Out of India. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
down in friendly conversation. Durga did not encourage her and answered as dryly as politeness permitted; but Mrs. Puri was a friendly woman and persisted, appearing twice and three times a day to comment to Durga on the state of the weather. After a while she even began to exercise the prerogative of a neighbor and to ask for little loans—one day she had run out of lentils, a second out of flour, a third out of sugar. In return, when she cooked a special dish or made pickle, she would send some down for Durga, thus establishing a neighborly traffic that Durga had not wished for but was too lethargic to discourage.
Then one day Mrs. Puri sent some ginger pickle down with her son. He appeared hesitantly in the courtyard, holding his glass jar carefully between two hands. Durga was lying drowsily on her cot; her eyes were shut and perhaps she was even half asleep. The boy stood and looked down at her, knowing what to do, lightly coughing to draw her attention. Her eyes opened and stared up at him. He was perhaps seventeen years old, a boy with large black eyes and broad shoulders and cheeks already dark with growth. Durga lay and stared up at him, seeing nothing but his young face looming above her. He looked back at her, uncertain, tried to smile, and blushed. Then at last she sat up and adjusted the sari which had slipped down from her breasts. His eyes modestly lowered, he held the jar of pickle out to her as if in appeal.
“Your mother sent?”
He nodded briefly and, placing the jar on the floor by her cot, turned to go rather quickly. Just as he was about to disappear through the door leading out from the courtyard, she called him back, and he stopped and stood facing her, waiting. It was some time before she spoke, and then all she could think to say was “Please thank your mother.” He disappeared before she could call him back again.
Durga had become rather slovenly in her habits lately, but that evening she dressed herself up in one of her better saris and went to call on Mrs. Puri upstairs. A visit from the landlady was considered of some importance, so Mrs. Puri, who had been soaking raw mangoes, left this work, wiped her hands on the end of her sari and settled Durga in the sitting room. The sitting room was not very grand; it had only a cane table in it and some cane stools and a few cheap bazaar pictures on the whitewashed walls. Durga sat in the only chair in the room, a velvet armchair that had the velvet rubbed bare in many places and smelled of old, damp clothes.
Mrs. Puri’s two daughters sat on the floor, stitching a quilt together out of many old pieces. They were plain girls with heavy features and bad complexions. Mr. Puri evidently was out—and his wife soon dwelled on that subject: every night, she said, he was sitting at some friend’s house, goodness knows what they did, sitting like that, what could they have so much to talk about? And wasting money in smoking cigarettes and chewing betel, while she sat at home with her daughters, poor girls, and wasn’t it high time good husbands were found for them? But what did Mr. Puri care—he had thought only for his own enjoyment, his family was nothing to him. And Govind the same. . . .
“Govind?”
“My son. He too—only cinema for him and laughing with friends.”
She had much to complain about and evidently did not often have someone whom she could complain to; so she made the most of Durga. The two plain daughters listened placidly, stitching their quilt; only when their mother referred to the urgent necessity of finding husbands for them—as she did at frequent intervals and as a sort of capping couplet to each particular complaint—did they begin to wriggle and exchange sly glances and titter behind their hands.
It took Durga some time before she could disengage herself; and when she finally did, Mrs. Puri accompanied her to the stairs, carrying her burden of complaint right over into her farewell and even pursuing Durga with it as she picked her way down the steep, narrow stone stairs. And just as she had reached the bottom of them, Govind appeared to walk up them, and his mother shouted down to him, “Is this a time to come home for your meal?”
Durga, passed him in the very tight space between the doorway and the first step. She was so close to him that she could feel his warmth and hear his breath. Mrs. Puri shouted down the stairs: “Running here and there all day like a loafer!” Durga could see his eyes gleaming in the dark and he could see hers; for a moment they looked at each other. Durga said in a low voice, “Your mother is angry with you,” and then he was already halfway up the stairs.
Later, slowly unwinding herself from her sari and staring at herself in the mirror as she did so, she thought about her husband. And again, and stronger than ever, she had that feeling of dislike against him, that grudge against the useless dead old man. It was eighteen or nineteen years now since they had married her to him: and if he had been capable, wouldn’t she have had a son like Govind now, a strong, healthy, handsome boy with big shoulders and his beard just growing? She smiled at the thought, full of tenderness, and forgetting her husband, thought instead how it would be if Govind were her son. She would not treat him like his mother did—would never reproach him, shout at him down the stairs—but, on the contrary, encourage him in all his pleasures so that, first thing when he came home, he would call to her—“Mama!”—and they would sit together affectionately, more like brother and sister, or even two friends, than like mother and son, while he told her everything that had happened to him during the day.
She stepped closer to the mirror—her sari lying carelessly where it had fallen around her feet—and looked at herself, drawing her hand over her skin. Yes, she was still soft and smooth and who could see the tiny little lines, no more than shadows, that lay around her eyes and the corners of her mouth? And how fine her eyes still were, how large and black and how they shone. And her hair too—she unwound it from its pins and it dropped down slowly, heavy and black and sleek with oil, and not one gray hair in it.
As she stood there, looking at herself in nothing but her short blouse and her waist petticoat, with her hair down, suddenly another image appeared behind her in the mirror: an old woman, gray and shabby and squinting and with an ingratiating smile on her face. “I am not disturbing?” Bhuaji said.
Durga bent down to pick up her sari. She began to fold it, but Bhuaji took it from her and did it far more deftly, the tip of her tongue eagerly protruding from her mouth.
“Why did you come?” Durga said, watching her. Bhuaji made no reply, but went on folding the sari, and when she had finished, she smoothed it ostentatiously from both sides. Durga lay down on the bed. As a matter of fact, she found she was quite glad that Bhuaji had come to see her.
She asked, “How long is it since they married me?”
“Let me see,” Bhuaji said. She squatted by the side of the bed and began to massage Durga’s legs. “It is fifteen years, sixteen . . .”
“No, eighteen.”
Bhuaji nodded in agreement, her lips mumbling as she worked something out in her head, her hands still skillfully massaging.
“Eighteen years,” Durga said reflectively. “I could have been—”
“Yes, a grandmother by now,” said Bhuaji, smiling widely with all her empty gums.
Durga suddenly pushed those soothing massaging hands away and sat upright. “Leave me alone! Why do you come here, who called you?”
Instead of sitting in her courtyard, Durga was now often to be found pacing up and down by the door that led to the staircase. When Govind came down, she always had a word for him. At first he was shy with her and left her as quickly as possible; sometimes he waited for her to go away before he came down or went up. But she was patient with him. She understood and even sympathized with his shyness: he was young, awkward perhaps, like a child, and didn’t know how much good she meant him. But she persevered; she would ask him questions like: “You go often to the cinema?” or “What are you studying?” to prove to him how interested she was in him, interested like a mother or a favorite aunt, and ready to talk on any topic with him.
And slowly he responded. Instead of dashing away, he began to stand still at the bottom of the steps and to answer her questions; at first in monosyllables but soon, when his interest was stirred, at greater length; and finally at such great length that it seemed pointless to go on standing there in that dark cramped space when he could go into her house