Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  My parents never mentioned the matter to me, though there was a certain wariness in their manner whenever Anand’s name came up in conversation. (It’s a sad moment, really, when parents first became a bit frightened of their child.) Privately, they must have put up with a good deal of questioning and comment from friends and relatives. Even to me people would sometimes say, ‘Can you come to a party on Saturday? Anand will be there.’ If Anand’s mother ever lectured him on getting talked about, he evidently didn’t think it worth repeating. Of them all, I daresay, she was the most troubled, being orthodox, wanting a good, conservative marriage for her only son, being bewildered by what must have appeared to her—it seems astonishing in retrospect—sophistication.

  Occasionally Anand would take me home to tea after our offices had closed. I think he did this out of an unadmitted consideration for his mother, to set her mind at rest about the company he was keeping, to show her that I was not a Fast Girl even if I did work in a magazine. I don’t know how much I reassured her, with my short hair and lipstick, no tika in the middle of my forehead. But she always greeted me politely, bringing her hands together in a namaskar, and gave me canny looks when she thought I wasn’t noticing. We couldn’t even speak to each other, since we came from different communities and she spoke only Gujarati, while my language was Hindi. She would always wait with us in the drawing room until one of the servants brought the tea; then she would lift her comfortable figure out of her chair, nod to me, and leave us alone. We were always conscious of her presence in the next room beyond the curtained archway, and every now and then we would hear her teacup clink on the saucer. Our conversation, even if she didn’t understand it, was bound to be pretty stilted.

  Perhaps it was this silent pressure, perhaps it was only a sort of restlessness that made Anand and me leave the usual haunts of our set and look for more obscure restaurants for our lunch dates. Liberal as we considered ourselves, we still couldn’t help being affected by the knowing curiosity. There’s no point in denying it (predictably, I always did deny it to Anand); I was concerned about public opinion. I suppose I was beginning to lose my England-returned brashness and intractability. I was not, however, prepared to stop meeting Anand for lunch. I liked him and waited with some impatience for his telephone calls, the rather pleasant voice saying things like ‘Hello? Is this the career girl?’ (This was one of Anand’s favourite phrases of defiance—a career girl was still something of a peculiarity in Bombay in those days. If you came from a respectable family that could support you, you weren’t supposed to work for money. Social work would have been all right, but not something as shady as journalism.) Sometimes he would say, ‘This is underground agent 507. Are you a fellow resistance fighter?’ or, ‘Am I speaking to Miss Emancipation?’

  In any case, I would laugh and say, ‘Yes,’ and he would suggest that we try some Chinese food, or eat dry curried chicken at a certain Irani shop, or, if it was one of the steamy, rainless days near the end of the monsoon, go to Chowpatty beach and eat odds and ends of the delicious, highly spiced mixtures the vendors there concoct. By tacit agreement, he no longer picked me up at the office. Instead, we either met at the corner taxi rank (leaving Anand’s car parked in the alley behind his office building) or arrived separately at our rendezvous.

  Once, when we were driving to Colaba, the southernmost point of the island, Anand suddenly leaned forward and asked the taxi driver to stop. On an otherwise uninspired looking street, lined with dingy middle-class houses, he had seen a sign that said, ‘Joe’s Place’. Anand was entranced, and certainly the sign did look exotic among the bungalows and hibiscus. Joe’s Place—named by some homesick American soldier, who had found his way there during the war—quickly became our favourite restaurant. We felt it was our discovery, for one thing, and then it had a Goan cook, which meant that, unlike some of the other Indian restaurants, you could order beef. Most Hindus will not eat beef, cook it, or allow it on the premises; it is, as a result, the cheapest meat in Bombay. We ate a lot of beef at Joe’s Place, and I often thought that Anand, at home in the evening, probably got rather a kick out of imagining how horrified his mother would be if she knew he had a rare steak inside him.

  The proprietor, whom Anand insisted on calling Joe, even though he was a fat and jolly Indian, soon got used to seeing us almost every other day. We couldn’t imagine how he made any money, since there never seemed to be anyone there besides Anand and me. Joe waited on table, so there weren’t even any waiters. Anand said that it was probably a front for black-market activities and that you could expect anything of a man who ran a Joe’s Place in Bombay. More likely, the real, prosaic reason was that most of Joe’s business was in cooking meals to send out.

  We came to feel so much at home at Joe’s that we bought him a checkered tablecloth, to lend the place a bit of class, and he would spread it ceremoniously over the corner table, invariably pointing out that it had been laundered since our last meal. We kept a bottle of gin at Joe’s and taught him to make fresh-lime gimlets with it, so that we could have a cocktail before lunch. He hadn’t a license to sell liquor, so he always shook our cocktails in an opaque bottle labelled Stone Ginger, in case anyone came in. He probably watered the gin; but we didn’t much care, because it was the idea that pleased us.

  We would sit at our table between the windows, glancing out occasionally at the patch of straggly garden, the jasmine bush, the desultory traffic and talk. How we talked! On and on and on. Sometimes it was, ‘In the States, did you ever—’ or, ‘Do you remember—’ kind of talk. Sometimes it was about incidents at home or in our offices. We talked a lot about Them—a flexible term, including any relatives or friends we considered old-fashioned, interfering, lacking in understanding. We often discussed their iniquities, and many of our conversations began, ‘Do you know what They’ve gone and done now?’ All through the sticky post-monsoon months, into the cooler, brilliant days of early winter, we talked. It seems a miracle to me now that we could have found so much to say about the details of our reasonably pedestrian lives.

  If we’d been a bit older or more observant, we would certainly have known that this state of affairs couldn’t last much longer. I was dimly aware that every day of life in Bombay relaxed our antagonism a tiny bit and blurred the outlines of our American years. However, I never guessed what Anand’s family’s counter-attack to his England-returned discontent would be. Anand’s mother was a direct, uncomplicated woman, and in her view there was one obvious and effective way to cure the whole disease without waiting for the slower methods of time.

  It was at Joe’s Place that Anand announced the arrival of Janaki. I had got there early, I remember, and was sitting at our table when Anand came in. He always had a certain tension in his walk, but that day it seemed more pronounced. He held his narrow shoulders stiffly and carried an air of trouble, so I asked him at once whether anything was the matter.

  ‘Matter?’ he asked sharply, as though it were an archaic word. ‘Why should anything be the matter?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. You just look funny.’

  ‘Well, I don’t feel funny,’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding.

  Joe brought him his gimlet and inquired if he wanted a steak again.

  Anand waved a hand at him impatiently and said, ‘Later. We’ll decide later.’ Then he looked at me in silence with a protentous frown. At last he said, ‘Do you know what They’ve gone and done now? They’ve invited a cousin—a distant cousin—to stay.’

  This didn’t seem to me any great disaster. Cousins, invited or not, were eternally coming to visit. Any relative had the right to turn up whenever it was convenient for them and stay as long as they liked. His announcement came as an anticlimax; but since he did seem so distressed, I asked carefully, ‘And I suppose you’ll be expected to fit him into the firm in some capacity?’

  ‘Her,’ Anand said, ‘It’s a girl.’

  ‘A girl? Is she going to work in the business?’ This was really cataclysmic ne
ws.

  ‘Oh, of course not. Can’t you see what They’re up to?’

  ‘Well, no, I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he said, looking helpless before such stupidity. ‘They’re trying to arrange a marriage for me.’

  I could think of nothing to say except an unconvincing ‘Surely not.’

  He went on without paying any attention. ‘I dare say They think They’re being subtle. Throwing us together, you know, so that my incomprehensible, foreign—’ he emphasized the word bitterly—‘preference for making up my own mind about these things will not be offended. We are to grow imperceptibly fond of each other. Oh, I see the whole plot.’

  ‘You must be imagining it all.’

  ‘She arrived last night. They didn’t even tell me she was coming.’

  ‘But these people are forever dropping in.’

  ‘I know. But she was invited. She told me so.’

  ‘Poor Anand.’ I was sorry for him, and angry on his behalf. There had never been any romantic exchanges between Anand and me, so the girl didn’t represent any personal threat; but I honestly thought that a matter of principle was involved and that one should stand by the principle. We had so often agreed that the system of arranged marriages was the ultimate insult to one’s rights as a human being, the final, insupportable interference of domineering families. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but could only produce, feebly, ‘Well, all you have to do is sit it out.’

  ‘And watch her doing little chores around the house? Making herself quietly indispensable?’ He added with a sour smile, ‘As the years roll by do you suppose we will grow old gracefully together?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a fool,’ I said, laughing. ‘She’ll have to go, sooner or later.’

  ‘But will I live that long?’ He seemed to be cheering up.

  ‘It’s rather unfair to the poor thing,’ I said, thinking for the first time of the girl. ‘I mean, if they’ve got her hopes up.’

  ‘Now, don’t start sympathizing with her. The only way to finish the thing once and for all—to make my position clear—is to marry someone else immediately. I suppose you wouldn’t consider marrying me, would you?’

  ‘Heavens, no,’ I said, startled. ‘I don’t think you need to be as drastic as that.’

  ‘Well, perhaps not. We’ll see.’

  At last I thought to ask, ‘What’s she called?’

  ‘Janaki.’

  ‘Pretty name.’

  ‘It makes me vomit.’

  I could hardly wait for our next lunch date, and when we met a couple of days later at Joe’s Place I started questioning Anand eagerly, ‘Well, how are things? How are you making out with Janaki?’

  Anand seemed remote, a bit bored with the subject. ‘Joe!’ he called. ‘More ice, for Pete’s sake. Gimlets aren’t supposed to be mulled.’ He tapped his fingers on the table in a familiar, nervous movement. ‘He’ll never learn,’ he said resignedly. Then, after a pause, ‘Janaki? Oh, she’s all right, I suppose. A minor pest.’

  ‘Is she being terribly sweet to you?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I will say this for her, she manages to be pretty unobstrusive.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was obscurely disappointed.

  ‘It’s just knowing she’s always there that’s so infuriating.’

  ‘It would drive me crazy.’

  In a voice that was suddenly cross, he said, ‘She’s so womanly.’

  ‘Hovers about, you mean?’

  ‘Not that so much, but I can see her hoping I’ll eat a good dinner or have had a good day at the office, or some damn thing.’

  ‘It sounds rather flattering.’

  ‘I would rather say that’s the strategy. It’s pathetic, really, how little They know me if They think she’s the sort of girl I’d want to marry.’

  ‘What sort of girl would you want to marry?’

  ‘Heaven knows,’ Anand said in a hopeless voice. ‘Someone quite different, anyway. I knew one once.’

  ‘Was there a girl in America?’ I asked with interest.

  ‘Isn’t there always a girl in America? A sort of tradition. In our father’s time, it used to be the daughter of the landlady somewhere in Earl’s Court. Usually blonde, always accommodating.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Accommodating. But several cuts above the landlady’s daughter. She was a senior in college. And she had quite a nice family, if you can stand families, rather timid, but determined to believe that a Good Home Environment was a girl’s best protection. I don’t think they would have raised many objections if we’d got married.’

  ‘Why didn’t you marry her, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Do those things work? I really don’t know.’

  ‘I expect your parents would have raised the devil.’

  ‘Before—if I’d told them. Not after. By then the particular alchemy that turns a girl into a daughter-in-law would have done its work. That was really the trouble. I couldn’t see her being an Indian daughter-in-law living in a Bombay family—and what a mess that would have made. Hurt feelings and recriminations and disappointment all around. I’m not sentimental about her,’ he said earnestly, as if it were an important point. ‘I mean, I know she wasn’t particularly good looking or anything, but I had a separate identity in her mind. I wasn’t just somebody’s son, or someone to marry, or someone with good business connections.’

  ‘And all that is what you are to Janaki?’

  ‘I suppose so. What else could I be?’

  As we left Joe’s Place after lunch, he said, ‘I think you’d better come to tea to meet her. Would you like to?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d ask me.’

  ‘Okay, then. Tomorrow?’

  Full of excitement, the next day, I met Anand after work and drove home with him. ‘Is your mother going to be cross about your asking me?’

  ‘Why should she be cross? You’ve been to tea with us before.’

  ‘But that was different.’

  ‘I can’t see why,’ he said, refusing to accept the situation.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so dense,’ I said, thinking, Poor girl, it’s going to be very frustrating for her if he insists on treating her as a casual cousin come for a holiday. ‘Does your mother tactfully leave you alone with her for tea?’

  ‘Never. The two of them chatter about domestic details. It’s really very boring.’

  To me it was far from boring. For one thing, Anand’s mother was far more cordial to me than she had been on previous visits, and I wondered whether she could already be so sure of the success of her plan that I was no longer a danger. And then there was the suspense of waiting to see what Janaki would be like.

  She came in with the servant who carried the tea tray, holding back the curtain of the dining room archway so that he could manage more easily. A plump, graceful girl with a very pretty face and a tentative, vulnerable smile, which she seemed ready to cancel at once if you weren’t going to smile with her. I saw, instantly, that she was any mother-in-law’s ideal—quiet, obedient, helpful. Her hair was drawn back into the conventional knot at the nape of her neck; she had a tika on her forehead, wore no makeup except for the faintest touch of lipstick, and even that, I decided, was probably a new experiment for her, a concession to Anand’s westernized tastes.

  She spoke mostly to Anand’s mother, in Gujarati, and I noticed that she had already assumed some of the duties of a hostess. She poured the tea and asked, in clear, lilting English, whether I took milk and sugar, handed around the plates of Indian savouries and sweets.

  After the first mouthful, I remarked formally, ‘This is delicious.’

  Anand’s mother caught the tone, even if she didn’t understand the words, and said something in Gujarati to Anand.

  He translated, without much interest, ‘Janaki made them.’

  Janaki, in embarrassment, wiped her mouth on her napkin with the thorough gesture that someone unused to wearing lipstick makes, and then gazed in surprise a
nd alarm at the pink smear on the linen. She saw me watching and gave me one of her diffident smiles.

  I quickly said the first thing that came into my head. ‘How clever you are. I wish I could cook.’

  ‘It is very easy to learn,’ she replied.

  ‘There never seems to be any time for it.’

  Entirely without sarcasm or envy she said, ‘That is true for someone like you who leads such a busy and interesting life.’

  I felt ashamed of myself for no reason I could quite put my finger on.

  We continued to talk banalities, and Janaki kept up her end admirably, managing to seem interested in the most ordinary comments and still keeping a watchful eye out to see that cups and plates were filled. The conversation gradually fell entirely to Janaki and me, because Anand retreated into a sulky silence. I remember thinking that one couldn’t really blame him. It must have been maddening to have to face this sweet and vapid politeness every day after work. As last he jumped up, said abruptly that he had some papers to go through, and left the room. I left soon after.

  Janaki saw me to the front door and, with an unexpected spontaneity, put her hand on my arm. ‘Please come to tea again,’ she said. ‘I mean, if you are not too occupied. I should so much like it. I have no friends in Bombay.’

  ‘I’d be delighted, and you must come to tea with me.’

  ‘Oh, no, thank you very much. Perhaps later on, but I must learn the ways of this house first. You see that, don’t you?’