At the End of the Century

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  ‘Four,’ Elizabeth said in a humble voice.

  ‘Four, then. I can hardly be expected to keep count of each wonderful day. Do you want me to speak to him?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘I will, you know. It’s nothing to me. I won’t mince my words.’ She gave a short, harsh laugh, challenging anyone to stop her from speaking out when occasion demanded. Indeed, at the thought of anyone doing so, her face grew red under her crop of grey hair, and a pulse throbbed in visible anger in her tough, tanned neck.

  Elizabeth glanced imploringly towards Babaji. But he was rocking and smiling and looking with tender love at two birds pecking at something on the lawn.

  ‘There are times when I can’t help feeling you’re afraid of him,’ Margaret said. She ignored Elizabeth’s little disclaiming cry of horror. ‘There’s no trust between you, no understanding. And married life is nothing if it’s not based on the twin rocks of trust and understanding.’

  Babaji liked this phrase so much that he repeated it to himself several times, his lips moving soundlessly and his head nodding with approval.

  ‘In everything I did,’ Margaret said, ‘Arthur was with me. He had complete faith in me. And in those days – well.’ She chuckled. ‘A wife like me wasn’t altogether a joke.’

  Her late husband had been a high-up British official, and in those British days he and Margaret had been expected to conform to some very strict social rules. But the idea of Margaret conforming to any rules, let alone those! Her friends nowadays often had a good laugh at it with her, and she had many stories to tell of how she had shocked and defied her fellow-countrymen.

  ‘It was people like you,’ Babaji said, ‘who first extended the hand of friendship to us.’

  ‘It wasn’t a question of friendship, Babaji. It was a question of love.’

  ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘As soon as I came here – and I was only a chit of a girl, Arthur and I had been married just two months – yes, as soon as I set foot on Indian soil, I knew this was the place I belonged. It’s funny, isn’t it? I don’t suppose there’s any rational explanation for it. But then, when was India ever the place for rational explanations?’

  Babaji said with gentle certainty, ‘In your last birth, you were one of us. You were an Indian.’

  ‘Yes, lots of people have told me that. Mind you, in the beginning it was quite a job to make them see it. Naturally, they were suspicious – can you blame them? It wasn’t like today. I envy you girls married to Indians. You have a very easy time of it.’

  Elizabeth thought of the first time she had been taken to stay with Raju’s family. She had met and married Raju in England, where he had gone for a year on a Commonwealth scholarship, and then had returned with him to Delhi; so it was some time before she met his family, who lived about two hundred miles out of Delhi, on the outskirts of a small town called Ankhpur. They all lived together in an ugly brick house, which was divided into two parts – one for the men of the family, the other for the women. Elizabeth, of course, had stayed in the women’s quarters. She couldn’t speak any Hindi and they spoke very little English, but they had not had much trouble communicating with her. They managed to make it clear at once that they thought her too ugly and too old for Raju (who was indeed some five years her junior), but also that they did not hold this against her and were ready to accept her, with all her shortcomings, as the will of God. They got a lot of amusement out of her, and she enjoyed being with them. They dressed and undressed her in new saris, and she smiled good-naturedly while they stood round her clapping their hands in wonder and doubling up with laughter. Various fertility ceremonies had been performed over her, and before she left she had been given her share of the family jewellery.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Margaret said, ‘if you’re going to be so slow, I’d rather do them myself.’

  ‘Just these two left,’ Elizabeth said, bending more eagerly over the envelopes she was addressing.

  ‘For all your marriage,’ Margaret said, ‘sometimes I wonder how much you do understand about this country. You live such a closed-in life.’

  ‘I’ll just take these inside,’ Elizabeth said, picking up the envelopes and letters. She wanted to get away, not because she minded being told about her own wrong way of life but because she was afraid Margaret might start talking about Raju again.

  It was cold inside, away from the sun. Margaret’s house was old and massive, with thick stone walls, skylights instead of windows and immensely high ceilings. It was designed to keep out the heat in summer, but it also sealed in the cold in winter and became like some cavernous underground fortress frozen through with the cold of earth and stone. A stale smell of rice, curry and mango chutney was chilled into the air.

  Elizabeth put the letters on Margaret’s work table, which was in the drawing-room. Besides the drawing-room, there was a dining-room, but every other room was a bedroom, each with its dressing-room and bathroom attached. Sometimes Margaret had to put as many as three or four visitors into each bedroom, and on one occasion – this was when she had helped to organize a conference on Meditation as the Modern Curative – the drawing- and dining-rooms too had been converted into dormitories, with string cots and bedrolls laid out end to end. Margaret was not only an energetic and active person involved in many causes, but she was also the soul of generosity, ever ready to throw open her house to any friend or acquaintance in need of shelter. She had thrown it open to Elizabeth and Raju three years ago, when they had had to vacate their rooms almost overnight because the landlord said he needed the accommodation for his relatives. Margaret had given them a whole suite – a bedroom and dressing-room and bathroom – to themselves and they had had all their meals with her in the big dining-room, where the table was always ready laid with white crockery plates, face down so as not to catch the dust, and a thick white tablecloth that got rather stained towards the end of the week. At first, Raju had been very grateful and had praised their hostess to the skies for her kind and generous character. But as the weeks wore on, and every day, day after day, two or three times a day, they sat with Margaret and whatever other guests she had round the table, eating alternately lentils and rice or string-beans with boiled potatoes and beetroot salad, with Margaret always in her chair at the head of the table talking inexhaustibly about her activities and ideas – about Indian spirituality and the Mutiny and village uplift and the industrial revolution – Raju, who had a lot of ideas of his own and rather liked to talk, began to get restive. ‘But madam, madam,’ he would frequently say, half-rising in his chair in his impatience to interrupt her, only to have to sit down again, unsatisfied, and continue with his dinner, because Margaret was too busy with her own ideas to have time to take in his.

  Once he could not restrain himself. Margaret was talking about – Elizabeth had even forgotten what it was – was it the first Indian National Congress? At any rate, she said something that stirred Raju to such disagreement that this time he did not restrict himself to the hesitant appeal of ‘madam’ but said out loud for everyone to hear, ‘Nonsense, she is only talking nonsense.’ There was a moment’s silence; then Margaret, sensible woman that she was, shut her eyes as a sign that she would not hear and would not see, and, repeating the sentence he had interrupted more firmly than before, continued her discourse on an even keel. It was the other two or three people sitting with them round the table – a Buddhist monk with a large shaved skull, a welfare worker and a disciple of the Gandhian way of life wearing nothing but the homespun loincloth in which the Mahatma himself had always been so simply clad – it was they who had looked at Raju, and very, very gently one of them had clicked his tongue.

  Raju had felt angry and humiliated, and afterwards, when they were alone in their bedroom, he had quarrelled about it with Elizabeth. In his excitement, he raised his voice higher than he would have if he had remembered that they were in someone else’s house, and the noise of this must have disturbed Margaret, who suddenly stood
in the doorway, looking at them. Unfortunately, it was just at the moment when Raju, in his anger and frustration, was pulling his wife’s hair, and they both stood frozen in this attitude and stared back at Margaret. The next instant, of course, they had collected themselves, and Raju let go of Elizabeth’s hair, and she pretended as best she could that all that was happening was that he was helping her comb it. But such a feeble subterfuge would not do before Margaret’s penetrating eye, which she kept fixed on Raju, in total silence, for two disconcerting minutes; then she said, ‘We don’t treat English girls that way,’ and withdrew, leaving the door open behind her as a warning that they were under observation. Raju shut it with a vicious kick. If they had had anywhere else to go, he would have moved out that instant.

  Raju never came to see Margaret now. He was a proud person, who would never forget anything he considered a slight to his honour. Elizabeth always came on her own, as she had done today, to visit her friend. She sighed now as she arranged the letters on Margaret’s work table; she was sad that this difference had arisen between her husband and her only friend, but she knew that there was nothing she could do about it. Raju was very obstinate. She shivered and rubbed the tops of her arms, goose-pimpled with the cold in that high, bleak room, and returned quickly to the veranda, which was flooded and warm with afternoon sun.

  Babaji and Margaret were having a discussion on the relative merits of the three ways towards realization. They spoke of the way of knowledge, the way of action and that of love. Margaret maintained that it was a matter of temperament, and that while she could appreciate the beauty of the other two ways, for herself there was no path nor could there ever be but that of action. It was her nature. ‘Of course it is,’ Babaji said. ‘And God bless you for it.’

  ‘Arthur used to tease me. He’d say, “Margaret was born to right all the wrongs of the world in one go”. But I can’t help it. It’s not in me to sit still when I see things to be done.’

  ‘Babaji,’ said Elizabeth, laughing, ‘once I saw her – it was during the monsoon, and the river had flooded and the people on the bank were being evacuated. But it wasn’t being done quickly enough for Margaret! She waded into the water and came back with someone’s tin trunk on her head. All the people shouted, “Memsahib, Memsahib! What are you doing!” but she didn’t take a bit of notice. She waded right back in again and came out with two rolls of bedding, one under each arm.’

  Elizabeth went pink with laughter, and with pleasure and pride, at recalling this incident. Margaret pretended to be angry and gave her a playful slap, but she could not help smiling, while Babaji clasped his hands in joy and opened his mouth wide in silent, ecstatic laughter.

  Margaret shook her head with a last fond smile. ‘Yes, but I’ve got into the most dreadful scrapes with this nature of mine. If I’d been born with an ounce more patience, I’d have been a pleasanter person to deal with and life could have been a lot smoother all round. Don’t you think so?’

  She looked at Elizabeth, who said, ‘I love you just the way you are.’

  But a moment later, Elizabeth wished she had not said this. ‘Yes,’ Margaret took her up, ‘that’s the trouble with you. You love everybody just the way they are.’ Of course she was referring to Raju. Elizabeth twisted her hands in her lap. These hands were large and bony and usually red, although she was otherwise a pale and rather frail person.

  The more anyone twisted and squirmed, the less inclined was Margaret to let them off the hook. Not because this afforded her any pleasure but because she felt that facts of character must be faced just as resolutely as any other kinds of fact. ‘Don’t think you’re doing anyone a favour,’ she said, ‘by being so indulgent towards their faults. Quite on the contrary. And especially in marriage,’ she went on unwaveringly. ‘It’s not mutual pampering that makes a marriage, but mutual trust.’

  ‘Trust and understanding,’ Babaji said.

  Elizabeth knew that there was not much of these in her marriage. She wasn’t even sure how much Raju earned in his job at the municipality (he was an engineer in the sanitation department), and there was one drawer in their bedroom whose contents she didn’t know, for he always kept it locked and the key with him.

  ‘I’ll lend you a wonderful book,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s called Truth in the Mind, and it’s full of the most astounding insight. It’s by this marvellous man who founded an ashram in Shropshire. Shafi!’ She called suddenly for the servant, but of course he couldn’t hear, because the servants’ quarters were right at the back, and the old man now spent most of his time there, sitting on a bed and having his legs massaged by a granddaughter.

  ‘I’ll call him,’ Elizabeth said, and got up eagerly.

  She went back into the stone-cold house and out again at the other end. Here were the kitchen and the crowded servants’ quarters. Margaret could never bear to dismiss anyone, and even the servants who were no longer in her employ continued to enjoy her hospitality. Each servant had a great number of dependants, so this part of the house was a little colony of its own, with a throng of people outside the rows of peeling hutments, chatting or sleeping or quarrelling or squatting on the ground to cook their meals and wash their children. Margaret enjoyed coming out there, mostly to advise and scold – but Elizabeth felt shy, and she kept her eyes lowered.

  ‘Shafi,’ she said, ‘Memsahib is calling you.’

  The old man mumbled furiously. He did not like to have his rest disturbed and he did not like Elizabeth. In fact, he did not like any of the visitors. He was the oldest servant in the house – so old that he had been Arthur’s bearer when Arthur was still a bachelor and serving in the districts, almost forty years ago.

  Still grumbling, he followed Elizabeth back to the veranda. ‘Tea, Shafi!’ Margaret called out cheerfully when she saw them coming.

  ‘Not time for tea yet,’ he said.

  She laughed. She loved it when her servants answered her back; she felt it showed a sense of ease and equality and family irritability, which was only another side of family devotion. ‘What a cross old man you are,’ she said. ‘And just look at you – how dirty.’

  He looked down at himself. He was indeed very dirty. He was unshaven and unwashed, and from beneath the rusty remains of what had once been a uniform coat there peeped out a ragged assortment of grey vests and torn pullovers into which he had bundled himself for the winter.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ Margaret said, ‘that this old scarecrow is a terrible, terrible snob. You know why he doesn’t like you, Elizabeth? Because you’re married to an Indian.’

  Elizabeth smiled and blushed. She admired Margaret’s forthrightness.

  ‘He thinks you’ve let down the side. He’s got very firm principles. As a matter of fact, he thinks I’ve let down the side too. All his life he’s longed to work for a real memsahib, the sort that entertains other memsahibs to tea. Never forgave Arthur for bring home little Margaret.’

  The old man’s face began working strangely. His mouth and stubbled cheeks twitched, and then sounds started coming that rose and fell – now distinct, now only a mutter and a drone – like waves of the sea. He spoke partly in English and partly in Hindi, and it was some time before it could be made out that he was telling some story of the old days – a party at the Gymkhana Club for which he had been hired as an additional waiter. The sahib who had given the party, a Major Waterford, had paid him not only his wages but also a tip of two rupees. He elaborated on this for some time, dwelling on the virtues of Major Waterford and also of Mrs Waterford, a very fine lady who had made her servants wear white gloves when they served at table.

  ‘Very grand,’ said Margaret with an easy laugh. ‘You run along now and get our tea.’

  ‘There was a little missie sahib too. She had two ayahs, and every year they were given four saris and one shawl for the winter.’

  ‘Tea, Shafi,’ Margaret said more firmly, so that the old man, who knew every inflection in his mistress’s voice, saw i
t was time to be off.

  ‘Arthur and I’ve spoiled him outrageously,’ Margaret said. ‘We spoiled all our servants.’

  ‘God will reward you,’ said Babaji.

  ‘We could never think of them as servants, really. They were more our friends. I’ve learned such a lot from Indian servants. They’re usually rogues, but underneath all that they have beautiful characters. They’re very religious, and they have a lot of philosophy – you’d be surprised. We’ve had some fascinating conversations. You ought to keep a servant, Elizabeth – I’ve told you so often.’ When she saw Elizabeth was about to answer something, she said, ‘And don’t say you can’t afford it. Your Raju earns enough, I’m sure, and they’re very cheap.’

  ‘We don’t need one,’ Elizabeth said apologetically. There were just the two of them, and they lived in two small rooms. Sometimes Raju also took it into his head that they needed a servant, and once he had even gone to the extent of hiring an undernourished little boy from the hills. On the second day, however, the boy was discovered rifling the pockets of Raju’s trousers while their owner was having his bath, so he was dismissed on the spot. To Elizabeth’s relief, no attempt at replacing him was ever made.

  ‘If you had one you could get around a bit more,’ Margaret said. ‘Instead of always having to dance attendance on your husband’s mealtimes. I suppose that’s why you don’t want to take those poor little children to Agra?’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ Elizabeth said hopelessly.

  ‘Quite apart from anything else, you ought to be longing to get around and see the country. What do you know, what will you ever know, if you stay in one place all the time?’

  ‘One day you will come and visit me in Almora,’ Babaji said.

  ‘Oh Babaji, I’d love to!’ Elizabeth exclaimed.

  ‘Beautiful,’ he said, spreading his hands to describe it all. ‘The mountains, trees, clouds . . . ’ Words failed him, and he could only spread his hands farther and smile into the distance, as if he saw a beautiful vision there.