Three Continents

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Renée exclaimed impatiently. “Whoever put that in your head—did you?” she turned to Crishi, and back to me: “I suppose you think you’ll have him to yourself up there.” It was Crishi who began to protest—I kept quiet—but she cut him short: “Oh I don’t blame her, I know how it feels to have a horde of people hanging around when you want to be alone with someone. But what to do,” she said to me as to an ally or someone very close. “We have to put up with one another, there’s no other way.”

  Deep in my mind I thought, Oh isn’t there? And at the same moment I caught Crishi’s eye and he seemed to be signaling some similar thought to me. I felt safe, reassured; and that I could leave her to him and it would come out all right for me. They were still sitting side by side, lovingly, on our bed; she was fondling his face as if he were a little boy and she his doting mother: “All because of him,” she said. He lowered his eyes, so sweetly, bashfully, I couldn’t help smiling and neither could she.

  There was a rap on the door—it was Tom come for Robi. We had almost forgotten about Robi; but he was still standing there, waiting to see what was going to be decided about him. “Well—ready?” Tom asked him, in his cheery way; he himself seemed to be ready for his journey with only an old cloth pouch slung across his cassock.

  I think Renée was about to speak—to tell him of a change of plan—but Crishi prevented her. He tried to get up but there she prevented him—if he was embarrassed to be seen sitting so close beside her, she was not; on the contrary, she caught his hand and held it tight, flaunting their close proximity. Tom didn’t look at them but only at Robi: “Ready?” he said again. He saw the bags I had packed and hoisted one, encouraging Robi to try with the other. No one stopped them—I don’t know what secret communication Crishi made to Renée beside him, but she said nothing about a change of plan and only watched the preparation for departure. Tom continued to take no notice of them, but he did of me; with Robi’s suitcase on his shoulder, he looked down and said quite wistfully: “And I can’t persuade you to change your mind?”

  “Look out for him!” cried Renée in a merry mood from the bed. “He’s forever trying to make people change their minds to what he thinks is good for them.”

  “But I don’t succeed very often,” Tom said, speaking to me and not to her, and lingering for my answer to his question.

  “And he never gives up!” Renée continued to taunt him; she seemed to be challenging an old adversary whom she had once defeated so that she felt safe and victorious with him.

  To get away from Tom looming over me, I went to help Robi carry his luggage. But Tom followed me and said “If you leave, Michael will too; he’ll do what you do.”

  “Why should I leave?” I said, busying myself with the luggage to avoid looking at him, or at the couple on the bed. Not that I minded looking at them but I knew he did; I knew he was misinterpreting our whole situation and there was nothing I could do to set him right. I just wanted him to go—take Robi and go!

  But instead of doing that, he put down the suitcase he had hoisted and, pretending to rearrange the luggage, he knelt on the floor and unbuckled the strap I had fastened around Robi’s sleeping bag. I don’t know whether it was the effort of doing that which made his face and balding head flush, or whether it was the effort of staying here where obviously he didn’t want to be. Because if I was impatient for him to take Robi and go, he was perhaps no less so; but being what he was—that is, vowed, I suppose, to duty and sacrifice—he stuck it out with us, on the off-chance of—what? What? Why should he care for me and Michael or what happened to us when he already had Robi, who was at least something to him, since he had accepted him as his brother’s son?

  It was Renée who asked that question: “What is it to you what they do? What any of us do? Why have you selected us for your missionary activities?” Crishi murmured to her, to calm her down; she was seething with excitement. Tom hadn’t yet glanced at her but had his head lowered over the strap he was retightening. Robi stood by him, watching him, as if there were no one else in the room and nothing else were happening here.

  But “Come here!” Renée called to her son. Her voice and its tone of command made him start. Never very quick, he didn’t move at first but kept on standing there; and worse, he didn’t look at Renée but at Tom, as though asking him what he should do.

  “Oh my God can’t you hear me!” cried Renée. “Or has he trained you already to do nothing without his permission?”

  “Come on now, Rani, leave it,” said Crishi and grasped her arm. She shook him off and said “Because he couldn’t turn his brother against me, he’s started in on my son, to get him away from me. And for what, why? What are we to him that he’s so concerned with us?”

  “Obviously,” Crishi said, “since Robi’s his nephew—”

  “Oh obviously,” said Renée; “obviously, obviously.” She made it out to be the best joke she had heard in a long time; she flung back her head and burst out laughing. But it sounded desperate, despairing—was it because of letting go of Robi? Or whatever it was that had happened in the past between her and Rupert and Tom? Or was it something new, some new turn, new fear in her life?

  Crishi was irritated; he hated hysteria above everything. He got up from beside her, and turning his back on all of us, went to the window and pulled the curtains aside. The room had been in the soothing twilight in which we had been asleep—Crishi and I—since dawn. But now everything, including our rumpled bed, was exposed to harsh daylight blaring in through the picture window. The hotel, towering like a ruler’s palace over the surrounding newly built flats, and stalls, and straw huts where the construction workers lived, stood in a very exposed position in that raw, treeless land: so that the light coming through the window, unmediated by anything green or pleasant, seemed to strike straight in from the desert, and was white and laden with dust. We blinked from its impact, and Renée put up her arm to shield her eyes; or was it her whole face she was trying to shield, its beginning signs of age so unfairly exposed? Crishi kept on standing by the window as though he saw something out there more interesting to him than were the rest of us in the room. Renée was half turned toward him, and there was something imploring in her attitude. He never glanced behind, and, intent only on him, Renée didn’t notice that Tom’s gaze was for the first time fixed on her. Like the light striking in through the window, this gaze was unmediated and so perhaps could be interpreted as unmitigated; he had pale, colorless eyes that reflected no judgment of any kind but looked very steadily out of his narrow, hollowed face. Whatever it was they saw in Renée, it made him want to finish this scene and not provoke her anymore by his presence. He said to Robi, standing tiny beside him and holding on to his cassock, “Say good-bye to your mother.” But he had to say it again before Robi let go of him to approach the disheveled figure squatting on the disheveled bed.

  She still had her arm up to shield her from the light and was half turned toward Crishi: and it was some time before she noticed Robi standing before her. When she did, she looked at him as if she had never really seen him before. She cupped his face between her hands; of course this face was very much like Crishi’s—triangular, delicate, with slightly slanted eyes. She said “So you’re going, you’re leaving us, are you?” As usual with her, he held himself rigid, as with an unpredictable animal. She smoothed the hair from his forehead with her large palm; her scarlet nails lingered in his dark hair. “And are you going to be a good boy and do everything your teachers tell you?” she said. Her voice, husky with tenderness, was unfamiliar to him, and not knowing how to respond, he continued to stare at her. This must have irritated her, and though she tried to continue to speak tenderly, there was a sharper edge to her voice: “I hope you’re going to write long letters home and tell us everything you’re doing.” He said “I want to write to my father.” After this declaration, he looked around him, maybe for protection; and finding that Tom had come up very close, he clung to him.

  Renée let him go. Tom be
gan to bustle with the luggage again, picking up most of it himself, and letting Robi carry what he could. Quickly getting into my jeans and shirt, I followed them down the hotel corridor and to the elevator. I was a bit hurt by the way Robi never glanced back for me, any more than for Renée or Crishi, but stuck close to Tom; maybe he was afraid of being left behind. A party of Japanese businessmen got in the elevator with us, separating us, I on one side and Tom with Robi clinging to him on the other. It wasn’t only Robi who had nothing to say to me; Tom didn’t either. I went right out in the street with them, and helped them get into the auto rickshaw that Tom hailed to take them to the station. By this time Robi was quite excited, and when they took off, he waved to me cheerfully, and so did Tom, though both soon turned away. I went back slowly into the hotel, through the revolving door into the artificially cooled and freshened lobby. I had a slight feeling of having been abandoned but it didn’t last long—no longer than it took to get upstairs, back to our room, where Crishi was again on the bed with Renée, holding her in his arms, though not so engrossed in her that he couldn’t acknowledge me over her shoulder, in the amused conspiratorial way he nowadays had with me.

  “YOU can’t do it,” Michael said to me. This was just before the Bari Rani’s biggest party yet, and maybe that is why his words have stayed with me so clearly through the years, though at the time I was too preoccupied to be listening to them very carefully. He went on, “You can’t let another person take you over that way. Even if it’s a good person, and not—” I don’t remember his finishing the sentence. Then he said “Self-surrender is okay, but it has to be to something—” his Adam’s apple worked up and down—“something higher—” he flushed fiercely—“nobler”—he swallowed as if in pain—“of a different quality altogether from what we are.” I didn’t know what he was talking about, or didn’t want to know. Because on the subject of self-surrender—at that time I loved Crishi in such a way that I wasn’t capable of keeping back one ounce of myself but wanted to give myself completely for him: my will, my intelligence, my understanding, everything I was. I’m not saying I’m not guilty but only stating the reason why.

  And so I come to Bari Rani’s big party. It was a very important event, she impressed on all of us—important, that is, for the Rawul’s career. By this time we had got used to the word career, and it no longer sounded odd to us in conjunction with the Rawul. There was a conference of the chief ministers of all the states of India, and Bari Rani wanted to take advantage of the presence of so many VIPs. She hired one of the lawns at the back of the hotel and had a big orange tent put up with carpets and bolsters inside it, and rows of lights, long buffet tables, musicians, and armchairs for the guests who found it difficult to get down on the carpets. These turned out to be more than expected—some were grossly overweight, some suffered from piles, and there were those who didn’t want to be put in an inferior position to the ones favored with armchairs. Bari Rani had gauged the problem almost before it arose and more armchairs were quickly carried down from the hotel. There were plenty of helpers, for besides the hotel staff, Bari Rani had engaged an outside caterer; and the Bhais were there in full force—they had to be, for the Rawul could not fall short of his guests, who had all come with a large retinue of personal assistants and general hangers-on.

  To keep the events of that night straight, I had better record them one by one. The center of activity was inside the tent, where the Rawul was receiving his guests. He stood resplendently by the entrance, and as each VIP came in, he greeted him with that formal, stylized courtesy he had worked up to such perfection—one world power meeting another, making an event that went far beyond the personal to where the fate of nations hung in balance. How often I had seen and admired the Rawul in this role—with Grandfather, with Babaji, even with Tom: but never had the scene been as impressive as it was now. This may have been due to the guests, who, for one thing, were physically as weighty as the Rawul. They wore various forms of national dress—pajamas, kurtas, lungis, dhotis; the thin muslin cloth, starched to perfection by Indian washermen who had done nothing else for generations, showed off the full weight and volume of each chief minister. And besides the physical weight, there was also the moral one—I mean, they were very important, each in his state literally ruling over millions; they had in reality what the Rawul so far had only in his thoughts and dreams.

  The tent was filled to capacity, for besides the chief ministers with their retinue, there were other dignitaries with theirs, and local politicians, and whoever else Bari Rani considered useful to her cause. The serving staff circulated with trays of fruit juice and hors d’oeuvres and carried in the dishes to be placed on the long buffet tables, behind which more attendants stood ready to serve. The tent had begun to heat up, and the electric fans, hanging down among the lights, had been set in motion; along with the air, they circulated the smell of spicy foods and hot breads and pickles, and of heavy bodies lubricated in perfumed oils. The wives sat to one side, and it was the task of Bari Rani and the girls to make what conversation they could with them. I could see them working hard at it—even the girls, who had had to be primed for several days before, were rallying nobly to their parents’ cause. It couldn’t have been easy for them, not even for Bari Rani, for their guests were mostly peasant women with plain manners and plain speech, some of it in a dialect no one could understand. Since there was such a crowd, Bari Rani had given orders that those of us who had no duties inside the tent should stay in attendance outside; I took this to apply to myself, as did Michael. The Bhais squatted at the back of the tent, where they had got up a game of throwing dice among themselves.

  I enjoyed lingering outside and watching the goings-on inside the tent. I ought to say that the weather had changed since our arrival—the crisp North Indian winter had gone, and the air, no longer tangy with the breath of Himalayan snow, was soft and warm and shot through with desert dust, also with waves of some exotic perfume. “What is it?” I had asked Crishi, and he had said “Oh some Oriental creeper the hotel people have planted.” “What’s it called?” “How should I know?” (How indeed? Nothing was further from Crishi’s interests than any kind of flowering natural thing.) The sky shone with more constellations than I had ever seen. It lit up the lawn where the tent was, eclipsing the rows of lights and paper lanterns strung from skinny, newly planted saplings. Beyond the lawn loomed the hulk of the main building, and here the sky was itself eclipsed: for inside all sorts of parties and receptions were going on, and the hotel was afloat like an ocean liner with lights and music streaming from it. Although I was watching the proceedings in the tent, some of my thoughts lay in the direction of the hotel, for Renée was in there, as was Sonya, and maybe Crishi too: For some reason he hadn’t come down for the Rawul’s party.

  I made the mistake of asking Michael why Crishi wasn’t there. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it, for as always nowadays with Crishi, even at the mention of his name, Michael shrugged and turned away his face; and next moment he burst out, “Never mind why he’s not here. Why am I? Or you?”

  A new phalanx of heaped and steaming dishes was carried past us by uniformed hotel bearers, and the Bari Rani appeared at the door of the tent to hurry them up. Before she could go back inside, Michael blocked her way: “What’s the program? What’s going to happen next?” She stared at him blankly, too preoccupied as hostess to quite connect with him. “When’s he going to speak?” Michael went on; and when she still said nothing but tried to push past him to get back to her guests: “Don’t say he’s not going to speak—that this is all—that it’s just an eating and drinking party?”

  She had re-collected herself and tried to soothe him—“Michael dear, not now—this is not the time—”

  “Not the time for him to speak?” Michael took her up. Soft and insinuating, she was stroking his chest; it must have felt like a rock under her hands. “He’s got to speak,” Michael said. “They’re all here, they have to listen to him. He’s been silent too l
ong; bowing and smiling too long.”

  Looking into the tent, I saw that was exactly what the Rawul was doing. He was standing among a group of the chiefest of all the chief ministers. Anyway, they were the most massive—vast men in thin drapery shoveling food into their mouths. Whenever a bearer passed with a dish, the Rawul stopped him and insisted on serving the guests himself, ladling food onto their already overflowing plates, bowing low over them as he did so, coaxing and smiling and putting everyone in a good mood so that bursts of fat laughter rose from that group.

  “See that?” Michael turned to me; and then he said “It’s disgusting,” bringing out the word like a lump from his chest.

  Bari Rani also turned to me—she looked worried, as if she thought he was sick in his mind. Well he wasn’t—I knew that—but he was suffering in both his body and his mind, the way he did when something deeply, deeply affected him. He breathed heavily, the disgust he spoke of suffocating him; his face was contorted with it. It may have been a trivial cause to set him off that way—just a bunch of fat men eating—but I could see how for him it was the culmination of his disappointment.

  “Listen,” he told Bari Rani. He was still barring her way. “If he won’t do it—if he’s not going to speak to them about our movement—and why we’re here—why we’re here!” he repeated, choking on his fury—“if he won’t, I’m going in there and I’ll break it up. I will,” he said. “Don’t think for a moment I wouldn’t.”

  Again she put both her hands on his chest, and now she was barring his way: for he did seem ready to rush in there, maybe to make a speech, or in his fury to brandish his Swiss army knife, snatch dishes and plates, scourge away the guests—Christ among the money changers—both Bari Rani and I knew he might do that; to me he looked stern and ascetic, to her I guess mad.