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  FARID AND FARIDA

  Farid couldn’t believe what he heard about Farida. She was his wife, and he would have thought that no one had known her more deeply, in every way, than he had. But now, they said, she was a holy woman sitting under a tree in some holy place in the Himalayas, and people came from all over India to take blessings and good vibrations from her. Ludicrous, he thought. She might fool all the world, but she couldn’t fool him. Or could she? He hadn’t seen her for twenty years.

  He still lived in London, in the flat they had rented long ago when they had first come to England as newlyweds. It was just one room, badly partitioned into two, with a makeshift kitchen and bathroom wedged in between, but the address was good, behind Harrods, so Farid hung on. The place was falling into decay. The landlord had been trying to get him out for years and refused to make any repairs. Farid couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. He had not got on and now never would, and no longer cared. He was in his fifties and slovenly, fat from drinking too much.

  In his youth, in India, he had been exquisite, and so had Farida—both of them small-boned, elegant, and quick in mind and body. Much had been expected of them, and they were confident of living up to these expectations. Their families were not rich but were very old; the overgrown gardens of their decaying mansions in Delhi abutted on each other, and from their earliest childhood Farid and Farida had gone back and forth through a gap in the boundary wall. They grew up and of course fell in love; now they met not only among the flowering jasmine bushes of their own gardens but also at the university, with its stone-flagged corridors and courtyards. They graduated, they married, they went to live in London. They felt they needed a wider horizon for their talent, which lay mainly in their own personalities—in their intense Indianness, which at that time was regarded, in the self-deprecating countries of the West, as synonymous with every kind of natural and spiritual superiority.

  Using their charm and their contacts, Farid and Farida had attempted to set up a business importing hand-loomed Indian textiles. It failed to prosper, and they became impresarios for visiting Indian musicians and dancers, and when these turned out to be unreliable and ungrateful they tried, in succession, ready-made Indian garments, hand-crafted Indian jewelry, Indian lampshades, Indian bedcovers, and Indian table linen—all those indigenous handicrafts by which others of their countrymen, far less gifted than Farid and Farida, made their fortunes in London, Paris, and New York. Ten years passed, then fifteen. They were still living in the temporary flat they had rented, and the landlord began trying to get them out. Farid was drinking. Farida stayed out late and went away for weekends; their erotic quarrels had turned into bitter fights. They had no money, they hated each other. One night, she packed up and returned to India. He stayed on, drank on—and survived, but only just.

  After he had heard that she had become a holy woman, he kept muttering, “We’ll see about that.” He didn’t know what he meant; he was a person impelled by instinct rather than thought. This impelled him one day to go to Sunil’s elegant offices, where he had to wait in the outer reception area before finally being admitted, as a special favor to an old friend. Sunil sat behind his desk and looked at the watch on his hairy wrist and said, “Ten minutes, Farid.” Although he was without charm or contacts or aesthetic sensibility, Sunil had become rich from the very handlooms and handicrafts that had broken Farid’s back and spirit. When they had all been students together in Delhi, Farid and Farida had laughed at Sunil, who was ridiculously in love with Farida. At that time, when Farid was slim and beautiful, Sunil was fat and ungainly. He hadn’t changed, but now he had the best tailors and shirtmakers to help him, and he exuded confidence and eau de cologne. Farid still addressed him in the condescending tone that he and Farida had always used toward him. Sunil was too busy to notice. He got rid of Farid within the scheduled ten minutes, though not without handing over the check to cover the air fare to India and expenses. Sunil had also heard about Farida, but he didn’t laugh at the news. As was his habit, he would wait and see.

  When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant. Trust her, Farid thought bitterly. Apart from her astonishing situation, she really was the same Farida—God knew how she did it. She was now in her fifties, but sitting there in the lotus position she looked as slim, lithe, and upright as ever. Her hair—dyed, no doubt—was black; her skin was clear and shone with a radiance that could only be the result of the best cosmetics, applied, he knew, with consummate skill. She was surrounded by four or five handmaidens, as exquisitely draped in orange as she was in white, and pilgrims came and went, touching her feet in reverence. She sat on the deerskin traditional to holy people, and someone stood behind her waving a fly whisk. If a fly happened to land on her, Farida waited for it to be flicked off. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she fingered a string of prayer beads in the same way, it occurred to Farid, that she had once fingered her pieces of jewelry, before they were sold off, one by one, to cover her expenses in London.

  Farid regarded the scene from a distance. The tree—a huge banyan—spread its foliage over Farida and her handmaidens, but the people lining up to see her had to stand outside in the sun until it was their turn to be admitted into the shade of the tree. Farid watched her as she dealt with the pilgrims. To some she spoke at length, while others she only lightly touched as they bowed down to her; a few favored ones were handed some holy talisman by a handmaiden. But everyone appeared to come away fully satisfied, for Farida radiated blessing. Farid couldn’t help admiring her; he had often told her that she would have made a first-rate actress. At last he approached the tree and lined up with the other pilgrims. When it was his turn to be led up to her, he didn’t bow, like the others, but stood and looked down at her, one hand on his hip. She looked up at him and met his cynical smile with an ambiguous one of her own. She made it seem as if she had been expecting him, even after twenty years. They kept on looking at each other, and he felt the challenge that had always lain between them.

  She looked away first, turning around to a handmaiden to murmur some command. Straightaway, he was led off and installed in a whitewashed little cell in one of a chain of plain brick structures that rambled all over the mountainside. These constituted an ashram, and of course the accommodations were of the simplest, but everything was clean, pleasant, and orderly. He decided to stay on, at least for a while. There was little expense to him, he discovered—in fact, none at all—which was just as well, because Sunil’s money wasn’t going to last forever. He couldn’t say he was uncomfortable. Within a day or two, he realized that he was being treated as an honored guest. Regular meals were brought to him on a tray, and there was always someone hovering around to see if he needed anything; someone even brought him his cigarettes from the bazaar. He decided to treat the whole thing as a holiday—a well-deserved one, at that, for God knew he’d had a pretty rough struggle to keep himself going, while Farida apparently had experienced no difficulty landing on her feet. She was his wife, after all, and if good fortune had come her way it was no more than right that he should have some modest share of it.

  The days passed as evenly for him as they did for everyone else. The place had its own rhythm. It was a traditional sacred spot—almost as sacred as Banaras—and there were other holy people like Farida living there. They were Hindus and she was a Muslim, but that didn’t matter. Allah and Ishwar were equal here, and no one questioned which of them was responsible for the mountain peaks rising against the immaculate sky, or the sun that set in orange glory on one side and rose in pink effulgence on the other. Cymbals and temple bells rang out at regular intervals, and everyone hurried smiling to a variety of little white shrines and temples adorned with flags and garlands. Not Farid, of course—he didn’t go in for anything like that. Instead, he took little walks in the mornings and the late afternoons, climbing up a green path till he got tired and began panting, which was quite soo
n. At night, he slept on a string cot in his whitewashed cell. They had given him an old electric table fan, which kept him moderately cool, though he could have wished it made less clatter. When he got tired of the vegetarian meals they brought him, he wandered down into the little bazaar at the foot of the hill and ate a meat curry at one of the stalls there and had some worldly conversation with the shopkeepers and customers. Once, he went into the town cinema, together with the other town loafers, and saw one of those long, loud Hindi films, which he enjoyed more than a sophisticated person like himself should have. Once a day, he visited Farida under her tree. When she asked him whether everything was to his satisfaction, he replied with a shrug that suggested he neither asked for nor got much. Altogether, he conveyed the impression that he was doing her a favor by being there at all.

  He was waiting for a showdown with her. He expected it. They had always had showdowns—explosions ignited by the fuel of their fiery temperaments. In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking, but later, during the years in London, the showdowns had become a release from the tensions not of love but of failure and frustration. They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors’ cooking. (They themselves had given up on cooking and only opened cans and frozen packets.) The flat also held the odors of Farida’s scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid’s drinks.

  It was no wonder that, in their last years together, Farida had gone away as often as possible. She told him she went to follow up useful contacts—though these were vague by now, for they no longer had definite plans but just lived on in the hope of something turning up. It was when she came back from one of those expeditions that they had had their final quarrel. He had been alone in the flat all weekend, drinking. His eyes hurt, his head felt huge, and now he lay on the bed watching her brush her hair in front of the mirror. He could see her smiling to herself in a secret, sensuous way. He began to taunt her, asking her questions about where she had spent the weekend and taking pleasure in trapping her in discrepancies. Actually, she wasn’t very careful about her excuses any more and presented them to him with a take-it-or-leave-it indifference. But that day he persisted and she became angry, which was what he had wanted, for why should she be smiling that way when he was feeling so rotten?

  In the past, in their years of happiness, he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way. Later, he began to miss his mark, and that was what happened that day. Before he knew where he was, with his sick eyes and head, she had jumped up from the mirror, crashed her hairbrush against the wall behind him, and stood above him in an attitude of menace. He squinted up at her, mocking and malevolent. Her silk robe, cut down from a sari, swung wide open, and her full breasts, unconfined by a brassiere, were before him. Her breasts had always been an exciting contrast to her small waist and slender arms, though not to her hips, which also swelled voluptuously. He reached up his hand to squeeze one breast, and remarked with a sneer that these fruits must have been damaged by being handled too often on too many weekends. All at once she was on top of him. She sat astride his chest and seized his hair and banged his head up and down. Even without a hangover, there would have been no way he could defend himself against her. At that moment, she was as irresistible, as inexorable, as the goddess Kali, who, with bared and dripping fangs, rides her victims to destruction.

  The next moment—well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image—there she was, holy under a tree. It was only natural that on his daily visits he should continue to look at her with the same cynical, not-to-be-fooled expression—with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, in a most unreverential posture. She didn’t seem to mind. The eyes she raised to him were absolutely clear, inviting him to read what he would in them. Meanwhile, her other visitors, the pilgrims, came and went, touching her feet and taking her blessings. As they drew near, their faces became radiant, and they appeared to retain this glow as they departed. Farida’s handmaidens glided about, and now and then one of them sang a song of spiritual love while another accompanied her, plucking a slow, droning sound out of a lutelike instrument. If Farida felt the song was too low-spirited—and her handmaidens, so gentle and good, did have a tendency to droop—then she herself would chime in, giving more of a swing and lift to it, and snapping her fingers as if to say, “Come on, let’s get going!” Then everybody responded; voices rose, the drone hastened and took on melody, gentle smiles shook off melancholy, and at the end, when the women had finished in unison on their top notes, Farida said, “That’s better,” so that everyone laughed out loud, and this sound mingled with the last joyful notes still vibrating in the air.

  At home, in her youth and heyday, Farida had always had this ability to make a party go. When things got too slow for her, she would turn up the record-player or replace the LP on it with a faster one to dance to. If her partner couldn’t keep up with her, she would discard him and try another and another, and if none of them could come up to the mark—“What a bunch of dummies!”—she simply danced by herself, with her slippers kicked off and her hair and gossamer veil flying, while everyone stood around her and applauded. In London, too, at the beginning of their life there, she and Farid had given terrific parties, cramming the flat with more people than it could hold, so that the guests spilled into the kitchen, where Farida was boldly throwing spices together. She was always experimenting with curries she remembered from her grandmother’s cuisine, and these usually turned out extremely well, filling the flat with their rich aromas. Everyone sat on the floor, eating with their fingers Indian style, while Farida picked her way among her friends, putting more delicious things on their already overflowing plates while Farid refilled their glasses, and both of them—Farid and Farida—talking in their high, excited voices, which could always be heard above the hubbub of their guests.

  At that time it had been easy for them to enjoy themselves and make everyone else happy too. It was all done with no more effort than the way Farida made herself look beautiful; he never saw her do more than glance over her shoulder in the mirror, twisting her hair quickly into a coil on top of her head, or else deciding to leave it loose down her back, with a rose stuck in it. Later, however, this changed. It irritated him to watch the painstaking way she got herself ready to go to other people’s parties—by then, they could no longer afford to give them—painting larger lips and darker eyelids over her own; she had begun to wear curlers at night, and she got up with them in the morning, looking cross and ugly. And, just as she had to take pains over her appearance, she had to work harder to be successful at these parties. Now when she cried, “Come on, let’s get going!” no one seemed to hear her or pay attention. Her voice had become shrill, her laugh harsher and louder. When she had decided who was worth her attention at a party, she would hang on to his arm with her skinny hands. Often it was Sunil on whom she concentrated at parties. He was getting to be the richest and most successful of their circle. Once he had mooned after Farida in a dogged, hopeless way, but now he liked plump Scandinavian blondes, who sometimes perched on his lap. Farida, ignoring them, would bring some tidbit for him from the buffet table and dangle it above him until he opened his mouth to receive it; she cried, “Good boy!” and clapped her hands, while he chewed with indifferent relish. It sickened Farid to watch this, and perhaps it sickened Farida too, because when they got home she was in a rotten mood and turned her back on him and went to sleep as if she never wanted to get up again.

  Somehow she did get up, every morning, and although all their projects failed, one after the other, she was always starting new ones. Elegantly dressed, meticulously made up, her jaw somewhat set, she went out each day in pursuit of some business she had just thought up that was certain to pull them out of their predicament. When they had been in London for about ten years (she was well into her thirties by this time), she decided to organize a line of Indian cocktail delicacies—samosas
, pakoras, kebabs—to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores. She dealt with the very fanciest places, and only with their top directors; it was taken for granted that no secretary or any other underling could stand in her way when she presented herself, without an appointment but emanating an almost royal authority, and quickly sailed right into the innermost sanctum of these offices. And when she came out again she was invariably escorted by the director himself, smiling and flattered by her direct approach to him. She gave the impression that she was conducting the affairs of her own exclusive catering firm—which was true, in a way. What the directors did not realize was that she made all the delicacies herself, working alone in the makeshift kitchen of their flat, while Farid lay in bed and complained about the smell of her deep-fat frying.

  She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes, which stood piled in their living room. She packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores, going from one to the other in a taxi. By the third week of this, she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, from her slow and expensive delivery rounds, and from the complaints that were beginning to come in. Also, it was becoming evident that the cost of the ingredients, the packaging, and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected, and one night when Farid again complained about the smell she marched into the bedroom with a pan of hot oil and threatened to pour it on him. He locked himself in the bathroom, and when at last he emerged he found her sitting on the floor with the deep-fry pan beside her. Her knees were hunched up and her head was laid on them; her hair was half uncoiled, and she was wearing an old cotton sari spattered with grease. He grew angry at the sight of her. “What are you—a cook or something?” he shouted, and when she didn’t answer or stir he worked himself up further. “No one asked you to do this kind of work. Tcha—what would your parents say, what would my parents say, if they knew?”