At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

ALSO BY RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

Three Continents

Travelers

Heat and Dust

Out of India: Selected Stories

Amrita

Get Ready for Battle

A Backward Place

Esmond in India

The Nature of Passion

Poet and Dancer

Shards of Memory

East Into Upper East

In Search of Love and Beauty

The Householder

My Nine Lives

A Lovesong for India

Like Birds, Like Fishes

A Stronger Climate

An Experience of India

How I Became a Holy Mother

At the End

of the Century

LEFTOVER SHARDS AT QUTB

C. S. H. Jhabvala

At the End of the Century

Copyright © 2017 by The Legal Heirs of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Introduction copyright © 2017 by Anita Desai

Frontispiece copyright © 2014 by The Legal Heirs of Cyrus Jhabvala 2014

Page 439 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Little, Brown

First Counterpoint hardcover edition: 2018

First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2019

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover as follows:

Names: Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 1927–2013, author.

Title: At the end of the century : the stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Description: First Counterpoint hardcover edition. | Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018041024 | ISBN 9781640091375 (alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PR9499.3.J5 A6 2019 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041024

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-324-9

Cover design by Sarah Brody

Book design by Jordan Koluch

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Contents

Introduction by Anita Desai

A Loss of Faith

The Widow

A Spiritual Call

Miss Sahib

A Course of English Studies

An Experience of India

Two More under the Indian Sun

Desecration

Expiation

Great Expectations

Two Muses

Ménage

A Choice of Heritage

A Lovesong for India

Pagans

At the End of the Century

The Judge’s Will

At the End

of the Century

Introduction

Alipur Road, Old Delhi, 1955

Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it – to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further on to the Quidsia Gardens. And, across the road, I’d see a young woman pushing along a perambulator with a baby seated in it and a little girl dancing alongside it. She was a married woman, clearly, and I a student at the University of Delhi, but glancing across the road at her, I felt an instinctive relation to her. Why?

She was revealed to be a young woman of European descent – German and Polish – who was married to an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and lived in rooms in a sprawling bungalow just off Alipur Road. When her mother, a German Jewish woman from London, visited her, Ruth searched for someone she could talk to. I think it might have been Dr Charles Fabri, the Hungarian Indologist who lived in the neighbourhood, who suggested she might meet my German mother, who had also come to India on marrying an Indian, thirty years ago in the 1920s.

A coffee party – a kaffeeklatsch – was arranged so the two could indulge in their shared language in this foreign setting.

I can’t imagine how or why, but Ruth decided to follow their meeting, after her mother had returned to England, with many others, on a different level – that of daughters. With extraordinary kindness and generosity she would have me over to their house, one filled with books, the books she had brought with her from England where she had been a student at the University of London when she had met Jhab. Perhaps it touched her that I was so excited about being among her books, talking to her about books. After that, whenever I came away with an armful of books on loan, with her talk still in my ears, I felt elated, a visitor to another world, the writer’s world I had only imagined and which now proved real. I would go home to scribble at my desk with a new, unaccustomed sense of the validity of such an occupation. I had met someone who, like myself, regarded writing as a very private, almost secret practice, a product of the interior space of shadows and silence. (This was very, very long before the age of readings, literary conferences and book festivals at which writers now meet and talk almost incessantly.)

One day she placed in my hands a copy of To Whom She Will, her first novel that had been published in faraway England, an unimaginable distance from Alipur Road, Old Delhi. Holding it, I felt I had touched something barely considered possible – that the scribbling one did in one’s hidden corner of the world could be printed, published and read in the world beyond. Could our drab, dusty, everyday lives yield material that surely belonged only to the genius of a Chekhov, a Jane Austen, a Woolf or a Brontë? Taking home the copy Ruth inscribed for me and reading it, I made the discovery that Ruth had found, in this ordinary, commonplace world I so belittled, the source for her art, the material for her writing, using its language, its sounds and smells and sights with a veracity, a freshness and immediacy that no other writer I had read had. The message like an electric current: yes, this is our world, our experience, it can be our writing too.

Many years, much experience later, we once had an unexpected encounter in the airport at Frankfurt. She was on her way from New York to India and I was on my way from India to New York. Alarmed at my lack of proper clothing, she insisted on giving me her duffel coat that she would not need in India but I would in New York. So we made our separate ways, across the hemispheres, safely.

In the years that followed, we shared so much or, looked at differently, so little: our lives were small, restricted. The Jhabvalas moved to the beautiful house designed by Jhab on Flagstaff Road, and there were now three daughters – and two enormous German shepherd dogs. I too married and had children and would take them over for tea, which they would greatly look forward to because Ruth always had her cook, Abdul, bake a cake for them and Jhab would come back from his office to entertain them with his repertoire of magic tricks.

In the summers we met in the ‘hill-station’ of Kasauli where the Jhabvalas booked rooms at the Alasia Hotel every year while I stayed in a rented cottage nearby. Our children would run wild in the pine woods on the hillsides while Ruth and I went for our more sedate walks and occasionally met with Khushwant Singh, the Sikh historian and novelist who also had a home there.

In all these orderly, regulated, uneventful years, Ruth wrote prolifically: novels and short stories that seemed to draw upon a bottomless well of material. She always had such an air of existing in a separate world, in isolation and perfect stillness – so where did all this come from? Where, how, did she come to know the men and women who peopled her books?

We need to listen to her: in her 1979 Neil Gunn Fellowship lecture she said that as a Jewish refugee from Europe, the loss of her inheritance made her ‘a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests’, ‘a chameleon hiding myself in false or borrowed colours’. Also that ‘You take over other people’s backgrounds and characters. Keats called it negative capability.’

It was a contrast to what E.M. Forster and Paul Scott had done in their writing about India as outsiders and visitors, if fascinated observers. Caryl Phillips has remarked that ‘she was postcolonial before the term had been invented’. Ruth’s own explanation was typically understated and wry: ‘Once a refugee, always a refugee’, which is why John Updike called her ‘an initiated outsider’.

Once when she had V.S. Naipaul to tea and passed him a plate of cakes, he pointed at it with a trembling finger and cried, ‘There’s a fly on it!’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘just take off your glasses. I always do.’ But not when she was writing, when her vision was laser-sharp; nothing was glossed or obscured.

This would explain stories such as ‘The Widow’, whose central character longs for a life other than that of marriage to an old man, mean and vindictive, and after his death lusts after her tenant’s young son, pathetically pursuing him with promises of the fine clothes his mother can’t buy him and even the motor scooter he yearns for, only to be spurned and having return to her watching and waiting circle of relatives, a cast of sly and avaricious dependants. The voice, the point of view, is so perfectly captured, one would not add or alter a single word for greater effect. ‘Expiation’, a story so wrenching it is almost unbearable, is about the owner of a cloth shop in a small town and the unconditional love he has for his younger brother, a wastrel who falls in with a criminal and commits a murder for which both are hanged, then brings himself, in a supreme act of love and forgiveness, to perform the necessary last rites for both of them.

Both are word-perfect; one might be hearing the protagonists themselves speaking. And Ruth’s characters were not likely to be speaking English, they would be speaking Hindi or Urdu or Hindustani. So there was a translation going on – yet there was no hint of the strain and uneasiness of crude, satirical and parodied translation of an Indian language into English that we encounter today. Hers was a total absorption. Ruth, like a great actress, becomes her characters and presents them to us from the inside out, not the outside in. She does not criticize them or satirize them – as so many Indian readers accused her of doing – she becomes those she portrays.

It was her fate to be presented to Western readers as a Jane Austen, but although she does share her wit, precision and asperity of style, she was not ever Jane Austen at a ball, watching the flirt, the sharp-eyed mother or the tittering gossip – she entered into and inhabited her characters, herself withdrawing.

I think none of us in India knew what an immense drain this was upon her energy, her resources. Not until we read her extraordinary essay ‘Myself in India’, in which she wrote of the split, the fracture between her Western sensibility and her Eastern experience which is made plain in the first line: ‘I have lived in India for most of my adult life. My husband is Indian and so are my children. I am not, and less so every year.’ She went on to reveal the exhaustion relating to the constant to and fro of her love and loathing for her adopted land. ‘I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down.’

This was when the subject of her work changed to the Europeans who came to India, the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, unlike herself in search of the exotic – whether spiritual or sexual, they hardly knew themselves, often confusing the two and finding it in the figure of the charismatic and unscrupulous guru.

In ‘An Experience of India’ the heroine, a woman married to an English correspondent posted to Delhi, becomes infatuated with a young Indian musician, practically kidnaps him and drags him, miserably, home to her husband and their very Western apartment. He flees from her and returns to his family, and she becomes very ill. Her husband contrives a transfer to Geneva so she may recover there, but when it comes to it she refuses with unexpected ferocity to go, choosing instead the life of a destitute pilgrim, still in search for what she had set out to discover.

Over and over again the stories are about the spirit longing for a physical manifestation of the ideal although, in the devastating story ‘Desecration’, a marriage to a fine, honourable man is abandoned for an affair with a coarse, brutal man as if degradation was what was wanted even if it destroys.

Ruth herself became ill, her family worried about her. In those days if she ever saw I was myself going through some anguish over the life I was living and the writing I was struggling to do, she would not question or probe but instead rally me – and perhaps herself – by quoting Thomas Mann: ‘He is mistaken who believes he may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life’, or ask, laughingly, ‘What would you rather be – the happy pig or the unhappy philosopher?’ making light of it – but not taking it lightly herself.

It must have been at this time that James Ivory and Ismail Merchant entered her life when they came to India in search of material for a film. They found it in an early novel of hers, The Householder, which she adapted for the screen for them. She said, ‘Films made a nice change for me. I met people I wouldn’t have done otherwise: actors, financiers, con men,’ and she moved to New York, buying herself an apartment, a tiny eyrie in a building on the Upper East Side where Ismail and Jim lived.

In the summers she joined them in James Ivory’s country house in the upper Hudson river valley that became a gathering place for their far-flung families and friends. Ismail bought Ruth a camper’s travelling desk to set up under the trees by the lake so she could work there. Claverack was the scene for some great occasions, like the fiftieth anniversary of Ruth and Jhab’s wedding, attended by all their daughters and grandchildren, at which they were presented with a replica of Henry James’s ‘golden bowl’ and Ruth surprised everyone by standing up and delivering a speech, flawlessly. She spoke so little, but when she did it was always carefully considered and precisely worded as if she were writing, pen on paper.

I saw less of her in these years, although I moved to America myself, not to the film world but the academic one of New England, but kept in touch through her writing. Apart from the film scripts she wrote for Merchant Ivory Productions, and the adaptations of novels by E.M. Forster and Henry James for which she won Academy Awards, she now wrote only short stories that she said she loved ‘for their potential of compressing and containing whatever I have learnt about writing and about everything else’.

She found a new, rich vein in the lives of the Jewish European refugees, the people she might have known in the past, who had come to America and could be observed in the grand hotels and restaurants of New York and Los Angeles. One can discern in these stories her continued fascination with the false guru who in America takes the form of the temperamental artist, the supposed genius, attracting women who submit to their stormy tempers and selfish demands. Very often the solution to these tangled, tortuous relationships presents itself in the form of the ménage, as in the story by that name: a temperamental pianist is attracted to two sisters; each of them puts up with his dark moods and unruly life and do everything to help his genius flourish. When they age and tire, the daughter of one steps in to replace them. In ‘Pagans’, one of two sisters, married to a powerful studio head in Hollywood, stays on after his death, acquiring a devoted young admirer, Shoki. Her sister arrives to persuade her to return to New York, but falls for Shoki herself and when her husband, a prosperous banker, comes to take her back, he fails and the threesome in Hollywood is happy and complete without him. The ménage in these stories is brought about through understanding and acceptance that is not easily come by but welcomed when it is.

For such a quiet, still person it is extraordinary what strong passions each story, novel and film contains. She never shied away from them and continued to address their immense potential for both joy and destruction with a clarity of vision, unobscured by any wisp of illusion. Clear, cool, dry and infused by wit and insight, her style was the mirror of her person, the poise and elegance of her being.

ANITA DESAI

May 2017

A Loss of Faith

Ram Kumar could not remember his father, who had been a printer and had died of a sudden fever, leaving his wife and five small children to be supported by his brother, a postal inspector. The impression that Ram Kumar’s mother gave of her husband was, on the one hand, that of a man all tenderness and generosity and, on the other, of one very much like his brother the postal inspector – that is to say, a man who was often drunk on raw liquor, was careless of his family and beat his wife. In her moments of depression – which were frequent, for her life among her sisters-in-law and mother-in-law was not easy – she favoured the first impression: ‘Ah,’ she would say, ‘if my children’s father were still alive, it would be different for me’; and then she would suggest how her husband in his lifetime had cared for her, brought special foods for her when she was pregnant, given her and the children warm things to wear in the winter, and on festival days had taken them to see fairs and processions. But when things were not going too badly for her, she gave a different picture. Then she spoke with a kind of bitter satisfaction of the way all men were the same, all given to drink, selfishness and wife-beating; and she compressed her lips and nodded her head up and down, suggesting that, if called upon, she could tell many a tale from her own experience of married life to illustrate this truth.

Her eldest child – not Ram Kumar, who was the third – was fortunately a boy, and all her hope was in him. Vijay was a strong, healthy, daring boy, and she could hardly wait for him to grow up and earn money and take her and her other children away to live with him. But when he finally did grow up, he turned out to be too fond of strolling through the bazaars, going to the cinema and having fun with his friends to give much of his attention to the jobs that were found for him; so that within two years he had run through fourteen such jobs – all of the nature of office messenger or contractor’s errand boy – and it became clear even to his mother that he would not hurriedly earn a lot of money. After these two years, he disappeared and was not heard of for another two; at the end of which time he came back and said he had been to Calcutta, where he had earned a lot of money and had been about to send for them when a thief had come in the night and stolen it all from under his bed. He was now in no hurry to look for another job, but stayed around in his uncle’s home during the day and went out towards evening to enjoy life with his numerous acquaintances.

At first he went out quite often with his uncle and the two came back late in the night, very drunk and very friendly. But the friendship did not last long, and soon the uncle came to be tired of feeding a large, strong, healthy nephew who made no attempts to find another job. Quarrels between them became more and more frequent: watched by women cowering against the wall and clutching their hair, the two of them flung bitter words against one another; until one day the nephew ended another such quarrel by smashing his fist in his uncle’s face and, stepping over the prostrate body, disappeared out of the house. When he next reappeared, he was wearing a beautiful suit of smuggled silk and a big ring on his little finger and was working in some rather shady capacity for a big business magnate. But though he now really seemed to be earning a lot of money, he made no attempts to take away his mother and his younger brother and sisters. Nor did he come to see them very often or, when he did, speak much of his affairs; so that it was only by devious routes that they finally discovered him to be spending much of his time and most of his money on a very beautiful young Muslim lady, who employed her abilities at singing and dancing to entertain at certain kinds of parties. His mother took this news as she had taken all her other afflictions: with tears, with resignation, with pleas to God to lighten her lot.

Meanwhile Ram Kumar too was growing up, and his mother tried to turn her hopes to him. But, unlike his brother, he was not very promising. Where Vijay was broad and strong and good-looking, Ram Kumar was small and weak, with a pinched face to go with his pinched body. And he was always afraid. At the little charity school he attended he was afraid both of the master and of the other boys. He worked feverishly so that the master should have nothing with which to reproach him, and he hunched himself up to an even smaller size in the hope that the boys would not notice him. He was so successful that nobody, neither master nor boys, ever did notice him, and he remained unknown, unbefriended and – which was what he had aimed for – unmolested.

At home he tried the same tactics, though less successfully. The whole family lived together in one room and one veranda. There were Ram Kumar, his mother and his two sisters – his elder sister had been married to a policeman in Saharanpur, and Vijay, of course, was no longer living with them – the postal inspector uncle with his wife and children, as well as one widowed aunt and a grandmother.

Their room was in a row of six quarters built on one side of a courtyard which had on its other side the workshop of a dry-cleaner and the office with cyclostyle of an Urdu weekly of limited circulation. On summer nights all the families slept outside in the courtyard, but summer days were hot and long and the room small, and even Ram Kumar could not always escape notice. He suffered especially from his thin, hard, old grandmother and the widowed aunt, who looked just as old as the grandmother. They were often angry with him and beat him and abused him while he cowered in a corner and wept into his hands.

There was no one who could protect him against them. His mother could not even put in a good word for him because, if she had done so, they would have begun to beat and abuse her too. As it was they did this often enough. They pinched her and pulled her hair and poked her with sharp cooking-irons. ‘Evil eye’, they called her, ‘killer of your husband, bringer of death’. She had to accept everything, for it was true she was a widow and guilty of the sin of outliving her husband. Ram Kumar had to watch the beatings meted out to his mother as she had to watch his; but it did not bring him any closer to her. On the contrary, he even resented her because she was weak and could not protect him. So when she tried to comfort him after his beatings, petting and stroking and whispering to him, he sat there passive and unmoved with his face closed and the tear-marks on his cheeks; and when she whispered into his ear, ‘When you are grown up and are earning a lot of money, you will take me away to live with you’, he did not reply and even tightened his lips, for though he had, in his wilder moments, hopes of going away himself, he never entertained the idea of taking her with him.

He liked to sit on the opposite side of their courtyard, in the poky little office of the old man who wrote, cyclostyled and distributed the Urdu weekly. The old man sat on the floor with a tiny desk in front of him and lingered lovingly with a quill pen over the flowering Urdu script in which he wrote his paper. Ram Kumar was not interested in what he was writing, but he liked the peace and order of the little room – the smell of black ink and the gentle sucking noise the old man made between his teeth as he wrote. Very few visitors ever came to disturb him; but it was through one such visitor, a relative of the old man’s, that Ram Kumar got a job. It happened that the relative sat talking to the old man about this and that – a sick sister, a journey to Lucknow – and mentioned in passing that a boy was wanted to help in the shop in which he was employed. The old man jerked his head back to where Ram Kumar sat quietly behind the cyclostyle and said, ‘Take him.’ Ram Kumar was startled: he was not used to the old man taking any notice of him. But that ‘Take him’ came at a right time. He had left school, his uncle was trying to find him a job, his grandmother and aunt abused him for being idle. So he went gratefully to the shop.

He loved it from the first. It was a draper and outfitter’s shop, but not an ordinary shop, not one of the little booths in the city bazaars which was the only kind of shop he and his like ever visited. This was in the fashionable shopping centre of New Delhi, where the rich went, and it was a big shop with a door to go in by and two glass windows in which were displayed samples of all the beautiful things sold inside. There were two counters inside, and behind the counters stood the assistants, serving the customers. Ram Kumar watched them with eager eyes, he darted forward to be of assistance to them in taking the goods from the shelves, his lips moved with theirs as they offered the customers all there was at their disposal. It did not take him long to know more about stock and prices than any other employee in the shop; for though he was only the general boy, hired to go out on errands, wrap parcels and tidy up counters, he had soon learned so much that the others began to rely on him, and it was he who was asked, ‘Ram Kumar, has the new voile come in yet?’ ‘Ram Kumar, is there a baby vest, size 2?’ ‘Ram Kumar, how much for Hind Mill sheets, single-bed size?’

After about a year, they began to allow him to change the goods in the windows. He spent sweet hours displaying newly arrived stock, not with taste but with love; reverently he laid out or hung up materials, blankets, ladies’ underwear and children’s clothing. Inside the shop, on the edge of one of the counters, stood a pale wax doll, two feet high and rather peeling, with a mouse-tooth smile, one hand with a finger missing outstretched, its feet painted with white socks and black anklestrap shoes. Once a week, Ram Kumar changed its clothes, making it display now a pink satin frock with lace trimmings, now a boy’s sailor suit or a hand-embroidered skirt with cap to match. He loved the doll and loved dressing it, but there was no element of play in the way he handled it; this was work for him, something important and deadly earnest.

He did not spend much time at home any more. He left early in the morning, carrying the little parcel of food which his mother had cooked for him at dawn, and he returned late in the night, so tired that he could only eat his supper and roll up in his corner to sleep. He slept well, and was not easily disturbed. Only sometimes, when the noise in the room rose to a pitch, he woke up and opened startled eyes to scenes which, though he had seen them all his life, were still scenes of horror to him. His uncle might be reeling round the room, drunk, bedraggled, desperate, shouting: ‘Let me be! Let me live!’ tearing his hair and then knocking his head against the wall and whimpering in anguish. Hands clutched at him, his wife, his sister, his mother; shrill tearful voices implored him to lie down and sleep, till suddenly he broke loose and roared like a madman: ‘They are eating me up!’ in a voice of pain and despair. The women reeled back and it was always at that point that he began to beat his wife. He struck out at her wildly, staggering and falling like a wounded animal, sometimes hitting and sometimes missing, while she screamed on one long high-pitched note and dodged him fairly successfully. ‘I will kill her!’ he shouted, hitting out with both arms and tears streaming down his face. ‘Kill them all!’ he sobbed. Ram Kumar, woken up from his sleep, clutched his tattered blanket to his chest and stared with horrified eyes at the drunken man and the screaming women, the little flame in the kerosene lamp flickering and dying for want of oil, and the grandmother on her knees praying with uplifted hands to God to save them all.

But in the shop it was different. Here there were comfortably well-to-do customers, courteous assistants, and the proprietor who sat all day at a table in a corner of the shop. Ram Kumar had a great respect for the proprietor. He admired the way he sat poring over business letters and accounts while remaining alert to everything that went on in the shop, every now and again rapping out an order or rising himself to help satisfy a difficult customer. He was a morose man, with a clean blue shave and rimless spectacles, who never talked much and suffered from a bad stomach. If he had any personal feelings, he never showed them in the shop: an inefficient assistant was got rid of, however piteously he might plead poverty and promise reform; salaries were docked with ruthless impartiality for a damage to stock and unpunctuality. But he showed the same impartiality in recognizing merit. Ram Kumar found himself step by step promoted, first to assistant salesman, then to salesman, then to deputy head salesman and finally, after seven years, when he was twenty-two years old, to head salesman and staff manager.

He was earning good money now. His status in the family increased and, with his, his mother’s. Nobody beat her now, nobody called her ‘evil eye’; she was no longer the widow of her husband but the mother of her son and, as such, worthy of respect. She held her head high, bought a new sari and gave sharp answers. But she was not yet satisfied. She still wanted, as she had wanted ever since her widowhood, to be taken away by her son and set up in a home of her own. Every night she urged this on him, in cajoling whispers; every night he made no reply but turned over in his corner and went to sleep. He wanted a different domestic life, but he was always too tired, after his day at the shop, to formulate thoughts of getting it. But one day she told him she had heard of a place they could have at low rent, and after that he began to think about it. And with his mother nagging him and pleading constantly, it was easier to give way than to hold out. So they moved, he and his mother and his two younger sisters, to a ground-floor room in a tenement, and he became head of a family.

Here he had his first taste of domestic bliss. It was good to come home, late in the evening, to the quiet room which the women kept scrupulously clean, and to eat the food they had prepared for him with such love and care. They treated him, their sole support, with high respect and he, in return, took his responsibility towards them very seriously. His senior position in the shop had already given him an air of authority, a certain dignity of bearing, which he could now afford to take home with him. He had also borrowed his employer’s somewhat sour expression of face, and his principles were strict. Not that he was very sure of any principles; but he knew how life should not be and deduced from that how perhaps it should. He was sure it should not be as he had known it in his uncle’s house – disorderly, dirty and violent; and in opposition he set up an ideal of quiet and orderliness, of meekness and domestic piety. To this he wished his women to adhere. He liked to think of them quietly following their household duties, taking in some sewing work and keeping themselves modestly to themselves.

This last was perhaps the most important: for the tenement was full of people who led the sort of lives he wanted to get away from. On the top floor was a Muslim insurance clerk whose two wives were for ever quarrelling and abusing one another, and underneath them a crippled astrologer, who augmented his income by selling love potions and whose dissatisfied clients frequently reported him to the police. Next to Ram Kumar on the ground floor lived a traveller in rugs and carpets, whose wife and daughter, left often alone, did not conduct themselves with the decorum Ram Kumar could have wished for in his neighbours. They stood out in the street and laughed and joked, the mother as well as her daughter, showing off their big breasts and healthy cheeks. It was this family that Ram Kumar feared most, for they made overtures of friendliness and the girl was the same age as his sisters. He found it necessary to instruct his mother to avoid all contact with them, which she agreed to do, denouncing them with some fervour for loose morals and shameless conduct.

In appearance Ram Kumar remained as he had been as a child – small, weak and wholly unremarkable. Yet he was getting the habit of authority: at home there was no one but he who counted; in the shop he was next only to the proprietor. He became exacting, tight with money and slightly bad-tempered. His mother forbade everything to his sisters in his name – ‘Your brother will be angry’ – and every evening, just before his homecoming, she as well as the two girls began to fidget about the room, tidying everything up more than was necessary. And Ram Kumar looked round, pursed his lips and thrust out his thin stomach, and felt himself master of the house.

Except when his brother was there. Vijay came to see them sometimes, and his presence had what Ram Kumar felt to be a deplorable effect on the household. For Vijay, with his silk suit, his big ring, his oiled and scented hair, at once upset that prim orderliness which Ram Kumar had imposed. The mother and sisters became flushed and excited, they hovered around Vijay, listened to his stories, tittered and fussed and were restrained only by the presence of Ram Kumar, at whom they threw frequent guilty glances. Vijay himself hardly noticed his brother. As far as he was concerned, Ram Kumar’s status had not changed from the time he had been the puny and insignificant younger brother who kept out of everyone’s way. Sometimes, in the face of his contempt, Ram Kumar felt like asserting himself: after all, it was he who was now the head of the family and kept the mother and sisters, not Vijay, who did nothing for them. Yet most of the time he was glad not to be noticed by Vijay; for he was still afraid of him.

There was to him something alien and terrible about his elder brother. He was not sure quite what work he did for the big business magnate who kept him in his retinue, but he sensed that it was something rather shady of which no one ever spoke. And that to him characterized Vijay’s life altogether – it was something of which one could not speak and should not even think about. Where did he live, and with whom? A shudder passed through Ram Kumar when he thought of this. He could never forget the young Muslim lady they had been told about, who sang and danced. The tunes Vijay hummed he had perhaps first heard from her, this liquor of which he smelled he had drunk with her, the ring he wore had been given by her, when he smiled like that and smoothed his hair he was thinking of her. And all this he brought with him into their room, it was behind his eyes and voice as he joked with the mother and sisters, and Ram Kumar could do nothing and say nothing and wait only for him to be gone again.

Sometimes Vijay did not go so quickly. It seemed there were periods when he was out of work or had temporarily quarrelled with his employers or simply did not feel like working, and then he hung around his brother’s home, unwashed and dishevelled, sleeping with abandon, going out at nights to drink with his friends. Ram Kumar suspected that during these periods his mother supplied him with funds out of her housekeeping money, but he dared not ask and pretended not to notice. He pretended also not to notice the suppressed excitement which shone in the faces of the mother and her daughters, as if they were having a much better time than they wished him to know. But he did not wish to know and was even afraid of knowing. He went to the shop and lost himself in work. There was comfort in dressing the doll in a different outfit and hovering tender fingers over a newly arrived stock of silk underwear.

Once, on coming home, he found the wife and daughter of the traveller in rugs and carpets in the room. They all seemed to be on the friendliest terms together. Ram Kumar’s mother and his sisters looked shocked when he came in, but Vijay and the visitors went on talking and laughing undisturbed. Their laughter was loud and improper, and the girl flung back her head from a strong, healthy throat and let Vijay look down into her bosom. Ram Kumar retired into a corner and ate his food, while his mother whispered to him, ‘What could we do? They came to visit.’ He did not answer. When she lied, his mother’s face bore a prim, innocent expression. He hated her and hated his sisters and hated the home he had made. The traveller’s daughter looked at him over her shoulder; she looked sly and laughing, and her little gold earring shook against her plump cheek. He knew she was laughing at him and he felt ashamed for not being like Vijay. Yet he was angry too, because it was he who supported the family and paid the rent of the room in which they sat enjoying themselves, not Vijay.

After that, he often thought about the neighbours. He thought about the plump, shameless girl and felt indignant. He also felt it was time for him to marry off his sisters. His mother had been telling him so for some time: ‘Find someone for my girls,’ she told him in the urgent whisper she always used when she wanted something; ‘it is time they were off your hands.’ Then she looked coy, gazing at him with her head on one side and too sweet a smile on her lips: ‘And after that is finished, we can start thinking of you.’ She tried to stroke his face but he turned it away. He was not ready to think of his own marriage yet.

But he set earnestly and methodically about doing something for his sisters. He studied the matrimonial advertisement columns in the newspapers, inserted an advertisement of his own and, after some correspondence, settled things to everyone’s satisfaction. For their dowries he had to borrow from a moneylender at the usual rate of interest, but he knew that with his salary he would have little difficulty in repaying this by monthly instalments. He was pleased with himself, so was his mother. Her hints about his own marriage became more frequent, and he was more ready to listen to her.

He often saw the wife of the traveller in carpets nowadays, and her daughter. They always seemed to be outside their room when he passed in the mornings and in the evenings. The mother was very obsequious to him; she smiled humbly and inquired after his health, while the daughter hovered behind her, her head covered by her sari with a becoming, if uncharacteristic, air of modesty. Ram Kumar never looked at her, but when he passed her, he could not help thinking of the way she had glanced at him over her shoulder that night when he had seen her in his room, and her earring