Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
high heels and high golden hairdo she wore didn’t help—she had to stretch up with all her might to get as far as kissing my cheek. Actually, she liked to kiss right on the mouth—it was some Russian custom, I think—but I had long since learned to turn my face aside at the right moment. She had a sumptuous tea ready, with every kind of pastry and cake she must have run out herself to select at Greenberg’s, and she wore one of her flowered silk tea gowns that opened deep, deep down into a cleft. Grandfather was summoned from his study, and under her excited fluttering—she appeared actually to be skipping around them—he and the Rawul shook hands and looked each other steadily in the eye like two statesmen. I suppose there was a sort of historic ambience about their meeting—or would have been, if it hadn’t happened to take place in Sonya’s drawing room. I say Sonya’s, for although the house had been given to Grandfather’s parents on their wedding in 1898, after her marriage to Grandfather Sonya had managed to make it her own. The original sofas and cabinets and tables and bookcases were still there, but Sonya had overlaid them with her own taste and possessions: with fringed shawls, with rose-and-gold upholstery, and a whole heap of treasures dating from her traveling days around Europe and the Near and Far East and her forays into Madison Avenue antique shops—but all of them, wherever they had come from, marked by a preponderance of gilt and shell-pink ornamentation.
It was an incongruous setting for Grandfather, but he didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, he loved it—no doubt because he loved her so much and was so proud and pleased with her; and all the time she talked and fluttered and fussed around, he watched her with a smile and look you wouldn’t think someone like Grandfather could have had for anyone. Without her, I don’t suppose he would have had much time for the Rawul and his movement and his inspirational style of speaking. However, he sat there listening patiently, one long leg stretched stiffly out in front of him, and he even took the trouble to nod from time to time as though he were listening, which he probably wasn’t but was waiting for the polite moment to return to his study. Sonya was beside herself—everything the Rawul said struck chords in her, and she even claimed that, if she had been clever enough, she would have thought of something like it herself. She said she had always had this intuition—not that she was an intellectual person or educated or anything, but she had traveled and seen a great deal, many many civilizations old and young, and it seemed to her that something like the Rawul’s Fourth World was what humanity needed. “Oh wonderful, wonderful, marvelous!” she exclaimed often, clasping her small wrinkled hands with all her rings and squeezing Grandfather’s arm to make him respond too. But he only sat there and smiled a little bit at her enthusiasm—except once, when he leaned forward keenly and made the Rawul repeat something he had just said.
This was about Lindsay, Michael, and me donating Propinquity. I was surprised myself to hear the Rawul refer to it so naturally, almost casually. There had been no reference to it for some time, which had been a relief to me, making me hope that the question had been shelved and with it the need for me to decide. But now I learned it had been decided—anyway, the Rawul seemed to think so. And when Grandfather heard that, he turned to me and asked “Is that what you’re doing, Harriet?”
Grandfather’s eyes were the same as Manton’s and Michael’s: far-seeing seafarer’s eyes—though we don’t come from seafaring stock at all but from Irish Protestant landowners whose younger sons usually became clergymen or went to India, except for our ancestor, who had come to the American colonies.
I hesitated while Grandfather waited, and the Rawul, smiling politely, also waited for me to confirm his statement. Fortunately Sonya rushed in with “And they say the young are not idealists! Darling, give Sonya a kiss!” She held out her cheek to me and I had to go over and kiss it. I tried to get away with brushing that creamed, rouged, and powdered surface with my lips, but she caught my face between her hands and firmly planted her mouth on mine, which made even Grandfather smile, along with the Rawul.
Sonya and Grandfather usually went to the house on the Island just before the Fourth, but this year they had had to postpone their visit because Grandfather’s heart trouble had started up again. Now he said he was feeling perfectly well and was eager to get to the Island, where he loved to be. Only Sonya could have persuaded him to break their journey and pay us a visit at Propinquity; after meeting the Rawul, she could hardly wait to see the rest of the movement. Their reception was organized on a grand scale. The Rawul and Rani, with Crishi just a little way behind them, stood in welcome on the front porch and led them ceremonially into the drawing room. Here refreshments were served while everyone sat stiffly on chairs—the Rawul and Grandfather on the principal chairs on either side of the fireplace, both of them bolt upright as for an official portrait. It was not unlike a state visit, with no conversation at all except for a few platitudes delivered into the glacial silence. Even Sonya knew to keep quiet. The Rawul and Grandfather, both of them born to state visits, easily assumed the formal dignity expected of them.
When it was over, we all reverted to our usual selves—this was something that had always surprised me during Grandfather’s embassy days: how quickly everyone became normal again after going through some pompous official ceremony. Sonya tripped excitedly around the house, like one returning to a childhood home, although she hadn’t even visited us here all that often. She really was very sentimental. But it wasn’t put on; she did feel that way and had tears in her eyes as she hugged everyone—Lindsay, Jean, Mrs. Schwamm—and kissed them on the mouth. Michael was her very special favorite—she claimed that she understood him completely—and she greeted him in what was for her a restrained manner, confining herself to standing on tiptoe and kissing his chin.
She saw at once that Crishi was someone very special too. She stood in front of him, looked up at him, and exhaled a sigh of recognition; perhaps they had met in some previous birth. Sonya was a believer in reincarnation and often came across people she had been close to in other centuries. She held his hand and turned it over a few times and nodded; I don’t know whether she was admiring the shape or reading his palm. He took her in his stride, not putting himself out to charm her but just being his usual self. It was the Rawul who made the greatest effort to impress our guests. An hour or two before the usual evening session, he retired to his room, and when he emerged, it was as if he had charged himself with some new and powerful voltage. He had changed into his native dress and looked imposing in a long shiny tunic with jeweled buttons. And what he said that evening was more impressive, poignant, and more personal than his usual address, as if he had thought and felt it all out again from the beginning.
Once again he told us how his family, descending from the moon and passing through a series of semidivine incarnations, had established their earthly kingdom as far as the Caspian Sea on the one hand, and on the other into the Gangetic plains. His own ancestors, after surging as conquerors over Persia, had been driven back into Rajputana, winning and losing various kingdoms until finally cornered in a northwestern fastness of stony desert. Here they had built their fortress on a rock and defended themselves against all invaders so successfully that they were still there today—the oldest surviving kingdom in the world. They were no longer kings except in lineage; modern democracy had caught up with them. He was glad, the Rawul assured us, even proud: To be part of the modern world meant more to him than all his ancient titles and privileges. However, he could not escape from or deny his own lineage—that he was a descendant of a royal line so long that it reached back beyond antiquity to divinity: yes, to a time when the gods still walked on this earth, or rather, when there was not yet any division between this world and another, higher one. It was a thought that had haunted him as a child—especially when he climbed to the roof of the old palace built on a rock, where he truly felt nearer to heaven than to earth. Such a child would have different thoughts from other children: A different light would shine in his eyes—and here he invited us to look into his eyes. Sonya, who was sitting right by him, did so and exclaimed at the way the Rawul’s light-colored eyes contrasted with his Indian complexion. It came from looking up so much as a child into the sky, he explained, smiling, half-deprecating, inviting us to treat it as a joke if we wanted to. Grandfather said “Hm,” but there was no other comment, only a silence that I believe was rapt.
Whatever it was he had absorbed into himself up there in the rocky kingdom of the desert did not leave him when he was sent away to school in England: to Harrow, where his father and grandfather had gone before him. Remote and dreamy,