A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Davy and Munni had their own quarters set aside for them in his father’s part of the mansion, a bridal suite prepared for them before she had consented to be the bride. Under the rose-coloured canopy of a four-poster with carved foliage, Davy took possession of Munni’s body, as splendid as those of the famous stars his father had wooed on the screen. Davy quoted poetry to her – in his adolescence, he had written poetry himself but now he only quoted from the old poets. Sometimes it was a love song in praise of her beauty, but just as often it expressed another part of his nature: the melancholy that lay behind his smile – ‘Give not thy heart to the flirting hag of the world, she is the bride of too many grooms already’ – and so on, all of it nothing to do with them and the good times they had together.

  He took her up on the roof to show her the panorama of Bombay and the Arabian Sea like a private body of water flowing at the foot of the flowering hill on which the mansion was perched. He explained to her that this site, the most desirable in the whole city, was his by a double inheritance. It had once belonged to Shirin’s father’s father, who had inherited it from his father. After the family’s bankruptcy, the property had had to be sold, and Abhinav had bought it. Razing the original European Palladian-style house, he built his own imitation of fifteenth-century desert palaces, which were familiar to him from historical and mythological film sets; but although his turrets and balconies and battlements were built of concrete, they had somehow retained the same flat quality, of cardboard and make-believe, as their screen counterpart.

  At that time, that is at the beginning of their marriage, Davy often took his wife to visit his mother in her quarters. These had been furnished entirely from her parents’ household, much of it derived from their parents and grandparents – the heavy Edwardian interiors of wealthy Parsis who had travelled abroad and brought back what was sold to them as valuable antiques. It was usually late afternoon when Davy took Munni to visit here. ‘Mummy gets up late,’ he said, and in the evenings she preferred to be alone with her cocktail and her gramophone records. But in the beginning she sometimes said, ‘Oh no, don’t go yet, Bébé, leave this lovely girl with me a moment longer,’ and she smiled at Munni to show her how much she liked her. Then Munni had to sit and listen to the gramophone records and pretend that it was music she cared for (Moonlight Sonata and Chopin Preludes). ‘Isn’t it delicious!’ Shirin exclaimed, adding: ‘Délicieux,’ for she had gone to finishing school in Switzerland and had retained some French.

  Shirin went out once every day, always at the same time and to the same place, tea at the Taj Mahal hotel. At first Munni was expected to accompany her, and they both sat at a little round table specially reserved for them at the top of the crimson-carpeted staircase. At this table her aunts had sat in their time, two skeletal spinsters in French chiffon and high-heeled court shoes. From here they had observed the guests ascending and descending the stairs, and just as Shirin did now, they had deplored the lack of refinement they observed in this tide of newly rich humanity.

  For some time Shirin continued to seem fond of her new daughter-in-law. She caressed Munni’s hand in her own very small and delicate one, which was adorned with some costly rings. One by one she slipped them off to try them on Munni’s fingers but none of them fitted, they were much too small, which made her laugh. ‘You’re a big big girl and I’m a little little one,’ she said. She wrinkled her nose at Munni’s name – a lower-class pet name – ‘What’s your real name?’ and when Munni told her, she commented, ‘That’s not much better . . . Let’s call you something else.’ She came up with various alternatives and finally fixed on Muriel. She called her Muriel for a while, but then she dropped it and didn’t call her anything.

  Abhinav liked his daughter-in-law’s name – he said he remembered several little cousins affectionately nicknamed Munni. Altogether his memory matched hers in various ways, for he too came from a modest Punjabi family. He still loved the food he had eaten in the winter sun of his family’s courtyard, the millet bread and bitter spinach leaves; and although the language he mostly used was the Hindustani of film dialogue, he enjoyed speaking the earthy dialect of his boyhood. It had been Munni’s first language too, superseded by now, along with other family memories she had deliberately erased; but when he spoke to her in it, she answered with all those homely phrases that made them both smile. It began to happen that, when they were alone, they used it with each other; but never when Davy was there, for he didn’t understand their spicy dialect.

  Munni’s greatest satisfaction was being in charge of Abhinav’s grand parties. She loved these occasions and her own role in them. Her pleasure made her beauty glow, she illumined the room more than the shining marble and the crystal chandeliers (condemned by Shirin as second-hand imitations of the real ones that had hung in her grandfather’s house). Munni was indifferent to the admiration she aroused in the guests, and the only person she glanced at for approval was her father-in-law. Often he expressed his satisfaction with her by a splendid gift, and then she fell at his feet: not only in the traditional gesture of respect for an elder but in admiration for him, his generosity, his greatness.

  She was shocked to discover the way some of his servants plundered him. He said, ‘What to do?’ Then suddenly he flew into a rage – roaring and threatening, so that the servants cowered as under a storm at sea. Next day he regretted his outburst and reinstated the offenders he had dismissed. But Munni couldn’t bear to see the waste; and when she again mentioned it to him, he said, ‘You see to it, bitya (little daughter).’ Now she wore a big bunch of keys at her waist and walked around like any Hindu housewife on bare feet and in a cotton sari. Her careful control of expenses offended some of the servants, so that she had to dismiss them. But most of them adapted themselves to the new regime; and Munni herself was a considerate employer, and they even admired her strict management skills.

  Abhinav hardly kept track of his enormous expenses. Often his grand exits through the gilded gates ended up at the races, where he accumulated large losses. He opened a safe full of cash and, thrusting in his hand, took out bundles of notes without counting them. Other debts were made at cards played in the house with friends. Their games carried on for many hours, during which bottles of contraband Scotch were called for. Sometimes Munni came in to watch the game. She didn’t understand its rules, but it did seem to her that these were not adhered to by everyone.

  Once she followed her father-in-law when he got up from the game to go to his safe. She said, ‘How is it, sir, that they’re always winning and you’re always losing?’

  ‘They’re lucky and I’m not – except of course in my daughter-in-law.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re honest and they’re not.’

  He smiled when she tried to stop him extracting his usual bundle of notes. ‘You don’t trust me?’

  ‘I trust you, sir, but not others.’

  ‘Yes, those horses, they’re very untrustworthy – they keep losing.’

  ‘And your card-playing friends who keep winning?’

  With a simple grand gesture characteristic of him, he handed her the bundle of notes he had taken out. She counted them and put most of them back. She didn’t know what happened after that between him and his friends – the games continued, but he always allowed her to pay out his losses. And after a while he also asked her to take care of the ones at the race track and other places such as the wrestling matches he frequented. And then it was easiest to hand over the key of the safe to her; and instead of adding it to the bunch of store keys she already wore at her waist, she hung it on a string around her neck to nestle there and come to rest between her breasts.

  It was there that Davy discovered it. He stopped in his caresses to ask, ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Your father’s key.’

  ‘Key to what? To his heart?’

  ‘To the safe, you idiot.’ He asked nothing further. Making love to her seemed more important to him than any key, even if it was to his father’s safe.
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  A few days later Davy asked her to take some money out of the safe for him. It was a substantial amount, but he asked for it casually. Then he added, ‘Mummy needs it. She has tremendous expenses, you have no idea.’ And then, ‘You don’t understand about Mummy. Of course Daddy is very famous and all that, but Mummy comes from a very noble family, even if they did go bankrupt and left her with nothing.’

  She asked Davy about his parents: ‘How did it happen? How did they get married?’ Then he showed her magazines of thirty years before, featuring them in their youth. It was the time when Abhinav had been the leading hero, dashing and daring and not only on the screen. It was only later, in his maturity, that he began to take on the roles of the divinities and emperors that had become the expression of his entire personality.

  He had first seen Shirin at a dance in the exclusive Willingdon Club when he and his entourage were on a round of New Year parties. The rest of them, soon moving on to more rowdily festive places, couldn’t understand his decision to stay on. But Shirin understood very well, and it made her foxtrot more prettily and even to induce her staid partner to twirl her around once or twice in a more fashionable dance.

  ‘Wedding Bells???’ Munni read in the old magazines. She and Davy were lying across their bed in their usual way. ‘Haven’t you read enough yet?’ he asked. ‘Old stuff like that. Come on, Munni.’

  She gave in and they kissed, lying face to face. She said, ‘You don’t look like him, not a bit.’

  ‘Of course not. That’s why I’m not a national hero, but just an ordinary guy.’

  She waited for him to fall asleep – kissed him once more, brushed a lock of hair from his forehead – then returned to the magazines. She found many articles about the wedding. Most of these gave some details of Shirin’s family, mentioning the bankruptcy along with hints, and more than hints, about their mental balance. There were pictures of their mansion in its heyday, built in 1912, cream-yellow with white trim; in front of the pillared portico stood a carriage full of Parsi gentlemen in their round hats setting out on a picnic. But even at that time, Munni read, there had been one room in that mansion where a family member was kept locked up, with a servant to look after him (or, as often, her) and bars at the window through which to peer at a lost world.

  In the past, Munni’s girlfriends had often called her from New York, with eager questions about her marriage and her life in her father-in-law’s palace. As time went on, she became reluctant to answer them, so that they made haughty faces at one another to show what sort of a person she had become. But it wasn’t that – it was that she needed to keep this new life she loved to herself, not to be touched by any outsider’s curiosity. And more than her friends, it was her family she wanted to keep at a distance. She was not on good terms with them; she had not forgiven their attitude at the time of her divorce when they wouldn’t let her back into their house. After her elevation to be Abhinav’s daughter-in-law, they were eager to travel to Bombay and participate in her new splendour; and when she wouldn’t allow them to visit, they condemned her as her friends did, only more bitterly.

  Later, when the rumours began and were taken up by all the gossip magazines, they spread so far and so rapidly that they reached her family in their small town in the Punjab, six hundred miles away. Her father wrote her a letter in terms as virulent as those he had used about her divorce. She read a few lines, then tore the letter across and threw it away. More letters came and those she destroyed without opening them. She didn’t have to read them, she knew what was in them, and worse, she could see and hear her father, unshaven in a creased and stained shirt, banging his stick on the ground in fury as he denounced her for having blackened his name.

  The rumours may actually have started within the house, in Shirin’s domain. A cook whom Munni had had to dismiss came pleading to Shirin for reinstatement. After throwing himself at her feet, he squatted close by her chair to tell her things that evidently could not be said aloud. He stayed a long time, and next day he came again, and soon he was employed in Shirin’s kitchen, to learn her bland European dishes in place of Abhinav’s fiery curries.

  Not long afterwards, there was another big party, and Shirin made one of her entrances. This time she linked her arm in Munni’s in order to parade the room with her. But suddenly she let go of her and, surveying her from head to foot, she flicked at Munni’s splendid brocade sari: ‘Did you get that piece of cloth from one of the “temple dancers”?’ she said loud enough for surrounding guests to hear. ‘I’m told they’re fetching a good price nowadays – the saris, not the “dancers”, as the poor old things call themselves . . . And this?’ She fingered Munni’s antique necklace, another of Abhinav’s gifts. ‘It must weigh a ton – luckily you can wear it. With your thick neck.’ Then, plaintively, she called for Davy to take her away from this place that was stifling her with its smell of over-spiced food and all the people drenched in cheap bazaar perfume (she alleged unfairly about her husband’s high-profile guests).

  By the time Munni’s hostess duties were concluded, Davy was already asleep in their bedroom. She woke him by first flinging her necklace and then, unwinding herself from her sari, flinging that at him as well. ‘She’s seen them so many times before – what got into her today? What have I done to her?’

  Rousing himself from sleep, Davy tried to make excuses for his mother: ‘She wasn’t well tonight. She must have had one of her attacks of indigestion.’ And at Munni’s indignant cry, he retracted: ‘Well, maybe not indigestion – but what if it’s her heart? You must understand about Mummy, how much she’s been through.’

  ‘But that’s not my fault. I’ve always tried—’

  ‘I know you have. You’ve been very sweet with her.’ He kissed her gratefully, then he picked up the necklace where it had fallen on the floor. He ran his fingers over the stones and mused, ‘It really is worth a fortune.’

  ‘She can have it. I’ll give it to her gladly. It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’

  ‘No no, of course she wants you to have it. And it wouldn’t suit her the way it suits you.’

  ‘Because of my thick neck?’ Munni said, half laughing though still angry.

  ‘Your beautiful neck.’ He ran his fingers over it the way he had over the jewels.

  While suspicions and innuendos swirled around the house, inside it no one seemed to be aware of them. The guests at Abhinav’s parties acted as though nothing were further from their minds than the scandal that had attached itself to their host and his daughter-in-law. And he made it easy for them. He ignored or simply overrode everything that was written, with no change at all in his expansive manner, no diminishment of his majestic personality.

  It was more difficult for Munni. She read the same thoughts in everyone who looked at her, and it made her want to put her hand over the fine pieces of jewellery her father-in-law had given her. While she continued to dress up for her role as his hostess, now it was with a feeling of discomfort and even shame. But she decided that she would not accept any more gifts from him, however difficult it might be to decline them.

  He especially enjoyed bestowing some munificent present on her at the end of one of his grand parties, to thank her for making it a success. He was very proud of the occasions when famous classical musicians came to perform at his house. His tastes had been formed by the musical numbers of Bombay films in which he himself had sung and danced; but with classical music, he took his cue from others when to sway his head and give out sounds of ecstasy – principally from his son. Davy truly loved Indian classical music. When he was younger, his mother had tried to make him learn the piano, but instead he engaged a maestro to teach him the sitar. At first these lessons were a success, but after a while, disappointed with his progress, he gave up on them.

  It was at the end of a music recital that Abhinav tried to present another gift to his daughter-in-law. He proudly opened the velvet case delivered by his jeweller that morning. ‘These diamonds belonged to the Turkish bride o
f a Hyderabad prince. They have been specially set for you – please wear them,’ he said, lifting the heavy necklace from its velvet bed. She stepped back, but just then Davy joined them. He was still humming the raga they had just heard and didn’t stop humming while taking the necklace from his father. ‘Your husband will help you,’ Abhinav smiled. Davy had stepped between him and Munni, so that his father didn’t see her putting her hand on her throat in refusal. ‘No no,’ she mouthed at Davy, pleading to him. He turned to his father. ‘She wants to try it in front of a mirror, to be the first to admire herself. Women are so vain,’ he told Abhinav, who gallantly denied the accusation. Taking the case from him, Davy replaced the necklace in it; he began to hum again and did not stop till he and Munni were back in their own rooms.