East Into Upper East

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  One day Dipti and Arun’s afternoon was disturbed by the arrival of Arun’s father. He walked into the living room that opened straight off the main compound around which all the barrack-like structures were grouped. “I’m here!” he called, like an eagerly expected guest. In the bedroom, Dipti in a state of undress clapped her hand before her mouth and her wide eyes grew wider as she looked to Arun for rescue. As in all relations with his father, he was more exasperated than embarrassed. He got up and, winding a towel around his waist, went into the living room.

  “Ah-ah-ah!” cried the father with delight at the sight of his son; and he hugged him tenderly, held him away for a moment to look at him, then hugged him again. Arun frowned all through this performance—he never liked to be embraced by his father and especially not now, for Raju was full of sweat and soot, as after a long train journey in an overcrowded carriage. But he pretended to have come by plane—“Indian Airlines is hopeless, hopeless! Two hours late and keeping us waiting without even a cup of tea! . . . How are you? And your mother—I tried to call her in the office to tell her I was coming, but the connection between Delhi and Bombay—hopeless, hopeless! . . . Did you get my telegram? No? That’s funny . . . Why aren’t you at college? Is it holidays? Good, we’ll have a fine time, you and I, eh, what, ha? Pictures, coffee-house, and so on.”

  Arun said, “I came home to study for my exam.” He frowned more and added, “With a friend.”

  “Ah. A friend. Where is he? . . . Understood!” cried Raju, his eyes dancing with pleasure and amusement as they roved over his son’s handsome face and naked chest.

  Arun went into the bedroom and, seeing Dipti fully dressed, told her, “You can come out. It’s only my father . . . It’s all right,” he said in answer to her stricken look. When she still hung back, he took her hand and pulled her quite harshly through the curtain that separated the two rooms.

  But Raju stilled her fears at once. Giving no sign that there was anything out of the way in a young girl appearing with his son out of the bedroom, he greeted her warmly, and with obvious though highly respectful admiration for her beauty. He became the host of the occasion, gesturing grandly to everyone to sit. Apart from the couch on which Arun slept at night, the furniture was scanty and makeshift; but Indu had made everything tasteful with handloomed fabrics draped over oil cans and egg crates, and hanging up reproductions from art books wherever new cracks appeared on the walls. Raju wanted to make a tea party of it, encouraging Arun to go for fritters and potato patties to the stall at the corner, even rummaging in his own pocket for money, but when he came up with nothing, the idea was dropped. He made up for it with his conversation, and while his son rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, Raju enjoyed his own skill as an entertainer and its effect on Dipti. She responded to him the way women, starting with Indu, had done all his life long—they didn’t always believe what he said but liked his way of saying it. And he knew how to take the right tone with his audience: for instance, today, with Dipti, in telling her about the Bombay film industry, he did not stress its glamor but only its stupidity and vulgarity, adapting himself to what he guessed to be the opinion of someone like Dipti—a University student and, moreover, his scornful son’s girl friend.

  “I like him,” Dipti later insisted to Arun, and repeated it in spite of his “You don’t know a thing.” She did know some things—he had more or less told her the story of his parents’ marriage—but she had not plumbed the depths of his feelings on the subject. And he had not described the scene on that night of Raju’s arrival, when Indu got home from work. It was something that happened regularly whenever Raju reappeared in the bosom of his family. When it came time to sleep, he carried his battered little suitcase into his wife’s bedroom, on the assumption that this was his rightful place. Arun was already lying on the couch, which had been his bed ever since he had grown too old to share his mother’s. He had turned off the light and shut his eyes, pretending to himself that he was too sleepy to listen to the altercation in the next room. He didn’t have to: he knew exactly what course it would take. First they would keep their voices down—for his sake—but when Raju kept saying “Sh—sh,” Indu’s rage rose till she was shouting, so that Raju too had to speak up to make his protests heard. That caused her to shout louder till she was shrieking, and finally—Arun waited for it—Raju’s little suitcase came flying out through the curtain, and he followed, groping around in the dark to retrieve its scattered contents, while mildly clicking his tongue at his wife’s unreasonable temper. Arun continued to pretend to be asleep, and with a sigh of patient resignation, Raju lay down on the floor mat. Arun then got up to offer him his place on the couch, and after some protests, Raju accepted. He was soon blissfully asleep, while Arun lay awake for hours, tossing and seething and aware of his mother doing the same in the next room.

  Arun had grown up with such scenes, for his parents had been separated since he was two. Over the years, they had given him much occasion to ponder the relationship between men and women. Now he shared these thoughts with Dipti, though in a purely general way, careful not to give any insight into the particulars on which his theories were based. And that was the way she responded to him—also theoretically, with no reference to what she had observed between her own parents. For that marriage too, though enduring in the face of the world, had its own unmentioned, unmentionable areas on which no light was ever shed. Even in her own mind Dipti had veiled the scenes she had witnessed since her childhood—her father’s outbursts when, for instance, a garment was not pressed well enough, or a stud was missing from his shirt: then her mother would cower in a corner with her arms shielding her head against the shoes he threw at her or the blows from his fist. Yet not half an hour later, when the defect in his toilet had been corrected and, starched and resplendent, he reclined among his guests, she was once more the modestly veiled hostess offering sherbet in silver vessels. It was only to Dipti that her mother sometimes whispered, in the dark and in secret, about the shame that it was the fate of wives to suffer: beatings and abuse, and also that other shame—she did not specify it further—that had to be undergone.

  But Dipti knew, just as Arun did, that this was not how men and women should be together. They had formed their own idea on the subject, and it was the opposite of what they had observed between their parents. Their plan was to try out their theories on each other, and having already begun at the most basic, or essential, level in their afternoons together, they found that it was indeed a far cry from Raju’s suitcase being flung out of Indu’s bedroom, or that unspecified humiliation that Dipti’s mother whispered to her about. Instead, they learned to grope their way around together in a completely new world that opened up for them, in infinite sweetness, at the touch of delicate fingers and the mingling of their pure breath.

  “Yes, and if she gets pregnant?” Having found yet another blossom on her pillow, Indu could no longer refrain from confronting her son. He shrugged—his usual response to any of her questions he did not care to answer. But his father, who was still there and more and more on sufferance, interposed: “Ah, don’t spoil it for him.”

  Indu seized the opportunity to turn on her husband: “Oh yes—having ruined my life, now you send your son out to do the same to another innocent girl . . . Not that I care what happens,” she returned to Arun. “This time the shoe’s on the other foot: it’s not you who’ll get pregnant and have to be married whether you want to or not.”

  If Raju had not been in such a precarious position in his wife’s household—or if he had had the least bit of malice in him, which he did not—he could have pointed to himself as an unfortunate example of what Indu was talking about: for he, though still a student at the time, and from a very poor family, had been forced to marry Indu when she was found to be pregnant after their months of delight on her parents’ roof.

  This thought did arise in Indu, filling her with bitterness: “But of course,” she told her son, “you can always follow your father’s fine examp
le and never spend a single rupee on your child’s support—well, what else have you been doing your whole life long!” she said to Raju, as though he had dared utter a word of protest. “Sitting around in Bombay, running after film stars, while I’m working myself into a nervous breakdown to raise this child and give him a decent education fit for my father’s grandson—oh leave me alone, leave me alone!” she cried, though neither her husband nor her son had made a movement toward her. She ran into her bedroom—if there had been a door instead of only a curtain she could have banged it—and flung herself face down on to her bed.

  Father and son remained together in silence. Raju would have liked to follow and comfort her but knew that his good intention would meet only with rejection. At last he said to Arun in a low voice, “Go. Go to her.”

  But Arun would not. It was not in his nature to dispense tender consolation to a woman in tears. He loved his mother fiercely and suffered because she did; but at this moment he also felt sorry for his father. Everything that Indu accused him of was true—Raju had got her pregnant and had never been able to provide for her and Arun but had let them struggle along on their own. But this was because he couldn’t provide even for himself let alone a family, because he was—so his son thought with contempt and pity—just a poor devil. Raju would have liked to be generous, and if his pocket had not been chronically empty, he would have put his hand in it and pulled out bundles of bank notes to fling on his wife’s table—“Here, take.”

  Dipti’s feelings for her father were equally confused. Immensely proud of him for being what he was in the world, she could not forget what he was at home, behind closed doors with her mother. At the same time, she blamed her mother for the way she submitted to his treatment, crouching under his fury like an animal unable to defend itself. Yet she was a proud woman. Haughty and imperious with servants, with petitioners, with her husband’s clerks, she passed among them like a queen, walking with slow majesty, as though her own massive weight and that of all her jewels and brocades were difficult to carry.

  All this was before the scandal, which broke slowly, with a minor paragraph in one or two newspapers, and proceeded to mount with headlines in all of them, and photographs in the news magazines. At first Dipti’s father brushed away the accusations against him, he joked with the visitors assembled around him on his verandah and made them laugh at the expense of journalists and other gossip-mongers who had nothing to do in their offices except kill flies and make up lies about him. Then, when the stories persisted and questions began to be asked in Parliament, he grew angry, he challenged his cowardly accusers—this too on his verandah amid his friends—to come out with one single fact against him. And when they did—not with one but with many, how he had taken money from industrialists, businessmen and foreign investors—he blustered and demanded proof. This was forthcoming: there were letters and diary entries as well as the huge unexplained wealth he had accumulated in movable and immovable properties. Denying everything, he demanded an inquiry where he could, he said, easily prove himself as innocent as a newborn child. Cartoons of him in this latter role promptly appeared in the press. Although his resignation was demanded not only by the opposition but by his own party, he refused to submit it and hung on to his position, and to his official residence, until given the chance to clear himself before a committee to be appointed from the highest in the land.

  During these difficult times, Dipti continued to attend her classes at the University, holding her head high. It was only when she was alone with Arun, during their afternoons in his mother’s house, that she sometimes gave way to her feelings—and then only with silent tears, hiding her face against his chest. They never discussed the case and only referred to its essentials—as when she informed him that a committee of inquiry had been set up, or that her father had drafted his letter of resignation. Arun received the information without comment. Like Dipti herself, he had no desire to discuss the affair, and when other students did so within his hearing—and they spoke of it constantly, cynically, with jokes, everyone convinced of Dipti’s father’s guilt and gloating over it—he harshly reproved them. They nudged each other and grinned behind his back and called him “the son-in-law.”

  He also quarreled with his mother—his father was back in Bombay where he claimed to have been hired as a scriptwriter for a major production—for Indu had strong opinions about the affair.

  “What do you know about it?” he challenged her.

  “I know what I read in the papers plus what I’ve seen with my own eyes . . . You’re not trying to tell me,” she went on, “that they were living on his salary? . . . All that vulgar display—tcha, and everything in the lowest taste possible of course, but what can you expect from people like that.”

  “People like what?”

  She refused to be intimidated by his angry frown: “Uncultured, uneducated people. Peasants,” she threw the word out with contempt.

  “Oh yes, only you’re very grand and cultured.”

  “Yes I am. And so are you.” She tried to touch his face, glorying in his light complexion, his aristocratic features, but he jerked away and said, “And what about my father? Is he so very grand too?”

  “Forget about your father. Think of your grandfather, who he was . . . God forgive me for what I did—dragged his name in the mud by marrying your father—all right, by getting pregnant from him, stupid, stupid girl that I was! . . . Arun, are you sure that you’re doing everything—or she’s doing everything—you know, so that she doesn’t—?”

  “Why, what are you afraid of?”

  “That you’ll ruin your life the way I ruined mine.”

  He wouldn’t listen any more. He turned his back on her and went out of the house, through the compound, into the street, and walked for a long time through the lanes of the city, all the way to Mori Gate where he sat outside a tea stall smoking cigarettes, immersed in his thoughts.

  A few evenings later he had to take the same walk again. It happened after his mother had come home from work and was cooking their dinner in the little attached shed that served as their kitchen. There was a commotion outside, and from the window he saw that the children of the compound as well as one or two repressed little servant boys and the old sweeper woman employed by all the tenants had come running to see the spectacle that was unfolding outside Indu’s house. A long shiny car with satin curtains had drawn up; a chauffeur jumped out to open the back door from which emerged Dipti’s mother, in all the glory of an orange brocade sari with golden border and her full array of ornaments. Indu too had come to look but went quickly running in again to fix her hair, which was straggling over her forehead damp with perspiration from her cooking. She was in the somewhat stained cotton sari she wore for housework, and with no time to change, she had to maintain her dignity with a display of the breeding and fine manners she had acquired in her father’s house and at her convent school. The chauffeur carried in a basket of fruit and several boxes of pastries and other sweets, then returned to his car to chase away the children scratching at its bright blue enamel paint. Arun too had to chase them off when they peered in at the window of the living room to see what was going on. This was not anything that required Arun’s presence, so he went out and repeated the walk to the tea stall outside Mori Gate where he sat for a long time, not wanting to return and hear what Indu had to say about her visitor and the mission on which she had come.

  But of course he had to hear all about it for days on end. Indu was indignant—“Yes, now they come running when they’re in disgrace and think no one will take the girl off their hands. How old is she now?” Arun didn’t answer so she answered herself, “Old enough to have been married long ago, I’m sure, only now who’ll have her?”

  “Dipti wants to be a college lecturer.”

  “She may want but her mother wants something different . . . Who do they think we are?” She was incensed. “Who do they think they are?”

  Arun did not tell Dipti about her mother’s call
, or its purpose. Yet she may have suspected it—even seen signs of it on her afternoon visits: for days the pastries that had been brought lay moldering in their golden boxes (Arun didn’t like them and his mother, who loved and could never afford them, was too proud to eat them). Dipti pretended not to see them. Secrets grew like a wall between her and Arun, making them often avoid each other’s eyes. But as if to make up for the lack of words, their lovemaking became more passionate and they clung to each other as if fearful of being torn apart. They also grew more careless, and when Indu came home from work, she sometimes found an undergarment forgotten on her bedroom floor.

  Now she changed her tactics with her son. She sidled up to him with sighs; she took his hand in hers, and when he snatched it away, she smiled and said that yes, he was too big now for her fondling. Smiling more, she recalled their past together, when he had been a little boy and had crept into her bed and kissed her and promised her that, when he grew up, he was going to be a policeman and guard and take care of her forever. He squirmed at these memories—they were like little stab wounds in his soul—but she went right on, talking not of the past now but of the future she had always envisaged. No, he was not going to be a policeman, except perhaps a very high-ranking one who sat at a desk and controlled whole districts. A year from now, after he had graduated, he would take the entrance exam of the Indian Administrative Service and he would pass with flying colors—ah, she knew it! Wasn’t he his grandfather’s grandson and with the same brains? He would rank among the country’s ruling élite, rising from one eminent bureaucratic post to the next. As for marriage—everyone knew that once a boy had passed into that corps, all the best families would come running with their daughters and their dowries. Well, he was free to accept them or not, as he pleased, just as long as he kept himself unencumbered and at liberty to pursue all his advantages.