A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Anuradha complained to Maria about the girlfriends. It seemed they were all the same type – all academics, all doing their Ph.D. on subjects no one had ever heard of, all skeletons with nothing up in front – not that they needed it, for what was it that they and Som could possibly do together except discuss each other’s thesis? Yes, she concluded gloomily, it was right for him to go abroad, perhaps there he might at last find a proper daughter-in-law to bring home to his mother, who would welcome anyone, even a dance hostess. At that she laughed out loud and coquetted with her veil in a way she considered characteristic of a dance hostess. Maria was used to these changes of mood – they were there in the poetry she was struggling to translate, where Anuradha was now imperious like a Hindu god flinging his thunderbolt and next moment a young girl sick with longing for a lover.

  Although the front of the house was imposing with Doric pillars and a verandah leading into Anuradha’s spacious salon, the back of it comprised only two cramped rooms, one of them occupied by Maria, the other by Som. Maria often had to shut the door of hers so as not to overhear the terrible rows between mother and son; but even through the closed door, Maria couldn’t help hearing how Anuradha cursed her son and her own womb that had borne him. The whole house heard her – in fact, the whole neighbourhood, for when he ran out she followed him down the street with her curses. She had rented out the property she owned at the back of her house, and if she saw the tenants leaning out to listen, she turned her fury on them. They accepted it all from her – everyone did, however outrageous her behaviour. Maria too very soon got used to it. Whenever Anuradha was displeased with Maria’s translation, she scrawled her pencil across it, impressing down so hard that she tore through the paper; sometimes she also broke the pencil and flung away the pieces.

  Since all the furniture had gravitated to the salon, Maria’s room had only a rope bed and a rickety cane table and stool with the cane unwinding. This spare whitewashed space suited her; her home in Boston, now that she lived alone, was a small apartment sparsely furnished. But asceticism was not the whole of her. She may have looked spinsterish with her glasses slipping on her nose and her thin hair turning grey; but she liked dressing in silks and also wore some jewellery, modest but gold, and even her glasses were gold-rimmed. Behind these, her eyes were pale blue pools, enlarged by the correction for her extreme near-sight; they were slightly protruding, which gave her a perpetually eager look as one leaning forwards in order not to miss anything.

  This was exactly her attitude from the moment she woke and feared missing the summons to the salon. Anuradha slept late into the day, while everyone walked around on tiptoe. Usually it was well past noon when the awaited cry came from the salon. Then the household flurry began, with the old man who tended the boiler carrying buckets of hot water to her bathroom, then another old man fanning up the fire in her kitchen (or cook-house, as it was called), the maid, also old, laying out her towel and the day’s freshly washed clothes. Anuradha sang as she poured water over herself from the bucket of her bath, and this morning hymn was as joyful as the sunrise.

  When at last Maria was sent for, she came trembling with anticipation for their work to begin. But sometimes she found Anuradha in a very bad mood. Once she was having her feet massaged by her old maid when, in an access of temper, she kicked out one foot so that the maid fell over backwards. That made Anuradha angrier; she shouted, ‘Did you go to the eye doctor? No? Good, go blind then, you stubborn fool.’ The maid muttered what time did she have for eye doctor, running here and there for Anuradha day and night; and when Anuradha stuck out her foot again, she refused to resume her work on it, instead gathering up her paraphernalia, her oils and balms.

  ‘This is what I have to put up with,’ Anuradha complained to Maria. ‘No respect anywhere; the least little wish of mine ignored and trodden underfoot. Even my own son! I tell him, “You’re thirty-five years old and what is your work? What are you? Who esteems you in the very same university where your grandfather was the vice-chancellor?”’

  At mention of her father, her mood improved. His portrait hung above her divan. He was in formal European dress with some sort of order on a crimson ribbon around his neck. She spoke of his nobility and courage: a high-caste Hindu, he had married a Muslim girl at a time when this was dangerous enough to cause a riot. After she died, he had devoted himself to their daughter Anuradha, educating her like a son, even sending her abroad to study in London and Paris.

  ‘And when I came back, I married his secretary – can you imagine?’ She laughed at herself for doing that. She had loved her late husband, who had been, like their son Som, small and slight, gentle in manner. But he had never come to anything, and it was his lack of ambition that she now saw reflected in their son Som and led to more quarrels with him.

  While her father hung splendidly portrayed above her divan, she kept small snapshots of her husband in a nearby drawer. This she opened frequently, taking out a sandalwood box to show to Maria. Besides the snapshots, it contained a rosary, a bundle of yellowed papers tied with a red thread, some dried and dusty margosa leaves, and her husband’s spectacles with a crack across one lens. She handed the box to Maria. ‘Open it, smell it.’ Mingled with the sandalwood, Maria discovered a delicate scent as of evaporated incense or long-dead blossoms. The photographs had all been snapped outdoors and were so faded that Anuradha’s husband, frail in his white shirt and Gandhi cap, appeared insubstantial, ghost-like, a saintly spirit. He may have been further reduced by Anuradha’s kisses – she never shut the box without pressing his image to her lips. She described how he was the only person in the world who had ever been able to still the turmoil within her – yes, even when it was turned against himself as, God forgive her, it often was. He would put his arms around her, which was not easy since she was so stout; he murmured her name into her ear, soothingly, sweetly. How she missed that loving restraint; now there was no one to whisper ‘Anuradha, Anuradha’ and bring her back to herself, quietening the demons that made her rage against even those, especially those, whom she loved. Here she squeezed Maria’s hand, and then how willingly and gladly Maria forgave all Anuradha’s harsh words whenever she was dissatisfied with Maria’s translations.

  There were times when the two of them had very intimate conversations together. Anuradha was completely outspoken about her life, including the two abortions she had had in Paris. Remembering those, and especially what had led up to them, she flung her hands before her face and rocked to and fro with laughter. ‘And you?’ she asked Maria. ‘No husband, no lovers?’ Maria smiled shyly, regretfully. Then Anuradha thought of helping her by changing her appearance. Unlike herself, whose mouth was painted a bright moist red and her eyes black with kohl, Maria only wore a very pale pink lipstick. ‘That’s not the way to make anyone fall in love with you,’ Anuradha advised her; but although she presented Maria with some potent dyes, Maria continued to use her own, applying it so sparingly that it was almost invisible. It was a part of her, along with the thin gold jewellery and the silk dresses – adornments worn not to enhance herself but to pay homage to an ideal of beauty.

  One day Anuradha said, ‘You’ve done so much for me. I would like to give you something. What can I give you?’ She looked at her critically, from head to toe. ‘When I first saw you, I thought – her dress is pretty, she has fine taste – but see here, the hem is uneven, the waist is dragging where the hip should be.’

  She decided that she would have new dresses made for her and that they would go together to the bazaar to order them. At once she told her tenants to send around their car and driver, and at their mild reminder that these were needed to bring their children from school, she advised them to hire a motor rickshaw.

  Although Anuradha’s poetry was full of imagery taken from nature, nowadays she rarely left her house. She said everything was inside her, the earth, the oceans and rivers, the heavens above, and the hell below trying to push up through every available rift. But when she did go out, as now w
ith Maria in the tenants’ car, she was excited by all the sights on the way. Impatiently pushing aside the satin curtains shielding the passengers from view, she pointed out well-known landmarks of this city that was hers. Here was where the Emperor Humayun had fallen to his death from the steps of his library (some said after an overdose of opium); here the ‘Gate of Blood’ where the Persian invader Nadir Shah had ordered the massacre of the citizens of Delhi; there the convent school Anuradha had attended, just like the girls they passed now in oiled pigtails and white socks; and there the lane where in 1938 a Hindu-Muslim riot had had to be suppressed when her father married her mother.

  On arrival at their destination in the cloth market, Maria discovered that Anuradha was herself a popular landmark. Although she was a classical and highly sophisticated poet, some of her lyrics had reached a much wider audience through being sung in popular Bombay films. Anuradha was recognised the moment they left their car and walked the few steps to the shop she patronised. People sang out lines of hers that everyone knew by heart: ‘How many petals has the lotus – are they One, are they Four, or are they Seven?’ She sang back: ‘What fool would count the Stars of Heaven?’ before entering the open front of the shop. Here, welcomed as the empress, the star she was, she was enthroned on a special chair brought for her, while Maria perched on the narrow bench meant for ordinary customers. Anuradha made the shopkeeper and his assistants bring down bolt after bolt of silk cloth. Nothing pleased her, she kept pointing to new ones further up, beyond reach so that a ladder had to be brought. Maria was embarrassed, she hated giving trouble to anyone and usually bought the first thing she was shown. Now, with the sea of silk spread on the platform before them, she was too bewildered to make a choice; but finally and without hesitation, Anuradha extracted from those billowing waves the exact pattern she had had in mind for her friend. This was not the dazzling colours she favoured for herself but tiny buds ingrained in the silk and entwined with the delicate glitter of gold thread. Maria engrossed herself in admiring and stroking the soft texture and tried not to hear Anuradha’s robust bargaining with the shopkeeper. But she blushed again when the tailor, summoned from a nearby shop, had to take her measurements, which were so pitifully inadequate that the tailor shook his head in disbelief and Anuradha stifled a smile.

  It was the tailor’s fault that Maria had to postpone her departure. Her six-month sabbatical was coming to an end, and she was to leave at the end of July. Although Som’s fellowship wasn’t due to start until a few months later, he had been planning to go on the same plane; and until he got settled, she had invited him to stay with her in her apartment in Boston. But when the tailor came to fit the first of Maria’s new dresses, Anuradha was so dissatisfied that she ordered him to take it back. The same happened at the next fitting; and when Maria, always reluctant to give trouble, was ready to accept them, Anuradha turned on her: ‘Just see! You’re ready to take the first clumsy piece of bad work, whereas I – I aim only for Perfection.’ Then Maria too had to reject the dresses. After several more tries, she informed Som that they would have to change their date of departure; she could not leave without his mother’s gift.

  He at once recognised his mother’s stratagem. Although at first Anuradha had welcomed and encouraged the fellowship, once she found that his current girlfriend was no longer a danger, she changed her mind. ‘To leave your mother’s house,’ she accused him, ‘for some stupid Ph.D. that’s no use to anyone. This is all Maria’s doing.’

  At the sound of her name, Maria had emerged from her room. She did something of which she would not have thought herself capable: she crept to the door of the salon to hear what was said between mother and son.

  ‘I should never have let her into the house,’ Anuradha was telling Som. ‘These foreign women are very wily.’

  ‘She only wants to be helpful to you, and to me. She’s said I can stay in her place in Boston till I get settled.’

  ‘Stay with her? Live with her?’

  Maria heard Som shout, ‘Now what’s on your mind!’ and then a deep sigh from Anuradha: ‘She’s stealing you from me.’

  ‘Everyone’s always stealing me – if it’s not my girlfriend, it’s Maria. She’s your age, for God’s sake. She’s like my mother; like you.’

  ‘That’s how it is with these women who have never lived. When their age is past, they no longer want lovers, they want sons. Other women’s sons. Call her! Call her in here, talk to her in my presence!’

  Maria had sunk to her knees to look through the keyhole. She saw Anuradha point to the space in front of her where Som and Maria were to stand and speak. Maria quickly got up and scuttled off to her room. She thought of her parents, who had lived up to a strict code of moral dignity; she herself too had followed the same code. Yet now she had eavesdropped on others, peered at them through a keyhole. A shudder passed through her – not of shame but of fear and helplessness against these new feelings, which were so hard for her nature to bear that they seemed to her to be unnatural.

  But next day, when she came to work with Anuradha, she found her in a very good mood. That was a happy day for Maria. Anuradha was at her best: stern and passionate, she laid bare every nuance of meaning while Maria stumbled after her, labouring to come up with a not entirely inadequate parallel. Again and again she failed and was rejected, but she liked it, being made to reach for perfection. After a few hours they were both exhausted – Maria tried to hold out but Anuradha fell on to her divan with a great exhalation of breath. She was pleased with herself and with Maria, and she patted the place beside her for Maria to join her. At first Maria was shy, also afraid of discomfiting Anuradha who was taking up most of the divan, with no indication of yielding an inch of it; but finally Maria, making herself as small as possible, squeezed in sideways to lie beside her. She heard her own heart beating – or was it two hearts beating, though she didn’t dare think that Anuradha was as deeply affected as she was. The poetess, a huge mound rising, pressed against her with her fat hot flesh, suffusing her with the by now so familiar, so beloved smell of rose-scented oil, garlic and perspiration. Just as in that day’s work, Maria had never felt herself so ecstatically close to her. One of Anuradha’s hands with its many rings pressed Maria even closer, may even have groped a little under her dress, though by that time Maria had shut her eyes and was no longer sure of what was happening.

  She woke, feeling Anuradha’s breath in her ear, whispering, ‘Promise me something’; then, more insistently, ‘You mustn’t say no. You must promise to say yes.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maria murmured drowsily.

  ‘All right, you’ve promised. Sit up.’

  They both sat up. Anuradha said, ‘You must tell him the fellowship is cancelled. Or given to someone else. You can think of something. I leave it to you, and surely you’d be happy to do this for me. For a mother. And remember,’ she ended up in irritated warning, ‘you said yes.’

  Telling a lie was a sin Maria’s parents had taught her to be unforgivable, so she had had no practice at it. She had also been brought up never to break a promise – and especially, she felt now, one that had been given under such intimate circumstances. Som, on the other hand, had lived all his life with his mother and had quickly learned how to detect a lie – and moreover, whose lie it was. His reply to Maria was, ‘She told you to say that.’

  Maria was incapable of a second lie. She lowered her eyes and said, ‘I couldn’t refuse her.’

  ‘Please come with me.’

  He took her to the salon where Anuradha was already waiting and ready for a confrontation. With a face of surpassing innocence, she said, ‘I don’t tell her what to say and what not to say, so how would I know what she’s told you?’

  Som was a gentle, peace-loving person in all his relations except with his mother. He shouted, ‘You don’t know, you never know anything! You don’t even know who it was that told my girlfriends all those lies about me.’

  ‘Your girlfriends.’ Anuradha made a sound with her lips
as contemptuous as spitting. ‘You should be thanking me on your knees that I got rid of them for you.’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you! Thank you thank you!’ He was beside himself. ‘But this is the last time, I tell you – the last time you interfere with me.’ She turned away her face and he grasped it and turned it back again: ‘Do you hear me? The last time!’

  ‘Oh my God, help me!’ She put up her arm to shield herself. ‘My son is striking me!’

  Maria also cried out, but Som said in disgust, ‘As if I would.’

  ‘Now you see with your own eyes,’ the stricken mother told Maria.

  ‘See what?’ Som demanded. ‘What’s she to see with her own eyes?’

  ‘The kind of son I have who would strike his mother, may God forgive him!’

  She burst into a storm of sobs and Maria tried to comfort her. She would not be comforted; she shook her head, she flung her hands before her face – though with one eye kept free, she saw Som leaving the salon. She told Maria: ‘Call him back.’ When Maria didn’t move quickly enough, she reproached her: ‘You’re not helping me.’

  Som had left the house and Maria had to pursue him down the street. Unlike his mother, she gave no entertainment to the neighbourhood by making a scene but remained her usual sedate self. When she caught up with him, she said quietly, ‘You mustn’t hurt her.’