By the same author
NOVELS
Amrita
The Nature of Passion
Esmond in India
The Householder
Get Ready For Battle
A Backward Place
Travelers
Heat and Dust
In Search of Love and Beauty
Three Continents
Poet and Dancer
Shards of Memory
STORIES
Like Birds, Like Fishes
A Stronger Climate
An Experience of India
How I Became a Holy Mother
Out of India (Selected Stories)
East into Upper East
Copyright © 2005 by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
First published in 2004 by John Murray Publishers, a division of Hodder Headline
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Shoemaker & Hoard
A Division of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-880-7
Contents
Apologia
1. Life
2. Ménage
3. Gopis
4. Springlake
5. A Choice of Heritage
6. My Family
7. Dancer With a Broken Leg
8. Refuge in London
9. Pilgrimage
THESE CHAPTERS are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn’t actually happen to me, it might have done so. Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was.
The central character—the “I” of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite, my own. I may not have outgrown the common childish fantasy that one’s real parents are someone different, somewhere else. Or I may have been trying out alternative destinies—this time not, as usual, for fictional characters but for myself. But however many times one may set oneself up with a new set of parents—or a new country—or new circumstances—the situations in which the “I” is placed (or places itself) always seem to work themselves out in the same way: as though character really were fate.
The various countries and continents in these chapters are those I have lived in. England gave me literature—language—words in which to express my world and the ambition to do so. But instead of the Anglo-Saxon world that I thought had formed and informed me, my autobiography seems to be an amalgam of a Central European background and years of living in India.
Although I soon felt at home wherever I happened to be, at the same time I held back, almost deliberately, from being truly assimilated. It was as though I wanted to feel exiled from some other place and to be free to go back to or in search of it. But then these quests turned out not to be for a place after all but always for a person. This may have been a person I have looked up to, or been in love with, maybe even for some sort of guru or guide. Someone better, stronger, wiser, altogether other . . . Does such a person exist, and if so, does one ever find him?
I HAVE gone back to live in India, partly for economic reasons. It’s cheaper for me here than in New York, and that has been a consideration during these last years. Of course I no longer live where I used to when I came here over forty years ago—with Somnath and his family in their crammed flat in the crammed house in a maze of alleys leading off the bazaar. The house is still standing, though a part of it, cracked and crumbled during a particularly heavy monsoon, has had to be propped up. Another family is occupying Somnath’s old flat, which has been divided into even smaller sections; the whole house is now a warren of subdivided living spaces let out to large families sharing sanitary facilities.
After my return, the first place I moved to was in a suburban middle-class colony. Although newly built, it was already overpopulated and not so different from the inner-city area where I used to live in Somnath’s house. The streets were crowded with hawkers and pushcarts and homeless dogs and cows and an occasional pig snuffling in the gutters for discarded food. I rented a room built on the terrace roof—it was small, but enough for me and with its own toilet and shower. It also had its own staircase at the side of the house so that I was independent of the landlord’s family living downstairs. At first they were very friendly to me, and once when I was sick with flu, they sent up food. I knew that they referred to me as the “budiya”—the old woman—up there. It is difficult for me to realize that this description fits me as it used to fit Somnath’s old mother: she had a hump and a chronic bad knee that she clutched all the time while groaning and calling to God for release. But I spend my days in the same feckless way I used to forty years ago—and, I must admit, with an even lighter heart. I have no responsibilities and am always alone.
Being alone is nothing new to me—from childhood I’ve always preferred it, except for being with my mother, and with my father, Otto. The only years when I felt my aloneness as loneliness or friendlessness—I really had no friends—was during my teenage years, from sixteen to twenty; and then it was not so much because of my own expectations and desires as those of my parents for me. My father had remarried but was in an apartment around the corner from where I lived with my mother, Nina. On Saturday nights she invariably went out whereas I invariably had nowhere to go. “Will you be all right?” she would ask me; she felt bad about leaving me and that was what made my eyes fill with tears. To hide them, I would lower my head over the book I was reading—“Oh yes,” I said, “this is fascinating;” the moment she left the tears would fall on to my fascinating book and I would have to wipe them off. But by the time I had entered more deeply into my studies—I was in the oriental department at Columbia—my books really were more interesting to me than anything offered elsewhere; and my parents, though still anxious about me, could reassure one another: “Rosemary is an intellectual.”
During my first visit to India, in my early twenties, I changed my name to Shanti (meaning Peace, which I was anxious to pursue and, if possible, possess). But on my return to New York I changed it back to Rosemary—which did not suit me, never had done, but was all that was left of my parents’