East Into Upper East

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  “Oh, I would know all right. That’s easy.”

  “Too easy,” put in another brilliant young man (later India’s ambassador to France). “Who was it said, ‘Many people would never have been in love if they hadn’t heard others talk about it’?”

  “That’s utter and complete rubbish,” Gita said, and Ratna felt even more strongly: “It’s horrible. I hate cynicism.”

  Pushpa’s voice was firmly raised again: “And supposing you were what you call in love with the wrong person—someone completely unsuitable? Like an uneducated person, or someone from a different class or caste or a different race?”

  Gita challenged her: “If Kitty fell in love with an Indian—is that what you’re asking?”

  Then Pushpa challenged me: “Would you marry him?”

  “Of course I would. If he asked me.” I laughed away my own embarrassment: “This is purely theoretical—probably I’ll never marry. I’m supposed to be a career woman.”

  “So am I,” said Pushpa. “But I hope and trust I shall also be a good wife and mother.”

  And Gita murmured, “Keep on hoping and trusting till you find some blind fool to ask for you.” Only one or two girls heard her, and it made them titter. Secure in their own beauty, they could afford to be patronizing about Pushpa. She was squat and overweight, and her arduous studying—it was not easy to pass the IAS exam—had weakened her eyesight, so that she was the only one of the girls who had to wear glasses.

  After that one almost romantic moment on the roof of his house, I never again found myself alone with Sanjay. Yet others in our group were not shy about being alone with each other. They even managed to sleep together—making secret sexual arrangements seemed to be almost a tradition among them (and other arrangements too, when a girl got accidentally pregnant). Sanjay was different; there was something aloof about him, as though he were cautiously keeping himself for his future. He was always more than polite to me—tenderly so: he worried about my health, that I shouldn’t eat anything outside or drink unboiled water. “You don’t have the stomach to deal with our stout Indian germs,” he told me (but I never once got sick). When the weather turned in November and we were still sitting out on the lawn, he would hurry inside and get a shawl for me to wear. It irritated Pushpa: “She’s not made of glass,” she said. A little later she herself would start shivering, so that Sanjay had to go in and get another shawl.

  Whenever there was a party, Gita and Sanjay argued about inviting Pushpa. “Why should she come?” Gita said. “She’s not such a great friend of ours that she has to be around our necks every time.”

  “She’s both a friend and a colleague,” Sanjay answered. “It’s important, Giti—we have to stick together, all of us in the services.”

  “That’s no reason for the rest of us to be bored to death.”

  But Sanjay, usually so sweetly yielding with his sisters, was adamant on this point: he could not, would not offend anyone who might in any way be involved in his career. He was ambitious, yes, but not only on his own account. He sincerely felt that the good of his country depended on people like himself and Pushpa, in charge of its development and progress.

  On her twentieth birthday, there was a party for Ratna. It was also an unofficial engagement party, for she and the witty young diplomat who was Sanjay’s colleague had come to an understanding. On the day of the celebration, an electrician fixed festive lights in the trees, and Gita ordered a birthday cake so enormous and white that it might as well have been a wedding cake. Good wishes and gifts were heaped on Ratna, along with a lot of teasing. Slight and slender, almost frail—her sister Gita, though also slim, was far more robust—she laughed and blushed; she kept hiding her face in her palms and also leaned forward so that her long hair veiled her completely. There came a moment when it was absolutely necessary for her to be alone with her happiness, and she slipped away as soon as she saw us absorbed in our usual topics of conversation. That never took long: the problems of India were always with us, and no birthday party could make us forget them.

  At this time Indian foreign policy tended to lean toward the Communist bloc, and as a representative of the other side, it was up to me to urge the advantage of joining us. Of course they jumped on me—as usual, I had to hear about the decadence of the West and the evils of our capitalist system. But they didn’t keep up the attack for long. It was a delicacy in them—I was a guest and outnumbered, and Sanjay was the first to drop the argument and to drift away. The only one who didn’t let go was Pushpa; it was not in her nature to let go of anything important to her. And she really did have strong feelings on the subject, as she did on most Now she became very heated, going beyond the subject of Eastern versus Western political alliance to the perennial matter of the evils of imperialism and how an independent India must free herself totally from the yoke of the West. She had every kind of argument at her fingertips—for instance, the relative figures of the cotton trade before and after Independence—and though I always enjoyed a good debate, I felt at a disadvantage against Pushpa. After all, as she kept reminding me, it was her country that had suffered injustice and mine that had inflicted it. She had raised her voice and others became uneasily aware that the light-hearted spirit of the birthday party was being disrupted. Soon Sanjay came back to us, smiling, a sociable host with a glass of champagne in each hand. But Pushpa said, “You know I don’t drink that stuff.”

  Sanjay went right on smiling: “Then let us drink your health—and the health of the Eastern bloc. Kitty, shall we?” While he and I clinked glasses, he said to Pushpa, “I’ll get you some pineapple juice.”

  “I don’t want it.” Her face, already puffy from arguing, swelled up even more and her eyes swam as though with tears. Tears at Ratna’s party! I felt guilty to have caused them and tried to touch her hand in a friendly gesture. She snatched it away and hid it behind her back, like a fat and angry child. Sanjay and I exchanged helpless glances—she saw us, and now the tears not only filled her eyes but came rolling down her cheeks. She said she wanted to go home.

  “But Pushpa, we haven’t even cut the cake yet!” cried Sanjay.

  “I can’t wait. I have to go. I promised Mummy—she’s not well.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Is it her blood pressure again?” When Sanjay solicitously touched her naked arm, she did not move it away. She said, “I suppose that goddamn driver’s disappeared again.”

  “Stay a bit,” Sanjay pleaded. “We’ll light the candles, cut the cake—Ratna, where’s Ratna? Kitty, please call her—”

  “No! I have to go!”

  Her voice was so loud, her anger so disproportionate that Sanjay had to save the situation. “I’ll take you,” he said quietly.

  She calmed down instantly, and while he left to get his car keys, she adjusted her sari in preparation for departure. Arranging it over one shoulder, she explained to me: “I get so carried away, I can’t help it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” And I did feel sorry to have worked her up so.

  “It’s not personal.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Only because you’re British—and you have been here, uninvited I may point out, for two hundred years. He’s gone to get his keys,” she explained to Gita who had come looking for Sanjay. “He’s taking me home. I told him not to, but he insisted. Because Mummy’s not well.”

  Gita brushed away Mummy and Pushpa both; and when Sanjay returned, she flashed at him: “You can’t leave now, not in the middle of our party.”

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  Pushpa, now perfectly composed, preceded him to the car. He turned around once to his sister: “Half an hour at the most. Just keep them all quiet and happy, Giti, all right? I rely on you . . . And you, Kitty.” He singled me out with a smile full of friendliness and charm.

  “Can you believe it?” Gita was furious and furiously she said to me, “Come upstairs. I have to talk to you.” When I gestured toward the guests, she dismissed them impatie
ntly: “They’re too drunk on champagne to even notice we’ve gone.” She led me through the drawing room and up the stairs to the roof. Here we found Ratna.

  She was leaning on the parapet—the way I had once leaned with Sanjay beside me. But of course in her case her dream was fulfilled. She was smiling as she gazed down at the party on the lawn, her eyes fixed on only one person. “Look at him, flirting his head off,” she said, proud and indulgent. I looked with her: her fiancé had his arm around one of the girls—that was the type he was, always touching girls, teasing them, free and forward. It was what shy Ratna loved him for: his worldliness, his easy sociability, the way he could make everyone laugh—he was doing it now, telling some fantastic story. One hand was on a girl’s shoulder, in the other a green-stemmed glass, which he held out for a servant to refill. “He’s going to be so drunk,” Ratna smiled; at that time, being drunk with them just meant being more high-spirited, more irresistible.

  But Gita was not smiling: “That Pushpa, I could kill her.”

  “What’s she done now?” Ratna said, but indulgent here too, in her happiness.

  “Probably she’s proposing to him right now in the car and he’s saying yes, you know how he can never bear not to be polite to people.”

  That made Ratna laugh, and me too, but Gita saw other undesirable probabilities: “Or she’ll say, Let me drive, and he gives her the keys and she drives like the madwoman she is down to the river and threatens to go right in if he doesn’t at once promise to marry her.”

  “There’s no water in the river,” Ratna said.

  “Do you think that would stop her? She’ll drive them to the edge of the Jumna Bridge and tell him she’ll go over—goodness only knows what she’ll do in her craziness.”

  “People are crazy when they’re in love,” Ratna explained to us. She turned to me, smiling: “What about you, Kitty?” And when I didn’t answer, “Aren’t you in love?” and she touched my cheek with her soft, small hand.

  “Well, if you are,” Gita said, “then please do something about getting him out of her clutches.”

  “But what can I do?” I laughed, embarrassed but flattered, hopeful, happy.

  “Tell him you’ll marry him—”

  “Get your car, we’ll go after them, catch up with them—”

  “And then what?”

  “Then you’ll say it.”

  “Just when she’s got to the end of the bridge, we’ll shout: ‘Wait, wait, here’s Kitty!’”

  “Here he is,” Gita said, looking down.

  “Oh, he’s back?” Ratna too looked down. “So she hasn’t . . .”

  “Driven him off the bridge? No, but who knows what she may not have made him promise . . . Go down now, Kitty. Tell him now.”

  They closed in on me eagerly, two beautiful temptresses under the silver sky. Down below, among the colored bulbs in the trees, everyone was laughing at the fiancé’s story. He was illustrating it now, with bizarre gestures and dance-steps, and he was trying to pull in Sanjay to partner him. But Sanjay, though enjoying the performance like everyone else, wouldn’t be drawn in: he never for a moment forgot himself as the perfect diplomat, a future Foreign Secretary.

  “Now,” Gita urged me. “Go now.”

  They were actually pulling me, one from each side, holding my hands; and, though tugged equally from within, I hung back, laughing, blushing: “I can’t, how can I—”

  “Oh I would! If I wanted him, I’d tell any man: I’ll marry you.” And this was what Gita did, shortly afterward. “And when I’m sick of him, I’ll tell him get out—” And this too she did.

  II

  Whatever happened between them in the car that night, Sanjay and Pushpa did not marry. Like myself, Pushpa never married, and Sanjay only did so a few years later when he was well advanced in his career. A beautiful bride was selected for him—a princess from one of the minor royal houses, an educated girl with a degree in art and home science. Two years later Sanjay was appointed to his first ambassadorship, and from there on his appointments grew in importance until he was recalled to New Delhi to become Foreign Secretary. Wherever they were, at home or abroad, he and his wife were famous for their gracious entertainments. Their residences were exquisitely appointed in Indian style—here his wife’s artistic training was shown to advantage, as were the fine art objects and miniature paintings she had brought as part of her dowry, along with her hereditary jewels.

  In later years, Sanjay sometimes came to visit me when he had meetings in London. I had left the foreign service by then. After India, I was posted to various other countries but never again formed the personal involvements I had enjoyed there. On the contrary, I regarded my contacts with the local population as nothing more than part of my job, and this became so unsatisfactory that finally I resigned and joined the BBC World Service. I bought a little house in a London suburb, and it was here that Sanjay came to see me. I cooked him a hearty meal of chicken in the pot or Irish stew, and we drew our chairs around the fire I had lit for him because he so loved an English open fire. He declared that never anywhere did he feel as cozy and carefree as he did with me. And when he said that, he sighed as if some great happiness that could have been between us had never been fulfilled.

  It was many years since I had had any such regrets about him; and anyway, in the meantime I had discovered that I preferred women to men. No doubt he was too worldly not to suspect this, but he was also too tactful to give any sign that he did. Our conversation was all about the past, not about people so much as incidents—charming happenings at parties and picnics. If I asked about a particular person, he would say, “He’s our Secretary of Commerce,” or “He took a job with the UN.” Most of them had done well and none of them was the same person any more. The one who had changed the most appeared to be Pushpa, of whom he spoke with admiration and respect. She had left the civil service and had stood for Parliament and was now a cabinet minister. But when I mentioned his sisters, his smile of reminiscence vanished; he appeared actually to wipe it away, passing his hand over his face. “Poor Ratna, what a tragedy, she died so young,” and though he made no mention of how she died, when he uncovered his face, it had settled back into the deep melancholy that, in spite of all his success, had become his characteristic expression. He rarely spoke of Gita, with whom he had quarreled and was involved in a lawsuit.

  And he rarely spoke about India—not the way he used to, about the new dams and fertilizer plants. “Problems, Kitty, problems,” was all he would say. Only sometimes he burst out in misery and disappointment. The country had changed because those in power had changed. They were no longer the young men I had known, who had all gone to the same English-type boarding schools and whom one could talk to and ask to one’s parties. Now they were local politicians elected from backward states; some of them could hardly read and write, but they had to be given important posts because they held huge blocks of votes. During the hot summer months, they liked to go on official tours abroad and had to be put up in the Indian embassy, where they harassed the staff. Sanjay himself had had awful experiences with visiting politicians for whom he had had to give official dinners though they didn’t know how to use a knife and fork and spat red betel juice on the walls. And then the following year another politician would arrive, with his own retinue of relatives eager to go shopping in foreign countries, with manners the same as the previous visitor, who had meanwhile been charged with bribery and corruption; or the entire cabinet had had to resign on these charges, or the government had fallen and a new one was being elected. But it was always the same types who were elected—no, worse: it seemed to Sanjay that they became worse and sometimes had to be sent back home midway through their tour for causing a scandal, such as getting drunk and harassing air hostesses. It was all too much for Sanjay, not at all what he had expected when he first took up the reins of responsibility; and he was glad, he said, that soon he would be able to relinquish them, for he had only two or three years before retirement. Probably
he would be offered the embassy in Washington; he would not accept but retire to the estate his wife had inherited from her father. He would build a golf course there, for he had become an enthusiastic golfer; unlike his in-laws, he did not care for hunting and shooting, although his teenage children were keen on these sports. When he spoke of his family—two boys and a girl—his face cleared again. Each time he brought new photographs to show me, and then he almost became the Sanjay I knew, his sad eyes lighting up the way they used to, with hope and ambition.

  Although Gita was married to an Englishman and lived in London for a few years, she mostly avoided me. I think perhaps she didn’t want to be with anyone who had known her in other, better times. These were difficult years for Gita. I heard rumors about her, how she was becoming more erratic and reckless. After the tragedy with Ratna, she was completely lost. During this time she visited me more often, to talk about what had happened. She repeated to me over and over how her brother-in-law had called her from Kampala to tell her, “Ratna has done something silly.” “Can you believe it!” cried Gita. “Those were his exact words: ‘Something silly’ . . . Of course he was dead drunk, the pig, wait—wait—wait—he’ll hear from me yet.” She had all sorts of mad schemes for revenge, but her weapons of torment were turned inward. Finally she had to enter a clinic for psychiatric treatment, and when she came out, she went back to Delhi, where she remained.

  I only twice returned to Delhi—the air fare is very high, and besides, I hardly know anyone there any more. On my second and last visit, a few years ago, I looked up Gita who was living by herself in their old house in the Civil Lines. Traveling in a battered taxi from my hotel in New Delhi, I marveled at the extent of the changes—the wild growth of the city, with high-rise modern office buildings and luxury hotels, a brand-new art museum and a sports stadium; and flowing in and out among these edifices, the squatter settlements for the laborers who were putting up all this new architecture by the old method of carrying bricks on their heads and clambering over bamboo scaffolding. The journey from New to Old Delhi, which used to take less than half an hour, was now twice as long, for the streets were choked with traffic that the posse of policemen wielding bamboo poles were hardly able to control. The buses were still the same old metal wrecks, only now there were many more people jammed inside them, with some hanging on outside. These ancient vehicles emitted volleys of black smoke that mingled with other fumes and shrouded the sky—the once radiant Delhi sky—in a pall of yellow smog with cinders flying around. The vastly increased motor traffic—even the rickshaws had been motorized—must have needed a lot of fixing, for the stalls that had sold embroidered caps and slippers were now given over to spare parts such as hub-caps and brake-linings, fan-belts and clutch-plates.