My Nine Lives. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
said it was absolutely impossible and that he would definitely put his foot down. In their confrontations, he was always putting his foot down, and when he said it, he looked stern and strong, though perfectly aware that Nina would always do what she wanted. But this time, for her trip to India, she needed Otto’s cooperation, in the form of financial assistance. My own visits to India didn’t cost much, but she could not be expected to travel or live there the way I did. She sent me off to explain this to Otto—“Be nice to him,” she told me, as always when something had to be wheedled out of him. I knew from experience that he found it hard to refuse her anything, especially money, with which he was so generous to her that Susie often warned we would all end up in the gutter. But he was genuinely worried about Nina. What if she fell sick in India with one of those diseases people got there? “Yes, and if she does something silly again?” Susie said. “You can hardly expect Otto to go running after her, not with his—” and she tapped her chest to indicate his heart condition. I myself was ambivalent about her proposed trip. I did want her to see the place that meant so much to me, but what if she didn’t like it, found it abhorrent as others had? Nevertheless, I persuaded Otto with promises to take good care of her until finally he wrote out a check—“with a heavy heart,” he said as he did so, while shielding the figure from Susie, who was craning forward anxiously to see it.
I realized that this time my stay in India would be very different. Instead of living with Somnath’s family, I joined Nina in her suite in an enormous Moghul-style hotel. It was built of sandstone like the Red Fort, though in salmon pink and with great domes stuck on at every available corner. Inside, it had marble walls and crystal chandeliers and bearers tall as maharajas in turbans and scarlet cummerbunds. Reproductions of Persian and Moghul miniatures lined the corridors, with the same scenes of princes hunting tigers woven into the carpets that lay thick as moss in the suites and staterooms and were beginning to smell from the damp that had seeped in during the rainy season. Nina only left her airconditioned rooms to go shopping—until she discovered that it was not necessary to go out at all, because the hotel had its own shops of precious merchandise. Moreover, the bearers were always ready to introduce salesmen into her suite; they came like magicians with humble cloth bundles out of which they poured torrents of silk and jewels on to her carpets.
My Indian family—I thought of Somnath and his family as my own—were very excited to hear that this time I had come with my mother, and of course I had to bring her to see them. This was not a success, though everyone pretended it was. To reach their house, it was necessary to turn off the main thoroughfare and, leaving the car behind, to walk through a series of intertwining alleys. I had been here so often that everyone had gotten used to me; but Europeans and Americans were rare enough to attract attention, and of course someone like Nina was a sensation. Everyone stared and commented; children came running from all directions, and the more daring touched her clothes (she was in a black and white moiré outfit) and related to the others what they had felt. So even before we had made our way up the narrow staircase that it was no one’s particular business to keep clean, Nina had set her face in a fixed smile; and this never relaxed throughout her visit. Somnath’s wife and old mother and sisters and sisters-in-law and a few neighbors were all in their best saris, which were the same colors as the sweets they had set out. They also brought platters of fritters fried in mustard oil and milky tea in crockery cups they had borrowed to supplement their own meager stock. Nina, fortified with her fixed smile and super-gracious manner, accepted everything like a ceremonial offering and merely touched it with her fingertips. Afterward she said what fun it had been and so colorful, but from then on she stayed exclusively in the hotel; and Somnath’s family thanked me for bringing her and praised her beauty and graciousness but neither she nor they suggested a second visit.
When her funds were exhausted, Nina returned to New York, and I moved back to Somnath’s for a few days before setting off on one of my long bus and train journeys across India, this time to Vinaynagar. It was there that Otto’s telegram reached me and I set off immediately for New York where he met me at the airport and took me home to where Nina was dying. I didn’t reproach him for not calling me earlier: my presence would probably have made no difference, although I might have suspected what doctors in New York, familiar only with the more advanced diseases, no longer knew how to diagnose. I had seen cases of typhoid fever in India, in the tenement where Somnath lived, in one of the little whitewashed rooms with niches for gods, where first a cadaverous old widow and then her granddaughter lay moaning on a string cot. Everyone there knew what it was, and the granddaughter was saved with modern medicines though the old woman died. But now to see this fever ravaging the pampered body of my film-star mother, tossing in her satin-backed, gold-crenellated bed, was too incongruous to be accepted.
We moved her to a hospital, to a private room where I could stay with her day and night. The right medicines were by now being injected into her, but already the fever had taken on a life and rage of its own. Not that she didn’t struggle hard; she wanted to live, there was too much she was required to give up. But she was no longer on the same level of consciousness as Otto and myself who sat by her bed, or as Susie, who sat silent and frightened in a corner. Nina was calling out names I had never heard—though Otto knew them—and recalling places she didn’t want to leave (again it was only Otto who had known them). Once, at night when she and I were alone together within the vast stillness of the hospital where not clocks but life-supporting machines clicked out the seconds, she suddenly opened her beautiful eyes and asked, “But where did I catch this?” It was a question I had already asked myself, and one I had had to answer for Otto too: when I had assured him that she had not eaten outside the hotel—unlike myself, who freely ate at wayside stalls whatever was cheap and available. Then Nina said, “It was that green sweet,” and I recalled the bright green pistachio sweetmeat—more expensive than anything the family could have afforded for themselves—that had been offered to her at Somnath’s. But she hadn’t eaten it; she had only touched it with her fingertips in symbolic acceptance—I tried to remind her of that, calling out to her urgently but unable to reach her where she had already returned to times and places I didn’t know.
The question of the green sweet remained unsettled. Nina died—even now, after all these years, I write the words in disbelief, unable to fit the subject to the predicate. Her funeral too had nothing to do with her—as always at funerals, there was a dull, depressing drizzle—and it was only the cluster of her women friends in their furs and designer hats who could be connected with Nina. But afterward, when I had to clear out our apartment which the landlords were waiting to repossess, she sometimes came alive for me again among her possessions: so that when I ran a scintillating necklace through my fingers, it seemed to be she herself who came sparkling back to life. Susie often stood watching me, and her eyes too lit up—“Oh isn’t that pretty!” She took the necklace and ran it through her fingers. But then it became just a piece of jewelry again; and since Susie liked it so much, I said, “Why don’t you take it.” “No really? No, Rosemary, I couldn’t!” so that I had to insist. Then she let me help her fasten it while she stood before the mirror, her eyes and the jewels both glittering, and she kissed me and said thank you like a sweet little girl.
Otto shrank into a querulous, quarrelsome old man. It was Susie he quarreled with now—not the way he used to fight with Nina, but in niggling, spiteful arguments. They often made separate appointments with me, so that each could complain about the other. After I had cleared out Nina’s apartment and Otto had given up the lease, he had wanted me to move in with himself and Susie; but she said it would be difficult because she had turned one of the bedrooms into her studio—she had begun to paint watercolors, mainly as therapy—and the other was needed for guests (though, so far as I knew, she never had any). So I rented a room in some old lady’s apartment—on a temporary basis, I thought, because soon I would be going back to India. However, week by week, month by month, I had to postpone this return because of the situation between Susie and Otto; and in the end I had to move into their apartment because Susie moved out of it. She checked herself into a hotel; staying with Otto, she said, had ruined her nerves and she was heading straight for a nervous breakdown.
After he died—he did not survive a second heart attack—she moved back to the Madison Avenue apartment. By this time I had a tutoring job at Columbia, so she thought it would be more convenient for me to live uptown, nearer my work. She phoned me every