Читать книгу East Into Upper East - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 9
ОглавлениеFarid 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 soon. 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?”
Still with her head on her knees, she murmured, “Then what are we going to do?”
“We’ll find something,” he said, her defeat making him strong. “We don’t have to put up with this nonsense. Get rid of all that filthy stuff.” He seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet. When she heard the firm way in which he flushed it away, she raised her head and wiped her eyes with the end of her sari and felt better.
But then it was his responsibility to raise some money to keep them going, and the only way he knew was to borrow from Sunil, as he had done so often over the years. Sunil received him in his Mayfair flat, and Farid looked severely around the place, which was sumptuously furnished with everything that money and bad taste could buy. “What’s that picture?” he said. “Is it new? Oh, my God.”
“Listen, Farid, it’s from a very ritzy gallery in Brook Street,” Sunil said calmly. “It cost me a packet, I can tell you.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted. Except of course when it comes to his friends—then it’s a different story.”
“When have I ever said no?” Sunil said in dull resignation.
It was true, he didn’t often turn down his old friends, but that did not improve Farid’s feelings toward him.
Matters grew worse as the years passed and Sunil went up and Farid down. Farida began to go away for weekends. Farid suspected that she went to meet Sunil, but when he accused her of this she just laughed. What made him think that she would go to Sunil for anything but money, she said. And what made him think Sunil had any time left for her, now that Sunil was what he was and she was—well, she said with a shrug, anyone could see what she was now. Farid stared at her. She was now in her late thirties—they had been struggling along in London for a good fifteen years—and she had grown very thin. Her face, under her lacquered hair, was heavily made up. But beneath it all she was still Farida—just as, he realized, beneath all his bad feeling, and all his anger against her, there remained still the heart, the flower, of love. He kissed her hand and then her wrist, and then the soft skin of her inner arm.
She took advantage of his good mood to murmur that they would have to sell some more jewelry. “I need the money,” she urged. “For a new business—no, no, this one’s going to make it for sure, you’ll see. It’s in taxis for tourists.”
“What’s left to sell?” he asked.
She got out her jewel box, which was empty except for the one piece they had agreed never to sell. This was a single large and lustrous pearl in a gold setting. It was said to have been given by the last of the great Mogul emperors to Farida’s great-great-great-grandfather, who had been a nobleman at his court, and it had always been coveted by Sunil, whose own great-great-great-grandfather had been a moneylender’s clerk at the same court. Farida had worn the pearl on her forehead at her wedding, but that time only the bridegroom, Farid, had seen it, for only he was allowed to look under her veil. It was years later, in London, when Sunil caught his first sight of it. This was at a reception he was giving for an American buyer of table linen, to which Farida had come all dressed up. She was trying to start a business in batik table mats with matching napkins, and so was out to make an impression. Sunil had eyed the ornament, which was on a chain around her neck. When he tried to touch it, she put her hand over it and said, “Not for sale.”
“Let me know when it is,” he said in his phlegmatic voice, which he made even more phlegmatic when he was eager to acquire something at a bargain price.
Farid never knew at what price Sunil finally did acquire this ornament—the money soon vanished anyway in the tourist taxi business. He often wondered what Sunil had done with it. Had he sold it? Kept it? Hung it around the neck of a girl? Sometimes he asked him, but Sunil never let on. Actually, Farid was almost sure that Sunil had locked it away in the deepest and most secret of all his safe-deposit vaults, for Sunil—one had to admit it—recognized a thing of value when he saw it. It was greed, of course, but Farid knew that when it was a question of making money Sunil’s greed could be as subtle and unerring as anyone else’s taste and wisdom.
After several weeks at the holy place, during which he faced her every day, Farid had still not arrived at the expected showdown with Farida. He was even beginning to enjoy his visits to her for their own sake. They became the high point of his day. At first he had stood in line with all the other pilgrims awaiting their turn, but then he noticed that there was a time, just after the midday meal, when no one else was there and even the handmaidens had lain themselves to sleep. Although Farid enjoyed a siesta as much as anyone, one day he spruced himself up a bit, making the most of the strands of hair that lay across the top of his head and smoothing his bush shirt over his stomach. He looked down at his stomach and decided he had seen worse on men his age. Then he hurried—yes, hurried—across the empty compound that separated his quarters from her tree. The sun beat down on him from a fierce white sky, the paving stones burned underfoot, and a hot glare as tangible as glass permeated the air, but Farid hardly noticed. Once he reached his destination, the air felt absolutely different. The shade spread by the tree was as wide and cool as the interior of a shuttered house. The handmaidens lay asleep off to one side of the thick tree trunk, on the other Farida sat reading some ancient text. She was wearing big spectacles to read with but took them off quickly when he arrived. They had begun to have little conversations now.
“Look at you, how hot you are,” she said now, watching him wipe the perspiration from his face and neck.
“Naturally, a person gets hot,” he answered irritably. “Not everyone has the opportunity to sit under a tree all day.”
“At least you should wear a hat.”
“You know I never wear a hat,” he said still impatiently, though he didn’t feel that way at all. It was cool and peaceful under her roof of foliage.
The next day, he set out to find a hat in the little bazaar at the foot of the mountain. He was a well-known figure there by now—he always made friends quickly—and his quest for a solar hat made the shopkeepers smile. They said that only English-style sahibs like himself needed to protect their brains from the good Indian sun. It was not until he came to the end of the row of narrow booths that he discovered what he was looking for among a stock of cotton undervests, bottles of hair oil, and oleographs of gods and saints. As he put on the hat and looked at himself in a little metal mirror, his attention was caught by one of the highly colored pictures—a portrait of a saint that featured its subject against a traditional background of shrines, forests, rivers, and mountain caves. Farid would not have noticed this one except that it bore some resemblance to Farida. He looked closer and then realized that the saint in the picture actually was Farida. He stared at her, and it seemed to him that out of her painted background she stared back at him in the same way she did every day under the tree.
Suddenly he remembered that it was past the hour of his usual visit to her. He paid for his purchase and hurried back through the bazaar and up the path toward her tree. He didn’t even notice the stiff climb, which usually made him pant and stop several times. But when he came within sight of the tree he slowed down. He was approaching from the bazaar instead of from the ashram, and so it happened that he caught sight of Farida half rising from her place to peer anxiously along his usual path. He tiptoed up from behind her. “Were you expecting someone, Madam?” he said suddenly, and when she turned around he swept off his new hat and made a deep bow, at the same time tilting up his face to look into hers. Although she tried to hide her feelings with a frown, he knew that he had caught her out, and that was as satisfying as the showdown he had been hoping for.
For the next few weeks, Farid felt particularly light-hearted and happy. With his solar hat, bush shirt, and an alpenstock he had acquired, he looked every inch a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, but he didn’t feel that way. It seemed to him that he had shaken off that part of his life and was now as much at home with his surroundings as Farida, that he was at one with the little ashram, and with the other pilgrims, the shrines, the trees, the mountain paths, the water springs. He climbed up and down the hillside—a bit out of breath because of his smoking and because of not being very slim (as he politely put it to himself) but nevertheless feeling nimble and agile and certain he could go up as high as he wanted. He never did climb very high but found a small incline a little way up the mountain that flattened out almost into an overlook. He liked to stand there and lean on his alpenstock, surveying the scene and feeling himself part of it. His visits with Farida in the afternoon became longer and more intimate. He sat beside her on the deerskin, and they talked like two people who have always been close to each other. They caught up on the last twenty years—or, rather, he caught up with her; there was nothing he needed to tell her about his years in London. She told him how, after that last scene with him, she had borrowed the fare from Sunil and gone straight back to her parents’ house in Delhi.
“The moment I got there,” she said, “it was as if I’d never been away, never got married, never been to London, never been broke. I did what everyone else did, all the sisters and cousins—went to the club in the evening, played tennis, played bridge, sat on committees to help the poor. Oh, you know your family’s old house next door that was sold? They’d pulled it down and built a block of flats on it. It was sad. Well, everything was sad. Papa got sick and then he died, and just six weeks later Mama died, too. Yes, you know about that. We had to start dividing everything—the furniture and carpets and silver and Mama’s jewelry—and there were such quarrels, you can’t imagine. How can such things happen between brothers and sisters! One day, Roxy and I got into this really awful fight about Mama’s diamond necklace. You remember how fat my sister Roxy always was? Well, she’s ten times fatter now—huge—with a huge face all painted with lipstick and mascara. And when we were tugging at the necklace—she at one end, me at the other, and both of us screaming—I looked into this face of hers and suddenly I thought, my God, that’s me, I’m looking in a mirror. And at the same moment I won the battle and had the necklace in my hand, only now I couldn’t bear even to hold it. I flung it away from me as far as I could, and then I rushed out of the room and out of the house and got into Papa’s old Fiat and drove without stopping—all the way up to Kasauli, you know, to the summer house there. No one had been there for ages, because of the lawsuit about it between Papa and his nephews. Everything inside had been taken away, completely stripped, and in what used to be the dining room there was a dead squirrel, with water dripping on it from a burst pipe. I got back in the Fiat and drove further up, as far as I could go, till I got to the first snow. It was completely silent there and completely bare; there were no birds and nothing growing, nothing at all. The snow sparkled white and the sky sparkled icy blue. The air was so sharp that it was like being inside a crystal. I found a cave in the side of the mountain, and it had icicles festooned around its entrance, as if someone had hung up decorations to welcome me. So I went in.”
That was as far as Farida got in telling her story to Farid. There was a silence, and when he asked, “And then?” she said, “And then I came here.” He never could find the connecting link between the entrance to the cave and this tree where she sat as a saint, with people lining up to see her. Whenever he pressed her for more information, she blushed and glanced down and smiled; she looked exactly the way she had when they were passing from childhood into adolescence and were awakening into new secrets that made him tremble with boldness and her with shyness and shame.
One day, Sunil turned up on the mountain. He came in an air-conditioned limousine driven by a chauffeur. Sunil was wearing a suit of the lightest tropical weight, but this did not prevent him from sweating most disagreeably. Farid felt at a tremendous advantage over him—a feeling that grew as the days passed and Sunil stayed on. For one thing, Sunil never had a private audience with Farida but had to line up with the other pilgrims. Also, the living conditions were not at all what he was used to; instead of occupying a suite in some five-star hotel, he was forced to sleep on a string cot placed beside Farid’s in the whitewashed cell. He could not get used to the plain meals prepared in the ashram kitchens, and when Farid took him to one of the eating stalls in the bazaar he got sick from the kebabs served there. At night he sweated and groaned and suffered tortures from the mosquitoes whining around him, though they never seemed to bother Farid. His air-conditioned limousine stood waiting to take him back down, and the chauffeur grumbled and had to be bribed to stay, but Sunil did not leave. It was almost the way it used to be when they were children and Sunil came to Farida’s birthday parties and stuck on stubbornly even though the other children pricked his balloons and hid his shoes and ate up his chocolate cake.
Of course, it was all for a purpose, a plan, and one night when he couldn’t sleep because of the mosquitoes he woke up Farid and broached it to him.
“She’s wasted up here,” he said.
Farid sat up. “What’s on your mind?” he said.
“It’s ridiculous,” Sunil grumbled. “Instead of sitting under that tree of hers, she could be making a fortune in London. Not to speak of New York.”
“You must be crazy,” Farid said in a shaky voice.
“You’re crazy,” Sunil said. “You and she both. But it’s always the same story with you two. You have absolutely no business sense.”
“Business!” Farid shouted. “What’s she got to do with business! She’s beyond all that now.”
“All right, call it something else then, call it whatever you like. But I’m telling you, she’ll go over big. They’ve never seen anything like her before. There’s money in what she does—money,” he repeated, irritably rubbing his thumb and middle finger together to make his meaning clear.
Sunil settled in. Each day, his car could be seen driving up and down the mountain roads, with Sunil sitting in the back, phlegmatic but confident, picking his teeth. He was setting up everything for Farida’s first public appearances in London; it meant getting a whole organization going, but of course that was the sort of thing he excelled at. He had made an arrangement with the post office in the bazaar to get his international calls through several times a day, and soon a contingent of publicity people arrived—very incongruous Englishmen in Daks slacks and Hush Puppies shoes who moved in on the group under the tree. They shot photographs, made sketches, took the measurements of Farida and the handmaidens, and called everyone “darling” and “angel” in cold, indifferent voices. They did their job and went away. But Sunil stayed on.
Farid sneered at all this, but he was frightened. He knew that Sunil was stupid, but he also knew that the man was capable of pushing and lumbering ahead like an army tank unencumbered by human intelligence. The worst of it was that he seemed to have sold his idea to Farida herself. She was fully persuaded that it was time for a wider, more international audience to be given the benefit of her spirituality, and that Sunil was the man to arrange it. One day when Farid arrived for his own session with her, he found Sunil there before him, sitting on the edge of her deerskin as though he had every right to be there. From then on, he was there every afternoon, and Farid’s blissful tête-à-têtes with Farida were finished. Now the handmaidens no longer slept quietly on the other side of the tree but tripped up and down, primping and preening, studiedly graceful. Farida was different, too. She didn’t lose the serenity that was now an integral part of her personality, like a shawl on a mature and beautiful woman, but she had that small half smile of satisfaction she had always worn when things were going well for her. It made Farid want to slap her. Doesn’t she see, he thought. Doesn’t she know? His anger turned on Sunil, who took no notice of it at all.
Farid stopped going to the tree in the afternoons, and instead began to nap on the cot in his cell. No one seemed to miss him; no message came from Farida to ask where he was. He slept as much as he could. It was the same thing that had happened to him in London, when he didn’t want to get up any more, and day turned into night for him, except that now he was dulled only by despair. He didn’t drink here; he didn’t need to. Now he took walks by moonlight, as he used to walk in the daytime. He climbed up to the same incline as before, from where he could look down on Farida’s tree and the bazaar on one side and a steep slope descending into a ravine on another. He wished it would never be day again.
One night, he went to Farida’s tree, descending very carefully, so that no stone might clatter down and make a noise. Everyone was sleeping—Farida on one side of the tree, the handmaidens on the other, on moss. The tree shaded them from the moon except for some silver streaks that spilled through the foliage and covered them as with a veil of finely patterned lace. Farid stood looking down at Farida. It seemed a pity to wake her, and when he did she wasn’t at all pleased. “Is this a time to come visiting?” she said irritably.
“Then when should I come?” Farid said. “With that slob sitting here all afternoon.”
She continued to lie there under her veil of moonlight. Her eyes were open and looking at him. It wasn’t so different from when she used to wake up at night in the other half of their double bed in London and regard him silently and speculatively in the dark. “Move over,” he said suddenly now. Didn’t he have the right? Wasn’t he still her husband? She didn’t argue but made room for him, so that he could nestle beside her. She no longer used the scent, Jolie Madame, she had in London but smelled of something else. Maybe it wasn’t a scent at all but only a fragrance rising from within her. It was somehow strengthened and given body by the racy smell of the deerskin.
“Let’s go away,” he whispered to her.
“We are going away,” she pointed out. “We’re going to London. I’m booked in the Royal Albert Hall in October.”
“Not like that. Not with all these people. Just you and me.” Chastely he kissed her cool neck.
“Where were you thinking of going?” she murmured.
“Away. Up there,” he said, gesturing toward a mountain peak glimmering with moon and snow.
“There’s nothing up there.”
“Yes there is. You said so. You’ve been there. You said there’s a cave.”
“Oh, my goodness,” she said. “That old story. You’d better go to bed and get some sleep. You’re dreaming with your eyes open.”
His reply was to move closer to her; he put his arm across her. After a long silence, during which both of them lay quite still, she said, “I don’t want to go up. I want to go down—go back. This time, it’ll work out. You’ll see.”
How often he had heard that from her—each time she had started some new scheme. She seemed to remember this herself, for she went on: “Sunil will help us. He’ll look after all that—you know, the business side you and I could never manage.”
“Sunil!” he said scornfully. “All he knows is buying and selling.”
“No one can live without buying and selling,” she said.
He was shocked. He sat up and stared at her in the moonlight. She looked back at him defiantly; and again he was reminded of how it had been between them all the years in London. Was she still the same? Hadn’t she changed after all?
She knew at once what he was thinking, of course. “It’s you who haven’t changed!” she cried. “You still think you can lie around with your mouth open, waiting for sweets to drop in. Well, that’s not my style at all, and this time you’re not going to drag me down with you.”
“But I told you, I don’t want to go down,” he said. “I want to go up—up to where that cave is.”
She snorted loudly—a sound of impatient anger that he knew very well. “And go away now,” she said, and when he didn’t move she gave him a little push. “Go on, before anyone sees us.”
“So what?” he said. “We’re married, aren’t we?”
A shipment of boxes arrived from London—the men in Daks slacks had arranged it all. The boxes contained new uniforms for the handmaidens and a white robe of Italian silk for Farida, along with a string of prayer beads set by a famous Italian designer, and a new deerskin, which must have been synthetic, for it had no smell at all. Everyone had gathered around for the unpacking—everyone, that is, except for Farid, who kept himself completely aloof from the excitement. By the time he next came to visit the tree, the handmaidens had changed into their new permanent-press robes and were gliding up and down in them like ethereal airline stewardesses. Farida appeared tremendously pleased with herself in her new white robe and Italian beads. She looked at Farid as if she expected a compliment, which he refused to pay. Sunil was there, surveying the scene with the satisfaction of an impresario. He stared at Farid, and Farida said at once, “Yes, he’ll need a new outfit, too.”
Farid shrugged contemptuously and went away. But when night came and everyone was asleep he got up and went to her again. She was awake and seemed to be expecting him. When he lay down next to her, she ran her finger over his frayed collar and said, “We’ll get you a new shirt and new shoes and ties and everything. We’ll start again.” She stroked what was left of his hair. “It’ll all be different this time,” she said. But when he groaned and said, “Oh, no,” she pulled back from him. “That’s all I’ve ever heard from you!” she shouted. “Whatever I wanted you to do, your only contribution was ‘Oh, no.’ I’m sick of it! I’m tired of it and I’m tired of you.”
Though she spoke in anger, Farid saw the tears trickling from her eyes.
“Who did I ever do anything for but you?” she said. “All those businesses I started—who was all that for? And even now, who is it all for?” Her voice broke. Her tears fell in perfect drops like pearls.
“Never mind,” he said. “Don’t say any more.” He lay beside her and held her hand, and remembered the time when he had had to rescue her and flushed her cooking oil away.
The next day, he invited Sunil to go for a walk with him. Sunil, who was in no condition to walk uphill, didn’t want to go, but Farid used his old tactics—taunting him about his ungainly figure, his breathlessness, his age—until Sunil gave in. Farid walked ahead, jaunty with his hat and stick, sometimes stopping on the steep path to look back at his friend panting behind him. When he reached his destination, which was his usual overlook, he sat comfortably on a stone and watched Sunil slowly coming up and, beyond him, the mountainside that spiraled away below.
Sunil arrived flushed and angry. “You want to kill me, making me climb up here?” he said.
“Calm down,” Farid said. “Take it easy. I only want to tell you something. Farida and I are leaving.”
“Oh, my God, is that all?” Sunil said, standing above him. “I know you’re leaving. So am I. Everyone is. Is that all you have to tell me?”
“We’re not going with you,” Farid said calmly. “We’re going up, not down. I just wanted you to know there’s been a change of plan.”
“Oh, sure, sure. A change of plan. I make the arrangements, spend a few hundred thousand, and he changes the plan.”
Farid remained serene. He pointed toward the mountaintop far above them, where its peak disappeared into mist. “That’s where we’re going, Farida and I,” he said.
“Listen, Farid,” Sunil said. He took a deep breath to keep his patience. “I don’t know what’s on your mind, but please try to get this straight. We’re going to London. Everything’s booked. Everything’s arranged. There’s a whole public waiting for us out there. There’s money to be made, and we’re going to make it.”
Farid, still seated on his stone, looked up at his friend. It was so easy. One push in the right direction and Sunil would go rolling off the path and down the steep ravine. He would not be heard from again. Farid stood up. He gave Sunil a sharp little push in the chest—he could have laughed at the expression on Sunil’s face as he lost his balance and began to tumble backward. The next moment, he didn’t feel like laughing at all but went running after him down the path. Sunil didn’t roll far. His bush shirt caught in the lower branches of a little pine tree, which stood a foot or two above a mountain ledge, and Sunil stuck there, while a few stones he had dislodged went bouncing down the path and sailed off into empty air. Farid jumped after him. He pulled and tugged at him, while Sunil awkwardly tried to heave himself back onto the path. It was not easy for either of them, for they were both overweight, out of breath, and terribly upset. When at last they managed it, Sunil slowly arose and stood there with his eyes shut in fright, while Farid felt him all over, pressing his limbs to see if anything was broken, and trembling as much as Sunil himself. Without opening his eyes, Sunil said at last, “Let me go. Take me down.”
Farid carefully led him down, his arm around Sunil’s stout waist, stopping solicitously every few steps to see if he was all right. Then he took his hat off and put it on Sunil, to guard him from the sun.
Later that day they presented themselves before Farida. “We’re all leaving tomorrow,” Sunil said.
“Certainly,” Farid said. “He can go down and we’ll go up.”
There was a pause. When Farida spoke, it was to Farid. “There’s nothing up there,” she said coldly. “Can’t you get that into your head? Absolutely nothing.” She looked at him with a face of stone.
What could he say to convince her? What could he do? He knelt beside her on the new deerskin; seen through his tears, she swam in a halo of light. He called her name out loud—“Farida! Farida!”—as if she were far away, instead of right next to him. He seized her hands and began to talk and cry desperately. He told her how he had tried to kill Sunil, so that the two of them, Farid and Farida, could go away together and everything could be again as it was. Yes, for that he had been prepared to murder their childhood friend. He said this twice, to impress it on her, but she only extracted her cool hands from between his and said, “You’re neurotic.”
“Neurotic!” Sunil exclaimed. “He’s completely psychotic. We have to get him to London for treatment.”
The next day, two other air-conditioned limousines arrived, and Sunil and Farida and the handmaidens and their luggage prepared for a stately departure. Pilgrims gathered while the cars were being loaded; they joined their hands in respectful salutation and shouted “Jai Mataji!” Some of them waved little orange flags with Farida’s picture imprinted in black. Sunil and Farida were sitting in the back of the third car, waiting for Farid to join the chauffeur on the front seat. But Farid could not be found. Sunil tapped his foot and said, “We’ll miss our plane.”
“Give him a few more minutes,” Farida said. Under her breath she muttered, “Isn’t that just like him!” A signal was given, and the two cars in front moved off. “We can’t just leave him behind!” Farida cried, as the procession began to wind downhill.
“Please smile, Farida,” Sunil said. “Please wave.” She waved at the pilgrims by the roadside as the car slowly descended, but kept turning in her seat and craning to peer behind her. For the first time in many years she looked discontented, disappointed.
Farid was standing above them at his overlook, at the terminal point of his daily walk. He looked down at the cars leaving. They seemed to go very slowly and reluctantly, and he knew it would be easy, if he wanted to, to run after them and catch them up. He felt a sensation in his heart as if someone—some other heart attached to his—were tugging him down. But he planted himself a bit more sturdily, with his legs apart, and stood his ground. The cars grew smaller, creeping down the mountain into the bazaar, into the town, into the plains below. When they were completely out of sight, he descended the path and returned to her tree. The place was deserted now, and there was nothing to be seen except her old deerskin, which someone had rolled up and stuffed under a root. Farid spread it out again and smoothed it and sat on it. He thought he would just wait here until she came back for him. Of course, this might take a long time—many years, even—but when she came at last he would say, “Let’s go up, Farida,” and after the inevitable argument she would agree.
