A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  There he threw the velvet case on the bed. ‘Refusing his gifts! You hurt my father’s feelings.’

  ‘I can’t do it, Davy. I can’t keep taking things.’

  ‘Why not? When he loves to give them to you.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘I’ve told you about Mummy. She has her moods and there are things she just doesn’t like.’

  ‘She doesn’t like me.’ She spoke simply, in a matter-of-fact way.

  He too spoke simply: ‘How can she? With everything that’s written in the papers.’ This was the first time anyone in the house had mentioned the gossip surrounding them. But now he went on: ‘You see how careful we have to be.’

  She snatched up the case he had flung on the bed. She thrust it at him. ‘Here, it’s yours! You’re his son, they can’t very well write filthy scandal about a son taking a gift from his father!’ Next moment she sank against him. ‘Please take it, Davy. I don’t want it. Please keep it.’

  ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘I’ll ask Mummy to keep it locked up in her safe . . . You know what would be nice? If you gave it to her yourself. She’d be pleased.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be pleased to see me.’

  He frowned. ‘You’re being very selfish. You’ve even been letting her go alone to her tea at the Taj.’

  ‘But she said she didn’t want me to come with her ever again!’

  ‘That’s because you weren’t good company for her. She said that instead of talking to you, she might as well be talking to herself. That’s what she’s been doing – she’s been sitting at her table talking to herself. She doesn’t harm anyone, she just says out loud what’s on her mind, but the manager called to say not to let her come any more. Now all she can do is stay home talking to the servants. It isn’t even that they’ve been with her forever, like Daddy’s people; they’re always new ones and she doesn’t really trust them.’

  Munni was aware that there was only one servant Shirin trusted, and this was the cook whom Munni herself had had to dismiss. Whenever she visited her mother-in-law’s quarters, he was there to welcome her – obsequiously, but making his favoured position clear. He was there now when Munni entered with the latest velvet jewellery box. ‘Oh look who’s come to honour us!’ Shirin cried. When Munni extended the gift to her, she waved her towards the cook. ‘Give it to him.’

  He held out his hands for the box, and when Munni hesitated, Shirin said, ‘You see, she doesn’t trust you. She thinks you’re a thief. She thinks everyone is a thief, but we know who has stolen what.’

  Munni was still standing, still with the jewel box. The cook offered her a chair, settled a cushion on it, dusted it. Shirin ordered her to sit on it – but next moment she told the cook, ‘Open the piano so she can play for me. And take that wretched box from her, she’s sitting there like a box-wallah come to sell me some trash.’

  The servant obeyed. He lifted the lid of the piano and the box from Munni’s lap. Shirin didn’t allow him to keep it. ‘Over there,’ she said. ‘On that table. My son will know what to do with it, he knows where I keep my things ... Why aren’t you playing? Do you know Chopin? No? No?’ In despair, she laid her delicate hands over her eyes; when she uncovered them again: ‘Look at my eyes – yes, those are my tears.’ She leaned forward for Munni to see them but there were none, and only the cook made pitying sounds. ‘Why are they there? Because in all our family only I have a daughter-in-law who can’t play the piano. A daughter-in-law who smells of oil in her hair and the spicy peasant food she eats with her father-in-law. Now look – look at her face! What’s in her mind when I mention her father-in-law?’

  What was in Munni’s mind was Shirin herself and what was written about her family history in the gossip magazines. When she spoke her fears to Davy, he shrugged, sadly, then changed the subject. ‘Ask Daddy not to get you any more of that antique jewellery,’ he said. ‘People don’t like it much nowadays so it’s not worth what it used to be . . . Yes, I know you don’t wear it but still, it’s property. We have to think of that. A rainy day and so on.’

  ‘But, Davy, aren’t we terribly rich?’

  ‘Daddy is. You and I aren’t. And Mummy’s family money – whoosh! Gone with the wind. That’s how things happen and suddenly everything’s changed.’

  ‘Once there was a palace whose turrets reached the sky

  And on its portals kings rubbed their foreheads . . . ’

  As with music, Abhinav respected classical poetry more than he loved or understood it. But there were frequent symposia at his house, arranged by Davy, who invited famous poets to perform. Like her father-in-law, Munni was better versed in popular film lyrics; and what she enjoyed at these symposia was to watch Davy deeply immersed in the recital. When he drew in his breath at the beauty of a sentiment and the apt rhyme in which it was expressed, she too breathed in ecstasy, though hers was not for the poetry but for him.

  Nevertheless, that day, she was the first to see her mother-in-law enter in the middle of a recital. Shirin came not with her usual imperious sweep but slyly sidling like one with a secret to impart. As she made her way towards Davy, Munni started up – her first thought was not to have his enjoyment interrupted – and respectfully she tried to detain her mother-in-law. Shirin shook her off and continued to stumble over the audience to reach the front row.

  At this disturbance, the poet faltered, and Davy, in quick reaction, jumped up to take charge of his mother. She clung to him, she whispered to him, loudly in her agitation so that some of her words could be made out. He led her to the door, and when they passed Munni, Shirin clung more tightly to him; her whisper became louder. ‘It’s her, I’m telling you. They’re in it together.’ But Abhinav had already given the signal for the recital to continue, and the poet’s voice drowned her:‘Now I see nothing there save a crow sitting on a cornice

  And in my ears I hear its mournful caw:

  “Where has it all gone? O where? Where?

  Kahan? Kahan?”’

  It was very late, almost dawn, when Davy at last joined Munni. She was sitting up in their bed, waiting for him. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, I have to know.’

  He sighed, drawing his finger along her cheek in his usual tender way. At last he said, ‘Mummy says she’s being poisoned – yes yes, but it’s what she thinks. At first she suspected only the servant – ’

  ‘And now?’ Munni held her breath.

  Davy paused, continued reluctantly: ‘He says when he came home from the bazaar, he found someone in his kitchen stirring something into the soup he had left to simmer. But what could he do? How could he, a poor man, accuse a person so close to her, a member of her own family?’

  ‘And she believes him? She actually believes him?’

  ‘Yes, she believes him.’

  ‘And you? . . . Davy! You? You think I did that?’

  ‘Of course I don’t! Of course not!’ He gathered her ample form in his arms. They lay down together, and he buried his face in her. ‘She’s sick,’ he pleaded. ‘Mummy is so terribly sick. I’m so afraid for her.’

  ‘We’ll care for her,’ Munni promised. ‘We’ll do everything for her. She can say and think about me whatever she wants, I know it’s not her really who’s thinking it.’

  ‘Yes we know, but others don’t. Others don’t understand, they’d want to lock her up in a hospital with people far more sick than she is. Or in a room – never let her out of a room with bars on the window. You’ve seen them, haven’t you? In the old houses? The faces looking out and the kids in the street laughing at them. I used to laugh too when I was a kid.’

  Again she comforted him, promising how they would care for her, he and she together, and Abhinav of course.

  He sat up. He didn’t smoke often, but now he lit a cigarette. ‘We’ll have to speak to Daddy,’ he said. ‘About taking her away . . . You know the only time she’s been truly happy? When she was a girl at school, in Switzerland, she loved it, the mountains and the lakes.’
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br />   Munni was silent. Her heart was heavy. She cared nothing for mountains and lakes, she had never seen them, but she cared deeply for this house and their life in it that Abhinav had made for them. Nevertheless, she said, ‘If that’s what you want – what you think would be best for her – we’ll go.’

  ‘And there are doctors there and good places where she can rest and be cared for . . . It’ll be expensive of course, and Mummy and I have nothing, and the jewellery Daddy gave you didn’t fetch the price I had hoped.’

  ‘And that’s all the money we have?’

  ‘But you have the cheque books and the key to the safe. Daddy trusts you absolutely. And he’ll give you more things, every time you and he have a party. He’s so pleased with the way you manage everything. He couldn’t ever be without you.’

  She snatched the cigarette from his lips and flung it on the carpet. He went after it and stamped it out with her slipper. ‘You’ll set the house on fire,’ he said. ‘Besides poisoning Mummy – that’s a joke!’ But she had already cried out, ‘You’re crazy! You’re completely nuts!’

  ‘I know it,’ he said humbly. He lit another cigarette, lightly blew smoke. ‘But there’s nothing like that in Daddy’s family. You’re best off with him. He and you. Careful!’ he said, shielding his cigarette.

  But she made no move to snatch it. Instead she sank down on the bed, sitting on the side of it, her hands clasped in her lap. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What are you planning?’

  ‘I’m planning your future. I want you to be happy, and Daddy to be happy. It’s what everyone says. They even say it in print! “Is she his daughter-in-law or is she his . . . ?” Hey! That’s a quote, why are you mad at me?’ He put up his hands to shield his face and her blow landed on his arm. He rubbed it. ‘Let’s be reasonable,’ he said. And he spoke in a reasonable way. ‘No, listen – really, what am I? Remember, in New York, when I asked you over and over to marry me? And you refused, till he came: then at once – yes! See, you knew, as soon as you saw him. And of course, why not? Look at the two of you. Both of you so healthy . . . You’ve read what they’ve been writing – “And the little crown prince? What’s wrong with him? Why no little stranger? She looks strong enough and so does the father-in-law . . . ”’ Now she covered her ears so as not to hear him quote what she knew only too well. But he shrugged. ‘It’s the sort of thing people like to read. I think I might like it too if it wasn’t about me. And it’s true; you are strong.’ Smiling, he rubbed his arm where her blow had landed.

  She clasped her arms around his neck. He felt her tears coursing down his face; he whispered, ‘You’ll see. Everything will be much better when we’ve gone.’ She held him more tightly, she moaned no no, she didn’t believe him; but it turned out to be true.

  After a while, even the gossip magazines stopped writing about them. And when a year or two had passed, it seemed to have been forgotten that Munni was the daughter-in-law and not the consort of Abhinav. As Davy had said: ‘Look at the two of you’ – they were indeed like a king and his consort, or a god and his goddess. It was the way they lived too, royally in their domain. The festivities were even more lavish than before. A favourite pastime now was to watch Abhinav’s old films in the screening room, and then come upstairs into the marble halls to enjoy the same numbers performed by live girls, half spangled and half nude, waving their veils at the audience. The mood was heightened – it was the end of Prohibition – and the guests, sprawled among cushions, were raucous in their appreciation.

  Moving among their inebriated guests, Abhinav and Munni seemed to be floating slightly above them – just as, in the films viewed in the screening room, a god and goddess presided over their subjects from clouds in the empyrean. It would have been blasphemous to speculate about the relationship of such a pair. There were never any signs of pregnancy, but as the years passed, Munni burgeoned into new magnificence. Her jewellery and brocades matched the splendour of her figure. She wore them openly now: as the reigning mistress of the palace, she was entitled to her adornments and had no need to lock them away like a guilty secret.

  She did keep one secret – the letters she received from Switzerland. They were as private and personal to her as her own thoughts. Davy often asked her to send money, admitting that his father’s allowance had run short again. There was the time he needed to buy a piano, he thought learning to play again might be good for Mummy when she came for weekends from the sanatorium. After scanning quickly over the business part of his letters, Munni came to what was for her their true gist. Usually he ended with a quote, and sometimes she could take it as addressed to herself (‘O cypress of lovely stature’); or, more often, it was an expression of a melancholy sense of loss, the crow’s cry echoing through the ruined palace. And both – the romantic and the melancholy – were characteristic of Davy as she never ceased to think of him. It was how she had first seen him, in the restaurant in New York. Now she imagined him in another country at another café table. And here too, though surrounded by a group of friends, he would be silent and aloof, smiling to himself while sad old verses murmured in his mind.

  Where? O where?

  Kahan? Kahan?

  School of Oriental Studies

  The first time Professor Maria von R saw and heard the poetess Anuradha was on a public stage. Anuradha, huge and stout, glittered like a star – she was a star, in her achievement and in her person. She was wearing a bright orange sari and her hair too was turning orange, with henna; she was hung around with gifts of gold and jewels from her admirers. The hall was over-full, extra chairs had to be brought in, more carpets spread in front, more intimates allowed to sit on the stage. They breathed in her words of poetry, not silently but with little cries almost of pain; she roused them to a pitch, and when they had reached it, she smiled and let them subside – till she was ready to let them strive once more to reach those heights that she alone seemed to attain without effort.

  Oriental studies were a family tradition for Maria. Her Prussian father had for ten years been a professor of Sanskrit in Göttingen until, in disgust with the German regime of the 1930s, he had accepted a position at an American university. Born in America, Maria had followed in the same field and at the same university, and had become a prominent scholar in her own right.

  She was also in a modest way a poet. In coming to New Delhi to meet Anuradha, it had been her dream to be allowed to translate her poetry into English. She had no idea how to begin to suggest this, but on her first visit Anuradha herself said, ‘So, where would you start?’ as though the two of them had already had a long discussion on the subject. Lighting a cigarette – raw tobacco folded in a brown leaf – Anuradha said, ‘Of course it’s all a mess. I’m a mess, always have been, from birth.’

  Maria was perched on a stool near the poetess who was sprawled on her floor-height divan. She tried to explain herself, why she had come, attracted by the magnet of just that mixture in Anuradha’s poetry and in Anuradha herself, whose father had been a Hindu and her mother a Muslim. It was also there in the room where they sat, in the house that Anuradha had inherited from her father. She had turned the front room into the place where she worked, ate, slept, received, entertained and bullied. All the good pieces from her father’s time, like his bookcases crammed with Western and Indian classics, had gravitated here. The walls of this salon-bedroom held another kind of mixture – the abstract paintings by one of Anuradha’s lovers from her years in Paris, Moghul miniatures of princes in their garden palaces, bazaar oleographs of prostitutes in pearls.

  Maria hardly remembered how it had happened that, only three days after her arrival, she had moved in with Anuradha, right into her home. It must have been at Anuradha’s instigation, or rather her insistence. Maria herself was shy and always afraid of imposing, a hesitant personality whom Anuradha could easily override. But Maria was glad – she had been in a hotel and was not used to being on her own. On her previous travels she had always been accompanied by her mother, a forceful Germ
an lady who made all the arrangements. Maria had been very close to her parents, who had referred to her as ‘the Child’ – ‘das Kind’ – even after she was forty. Now both her parents were dead, and Maria was left floundering on her own.

  On their first day of work together, Anuradha challenged her: ‘How do you think you can translate even one part of me, let alone the rest?’

  Maria fully understood the difficulty. She knew Sanskrit very well but not its present-day derivatives; the Hindi she spoke was so stylised and archaic that no living person was able to understand her. (This both amused and irritated Anuradha.) During her father’s lifetime, Maria had deeply immersed herself in the Hindu scriptures; it was only later, when she was left alone, that she realised she needed something more personal than the Absolute of Vedanta philosophy. That was when she had begun her studies in Persian and its derivative Urdu, with their much greater emphasis on an approachable, caring Presence; and it was also how she had been drawn to Anuradha’s poetry with its combination, in language and feeling, of both the Hindu and the Muslim areas of Maria’s studies.

  Maria was struggling for words – it was all so difficult to express, and to express in English! Fortunately for her, Anuradha never really listened to others. She cut across Maria in mid-sentence. ‘So he’s asked you to get him a fellowship in America. Very good. He should be doing something more than get stuck in a lecturer’s job here – so ridiculous! My son!’

  Her son Som was an economist – a field far from Maria’s, but she had many contacts in the academic world where she was greatly admired for her scholarly achievements. Her inquiries on his behalf had been positive: there were several openings, and Maria discussed them with him, while Anuradha listened. Her only questions were about the location of the various universities they mentioned. One was on the East Coast, another on the West Coast. ‘Let him go to the one farther away,’ Anuradha said. Afterwards Som explained that what his mother wanted was to get him as far away as possible from his current girlfriend.