Read A Lovesong for India Online
Authors: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
A Lovesong for India (7 page)
Romesh did not think that his father had done the right thing. In resigning his office, TC was giving up the chance of exerting pressure on behalf of his son. It might also be taken as an admission of guilt, which Romesh himself was far from making. Instead he worked energetically to extricate himself. With the help of his lawyers, he discovered the weak links obstructing his case – a chain stretching from the lower ranks up to the occupants of some top positions. He knew whom to avoid – Bobby for instance, whom he shrugged off as useless; so were most of his father’s former colleagues, though with some surprising exceptions. Romesh found himself frequently on the same track as Googa, whom he learned to respect for his ruthless energy and ability to make things work for him. ‘Not a bad chap,’ he said. And it was Googa who finally resolved matters for both of them. This was during a parliamentary crisis when Googa, with his command over a substantial block of votes, could make himself very helpful; and after that it was not long before it was decided that the charges against him and his co-defendants were completely baseless.
Romesh’s passport was returned to him, and he was left free to continue his business. He now shifted his base of operations to Bombay, which he said was a much livelier city, geared to modern business practices, and also with even wilder girls in it. He wanted to move his parents with him, but they were now well settled in the little flat Margaret had found for them. It was far from official New Delhi, in a bazaar area that Diana soon came to know well. Over the years she witnessed many changes in their new neighbourhood. An alley that had once been occupied by vegetable stalls and cooked-meat shops was now given over to motor parts. The site of a rotted old textile mill had become a propane-gas plant; and there was a brand-new charitable eye hospital under the patronage of a cabinet minister whose face – it happened to be Googa’s – loomed on a poster encircled by little coloured bulbs. Margaret’s mission was nearby, and here everything remained unchanged. Her helpers were still orphan girls in cotton saris, and shoes and socks to save their feet from ringworm. Out on the verandah the petitioners still stood waiting for Margaret to help solve their problems, which never seemed to grow different or less.
Diana tremendously admired Margaret’s selfless devotion to India, which she couldn’t help contrasting with her own selfish devotion to only two Indians, her husband and her son. But her sense of guilt left her as soon as she got home to where TC was writing his memoirs and waiting to read his day’s work to her. His style had been honed for official reports: ‘In November we moved to Sitapur where we encountered a variety of incidents, some of them of a humorous nature, others rather more serious.’ She knew all the incidents and was able to flood his spare prose with her memories. Often, while he read, it was not the city noises outside that she heard but the jackals and peacocks surrounding the bungalow of their early districts. She didn’t need to look out of the window of their cramped little flat to know that the sun setting over the city streets was the same that she had watched over the unbroken plains of their first postings. The moon too would be the same, spreading a net of silver over the people asleep outside the shuttered shops.
Romesh came to Delhi to visit his parents. Stout, middle-aged, shining in a silk jacket and some gold jewellery, he burst in on them: ‘So what’s new!’ Of course he knew there never could be anything new for them, washed up in all their innocence, their total ignorance of life in the world. What he couldn’t account for was their happiness, though he was aware that it included him, all the years of his existence as their son.
Bombay (pre-Mumbai)
If it hadn’t been for her grace and beauty, Munni might have become like any other unhappy Indian woman whose arranged marriage had turned out badly. As it was, her family – from a provincial town in the Punjab, her father a small subcontractor – urged her to adjust to her circumstances and the brutal husband they had found for her. But she knew, had known since puberty, that there were many people out in the world willing to help her, and she had learned to take advantage of their good intentions without indulging their bad ones. So it was that a friend in Air India arranged for a ticket to New York, and another friend for a place to stay there, and yet another to find her a hostess job in an upscale Indian restaurant. This place was as luxuriantly oriental as she herself was. It was decorated with erotic Rajasthani miniatures and niches holding plaster-cast statues of burgeoning Hindu goddesses. Munni might herself have been one of those goddesses, stepped out of a niche to welcome the guests. She had to use all her charm and tact to put off the many men – including the proprietor and his several sons – who wanted to establish some relationship with her beyond her professional duties. Some of them persisted and kept coming again and again and followed her with their eyes as she glided in her sari and smiled and greeted everyone in the low sweet murmur of a highly cultivated courtesan.
At first Davy, who became her husband, was part of a group of loud, rich and confident Americans and Americanised Indians. She noticed him even then, if only because he was different from the others. He was neither loud nor confident and probably not as rich, for it was never he who picked up the cheque. He seemed apart from his companions – there was a sort of melancholy abstraction about him, as if he were not really present with them but elsewhere. She was soon aware that he
was
elsewhere, was in fact with her. Even when she wasn’t looking in his direction, she felt his attention following her; and when she did look – which she couldn’t help doing more often than she wanted – his eyes lit up and he smiled. His smile was charming but, even with her, aloof. Soon he was coming on his own; he simply showed up, knowing a place would be found for him. If he suspected that she had kept it waiting for him – perhaps that she herself was waiting for him – he took it for granted as his due.
was
elsewhere, was in fact with her. Even when she wasn’t looking in his direction, she felt his attention following her; and when she did look – which she couldn’t help doing more often than she wanted – his eyes lit up and he smiled. His smile was charming but, even with her, aloof. Soon he was coming on his own; he simply showed up, knowing a place would be found for him. If he suspected that she had kept it waiting for him – perhaps that she herself was waiting for him – he took it for granted as his due.
One day he turned up at her apartment. He may have followed her – she could imagine him doing that, in his shy persistent way – or he could have simply inquired about her within their compact Indo-American Manhattan circuit. She shared a small East Side flat in a jerry-built, whitewashed block with two other Indian girls who had more or less the same stories as her own. She had never mentioned Davy to her room-mates, but the girl who let him in gasped and ran to Munni: ‘It’s Davy! He’s asking for you!’ It turned out she was the only one ignorant of his identity. ‘Where have you
been
? You mean you didn’t know who his father is?’
been
? You mean you didn’t know who his father is?’
‘Oh my God!’ Munni said when they told her, holding her hand in front of her mouth in shock, delight, amazement. His father was Abhinav, the legendary film star, the king, the emperor of Bombay talkies, even now when he was in his sixties and hadn’t made a film in years.
Davy – his real name was Dev Kumar – was made so welcome in her apartment that he soon became part of the household. He stopped going to the restaurant and instead waited for Munni to come home. When he followed her into the bedroom, she made him turn around while she changed her clothes, though after some time he was allowed to unhook her bra, and after some more time to catch hold of the two magnificent breasts that came tumbling out. But when he asked her to marry him, she laughed in his face: ‘No way!’ She treasured her job, her girlfriends, her wonderful freedom; and she had had enough of marriage – more, more than enough – it was the last thing, she assured him, she wanted, now and forever.
Nevertheless, she married him. It was not his proposal she accepted but his father’s, who had come to New York for the purpose of making it. She learned at once that it was not possible to say no to Abhinav – how could anyone? He was a huge and hugely powerful man, physically and in his renown. When Munni got to Bombay, she found that even now, years after his retirement, a permanent cluster of spectators stood outside his mansion in the hope of catching a glimpse of him. As the tall gilt gates were thrown open, the porter – a dragoman in his scarlet and gold uniform – ordered the crowd surging forward to retreat before the advent of the automobile, a silver Mercedes of royal size. And Abhinav, royally seated behind his chauffeur, raised his hand in acknowledgement of the reverence paid to him – children were held up – and inclined his head in stately humility before the acclaim of the millions who had adored him for generations, not only in India but over vast areas of the world. He was always in Indian dress, always in white, the cloth as sparkling as the diamond buttons in his high-collared coat.
Inside the palace too he was a king – even a god, in the loose muslin robes he wore at home; these wafted around his frame and gave him the appearance of the mythological figures descending from clouds he had famously portrayed on the screen. Many people were waiting for him in a special room set aside for them: producers still begging for a comeback appearance, financiers with underworld ties in the Middle East. Then there was an inner ring of associates – ageing actors and playback singers, the new big stars eager to inherit his mantle (none ever did), even a few quite humble people who had helped him in his own humble days. Often feasts and entertainments were laid on for his guests – music, poetry and food, and always a showing of his famous old films in the soundproof screening room installed in the basement. Munni moved among his guests with the same sinuous grace as in the New York restaurant. Only now no one dared raise their eyes to her, for she was no longer an employee in a commercial establishment but the hostess in the great house of her great father-in-law.
Yet there was Shirin – his wife, his consort, who should have been the hostess. It was a role she had abdicated long ago, maybe right from the start of her marriage to Abhinav. Her part of the house was completely separate, and she did not allow her husband or any of his friends to enter it. She herself sometimes wandered into the main halls – it amused her to appear at one of his sumptuous parties, to make her way among his guests. She was like a ghost among them, for they glittered, men and women alike, in brocades and gold and precious gems whereas she wore only her rope of pearls and her pale pastel chiffons imported from Paris. And whereas they were dusky and shiny and plump, she was frail, bird-like, with the sallow complexion of her Parsi ancestors. Everyone drew aside to let her pass, their hands joined in respectful greeting, which she did not return. Her silent contempt took in not only the guests but the ambience in which they moved – in which her husband moved – the over-ornate furnishing and the excessive banquet set out in silver and gold dishes and the bottles of black-market liquor (it was the 1950s, the years of Prohibition). Her only words were of complaint addressed to her husband, always in an angry undertone; then she turned and tripped back on her high heels to her own quarters to collapse there in relief. There was the same relief among the party she had left – they gave each other significant nods and spiralled their forefingers against their temples. Abhinav pretended not to notice; probably he had long since known that she was referred to as the Madwoman, which was maybe the best interpretation of his unfortunate marriage.
Davy and Munni had their own quarters set aside for them in his father’s part of the mansion, a bridal suite prepared for them before she had consented to be the bride. Under the rose-coloured canopy of a four-poster with carved foliage, Davy took possession of Munni’s body, as splendid as those of the famous stars his father had wooed on the screen. Davy quoted poetry to her – in his adolescence, he had written poetry himself but now he only quoted from the old poets. Sometimes it was a love song in praise of her beauty, but just as often it expressed another part of his nature: the melancholy that lay behind his smile – ‘Give not thy heart to the flirting hag of the world, she is the bride of too many grooms already’ – and so on, all of it nothing to do with them and the good times they had together.
He took her up on the roof to show her the panorama of Bombay and the Arabian Sea like a private body of water flowing at the foot of the flowering hill on which the mansion was perched. He explained to her that this site, the most desirable in the whole city, was his by a double inheritance. It had once belonged to Shirin’s father’s father, who had inherited it from his father. After the family’s bankruptcy, the property had had to be sold, and Abhinav had bought it. Razing the original European Palladian-style house, he built his own imitation of fifteenth-century desert palaces, which were familiar to him from historical and mythological film sets; but although his turrets and balconies and battlements were built of concrete, they had somehow retained the same flat quality, of cardboard and make-believe, as their screen counterpart.
At that time, that is at the beginning of their marriage, Davy often took his wife to visit his mother in her quarters. These had been furnished entirely from her parents’ household, much of it derived from their parents and grandparents – the heavy Edwardian interiors of wealthy Parsis who had travelled abroad and brought back what was sold to them as valuable antiques. It was usually late afternoon when Davy took Munni to visit here. ‘Mummy gets up late,’ he said, and in the evenings she preferred to be alone with her cocktail and her gramophone records. But in the beginning she sometimes said, ‘Oh no, don’t go yet, Bébé, leave this lovely girl with me a moment longer,’ and she smiled at Munni to show her how much she liked her. Then Munni had to sit and listen to the gramophone records and pretend that it was music she cared for (Moonlight Sonata and Chopin Preludes). ‘Isn’t it delicious!’ Shirin exclaimed, adding: ‘
Délicieux
,’ for she had gone to finishing school in Switzerland and had retained some French.
Délicieux
,’ for she had gone to finishing school in Switzerland and had retained some French.
Other books
Michael Belmont and the Tomb of Anubis (The Adventures of Michael Belmont) by Erway, Ethan Russell
Duel At Grimwood Creek (Book 2) by Lucas Thorn
His Sassy Girl (Desiring the Forbidden Book 2) by Michaels, Megan
Flame of the West by David Pilling
Resisting Nick (Wicked in Wellington) by Pearson, Kris
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
A Reckless Promise by Kasey Michaels
Mykonos After Midnight by Jeffrey Siger
The Printmaker's Daughter by Katherine Govier
The Music of Pythagoras by Kitty Ferguson