Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

they had been crammed, came sounds of quarreling; sometimes a girl could be seen running up the stairs with a handkerchief pressed to her face; wandering around the grounds, one was very likely to come across a solitary figure seated in tears by the side of the lake, or lying face down under a tree in what used to be the apple orchard. I began to realize that involvement in a higher cause did not so much still the lower passions as stir them up and bring them to a pitch.

      Although I was at that time indifferent to the Rawul and Rani, and Crishi, to say nothing of their movement, I was not immune to the tense atmosphere in the house. That was because Michael had become a part of it. He was deeply involved in the movement—he really believed in it; he was also deeply interested in Crishi. Both these states of mind were new in Michael; I had never before seen him anything but detached, calm, his own person totally. It was the way we both tried to be. Although we were twins, we didn’t look that much alike—Michael was very fair and I had dark hair—but there must have been some other sort of close resemblance because people always commented on it. Except with each other, neither of us talked much, or laughed very easily; this may partly have been in reaction to our parents, who did a lot of both. People called us aloof—well, we never put ourselves out to make friends, preferring to be either alone or with each other. Certainly neither of us was the type to join a movement or follow a leader of any kind; we would have been the last people to do that. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in anything—we did: but it wasn’t ever anything you could share with outsiders, only with each other, who thought and felt the same. For us, believing was something you had to do for yourself—find for yourself—test out for yourself—and not be influenced by anything or anyone outside. Perhaps it was a quest for truth, though we never called it that: We didn’t call it anything but we knew what we meant. Mostly we knew what it wasn’t, and we used the word neti, the way other people use the word phony. “Oh no, neti,” we would tell each other—about a book, a person, a thought, a situation. When something didn’t come up to our standard, it was neti: not right, not Om, not Tao, not the real thing; phony. I would have said straight off that the Rawul’s movement and his entourage, if not the Rawul himself, were neti, but for once, for the first time, Michael did not agree with me.

      Here I might as well start talking about Crishi. Only where to start? At that time I saw him so differently. I don’t suppose I ever did see him really objectively, because even then, at the beginning, when my own feelings weren’t involved, Michael’s were. Of course Michael had had special friendships before; I was used to that, and it didn’t bother me. Although these friendships were usually intense, it was only physically, so that when that was over, it was all over and Michael was himself, and mine, again. But with Crishi I wasn’t even sure that it was physical, though they did the usual romantic things, like taking the boat out on the lake by moonlight, or swimming nude by the waterfall, or if anyone had lit a bonfire they would sit by it and poke around in the embers long after everyone else had gone to bed. But whereas Michael was tense and trembly, Crishi seemed too in control of himself, and of Michael, to be much affected; as if he could take it or leave it, whereas Michael couldn’t leave it at all. If at any time during the day he didn’t know exactly where Crishi was, he would go quite wild and walk around asking everyone, and sometimes people told him lies to save his feelings. Michael knew perfectly well—it may have been partly why he was so desperate—that Crishi was involved with girls in the entourage. And of course there was the Rani, with whom he was very intimate—neither of them made any secret of that, and when they presented each other as adopted mother and son, it was in an indifferent, believe-it-or-not way. Michael himself tried hard to believe it. Once, when I commented that she seemed awfully young to be Crishi’s mother, Michael got quite worked up: “Young? She? She’s as old as Medusa.” “How old is Medusa?” When Michael frowned at this would-be joke, I said, trying to sound casual the way I always did when I mentioned him: “How old is Crishi?” Michael shrugged: “Obviously years younger than she is. Years and years,” he said fiercely.

      It was hard to tell how old Crishi was; and even harder when you knew everything he had done and everywhere he had been, so that on calculating you could only wonder “Surely he can’t be that old?” He looked, at first sight, quite young. That may have been because he was so lithe and quick and always on the go, you could hardly keep up with him the way he ran around, and always in a terrifically good mood. It was only when you looked closer and saw the corners of his mouth and the skin around his eyes—but of course then, at the beginning, I never did look closer; that came later. And it was as difficult to make out his nationality as his age. His way of speech was a strange mixture—sometimes there was a slight Oriental lilt, and he used the usual international Americanisms; but his most basic accent was the sort of Cockney that was fashionable at the time, having supplanted the English the Rawul had learned to speak at Harrow. His appearance too was ambiguous: At first sight, he might have been an Italian or a Spaniard, but then there were his slightly slanted eyes, his double-jointed fingers, his very slim ankles, and feet so narrow that he had difficulty getting shoes to fit him.

      Besides myself, the other person in the house who wasn’t 100 percent enthusiastic about our guests was Jean. In her case, it was mostly jealousy over Lindsay and the quiet, secluded life they had made for themselves. Or rather, Jean had made—she was always very much in charge, and though it was Lindsay’s house, she was glad to have someone else look after it. Jean used to run a successful realty business, which she had sold at a good price after deciding to devote herself to Lindsay. She was an excellent businesswoman, hearty and one of the boys in her dealings with the world, but in her private relations she was ultrasensitive and very vulnerable and feminine inside her shapeless unfeminine body. Before they had settled down together as a more or less married couple, she and Lindsay used to have terrible fights. Many of them were about Mrs. Schwamm, who was jealous of Jean’s position in the house and treated her as a usurper. In the end, it became obvious that one of them had to go. By then Lindsay had found Jean suited her so well, in both her emotional and her domestic life, that she had no difficulty deciding between them, though Mrs. Schwamm had been her mother’s cook and had gone with Lindsay on her marriage because she was so devoted to her. One thing about Lindsay—she appeared to be very dithering, she was very dithering, but she never hesitated to get rid of people when necessary. But now of course Mrs. Schwamm was back again and in charge of the kitchen and Jean had to put up with her. And more, much more, she had to put up with Lindsay’s interest in the movement in general and the Rani in particular. And just as Michael used to go around wildly, even shamelessly, asking “Where’s Crishi?” so Jean could be observed with the same look of anguish on her face, stopping people to ask “Have you seen Lindsay?”

      THEN one day Lindsay decided to donate Propinquity. She announced this quite casually and in public, in the course of the Rawul’s evening talk under the tree. He had been mentioning the various centers of the movement that had already been established. Besides the one in his own kingdom—the cradle of the movement as well as, so we were often told, of civilization—there were centers in Sussex, England, at Fontainebleau outside Paris, on a baronial estate in Holland, and one on Columbus Avenue in New York. And suddenly Lindsay said “Oh, wouldn’t it be fun to have one here?” I’m sure she spoke without premeditation—she never did premediate anything, I don’t think she was capable of it. With her it was always “wouldn’t it be fun to—” and it might be anything like a trip to the city or to fly to a party in Dallas. I suspect that it was her approach to her love affairs, when she first decided to sleep with someone (“wouldn’t it be fun to—?”). And it always came out in a bright, little-girl voice, and then, if her suggestion wasn’t immediately taken up with enthusiasm, her face would fall and she urged “But why not?” That was what happened this time too. When her impulsive offer of the house was received in silence—and it was a very heavy silence—she looked from face to face and said “But why not?” in a hurt voice.

      No one answered, for differing reasons. The Rawul had flushed with pleasure; but as he was a modest and reticent man, he must have felt it to be indelicate to rush forward and accept such a handsome gift. The Rani played with her bracelets; there was an aloof little smile on her face, and what I noticed most was the way she was refusing to meet anyone’s glance. Crishi too was silent, but his eyes flashed like a person who unexpectedly gets something that he wants. He looked