At the End of the Century

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  An Experience of India

  Today Ramu left. He came to ask for money and I gave him as much as I could. He counted it and asked for more, but I didn’t have it to give him. He said some insulting things, which I pretended not to hear. Really I couldn’t blame him. I knew he was anxious and afraid, not having another job to go to. But I also couldn’t help contrasting the way he spoke now with what he had been like in the past: so polite always, and eager to please, and always smiling, saying, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘Yes madam please.’ He used to look very different too, very spruce in his white uniform and his white canvas shoes. When guests came, he put on a special white coat he had made us buy him. He was always happy when there were guests – serving, mixing drinks, emptying ashtrays – and I think he was disappointed that more didn’t come. The Ford Foundation people next door had a round of buffet suppers and Sunday brunches, and perhaps Ramu suffered in status before their servants because we didn’t have much of that. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps he suffered in status anyhow because we weren’t like the others. I mean, I wasn’t. I didn’t look like a proper memsahib or dress like one – I wore Indian clothes right from the start – or ever behave like one. I think perhaps Ramu didn’t care for that. I think servants want their employers to be conventional and put up a good front so that other people’s servants can respect them. Some of the nasty things Ramu told me this morning were about how everyone said I was just someone from a very low sweeper caste in my own country and how sorry they were for him that he had to serve such a person.

  He also said it was no wonder Sahib had run away from me. Henry didn’t actually run away, but it’s true that things had changed between us. I suppose India made us see how fundamentally different we were from each other. Though when we first came, we both came we thought with the same ideas. We were both happy that Henry’s paper had sent him out to India. We both thought it was a marvellous opportunity not only for him professionally but for both of us spiritually. Here was our escape from that Western materialism with which we were both so terribly fed up. But once he got here and the first enthusiasm had worn off, Henry seemed not to mind going back to just the sort of life we’d run away from. He even didn’t seem to care about meeting Indians any more, though in the beginning he had made a great point of doing so; now it seemed to him all right to go only to parties given by other foreign correspondents and sit around there and eat and drink and talk just the way they would at home. After a while, I couldn’t stand going with him any more, so we’d have a fight and then he’d go off by himself. That was a relief. I didn’t want to be with any of those people and talk about inane things in their tastefully appointed air-conditioned apartments.

  I had come to India to be in India. I wanted to be changed. Henry didn’t – he wanted a change, that’s all, but not to be changed. After a while because of that he was a stranger to me and I felt I was alone, the way I’m really alone now. Henry had to travel a lot around the country to write his pieces, and in the beginning I used to go with him. But I didn’t like the way he travelled, always by plane and staying in expensive hotels and drinking in the bar with the other correspondents. So I would leave him and go off by myself. I travelled the way everyone travels in India, just with a bundle and a roll of bedding which I could spread out anywhere and go to sleep. I went in third-class railway carriages and in those old lumbering buses that go from one small dusty town to another and are loaded with too many people inside and with too much scruffy baggage on top. At the end of my journeys, I emerged soaked in perspiration, soot and dirt. I ate anything anywhere and always like everyone else with my fingers (I became good at that) – thick, half-raw chapattis from wayside stalls and little messes of lentils and vegetables served on a leaf, all the food the poor eat; sometimes if I didn’t have anything, other people would share with me from out of their bundles. Henry, who had the usual phobia about bugs, said I would kill myself eating that way. But nothing ever happened. Once, in a desert fort in Rajasthan, I got very thirsty and asked the old caretaker to pull some water out of an ancient disused well for me. It was brown and sort of foul-smelling, and maybe there was a corpse in the well, who knows. But I was thirsty so I drank it, and still nothing happened.

  People always speak to you in India, in buses and trains and on the streets, they want to know all about you and ask you a lot of personal questions. I didn’t speak much Hindi, but somehow we always managed, and I didn’t mind answering all those questions when I could. Women quite often used to touch me, run their hands over my skin just to feel what it was like I suppose, and they specially liked to touch my hair which is long and blonde. Sometimes I had several of them lifting up strands of it at the same time, one pulling this way and another that way and they would exchange excited comments and laugh and scream a lot; but in a nice way, so I couldn’t help but laugh and scream with them. And people in India are so hospitable. They’re always saying, ‘Please come and stay in my house’, perfect strangers that happen to be sitting near you on the train. Sometimes, if I didn’t have any plans or if it sounded as if they might be living in an interesting place, I’d say ‘all right thanks’, and I’d go along with them. I had some interesting adventures that way.

  I might as well say straight off that many of these adventures were sexual. Indian men are very, very keen to sleep with foreign girls. Of course men in other countries are also keen to sleep with girls, but there’s something specially frenzied about Indian men when they approach you. Frenzied and at the same time shy. You’d think that with all those ancient traditions they have – like the Kama Sutra, and the sculptures showing couples in every kind of position – you’d think that with all that behind them they’d be very highly skilled, but they’re not. Just the opposite. Middle-aged men get as excited as a fifteen-year-old boy, and then of course they can’t wait, they jump and before you know where you are, in a great rush, it’s all over. And when it’s over, it’s over, there’s nothing left. Then they’re only concerned with getting away as soon as possible before anyone can find them out (they’re always scared of being found out). There’s no tenderness, no interest at all in the other person as a person; only the same kind of curiosity that there is on the buses and the same sort of questions are asked, like are you married, any children, why no children, do you like wearing our Indian dress . . . There’s one question though that’s not asked on the buses but that always inevitably comes up during sex, so that you learn to wait for it: always, at the moment of mounting excitement, they ask, ‘How many men have you slept with?’ and it’s repeated over and over, ‘How many? How many?’ and then they shout ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ and ‘Bitch!’ – always that one word which seems to excite them more than any other, to call you that is the height of their lovemaking, it’s the last frenzy, the final outrage: ‘Bitch!’ Sometimes I couldn’t stop myself but had to burst out laughing. I didn’t like sleeping with all these people, but I felt I had to. I felt I was doing good, though I don’t know why, I couldn’t explain it to myself. Only one of all those men ever spoke to me: I mean the way people having sex together are supposed to speak, coming near each other not only physically but also wanting to show each other what’s deep inside them. He was a middle-aged man, a fellow-passenger on a bus, and we got talking at one of the stops the bus made at a wayside tea stall. When he found I was on my way to X—— and didn’t have anywhere to stay, he said, as so many have said before him, ‘Please come and stay in my house.’ And I said, as I had often said before, ‘All right.’ Only when we got there he didn’t take me to his house but to a hotel. It was a very poky place in the bazaar and we had to grope our way up a steep smelly stone staircase and then there was a tiny room with just one string cot and an earthenware water jug in it. He made a joke about there being only one bed. I was too tired to care much about anything. I only wanted to get it over with quickly and go to sleep. But afterwards I found it wasn’t possible to go to sleep because there was a lot of noise coming up from the street
where all the shops were still open though it was nearly midnight. People seemed to be having a good time and there was even a phonograph playing some cracked old love song. My companion also couldn’t get to sleep: he left the bed and sat down on the floor by the window and smoked one cigarette after the other. His face was lit up by the light coming in from the street outside and I saw he was looking sort of thoughtful and sad, sitting there smoking. He had rather a good face, strong bones but quite a feminine mouth and of course those feminine suffering eyes that most Indians have.

  I went and sat next to him. The window was an arch reaching down to the floor so that I could see out into the bazaar. It was quite gay down there with all the lights; the phonograph was playing from the cold-drink shop and a lot of people were standing around there having highly coloured pop drinks out of bottles; next to it was a shop with pink and blue brassieres strung up on a pole. On top of the shops were wrought-iron balconies on which sat girls dressed up in tatty georgette and waving peacock fans to keep themselves cool. Sometimes men looked up to talk and laugh with them and they talked and laughed back. I realized we were in the brothel area; probably the hotel we were in was a brothel too.

  I asked, ‘Why did you bring me here?’

  He answered, ‘Why did you come?’

  That was a good question. He was right. But I wasn’t sorry I came. Why should I be? I said, ‘It’s all right. I like it.’

  He said, ‘She likes it,’ and he laughed. A bit later he started talking: about how he had just been to visit his daughter who had been married a few months before. She wasn’t happy in her in-laws’ house, and when he said goodbye to her she clung to him and begged him to take her home. The more he reasoned with her, the more she cried, the more she clung to him. In the end he had had to use force to free himself from her so that he could get away and not miss his bus. He felt very sorry for her, but what else was there for him to do? If he took her away, her in-laws might refuse to have her back again and then her life would be ruined. And she would get used to it, they always did; for some it took longer and was harder, but they all got used to it in the end. His wife too had cried a lot during the first year of marriage.

  I asked him whether he thought it was good to arrange marriages that way, and he looked at me and asked how else would you do it? I said something about love and it made him laugh and he said that was only for the films. I didn’t want to defend my point of view; in fact, I felt rather childish and as if he knew a lot more about things than I did. He began to get amorous again, and this time it was much better because he wasn’t so frenzied and I liked him better by now too. Afterwards he told me how when he was first married, he and his wife had shared a room with the whole family (parents and younger brothers and sisters), and whatever they wanted to do, they had to do very quickly and quietly for fear of anyone waking up. I had a strange sensation then, as if I wanted to strip off all my clothes and parade up and down the room naked. I thought of all the men’s eyes that follow one in the street, and for the first time it struck me that the expression in them was like that in the eyes of prisoners looking through their bars at the world outside; and then I thought maybe I’m that world outside for them – the way I go here and there and talk and laugh with everyone and do what I like – maybe I’m the river and trees they can’t have where they are. Oh, I felt so sorry, I wanted to do so much. And to make a start, I flung myself on my companion and kissed and hugged him hard, I lay on top of him, I smothered him, I spread my hair over his face because I wanted to make him forget everything that wasn’t me – this room, his daughter, his wife, the women in georgette sitting on the balconies – I wanted everything to be new for him and as beautiful as I could make it. He liked it for a while but got tired quite quickly, probably because he wasn’t all that young any more.

  It was shortly after this encounter that I met Ahmed. He was eighteen years old and a musician. His family had been musicians as long as anyone could remember and the alley they lived in was full of other musicians, so that when you walked down it, it was like walking through a magic forest all lit up with music and sounds. Only there wasn’t anything magic about the place itself which was very cramped and dirty; the houses were so old that, whenever there were heavy rains, one or two of them came tumbling down. I was never inside Ahmed’s house or met his family – they’d have died of shock if they had got to know about me – but I knew they were very poor and scraped a living by playing at weddings and functions. Ahmed never had any money, just sometimes if he was lucky he had a few coins to buy his betel with. But he was cheerful and happy and enjoyed everything that came his way. He was married, but his wife was too young to stay with him and after the ceremony she had been sent back to live with her father who was a musician in another town.

  When I first met Ahmed, I was staying in a hostel attached to a temple which was free of charge for pilgrims; but afterwards he and I wanted a place for us to go to, so I wired Henry to send me some more money. Henry sent me the money, together with a long complaining letter which I didn’t read all the way through, and I took a room in a hotel. It was on the outskirts of town which was mostly waste land except for a few houses, and some of these had never been finished. Our hotel wasn’t finished either because the proprietor had run out of money, and now it probably never would be for the place had turned out to be a poor proposition, it was too far out of town and no one ever came to stay there. But it suited us fine. We had this one room, painted bright pink and quite bare except for two pieces of furniture – a bed and a dressing-table, both of them very shiny and new. Ahmed loved it, he had never stayed in such a grand room before; he bounced up and down on the bed which had a mattress, and stood looking at himself from all sides in the mirror of the dressing-table.

  I never in all my life was so gay with anyone the way I was with Ahmed. I’m not saying I never had a good time at home; I did. I had a lot of friends before I married Henry and we had parties and danced and drank and I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t like with Ahmed because no one was ever as carefree as he was, as light and easy and just ready to play and live. At home we always had our problems, personal ones of course, but on top of those there were universal problems – social, and economic, and moral, we really cared about what was happening in the world around us and in our own minds, we felt a responsibility towards being here alive at this point in time and wanted to do our best. Ahmed had no thoughts like that at all; there wasn’t a shadow on him. He had his personal problems from time to time, and when he had them, he was very downcast and sometimes he even cried. But they weren’t anything really very serious – usually some family quarrel, or his father was angry with him – and they passed away, blew away like a breeze over a lake and left him sunny and sparkling again. He enjoyed everything so much: not only our room, and the bed and the dressing-table, and making love, but so many other things like drinking Coca-Cola and spraying scent and combing my hair and my combing his; and he made up games for us to play like indoor cricket with a slipper for a bat and one of Henry’s letters rolled up for a ball. He taught me how to crack his toes, which is such a great Indian delicacy, and yelled with pleasure when I got it right; but when he did it to me, I yelled with pain so he stopped at once and was terribly sorry. He was very considerate and tender. No one I’ve ever known was as sensitive to my feelings as he was. It was like an instinct with him, as if he could feel right down into my heart and know what was going on there; and without ever having to ask anything or my ever having to explain anything, he could sense each change of mood and adapt himself to it and feel with it. Henry would always have to ask me, ‘Now what’s up? What’s the matter with you?’ and when we were still all right with each other, he would make a sincere effort to understand. But Ahmed never had to make an effort, and maybe if he’d had to he wouldn’t have succeeded because it wasn’t ever with his mind that he understood anything, it was always with his feelings. Perhaps that was so because he was a musician and in music everything is beyo
nd words and explanations anyway; and from what he told me about Indian music, I could see it was very, very subtle, there are effects that you can hardly perceive they’re so subtle and your sensibilities have to be kept tuned all the time to the finest, finest point; and perhaps because of that the whole of Ahmed was always at that point and he could play me and listen to me as if I were his sarod.

  After some time we ran out of money and Henry wouldn’t send any more, so we had to think what to do. I certainly couldn’t bear to part with Ahmed, and in the end I suggested he’d better come back to Delhi with me and we’d try and straighten things out with Henry. Ahmed was terribly excited by the idea; he’d never been to Delhi and was wild to go. Only it meant he had to run away from home because his family would never have allowed him to go, so one night he stole out of the house with his sarod and his little bundle of clothes and met me at the railway station. We reached Delhi the next night, tired and dirty and covered with soot the way you always get in trains here. When we arrived home, Henry was giving a party; not a big party, just a small informal group sitting around chatting. I’ll never forget the expression on everyone’s faces when Ahmed and I came staggering in with our bundles and bedding. My blouse had got torn in the train all the way down the side, and I didn’t have a safety pin so it kept flapping open and unfortunately I didn’t have anything underneath. Henry’s guests were all looking very nice, the men in smart bush-shirts and their wives in little silk cocktail dresses; and although after the first shock they all behaved very well and carried on as if nothing unusual had happened, still it was an awkward situation for everyone concerned.