I walked home, wondering at her mixture of nervousness and confidence, at the fact that she already felt certain she had a permanent place in that house.
At our next lunch date, it was Anand who asked the eager questions. ‘Well? What did you think of her?’
And I replied noncommittally, ‘She seemed very pleasant.’
‘Quite the little housewife, do you mean?’
‘No. Sweet and anxious to please, I meant.’
‘You sound like my mother. She says, “A goodnatured girl. You should count yourself fortunate.” I suppose she asked you to be her friend?’
‘How did you know?’
‘She’s not as stupid as she looks. She said the same to me. “Will you not allow us to be friendly, Anand?”’ He attempted a saccharin, unconvincing falsetto. He frowned. ‘The thin end of the wedge, don’t you see? It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.’
‘Well, at least she’s very good-looking,’ I said defensively.
‘She’s too fat.’
‘I think it rather suits her.’
‘A strong point in her favour, my mother says, to make up for my puniness.’ Anand was sensitive about his height. He said, in a touchy voice, daring one to sympathize with him, ‘Eugenically very sound. Strong, healthy girl like Janaki married to a weakling like me, and we have a chance of strong, healthy children who take after her. The children, you see, are the whole point of this stratagem. I’m an only son and must produce some. My mother has a rather simple approach to these things.
‘You must admit,’ I said rather uncomfortably, ‘that she’d make a very good mother.’
‘Not a doubt in the world. She’s a natural for the part of the Great Earth Mother. But I rather resent being viewed in such an agricultural light.’
In the weeks that followed, Janaki dominated our conversation at lunchtime, and I had tea with them quite frequently. Sometimes, if Anand was kept late at his office or had to attend a board meeting, Janaki and I would have tea alone, and she would ask hundreds of questions about America, trying, I thought, to build up a picture of Anand’s life there and the background that seemed to influence him so much. She claimed to be uniformly enthusiastic about everything American, and for me it was rather fun, because it made me feel so superior in experience. Once she asked me to teach her to dance, and I was unexpectedly disconcerted. There was something very refreshing about her lack of westernization, and I didn’t want to see her lose it.
‘I will if you really want me to, but—’
‘Anand likes dancing, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, but wouldn’t it be better if he taught you himself after you—I mean, when he—what I mean is, a little later on?’
‘You think that would be best?’ She meant, of course, would that be the best way of handling Anand?
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, meaning, you don’t want to seem too eager.
‘Very well.’ She nodded accepting my opinion as final. On this level of unspoken frankness we understood each other perfectly.
She would question me, sometimes openly and sometimes indirectly, about Anand’s tastes and preferences. We had a long session, I remember, about her looks. Should she wear make-up? Should she cut her hair? What about her clothes? I told her she was fine the way she was, but she insisted, ‘Has he never said anything? He must have made some remark?’
‘Well,’ I said reluctantly, ‘he did once mention that he thought you were just a fraction on the chubby side.’ Without a trace of rancour, Janaki said, ‘I will quickly become thin.’
‘Heavens! Don’t take the remark so seriously.’
‘It is nothing,’ Janaki assured me. ‘One need only avoid rice and ghee.’ She did, too. I noticed the difference in a couple of weeks.
When Anand was there, the atmosphere was much more strained. From the frigid politeness of his early days with Janaki, his manner gradually changed to irritation, which expressed itself in angry silence and later in a kind of undercover teasing sometimes laced with malice. For instance, he would greet her with something like, ‘What have you been up to today? Hemstitching the sheets? Crocheting for the hope chest?’ and Janaki would look puzzled and smile, as though she had missed the point of a clever joke. Actually, she was a beautiful needlewoman and did a good deal of exquisitely neat embroidery on all kinds of things—antimacassars, doilies, face towels—infallibly choosing hideous designs of women in enormous crinolines, watering the flowers in an English garden, or bunches of roses with ribbons streaming from them. Once Janaki answered Anand’s inquiry quite seriously with an account of her day, the household jobs she had done, the women who had called on his mother in the morning and had been served coffee, and even produced the embroidery she had been working on.
‘Wonderfully appropriate for India, don’t you think?’ Anand remarked to me with rather laboured irony.
‘I think it’s lovely,’ I said unconvincingly.
Janaki seemed unruffled. ‘Men do not appreciate embroidery,’ she said quietly.
Anand leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and gave an exaggerated sigh.
One couldn’t help disliking him in this role of tormentor. The fact was, of course, that in Anand’s phrase, I was getting imperceptibly fonder of Janaki as his impatience with her grew more overt. There was, to me, both gallantry and an appealing innocence in her undaunted conviction that everything would turn out all right. What I didn’t recognize was the solid realism behind her attitude. I started to suspect the calculation in her nature one day when Anand had been particularly difficult. He had insisted on talking about books she hadn’t read and, with apparent courtesy, addressing remarks to her he knew she couldn’t answer.
Janaki said nothing for a long time and then admitted, with a becoming lack of pretension, ‘I’m afraid I read only the stories in the Illustrated Weekly. But, Anand, if you would bring me some books you think good, I would read them.’
‘I’ll see if I can find the time,’ he replied in a surly voice.
When Janaki showed me to the door that evening, I said in considerable exasperation, ‘Why do you put up with it? He needn’t be so disagreeable when he talks to you.’
‘It is natural that there should be difficulties at first. After his life in America, there are bound to be resentments here.’
‘Well, I think you are altogether too forebearing. I wouldn’t stand it for a second.’ Privately, I had begun to think she must, after all, be stupid.
Then Janaki said, ‘What would you do?’
‘Leave, of course. Go back.’ And at that moment I realized what she meant. Go back to what? To another betrothal arranged by her elders? Learning to please some other man? Here, at least, she liked her future mother-in-law.
‘And besides,’ she said, ‘I know that really he is kind.’
In the end, Janaki turned out to be the wisest of us all, and I have often thought how lucky it was that she didn’t follow my advice then. Not that Anand capitulated all at once, or that one extraordinary morning he suddenly saw her with new eyes, or anything like that. He remained irritable and carping; but gradually he became enmeshed in that most satisfactory of roles, a reluctant Pygmalion.
I noticed it first one day when he finished his lunch rather hurriedly and said, as we were going back to our offices, ‘That girl’s conversation is driving me nuts. I think I really had better buy her some books. As long as I’m stuck with her company,’ he added awkwardly.
We parted at the bookshop, and in later conversations I learned that Janaki was doing her homework with diligence and pleasure.
From then on things moved fairly rapidly. I began to anticipate Anand’s frequent suggestions that we spend part of the lunch hour shopping—usually rather ungraciously expressed: ‘We’ve got to get that girl into some less provincial-looking saris.’ ‘That girl listens to nothing but film music. I really must get her some decent classical stuff. What do you suggest as a beginning? Kesarbai? Subbulakshmi?’
‘No We
stern music?’ I asked pointedly.
‘She wouldn’t understand it,’ Anand replied.
All the same, at home he continued to be offhand or overbearing with her. She remained calm and accepting, a willing pupil who knew that her stupidity was a great trial to her teacher. Still, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind about the change of attitude going on in Anand. I wanted a lived-happily-ever-after conclusion for Janaki; but mostly I was certain that the Pygmalion story could have only one ending, whatever the minor variations might be.
Anand’s parents were evidently equally confident of the outcome, for one day at tea he announced, with an exuberance no amount of careful casualness could disguise, that his father was going to send him to New York on a business trip. He was pleased, he insisted, largely because it meant that at last he was to be trusted with some real responsibility.
I said, ‘And it will be such wonderful fun to be back in America.’
‘Oh, yes. That, too, naturally. But I don’t know how much time I’ll have for the bright lights and parties.’ He had moved so smoothly into the correct businessman’s viewpoint that I wanted to laugh.
We were absorbed in discussing the details of the trip, and besides, by then Janaki had become such an accepted—and pleasing—part of the scenery of the house that we assumed she was listening with her usual attention and, as always, trying to fit in with Anand’s mood.
So it came as quite a shock when she suddenly spoke in a flat, decisive voice. ‘I, too, am leaving. I am going back to my home.’ Dead silence for a moment.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said.
‘But why—’ I began.
‘It is my decision,’ she said, and wouldn’t look at either of us.
Anand didn’t say anything, just stood up, with all his bright, important planning gone, and walked out of the room. We waited to hear his study door slam.
Then my affection for Janaki (and, of course, curiosity) made me ask, ‘But why now, just when things are going so well?’
‘It was your advice, don’t you remember?’
‘But things were different then.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded as though we both recognized some particular truth.
At the time I thought she believed herself defeated. I was surprised and concerned that what seemed so plain to me should remain obscure to her. ‘Listen,’ I said cautiously, ‘don’t you see that he—that in spite of everything, he has fallen in love with you?’
I don’t know quite what I had expected her response to be—a radiant smile, perhaps, or even a sense of triumph. I hadn’t expected her to glare at me as though I were an enemy and say, ‘Oh, love. I don’t want him to love me. I want him to marry me.’
‘It’s different for him,’ I said, as persuasively as I could. ‘For him it is important.’
She looked at me shrewdly, making up her mind about something. ‘You are sure?’ she asked.
‘Absolutely sure.’
Her voice was hard and impatient. ‘Love, what books you read, whether you like music, your “taste”—whatever that may mean. As if all that has anything to do with marriage.’
‘Well,’ I said ineffectually.
How can one make the idea of romantic love attractive to someone who wants only a home, a husband, and children? Even if nothing could be done about that, I thought I knew the reason for her sudden despair. The renewing of Anand’s American experiences must have seemed to her an overwhelming menace. I tried to reassure her, reminded her that Anand would be gone only a matter of weeks, that he would miss her, that America would look quite different to him now, that he had changed a lot in the past year—more than a year, actually.
But she wouldn’t listen, and she kept repeating, ‘I must pack my things and leave the house tomorrow.’
I thought, Poor Janaki. I can see that the tedious business of starting all over again on the unravelling of Anand’s England-returned tangles might well seem to be too much to face. It didn’t occur to me that I might equally have thought, Clever Janaki, the only one of us who knows exactly what she wants. Leave the house? She would have slit her throat first.
When I think of it, I can’t help wondering at the extent of my naїvete then. The fact is that women—or perhaps I mean just the women of a certain kind of world, Janaki’s world—have inherited, through bitter centuries, a ruthless sense of self-preservation. It still seems to me ghastly that they should need it; but it would be silly to deny that, in most places on earth, they still do. That cool, subtle determination to find her security and hang on to it, that all’s-fair attitude—not in love, which she discounted, but in war, for it was war, the gaining or losing of a kingdom—was really no more than the world deserved from Janaki. As in war, victory, conquest, success, call it what you will, was the only virtue. And, of course, the really absurd thing was that nobody would have been more appalled than Janaki if you had called her a feminist.
As it was, I heard with anxiety Anand on the phone the next day, saying, ‘Let’s lunch. I want to talk to you. Joe’s Place? One o’clock?’
I was certain that Janaki had gone home, with only the indignities of a few new clothes and a lot of tiresome talk to remember.
As soon as I saw him, I knew I was wrong. He had the conventionally sheepish look that makes the announcing of good news quite pointless. He said, ‘An eventful evening, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, it was, rather.’
Then there was a long pause while he looked embarrassed and I could think of no way to help him out. At last he said, all in a rush, ‘Look, this is going to seem ridiculous, I mean—well, Janaki and I are going to be married.’
‘You couldn’t do a more sensible thing,’ I said, much relieved.
He looked startled. ‘Sensible? Perhaps it seems that way to you. Actually, we’re in love with each other.’
‘With each other?’ I echoed incredulously, and regretted it immediately.
‘I knew it would seem peculiar to you. I daresay you’ve thought I hated her all this time.’ He smiled at me in a rather superior way. ‘I thought so myself for a while. And Janaki, as you well imagine, had every reason to think so. And I must say it certainly took a lot of courage on her part. I mean, when you think—’
‘You’d better start at the beginning,’ I said, suddenly feeling depressed.
‘Okay. I heard you leave yesterday, and then I heard Janaki come into the hall—you know that timid way she has of walking—and stand outside my study door. I was in quite a state; but I daresay that I wouldn’t have done anything about anything if she hadn’t—I mean, if someone hadn’t taken the initiative.’
‘Yes,’ I said, knowing what was coming but unable to shake off my gloom. ‘She came to explain why she was going home.’
‘She said—you see, she isn’t the passive, orthodox girl you think—she told me that quite against her plans or anything she’d expected, she’d—I know this will seem silly—but she’d fallen in love with me.’
‘I see. And that accounted for her behaviour. Trying all the time to please you, I mean.’
‘Well, yes. Then I realized that—’
‘All your resentment and bad manners were just that—’ I wanted to hurry him through the story.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Well, yes,’ I repeated, and couldn’t look at him. We were silent for a while. ‘Well, congratulations,’ I said uneasily.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ he said in a confident voice, ‘that Their plans should have worked out—but so differently. I don’t suppose They’ll ever understand.’
‘It wouldn’t be worth trying to explain.’
‘Heavens, no. Look, I’m taking Janaki out to lunch tomorrow. Will you join us?’
‘Oh, no, surely—’
‘She asked particularly that you come. She likes you very much, you know, and besides, she doesn’t feel quite comfortable going out without a chaperon.’
‘In that case—’ I said with a nastiness lost on Anand. And all the time I was thi
nking, Have we all been made use of? A sympathetic mother-in-law, a man you can flatter, a gullible friend from whom you can learn background and fighting conditions, with whom you can check tactics and their effects. Now that she has won, she must have nothing but contempt for all of us. But simultaneously I was wondering, Is she, after all, really in love? It was a state she didn’t know how to cope with, and she could hope only to use the weapon she knew, an ability to please or try to please. Why should she, or how could she, tell me all that herself—a realm of which she was so unsure, which was so far out of her experience?
Now that I have met so many Janakis of the world, I think I know which explanation was right.
‘So we’ll meet,’ Anand was saying, ‘at the Taj, if that’s all right with you?’
He had reserved a table by the windows. Janaki was a bit late, to be sure—she explained breathlessly—that we would be there before her, because it would have been agony to sit alone.
We ordered from the Indian menu, and Anand said, with only a fleeting, questioning glance at me, ‘No wine, I think. There really isn’t any wine at all that goes with Indian food, is there?’
The Cow of the Barricades
RAJA RAO
They called her Gauri for she came every Tuesday evening before sunset to stand and nibble at the hair of the Master. And the Master touched her and caressed her and he said: ‘How are you, Gauri?’ and Gauri simply bent her legs and drew back her tongue and, shaking her head, ambled round him and disappeared among the bushes. And till Tuesday next she was not to be seen. And the Master’s disciples gathered grain and grass and rice-water to give her every Tuesday, but she refused it all and took only the handful of grain the Master gave. She munched it slowly and carefully as one articulates a string of holy words, and when she had finished eating, she knelt again, shook her head and disappeared. And the Master’s disciples said: ‘This is a strange creature,’ and they went to the Cotton Street and the Mango Street, and they went by the Ginning Mills and through the Weavers’ Lines, but Gauri was nowhere to be seen. She was not even a god-dedicated cow, for never had a shopkeeper caught her eating the grams nor was she found huddled in a cattle-pound. People said, ‘Only the Master could have such strange visitors,’ and they went to the Master and said: ‘Master, can you tell us who this cow may be?’ And the Master smiled with unquenchable love and fun and he said: ‘She may be my baton-armed mother-in-law. Though she may be the mother of one of you. Perhaps, she is the great Mother’s vehicle.’ And like to a mother, they put kumkum on her forehead and till Tuesday next they waited for Gauri.
Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1 Page 6
