainer a generation ago; that would take nothing away from its radiance. The centuries collapsed in India, so no one really seemed to care what was new and what was millennia-old, any more than they would worry about whether this copy of Reader's Digest came from last week or a century before.
On his last night in the place, after dinner, Hussein asked him if he wanted to see something “absolutely unexpected,” and he followed him up some small, narrow, winding stairs to a rooftop, where his host (ever-surprising) kept a telescope. Lights were intermittent from this vantage point, but the older man fumbled and cursed at the lenses till they could see the planets as clearly as he had seen her, a few days before.
“You've come to some conclusion about my manuscript,” said the man, screwing up a lens.
“Not at all. All I can tell you is it's beautiful, which you know already. As you also know, the likelihood of its being original, or worth anything, is next to nothing, I'm afraid.”
The man held on to his demeanor as if he was remembering what the English said about sangfroid.
“What I'd recommend is keeping it here, with all your other treasures”—a nice touch—“and enjoying it whenever possible. Whatever you might get for it would not be worthy of it in any way.”
This had been Sefadhi's suggestion, and again it seemed to work: the Englishman from across the seas had somehow converted disappointment into something to be cherished.
“You wouldn't recommend other appraisers?”
“Obviously, it wouldn't be in my interests to do so. But even to be disinterested for the moment”—“Be an Englishman with him,” Sefadhi had said, “that's all he wants”—“I think too many hands would only injure what is, whatever its provenance, a gesture of love.”
These were the right words to use, and the man smiled again, flattered at the quality of the messenger, if not his message. “Jolly good,” he said, in that engagingly antiquated way the foreigner remembered from his other visit. “Shall we go down and celebrate with a cigar?” The “celebrate” a gesture of thanks to him.
On the way back to Delhi, he stopped off in Agra, as he'd promised her. “I know it made me almost fall asleep with disappointment when I was a teenager,” he'd said, “but our eyes change. Grow up. Before, I didn't know that the gardens were a diagram of Paradise, and I couldn't read the inscription on the dome. I knew nothing about Shah Jahan's connection with the Sufis— the way his son had had the Upanishads translated into Persian, and his daughter had been so ardent a mystic she would have been a sheikh if she had been a he. I was like a nonbeliever staring at a sacred manuscript. I think I'll have grown into it, in a way.”
When he walked through the main gateway this time, he thought of the court chronicler of Akbar, centuries before: “Through order, the world becomes a medium of truth and reality; and that which is but external receives through it a spiritual meaning.” Amidst the dust and the noise and the crowds of the city around, the cab drivers with their whispers, the boys with their carpet shops “close close,” the squiggled commotion of nonlinear India—surely no clearer when Shah Jahan was on the throne—the building made a different kind of sense. In its way, in fact, it seemed a kind of Sufi parable: while the visitors thronged into the main chamber, bright with lapis and carnelian and jade, letting their voices echo around its great dome, the real meaning of the place, Martine had told him, was all underground. “You've got to go there at dusk,” she'd said, “after the heat's gone down, and the crowds have begun to thin out. Just before the gates are closed. If you're lucky, the small gate will be open. The whole point of the Taj is what you can't see.”
He went back to a hotel for lunch, having taken in the details and oriented himself, as meticulous as any spy circling around his prey—every Sufi poem has a face it shows the world, and a secret life that is its own: a Sufi building is a model of the soul. Then, in late afternoon, he went back through the great gates, paying again, just as lights were beginning to come on across the Yamuna, and water buffalo were gathering along the far shore to drink. The crowds of villagers in flaming orange and scarlet and golden saris—antidotes to the deserts where they lived—were just about gone now, subdued into murmurings, and as the sun declined into mist across the polluted river, guards were walking about the benches with torches, making sure no one was hiding in the dark.
As he hovered around the great entrance, trying to make himself unobtrusive, suddenly, amazed, he saw a faint light—a naked bulb only—shining from the bottom of a flight of stairs plunging down. He descended quickly, so quickly he almost slipped on the recently washed steps, and at the bottom he came out into a strange inner chamber, hushed and small, where two men were pouring water on the floor.
One of the men—both dark, and dressed in the clothes of the poor, dirty white shirts and grey trousers—shuffled over to one of the great caskets in the room, and placed a lighted stick of incense on it. Then a rose. A few moments later, he took another stick of incense and a rose and put them on the other casket, built like an afterthought on the side, housing the man who dreamed up the palace, now beside his wife. The decorations on his tomb were flowers, on hers verses from the Quran.
Above them, just faintly coming down the steps, were the last voices of sightseers trying out the echo, amazed to have the great dome talk back to them and no one else. Their voices climbing up toward the rafters, and then reverberating around and around them in circles. But the caskets they were so busily serenading were empty ones, ruses to distract the world from the real spirits buried in this underground place.
The men said nothing, just went quietly, devotedly, about their task. He was the only other one in the company of the tombs. His feet on the marble floor—Damascus again—were cold. He felt in some way that he didn't try to explain to himself, or even to make clear, that being here was a large part of what reading his poems, seeing her was about. Under the public exterior, there was always an unvisited deep vault.
RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
(1927–)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany, in a family of Polish Jews, and was educated in London. In 1951, she married an Indian architect and began a long and productive stay in India. In 1975, she moved to New York. She is p
rimarily known now for her screen adaptations of novels by E. M. Forster and Henry James, and for her long collaboration with the producer-director team Merchant-Ivory. But Jhabvala's corpus of novels and short stories, which include the Booker Prize–winning Heat and Dust (1975), established her as one of the most insightful chroniclers of both middle-class Indians and the western Indophiles. Her fastidious irony seems to hide an exasperation with the double-talk of modernizing Indians, and with the well-off westerners who claim to find a special spiritual wisdom in India. But her Chekhovian sensitivity to mood and setting manages to override the frequently stereotypical depiction of Indians and westerners. The short story excerpted here has all her stock characters: the old British memsahib, her Indian guru, the western-educated Indian, and his weak and confused English wife. Their profound dependence upon each other gives the story its pathos, but its real power lies in its evocative sense of place and the moments of solitude in which Jhabvala catches her characters.
TWO MORE UNDER THE INDIAN SUN
Elizabeth had gone to spend the afternoon with Margaret. They were both English, but Margaret was a much older woman and they were also very different in character. But they were both in love with India, and it was this fact that drew them together. They sat on the veranda, and Margaret wrote letters and Elizabeth addressed the envelopes. Margaret always had letters to write; she led a busy life and was involved with several organizations of a charitable or spiritual nature. Her interests were centered in such matters, and Elizabeth was glad to be allowed to help her.
There were usually guests staying in Margaret's house. Sometimes they were complete strangers to her when they first arrived, but they tended to stay weeks, even months, at a time—holy men from the Himalayas, village welfare workers, organizers of conferences on spiritual welfare. She had one constant visitor throughout the winter, an elderly government officer who, on his retirement from service, had taken to a spiritual life and gone to live in the mountains at Almora. He did not, however, very much care for the winter cold up there, so at that season he came down to Delhi to stay with Margaret, who was always pleased to have him. He had a soothing effect on her—indeed, on anyone with whom he came into contact, for he had cast anger and all other bitter passions out of his heart and was consequently always smiling and serene. Everyone affectionately called him Babaji.
He sat now with the two ladies on the veranda, gently rocking himself to and fro in a rocking chair, enjoying the winter sunshine and the flowers in the garden and everything about him. His companions, however, were less serene. Margaret, in fact, was beginning to get angry with Elizabeth. This happened quite frequently, for Margaret tended to be quickly irritated, and especially with a meek and conciliatory person like Elizabeth.
“It's very selfish of you,” Margaret said now.
Elizabeth flinched. Like many very unselfish people, she was always accusing herself of undue selfishness, so that whenever this accusation was made by someone else it touched her closely. But because it was not in her power to do what Margaret wanted, she compressed her lips and kept silent. She was pale with this effort at obstinacy.
“It's your duty to go,” Margaret said. “I don't have much time for people who shirk their duty.”
“I'm sorry, Margaret,” Elizabeth said, utterly miserable, utterly ashamed. The worst of it, almost, was that she really wanted to go; there was nothing she would have enjoyed more. What she was required to do was take a party of little Tibetan orphans on a holiday treat to Agra and show them the Taj Mahal. Elizabeth loved children, she loved little trips and treats, and she loved the Taj Mahal. But she couldn't go, nor could she say why.
Of course Margaret very easily guessed why, and it irritated her more than ever. To challenge her friend, she said bluntly, “Your Raju can do without you for those few days. Good heavens, you're not a honeymoon couple, are you? You've been married long enough. Five years.”
“Four,” Elizabeth said in a humble voice.
“Four, then. I can hardly be expected to keep count of each wonderful day. Do you want me to speak to him?”
“Oh no.”
“I will, you know. It's nothing to me. I won't mince my words.” She gave a short, harsh laugh, challenging anyone to stop her from speaking out when occasion demanded. Indeed, at the thought of anyone doing so, her face grew red under her crop of gray hair, and a pulse throbbed in visible anger in her tough, tanned neck.
Elizabeth glanced imploringly toward Babaji. But he was rocking and smiling and looking with tender love at two birds pecking at something on the lawn.
“There are times when I can't help feeling you're afraid of him,” Margaret said. She ignored Elizabeth's little disclaiming cry of horror. “There's no trust between you, no understanding. And married life is nothing if it's not based on the twin rocks of trust and understanding.”
Babaji liked this phrase so much that he repeated it to himself several times, his lips moving soundlessly and his head nodding with approval.
“In everything I did,” Margaret said, “Arthur was with me. He had complete faith in me. And in those days—Well.” She chuckled. “A wife like me wasn't altogether a joke.”
Her late husband had been a high-up British official, and in those British days he and Margaret had been expected to conform to some very strict social rules. But the idea of Margaret conforming to any rules, let alone those! Her friends nowadays often had a good laugh at it with her, and she had many stories to tell of how she had shocked and defied her fellow countrymen.
“It was people like you,” Babaji said, “who first extended the hand of friendship to us.”
“It wasn't a question of friendship, Babaji. It was a question of love.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed.
“As soon as I came here—and I was only a chit of a girl, Arthur and I had been married just two months—yes, as soon as I set foot on Indian soil, I knew this was the place I belonged. It's funny isn't it? I don't suppose there's any rational explanation for it. But then, when was India ever the place for rational explanations.”
Babaji said with gentle certainty, “In your last birth, you were one of us. You were an Indian.”
“Yes, lots of people have told me that. Mind you, in the beginning it was quite a job to make them see it. Naturally, they were suspicious—can you blame them? It wasn't like today. Ienvy you girls married to Indians. You have a very easy time of it.”
Elizabeth thought of the first time she had been taken to stay with Raju's family. She had met and married Raju in England, where he had gone for a year on a Commonwealth scholarship, and then had returned with him to Delhi; so it was some time before she met his family, who lived about two hundred miles out of Delhi, on the outskirts of a small town called Ankhpur. They all lived together in an ugly brick house, which was divided into two parts—one for the men of the family, the other for the women. Elizabeth, of course, had stayed in the women's quarters. She couldn't speak any Hindi and they spoke very little English, but they had not had much trouble communicating with her. They managed to make it clear at once that they thought her too ugly and too old for Raju (who was indeed some five years her junior), but also that they did not hold this against her and were ready to accept her, with all her shortcomings, as the will of God. They got a lot of amusement out of her, and she enjoyed being with them. They dressed and undressed her in new saris, and she smiled good-naturedly while they stood around her clapping their hands in wonder and doubling up with laughter. Various fertility ceremonies had been performed over her, and before she left she had been given her share of the family jewelry.
“Elizabeth,” Margaret said, “if you're going to be so slow, I'd rather do them myself.”
“Just these two left,” Elizabeth said, bending more eagerly over the envelopes she was addressing.
“For all your marriage,” Margaret said, “sometimes I wonder how much you do understand about this country. You live such a closed-in life.”
“I'll just t
ake these inside,” Elizabeth said, picking up the envelopes and letters. She wanted to get away, not because she minded being told about her own wrong way of life but because she was afraid Margaret might start talking about Raju again.
It was cold inside, away from the sun. Margaret's house was old and massive, with thick stone walls, skylights instead of windows, and immensely high ceilings. It was designed to keep out the heat in summer, but it also sealed in the cold in winter and became like some cavernous underground fortress frozen through with the cold of earth and stone. A stale smell of rice, curry, and mango chutney was chilled into the air.
Elizabeth put the letters on Margaret's work table, which was in the drawing room. Besides the drawing room, there was a dining room, but every other room was a bedroom, each with its dressing room and bathroom attached. Sometimes Margaret had to put as many as three or four visitors into each bedroom, and on one occasion—this was when she had helped to organize a conference on Meditation as the Modern Curative—the drawing and dining rooms too had been converted into dormitories, with string cots and bedrolls laid out end to end. Margaret was not only an energetic and active person involved in many causes but she was also the soul of generosity, ever ready to throw open her house to any friend or acquaintance in need of shelter. She had thrown it open to Elizabeth and Raju three years ago, when they had had to vacate their rooms almost overnight because the landlord said he needed the accommodation for his relatives. Margaret had given them a whole suite—a bedroom and dressing room and bathroom—to themselves and they had had all their meals with her in the big dining room, where the table was always ready laid with white crockery plates, face down so as not to catch the dust, and a thick white tablecloth that got rather stained toward the end of the week. At first, Raju had been very grateful and had praised their hostess to the skies for her kind and generous character. But as the weeks wore on, and every day, day after day, two or three times a day, they sat with Margaret and whatever other guests she had around the table, eating alternately lentils and rice or string beans with boiled potatoes and beetroot salad, with Margaret always in her chair at the head of the table talking inexhaustibly about her activities and ideas—about Indian spirituality and the Mutiny and village uplift and the industrial revolution—Raju, who had a lot of ideas of his own and rather liked to talk, began to get restive. “But Madam, Madam,” he would frequently say, half rising in his chair in his impatience to interrupt her, only to have to sit down again, unsatisfied, and continue with his dinner, because Margaret was too busy with her own ideas to have time to take in his.
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