Three Continents. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
organization is formed with more and more people joining it; because so many, and maybe everyone, wants to have something or someone to believe in.
To begin with, as far as I knew, it was the Rawul who had this simple but forceful idea of constituting himself the savior of world civilization. He felt he had excellent credentials, for he belonged to what he claimed to be one of the oldest tribes in the world, with a whole genealogy of primeval mythical figures and historical heroes. Their breeding ground was a mountainous desert state wedged in a corner of northwest India—geographically not very promising, but the Rawul liked to refer to it as the cradle of civilization; and though their glory had long since departed—he wasn’t even entitled to be called the Rawul anymore—he felt it to be an ideal source from which to start the whole thing up again, in a different way and on a different scale. And if he regarded his little kingdom of Dhoka—in which he still had a little palace though no income apart from what he had managed to stow away in foreign bank accounts—as the physical base of the Fourth World, then he himself was the human one: combining in his own person an ancient Oriental title and tradition with a modern Western mind and education. It was strange that such a modest man as the Rawul could have such an exalted notion of himself, but it was almost a sort of selflessness in him. He didn’t want to be a world leader, but he felt he was born to be—chosen by exterior circumstances rather than any value he set upon himself.
I was ready to concede that he had a right to our house. He was a royal person; and so I guess was the Rani, even if she wasn’t of royal origin. Neither was Crishi: but the three of them, in manner, in appearance, and in expectations, did constitute a sort of royal family with a suggestion of divine rights about them. And perhaps slowly I would have begun, or had already begun, to come around to the idea of making over our house to their movement. It did seem reasonable that such a house should be put to a purpose rather than just kept for a few people who didn’t even live in it properly. I hadn’t yet made up my mind that this particular purpose—the Fourth World—was what I would have chosen to donate it to; but since Michael had, and even Lindsay, there was no reason for me to hold back. I went to the place—behind the abandoned apple orchard—where I hid whenever I wanted to think something out, and where only Michael knew to find me; but there I overheard a scene that changed my mind again.
It was between Crishi and one of the followers—Paul, a man older than most of the others, maybe in his thirties. He looked as if he had suffered some bad sickness from which his face and body remained harrowed; he may also have been very poor, for he grabbed at food in the greedy way of someone for whom it hasn’t always been there. He liked to join in on any fun that was going, but again in a rather desperate way, and when he laughed, it half sounded like crying. Actually, he looked like a person who had cried a lot to himself but now was dried up. It was his voice I heard from my hiding place—always unmistakable because of the whine in it, which had risen to a pitch. He was pleading with someone—with Crishi. Crishi’s voice too would normally have been easy to recognize but it was transformed; not so much in itself, it was still pleasant and light, but in its tone and words, which were foul. The other kept saying “But Crishi, why me, why me?” to which Crishi gave no answer but abuse so vile that I at once got up to show myself. I was enraged to hear such words spoken from one human being to another, and in our house, in my secret hiding place! I was separated from them by a clump of blackberry bushes and, just as I parted it to get through, I saw the other man cover his face with his hands and sink slowly along the trunk of a tree to the ground, sobbing “I can’t, I can’t.” “I’ll show you how you can’t, shit hole,” Crishi said and raised his foot and kicked into Paul’s shoulder, making him fall over and lie along the ground. And when he lay there, Crishi kicked him once more and walked away. At first I wanted to run after him, but instead I retreated behind the bushes and buried myself into the overgrown grass, on my stomach, my head pressed into the earth so as not to have to hear or see anything more. After a while I felt ashamed and got up to help the other man; but when I looked at him through the bushes I saw that, though still lying where he had fallen, he was quite happily watching an ant walk up and down a blade of grass, as if nothing particularly bad had happened.
I went at once to tell Michael what I had witnessed. I described the scene in detail and even forced myself to repeat some of the words Crishi had used. Like myself, Michael detested such language—we really had a sort of physical revulsion against it, as against a dirty act; and it may be one of the reasons—among plenty of others—why we never got on well in the schools we went to or made many friends anywhere, because to most people these words don’t mean anything; they use them freely and can’t understand why we shrink from them. Michael didn’t like me to repeat them—“Yes yes all right, I get the idea,” he said when I forced them on his attention—but he wasn’t as outraged with Crishi as I thought he would be.
“You don’t know all of it,” he said. He frowned and I think would have liked to drop the subject; but he was very fair-minded and was used to explaining and interpreting everything as carefully to me as to himself, so he went on: “You don’t know anything about Paul—what sort of a person he is. Some people have to be treated in a certain way, for their own good and everyone else’s, if it’s an organization.”
An area around my heart grew cold to hear this from Michael. He felt it of course, and he continued: “You have no idea, Harriet, what it’s like to keep all this moving. It’s fine for the Rawul to sit under a tree and give these discourses, but to make everything go, that’s all on Crishi, and it’s not easy, I can tell you.”
I thought that what he was saying only meant that he liked Crishi very much. But when Michael had felt that way about someone in the past, it had never clouded his judgment. On the contrary, when he liked someone, he applied the same stringent standards to them as he did to himself, and to me: sort of welcoming them to his own world. But with Crishi, it seemed to be the other way around—as if he were giving up his own standards for Crishi’s. I think he felt it too, that there was some big change in himself; and as any change in him implied a betrayal or at least a negation of what there was between us, he seemed to feel guilty. Anyway, he didn’t want to go on talking about it, and I didn’t want him to either.
But he soon told Crishi about what I had seen, leaving him to handle my misgivings. That was the sort of situation in which Crishi must have excelled all his life—handling people, allaying suspicion, bringing them around. All his charm was geared to it. So that evening, when I was about to join the others under the tree, he stopped me; and I knew at once what he was going to say and he knew I knew and said it: “Michael wants me to explain to you.”
“Explain what?” I said coldly.
“Sometimes I act really nasty. I can be a swine.” But his lips twitched, and next moment he was frankly laughing. “I want to talk to you,” he said, looking into my face with amusement and lightly spanning my arm with his fingers. When he saw me glancing toward the tree, he said “You’ve heard the Rawul before and you’ll hear him again.”
Still holding my arm, he led me away from the tree and toward the porch in front of the house. I could have resisted but to do so—to snatch my arm away—seemed childish, so I went with him and we sat in rocking chairs. I ought to explain that the porch had always been very handsome, but now the gray-and-white marble floor was polished and the white pillars newly painted; and the lawn it faced had been smoothly mown, and at this moment one of the followers was assiduously watering it to keep it emerald green. A house and grounds like ours did need a large staff, no doubt.
“I know you don’t think too much of all that,” Crishi said, nodding toward the circle under the tree. From this distance, and in a mellow evening light, the scene was dignified and serene. They were all grouped around the Rawul as in a painting of a sage inspiring his disciples with wisdom and high ideals. “He means well, you have to admit,” Crishi said.
I said “I do admit”—no doubt sounding very uptight, for he cried out, half laughing and half exasperated: “Oh Jesus, Harriet, you sound just like Michael!”
Well, to me that was a big compliment, but I didn’t care for his familiarity; he even touched my knee—very very lightly, true, but he did touch it, as one laying a claim. I moved it away and he went on: “You’ve got such