Still with her head on her knees, she murmured, “Then what are we going to do?”
“We’ll find something,” he said, her defeat making him strong. “We don’t have to put up with this nonsense. Get rid of all that filthy stuff.” He seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet. When she heard the firm way in which he flushed it away, she raised her head and wiped her eyes with the end of her sari and felt better.
But then it was his responsibility to raise some money to keep them going, and the only way he knew was to borrow from Sunil, as he had done so often over the years. Sunil received him in his Mayfair flat, and Farid looked severely around the place, which was sumptuously furnished with everything that money and bad taste could buy. “What’s that picture?” he said. “Is it new? Oh, my God.”
“Listen, Farid, it’s from a very ritzy gallery in Brook Street,” Sunil said calmly. “It cost me a packet, I can tell you.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted. Except of course when it comes to his friends—then it’s a different story.”
“When have I ever said no?” Sunil said in dull resignation.
It was true, he didn’t often turn down his old friends, but that did not improve Farid’s feelings toward him.
Matters grew worse as the years passed and Sunil went up and Farid down. Farida began to go away for weekends. Farid suspected that she went to meet Sunil, but when he accused her of this she just laughed. What made him think that she would go to Sunil for anything but money, she said. And what made him think Sunil had any time left for her, now that Sunil was what he was and she was—well, she said with a shrug, anyone could see what she was now. Farid stared at her. She was now in her late thirties—they had been struggling along in London for a good fifteen years—and she had grown very thin. Her face, under her lacquered hair, was heavily made up. But beneath it all she was still Farida—just as, he realized, beneath all his bad feeling, and all his anger against her, there remained still the heart, the flower, of love. He kissed her hand and then her wrist, and then the soft skin of her inner arm.
She took advantage of his good mood to murmur that they would have to sell some more jewelry. “I need the money,” she urged. “For a new business—no, no, this one’s going to make it for sure, you’ll see. It’s in taxis for tourists.”
“What’s left to sell?” he asked.
She got out her jewel box, which was empty except for the one piece they had agreed never to sell. This was a single large and lustrous pearl in a gold setting. It was said to have been given by the last of the great Mogul emperors to Farida’s great-great-great-grandfather, who had been a nobleman at his court, and it had always been coveted by Sunil, whose own great-great-great-grandfather had been a moneylender’s clerk at the same court. Farida had worn the pearl on her forehead at her wedding, but that time only the bridegroom, Farid, had seen it, for only he was allowed to look under her veil. It was years later, in London, when Sunil caught his first sight of it. This was at a reception he was giving for an American buyer of table linen, to which Farida had come all dressed up. She was trying to start a business in batik table mats with matching napkins, and so was out to make an impression. Sunil had eyed the ornament, which was on a chain around her neck. When he tried to touch it, she put her hand over it and said, “Not for sale.”
“Let me know when it is,” he said in his phlegmatic voice, which he made even more phlegmatic when he was eager to acquire something at a bargain price.
Farid never knew at what price Sunil finally did acquire this ornament—the money soon vanished anyway in the tourist taxi business. He often wondered what Sunil had done with it. Had he sold it? Kept it? Hung it around the neck of a girl? Sometimes he asked him, but Sunil never let on. Actually, Farid was almost sure that Sunil had locked it away in the deepest and most secret of all his safe-deposit vaults, for Sunil—one had to admit it—recognized a thing of value when he saw it. It was greed, of course, but Farid knew that when it was a question of making money Sunil’s greed could be as subtle and unerring as anyone else’s taste and wisdom.
After several weeks at the holy place, during which he faced her every day, Farid had still not arrived at the expected showdown with Farida. He was even beginning to enjoy his visits to her for their own sake. They became the high point of his day. At first he had stood in line with all the other pilgrims awaiting their turn, but then he noticed that there was a time, just after the midday meal, when no one else was there and even the handmaidens had lain themselves to sleep. Although Farid enjoyed a siesta as much as anyone, one day he spruced himself up a bit, making the most of the strands of hair that lay across the top of his head and smoothing his bush shirt over his stomach. He looked down at his stomach and decided he had seen worse on men his age. Then he hurried—yes, hurried—across the empty compound that separated his quarters from her tree. The sun beat down on him from a fierce white sky, the paving stones burned underfoot, and a hot glare as tangible as glass permeated the air, but Farid hardly noticed. Once he reached his destination, the air felt absolutely different. The shade spread by the tree was as wide and cool as the interior of a shuttered house. The handmaidens lay asleep off to one side of the thick tree trunk, on the other Farida sat reading some ancient text. She was wearing big spectacles to read with but took them off quickly when he arrived. They had begun to have little conversations now.
“Look at you, how hot you are,” she said now, watching him wipe the perspiration from his face and neck.
“Naturally, a person gets hot,” he answered irritably. “Not everyone has the opportunity to sit under a tree all day.”
“At least you should wear a hat.”
“You know I never wear a hat,” he said still impatiently, though he didn’t feel that way at all. It was cool and peaceful under her roof of foliage.
The next day, he set out to find a hat in the little bazaar at the foot of the mountain. He was a well-known figure there by now—he always made friends quickly—and his quest for a solar hat made the shopkeepers smile. They said that only English-style sahibs like himself needed to protect their brains from the good Indian sun. It was not until he came to the end of the row of narrow booths that he discovered what he was looking for among a stock of cotton undervests, bottles of hair oil, and oleographs of gods and saints. As he put on the hat and looked at himself in a little metal mirror, his attention was caught by one of the highly colored pictures—a portrait of a saint that featured its subject against a traditional background of shrines, forests, rivers, and mountain caves. Farid would not have noticed this one except that it bore some resemblance to Farida. He looked closer and then realized that the saint in the picture actually was Farida. He stared at her, and it seemed to him that out of her painted background she stared back at him in the same way she did every day under the tree.
Suddenly he remembered that it was past the hour of his usual visit to her. He paid for his purchase and hurried back through the bazaar and up the path toward her tree. He didn’t even notice the stiff climb, which usually made him pant and stop several times. But when he came within sight of the tree he slowed down. He was approaching from the bazaar instead of from the ashram, and so it happened that he caught sight of Farida half rising from her place to peer anxiously along his usual path. He tiptoed up from behind her. “Were you expecting someone, Madam?” he said suddenly, and when she turned around he swept off his new hat and made a deep bow, at the same time tilting up his face to look into hers. Although she tried to hide her feelings with a frown, he knew that he had caught her out, and that was as satisfying as the showdown he had been hoping for.
For the next few weeks, Farid felt particularly light-hearted and happy. With his solar hat, bush shirt, and an alpenstock he had acquired, he looked every inch a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, but he didn’t feel that way. It seemed to him that he had shaken off that part of his life and was now as much at home with his surroundings as Farida, t
hat he was at one with the little ashram, and with the other pilgrims, the shrines, the trees, the mountain paths, the water springs. He climbed up and down the hillside—a bit out of breath because of his smoking and because of not being very slim (as he politely put it to himself) but nevertheless feeling nimble and agile and certain he could go up as high as he wanted. He never did climb very high but found a small incline a little way up the mountain that flattened out almost into an overlook. He liked to stand there and lean on his alpenstock, surveying the scene and feeling himself part of it. His visits with Farida in the afternoon became longer and more intimate. He sat beside her on the deerskin, and they talked like two people who have always been close to each other. They caught up on the last twenty years—or, rather, he caught up with her; there was nothing he needed to tell her about his years in London. She told him how, after that last scene with him, she had borrowed the fare from Sunil and gone straight back to her parents’ house in Delhi.
“The moment I got there,” she said, “it was as if I’d never been away, never got married, never been to London, never been broke. I did what everyone else did, all the sisters and cousins—went to the club in the evening, played tennis, played bridge, sat on committees to help the poor. Oh, you know your family’s old house next door that was sold? They’d pulled it down and built a block of flats on it. It was sad. Well, everything was sad. Papa got sick and then he died, and just six weeks later Mama died, too. Yes, you know about that. We had to start dividing everything—the furniture and carpets and silver and Mama’s jewelry—and there were such quarrels, you can’t imagine. How can such things happen between brothers and sisters! One day, Roxy and I got into this really awful fight about Mama’s diamond necklace. You remember how fat my sister Roxy always was? Well, she’s ten times fatter now—huge—with a huge face all painted with lipstick and mascara. And when we were tugging at the necklace—she at one end, me at the other, and both of us screaming—I looked into this face of hers and suddenly I thought, my God, that’s me, I’m looking in a mirror. And at the same moment I won the battle and had the necklace in my hand, only now I couldn’t bear even to hold it. I flung it away from me as far as I could, and then I rushed out of the room and out of the house and got into Papa’s old Fiat and drove without stopping—all the way up to Kasauli, you know, to the summer house there. No one had been there for ages, because of the lawsuit about it between Papa and his nephews. Everything inside had been taken away, completely stripped, and in what used to be the dining room there was a dead squirrel, with water dripping on it from a burst pipe. I got back in the Fiat and drove further up, as far as I could go, till I got to the first snow. It was completely silent there and completely bare; there were no birds and nothing growing, nothing at all. The snow sparkled white and the sky sparkled icy blue. The air was so sharp that it was like being inside a crystal. I found a cave in the side of the mountain, and it had icicles festooned around its entrance, as if someone had hung up decorations to welcome me. So I went in.”
That was as far as Farida got in telling her story to Farid. There was a silence, and when he asked, “And then?” she said, “And then I came here.” He never could find the connecting link between the entrance to the cave and this tree where she sat as a saint, with people lining up to see her. Whenever he pressed her for more information, she blushed and glanced down and smiled; she looked exactly the way she had when they were passing from childhood into adolescence and were awakening into new secrets that made him tremble with boldness and her with shyness and shame.
One day, Sunil turned up on the mountain. He came in an air-conditioned limousine driven by a chauffeur. Sunil was wearing a suit of the lightest tropical weight, but this did not prevent him from sweating most disagreeably. Farid felt at a tremendous advantage over him—a feeling that grew as the days passed and Sunil stayed on. For one thing, Sunil never had a private audience with Farida but had to line up with the other pilgrims. Also, the living conditions were not at all what he was used to; instead of occupying a suite in some five-star hotel, he was forced to sleep on a string cot placed beside Farid’s in the whitewashed cell. He could not get used to the plain meals prepared in the ashram kitchens, and when Farid took him to one of the eating stalls in the bazaar he got sick from the kebabs served there. At night he sweated and groaned and suffered tortures from the mosquitoes whining around him, though they never seemed to bother Farid. His air-conditioned limousine stood waiting to take him back down, and the chauffeur grumbled and had to be bribed to stay, but Sunil did not leave. It was almost the way it used to be when they were children and Sunil came to Farida’s birthday parties and stuck on stubbornly even though the other children pricked his balloons and hid his shoes and ate up his chocolate cake.
Of course, it was all for a purpose, a plan, and one night when he couldn’t sleep because of the mosquitoes he woke up Farid and broached it to him.
“She’s wasted up here,” he said.
Farid sat up. “What’s on your mind?” he said.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sunil grumbled. “Instead of sitting under that tree of hers, she could be making a fortune in London. Not to speak of New York.”
“You must be crazy,” Farid said in a shaky voice.
“You’re crazy,” Sunil said. “You and she both. But it’s always the same story with you two. You have absolutely no business sense.”
“Business!” Farid shouted. “What’s she got to do with business! She’s beyond all that now.”
“All right, call it something else then, call it whatever you like. But I’m telling you, she’ll go over big. They’ve never seen anything like her before. There’s money in what she does—money,” he repeated, irritably rubbing his thumb and middle finger together to make his meaning clear.
Sunil settled in. Each day, his car could be seen driving up and down the mountain roads, with Sunil sitting in the back, phlegmatic but confident, picking his teeth. He was setting up everything for Farida’s first public appearances in London; it meant getting a whole organization going, but of course that was the sort of thing he excelled at. He had made an arrangement with the post office in the bazaar to get his international calls through several times a day, and soon a contingent of publicity people arrived—very incongruous Englishmen in Daks slacks and Hush Puppies shoes who moved in on the group under the tree. They shot photographs, made sketches, took the measurements of Farida and the handmaidens, and called everyone “darling” and “angel” in cold, indifferent voices. They did their job and went away. But Sunil stayed on.
Farid sneered at all this, but he was frightened. He knew that Sunil was stupid, but he also knew that the man was capable of pushing and lumbering ahead like an army tank unencumbered by human intelligence. The worst of it was that he seemed to have sold his idea to Farida herself. She was fully persuaded that it was time for a wider, more international audience to be given the benefit of her spirituality, and that Sunil was the man to arrange it. One day when Farid arrived for his own session with her, he found Sunil there before him, sitting on the edge of her deerskin as though he had every right to be there. From then on, he was there every afternoon, and Farid’s blissful tête-à-têtes with Farida were finished. Now the handmaidens no longer slept quietly on the other side of the tree but tripped up and down, primping and preening, studiedly graceful. Farida was different, too. She didn’t lose the serenity that was now an integral part of her personality, like a shawl on a mature and beautiful woman, but she had that small half smile of satisfaction she had always worn when things were going well for her. It made Farid want to slap her. Doesn’t she see, he thought. Doesn’t she know? His anger turned on Sunil, who took no notice of it at all.
Farid stopped going to the tree in the afternoons, and instead began to nap on the cot in his cell. No one seemed to miss him; no message came from Farida to ask where he was. He slept as much as he could. It was the same thing that had happened to him in London, when he didn’t want to get up an
y more, and day turned into night for him, except that now he was dulled only by despair. He didn’t drink here; he didn’t need to. Now he took walks by moonlight, as he used to walk in the daytime. He climbed up to the same incline as before, from where he could look down on Farida’s tree and the bazaar on one side and a steep slope descending into a ravine on another. He wished it would never be day again.
One night, he went to Farida’s tree, descending very carefully, so that no stone might clatter down and make a noise. Everyone was sleeping—Farida on one side of the tree, the handmaidens on the other, on moss. The tree shaded them from the moon except for some silver streaks that spilled through the foliage and covered them as with a veil of finely patterned lace. Farid stood looking down at Farida. It seemed a pity to wake her, and when he did she wasn’t at all pleased. “Is this a time to come visiting?” she said irritably.
“Then when should I come?” Farid said. “With that slob sitting here all afternoon.”
She continued to lie there under her veil of moonlight. Her eyes were open and looking at him. It wasn’t so different from when she used to wake up at night in the other half of their double bed in London and regard him silently and speculatively in the dark. “Move over,” he said suddenly now. Didn’t he have the right? Wasn’t he still her husband? She didn’t argue but made room for him, so that he could nestle beside her. She no longer used the scent, Jolie Madame, she had in London but smelled of something else. Maybe it wasn’t a scent at all but only a fragrance rising from within her. It was somehow strengthened and given body by the racy smell of the deerskin.
East Into Upper East Page 4
