East Into Upper East Read online

  When she returned to her party, it was still going splendidly. The Minister had finished his act and, pleased to have given pleasure, was laughing together with his audience. He had taken off his little boat-like cotton cap and was wiping the perspiration from his head. As he did so, for a brief second his eyes slid toward Sumitra, and she gave him the briefest nod to reassure him that Harry was being taken care of. From here on—according to the official report to New Delhi—the evening’s program proceeded as per schedule.

  DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS

  I

  We were all young then and in our beginnings: Sanjay and I, Gita and Ratna—the country itself, for it was only a few years after Independence. I was in New Delhi on my first diplomatic posting, and along with everyone else at the British High Commission, I had come in a spirit of atonement. We felt it to be our mission to make up for two hundred years of colonial rule and, in contrast to our predecessors, to show our full appreciation of India and Indian culture. I had no difficulty with that; like some before and many, many after, I fell in love with the country. There is no need for me to go into detail. Others have done so, describing the overwhelming sensual and emotional effect India has had on them; and, in some cases, how this was enhanced by their feeling for a particular person, or persons.

  I lived in a flat in what was then becoming known as new New Delhi, extending beyond old New Delhi, which had been built as the imperial capital. Now it was the national capital and everyone who could, including all the foreign missions, was buying up land and building on it. While waiting for the British High Commission complex to be completed, we staff members rented accommodation in private houses, most of them newly built by newly rich Indians. My flat was in an area known as Golf Links because one of the sites had been earmarked for a golf club. Only a few years ago it had all been desert land, nothing but dust and jackals, but now, besides the potential golf club, there were rows of expensive villas, all of them ultra-modern, pastel-colored, air-conditioned. Spindly trees had been planted along what were not yet streets; a market was coming up, not bazaar stalls but proper shops, with doors and plate-glass windows, selling things required by Westerners and Westernized Indians, such as pastries and ham.

  Although Sanjay was entitled to government quarters—he was among the very bright young men at the very new Ministry of External Affairs—he chose to remain with his sisters, Gita and Ratna, in their house in the Civil Lines of Old Delhi. The house had been built by their grandfather in a vaguely Gothic style with a turret on the roof and pointed arches enclosing the surrounding verandah. It was in an enclave of houses belonging to members of their family, for several brothers had bought up the land together. When Sanjay was sixteen, Gita twelve, and Ratna nine, their parents were killed in a car accident. Instead of moving in with their neighboring relatives, the three young orphans elected to remain on their own; so by the time I got to know them ten years later, they were used to being entirely free and independent. This somehow enhanced their glamor—already considerable, for all three were extremely good-looking. They had two cars which they loved to drive, one hand lightly on the steering wheel, the other, holding a cigarette, on the open window. Sanjay took the Chevrolet every morning to the External Affairs Ministry, while Gita and Ratna disputed—they never quarreled—the use of the other car, a dashing MG. Gita usually took it, for she often had to drive to New Delhi, to help one of her artist friends set up an exhibition. Ratna only had to go to her nearby college, where she studied English literature; she also wrote poetry and stories, which she was too shy to let anyone see.

  All of us at the High Commission were very conscientious about mixing with Indians: mostly higher-ranking civil servants and people in culture and the arts. But these social efforts tended to break down, and our parties often ended up with the Indian guests on one side talking shop with one another and foreigners doing the same on the other. I attended enough High Commission parties to learn that there was always an unheard—and later, when everyone was more outspoken—a positively audible sigh of relief when the Indians left and the rest of us could draw together into our own cosy circle. Still, we continued these “bridge parties”—we had even ironically adopted the old Anglo-Indian term—for they were so much part of our job that we were paid per head for each local guest we entertained. But for most people, on either side, it became more and more just part of one’s official duties, and finally there were only a few of us left who genuinely enjoyed the company of Indians. And then sometimes it happened—as it did to me—that we preferred it to that of our compatriots whose social occasions we got through as quickly as possible, to rush off to our Indian friends.

  I spent every moment I could with Sanjay and his sisters in their Gothic house in the Civil Lines. Friends were always welcome there, for any meal, at any hour. There were plenty of servants, some of them descended from several generations of retainers, who considered themselves part of the family and even as guardians of the three young orphans. The house had not been changed since the time of the parents and grandparents. The long drawing room, which formed the center of the house, was still basically Indo-Victorian, with carved sofas and armchairs and many occasional tables, and weighty silver pieces like a rose-water sprinkler and an ornate tea-set on a tray with scalloped edges. There were no windows but skylights set high up under the ceiling so that it was always dark in there—dark and cool in the summer but freezing in the winter months, since no ray of sunlight could penetrate the thick masonry of the outer and inner walls. So during the cold season there was always a fire lit and the friends gathered around it and drank mulled red wine. They talked incessantly on the many topics that burned inside them like the hot wine they were drinking. This whole country was theirs now at last, in all its breadth and multitudes, with all its history and relics left behind by its defeated conquerors (including us, the last of them). Many of these young people already held positions of great authority, like Sanjay in the Ministry of External Affairs; others, like Gita’s painter friends, were developing a whole new line of indigenous culture, exploring the depths of their Indian souls. Of course everyone had a different agenda—everything was so wide open—and they argued loudly in their rather high-pitched voices that were such a pleasure to listen to that sometimes I simply enjoyed the sound of them without following their arguments. They spoke in an English that was perfect but more softly accentuated, more mellifluous, more feminine even than is characteristic of our language.

  Naturally, there were romances—but mostly with no cost attached because serious arrangements were left to their elders. There were however a few love matches, and I’m sorry to say that these did not always work out. It is a pity to turn from those days of hope and romance to the grimmer future that awaited some among us. Let me get it over with: both Gita and Ratna married for love, both marriages ended badly. Gita married one of her artist protégés—she went so far as to elope with him, for a civil service in Meerut where his family lived in poor circumstances. He did not turn out to be the genius she had expected and she soon left him and had other affairs, some with foreigners, none of them happy. Ratna made a more suitable choice: she married a young diplomat, a colleague of her brother’s, who started off with the same chances of high promotion as Sanjay but ended them through his heavy drinking and his ugly, dishonest character. He was finally suspended from the service but that was after Ratna had committed suicide during a posting in Kampala. It was a great scandal at the time, but what is the point of talking about the dismal future that followed those early radiant days.

  Whenever I was with them, our Indo-British relationship was a frequent and favorite topic. They warned me that it would all go out of the window, everything we had tried to foist on them: our mode of dress, our method of government and of education. The English language itself, they said, would end up on the dust-heap, for it had no potential to express the Indian soul—all this delivered in their very pure English sprinkled with some rather old-fashioned slang like �
�what the heck” and “putting on side.” They teased me for being so English—but how could I help it? I was tall, thin and pale and had inherited my mother’s blue eyes and rather long chin; before joining the foreign service, I had studied PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford. In my Oxford accent I would pretend to contradict them—“Yes, but we gave you the railways, the telegraph and the telephone and all the rest of it: where would you be if we hadn’t dragged you with us into the twentieth century?”

  “Where would we be? Listen to her—you gave us Macaulay and denigrated our Indian culture—”

  “Hey wait a minute! Who was it translated Kalidasa and the Upanishads?”

  “A German! It was Germans, not you people, all you gave us was your steamed pudding and custard!”

  So we went on, mostly in good fun; I remember only one person who was seriously angry with me for our two hundred years of colonial oppression, and that was Pushpa. But she, I suppose, was angry for other reasons as well.

  I have spoken of our winter evenings, but there were also the summer ones. After the scorching day, we gathered on the lawn that had been deeply watered by the gardener and his assistant. The flowerbeds were empty—the roses and chrysanthemums bloomed in winter—but there were jasmine bushes and Queen of the Night emitting scents that were so pungent that the first wave deadened the olfactory nerves and it was some time before they revived enough to receive the next onslaught; and the hotter the day the more lusciously sweet the perfumes drenching the night air. We sat in white wicker armchairs and drank iced sherbet, while fans, plugged in from the verandah, whirled around to keep us cool. The only sound came from the excited voices of the very new and very young administrators of India, raised in debate. Sometimes we went up on the terrace where the turret held more armchairs and fans. We leaned on the parapet and gazed over the tops of the trees to the open land surrounding Delhi where jackals and peacocks lived, emitting untamed cries.

  It was here one night that Sanjay joined me. We leaned side by side, breathing in the air of jasmine and desert dust, spanned by the sky with its crowd of diamond stars scintillating like wedding guests.

  “Ah Kitty,” he said, “here you are—getting away from us all, I suppose. Escaping our endless talk, talk, talk.”

  I said, “I could listen to you for ever.”

  “No, don’t encourage us. We talk too much. Far too much.”

  We gazed down at the group on the lawn. The girls in their pastel saris were only a soft glimmer but the young men shone in their starched white Indian clothes. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, just their voices drifting up to the terrace, melodious and indistinct.

  Sanjay said, “But it’s not just talk. We really mean it.”

  “I know you do.” I wanted to keep it vague and not have him explain what it was they really meant. All winter I had heard about their concern for the future of India, and I believed in it and was on their side; now I wanted him to say other things to me.

  “You must understand our dilemma,” he said. “Nehru’s steel plants versus Gandhi’s spinning wheel. Of course, the spinning wheel has to go, there’s no question.”

  “But how to preserve its spirit.”

  “Exactly. You understand us exactly, Kitty.” He had a caressing way of saying my name. He said it again: “Kitty . . . It’s a nice name, I like it, but it doesn’t really suit you. It’s not serious enough. And I think you’re basically a very serious person. Of course you are: I mean, my goodness, not everyone can get a First in PPE and pass the foreign service exam.”

  “You’ve passed yours so you must be a basically serious person too.” I was teasing him: a lot of teasing went on among us, I suppose it was a form of flirtation.

  But he remained grave: “I try to be, but sometimes I feel I’m too playful.”

  Playful! I loved the word, it expressed the light-hearted spirit that bubbled like a spring under all their high ideals and ambitions and kept these fresh.

  “We have terrible problems, Kitty. Poverty—backwardness—diseases, medieval diseases that have long been wiped out in the developed world—”

  “My real name isn’t Kitty, if that’s any help. I mean to your conception of me. It’s really Katharine.”

  “Katharine.” He considered it. “Yes, Katharine is seriously English.”

  He stood close beside me; his breath was very sweet. Waves of deliciousness welled up inside me: so this was love, falling in love, the real thing.

  “But you know what?” he said. “I prefer Kitty. Because I don’t believe you’re so very English. You’re sensitive, understanding—in a way the others aren’t. You know what I think? I think you’re more like us. You’re really Indian.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Really? You wish that? Why, Kitty? Please tell me.”

  His eyes, dark pools melting in moonlight, were fixed on me. Perhaps from that moment a new intimacy might have arisen between us. But we were interrupted.

  “Sanjay? Are you here?”

  It was Pushpa, the fat girl whom no one liked very much. She stepped closer and peered to make us out: “Oh, it is you. What are you doing up here? Listen, I have to go and my car hasn’t shown up. That new driver is completely unreliable, I’ve told Daddy again and again, but of course it’s me who’ll get the scolding if I’m home late.”

  “I’ll drop you,” Sanjay said at once.

  “Sorry to break up the tête-à-tête,” she said with an unapologetic laugh.

  “Oh yes, you should be sorry. Kitty and I were on the verge of solving all the problems of the world, weren’t we, Kitty? Wait a sec while I get my car keys.”

  We trooped down the stairs. I left shortly after they did, driving my little Morris Minor through the ancient city gates of crumbling masonry that led from Old to New Delhi. I wasn’t disappointed but very excited. The city was asleep, people were stretched out on the sidewalks, some on string cots, others on tattered cloths spread on the ground or on handcarts from which in the day they sold peanuts and bananas. On one side the turrets and bastions of the Red Fort stood massed in shadow, on the other the dome of the great mosque was veiled in a reflected light, dimly white but with the moon in its first quarter glittering beside it, a diamond-hard scimitar.

  Pushpa was different from the other girls. They were all bright and intelligent, but she was brilliant. She was among the first women to pass the Indian Administrative Service exam and was at present with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Before that, she had been sent out to a district in central India, where she had been responsible for administering vast areas of land and a rural population of several hundred thousand. This had given her a very authoritative manner and a loud voice that drowned out every argument. She was respected for her brains, but she was not popular. Sanjay’s sister Gita was positively hostile to her. She warned Sanjay that Pushpa was “out to catch him” (this was the phrase she used). Sanjay just laughed in his easy charming way and said, Don’t worry, he had no intention of getting caught before his time. As a member of the élite foreign service, he was of course a highly desirable match; very good offers kept coming for him, from landowning and even royal families of their own caste. These offers were rejected out of hand by his two sisters. They were none of them in a hurry to give up their carefree life in their own house. And besides, they were radically opposed to the concept of arranged marriages—at least, the two girls were: both of them were determined to marry only for love. Sanjay’s attitude was more ambivalent.

  The subject of arranged marriage was among those often discussed by these friends. It came under the category of tradition versus modernity (spinning wheel v. steel plant), though with a more personal edge to it. Some agreed with Gita and Ratna that only the free choice of a love match was acceptable to a modern educated Indian; others urged the wisdom that their elders would bring to the selection of a suitable mate. Pushpa was among those advocating a middle course. By all means, she shouted, meet each other, get to
know each other, make your own decision, but for goodness sake, nothing rash, no elopement! Let parents have the say to which they were entitled. Since her argument was delivered more cogently and more loudly than anyone else’s, it prevailed with some who wavered in their opinion. These included Sanjay. Much annoyed, his sister Gita tossed her shoulder-length dark auburn hair and said that he could do what he liked but she wasn’t going to let herself be led like a lamb to slaughter. This caused laughing protests that they were talking about marriage not slaughter. The wit among them—it was Ratna’s future husband—called out: “Isn’t it the same thing?” Amid more laughter, Gita stamped her foot: “I thought we were having a serious discussion!” Then she turned to me: “What do you think?”

  They often did that—asked for my opinion as that of an impartial outsider. Now too they all turned toward me and Sanjay said, “Yes, let’s hear your side of this highly interesting question.”

  Although I felt myself stupidly blushing, I spoke up bravely: “Well of course, I could only marry if I were in love.”

  “But how would you know?” Sanjay said, frowning the way he did when he wanted to get to the root of a problem.