Out of India. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

gentle and tidying the handkerchiefs in my drawer. I would even tell her the story of the film I had not seen. “Tomorrow I’m meeting her again.” “No, tomorrow I want you to come with me to Meena auntie—”

      It began to be difficult to get out of the house. Mama watched me every minute, and when she saw me ready to leave, she stood in the doorway: “Today you are coming with me.”

      “I told you, I have to meet—”

      “You are coming with me!”

      We were both angry and shouted. Daddy came out of the study. He told Mama, “She is not a child. . . .”

      Then Mama started to shout at him and I ran out of the house and did not look back, though I could hear her calling me.

      When I told M., he said, “You had better come with me.” I also saw there was no other way. On Friday afternoons Mama goes to a committee meeting of the All-India Ladies’ Council, so that was the best time. I bundled up all my clothes and jewels in a sheet and I walked out of the house. Faqir Chand, our butler, saw me, but he said nothing—probably he thought I was sending my clothes to the washerman. M. was waiting for me in a tonga by the post office and he helped me climb up and sit beside him; the tonga was a very old and shaky one, and the driver was also old and so was the horse. We went very slowly, first by the river, past the Fort and through all the bazaars, he and I sitting side by side at the back of the tonga with my bundle between us.

      We had such a strange wedding. I laugh even now when I think of it. He had a friend who was a sign painter and had a workshop on the other side of the river. The workshop was really only a shed, but they made it very nice—they turned all the signboards to the wall and they hung my saris over them and over the saris they hung flower garlands. It looked really artistic. They also bought sweetmeats and nuts and put them on a long table that they had borrowed from a carpenter. Several friends of his came and quite a lot of people who lived in sheds and huts nearby. There was a priest and a fire was lit and we sat in front of it and the priest chanted the holy verses. I was feeling very hot because of the fire and of course my face was completely covered by the sari. It wasn’t a proper wedding sari, but my own old red sari that I had last worn when Mama gave a tea party for the professors’ wives in our drawing room, with cakes from Wenger’s.

      M. got very impatient, he kept telling the priest, “Now hurry hurry, we have heard all that before.”

      The priest was offended and said, “These are all holy words.”

      I couldn’t help laughing under my sari, even though I was crying at the same time because I was thinking of Daddy and Rahul and Mama.

      There was a quarrel—his friends also told him to keep quiet and let the priest say his verses in the proper manner, and he got angry and shouted, “Is it my marriage or yours?”

      At last it was finished and we were married and everyone ate sweetmeats and nuts, even people who just wandered in from the road and whom no one knew.

      We stayed a few days with his friend. There was a little room built out of planks just off the workshop and in that we all slept at night, rolled up in blankets. In the day, when the friend painted signs, we stayed in the room by ourselves, M. and I, and no one came in to disturb us. When he slept, I would look at him and look; I studied all the lines on his face. After I had looked my fill, I would shut my eyes and try and see his face in my mind, and when I opened them again, there he was really, his real face, and I cried out loud with joy.

      After some days we went on a bus to Niripat. The journey was four hours long and the bus was crowded with farmers and laborers and many old women carrying little bundles. There was a strong smell of poor people who can’t afford to change their clothes very often and of the food that the old women ate out of their bundles and the petrol from the bus. I began to feel a little sick. I often get carsick: when we used to drive up to Naini Tal for the summer holidays, Daddy always had to stop the car several times so that I could go out and take fresh air; and Mama would give me lemon drops to suck and rub my temples with eau de cologne.

      In Niripat we stayed with M.’s cousin, who had a little brick house just outside the town. They were a big family, and the women lived in one side of the house, in a little set of dark rooms with only metal trunks and beds in them, and the men on the other side. But I ran all over the house; I was singing and laughing all the time. In the evenings I sat with the men and listened to them talking about religion and philosophy and their business (they had a grinding mill); and during the day I helped the women with their household work. M. and I went out for walks and sometimes we went swimming in a pond. The women of the house teased me a lot because I liked M. so much. “But look at him,” they said, “he is so dark; and see! his hair is going gray like an old man’s.” Or, “He is just a loafer—it is only talking with him and never any work.” I pretended to be annoyed with them (of course, I knew they were only joking) and that made them laugh more than ever. One of them said, “Now it is very fine, but just wait, in the end her state will be the same as Savitri’s.”

      “Savitri?” I said.

      So that was how I first heard about Savitri and the children. At first I was unhappy, but M. explained everything. He had been married very young and to a simple girl from a village. After some years he left her. She understood it was necessary for him to leave her because he had a task to fulfill in the world in which she could not help him. She went back to her parents, with the children. She was happy now, because she saw it was her duty to stay at home and look after the children and lead the good, simple, self-sacrificing life of a mother. He talked of her with affection: she was patient and good. I too learned to love her. I thought of her in the village, with the children, quietly doing her household tasks; early in the mornings and in the evenings she said her prayers. So her life passed. He had gone to see her a few times and she had welcomed him and been glad; but when he went away again, she never tried to keep him. I thought how it would be if he went away from me, but I could not even bear the idea. My heart hurt terribly and I stifled a cry. From that I saw how much nobler and more advanced Savitri was than I; and I hoped that, if the time ever came, I too could be strong like her. But not yet. Not yet. We sold my pearl brooch and sent money to her; he always sent money to her when he had it. Once he said of her: “She is a candle burning in a window of the world,” and that was how I always thought of her—as a candle burning for him with a humble flame.

      I had not yet written to Daddy and Mama, but I wrote to Rahul. I wrote, “Everything is for the best, Rahul. I often think about you. Please tell everyone that I am all right and happy.” M. and I went to the post office together to buy a stamp and post the letter. On the way back he said, “You must write to your father also. He must listen to our ideas.” How proud I was when he said our ideas.

      Daddy and Mama came to Niripat. Daddy sent me a letter in which it said they were waiting for me at the Victoria Hotel. M. took me there, and then went away; he said I must talk to them and explain everything. The Victoria Hotel is the only hotel in Niripat and it is not very grand—it is certainly not the sort of hotel in which Mama is used to staying. In front there is the Victoria Restaurant, where meals can be had at a reduced rate on a monthly basis; there is an open passage at the side that leads to the hotel rooms. Some of the guests had pulled their beds out into the passage and were sitting on them: I noticed a very fat man in a dhoti and an undervest saying his prayers. But Daddy and Mama were inside their room.

      It was a very small room with two big beds in it and a table with a blue cotton tablecloth in the middle. Mama was lying on one of the beds; she was crying, and when I came in, she cried more. Daddy and I embraced each other, but Mama turned her face away and pressed her eyes with her handkerchief and the tears rolled right down into her blouse. It made me impatient to see her like that: every mother must part with her daughter sometime, so what was there to cry about? I squeezed Daddy’s hands, to show him how happy I was, but then he too turned his face away from me and he coughed. Here we were meeting after so many days, and they were both behaving in a ridiculous manner. I spoke to them quite sharply: “Every individual being must choose his own life and I have chosen mine.”

      “Don’t, darling,” Daddy said as if something were hurting him.

      Mama