The Householder Read online

  For

  Renana, Ava

  and Firoza-Bibi

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Copyright

  More praise for The Householder

  “Here is another delightful novel.… [Ruth Prawer Jhabvala] brings a lively sense of humor, a sharp and observant eye, and an insider’s knowledge to bear on modern Indian life. The result has been a series of deft and sprightly comedies, of which The Householder is perhaps the best.”

  —Rosanne Archer, New York Herald Tribune

  “Deliciously droll, wickedly irreverent, and altogether most satisfying.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “I can’t describe the humour, charm and deft obliquity with which Mrs. Jhabvala draws from Prem’s small self-knowledge the rounded picture of a whole milieu.… It’s a cross-section as brilliantly penetrating as V. S. Naipaul’s West Indian comedies: the picture of a society which has always known that dignity is the most precarious, absurd and rare of man’s inventions.”

  —Ronald Bryden, The Spectator

  1

  PREM sat at the only table they had and corrected his students’ essay papers. The table was a very frail and shaky one, made of thin cane, and it would have been more comfortable to sit on the floor. But he felt there was a certain dignity about sitting at a table; his father had always sat at a table when correcting papers. It was unreasonable, of course, to consider dignity, when there was no chance of any of his students seeing him; but he considered he would feel better for it afterwards, when he was returning their papers. He was not too good at enforcing discipline, and that made him a little afraid of his students and in need of all the moral support he could give himself.

  It was a Sunday evening, and correcting papers, he felt, was not a very good way of spending it. But he had as yet no friends in Delhi and knew of no places to go to. He had been for a walk earlier in the evening, but walking by oneself was depressing. He had sauntered down the road, past the compound where the milkman’s four black buffaloes lived and past the sewage canal and the municipal Family Planning clinic. It had been very boring. Afterwards he had gone and sat for a few minutes in the children’s park, watching the children go round and round on the stiff little wooden seats of the roundabout; and on the way home, through the street of the bazaar, he had jingled the coins in his pocket and wondered whether to buy himself a bag of nuts and raisins or not. Sometimes he thought yes and sometimes he thought no; not because of the money, but because of Indu. He considered that if he bought a bag for himself, he would have to bring one for her too. But he felt shy of doing so. He had never yet brought her a gift, and he did not know in what way to offer it to her; nor did he know how she would accept it from him. In the end he bought just one bag of nuts and raisins and ate it by himself, throwing away the paper before he reached home. But he ate it so quickly and guiltily that he did not enjoy it at all.

  ‘Afterwards,’ he read, ‘there was a great crush of people and many children cried and also were lost to their parents.’ He had given his students an essay to write on the Republic Day Parade. None of them had anything interesting to say on the Parade itself, but they all expressed moral sentiments of a high order. ‘How beautiful to see our Country, our Bharat, so feasted and loved,’ they wrote; or ‘Thus was offering of thanks given to God and our good and great Prime Minister for our Freedom and Independence.’ When Prem came across a particularly good sentiment like that, he ticked it and wrote ‘Very good’, even if there was a mistake in spelling or grammar. He was often surprised, when correcting papers, at the deep thoughts and feelings his students expressed. In the classroom they seemed such callow young men, one would never have credited them with any of these finer sentiments.

  Indu yawned, rather loudly, which irritated Prem. Why should she be tired? She had done no work. She was sitting on the floor, stitching a blouse for herself. Once or twice he had heard her very quietly sigh. That too had irritated him, for he did not see that she had any cause for unhappiness. Rather it was he who had cause for unhappiness, for the burden of providing for her and for himself, for paying their rent and their food and their servant-boy, was all his. And now she was pregnant. He had already had to pay five rupees to a doctor for confirming that fact. Her pregnancy was a terrible embarrassment for him. Now everybody would know what he did with her at night in the dark, as quickly and guiltily as he had eaten the nuts and raisins. And besides the embarrassment, there was the worry. Soon he would have a family and his expenses would mount; but his salary at Mr. Khanna’s college was only 175 rupees a month. How to manage on that? His rent alone came to 45 rupees.

  What he needed was a better-paid job. He had been thinking of it for some time now, ever since he had learnt that Indu was pregnant, but this evening it occurred to him for the first time to glance through old newspapers and see what kinds of likely jobs were being advertised nowadays. He got up to go into the kitchen where he knew Indu stored the old newspapers. She used some for lighting the fire and collected the rest in order to sell them to the rag, bottle and paper man who paid a good price for them.

  While he was crossing the landing to go from their sitting-room to their kitchen, he heard the noise from the Seigals downstairs. The Seigals were their landlords and occupied the downstairs portion of the house. They were very jolly people, and every evening they had visitors. Mr. Seigal played cards with the men—they all sat round a little card-table under a lamp, drank whisky and slammed down their cards with gusto; sometimes they laughed and made jokes, sometimes they shouted and quarrelled. The ladies sat on the veranda and knitted and talked. The Seigals’ son Romesh twiddled with the radio and when he got some good film music, he loudly joined in; he knew all the film songs, for he went to the cinema three times a week. Prem stood on the landing and listened to him. He could also hear Mr. Seigal laughing and thumping the table over some very good story. Tea-cups rattled on a tray and all the lights were blazing.

  Prem’s kitchen was bare and empty. The servant-boy was, as usual, out (he had many friends in the district). Prem found the newspapers piled up by the fire-grate and sat down on the floor to look through them. Some had already been torn for lighting the fire and had the advertisement pages missing. But even in those in which he still found the advertisements, there were no jobs for him. Only for engineers and draughtsmen and doctors. Nobody seemed to want a Hindi teacher; or if they did, they wanted him to be a first-class M.A. with three years’ teaching experience, not a second-class B.A. with only four months’ teaching experience, such as he was. He sat on the floor in the kitchen, with the newspapers spread round him, and felt a terrible oppression. He was so young; only a very short while ago he had been a student and he had lived at home with his parents who had looked after him and he had had no responsibility except to pass his examinations. His mother had gone round the house with her finger on her lips and she said to everyone who came, ‘Sh, Prem is studying for his examinations.’ And she had cooked big meals for him to build up his strength. Not like the tasteless food Indu served to him. He realized that he felt a great dislike for Indu. Why had they married him to her? She was not even very pretty.

  Because there were no other jobs for him, he realized he would have to improve on what he had. He would have to ask the Principal of his college for a rise in salary. It was not something he liked to do, but that only increased his conviction that he must do it. When his father was still alive, he had always told him ‘Put all your strength into doing the things you don’t like to do’, and Prem had taken the lesson to heart. So all the way to the college he was saying to himself, ‘I don’t like to do it, therefore I must do it.’ He was frowning with co
ncentration, keeping himself up to this resolution, which had one good result, for in his preoccupation he hardly noticed that he had reached the college. Usually he felt great embarrassment on reaching the college, for many students stood lounging outside, leaning against the wall with their hands in their pockets and looking with bored and critical eyes at all passers-by. Prem hated having to pass and be inspected by them, it made him feel most inadequate.

  It was a pity the students had nowhere to go before and after classes except out in the street; but the college was only an ordinary residential house in the middle of a street consisting of other ordinary residential houses, so there was no question of grounds. Between classes the students had either the corridor or the street, and most of them preferred the street. Consequently the college had a bad name in the neighbourhood and letters of complaint were constantly being sent to the Principal (‘Sir, I wish to bring to your notice that my daughter cannot pass your college without being affronted by your students with remarks that are not proper for a young unmarried girl to hear.’) At regular intervals the Principal would call the whole college together in the biggest class-room, which had to serve as assembly-hall on such occasions, and he would tell the students how the college had always had a good name and that this good name must be preserved at all costs, and that, therefore, he would expel—‘without mercy’, he said, looking sternly round the room—any student who did not know how to behave himself. But though he spoke very severely, occasionally pounding his fist on a desk, he never did expel anyone because he could not bear to refund the fees.

  All the rooms were divided in the middle, to accommodate two classes each. The students of the two different classes sat with their backs to one another, but the teachers faced each other from their dais and blackboards at opposite ends of the room. Prem, who was in charge of the Hindi class, shared a room with Mr. Chaddha, the professor of history. Mr. Chaddha was a birdlike little man who managed to keep discipline very well, so that his end of the room was always very much quieter than Prem’s. All his students were already seated on their benches, arranging their notes, while only two or three of Prem’s students had arrived and casually lounged around, leaning over to talk to one another. One of them was even smoking. Irritated by this contrast between his own and Mr. Chaddha’s students, Prem said, more sternly than he would otherwise perhaps have done, ‘Smoking in the classroom is not allowed.’ ‘I am just finishing this one, sir,’ said the student, quite easy and friendly; so now Prem did not know whether to force the issue or let it pass. (This was a dilemma he faced several times a day, for he feared on the one hand to be too strict with the students, on the other to lose their respect.) Finally he let it pass. Since he had definitely decided to ask Mr. Khanna for a rise in salary that very morning, he had, he considered, a hard enough task before him and did not wish to exhaust his mental energy beforehand.

  At nine-thirty there was a break, so he went to the staffroom to drink the cup of tea which was supplied from Mrs. Khanna’s kitchen and for which each member of staff paid two rupees eight annas a month. The staffroom was not always a staffroom, for when Mr. Khanna had guests, he used it as a guest-room, bringing in a bed and a towel with ‘Work is Worship’ embroidered on it. While the guests remained, the professors had to drink their tea either in the corridor or in their own classrooms. This was most awkward for Mr. Sohan Lal, the professor of mathematics, who lived in Mehrauli and had to leave his home at six o’clock in the morning to come cycling to the college. He always brought his breakfast with him in a tin tiffin-carrier, as well as a thermos flask of tea since he could not afford to pay Mrs. Khanna’s two rupees eight annas. He felt very shy while eating his food and sat in a corner with his head turned delicately away while he chewed. When the staffroom was not available, he would often go without his food because he could not find a quiet retreat in which to eat it.

  Prem knew how shy Sohan Lal felt while eating, so he did not go to sit near him, though he enjoyed his company more than that of any of the other professors. Instead he sat by Mr. Chaddha, whose company he did not enjoy at all. Indeed, Mr. Chaddha took no notice of him, but sat there in an armchair in the middle of the room with his legs crossed, swinging one little foot and reading a book; when he came to an interesting point in his reading, he exclaimed ‘Ha!’ and made a bold pencil-mark in the margin.

  The Principal’s private residence took up the first floor of the house. Prem stood hesitating outside the sitting-room door, but he made himself be brave and entered. Mr. Khanna was sitting eating his breakfast. ‘Yes, come in!’ he called. ‘Don’t be shy!’ But Prem was shy; he hovered by the door and kept his eyes lowered. Mr. Khanna was in a jovial mood. ‘You see me enjoying my breakfast,’ he explained. Prem looked up and nodded. He saw that Mr. Khanna was having an English breakfast of eggs and toast.

  ‘It is very important to start the day with a good breakfast,’ Mr. Khanna said. Prem nodded again. He could not speak, he was so overwhelmed with shyness. Not only because of what he had come to say, but also because the Principal’s sitting-room always made him feel shy. Everything was new and opulent and comfortable—plump cushions and flowered curtains and a big shiny radio-set; and Mr. Khanna himself so cheerful and self-confident, wearing a nicely laundered shirt and mopping up his egg with a piece of toast.

  ‘You see,’ explained Mr. Khanna, ‘the gastric juices must be allowed to flow from early morning, otherwise they will become clogged and nasty indigestions follow.’

  Quite unreasonably, Prem thought of Sohan Lal eating his first humble meal perched on a little bench in the staffroom. And this thought made him say quite the wrong thing: ‘Please sir,’ he said, ‘Mr. Sohan Lal lives in Mehrauli.’

  ‘I know it,’ said the Principal. He finished chewing a bite of toast and added ‘It is a long way’; there was even a note of sympathy in his voice which encouraged Prem to think he had started on a good line.

  ‘A very long way, sir,’ he said. He took a step forward and earnestly looked at the Principal. ‘He has to leave his house at six o’clock in the morning, without any food.’

  Mr. Khanna nodded, again with sympathy. He shook some salt from a container and said, ‘You should always take plenty of salt with your food. It quickens the energies.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Prem, ‘Mr. Sohan Lal has a large family to support.’

  ‘A spoonful of salt taken in a glass of warm water is also very good for replacing liquid strength lost through too much perspiration. You see, in our climate we must take great care of the body.’

  ‘He has not only his mother, his wife and his own children, but also his brother’s family to take care of. His brother died four years ago of fever.’

  ‘In our climate there are many different kinds of fever we have to guard against.’

  ‘It is very difficult for him to manage on his present salary,’ Prem said. ‘How can he support so many people on 175 rupees a month?’ He took another step forward and said in a voice passionate with conviction and pity, ‘Poverty and want are terrible things. In the Panchatantra it is written “It is better to be dead than poor”.’

  Mr. Khanna said, ‘It is an interesting thought.’

  ‘It is also a very sad thought, sir,’ Prem said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Mr. Khanna with a sigh. He left a moment’s respectful silence, then said in a matter-of-fact business tone, ‘He has sent you to ask for a rise in salary?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Prem said at once; he was shocked when he realized how he had laid himself open to being misunderstood. He knew that, in order to retrieve the situation, he ought to say at once it is for myself I am asking; but before he could get up the courage to say it, Mrs. Khanna entered and asked, ‘You want more toast?’

  Prem immediately brought his hands together in deferential greeting, but she only gave him a sideways and impatient look. She did not care for members of her husband’s staff to come into her living-room, and always made this clear when any of them did. She was a short plump wo
man who wore, even in the house, a lot of gold ornaments and brightly flowered clothes. She looked as opulent and upholstered as her sitting-room, and consequently inspired Prem with the same feeling of shyness.

  ‘You can give me another cup of tea,’ Mr. Khanna told her.

  ‘Sir,’ Prem found himself saying in a croaking voice, ‘Mr. Sohan Lal is so poor that he cannot even afford to give Mrs. Khanna her two rupees eight annas a month for tea.’ He saw the look of astonishment on both Mr. and Mrs. Khanna’s faces; Mrs. Khanna was staring at him with round eyes, holding the plump teapot with the English cottage on it poised in the air. Prem was astonished himself; he did not know why he was saying so much about Sohan Lal.

  Mrs. Khanna turned to her husband and said, ‘What is he saying?’

  ‘Pour the tea,’ he told her.

  ‘Perhaps he is suggesting I make a profit on the money I have to charge for their tea?’ Prem was startled by her hostile, even threatening tone. He hung his head and twisted his hands behind his back. He was very much tempted to answer her: they had worked it out long ago and knew that she made a handsome profit on their tea. But if he told her so, she would be very angry with him, and Mr. Khanna too would be angry.

  ‘Finest Darjeeling tea I serve to them!’ she shouted. ‘At what loss to myself every month God only knows!’

  Prem looked down at the rug on which he was standing and counted the number of petals to each flower. Why seven, he thought; which flower has seven petals?

  ‘Like a servant I wait on them,’ she said; her gold earrings were shaking with indignation.

  ‘It is all right,’ Mr. Khanna said. ‘Go now.’

  ‘In what other college,’ she demanded from outside the door, ‘does the Principal’s wife make a slave of herself for her husband’s employees?’

  After she had gone, there was a short silence between Prem and Mr. Khanna, during which they heard her shouting with the same indignation and probably on the same topic in some other room. Mr. Khanna said, ‘If Mr. Sohan Lal wishes to speak with me, perhaps it would be better for him to come himself.’