My Nine Lives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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.