My Nine Lives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
my first indication of what love could be.
I was sent to very expensive private schools, gladly paid for by Otto, where I was miserable because all the other girls were so much smarter, in the fashionable as well as the intellectual sense, than I could ever hope to be. I worked hard but the results were far from encouraging, and it was doubtful whether they could ever be good enough to get me into college. Fortunately, during my last two years in High School, my interests became focused on oriental studies, where I discovered the same questions I had been asking since I could remember and even some approximate answers to them. It was when I entered the oriental department at Columbia that Otto and Nina began to say—with pride, for they had a tremendous respect for intellectuals—“The child is intellectual.” Neither of them had had a college education. Otto had gone straight from school into the family business, while Nina hadn’t even finished school but at fourteen, to her everlasting regret, had begun to model, act, flirt, and generally have a good time. For the rest of her life she tried to make up for this by reading books. She read avidly, indiscriminately, with passion. She adored the classics—Tolstoy, Chekhov, Thomas Mann—but also the latest bestsellers, swallowing everything with the same ravenous appetite, her eyes racing down the page as though devouring the print.
And she adored intellectuals, male ones, that is—she hated “bluestockings,” turning down the corners of her mouth in pronouncing the word. Her lovers were all writers, musicians, philosophers, philologists, even a theologian—sometimes several of them together, so that she would quote from the works of one to the other. Most of them, in Los Angeles and later in New York, were European refugees. She didn’t care for Anglo-Saxon men, whom she characterized as sexually puerile and stingy with money (“Can you imagine! He wanted to go Dutch treat! Dutch indeed—it’s a purely American invention”). Whatever their line of intellectual pursuit, all her refugees were of the same type: suave, cynical men who gave the impression of a difficult past stoically borne. Some were handsome, others extremely ugly, but whatever they were, Otto was always jealous. Even when Nina and I were in Hollywood and were communicating with him only by telegram and trunk call (daily, and often several times a day), he could sense the appearance of a new lover across the entire continent. Not that she ever kept him guessing long—he was always, apart from myself, her first and most intimate confidant: a role that, however much it made him suffer, he could not have lived without. But none of these affairs lasted long, and when they ended, Otto and I would have whispered conversations over the phone. He instructed me to hide her sleeping and blood pressure pills, for she had twice tried to take an overdose.
In spite of their respect for my studies, my parents regarded me as very naive. “The child knows nothing about Life,” they would tell each other. It was true that life at first hand only began for me with my visits to India, and this would not have qualified as Life for Otto and Nina. In the earlier years, I usually stayed with my friend Somnath’s family, sleeping on a mat in a corner of their verandah, which was also a general passage. Somnath was a sales clerk in an old established firm of drapers and outfitters in Connaught Place, at that time a fashionable shopping center. I don’t think he could ever have been a forceful salesman, he was much too reticent for that; but he was courteous and obliging and spoke nice English, so that customers sought him out. He had a large family to support and from time to time was forced to ask his bosses for a raise. This was always an embarrassing task for him, for he respected his bosses and could not bear to see the disappointed look that came over their kindly faces while he stated his request. Finally his wife, a more forceful character and also responsible for balancing the family budget, would put on her good sari and shoes and come to the shop to clinch the matter.
Somnath and I had met in the park in the center of Connaught Place where clerks from surrounding shops and businesses came for their lunch break. It was not a beauty spot—the grass was worn away, the benches broken—but it was somewhere to sit in the shade of trees. Most people were in groups and were quite jolly, but he was alone and so was I. Neither of us was good at striking up conversation with strangers, but he overcame his shyness when he saw that I was reading a Sanskrit text. I gladly showed it to him—he could read it but admitted he couldn’t understand it: he had forgotten the lessons in Sanskrit he had had at school, long ago. He smiled when he said it, showing a row of splendid teeth rather too large for his face. His smile did not enter his eyes but seemed to make them even more melancholy. He smiled often, with a sudden flash of those large white teeth, but it was always as if he were apologizing—for what? Later I thought that perhaps it was for a lack he felt in himself, for not being more than he was. Or—and this too came to me during the years I got to know him—it may have been for a lack he felt not only in his own life but in life in general, that it could be better for everyone. He loved poetry and wrote some himself. He took me to symposia held in the courtyards and small rooms where his friends lived, all of them poor and all of them intoxicated with poetry. When a particularly poignant line was sounded, a cry of ecstasy rose from all their throats.
My excuse for my prolonged and frequent visits to India was the research I was doing for my PhD thesis. My subject was a woman poet—I guess she could be called a poet-saint—whom I had found through one of Somnath’s friends. He was her grandson and himself a poet, though earning his living as a clerk in the Income Tax Office. He hadn’t even known that she had written poetry till after her death when he rescued a batch of what everyone else thought was useless scribblings. Before that he, like the rest of the family, had thought her almost a madwoman because she kept running away and had to be brought back from distant temple sites and caves and even mosques and graves of Sufi saints. Her subject was the same as that of earlier poet-saints—the search for the Lover, the Friend—so I really don’t know why my PhD advisers were so sceptical about her except that she had been dead only ten and not five hundred years. But that was what attracted me to her—that I felt I could put out my hand and almost touch her.
I was taken to the house where she had lived with her family—they were still there, at the end of an alley, across a courtyard, in a tenement not so different from Somnath’s. I was shown the corner where she used to sit, singing and combing her white hair—which was long, for though a widow she refused to let it be cut off, wanting to be beautiful for when the Friend at last would come. I saw a photograph of her taken at a granddaughter’s wedding, where she didn’t look very different from other widowed grandmothers, skinny and wizened and already a ghost in the shroud of her white cotton sari. I also traveled to the places she had run away to: these were never well-known pilgrim spots but deserted, inaccessible sites outside anonymous villages, ruined piles of brick hidden in overgrown thickets of shrubs or exposed on barren land under a burning sky of white heat. Since my long vacations came in the summer, my visits always coincided with the hottest time of the year; but heat never really bothered me, maybe because I had ancestors who had wandered forty years in the desert. At noon I would cool my head under a wet handkerchief knotted at the corners, which probably made me look as mad as everyone thought she had been.
My parents considered India an unsuitable, dangerous place. Otto even had firsthand reports from relatives who in the 1930s had emigrated to Bombay, that being the only place where they could get an entrance permit. Although they had done well there, establishing a successful confectionery business, they never got used to the alien atmosphere. In long letters to their relatives—all the family wrote long letters to each other, it was a characteristic of the Diaspora, going right back to the Levy who had been sent to Smyrna to check up on the Messiah—they reported on conditions of squalor and ignorance that made the country completely impossible for cultured Europeans like themselves (after the war, they sold the confectionery business and returned to Germany). I could never convince my parents of my own, very different experience. Anyway, almost every time I was in India, there was an emergency that made it necessary for me to return home. Once it was because of Otto’s heart attack, which Susie declared was brought on by worry about me; another time Nina took pills that Susie said I should have been there to hide from her. Even when the emergency was over, I couldn’t return to India because they needed me in New York, their nerves having been shattered by the crisis and my absence. Susie’s nerves were shattered the most—she was psychologically frailer than Otto and Nina; and physically too, she appeared frailer, for unlike Nina, who was dark and heavy, Susie was pale, sandy, and so slight that it seemed any breeze might blow her away.
Then