East Into Upper East

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  The Civil Lines area had also changed, with the large family houses replaced by blocks of new flats. Only Gita’s house remained, standing in isolation among these flats; all her aunts, uncles and cousins had sold up and moved away. She still had her large garden but the lawn was now patched with brown and the flowerbeds were full of dry earth. Only the trees had grown even more luxuriant and pressed in on the house. It had always been kept dark inside, for coolness, but now, buried in trees, it was as cold and damp as a tomb. Dust had settled in the velvet upholstery and in the cracks of the carved furniture, and there was the smell of Gita’s dogs and another smell that may have been bat droppings. Gita simply did not have the staff to look after such a large place, and those she did have she needed for the thriving new business she had started.

  She was dying to get rid of the house—to sell it, like everyone else had done, and build flats. “Do you have any idea how much those flats go for?” she asked me—indignantly, because Sanjay had no idea and refused to sell. That was why she had filed a suit against him and was no longer speaking to him or his family. She went into a long list of her grievances against them—it was the first thing I heard, almost immediately after her greeting: “Kitty! How thin you are! And my goodness—what’s that I see? Grey hair!” Gita’s own once auburn hair was dyed a solid black, but it was still shiny and healthy like the rest of her. She was attended by two dogs, huge Alsatians who stood on either side of her. She held herself very erect and with squared shoulders and still tossed her head back the way she used to, in defiance. She tossed it a lot while speaking of her brother. I think it was a relief to her to have someone like me to speak to, who had known him; now their paths had diverged completely and they had no common friends or even acquaintances. “All he knows are those dull as ditchwater civil servants like himself with their promotions and pensions which is all they ever think about . . . And of course his wife and her family. What dodos, Kitty, you would not believe!” She detested her sister-in-law and her courtly manners—she imitated these for me, the exaggerated courtesies, the exquisite circumlocutions, the obsequious greeting with palms joined under bowed head. “It’s just hypocrisy, that’s all it is; like those old Rajputs sticking knives into each other’s backs while clasped in brotherly embrace . . . And to think he could have married anyone; he could have married you, Kitty.”

  She laughed, and so did I. I asked if we could go up on the roof. She led the way, followed by her two Alsatians. She had transformed the place into a busy workshop, with two tailors cross-legged inside the turret turning their little sewing-machines, while outside on the terrace young boys were sorting and packing bales of textiles for Gita’s boutique. She had also begun to export to England and Germany, where she had good contacts. She showed me her goods—all in excellent taste, designed by herself—gave instructions to her tailors, shouted a bit at the boys in what sounded like a racy dialect. She was in her element up here.

  I leaned on the parapet the way we used to do. Although the trees were smothering the house, some trailing branches over the terrace, the housewives in the surrounding flats had no difficulty watching us from their higher level. A mild winter sunshine filtered through the smog of pollution sagging from the sky; more gaseous fumes rose from the traffic on the road outside, which had become a main thoroughfare leading to new colonies. The scene was busy and intensely alive, but no longer romantic. Nor were Gita’s thoughts when she joined me, though she too leaned her elbows on the parapet in our old way. “If I could just get rid of this place,” she said. She described everything she would do: build flats and sell them and then move herself and the dogs to New Delhi, near her boutique. She was eager to take me there—it was a whole new development, she told me, with very smart shops dealing in the highest quality designer goods. “It’s all different now, Kitty, you’ll see. We’re all different.” She told me about the other women who had gone into business; like herself, most of them had escaped from bad marriages, or other unfortunate situations. Instead of waiting for some man to take care of them, they had turned their assets to their own advantage—these assets being their looks, their culture, their brains, and some inherited money. They had started art galleries, the wholesale export of fashion garments designed by themselves, beauty salons selling their own herbal products. Some of them were already millionaires, Gita told me, with pride in her class; and when I asked, what about you, she laughed in a full-throated way: “I’m getting there.” There was no trace left of the neurotic Gita I had known in London, but she was still in some way the Gita of our youthful days: only even more proud and strong, and with the wary and rather calculating look of someone determined not to be taken advantage of. I admired her, but I was sad too, the way one tends to be when the past has irrevocably changed. I looked away from her over the parapet, but of course everything there had changed too and all I saw was housewives hanging up washing on lines slung across their verandahs.

  “Do you remember how we stood up here and told you to marry Sanjay?” She spoke with no nostalgia at all; on the contrary, as of something ridiculous.

  “You told me to go down and propose to him. You said I could easily do it if I was in love.”

  “Fortunately you had more sense than we did. Love—what rubbish. The only creatures to love are these filthy beasties.” She bent down to rub her face against the heads of her Alsatians, and they responded by licking her face with large and eager tongues.

  “What we really wanted was to save him from Pushpa. And now it turns out that it’s Pushpa who had the lucky escape—wait till you see her! Success Story Number One.”

  “Do you see her?”

  “Only in the newspapers. And on TV of course; she loves to go on TV.”

  It was not easy to meet Pushpa. I telephoned her several times, and each time was told by a different assistant that she was in a cabinet meeting, or was opening a school fête. But when at last I got through to her—“Kitty! What a lovely surprise!” Her voice blasted into my ear like a trumpet—she would send a car for me, not to move, her chauffeur would be there instantly. She lived in the old, the imperial New Delhi, in one of the imperial mansions taken over by cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff. She was in her office at the front of the house, and she emerged from behind an enormous desk, which was piled high with papers and flanked by two assistants trying to sort them. She descended on me, arms flailing, hair flying, full of energy though she had grown very fat, and at once began to drench me in a flood of words that never stopped the entire time I was there. She wore a plain white cotton sari, her only ornaments some gold bangles and a diamond stud in her nose. While she talked and gesticulated, her sari kept slipping off her shoulder, till she impatiently pinned it with a huge silver brooch in the shape of an oak tree (“A gift from the President of Poland”). The walls were covered in photographs of her with various such Presidents at official functions, also with national leaders—all of them, including Pushpa, heavily garlanded, smiling, powerful.

  She led me across a courtyard dividing her office from her living rooms. These were furnished with Indian handicrafts—she pointed them out to me, the work of the weavers’ association and the spinning cooperatives. Under government auspices, giant strides had been made in the development of cottage industries. Her mother, who had suffered a stroke, was wheeled in to join us for lunch and Pushpa kissed her and tried to coax her to take titbits from a spoon (“Mummy is naughty sometimes about not eating”). Pushpa herself ate heartily—Indian-style, with her hands; she had given up using cutlery—and continued to do so even when her assistant entered with a cellular phone, which he held to her ear. She told me everything she felt I ought to know; she was concerned that I should be as fully informed as a press conference on current developments and progress. And this not to show off but out of affection, as though loading me with precious gifts to carry home. By a lucky chance that afternoon she was to address a women’s rally—she consulted her watch: “My goodness! In fifteen minutes!”—and pro
posed to take me with her. “Now you will see, Kitty, with your own eyes!” she cried as she whirled out of the house, with me in her wake, doors held open for us all the way.

  Ensconced in the back of her official car, she said how she loved to meet old friends and talk about the past—though not one word about the past had we exchanged, or mentioned one single person we had known in it. It was all the future for Pushpa, she drowned us in the future. The rallying ground lay just outside the gate dividing New and Old Delhi. It was the road I had often traveled to and from Sanjay’s house—always, so it seemed in my memory, by moonlight and with romantic thoughts, passing a mosque with a striped dome and a garden surrounding the tomb of an Emperor’s sister. But now, when I tried to peer between the satin curtains that shielded Pushpa from the public gaze—as once Moghul queens and princesses had been shielded—she nudged me to take note of a newly constructed colony of low-cost housing for government clerks.

  A welcoming committee awaited Pushpa at the entrance of the rallying ground to garland and lead her to the platform. As she passed, women tried to touch her, like a goddess or a film star. I had to sit beside her on the platform—a garland had been hung around my neck too—along with many other people, some of them arguing about their right to that position of eminence. The successful claimants got up one by one to address the crowd. Everyone spoke for a long time and in Hindi. The crowd consisted entirely of poor laboring women, a mass, a living sea of them filling the vast open space. They sat cross-legged on the ground, very old women and very young ones with small children in their laps. Older children ran around, playing games and piping shrilly, which seemed to be their right for no one tried to stop them. Yet all the women were attentive, their faces raised to those who addressed them from the platform at such length, never relaxing their respectful, grateful, listening attitudes. Beyond the rallying ground, I could see the old city gate, now flanked by a statue of a dead national leader in stone waistcoat and spectacles. And beyond him, stretching as far as the river, there was some empty land that Pushpa had pointed out to me as the potential site of a new industrial complex. It was still an open dumping ground, almost a swamp, with kites and vultures circling above it.

  At last, when all the speakers had had their turn, Pushpa got up to take the microphone. A current of renewed ardor ran through the mass of women at her feet. I couldn’t understand the Hindi she spoke to them, but whatever it was she said seemed to be what they most wanted to hear. They raised their faces higher, in adoration, in worship: those who clutched slogans scrawled on pieces of cloth held them up and waved them. Murmurs of assent to everything she said rippled through the crowd, then swelled into shouts of approval. She swooped them up to further heights with the chanting of slogans—to be repeated by them again and again. Huge and fat, perspiring and inspiring, she flailed about, a many-armed, golden-bangled goddess with the diamond in her nose flashing in the sun. The women laughed, they shouted, their hour had come. I had never seen so many faces radiant with hope—all of them worn by poverty, overworked and undernourished, some pockmarked through disease, others bruised with beatings, a few with their noses cut off (the ultimate act of cruelty from a vengeful husband), but all of them infused, suffused with whatever it was that Pushpa promised them. It became impossible to hear what she said, every word was drowned in triumphant shouts, and now she was only repeating the same slogan and making them echo it—again, and louder, louder!—right up to the polluted sky and into the distance where the kites and vultures wheeled over the sewage that would soon be drained and cleared for a new industrial estate of small-scale industries.

  A NEW DELHI ROMANCE

  Indu had married beneath her, but that was many years ago, and besides, she no longer lived with her husband. Everything else had changed too—her parents, who had so deplored her marriage, were long since gone, her brother and sisters had moved away, and the big house they had all lived in had been torn down and a block of flats built on its site. Indu herself still lived in the neighborhood, almost around the corner from the old house, in a complex of ramshackle hutments that had once been a barrack for policemen. She had lived here for twenty years and the rent was still the same, which was why she stayed on—who could have afforded anything else?—though it was far from her place of work. However, it did have the advantage of being near the University, so that her son Arun, who was a student there, could easily come home if his classes were canceled due to a strike or the death of some important politician.

  Arun, taking full advantage of the proximity of his home and his mother’s day-long absence from it, didn’t wait for classes to be canceled but cut them whenever he felt like it. Lately he had begun to bring his girl friend Dipti there—though only after a struggle, not with Dipti, who was willing enough, but with himself. For one thing, he had to overcome his feelings of guilt toward his mother for doing this in her home; and then there was the shabbiness of that home—he was ashamed of it for himself and his mother, and angry with Dipti for maybe judging it in the same way he did. But Dipti was so happy to be there that she had no wish to criticize it: on the contrary.

  Yet Dipti herself lived in a very grand house and was brought to the college every day in a chauffeur-driven car. Her father was a politician, an important cabinet minister, and the family lived in luxury. They gave lavish parties at which everyone ate and drank too much, they brought back all the latest household gadgets from their trips abroad, even a washing machine though they had their own washerman living on the premises along with their other servants. Dipti’s mother was always going shopping, for saris and textiles and jewelry, and she bought fresh pastries and chicken patties, so that if Dipti brought her friends home there was plenty to eat, as well as every kind of soft drink in the refrigerator. Long before he decided to bring Dipti to his own house, Arun had been visiting hers. He didn’t eat the pastries—he didn’t care for them—and made no attempt to ingratiate himself with her parents. But they liked him—approved of him, and of his mother. Dipti’s mother was very gracious to her, not at all assuming the role of VIP’s wife that she usually played to its full extent, as was her right. She brought Indu home, ostensibly consulting her on a question of interior decoration, and she even pretended to take her advice, though Indu’s taste was not at all consonant with her own preference for rich ornamentation.

  Indu accepted Dipti’s mother’s respect as her due and did not return it. But she liked Dipti—how could she not, for Dipti was everything a young girl should be: sweet and pretty and very much in love with Arun. It had not taken Indu long to discover that the two young people spent afternoons in her house. Dipti’s floral perfume hung in the air hours after she had left, and once Indu found a white blossom on her pillow, which might have dropped out of the garland wound into a girl’s hair. Indu’s feelings as she picked it up were mixed: pride in a son’s conquest, as well as a movement of jealous anger that made her indulge in a burst of outrage (“and on my bed”). But as she sat on this bed, slowly rubbing the petal between her fingers so that it released its scent, memories of her own obliterated all thoughts of the young couple. She hardly needed the fragrance of the jasmine emanating from between her fingers to recall the secret nights on her parents’ roof with Arun’s father, when the rest of the household was fast asleep. What more romantic than those nights drenched in moonlight and jasmine – or what more evanescent? The blossom in tatters between her fingers, she flung it away, her resentment now not against Arun and Dipti but against Arun’s father; and also against her own stupid young self, who had tossed away all the advantages of her birth for the sake of those stolen nights.

  Arun’s father, Raju, had for years lived in Bombay, where he was involved in films. He had turned up throughout Arun’s childhood, an unwanted guest who stayed too long, and far from contributing to the household or his son’s support, borrowed money from Indu. Raju was good fun, especially for a young child—he sang, he played games, jokes, and magic tricks; but later Arun became as exaspera
ted with him as his mother was. Dipti likewise expressed exasperation with her father: “Daddy works far too much! And all those people who come—does he have to see all of them!” But this was a pretence: she was proud of her father and the way crowds thronged to him. At certain hours of the day he sat enthroned on their verandah, an obese idol wrapped in a cloud of white muslin. Petitioners touched his feet in traditional gestures of respect; some brought garlands, some baskets of fruit or boxes of sweetmeats; poor people brought an egg or two, or milk from their cow. There were those who had traveled all night in crowded third-class railway carriages from his native state, in order to present some petition to him; others came only to be in his presence, imbibing his aura of riches and power. He addressed them in a tangy native dialect, and his homilies were illustrated by examples drawn nostalgically from the simple life of thatched huts he had long left behind. He had a reputation for salty humor and liked the sound of appreciative laughter. That was one aspect of him—racy, earthy, a man of the people; at other times, with other guests, he was different. Big cars drew up outside his house; if there were too many of them, special police constables had to be called to supplement the guard on duty at his gate. Then he himself became obsequious—he hurried out to receive the visitors, his big bulk moving lightly and with grace. He led them inside and into his carpeted drawing room where refreshments were served, not by servants but by his wife, her head covered as she offered silver beakers on a silver tray. Sometimes these visitors were led into a further room where a white sheet had been spread on the carpet; here they all sat cross-legged in their loose native clothes leaning against bolsters, some fat like himself, others scrawny from fasting and prayer. These powerful men weighed each other up like poker players, sometimes staying up all night while journalists waited outside; for the game that was being played involved millions not only of rupees but of lives. However, this was never a consideration in the minds of the players who, like all true sportsmen, were wholly dedicated to the game for its own sake.