Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Michael never made arrangements to meet people again, because he knew he always would. They covered vast tracts of the earth, but they traveled within a narrow route of the same sort of cheap hotels, beaches, and campsites, and spent many nights on the floors of airport lounges or bus terminals. It was in some such place that Michael expected to meet Crishi and his gang again someday; but when he did meet him, it was somewhere so entirely different that he didn’t recognize him. It was in Berkeley Square, in London; Crishi was emerging from an art dealer’s and about to step into a limousine. It was he who recognized Michael; that wasn’t difficult because in those days Michael wore the same sort of clothes wherever he was—jeans, kurta, steel bangle, and one earring. But Crishi himself was transformed, in a velvet jacket and silk scarf tucked into his shirt. He was cordial to Michael but was in a hurry; he offered him a ride, which Michael refused because he was staying nearby. “Where?” Crishi asked. Michael muttered—he hated it to be known that he was staying at the embassy. But Crishi got it out of him, and also that the ambassador was a family friend, and after that everything else about our family; so then Crishi became cordial in a different way, and he invited Michael to come and visit him; and that was how Michael got involved with them all—that is, with the Rawul and Rani and their entourage, and with their Fourth World movement.

  In order to find out more about this movement, I began to join the group under the tree when the Rawul gave his evening talks. It took me some time to get used to his accent. He spoke the way Englishmen themselves no longer speak—in a very upper-class drawly way that made him sound like a stage Englishman. In appearance he was plump and pampered, not a bit like a leader of a new world or redeemer of the old. All the same, these talks under the tree were inspiring. The setting may have had something to do with it—those beautiful summer evenings with the sky gold from the sun melting into it, and behind us the pillared house dark in shadow, and in front of us the lake illuminated by the sunset and reflecting, like an underwater painting, the woods on the opposite bank and the deer that came out to drink. The members of the Rawul’s entourage—those pale messengers—sat enthralled, though they must have heard him a thousand times. Their enthusiasm and reverence affected everyone else—Lindsay and Jean and even Mrs. Schwamm, who came out of her kitchen to listen to the Rawul; and when he had finished, she went back and clattered among her pots and pans, muttering “Good heavens, good heavens,” in sheer wonder at what she had heard. It was then I realized that everyone—everyone in the world, maybe, and not only Michael and me—would like to have something better than they had, and when it was offered to them, were ready to rise to heights one would not have suspected.

  Even Lindsay, our mother—I say “even” because she had never before in her life shown interest in anything except having a good time. When she was young, she had liked to dance and go to parties and sail and ski and whatever else girls like her did. When she got older, she couldn’t understand why things weren’t fun anymore; and before she met Jean, it had been so tough for her that she had been trying out psychiatrists and psychotherapists and people like that. But with the Rawul everything promised to start again—the fun, that is—and she really liked having those people there and the activity; and there was no doubt that the Rawul and Rani were what she called “nice people.” However small his kingdom, the Rawul really was a king—descended, as he explained in his evening talks, from a long line of kings; and the Rani was his consort. Lindsay was fascinated by the Rani—by her wonderful Paris clothes, and her Oriental jewelry, as well as her manner, which was mostly languid and indifferent. She often absented herself from the evening talks, and also from the terrific meals that Mrs. Schwamm cooked with such enthusiasm and the Rawul ate with such relish. The Rani stayed a lot in her room—the master bedroom at the top of the double staircase allotted to her and the Rawul—and when she emerged, she didn’t talk much but yawned often as she moved around in that gliding walk of hers, with her full hips oscillating in silk. Her eyes tended to be half closed, which made her look lazy but also as if she were awaiting what was going to happen, biding her time. Crishi’s eyes gave the same impression—as of someone, though more a magnificent animal than a person, half asleep and yet at the same time alert, and watching.

  Crishi, it was generally understood, was the Rawul and Rani’s adopted son. The Rawul may have been old enough to be his father, but the Rani was certainly not more than a few years, at the most eight or ten, older than Crishi. No one ever went to much trouble to explain the relationship of the three of them, so that anyone who cared to speculate on it was free to do so. Crishi spent a lot of time locked up either with both of them, or with the Rani alone, in their bedroom; but of course they did have a great deal to discuss, all sorts of secret matters of high state—after all, they were leading a world movement; that was what was important, not the personal relationship there might or might not be between them.

  However, personal relationships did play an enormous part within their entourage. The air around us became charged with strong feelings, emanating from an unlikely source: from the pale, devoted followers. One would have thought that they had too selflessly immersed themselves in their cause, and besides, were too anemic to be the victims of such passions. But as the days passed, it became clear that jealousy and rivalry raged among them. It was a matter of the highest importance who slept outside the master bedroom, who went in and out with messages, who was allowed to carry out the most personal duties. From behind the closed doors of the attic rooms, into which they had been crammed, came sounds of quarreling; sometimes a girl could be seen running up the stairs with a handkerchief pressed to her face; wandering around the grounds, one was very likely to come across a solitary figure seated in tears by the side of the lake, or lying face down under a tree in what used to be the apple orchard. I began to realize that involvement in a higher cause did not so much still the lower passions as stir them up and bring them to a pitch.

  Although I was at that time indifferent to the Rawul and Rani, and Crishi, to say nothing of their movement, I was not immune to the tense atmosphere in the house. That was because Michael had become a part of it. He was deeply involved in the movement—he really believed in it; he was also deeply interested in Crishi. Both these states of mind were new in Michael; I had never before seen him anything but detached, calm, his own person totally. It was the way we both tried to be. Although we were twins, we didn’t look that much alike—Michael was very fair and I had dark hair—but there must have been some other sort of close resemblance because people always commented on it. Except with each other, neither of us talked much, or laughed very easily; this may partly have been in reaction to our parents, who did a lot of both. People called us aloof—well, we never put ourselves out to make friends, preferring to be either alone or with each other. Certainly neither of us was the type to join a movement or follow a leader of any kind; we would have been the last people to do that. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in anything—we did: but it wasn’t ever anything you could share with outsiders, only with each other, who thought and felt the same. For us, believing was something you had to do for yourself—find for yourself—test out for yourself—and not be influenced by anything or anyone outside. Perhaps it was a quest for truth, though we never called it that: We didn’t call it anything but we knew what we meant. Mostly we knew what it wasn’t, and we used the word neti, the way other people use the word phony. “Oh no, neti,” we would tell each other—about a book, a person, a thought, a situation. When something didn’t come up to our standard, it was neti: not right, not Om, not Tao, not the real thing; phony. I would have said straight off that the Rawul’s movement and his entourage, if not the Rawul himself, were neti, but for once, for the first time, Michael did not agree with me.

  Here I might as well start talking about Crishi. Only where to start? At that time I saw him so differently. I don’t suppose I ever did see him really objectively, because even then, at the beginning,
when my own feelings weren’t involved, Michael’s were. Of course Michael had had special friendships before; I was used to that, and it didn’t bother me. Although these friendships were usually intense, it was only physically, so that when that was over, it was all over and Michael was himself, and mine, again. But with Crishi I wasn’t even sure that it was physical, though they did the usual romantic things, like taking the boat out on the lake by moonlight, or swimming nude by the waterfall, or if anyone had lit a bonfire they would sit by it and poke around in the embers long after everyone else had gone to bed. But whereas Michael was tense and trembly, Crishi seemed too in control of himself, and of Michael, to be much affected; as if he could take it or leave it, whereas Michael couldn’t leave it at all. If at any time during the day he didn’t know exactly where Crishi was, he would go quite wild and walk around asking everyone, and sometimes people told him lies to save his feelings. Michael knew perfectly well—it may have been partly why he was so desperate—that Crishi was involved with girls in the entourage. And of course there was the Rani, with whom he was very intimate—neither of them made any secret of that, and when they presented each other as adopted mother and son, it was in an indifferent, believe-it-or-not way. Michael himself tried hard to believe it. Once, when I commented that she seemed awfully young to be Crishi’s mother, Michael got quite worked up: “Young? She? She’s as old as Medusa.” “How old is Medusa?” When Michael frowned at this would-be joke, I said, trying to sound casual the way I always did when I mentioned him: “How old is Crishi?” Michael shrugged: “Obviously years younger than she is. Years and years,” he said fiercely.

  It was hard to tell how old Crishi was; and even harder when you knew everything he had done and everywhere he had been, so that on calculating you could only wonder “Surely he can’t be that old?” He looked, at first sight, quite young. That may have been because he was so lithe and quick and always on the go, you could hardly keep up with him the way he ran around, and always in a terrifically good mood. It was only when you looked closer and saw the corners of his mouth and the skin around his eyes—but of course then, at the beginning, I never did look closer; that came later. And it was as difficult to make out his nationality as his age. His way of speech was a strange mixture—sometimes there was a slight Oriental lilt, and he used the usual international Americanisms; but his most basic accent was the sort of Cockney that was fashionable at the time, having supplanted the English the Rawul had learned to speak at Harrow. His appearance too was ambiguous: At first sight, he might have been an Italian or a Spaniard, but then there were his slightly slanted eyes, his double-jointed fingers, his very slim ankles, and feet so narrow that he had difficulty getting shoes to fit him.

  Besides myself, the other person in the house who wasn’t 100 percent enthusiastic about our guests was Jean. In her case, it was mostly jealousy over Lindsay and the quiet, secluded life they had made for themselves. Or rather, Jean had made—she was always very much in charge, and though it was Lindsay’s house, she was glad to have someone else look after it. Jean used to run a successful realty business, which she had sold at a good price after deciding to devote herself to Lindsay. She was an excellent businesswoman, hearty and one of the boys in her dealings with the world, but in her private relations she was ultrasensitive and very vulnerable and feminine inside her shapeless unfeminine body. Before they had settled down together as a more or less married couple, she and Lindsay used to have terrible fights. Many of them were about Mrs. Schwamm, who was jealous of Jean’s position in the house and treated her as a usurper. In the end, it became obvious that one of them had to go. By then Lindsay had found Jean suited her so well, in both her emotional and her domestic life, that she had no difficulty deciding between them, though Mrs. Schwamm had been her mother’s cook and had gone with Lindsay on her marriage because she was so devoted to her. One thing about Lindsay—she appeared to be very dithering, she was very dithering, but she never hesitated to get rid of people when necessary. But now of course Mrs. Schwamm was back again and in charge of the kitchen and Jean had to put up with her. And more, much more, she had to put up with Lindsay’s interest in the movement in general and the Rani in particular. And just as Michael used to go around wildly, even shamelessly, asking “Where’s Crishi?” so Jean could be observed with the same look of anguish on her face, stopping people to ask “Have you seen Lindsay?”

  THEN one day Lindsay decided to donate Propinquity. She announced this quite casually and in public, in the course of the Rawul’s evening talk under the tree. He had been mentioning the various centers of the movement that had already been established. Besides the one in his own kingdom—the cradle of the movement as well as, so we were often told, of civilization—there were centers in Sussex, England, at Fontainebleau outside Paris, on a baronial estate in Holland, and one on Columbus Avenue in New York. And suddenly Lindsay said “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have one here?” I’m sure she spoke without premeditation—she never did premediate anything, I don’t think she was capable of it. With her it was always “wouldn’t it be fun to—” and it might be anything like a trip to the city or to fly to a party in Dallas. I suspect that it was her approach to her love affairs, when she first decided to sleep with someone (“wouldn’t it be fun to—?”). And it always came out in a bright, little-girl voice, and then, if her suggestion wasn’t immediately taken up with enthusiasm, her face would fall and she urged “But why not?” That was what happened this time too. When her impulsive offer of the house was received in silence—and it was a very heavy silence—she looked from face to face and said “But why not?” in a hurt voice.

  No one answered, for differing reasons. The Rawul had flushed with pleasure; but as he was a modest and reticent man, he must have felt it to be indelicate to rush forward and accept such a handsome gift. The Rani played with her bracelets; there was an aloof little smile on her face, and what I noticed most was the way she was refusing to meet anyone’s glance. Crishi too was silent, but his eyes flashed like a person who unexpectedly gets something that he wants. He looked around the circle at Michael, and at me. I saw that Michael met his glance; and when Lindsay asked for the third time “But why not?” Michael answered her, “Yes why not.” And then everyone was looking at me, in their different ways.

  From that time on they got to work on me, again in their different ways. Jean started it, maybe because she was the one who felt the strongest. That night she stood waiting for me outside Lindsay’s bedroom door; “Come in here,” she said. Lindsay was lying with her head buried in the pillows, the way she did when anyone involved her in an argument, not wanting to hear or see anything. Jean said “You’re not going to go along with this nonsense, are you, Harriet?” I said “I don’t want to.” “No I should say not,” Jean said grimly. She looked at Lindsay’s slender form on the bed. “Turn around,” she said. Lindsay didn’t stir. I could see that Jean was tempted to grab hold of her and make her turn around. I had witnessed physical fights between them before and had not liked them; so I really wanted to get out. But Jean looked at me with her pathetic dog eyes: “Try and talk some sense into your mother, if you can, Harriet.”

  Then Lindsay tossed around to face us: “That’s all I ever hear from you, Jean. Sense. Good sense. Common sense. I despise common sense.”

  “Listen to her,” Jean said to me. “Now we are too mundane for her. She wants to get onto a higher plane: a world movement, no less.”

  “You’ve been as involved as the rest of us,” Lindsay said.

  “Involved with who?”

  “With who: That’s all you can ever think of. Everything with you is personal; as if nothing exists beyond your own little ego. You can’t—rise.”

  She made a vague movement with her hand, indicating some lofty height to rise to. It made me laugh—the idea of Lindsay rising. Jean laughed too. Lindsay spoke to both of us in a genuinely hurt voice: “I thought we were all agreed that it was something extraordinary. And isn’t it about
time that there was a Fourth World—that all these different elements got together—I mean us here, with all our—materialism,” she said, gesturing at her crowded dressing table, “and they with their—”

  “Oh yes,” Jean said. “They’re very spiritual. Especially her; that Rani. With all her spiritual jewelry.”

  “It’s absolutely no use talking to you, Jean Potts. I’m not going to say another word.”

  There was something so appealing in the way she clamped her pretty lips together that Jean couldn’t resist sitting beside her on the edge of the bed. Lindsay went on pouting—but flirtatiously now, in the reproachful little-girl way that she knew would get her anything she wanted from Jean; and Jean, her voice gruff with tenderness, said “I know I’m a bore.”

  “You’re not a bore—but you are so stubborn and contrary. You make me so mad. I want us to do everything together, as a couple, and how can we when you say no to me all the time.”

  Jean brought Lindsay’s hand up to her lips and turned it over and kissed her palm. By this time neither of them cared about me, whether I wanted to donate our house to the Rawul’s movement or not.