Читать книгу My Nine Lives - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 9
ОглавлениеI HAVE gone back to live in India, partly for economic reasons. It’s cheaper for me here than in New York, and that has been a consideration during these last years. Of course I no longer live where I used to when I came here over forty years ago—with Somnath and his family in their crammed flat in the crammed house in a maze of alleys leading off the bazaar. The house is still standing, though a part of it, cracked and crumbled during a particularly heavy monsoon, has had to be propped up. Another family is occupying Somnath’s old flat, which has been divided into even smaller sections; the whole house is now a warren of subdivided living spaces let out to large families sharing sanitary facilities.
After my return, the first place I moved to was in a suburban middle-class colony. Although newly built, it was already overpopulated and not so different from the inner-city area where I used to live in Somnath’s house. The streets were crowded with hawkers and pushcarts and homeless dogs and cows and an occasional pig snuffling in the gutters for discarded food. I rented a room built on the terrace roof—it was small, but enough for me and with its own toilet and shower. It also had its own staircase at the side of the house so that I was independent of the landlord’s family living downstairs. At first they were very friendly to me, and once when I was sick with flu, they sent up food. I knew that they referred to me as the “budiya”—the old woman—up there. It is difficult for me to realize that this description fits me as it used to fit Somnath’s old mother: she had a hump and a chronic bad knee that she clutched all the time while groaning and calling to God for release. But I spend my days in the same feckless way I used to forty years ago—and, I must admit, with an even lighter heart. I have no responsibilities and am always alone.
Being alone is nothing new to me—from childhood I’ve always preferred it, except for being with my mother, and with my father, Otto. The only years when I felt my aloneness as loneliness or friendlessness—I really had no friends—was during my teenage years, from sixteen to twenty; and then it was not so much because of my own expectations and desires as those of my parents for me. My father had remarried but was in an apartment around the corner from where I lived with my mother, Nina. On Saturday nights she invariably went out whereas I invariably had nowhere to go. “Will you be all right?” she would ask me; she felt bad about leaving me and that was what made my eyes fill with tears. To hide them, I would lower my head over the book I was reading—“Oh yes,” I said, “this is fascinating;” the moment she left the tears would fall on to my fascinating book and I would have to wipe them off. But by the time I had entered more deeply into my studies—I was in the oriental department at Columbia—my books really were more interesting to me than anything offered elsewhere; and my parents, though still anxious about me, could reassure one another: “Rosemary is an intellectual.”
During my first visit to India, in my early twenties, I changed my name to Shanti (meaning Peace, which I was anxious to pursue and, if possible, possess). But on my return to New York I changed it back to Rosemary—which did not suit me, never had done, but was all that was left of my parents’ expectations for me. Even the room that Nina had so lovingly furnished for me in her apartment—in all her apartments, whether we were in Los Angeles or in New York—had been overlaid by my own interests. Oriental texts and Sanskrit grammars filled the closet that should have held rows of pretty dresses; the vanity table with its frilly skirt had to bear my brass statues of Hindu deities; a mandala featuring the cycle from birth to death eclipsed the rosebuds on the wallpaper chosen by Nina as suitable for a young girl’s bower (or “Mädchenzimmer,” as she and Otto called it).
All through my childhood, I tried to live up to my name Rosemary. I knew how hard it was for Nina that I was not pretty, let alone beautiful as she was. She would buy me frocks that would have looked lovely on some other little girl and I put them on eagerly. But it was Nina herself who said, “Take it off, darling,” and she would turn away—in tears, I imagined, so that I ran after her and clung to her. Then she would say, “Never mind, darling, what’s it matter?” But that only made me more miserable because I knew how much it mattered to her.
Nina herself had been a spectacular beauty. In Germany in the 1930s, before they were forced to emigrate, she had begun a career as a film actress that might have led to stardom. Nina left because she was married to a Jew—my father, Otto Levy; she herself came from a Catholic family of modest means (petit-bourgeois, she said, but only just). The Levy family had sufficient influence to arrange for visas to America; also sufficient funds to start a New York branch of their prosperous business in fine leather goods, with Otto as the managing director. Nina and I did not stay with him for long. By this time they fought a lot, and I believe Susie too had already attached herself to them. But mainly it was because Nina felt that her place was in Hollywood, and following up some leads and promises, she boldly packed us up and left. Her stunning looks, her courage, her perseverance, and maybe to some extent Otto’s money with which he was always generous to us even after their divorce, all these helped us through. She did have some success in Hollywood, though never on the scale she might have expected in her native Germany. She always played foreigners, for though her English was fluent and even racy, her accent remained heavily German; and with this accent, and her sultry, pouting looks, she was inevitably cast as the bad woman—during the war years even as a Nazi—in contrast to the wholesome American heroine. They were not good parts, nor were they good films, and she spoke of them disparagingly, pretending to shrug them off as merely her, and my, bread and butter. But in fact she worked hard at her roles, however small and unworthy they were, analyzing them, researching the background, extracting possibilities of depth that may have been in her but were not in the characters she was called on to play. And after a while, when she got older and heavier—she always had a weight problem—the parts that came her way were smaller and fewer, until finally she decided that it was not worth staying in Hollywood but that she might as well go back to New York, to allow Otto a share in my upbringing.
It was Otto who found the Upper East Side apartment in which Nina and I lived for so many years. He and Susie, whom he had since married, were just around the block, so we became one fairly harmonious family. He and Nina no longer fought the way they used to; they had far too many interests in common and were eager for each other’s company. Susie did whatever they did, but since she had less stamina, they preferred to leave her at home for their more strenuous activities, such as their “antiquing” expeditions. Both loved buying objects and both had the same taste. Nina had a flair for picking up bargains, and they always returned flushed with victory and loaded with vases and clocks and tapestries for Nina’s and my apartment. Susie didn’t care to have too many things in her and Otto’s place—they only collected dust, she complained, and that was a problem for her who could never keep household help for more than a few weeks. But she joined them on their visits to museums and private openings at galleries; on Sundays they attended chamber music concerts, on Wednesdays they had subscription seats at the Metropolitan Opera; and of course there was always the theatre, classical theatre, where Nina sat far forward in her seat with clasped hands and bright eyes, imagining herself as Hedda Gabler or Madame Arkadina. Otto loved to arrive at these events with a woman in furs and jewels on each arm, himself impeccable with his white silk evening scarf and his Clark Gable mustache.
Otto was very correct, very German, in the tradition of his family who had, until told otherwise, considered themselves entirely, patriotically German, reveling in every German triumph, which they regarded as their own. But there was one strain in their ancestry at odds with these characteristics. Of course as Levys they were of the priestly tribe—which they treated as a joke, worldly uncles bantering about it over their pork cassoulet and their lobster mayonnaise. But there was one item of family memorabilia, dating from the seventeenth century, that filled them with pride, even as they joked about it. This was a letter—a farsighted uncle donated it to the Hebrew University in 1936 (before himself emigrating to Argentina where he too did well in the leather business)—written by a Rabbi Mordechai Levy who had been sent by his Frankfurt community to Smyrna to inquire into the authenticity of a self-proclaimed Messiah. The letter he sent back home to Frankfurt confirmed every claim—yes yes yes, it is He, the Messiah sent to redeem us; and we must do His bidding immediately and sell all our goods and properties and go to Jerusalem to await our redemption. But my ancestors Were too hardheaded and cautious for that, and anyway the Messiah later turned out to be false. Otto always kept a copy of the letter from Smyrna, in its German translation—the original was in Hebrew, which he could not read—and later he had an English translation made. That was the one I read and I suppose somehow its expectations entered into me; that cry of yes it is He! He has come! though I never seriously expected a real Messiah to enter my life.
As a small child, I asked the usual questions that children like me ask about God and Death and Time, and Nina did her best to answer them. Even when she was on the point of going out, looking over her shoulder to check if the seams of her stockings were straight, she would pause to find some suitable reply for me. But later, when I reached my teens and should have been asking other kinds of questions, she became impatient. I know she and Otto discussed me—“Why doesn’t she have any friends—any boy friends?” Nina would ask. “My goodness, at her age—” She rolled her eyes heavenward at the thought of herself at my age.
Finally, she had to resort to giving me the answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask. She made a solemn occasion of it: we went for tea at the Plaza—I loved that, because I knew she often met friends there and they talked about Life, which was such an overwhelmingly important subject for her. And now she was here with me, in the crowded, scented, opulent room, among banks of hothouse flowers and the string orchestra playing and the waiters with their trolleys of giant pastries oozing chocolate and cream. It was with me that she was discussing the human condition in its weightiest aspects. She talked the way I had seen her do with others—with men, all of them artists and intellectuals—her elbows propped on the table, her sleeves pushed up from her creamy, rounded arms with bracelets tumbling down them. Her eyes vague and dreamy through the smoke of her cigarette, she informed me what it was that men and women did together. This information, though entirely new to me, did not engage my interest; and the only question I asked was why they did it. She opened her eyes wide in surprise (her eyes were green but looked dark because of her lashes, black as patent leather). Then she laughed: “But darling—because they love each other.” “The way I love you?” I asked—sometimes, I have to admit, I was deliberately childish with her, to amuse her, but that time I was serious. However, I had succeeded in amusing her and she responded in the way I loved most: with a burst of laughter, her lips parting to reveal her still perfect teeth, her healthy tongue, and she leaned forward to kiss me, enfolding me in the warmth of her breath, her perfume, the smell and taste of the good strong coffee she drank all day long, even at tea-time.
Although in the years ahead she and I often talked about Love, she hardly ever again brought sex into it. When she did, she was dismissive: “What is it, after all? Just technical.” And whenever she broke up with a lover, her invariable verdict against him was: “All he cares about is sex. Men are swine.” Only Otto was exempt. They had long ago ceased any sexual relation but were bound by other, stronger ties: myself, their past, their conception of the importance of experience, the course of life, of Life—das Leben. But what was for her the highest, finest part of it she shared not with Otto but with me: it was with me that she discussed Love as she understood it, as something entirely, overwhelmingly other, breaking into a different dimension altogether. And that’s how I understood it too—perhaps influenced by her, certainly by my feeling for her, which was my first indication of what love could be.
I was sent to very expensive private schools, gladly paid for by Otto, where I was miserable because all the other girls were so much smarter, in the fashionable as well as the intellectual sense, than I could ever hope to be. I worked hard but the results were far from encouraging, and it was doubtful whether they could ever be good enough to get me into college. Fortunately, during my last two years in High School, my interests became focused on oriental studies, where I discovered the same questions I had been asking since I could remember and even some approximate answers to them. It was when I entered the oriental department at Columbia that Otto and Nina began to say—with pride, for they had a tremendous respect for intellectuals—“The child is intellectual.” Neither of them had had a college education. Otto had gone straight from school into the family business, while Nina hadn’t even finished school but at fourteen, to her everlasting regret, had begun to model, act, flirt, and generally have a good time. For the rest of her life she tried to make up for this by reading books. She read avidly, indiscriminately, with passion. She adored the classics—Tolstoy, Chekhov, Thomas Mann—but also the latest bestsellers, swallowing everything with the same ravenous appetite, her eyes racing down the page as though devouring the print.
And she adored intellectuals, male ones, that is—she hated “bluestockings,” turning down the corners of her mouth in pronouncing the word. Her lovers were all writers, musicians, philosophers, philologists, even a theologian—sometimes several of them together, so that she would quote from the works of one to the other. Most of them, in Los Angeles and later in New York, were European refugees. She didn’t care for Anglo-Saxon men, whom she characterized as sexually puerile and stingy with money (“Can you imagine! He wanted to go Dutch treat! Dutch indeed—it’s a purely American invention”). Whatever their line of intellectual pursuit, all her refugees were of the same type: suave, cynical men who gave the impression of a difficult past stoically borne. Some were handsome, others extremely ugly, but whatever they were, Otto was always jealous. Even when Nina and I were in Hollywood and were communicating with him only by telegram and trunk call (daily, and often several times a day), he could sense the appearance of a new lover across the entire continent. Not that she ever kept him guessing long—he was always, apart from myself, her first and most intimate confidant: a role that, however much it made him suffer, he could not have lived without. But none of these affairs lasted long, and when they ended, Otto and I would have whispered conversations over the phone. He instructed me to hide her sleeping and blood pressure pills, for she had twice tried to take an overdose.
In spite of their respect for my studies, my parents regarded me as very naive. “The child knows nothing about Life,” they would tell each other. It was true that life at first hand only began for me with my visits to India, and this would not have qualified as Life for Otto and Nina. In the earlier years, I usually stayed with my friend Somnath’s family, sleeping on a mat in a corner of their verandah, which was also a general passage. Somnath was a sales clerk in an old established firm of drapers and outfitters in Connaught Place, at that time a fashionable shopping center. I don’t think he could ever have been a forceful salesman, he was much too reticent for that; but he was courteous and obliging and spoke nice English, so that customers sought him out. He had a large family to support and from time to time was forced to ask his bosses for a raise. This was always an embarrassing task for him, for he respected his bosses and could not bear to see the disappointed look that came over their kindly faces while he stated his request. Finally his wife, a more forceful character and also responsible for balancing the family budget, would put on her good sari and shoes and come to the shop to clinch the matter.
Somnath and I had met in the park in the center of Connaught Place where clerks from surrounding shops and businesses came for their lunch break. It was not a beauty spot—the grass was worn away, the benches broken—but it was somewhere to sit in the shade of trees. Most people were in groups and were quite jolly, but he was alone and so was I. Neither of us was good at striking up conversation with strangers, but he overcame his shyness when he saw that I was reading a Sanskrit text. I gladly showed it to him—he could read it but admitted he couldn’t understand it: he had forgotten the lessons in Sanskrit he had had at school, long ago. He smiled when he said it, showing a row of splendid teeth rather too large for his face. His smile did not enter his eyes but seemed to make them even more melancholy. He smiled often, with a sudden flash of those large white teeth, but it was always as if he were apologizing—for what? Later I thought that perhaps it was for a lack he felt in himself, for not being more than he was. Or—and this too came to me during the years I got to know him—it may have been for a lack he felt not only in his own life but in life in general, that it could be better for everyone. He loved poetry and wrote some himself. He took me to symposia held in the courtyards and small rooms where his friends lived, all of them poor and all of them intoxicated with poetry. When a particularly poignant line was sounded, a cry of ecstasy rose from all their throats.
My excuse for my prolonged and frequent visits to India was the research I was doing for my PhD thesis. My subject was a woman poet—I guess she could be called a poet-saint—whom I had found through one of Somnath’s friends. He was her grandson and himself a poet, though earning his living as a clerk in the Income Tax Office. He hadn’t even known that she had written poetry till after her death when he rescued a batch of what everyone else thought was useless scribblings. Before that he, like the rest of the family, had thought her almost a madwoman because she kept running away and had to be brought back from distant temple sites and caves and even mosques and graves of Sufi saints. Her subject was the same as that of earlier poet-saints—the search for the Lover, the Friend—so I really don’t know why my PhD advisers were so sceptical about her except that she had been dead only ten and not five hundred years. But that was what attracted me to her—that I felt I could put out my hand and almost touch her.
I was taken to the house where she had lived with her family—they were still there, at the end of an alley, across a courtyard, in a tenement not so different from Somnath’s. I was shown the corner where she used to sit, singing and combing her white hair—which was long, for though a widow she refused to let it be cut off, wanting to be beautiful for when the Friend at last would come. I saw a photograph of her taken at a granddaughter’s wedding, where she didn’t look very different from other widowed grandmothers, skinny and wizened and already a ghost in the shroud of her white cotton sari. I also traveled to the places she had run away to: these were never well-known pilgrim spots but deserted, inaccessible sites outside anonymous villages, ruined piles of brick hidden in overgrown thickets of shrubs or exposed on barren land under a burning sky of white heat. Since my long vacations came in the summer, my visits always coincided with the hottest time of the year; but heat never really bothered me, maybe because I had ancestors who had wandered forty years in the desert. At noon I would cool my head under a wet handkerchief knotted at the corners, which probably made me look as mad as everyone thought she had been.
My parents considered India an unsuitable, dangerous place. Otto even had firsthand reports from relatives who in the 1930s had emigrated to Bombay, that being the only place where they could get an entrance permit. Although they had done well there, establishing a successful confectionery business, they never got used to the alien atmosphere. In long letters to their relatives—all the family wrote long letters to each other, it was a characteristic of the Diaspora, going right back to the Levy who had been sent to Smyrna to check up on the Messiah—they reported on conditions of squalor and ignorance that made the country completely impossible for cultured Europeans like themselves (after the war, they sold the confectionery business and returned to Germany). I could never convince my parents of my own, very different experience. Anyway, almost every time I was in India, there was an emergency that made it necessary for me to return home. Once it was because of Otto’s heart attack, which Susie declared was brought on by worry about me; another time Nina took pills that Susie said I should have been there to hide from her. Even when the emergency was over, I couldn’t return to India because they needed me in New York, their nerves having been shattered by the crisis and my absence. Susie’s nerves were shattered the most—she was psychologically frailer than Otto and Nina; and physically too, she appeared frailer, for unlike Nina, who was dark and heavy, Susie was pale, sandy, and so slight that it seemed any breeze might blow her away.
Then one year Nina said she wanted to go with me to India, to see for herself what it was all about. Otto opposed the idea—he said it was absolutely impossible and that he would definitely put his foot down. In their confrontations, he was always putting his foot down, and when he said it, he looked stern and strong, though perfectly aware that Nina would always do what she wanted. But this time, for her trip to India, she needed Otto’s cooperation, in the form of financial assistance. My own visits to India didn’t cost much, but she could not be expected to travel or live there the way I did. She sent me off to explain this to Otto—“Be nice to him,” she told me, as always when something had to be wheedled out of him. I knew from experience that he found it hard to refuse her anything, especially money, with which he was so generous to her that Susie often warned we would all end up in the gutter. But he was genuinely worried about Nina. What if she fell sick in India with one of those diseases people got there? “Yes, and if she does something silly again?” Susie said. “You can hardly expect Otto to go running after her, not with his—” and she tapped her chest to indicate his heart condition. I myself was ambivalent about her proposed trip. I did want her to see the place that meant so much to me, but what if she didn’t like it, found it abhorrent as others had? Nevertheless, I persuaded Otto with promises to take good care of her until finally he wrote out a check—“with a heavy heart,” he said as he did so, while shielding the figure from Susie, who was craning forward anxiously to see it.
I realized that this time my stay in India would be very different. Instead of living with Somnath’s family, I joined Nina in her suite in an enormous Moghul-style hotel. It was built of sandstone like the Red Fort, though in salmon pink and with great domes stuck on at every available corner. Inside, it had marble walls and crystal chandeliers and bearers tall as maharajas in turbans and scarlet cummerbunds. Reproductions of Persian and Moghul miniatures lined the corridors, with the same scenes of princes hunting tigers woven into the carpets that lay thick as moss in the suites and staterooms and were beginning to smell from the damp that had seeped in during the rainy season. Nina only left her airconditioned rooms to go shopping—until she discovered that it was not necessary to go out at all, because the hotel had its own shops of precious merchandise. Moreover, the bearers were always ready to introduce salesmen into her suite; they came like magicians with humble cloth bundles out of which they poured torrents of silk and jewels on to her carpets.
My Indian family—I thought of Somnath and his family as my own—were very excited to hear that this time I had come with my mother, and of course I had to bring her to see them. This was not a success, though everyone pretended it was. To reach their house, it was necessary to turn off the main thoroughfare and, leaving the car behind, to walk through a series of intertwining alleys. I had been here so often that everyone had gotten used to me; but Europeans and Americans were rare enough to attract attention, and of course someone like Nina was a sensation. Everyone stared and commented; children came running from all directions, and the more daring touched her clothes (she was in a black and white moiré outfit) and related to the others what they had felt. So even before we had made our way up the narrow staircase that it was no one’s particular business to keep clean, Nina had set her face in a fixed smile; and this never relaxed throughout her visit. Somnath’s wife and old mother and sisters and sisters-in-law and a few neighbors were all in their best saris, which were the same colors as the sweets they had set out. They also brought platters of fritters fried in mustard oil and milky tea in crockery cups they had borrowed to supplement their own meager stock. Nina, fortified with her fixed smile and super-gracious manner, accepted everything like a ceremonial offering and merely touched it with her fingertips. Afterward she said what fun it had been and so colorful, but from then on she stayed exclusively in the hotel; and Somnath’s family thanked me for bringing her and praised her beauty and graciousness but neither she nor they suggested a second visit.
When her funds were exhausted, Nina returned to New York, and I moved back to Somnath’s for a few days before setting off on one of my long bus and train journeys across India, this time to Vinaynagar. It was there that Otto’s telegram reached me and I set off immediately for New York where he met me at the airport and took me home to where Nina was dying. I didn’t reproach him for not calling me earlier: my presence would probably have made no difference, although I might have suspected what doctors in New York, familiar only with the more advanced diseases, no longer knew how to diagnose. I had seen cases of typhoid fever in India, in the tenement where Somnath lived, in one of the little whitewashed rooms with niches for gods, where first a cadaverous old widow and then her granddaughter lay moaning on a string cot. Everyone there knew what it was, and the granddaughter was saved with modern medicines though the old woman died. But now to see this fever ravaging the pampered body of my film-star mother, tossing in her satin-backed, gold-crenellated bed, was too incongruous to be accepted.
We moved her to a hospital, to a private room where I could stay with her day and night. The right medicines were by now being injected into her, but already the fever had taken on a life and rage of its own. Not that she didn’t struggle hard; she wanted to live, there was too much she was required to give up. But she was no longer on the same level of consciousness as Otto and myself who sat by her bed, or as Susie, who sat silent and frightened in a corner. Nina was calling out names I had never heard—though Otto knew them—and recalling places she didn’t want to leave (again it was only Otto who had known them). Once, at night when she and I were alone together within the vast stillness of the hospital where not clocks but life-supporting machines clicked out the seconds, she suddenly opened her beautiful eyes and asked, “But where did I catch this?” It was a question I had already asked myself, and one I had had to answer for Otto too: when I had assured him that she had not eaten outside the hotel—unlike myself, who freely ate at wayside stalls whatever was cheap and available. Then Nina said, “It was that green sweet,” and I recalled the bright green pistachio sweetmeat—more expensive than anything the family could have afforded for themselves—that had been offered to her at Somnath’s. But she hadn’t eaten it; she had only touched it with her fingertips in symbolic acceptance—I tried to remind her of that, calling out to her urgently but unable to reach her where she had already returned to times and places I didn’t know.
The question of the green sweet remained unsettled. Nina died—even now, after all these years, I write the words in disbelief, unable to fit the subject to the predicate. Her funeral too had nothing to do with her—as always at funerals, there was a dull, depressing drizzle—and it was only the cluster of her women friends in their furs and designer hats who could be connected with Nina. But afterward, when I had to clear out our apartment which the landlords were waiting to repossess, she sometimes came alive for me again among her possessions: so that when I ran a scintillating necklace through my fingers, it seemed to be she herself who came sparkling back to life. Susie often stood watching me, and her eyes too lit up—“Oh isn’t that pretty!” She took the necklace and ran it through her fingers. But then it became just a piece of jewelry again; and since Susie liked it so much, I said, “Why don’t you take it.” “No really? No, Rosemary, I couldn’t!” so that I had to insist. Then she let me help her fasten it while she stood before the mirror, her eyes and the jewels both glittering, and she kissed me and said thank you like a sweet little girl.
Otto shrank into a querulous, quarrelsome old man. It was Susie he quarreled with now—not the way he used to fight with Nina, but in niggling, spiteful arguments. They often made separate appointments with me, so that each could complain about the other. After I had cleared out Nina’s apartment and Otto had given up the lease, he had wanted me to move in with himself and Susie; but she said it would be difficult because she had turned one of the bedrooms into her studio—she had begun to paint watercolors, mainly as therapy—and the other was needed for guests (though, so far as I knew, she never had any). So I rented a room in some old lady’s apartment—on a temporary basis, I thought, because soon I would be going back to India. However, week by week, month by month, I had to postpone this return because of the situation between Susie and Otto; and in the end I had to move into their apartment because Susie moved out of it. She checked herself into a hotel; staying with Otto, she said, had ruined her nerves and she was heading straight for a nervous breakdown.
After he died—he did not survive a second heart attack—she moved back to the Madison Avenue apartment. By this time I had a tutoring job at Columbia, so she thought it would be more convenient for me to live uptown, nearer my work. She phoned me every day and often I had to go visit her, if she had a cold or the pain in her back was bad. But she appeared to thrive on her own in the apartment with the fine furniture that Otto had inherited from his family. Some of it came from hers, for she was from the same sort of prosperous German-Jewish family as Otto’s. Susie used to refer to Nina as “from the wrong side of the tracks” (she liked using these phrases—of my unmarried state she would say, for instance, “You’ve missed the boat, Rosemary”). Susie was always very tense about Nina, which I suppose was only natural, especially as Nina had never really bothered to hide her opinion of Susie. “That mouse,” she called her—she even nicknamed her “Mousie.” It was true that, in comparison with Nina, Susie was quite insignificant, in looks and personality. But later, when she was alone and in sole possession of Otto’s apartment, she came into her own. From being sandy, mousy, she became as pastel as the watercolors she painted. Wearing a pale blue-and-pink smock, she sat in her studio, which was also pastel-colored, and grew serene. All her nervousness dropped away; she painted not for therapy now but for fulfillment.
I was around thirty at this time and Susie in her fifties, but we were like sisters and I the elder. We were also united by our financial interests, Otto having left half his estate to each of us. Although he had not, as she had predicted, ended in the gutter, he had in his last years lost all interest in his business and had finally sold it for much less than expected. There was enough left for Susie and me to live on, but every now and again it struck her that our money might be running out. Then I had to reassure her and also make some financial adjustments. As she rightly pointed out, I didn’t need much whereas she had all those expenses. These worries, as well as her constant difficulties with domestic help, so wore her out that the doctor had often to prescribe a cruise or a vacation in Europe. And it was true that, when she returned, she was serene again and very affectionate and charming to me. One year she came back with her face smooth as glass, and when I congratulated her on the beneficial effect of her holiday, she smiled, though painfully as though afraid something might crack.
As the years passed—and not just two or three years, for she survived my parents by over twenty—Susie became more and more opposed to my going to India. I had already given up my winter trips because, as she said, I could hardly expect her to be alone for Christmas. Then she began to fret when the summer vacations came around; and if she didn’t fall ill before I left, then it happened more than once that I had to be recalled for some medical or other emergency of hers.
Even when I did manage to get away, I could never recapture the complete ease, the freedom, the irresponsibility of my earlier Indian years. In Delhi, I still stayed with Somnath’s family, but here too circumstances had changed in the course of the years. There had been a number of deaths—I was there for his mother’s funeral, which was treated as a joyful occasion since it was an old person who had died, rich in years and offspring. I saw Somnath dance in that procession, laughing and spinning around, though with tears of grief rolling down his cheeks. And there were other deaths—that of a brother-in-law who died suddenly after a hernia operation, leaving his widow and three young children with no one to provide for them except Somnath. His own children were growing up—especially his eldest daughter, Priti, of whom he was very proud because she had won a scholarship to go to college. There she met girls from very advanced homes and became scornful of her own family’s oldfashioned ways. She cut off her hair and also brought home some very modern ideas, which made Somnath smile with pride in her, whom he loved most deeply. But the women shook their heads, taking her advanced opinions as a sign of worse to come. And worse did come, when she was discovered in secret meetings with a college boy who was not only not of their caste, he wasn’t even a Hindu but from a family of Christian converts who ate beef and pig.
With the widowed sister and her family moved in, the house was too crowded now for me to stay there. Anyway, I no longer spent much time in Delhi, but following the subject of my thesis, I traveled all over the country, to the places where she had escaped till brought back by her family. All she had wanted was to be in the company of some holy person, usually a dead one, in a tomb or in a sacred spot marked by a little whitewashed temple. And all I wanted was to be in her company; but, like her, I too was brought back—always by a telegram or trunk call from Susie. Once I was in what I thought must be the remotest part of a remote province, trying to decipher the inscription on a Sufi poet’s grave, when a horde of excited children descended on me, shouting, “Mem! Mem! Telephone!” They led me back in triumph to the telephone in the post office, which was only another village hut; and everyone, adults and children, stood around smiling and commenting while Susie called down the line to me to come soon, to come quickly because her bathroom ceiling had sprung a leak and she was too ill with nerves to deal with it. I laughed, was exasperated, yet I had to go back.
Susie never revealed her age, but by this time she must have been in her eighties. Physically she was marvelously well—of course she was very careful, taking regular massage and salads with no dressing—but her mind was more fragile. When it was no longer possible for her to live on her own, I had to move back in with her. It became impossible for me to leave New York. Besides the nursing arrangements for Susie, I had to make financial ones for both of us. There was still my tutoring job but since I had not yet managed to complete my PhD thesis, I couldn’t apply or hope for more. I sold some good pieces of furniture and silver, and in view of the sliding market, I had to learn about stocks and have meetings with our accountant and stockbroker. I discovered we owed back taxes as well as estate duties, and to pay them I had to sell more stock, more silver, and also some of Nina’s jewelry—this last with great caution, but Susie never noticed. She remained completely serene. Even when I could no longer afford the maintenance on our apartment and had to move us to a cheaper place, she maintained her daily routine of eating and napping, often humming to herself happily in a way she never had in younger days.
I had letters from India. Somnath wrote about his family, always beginning with the regular salutation, “We are all well and happy.” Occasionally I had no time to read further, so that I may have missed certain items of not so good news. I did read how his daughter Priti had gone away to marry her Christian boy friend—his feelings on the subject were confined to this simple statement of fact, followed by other facts such as the high price of staples and vegetables. I don’t remember any mention of his own illness. When I was too busy to read his letter to the end, I stuffed it in my pocket for later and then forgot about it and put it through the washing machine; so he may have somewhere mentioned the mysterious illness and the tests and the hospitals and the expense, the expense. By now I knew for myself what it was to be consumed by worries, eaten up by Life not in the radiant Nina-sense but as something insidious as a worm. Finally his eldest son wrote. The letter was dignified, calm, weary with acceptance the way Somnath himself had been. It might have been a fitting elegy if it hadn’t lacked that other element I knew to be his: that sudden leap of recognition—as when listening to poetry or music—that this is how life could be and maybe, somewhere else, really was.
Susie also died—or passed away, she would have said—as serene in her pastel nightie as she had been for the past two decades. By that time our money was gone, mostly on round-the-clock nursing for her. Fortunately I myself was an old woman by then and could draw my social security. It was not enough to live on in New York but would see me through a modest existence in India. I bought a one-way ticket to New Delhi where I have been ever since, first in the upstairs flat in the new colony with the landlords living downstairs. I’ve stopped traveling—I’m not planning to finish my thesis, for even if it were to be awarded the PhD degree, I’m too old to get a teaching appointment. But it’s all right, I don’t have to travel far now to be where my subject had been. Every Thursday evening I take a bus to Nizamuddin, to listen to the singers in the courtyard of the mausoleum compound. There is a wash of pink-tinted light over the white marble until the sun finally sets; then the sky, stretched between tombs and mosque, is a soft silk cloth with stars sewn into it—such a beautiful setting for the words of praise and longing so lustily sung for rupees by the muscular performers in shirtsleeves. One of them smiles and sways to the sounds he is squeezing out of the harmonium, and peace flows from the night and the music, soothing the madmen in their chains who have been brought here to benefit from the influence of the live music and the dead saint. Other evenings I take another bus, which deposits me near the river. Here I join a little group of women—most of them widows, all of them old—and they too are singing, in the same strain though to a different god or, in their case, gods. I sing along with them, while they laugh at my pronunciation and try to teach me better. They have no difficulty accepting my alien presence, for though my face is white, it is as wrinkled as theirs; I have taken to wearing a cotton sari, which is more convenient, especially to draw over one’s head as a protection against the hot sun. We are all singing the same songs and all enjoying the river when it is in spate or, when it is not, the liquid luminous sky flowing above the bed of dry mud.
I notice I’ve been using the present tense—as though all the above were the present. But it is not. If it were, I might have been able to end my days as serenely singing as Susie did hers. One day, while returning from an excursion to the river, maybe still singing and smiling to myself, I heard someone behind me in the bus line calling my name. “Is it you? Really you?” She embraced me as no one had done in a long time. It was Priti, Somnath’s daughter, though it took me some time to recognize her. I had last seen her when she was a student, in love, with a defiant short haircut and ideas to match. Now it was many years since her romantic elopement and she was almost middleaged. My bus arrived, and when that happens, there is no time to waste (more than once, unable to move fast enough, I’ve been knocked down in the rush to get on). I just managed to shout my address to her, and she came to see me the very next day. It was a holiday and she didn’t have to work. Yes, she had a job—not a good one, underpaid, in a travel agency run by a greedy and tyrannical woman; but the hours were good, so that she only needed part-time help at home. Fortunately, her children were bigger now—sixteen and seventeen—and her husband, thank heavens, no longer lived with her but was drinking himself to death in Bombay.
She came often; she said she loved to be with me and talk about the past. But it was mostly the present we talked of, her stressful present, which included a bad relationship with her brothers and sisters, all of whom had made conventional arranged marriages and felt themselves entitled to look down on her. (At that she proudly tossed her hair, still short, the way she used to.) She also loved, she said, to be with me in my cozy, comfortable little place—here her eyes roved around, in the slightly calculating way of women who have for years had to look out for themselves. I was surprised: “cozy and comfortable” were not words truly applicable to my little whitewashed room, at least not for anyone but me. I had a string bed with a mat beside it on which I slept more often than on the bed. The room was on the roof, so there was a lot of light—also heat, but I possessed a big black table fan that I had bought from my landlords when they installed their airconditioner. Priti said she felt more peaceful here than anywhere else. At home, the children brought back friends and played loud music, which was disturbing to her when she returned from work, often with a headache brought on by the stressful situation with her employer. How she would love to come and relax in a place like mine—although of course she didn’t want to disturb me in any way. I suggested that, if I gave her my key, she could just come and rest here for an hour or two when I was out. Well, I was always out at dusk when I went down to the river or, on Thursdays, to Nizamuddin. This worked out perfectly because those were the same hours that Priti was finished for the day, and it was a great relief to her to have my quiet place to come to.
I began to suspect that she did not come there alone, but I didn’t mind. I even liked the idea of Priti bringing a friend. I knew she had had a bad marriage—she told me details that I didn’t want to hear—and I also knew that she was, like my mother, a person who thirsted for love. This too she often told me, and in any case, didn’t I remember her as a young girl defying her whole family and all her caste and traditions, for the sake of love? I began to stay out later than usual so as not to disturb her time together with her friend. By the time I arrived home she had gone, with everything as I had left it, except sometimes for a lingering smell of liquor and tobacco smoke.
But one night she was still there. She had locked up my place and was on the stairs, and so was my landlady. Their voices could be heard down the street, and some neighbors had also come out to listen. Fights were not uncommon in the neighborhood—if they were between men, they could turn violent and not long before there had been a murder, a brother mortally stabbing his sister’s alleged seducer. But women tended to confine themselves to deadly invective shouted out loud for everyone to hear. By the time I was walking up the stairs toward them, I had already understood what the fight was about. I realized that my landlady had misinterpreted the situation, and I tried to calm her by explaining that Priti was only using my room to entertain a personal friend. “One friend!” screamed my landlady. Then she turned on me—how I had fooled everyone, with my white hair and simple ways, insinuating myself into a respectable home to carry on my nefarious business. Of course I was not allowed to stay another minute but had to pack up there and then; Priti came back up with me and helped me. The only difficult part was to carry down my trunk—not that it had much in it, but it was one of those metal trunks they have in India as a precaution against rodents and destructive insects.
Priti very quickly found another place for me. This one is further out—since I first came here, Delhi has proliferated into widespread new suburbs and colonies—so that after work Priti has to hire a motorcycle rickshaw to bring her here. But she seems to think this expense worth her while. Her mood is altogether much better nowadays than when I first met her again. Her circumstances appear to have improved from that time; she often wears new clothes and her face too is smoother, brighter with more make-up. Far from borrowing money from me as she sometimes had to, she leaves little gifts for me, such as a picture framed from a calendar. Altogether she has tried to make my room more attractive and comfortable. I have a solid wooden double bed now instead of the narrow string cot I had in the other place; the new bed is really too big for the room and also for me, so I sleep on the mat, which has been changed and is very colorful. I don’t often meet Priti, for I try to stay out beyond the time that she is entertaining her friends. But sometimes she waits for me to come home, and then she is very nice to me and asks me whether I’m comfortable in this new place and not disturbed by the people living in the downstairs part of the house.
It is true that these tenants, who are all women, are noisy, especially at night when they entertain clients with music and dancing, and probably drinking too, for their voices and laughter become very loud. Sometimes there are fights, and once or twice the police have been called. I would have liked to make friends with my new neighbors, but I don’t often see them, for after their lively nights they like to sleep late into the day. However, we live together very amicably, and I’m glad to help them out with little household items, such as sugar for their tea. They like to sip it hot and sweet, while sitting on the steps leading up to my room—large, plump, youngish women in shiny satin saris and with cascades of jewelry.
I’m now too far from Nizamuddin and from the river to visit there as regularly as before. But there are always nice peaceful places to be found in India, even in the middle of a crowded city. On the outskirts of the new colony where I now live is a cluster of crumbling little pavilions; there are tombs inside them with inscriptions that have become indecipherable so that I have no idea who is buried here. I sit inside one of the pavilions by the tombs—there are three of them, side by side—waiting until I can go home without disturbing Priti. Although there is a hole in the roof, it is cool in here—anyway, cooler than outside where the sun beats down on the flat earth with only dry shrubs growing out of it and no trees. When the sun has set, the bats come out and cut into the soft skin of the darkened sky. When I first came here, I was completely alone and would squat on the stone floor, leaning against a tomb with a book, or with my unfinished thesis and the poetry quoted in it. Now other people have begun to join me. First there was an old man, a retired accountant, whose eyes were failing so that he asked me to read to him. Then more have come—mostly old people, but also one or two young clerks who love to hear or recite poetry in the way Somnath and his friends used to. One old lady has a very sweet voice and she knows all the songs of Mirabai, which she sings to us and encourages us to join in. When we are not singing or reciting, we talk together, often about the hardships in our lives: some suffer from their kidneys, others from bad daughters-in-law. I suppose it is a relief to be able to talk of these matters with others. But sooner or later we are back singing again. Not that these songs are free from suffering; on the contrary, sometimes they sound like a cry of anguish—of desperate love for the Friend who will not come, who will not come, not even now at the end of our lives of unrequited longing.
