Out of India Read online

  Previous books by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala:

  NOVELS

  Amrita

  The Nature of Passion

  Esmond in India

  The Householder

  Get Ready for Battle

  A Backward Place

  Travelers

  Heat and Dust

  In Search of Love and Beauty

  Three Continents

  STORIES

  Like Birds, Like Fishes

  A Stronger Climate

  An Experience of India

  How I Became a Holy Mother

  East into Upper East

  Copyright 1957, 1963, 1966, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1986, 2000

  by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  First Counterpoint paperback copyright 2000.

  “The Widow,” “The Interview,” “Passion,” “The Man with the Dog,” “Rose Petals,” “Two More Under the Indian Sun,” “Bombay,” “On Bail,” “In the Mountains,” and “Desecration” appeared originally in The New Yorker.

  The Introduction, “Myself in India,” first appeared in London Magazine.

  “A Spiritual Call” first appeared in The Cornhill.

  “The Housewife” first appeared in Cosmopolitan.

  “My First Marriage,” “An Experience of India,” and How I Became a Holy Mother” first appeared in Encounter.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 1927–

  Out of India : selected stories / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—1st Counterpoint pbk. ed.

  p.cm.

  1. India—Social life and customs—Fiction.I. Title.

  PR9499.3.15A62000

  823—dc2199-046035

  Printed in the United States of America

  COUNTERPOINT

  P.O. Box 65793

  Washington, D.C. 200035-5793

  Counterpoint is a member of the Perseus Book Group.

  10987654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-877-7

  For C.S.H.J. as always

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Myself in India

  My First Marriage

  The Widow

  The Interview

  A Spiritual Call

  Passion

  The Man with the Dog

  An Experience of India

  The Housewife

  Rose Petals

  Two More Under the Indian Sun

  Bombay

  On Bail

  In the Mountains

  How I Became a Holy Mother

  Desecration

  INTRODUCTION: MYSELF IN INDIA

  I have lived in India for most of my adult life. My husband is Indian and so are my children. I am not, and less so every year.

  India reacts very strongly on people. Some loathe it, some love it, most do both. There is a special problem of adjustment for the sort of people who come today, who tend to be liberal in outlook and have been educated to be sensitive and receptive to other cultures. But it is not always easy to be sensitive and receptive to India: there comes a point where you have to close up in order to protect yourself. The place is very strong and often proves too strong for European nerves. There is a cycle that Europeans—by Europeans I mean all Westerners, including Americans—tend to pass through. It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm—everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down. When I meet other Europeans, I can usually tell after a few moments’ conversation at what stage of the cycle they happen to be. Everyone likes to talk about India, whether they happen to be loving or loathing it. It is a topic on which a lot of things can be said, and on a variety of aspects—social, economic, political, philosophical: it makes fascinating viewing from every side.

  However, I must admit that I am no longer interested in India. What I am interested in now is myself in India—which sometimes, in moments of despondency, I tend to think of as my survival in India. I had better say straightaway that the reason I live in India is that my strongest human ties are here. If I hadn’t married an Indian, I don’t think I would ever have come here for I am not attracted—or used not to be attracted—to the things that usually bring people to India. I know I am the wrong type of person to live here. To stay and endure, one should have a mission and a cause, to be patient, cheerful, unselfish, strong. I am a central European with an English education and a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis. I am irritable and have weak nerves.

  The most salient fact about India is that it is very poor and very backward. There are so many other things to be said about it but this must remain the basis of all of them. We may praise Indian democracy, go into raptures over Indian music, admire Indian intellectuals—but whatever we say, not for one moment should we lose sight of the fact that a very great number of Indians never get enough to eat. Literally that: from birth to death they never for one day cease to suffer from hunger. Can one lose sight of that fact? God knows, I’ve tried. But after seeing what one has to see here every day, it is not really possible to go on living one’s life the way one is used to. People dying of starvation in the streets, children kidnapped and maimed to be sent out as beggars—but there is no point in making a catalog of the horrors with which one lives, on which one lives, as on the back of an animal. Obviously, there has to be some adjustment.

  There are several ways. The first and best is to be a strong person who plunges in and does what he can as a doctor or social worker. I often think that perhaps this is the only condition under which Europeans have any right to be here. I know several people like that. They are usually attached to some mission. They work very hard and stay very cheerful. Every few years they are sent on home leave. Once I met such a person—a woman doctor—who had just returned from her first home leave after being out here for twelve years. I asked her: but what does it feel like to go back after such a long time? How do you manage to adapt yourself? She didn’t understand. This question, which was of such tremendous import to me—how to adapt oneself to the differences between Europe and India—didn’t mean a thing to her. It simply didn’t matter. And she was right, for in view of the things she sees and does every day, the delicate nuances of one’s own sensibilities are best forgotten.

  Another approach to India’s basic conditions is to accept them. This seems to be the approach favored by most Indians. Perhaps it has something to do with their belief in reincarnation. If things are not to your liking in this life, there is always the chance that in your next life everything will be different. It appears to be a consoling thought for both rich and poor. The rich man stuffing himself on pilau can do so with an easy conscience because he knows he has earned this privilege by his good conduct in previous lives; and the poor man can watch him with some degree of equanimity, for he knows that next time around it may well be he who will be digging into that pilau while the other will be crouching outside the door with an empty stomach. However, this path of acceptance is not open to you if you don’t have a belief in reincarnation ingrained within you. And if you don’t accept, then what can you do? Sometimes one wants just to run away and go to a place where everyone has enough to eat and clothes to wear and a home fit to live in. But even when you get there, can you ever fo
rget? Having once seen the sights in India, and the way it has been ordained that people must live out their lives, nowhere in the world can ever be all that good to be in again.

  None of this is what I wanted to say. I wanted to concentrate only on myself in India. But I could not do so before indicating the basis on which everyone who comes here has to live. I have a nice house, I do my best to live in an agreeable way. I shut all my windows, I let down the blinds, I turn on the air-conditioner; I read a lot of books, with a special preference for the great masters of the novel. All the time I know myself to be on the back of this great animal of poverty and backwardness. It is not possible to pretend otherwise. Or rather, one does pretend, but retribution follows. Even if one never rolls up the blinds and never turns off the air-conditioner, something is bound to go wrong. People are not meant to shut themselves up in rooms and pretend there is nothing outside.

  Now I think I am drawing nearer to what I want to be my subject. Yes, something is wrong: I am not happy this way. I feel lonely, shut in, shut off. It is my own fault. I should go out more and meet people and learn what is going on. All right, so I am not a doctor nor a social worker nor a saint nor at all a good person; then the only thing to do is to try to push that aspect of India out of sight and turn to others. There are many others. I live in the capital, where so much is going on. The winter is one round of parties, art exhibitions, plays, music and dance recitals, visiting European artistes: there need never be a dull moment. Yet all my moments are dull. Why? It is my own fault, I know. I can’t quite explain it to myself but somehow I have no heart for these things here. Is it because all the time underneath I feel the animal moving? But I have decided to ignore the animal. I wish to concentrate only on modern, Westernized India, and on modern, well-off, cultured Westernized Indians.

  Let me try and describe a Westernized Indian woman with whom I ought to have a lot in common and whose company I ought to enjoy. She has been to Oxford or Cambridge or some smart American college. She speaks flawless, easy, colloquial English with a charming lilt of an accent. She has a degree in economics or political science or English literature. She comes from a good family. Her father may have been an I.C.S. officer or some other high-ranking government official; he too was at Oxford or Cambridge, and he and her mother traveled in Europe in prewar days. They have always lived a Western-style life, with Western food and an admiration for Western culture. The daughter now tends rather to frown on this. She feels one should be more deeply Indian, and with this end in view, she wears handloom saris and traditional jewelry and has painted an abnormally large vermilion mark on her forehead. She is interested in Indian classical music and dance. If she is rich enoughs—she may have married into one of the big Indian business houses—she will become a patroness of the arts and hold delicious parties on her lawn on summer nights. All her friends are there—and she has so many, both Indian and European, all interesting people—and trays of iced drinks are carried around by servants in uniform and there is intelligent conversation and then there is a superbly arranged buffet supper and more intelligent conversation, and then the crown of the evening: a famous Indian maestro performing on the sitar. The guests recline on carpets and cushions on the lawn. The sky sparkles with stars and the languid summer air is fragrant with jasmine. There are many pretty girls reclining against bolsters; their faces are melancholy, for the music is stirring their hearts, and sometimes they sigh with yearning and happiness and look down at their pretty toes (adorned with a tiny silver toe ring) peeping out from under the sari. Here is Indian life and culture at its highest and best. Yet, with all that, it need not be thought that our hostess has forgotten her Western education. Not at all. In her one may see the best of East and West combined. She is interested in a great variety of topics and can hold her own in any discussion. She loves to exercise her emancipated mind, and whatever the subject of conversation—economics, or politics, or literature, or film—she has a well-formulated opinion on it and knows how to express herself. How lucky for me if I could have such a person for a friend! What enjoyable, lively times we two could have together!

  In fact, my teeth are set on edge if I have to listen to her for more than five minutes—yes, even though everything she says is so true and in line with the most advanced opinions of today. But when she says it, somehow, even though I know the words to be true, they ring completely false. It is merely lips moving and sounds coming out: it doesn’t mean anything, nothing of what she says (though she says it with such conviction, skill, and charm) is of the least importance to her. She is only making conversation in the way she knows educated women have to make conversation. And so it is with all of them. Everything they say, all that lively conversation around the buffet table, is not prompted by anything they really feel strongly about but by what they think they ought to feel strongly about. This applies not only to subjects that are naturally alien to them—for instance, when they talk oh so solemnly! and with such profound intelligence! of Godard and Becket and ecology—but when they talk about themselves too. They know modern India to be an important subject and they have a lot to say about it: but though they themselves are modern India, they don’t look at themselves, they are not conditioned to look at themselves except with the eyes of foreign experts whom they have been taught to respect. And while they are fully aware of India’s problems and are up on all the statistics and all the arguments for and against nationalization and a socialistic pattern of society, all the time it is as if they were talking about some other place—as if it were a subject for debate—an abstract subject—and not a live animal actually moving under their feet.

  But if I have no taste for the company of these Westernized Indians, then what else is there? Other Indians don’t really have a social life, not in our terms; the whole conception of such a life is imported. It is true that Indians are gregarious insofar as they hate to be alone and always like to sit together in groups; but these groups are clan-units—it is the family, or clan members, who gather together and enjoy each other’s company. And again, their conception of enjoying each other’s company is different from ours. For them it is enough just to be together; there are long stretches of silence in which everyone stares into space. From time to time there is a little spurt of conversation, usually on some commonplace everyday subject such as rising prices, a forthcoming marriage, or a troublesome neighbor. There is no attempt at exercising the mind or testing one’s wits against those of others: the pleasure lies only in having other familiar people around and enjoying the air together and looking forward to the next meal. There is actually something very restful about this mode of social intercourse, and certainly holds more pleasure than the synthetic social life led by Westernized Indians. It is also more adapted to the Indian climate, which invites one to be absolutely relaxed in mind and body, to do nothing, to think nothing, just to feel, to be. I have in fact enjoyed sitting around like that for hours on end. But there is something in me that after some time revolts against such lassitude. I can’t just be! Suddenly I jump up and rush away out of that contented circle. I want to do something terribly difficult like climbing a mountain or reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I feel tempted to bang my head against the wall as if to wake myself up. Anything to prevent myself from being sucked down into that bog of passive, intuitive being. I feel I cannot, I must not allow myself to live this way.

  Of course there are other Europeans more or less in the same situation as myself. For instance, other women married to Indians. But I hesitate to seek them out. People suffering from the same disease do not usually make good company for one another. Who is to listen to whose complaints? On the other hand, with what enthusiasm I welcome visitors from abroad. Their physical presence alone is a pleasure to me. I love to see their fresh complexions, their red cheeks that speak of wind and rain; and I like to see their clothes and their shoes, to admire the texture of these solid European materials and the industrial skills that have gone into making them. I also like to hear the wa
y in which these people speak. In some strange way their accents, their intonations are redolent to me of the places from which they have come, so that as voices rise and fall I hear in them the wind stirring in English trees or a mild brook murmuring through a summer wood. And apart from these sensuous pleasures, there is also the pleasure of hearing what they have to say. I listen avidly to what is said about people I know or have heard of and about new plays and restaurants and changes and fashions. However, neither the subject nor my interest in it is inexhaustible; and after that, it is my turn. What about India? Now they want to hear, but I don’t want to say. I feel myself growing sullen. I don’t want to talk about India. There is nothing I can tell them. There is nothing they would understand. However, I do begin to talk, and after a time even to talk with passion. But everything I say is wrong. I listen to myself with horror; they too listen with horror. I want to stop and reverse, but I can’t. I want to cry out, this is not what I mean! You are listening to me in entirely the wrong context! But there is no way of explaining the context. It would take too long, and anyway what is the point? It’s such a small, personal thing. I fall silent. I have nothing more to say. I turn my face and want them to go away.

  So I am back again alone in my room with the blinds drawn and the air-conditioner on. Sometimes, when I think of my life, it seems to have contracted to this one point and to be concentrated in this one room, and it is always a very hot, very long afternoon when the air-conditioner has failed. I cannot describe the oppression of such afternoons. It is a physical oppression—heat pressing down on me and pressing in the walls and the ceiling and congealing together with time that has stood still and will never move again. And it is not only those two—heat and time—that are laying their weight on me but behind them, or held within them, there is something more, which I can only describe as the whole of India. This is hyperbole, but I need hyperbole to express my feelings about those countless afternoons spent over what now seem to me countless years in a country for which I was not born. India swallows me up and now it seems to me that I am no longer in my room but in the white-hot city streets under a white-hot sky; people cannot live in such heat, so everything is deserted—no, not quite, for here comes a smiling leper in a cart being pushed by another leper; there is also the carcass of a dog and vultures have swooped down on it. The river has dried up and stretches in miles of flat cracked earth; it is not possible to make out where the river ceases and the land begins, for this too is as flat, as cracked, as dry as the riverbed and stretches on forever. Until we come to a jungle in which wild beasts live, and then there are ravines and here live outlaws with the hearts of wild beasts. Sometimes they make raids into the villages and they rob and burn and mutilate and kill for sport. More mountains and these are very, very high, and now it is no longer hot but terribly cold, we are in snow and ice and here is Mount Kailash on which sits Siva the Destroyer wearing a necklace of human skulls. Down in the plains they are worshiping him. I can see them from here—they are doing something strange—what is it? I draw nearer. Now I can see. They are killing a boy. They hack him to pieces and now they bury the pieces into the foundations dug for a new bridge. There is a priest with them who is quite naked except for ash smeared all over him; he is reciting some holy verses over the foundations, to bless and propitiate.