A Lovesong for India: Tales from the East and West

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Leela had met him when he was a young Second Secretary at the High Commission in New Delhi. He was not her first lover. Her husband was many years older than she, very rich, very busy with his affairs and fast asleep when he was not. She had plenty of money to spend, plenty of time and a lot of energy. She first saw Paul at a reception at the Nigerian embassy where he was together with his First Secretary; he seemed in no way different from this other very British diplomat. He surprised her by phoning her later that same evening – in fact, the phone was ringing when she got home from the reception. She had had no indication that he had even caught her name, and when he said – his first words – ‘Remember me?’ she actually couldn’t or wasn’t sure. But that didn’t bother him. He at once suggested a meeting and had already decided on the place and time.

  Her previous lovers had been Indian, friends of her brothers or cousins with whom she spoke in their familiar jokey mixed-up Hindi. Paul was her first Englishman. She loved his looks: not very tall, he was slim and spare with light grey eyes in a face that was tanned by un-English suns. She was thrilled with him, and it was very difficult for her to keep silent about him. With earlier affairs, she had adored confessions – cross-your-heart, giggly secrets that she knew would not be kept. But this time, due to the nature of Paul’s work, they had to be kept. Of course, as always in India, everyone knew at least vaguely about him and didn’t believe her weak denials. When her two children were small, they wept when she left on her sudden journeys to meet him. Later they suspected her in the same way as everyone else did, and they were angry with her. Then it was she who wept and implored them to forgive her, though she didn’t tell them for what. Feeling guilty before her children was the hardest part for her, but she could do nothing about it. When her son was ten years old, he contracted typhoid fever. Day and night she sat by his bedside, she sponged and kissed his face, she promised God that, if he made her son well, she would give up Paul. The son did get well quite soon, with antibiotics, so it may not have been her promise; anyway, she didn’t keep it.

  From her first acquaintance with Paul, his comings and goings had been mysterious to her. There was something that had happened on his first diplomatic posting in New Delhi that had remained inexplicable, so that over the years she wondered whether it actually had happened. Leela never lost touch with her servants after they had become too old to work; and if she heard they were sick or in need, she would descend on them wherever they were living. This was how she came to visit an old bearer called Mohan, who was staying with his son in a makeshift colony of shacks about thirty miles outside the city limits. Like all the rest, the son’s house too was assembled from old planks and asbestos sheets, though he was prosperous enough to add another storey; this was so flimsily built that, while she was talking to the sick man downstairs, voices could be distinctly heard from above. The old man beckoned her to come closer; glancing up nervously towards the ceiling, he whispered to her about his son. The boy was rich, Mohan said, he always had money, bundles of cash notes. Once the police had come, but they left again, maybe they had been paid off with some of that cash. Other people visited upstairs, strangers whom Mohan suspected of leading the son into doing bad work. Hearing the voices raised, the father sank back on to his pallet, shutting his eyes to show that nothing had been seen or heard or said. But one of the voices Leela heard was Paul’s – wouldn’t she have recognised it anywhere? Except that this voice was not speaking in Paul’s broken Sahib-Hindi: it was colloquial, racy, freely mixed with Punjabi curse words. She felt she had to leave before she was discovered, as though it were she who was on a suspect mission.

  Her car and driver were waiting where she had left them on the outskirts of the colony, a desert no-man’s-land of scrub and abandoned planks and tyres. On their way home, the driver informed her: ‘Bibiji, I saw Paul Sahib going in there.’

  Leela said at once: ‘He too came all this way to visit poor old Mohan, wasn’t that kind of him?’ The driver agreed, and together they praised Paul’s kindness for a while.

  Afterwards Paul said the driver had been dreaming; probably some opium dream, didn’t they all take opium? He engaged her in a lively discussion of drugs and their problems, so that she had no opportunity to ask him anything else, such as his ability to speak and curse so freely in the local language. And in fact she never heard him speak again in anything except his Sahib-Hindi; and he let her continue to correct his pronunciation of certain consonants while continuing to get them wrong. It had been an amusing game between them, but afterwards she didn’t care to play it so much.

  During the twenty years of their attachment, Paul had sent for her whenever he came to India or its neighbouring countries on some business of his own. Sometimes he was in a big city, but more often in a far-off place that was difficult to reach. There was no way she could prepare for her journey in secret, but she was used to the oblique glances and the grim faces that met her whenever she went off on one of her meetings with Paul.

  Her son continued to suffer more than anyone else from her adultery. Once, when he was nineteen, he tried to stop her. He gripped her arm and said, ‘Why are you doing this to us?’ Impatient at the delay, she tried to shake him off; finally she said, ‘All right, now listen – supposing I were going off on a pilgrimage, you’d want me to, wouldn’t you? To Amarnath, to Shiva’s lingam?’ The comparison made her laugh – she was anyway in such high spirits with anticipation. But he, a pious boy shocked at the blasphemy, was so infuriated that he raised his hand and slapped her face. They stood staring at each other. She said, ‘May God forgive you.’ But then, seeing the tears welling up in his young eyes, she said, ‘It’s all right, darling, I forgive you.’

  That time Paul had summoned her to a small town tucked away among mountains where a pass led further north towards Ladakh. Already too soft and fat to get up on a horse, Leela had to have herself carried up by coolies in a palanquin. At first she could think only of her son: she knew it would be a long time before he could forgive himself, and she felt sorry for him. But then they went higher, the coolies chanted, the palanquin swayed and so did the crowns of the tall trees lining their ascent; water sprang from rocks on all sides, it splattered and foamed and was cool, and ice-cold the white mountain peaks rising on the glass-blue horizon.

  The place was the usual collection of shacks, with a bazaar selling the things the poor sell to the poor. The hotel where Paul was waiting for her was at the end of the bazaar and somewhat set back from it, one of a row of crumbling buildings with a sagging balcony. He appeared to be the only resident, and really it was difficult to think what business anyone could have in that place to stay in its hotel. Leela had no thoughts to waste on that. She remained three days with him, fiery food came to them from the bazaar in little clay pots, each covered with a leaf held in place with a twig. She came to know that room very well, what there was of it: a pink-washed wall with what may have been blood from crushed insects or spatterings of red betel juice; a clay water jug with arabesques from the potter’s wheel; a cotton mat, a narrow string cot on which they spent some of their time. At night only she slept on it – he needed to sleep on the floor, for his back. The floor sloped along with the hillside on which the hotel was perched; he arranged the mat on it and was perfectly comfortable. She let her hand dangle over the side of the bed, and whenever she woke, she found him holding it.

  After Paul’s death, the landlord of the empty Marylebone flat was impatient to rent it out at its market value, depressed so long by Paul’s tenacious tenancy. To lock the place up and return the key, Mrs Lord travelled once more on the coach to London. She found the house dark and deserted and the timer on the stairs went off before she could reach Paul’s door; inside, the only light was shed by a bulb dimmed with the dust collected on it. She opened the closet door – but she knew it was empty except for one wire hanger, from which they had removed the only garment they had found. She poked in further, hoping to find something they had overlooked; but there was
only a cobweb with a dead fly in it high up in a corner. It was the same in the rest of the flat – only cobwebs too high for her to reach.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs of the empty house. Leela had already left for India so she knew it could only be Phoebe – like herself wanting to be one more time in the place that had been his so long.

  Phoebe paced the tiny rooms in the same way as Mrs Lord had done. Her footsteps rang on the bare linoleum; she pressed her face against the window as though there was something to see other than the trash cans of an adjoining courtyard. She too opened the closet door. She knew it would be empty; she had herself taken his dinner jacket to carry back with her to America. She saw the cobweb; she was taller than Mrs Lord but she too couldn’t reach it without something to stand on. Of course there was nothing; they had disposed of the few sticks of furniture they had found there.

  ‘He had this place for more than twenty years,’ Mrs Lord said, in wonder at its emptiness.

  ‘Yes, it’s so full of him, isn’t it,’ Phoebe said, radiant at whatever it was she had discovered there.

  Mrs Lord decided to ask Phoebe a question. It took her some time – she walked away from Phoebe and then back again; at last she said, ‘Did he ever tell you anything?’

  Phoebe replied immediately: ‘That’s what it was about, wasn’t it – it was secret, secret work, something you’re not supposed to tell anyone.’

  ‘But didn’t you ever wonder what it was he did?’

  ‘Why should I? I knew it was noble. For a noble cause.’ She smiled at Mrs Lord, but she was also blushing a bit, embarrassed at being outspoken about something so private and sacred.

  Phoebe thought he would have felt at home in her American cabin. She too had only a few necessary items of furniture and not even a curtain to shut out the sky. She didn’t miss the things that had been auctioned off from the family house – pictures and carpets and gold clocks. It seemed to her that she had brought them to live with her and that they crowded her memory, together with the Civil War ghost and all the other ghosts she had read about among the lumber of the attic. Now Paul had joined them.

  She looked on a map for the approximate place where he had been found. It was some satisfaction for her to locate it somewhere within the region populated by those other British adventurers she had read about in the Victorian books she found crumbling in her American attic. She had always identified Paul with the heroes who had disguised themselves in weird costumes to penetrate places no European had ever seen. Some had returned home and been knighted and honoured with the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Others were lost in the desert, or in deep gorges or swollen rivers. Some of their deaths were ignoble, their heads displayed on the carts of kebab-sellers. But whatever the manner of their deaths, their cause had always been noble. So it was for her with Paul.

  Yet she knew that his heroes were not the same as hers. He had spoken to her about them only once. They too were part of the nineteenth-century empire, though they were Indian: hillmen selected for their intelligence and trained for the same dangerous work as Phoebe’s British soldiers and explorers. They travelled as Buddhist pilgrims or Himalayan traders, secretly to survey and map deserts and mountain passes. They carried rosaries of a hundred beads to count the number of their paces; they replaced the Buddhist prayer scrolls inside their prayer wheels with logbooks recording their secret findings. Their journeys were long, they were often not heard from for years; some of them were never heard from at all. Their disappearances or deaths, when these were known, were not as embarrassing to their employers as those of British subjects, for whom protests had to be delivered followed by costly punitive action. Some of the hillmen were caught by Turkoman traders and sold in the slave market of Khiva, though even here they probably fetched a lower price than a plump Caucasian. Some may have died of natural causes, though this was unlikely. The fate of most of them was never known; they had no name, only numbers or cryptograms, and that was what may have appealed to Paul: their invisibility, the forever undiscovered secrecy and anonymity in which they lived and died.

  When Phoebe had returned to America and Leela to India, Mrs Lord hardly ever thought about either of them. Her memories remained only with Paul, and the hours she had spent waiting for him. She had always tried to make the most of his presence; she sat close to him, told him everything she could think of. She wasn’t used to talking so much and that, together with old age and her anxiety about his leaving, exhausted her, and she fell asleep right there where they sat together. When she started awake, she found him looking at her as though imprinting her in his mind. If she had hung a picture in a different spot, he always noticed and put it back the way it had been. It seemed that he wanted to find everything exactly the same in this one familiar place on earth where he was always expected. She knew he loved the town, its gabled houses and the grey stone walls and whitewashed interior of the thirteenth-century church; and the churchyard where she would lie and maybe, if they were lucky, he too. It was here that he belonged; under the mild sky and by the river that was the same light grey as his eyes, though sometimes shadowed by clouds shifting overhead.

  After his death, she kept gazing into her empty fireplace as before, with the same thoughts as before, except that now she no longer expected him to return. When she hauled herself up the ladderlike stairs to her bedroom, she glanced out of habit into his, which she had kept unchanged. There was really nothing to change. In her bedroom too everything was the same, a glass of water on her bedside table, a vase of wild flowers on her dresser. She lay in her bed under her blanket and her feet on a hot-water bottle. Light played on the ceiling, from a streetlamp or the sky, so she was not in complete darkness. No ghosts had ever lived with her, or ever could, she thought. But again and again, every night, she suddenly sat up, her fist by her mouth in fright. It was not her fright but his that she imagined when she thought – as she did constantly – of the manner of his death. She imagined him lying as she was now lying on her bed; only not like that because she was alive with her thoughts and her heart pounding, while he had lain with blood oozing no one knew whether from his head or from his chest.

  Leela knew that Englishmen had often died in places far away from home, and for the sake of an alien people who did not always appreciate their sacrifice. India was full of them. Not far from her house there was a cemetery where British heroes of the 1857 Mutiny had been laid to rest; now there were plans to dig up those graves to make way for a new underground transport system. The names of some of the heroes would remain commemorated in books; the rest of them would vanish with the memories of those who had themselves died long ago.

  Even in her lifetime – and Leela lived to be very old – her Englishman had faded in her mind and finally disappeared, along with everything else. Yet in the first years after his death she had thought of him often. She had brought her letters to him home with her, and when she was alone, she took them out of the inlaid ivory box where she kept them hidden. They made her laugh, and she quickly clapped her hand over her mouth so as not to be heard by anyone in her large household. It was her own schoolgirl fun she laughed about – ‘Hi there! BIG Surprise! I’ve cut my hair! Ha-ha, just kidding, it’s all still there for you to wrap around you know what!’ She and Paul were together for twenty years, but her childish playfulness and his amusement at it remained till the end.

  One day while she was enjoying her letters, she forgot to lock the door, so that suddenly her daughter-in-law came in with her little boy. Leela quickly replaced the letters in their box and concentrated on her grandson climbing all over her, kissing her and she kissing him back. He tired of her when she began to argue with his mother, so he shifted his attention to the pretty ivory box. He admired it from the outside, then lifted the lid. By the time Leela noticed what he was doing, he had pulled out the contents and was crumpling them and tossing them like a ball. Leela took it all away from him and shut the box, while consoling him with the promise of a brand-new bri
ght blue ball that would bounce properly.

  Her daughter-in-law said, ‘I hope it was nothing important?’

  ‘No no, just some old household accounts. I have no idea why I’m still keeping them.’

  Afterwards she smoothed the crumpled papers and replaced them with the rest. But she knew she couldn’t keep them much longer. What if her grandson had been old enough to read them? In a few years he would be, and then they must no longer remain in the house; they must no longer exist. To dispose of them, she had to wait till very late at night with everyone in the house asleep. She went to the bottom of the garden and scraped together a pile of sticks and dry leaves. She lit a match, and although at first the flame was very small, it leaped up when she laid the first of the letters on top, and then it was easy to feed in the rest.