At the End of the Century Read online

  ALSO BY RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

  Three Continents

  Travelers

  Heat and Dust

  Out of India: Selected Stories

  Amrita

  Get Ready for Battle

  A Backward Place

  Esmond in India

  The Nature of Passion

  Poet and Dancer

  Shards of Memory

  East Into Upper East

  In Search of Love and Beauty

  The Householder

  My Nine Lives

  A Lovesong for India

  Like Birds, Like Fishes

  A Stronger Climate

  An Experience of India

  How I Became a Holy Mother

  At the End

  of the Century

  LEFTOVER SHARDS AT QUTB

  C. S. H. Jhabvala

  At the End of the Century

  Copyright © 2017 by The Legal Heirs of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Anita Desai

  Frontispiece copyright © 2014 by The Legal Heirs of Cyrus Jhabvala 2014

  Page 439 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Little, Brown

  First Counterpoint hardcover edition: 2018

  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.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-64009-137-5

  eISBN: 978-1-64009-138-2

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Jacket design by Sarah Brody

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  Contents

  Introduction by Anita Desai

  A Loss of Faith

  The Widow

  A Spiritual Call

  Miss Sahib

  A Course of English Studies

  An Experience of India

  Two More under the Indian Sun

  Desecration

  Expiation

  Great Expectations

  Two Muses

  Ménage

  A Choice of Heritage

  A Lovesong for India

  Pagans

  At the End of the Century

  The Judge’s Will

  At the End

  of the Century

  Introduction

  Alipur Road, Old Delhi, 1955

  Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it – to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further on to the Quidsia Gardens. And, across the road, I’d see a young woman pushing along a perambulator with a baby seated in it and a little girl dancing alongside it. She was a married woman, clearly, and I a student at the University of Delhi, but glancing across the road at her, I felt an instinctive relation to her. Why?

  She was revealed to be a young woman of European descent – German and Polish – who was married to an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and lived in rooms in a sprawling bungalow just off Alipur Road. When her mother, a German Jewish woman from London, visited her, Ruth searched for someone she could talk to. I think it might have been Dr Charles Fabri, the Hungarian Indologist who lived in the neighbourhood, who suggested she might meet my German mother, who had also come to India on marrying an Indian, thirty years ago in the 1920s.

  A coffee party – a kaffeeklatsch – was arranged so the two could indulge in their shared language in this foreign setting.

  I can’t imagine how or why, but Ruth decided to follow their meeting, after her mother had returned to England, with many others, on a different level – that of daughters. With extraordinary kindness and generosity she would have me over to their house, one filled with books, the books she had brought with her from England where she had been a student at the University of London when she had met Jhab. Perhaps it touched her that I was so excited about being among her books, talking to her about books. After that, whenever I came away with an armful of books on loan, with her talk still in my ears, I felt elated, a visitor to another world, the writer’s world I had only imagined and which now proved real. I would go home to scribble at my desk with a new, unaccustomed sense of the validity of such an occupation. I had met someone who, like myself, regarded writing as a very private, almost secret practice, a product of the interior space of shadows and silence. (This was very, very long before the age of readings, literary conferences and book festivals at which writers now meet and talk almost incessantly.)

  One day she placed in my hands a copy of To Whom She Will, her first novel that had been published in faraway England, an unimaginable distance from Alipur Road, Old Delhi. Holding it, I felt I had touched something barely considered possible – that the scribbling one did in one’s hidden corner of the world could be printed, published and read in the world beyond. Could our drab, dusty, everyday lives yield material that surely belonged only to the genius of a Chekhov, a Jane Austen, a Woolf or a Brontë? Taking home the copy Ruth inscribed for me and reading it, I made the discovery that Ruth had found, in this ordinary, commonplace world I so belittled, the source for her art, the material for her writing, using its language, its sounds and smells and sights with a veracity, a freshness and immediacy that no other writer I had read had. The message like an electric current: yes, this is our world, our experience, it can be our writing too.

  Many years, much experience later, we once had an unexpected encounter in the airport at Frankfurt. She was on her way from New York to India and I was on my way from India to New York. Alarmed at my lack of proper clothing, she insisted on giving me her duffel coat that she would not need in India but I would in New York. So we made our separate ways, across the hemispheres, safely.

  In the years that followed, we shared so much or, looked at differently, so little: our lives were small, restricted. The Jhabvalas moved to the beautiful house designed by Jhab on Flagstaff Road, and there were now three daughters – and two enormous German shepherd dogs. I too married and had children and would take them over for tea, which they would greatly look forward to because Ruth always had her cook, Abdul, bake a cake for them and Jhab would come back from his office to entertain them with his repertoire of magic tricks.

  In the summers we met in the ‘hill-station’ of Kasauli where the Jhabvalas booked rooms at the Alasia Hotel every year while I stayed in a rented cottage nearby. Our children would run wild in the pine woods on the hillsides while Ruth and I went for our more sedate walks and occasionally met with Khushwant Singh, the Sikh historian and novelist who also had a home there.

  In all these orderly, regulated, uneventful years, Ruth wrote prolifically: novels and short stories that seemed to draw upon a bottomless well of material. She always had such an air of existing in a separate world, in isolation and perfect stillness – so where did all this come from? Where, how, did she come to know the men and women who peopled her books?

  We need to listen to her: in her 1979 Neil Gunn Fellowship lecture she said tha
t as a Jewish refugee from Europe, the loss of her inheritance made her ‘a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests’, ‘a chameleon hiding myself in false or borrowed colours’. Also that ‘You take over other people’s backgrounds and characters. Keats called it “negative capability”.’

  It was a contrast to what E.M. Forster and Paul Scott had done in their writing about India as outsiders and visitors, if fascinated observers. Caryl Phillips has remarked that ‘she was postcolonial before the term had been invented’. Ruth’s own explanation was typically understated and wry: ‘Once a refugee, always a refugee’, which is why John Updike called her ‘an initiated outsider’.

  Once when she had V.S. Naipaul to tea and passed him a plate of cakes, he pointed at it with a trembling finger and cried, ‘There’s a fly on it!’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just take off your glasses. I always do.’ But not when she was writing, when her vision was laser-sharp; nothing was glossed or obscured.

  This would explain stories such as ‘The Widow’, whose central character longs for a life other than that of marriage to an old man, mean and vindictive, and after his death lusts after her tenant’s young son, pathetically pursuing him with promises of the fine clothes his mother can’t buy him and even the motor scooter he yearns for, only to be spurned and having return to her watching and waiting circle of relatives, a cast of sly and avaricious dependants. The voice, the point of view, is so perfectly captured, one would not add or alter a single word for greater effect. ‘Expiation’, a story so wrenching it is almost unbearable, is about the owner of a cloth shop in a small town and the unconditional love he has for his younger brother, a wastrel who falls in with a criminal and commits a murder for which both are hanged, then brings himself, in a supreme act of love and forgiveness, to perform the necessary last rites for both of them.

  Both are word-perfect; one might be hearing the protagonists themselves speaking. And Ruth’s characters were not likely to be speaking English, they would be speaking Hindi or Urdu or Hindustani. So there was a translation going on – yet there was no hint of the strain and uneasiness of crude, satirical and parodied translation of an Indian language into English that we encounter today. Hers was a total absorption. Ruth, like a great actress, becomes her characters and presents them to us from the inside out, not the outside in. She does not criticize them or satirize them – as so many Indian readers accused her of doing – she becomes those she portrays.

  It was her fate to be presented to Western readers as a Jane Austen, but although she does share her wit, precision and asperity of style, she was not ever Jane Austen at a ball, watching the flirt, the sharp-eyed mother or the tittering gossip – she entered into and inhabited her characters, herself withdrawing.

  I think none of us in India knew what an immense drain this was upon her energy, her resources. Not until we read her extraordinary essay ‘Myself in India’, in which she wrote of the split, the fracture between her Western sensibility and her Eastern experience which is made plain in the first line: ‘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.’ She went on to reveal the exhaustion relating to the constant to and fro of her love and loathing for her adopted land. ‘I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down.’

  This was when the subject of her work changed to the Europeans who came to India, the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, unlike herself in search of the exotic – whether spiritual or sexual, they hardly knew themselves, often confusing the two and finding it in the figure of the charismatic and unscrupulous guru.

  In ‘An Experience of India’ the heroine, a woman married to an English correspondent posted to Delhi, becomes infatuated with a young Indian musician, practically kidnaps him and drags him, miserably, home to her husband and their very Western apartment. He flees from her and returns to his family, and she becomes very ill. Her husband contrives a transfer to Geneva so she may recover there, but when it comes to it she refuses with unexpected ferocity to go, choosing instead the life of a destitute pilgrim, still in search for what she had set out to discover.

  Over and over again the stories are about the spirit longing for a physical manifestation of the ideal although, in the devastating story ‘Desecration’, a marriage to a fine, honourable man is abandoned for an affair with a coarse, brutal man as if degradation was what was wanted even if it destroys.

  Ruth herself became ill, her family worried about her. In those days if she ever saw I was myself going through some anguish over the life I was living and the writing I was struggling to do, she would not question or probe but instead rally me – and perhaps herself – by quoting Thomas Mann: ‘He is mistaken who believes he may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life’, or ask, laughingly, ‘What would you rather be – the happy pig or the unhappy philosopher?’ making light of it – but not taking it lightly herself.

  It must have been at this time that James Ivory and Ismail Merchant entered her life when they came to India in search of material for a film. They found it in an early novel of hers, The Householder, which she adapted for the screen for them. She said, ‘Films made a nice change for me. I met people I wouldn’t have done otherwise: actors, financiers, con men,’ and she moved to New York, buying herself an apartment, a tiny eyrie in a building on the Upper East Side where Ismail and Jim lived.

  In the summers she joined them in James Ivory’s country house in the upper Hudson river valley that became a gathering place for their far-flung families and friends. Ismail bought Ruth a camper’s travelling desk to set up under the trees by the lake so she could work there. Claverack was the scene for some great occasions, like the fiftieth anniversary of Ruth and Jhab’s wedding, attended by all their daughters and grandchildren, at which they were presented with a replica of Henry James’s ‘golden bowl’ and Ruth surprised everyone by standing up and delivering a speech, flawlessly. She spoke so little, but when she did it was always carefully considered and precisely worded as if she were writing, pen on paper.

  I saw less of her in these years, although I moved to America myself, not to the film world but the academic one of New England, but kept in touch through her writing. Apart from the film scripts she wrote for Merchant Ivory Productions, and the adaptations of novels by E.M. Forster and Henry James for which she won Academy Awards, she now wrote only short stories that she said she loved ‘for their potential of compressing and containing whatever I have learnt about writing and about everything else’.

  She found a new, rich vein in the lives of the Jewish European refugees, the people she might have known in the past, who had come to America and could be observed in the grand hotels and restaurants of New York and Los Angeles. One can discern in these stories her continued fascination with the false guru who in America takes the form of the temperamental artist, the supposed genius, attracting women who submit to their stormy tempers and selfish demands. Very often the solution to these tangled, tortuous relationships presents itself in the form of the ménage, as in the story by that name: a temperamental pianist is attracted to two sisters; each of them puts up with his dark moods and unruly life and do everything to help his genius flourish. When they age and tire, the daughter of one steps in to replace them. In ‘Pagans’, one of two sisters, married to a powerful studio head in Hollywood, stays on after his death, acquiring a devoted young admirer, Shoki. Her sister arrives to persuade her to return to New York, but falls for Shoki herself and when her husband, a prosperous banker, comes to take her back, he fails and the threesome in Hollywood is happy and complete without him. The ménage in these stories is brought about through understanding and acceptance that is not easily come by but welcomed when it is.

  For such a quiet, still person it is extraordinary what strong passions each story, novel and film contains. She never shied away from them and continued to address their
immense potential for both joy and destruction with a clarity of vision, unobscured by any wisp of illusion. Clear, cool, dry and infused by wit and insight, her style was the mirror of her person, the poise and elegance of her being.

  ANITA DESAI

  May 2017

  A Loss of Faith

  Ram Kumar could not remember his father, who had been a printer and had died of a sudden fever, leaving his wife and five small children to be supported by his brother, a postal inspector. The impression that Ram Kumar’s mother gave of her husband was, on the one hand, that of a man all tenderness and generosity and, on the other, of one very much like his brother the postal inspector – that is to say, a man who was often drunk on raw liquor, was careless of his family and beat his wife. In her moments of depression – which were frequent, for her life among her sisters-in-law and mother-in-law was not easy – she favoured the first impression: ‘Ah,’ she would say, ‘if my children’s father were still alive, it would be different for me’; and then she would suggest how her husband in his lifetime had cared for her, brought special foods for her when she was pregnant, given her and the children warm things to wear in the winter, and on festival days had taken them to see fairs and processions. But when things were not going too badly for her, she gave a different picture. Then she spoke with a kind of bitter satisfaction of the way all men were the same, all given to drink, selfishness and wife-beating; and she compressed her lips and nodded her head up and down, suggesting that, if called upon, she could tell many a tale from her own experience of married life to illustrate this truth.

  Her eldest child – not Ram Kumar, who was the third – was fortunately a boy, and all her hope was in him. Vijay was a strong, healthy, daring boy, and she could hardly wait for him to grow up and earn money and take her and her other children away to live with him. But when he finally did grow up, he turned out to be too fond of strolling through the bazaars, going to the cinema and having fun with his friends to give much of his attention to the jobs that were found for him; so that within two years he had run through fourteen such jobs – all of the nature of office messenger or contractor’s errand boy – and it became clear even to his mother that he would not hurriedly earn a lot of money. After these two years, he disappeared and was not heard of for another two; at the end of which time he came back and said he had been to Calcutta, where he had earned a lot of money and had been about to send for them when a thief had come in the night and stolen it all from under his bed. He was now in no hurry to look for another job, but stayed around in his uncle’s home during the day and went out towards evening to enjoy life with his numerous acquaintances.