Today Ramu left. He came to ask for money and I gave him as much as I could. He counted it and asked for more, but I didn’t have it to give him. He said some insulting things, which I pretended not to hear. Really I couldn’t blame him. I knew he was anxious and afraid, not having another job to go to. But I also couldn’t help contrasting the way he spoke now with what he had been like in the past: so polite always, and eager to please, and always smiling, saying, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘Yes madam please.’ He used to look very different too, very spruce in his white uniform and his white canvas shoes. When guests came, he put on a special white coat he had made us buy him. He was always happy when there were guests – serving, mixing drinks, emptying ashtrays – and I think he was disappointed that more didn’t come. The Ford Foundation people next door had a round of buffet suppers and Sunday brunches, and perhaps Ramu suffered in status before their servants because we didn’t have much of that. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps he suffered in status anyhow because we weren’t like the others. I mean, I wasn’t. I didn’t look like a proper memsahib or dress like one – I wore Indian clothes right from the start – or ever behave like one. I think perhaps Ramu didn’t care for that. I think servants want their employers to be conventional and put up a good front so that other people’s servants can respect them. Some of the nasty things Ramu told me this morning were about how everyone said I was just someone from a very low sweeper caste in my own country and how sorry they were for him that he had to serve such a person.
He also said it was no wonder Sahib had run away from me. Henry didn’t actually run away, but it’s true that things had changed between us. I suppose India made us see how fundamentally different we were from each other. Though when we first came, we both came we thought with the same ideas. We were both happy that Henry’s paper had sent him out to India. We both thought it was a marvellous opportunity not only for him professionally but for both of us spiritually. Here was our escape from that Western materialism with which we were both so terribly fed up. But once he got here and the first enthusiasm had worn off, Henry seemed not to mind going back to just the sort of life we’d run away from. He even didn’t seem to care about meeting Indians any more, though in the beginning he had made a great point of doing so; now it seemed to him all right to go only to parties given by other foreign correspondents and sit around there and eat and drink and talk just the way they would at home. After a while, I couldn’t stand going with him any more, so we’d have a fight and then he’d go off by himself. That was a relief. I didn’t want to be with any of those people and talk about inane things in their tastefully appointed air-conditioned apartments.
I had come to India to be in India. I wanted to be changed. Henry didn’t – he wanted a change, that’s all, but not to be changed. After a while because of that he was a stranger to me and I felt I was alone, the way I’m really alone now. Henry had to travel a lot around the country to write his pieces, and in the beginning I used to go with him. But I didn’t like the way he travelled, always by plane and staying in expensive hotels and drinking in the bar with the other correspondents. So I would leave him and go off by myself. I travelled the way everyone travels in India, just with a bundle and a roll of bedding which I could spread out anywhere and go to sleep. I went in third-class railway carriages and in those old lumbering buses that go from one small dusty town to another and are loaded with too many people inside and with too much scruffy baggage on top. At the end of my journeys, I emerged soaked in perspiration, soot and dirt. I ate anything anywhere and always like everyone else with my fingers (I became good at that) – thick, half-raw chapattis from wayside stalls and little messes of lentils and vegetables served on a leaf, all the food the poor eat; sometimes if I didn’t have anything, other people would share with me from out of their bundles. Henry, who had the usual phobia about bugs, said I would kill myself eating that way. But nothing ever happened. Once, in a desert fort in Rajasthan, I got very thirsty and asked the old caretaker to pull some water out of an ancient disused well for me. It was brown and sort of foul-smelling, and maybe there was a corpse in the well, who knows. But I was thirsty so I drank it, and still nothing happened.
People always speak to you in India, in buses and trains and on the streets, they want to know all about you and ask you a lot of personal questions. I didn’t speak much Hindi, but somehow we always managed, and I didn’t mind answering all those questions when I could. Women quite often used to touch me, run their hands over my skin just to feel what it was like I suppose, and they specially liked to touch my hair which is long and blonde. Sometimes I had several of them lifting up strands of it at the same time, one pulling this way and another that way and they would exchange excited comments and laugh and scream a lot; but in a nice way, so I couldn’t help but laugh and scream with them. And people in India are so hospitable. They’re always saying, ‘Please come and stay in my house’, perfect strangers that happen to be sitting near you on the train. Sometimes, if I didn’t have any plans or if it sounded as if they might be living in an interesting place, I’d say ‘all right thanks’, and I’d go along with them. I had some interesting adventures that way.
I might as well say straight off that many of these adventures were sexual. Indian men are very, very keen to sleep with foreign girls. Of course men in other countries are also keen to sleep with girls, but there’s something specially frenzied about Indian men when they approach you. Frenzied and at the same time shy. You’d think that with all those ancient traditions they have – like the Kama Sutra, and the sculptures showing couples in every kind of position – you’d think that with all that behind them they’d be very highly skilled, but they’re not. Just the opposite. Middle-aged men get as excited as a fifteen-year-old boy, and then of course they can’t wait, they jump and before you know where you are, in a great rush, it’s all over. And when it’s over, it’s over, there’s nothing left. Then they’re only concerned with getting away as soon as possible before anyone can find them out (they’re always scared of being found out). There’s no tenderness, no interest at all in the other person as a person; only the same kind of curiosity that there is on the buses and the same sort of questions are asked, like are you married, any children, why no children, do you like wearing our Indian dress . . . There’s one question though that’s not asked on the buses but that always inevitably comes up during sex, so that you learn to wait for it: always, at the moment of mounting excitement, they ask, ‘How many men have you slept with?’ and it’s repeated over and over, ‘How many? How many?’ and then they shout ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ and ‘Bitch!’ – always that one word which seems to excite them more than any other, to call you that is the height of their lovemaking, it’s the last frenzy, the final outrage: ‘Bitch!’ Sometimes I couldn’t stop myself but had to burst out laughing. I didn’t like sleeping with all these people, but I felt I had to. I felt I was doing good, though I don’t know why, I couldn’t explain it to myself. Only one of all those men ever spoke to me: I mean the way people having sex together are supposed to speak, coming near each other not only physically but also wanting to show each other what’s deep inside them. He was a middle-aged man, a fellow-passenger on a bus, and we got talking at one of the stops the bus made at a wayside tea stall. When he found I was on my way to X—— and didn’t have anywhere to stay, he said, as so many have said before him, ‘Please come and stay in my house.’ And I said, as I had often said before, ‘All right.’ Only when we got there he didn’t take me to his house but to a hotel. It was a very poky place in the bazaar and we had to grope our way up a steep smelly stone staircase and then there was a tiny room with just one string cot and an earthenware water jug in it. He made a joke about there being only one bed. I was too tired to care much about anything. I only wanted to get it over with quickly and go to sleep. But afterwards I found it wasn’t possible to go to sleep because there was a lot of noise coming up from the street where all the shops were still open though it was nearly midnight. People seemed to be having a good time and there was even a phonograph playing some cracked old love song. My companion also couldn’t get to sleep: he left the bed and sat down on the floor by the window and smoked one cigarette after the other. His face was lit up by the light coming in from the street outside and I saw he was looking sort of thoughtful and sad, sitting there smoking. He had rather a good face, strong bones but quite a feminine mouth and of course those feminine suffering eyes that most Indians have.
I went and sat next to him. The window was an arch reaching down to the floor so that I could see out into the bazaar. It was quite gay down there with all the lights; the phonograph was playing from the cold-drink shop and a lot of people were standing around there having highly coloured pop drinks out of bottles; next to it was a shop with pink and blue brassieres strung up on a pole. On top of the shops were wrought-iron balconies on which sat girls dressed up in tatty georgette and waving peacock fans to keep themselves cool. Sometimes men looked up to talk and laugh with them and they talked and laughed back. I realized we were in the brothel area; probably the hotel we were in was a brothel too.
I asked, ‘Why did you bring me here?’
He answered, ‘Why did you come?’
That was a good question. He was right. But I wasn’t sorry I came. Why should I be? I said, ‘It’s all right. I like it.’
He said, ‘She likes it,’ and he laughed. A bit later he started talking: about how he had just been to visit his daughter who had been married a few months before. She wasn’t happy in her in-laws’ house, and when he said goodbye to her she clung to him and begged him to take her home. The more he reasoned with her, the more she cried, the more she clung to him. In the end he had had to use force to free himself from her so that he could get away and not miss his bus. He felt very sorry for her, but what else was there for him to do? If he took her away, her in-laws might refuse to have her back again and then her life would be ruined. And she would get used to it, they always did; for some it took longer and was harder, but they all got used to it in the end. His wife too had cried a lot during the first year of marriage.
I asked him whether he thought it was good to arrange marriages that way, and he looked at me and asked how else would you do it? I said something about love and it made him laugh and he said that was only for the films. I didn’t want to defend my point of view; in fact, I felt rather childish and as if he knew a lot more about things than I did. He began to get amorous again, and this time it was much better because he wasn’t so frenzied and I liked him better by now too. Afterwards he told me how when he was first married, he and his wife had shared a room with the whole family (parents and younger brothers and sisters), and whatever they wanted to do, they had to do very quickly and quietly for fear of anyone waking up. I had a strange sensation then, as if I wanted to strip off all my clothes and parade up and down the room naked. I thought of all the men’s eyes that follow one in the street, and for the first time it struck me that the expression in them was like that in the eyes of prisoners looking through their bars at the world outside; and then I thought maybe I’m that world outside for them – the way I go here and there and talk and laugh with everyone and do what I like – maybe I’m the river and trees they can’t have where they are. Oh, I felt so sorry, I wanted to do so much. And to make a start, I flung myself on my companion and kissed and hugged him hard, I lay on top of him, I smothered him, I spread my hair over his face because I wanted to make him forget everything that wasn’t me – this room, his daughter, his wife, the women in georgette sitting on the balconies – I wanted everything to be new for him and as beautiful as I could make it. He liked it for a while but got tired quite quickly, probably because he wasn’t all that young any more.
It was shortly after this encounter that I met Ahmed. He was eighteen years old and a musician. His family had been musicians as long as anyone could remember and the alley they lived in was full of other musicians, so that when you walked down it, it was like walking through a magic forest all lit up with music and sounds. Only there wasn’t anything magic about the place itself which was very cramped and dirty; the houses were so old that, whenever there were heavy rains, one or two of them came tumbling down. I was never inside Ahmed’s house or met his family – they’d have died of shock if they had got to know about me – but I knew they were very poor and scraped a living by playing at weddings and functions. Ahmed never had any money, just sometimes if he was lucky he had a few coins to buy his betel with. But he was cheerful and happy and enjoyed everything that came his way. He was married, but his wife was too young to stay with him and after the ceremony she had been sent back to live with her father who was a musician in another town.
When I first met Ahmed, I was staying in a hostel attached to a temple which was free of charge for pilgrims; but afterwards he and I wanted a place for us to go to, so I wired Henry to send me some more money. Henry sent me the money, together with a long complaining letter which I didn’t read all the way through, and I took a room in a hotel. It was on the outskirts of town which was mostly waste land except for a few houses, and some of these had never been finished. Our hotel wasn’t finished either because the proprietor had run out of money, and now it probably never would be for the place had turned out to be a poor proposition, it was too far out of town and no one ever came to stay there. But it suited us fine. We had this one room, painted bright pink and quite bare except for two pieces of furniture – a bed and a dressing-table, both of them very shiny and new. Ahmed loved it, he had never stayed in such a grand room before; he bounced up and down on the bed which had a mattress, and stood looking at himself from all sides in the mirror of the dressing-table.
I never in all my life was so gay with anyone the way I was with Ahmed. I’m not saying I never had a good time at home; I did. I had a lot of friends before I married Henry and we had parties and danced and drank and I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t like with Ahmed because no one was ever as carefree as he was, as light and easy and just ready to play and live. At home we always had our problems, personal ones of course, but on top of those there were universal problems – social, and economic, and moral, we really cared about what was happening in the world around us and in our own minds, we felt a responsibility towards being here alive at this point in time and wanted to do our best. Ahmed had no thoughts like that at all; there wasn’t a shadow on him. He had his personal problems from time to time, and when he had them, he was very downcast and sometimes he even cried. But they weren’t anything really very serious – usually some family quarrel, or his father was angry with him – and they passed away, blew away like a breeze over a lake and left him sunny and sparkling again. He enjoyed everything so much: not only our room, and the bed and the dressing-table, and making love, but so many other things like drinking Coca-Cola and spraying scent and combing my hair and my combing his; and he made up games for us to play like indoor cricket with a slipper for a bat and one of Henry’s letters rolled up for a ball. He taught me how to crack his toes, which is such a great Indian delicacy, and yelled with pleasure when I got it right; but when he did it to me, I yelled with pain so he stopped at once and was terribly sorry. He was very considerate and tender. No one I’ve ever known was as sensitive to my feelings as he was. It was like an instinct with him, as if he could feel right down into my heart and know what was going on there; and without ever having to ask anything or my ever having to explain anything, he could sense each change of mood and adapt himself to it and feel with it. Henry would always have to ask me, ‘Now what’s up? What’s the matter with you?’ and when we were still all right with each other, he would make a sincere effort to understand. But Ahmed never had to make an effort, and maybe if he’d had to he wouldn’t have succeeded because it wasn’t ever with his mind that he understood anything, it was always with his feelings. Perhaps that was so because he was a musician and in music everything is beyond words and explanations anyway; and from what he told me about Indian music, I could see it was very, very subtle, there are effects that you can hardly perceive they’re so subtle and your sensibilities have to be kept tuned all the time to the finest, finest point; and perhaps because of that the whole of Ahmed was always at that point and he could play me and listen to me as if I were his sarod.
After some time we ran out of money and Henry wouldn’t send any more, so we had to think what to do. I certainly couldn’t bear to part with Ahmed, and in the end I suggested he’d better come back to Delhi with me and we’d try and straighten things out with Henry. Ahmed was terribly excited by the idea; he’d never been to Delhi and was wild to go. Only it meant he had to run away from home because his family would never have allowed him to go, so one night he stole out of the house with his sarod and his little bundle of clothes and met me at the railway station. We reached Delhi the next night, tired and dirty and covered with soot the way you always get in trains here. When we arrived home, Henry was giving a party; not a big party, just a small informal group sitting around chatting. I’ll never forget the expression on everyone’s faces when Ahmed and I came staggering in with our bundles and bedding. My blouse had got torn in the train all the way down the side, and I didn’t have a safety pin so it kept flapping open and unfortunately I didn’t have anything underneath. Henry’s guests were all looking very nice, the men in smart bush-shirts and their wives in little silk cocktail dresses; and although after the first shock they all behaved very well and carried on as if nothing unusual had happened, still it was an awkward situation for everyone concerned.
Ahmed never really got over it. I can see now how awful it must have been for him, coming into that room full of strange white people and all of them turning round to stare at us. And the room itself must have been a shock to him, he can never have seen anything like it. Actually, it was quite a shock to me too. I’d forgotten that that was the way Henry and I lived. When we first came, we had gone to a lot of trouble doing up the apartment, buying furniture and pictures and stuff, and had succeeded in making it look just like the apartment we have at home except for some elegant Indian touches. To Ahmed it was all very strange. He stayed there with us for some time, and he couldn’t get used to it. I think it bothered him to have so many things around, rugs and lamps and objets d’art; he couldn’t see why they had to be there. Now that I had travelled and lived the way I had, I couldn’t see why either; as a matter of fact I felt as if these things were a hindrance and cluttered up not only your room but your mind and your soul as well, hanging on them like weights.
We had some quite bad scenes in the apartment during those days. I told Henry that I was in love with Ahmed, and naturally that upset him, though what upset him most was the fact that he had to keep us both in the apartment. I also realized that this was an undesirable situation, but I couldn’t see any way out of it because where else could Ahmed and I go? We didn’t have any money, only Henry had, so we had to stay with him. He kept saying that he would turn both of us out into the streets but I knew he wouldn’t. He wasn’t the type to do a violent thing like that, and besides he himself was so frightened of the streets that he’d have died to think of anyone connected with him being out there. I wouldn’t have minded all that much if he had turned us out: it was warm enough to sleep in the open and people always give you food if you don’t have any. I would have preferred it really because it was so unpleasant with Henry; but I knew Ahmed would never have been able to stand it. He was quite a pampered boy, and though his family were poor, they looked after and protected each other very carefully; he never had to miss a meal or go dressed in anything but fine muslin clothes, nicely washed and starched by female relatives.
Ahmed bitterly repented having come. He was very miserable, feeling so uncomfortable in the apartment and with Henry making rows all the time. Ramu, the servant, didn’t improve anything by the way he behaved, absolutely refusing to serve Ahmed and never losing an opportunity to make him feel inferior. Everything went out of Ahmed; he crumpled up as if he were a paper flower. He didn’t want to play his sarod and he didn’t want to make love to me, he just sat around with his head and his hands hanging down, and there were times when I saw tears rolling down his face and he didn’t even bother to wipe them off. Although he was so unhappy in the apartment, he never left it and so he never saw any of the places he had been so eager to come to Delhi for, like the Juma Masjid and Nizamuddin’s tomb. Most of the time he was thinking about his family. He wrote long letters to them in Urdu, which I posted, telling them where he was and imploring their pardon for running away; and long letters came back again and he read and read them, soaking them in tears and kisses. One night he got so bad he jumped out of bed and, rushing into Henry’s bedroom, fell to his knees by the side of Henry’s bed and begged to be sent back home again. And Henry, sitting up in bed in his pyjamas, said all right, in rather a lordly way I thought. So next day I took Ahmed to the station and put him on the train, and through the bars of the railway carriage he kissed my hands and looked into my eyes with all his old ardour and tenderness, so at the last moment I wanted to go with him but it was too late and the train pulled away out of the station and all that was left to me of Ahmed was a memory, very beautiful and delicate like a flavour or a perfume or one of those melodies he played on his sarod.
I became very depressed. I didn’t feel like going travelling any more but stayed home with Henry and went with him to his diplomatic and other parties. He was quite glad to have me go with him again; he liked having someone in the car on the way home to talk to about all the people who’d been at the party and compare their chances of future success with his own. I didn’t mind going with him, there wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. I felt as if I’d failed at something. It wasn’t only Ahmed. I didn’t really miss him all that much and was glad to think of him back with his family in that alley full of music where he was happy. For myself I didn’t know what to do next though I felt that something still awaited me. Our apartment led to an open terrace and I often went up there to look at the view which was marvellous. The house we lived in and all the ones around were white and pink and very modern, with picture windows and little lawns in front, but from up here you could look beyond them to the city and the big mosque and the fort. In between there were stretches of waste land, empty and barren except for an occasional crumbly old tomb growing there. What always impressed me the most was the sky because it was so immensely big and so unchanging in colour, and it made everything underneath it – all the buildings, even the great fort, the whole city, not to speak of all the people living in it – seem terribly small and trivial and passing somehow. But at the same time as it made me feel small, it also made me feel immense and eternal. I don’t know, I can’t explain, perhaps because it was itself like that and this thought – that there was something like that – made me feel that I had a part in it, I too was part of being immense and eternal. It was all very vague really and nothing I could ever speak about to anyone; but because of it I thought well maybe there is something more for me here after all. That was a relief because it meant I wouldn’t have to go home and be the way I was before and nothing different or gained. For all the time, ever since I’d come and even before, I’d had this idea that there was something in India for me to gain, and even though for the time being I’d failed, I could try longer and at last perhaps I would succeed.
I’d met people on and off who had come here on a spiritual quest, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted for myself. I thought anything I wanted to find, I could find by myself travelling around the way I had done. But now that this had failed, I became interested in the other thing. I began to go to a few prayer meetings and I liked the atmosphere very much. The meeting was usually conducted by a swami in a saffron robe who had renounced the world, and he gave an address about love and God and everyone sang hymns also about love and God. The people who came to these meetings were mostly middle-aged and quite poor. I had already met many like them on my travels, for they were the sort of people who sat waiting on station platforms and in bus depots, absolutely patient and uncomplaining even when conductors and other officials pushed them around. They were gentle people and very clean though there was always some slight smell about them as of people who find it difficult to keep clean because they live in crowded and unsanitary places where there isn’t much running water and the drainage system isn’t good. I loved the expression that came into their faces when they sang hymns. I wanted to be like them, so I began to dress in plain white saris and I tied up my hair in a plain knot and the only ornament I wore was a string of beads not for decoration but to say the names of God on. I became a vegetarian and did my best to cast out all the undesirable human passions, such as anger and lust. When Henry was in an irritable or quarrelsome mood, I never answered him back but was very kind and patient with him. However, far from having a good effect, this seemed to make him worse. Altogether he didn’t like the new personality I was trying to achieve but sneered a lot at the way I dressed and looked and the simple food I ate. Actually, I didn’t enjoy this food very much and found it quite a trial eating nothing but boiled rice and lentils with him sitting opposite me having his cutlets and chops.
The peace and satisfaction that I saw on the faces of the other hymn singers didn’t come to me. As a matter of fact, I grew rather bored. There didn’t seem much to be learned from singing hymns and eating vegetables. Fortunately just about this time someone took me to see a holy woman who lived on the roof of an old overcrowded house near the river. People treated her like a holy woman but she didn’t set up to be one. She didn’t set up to be anything really, but only stayed in her room on the roof and talked to people who came to see her. She liked telling stories and she could hold everyone spellbound listening to her, even though she was only telling the old mythological stories they had known all their lives long, about Krishna, and the Pandavas, and Rama and Sita. But she got terribly excited while she was telling them, as if it wasn’t something that had happened millions of years ago but as if it was all real and going on exactly now. Once she was telling about Krishna’s mother who made him open his mouth to see whether he had stolen and was eating up her butter. What did she see then, inside his mouth?
‘Worlds!’ the holy woman cried. ‘Not just this world, not just one world with its mountains and rivers and seas, no, but world upon world, all spinning in one great eternal cycle in this child’s mouth, moon upon moon, sun upon sun!’
She clapped her hands and laughed and laughed, and then she burst out singing in her thin old voice, some hymn all about how great God was and how lucky for her that she was his beloved. She was dancing with joy in front of all the people. And she was just a little shrivelled old woman, very ugly with her teeth gone and a growth on her chin: but the way she carried on it was as if she had all the looks and glamour anyone ever had in the world and was in love a million times over. I thought well, whatever it was she had, obviously it was the one thing worth having and I had better try for it.
I went to stay with a guru in a holy city. He had a house on the river in which he lived with his disciples. They lived in a nice way: they meditated a lot and went out for boat rides on the river and in the evenings they all sat around in the guru’s room and had a good time. There were quite a few foreigners among the disciples, and it was the guru’s greatest wish to go abroad and spread his message there and bring back more disciples. When he heard that Henry was a journalist, he became specially interested in me. He talked to me about the importance of introducing the leaven of Indian spirituality into the lump of Western materialism. To achieve this end, his own presence in the West was urgently required, and to ensure the widest dissemination of his message he would also need the full support of the mass media. He said that since we live in the modern age, we must avail ourselves of all its resources. He was very keen for me to bring Henry into the ashram, and when I was vague in my answers – I certainly didn’t want Henry here nor would he in the least want to come – he became very pressing and even quite annoyed and kept returning to the subject.
He didn’t seem a very spiritual type of person to me. He was a hefty man with big shoulders and a big head. He wore his hair long but his jaw was clean-shaven and stuck out very large and prominent and gave him a powerful look like a bull. All he ever wore was a saffron robe and this left a good part of his body bare so that it could be seen at once how strong his legs and shoulders were. He had huge eyes which he used constantly and apparently to tremendous effect, fixing people with them and penetrating them with a steady beam. He used them on me when he wanted Henry to come, but they never did anything to me. But the other disciples were very strongly affected by them. There was one girl, Jean, who said they were like the sun, so strong that if she tried to look back at them something terrible would happen to her like being blinded or burned up completely.
Jean had made herself everything an Indian guru expects his disciples to be. She was absolutely humble and submissive. She touched the guru’s feet when she came into or went out of his presence, she ran eagerly on any errand he sent her on. She said she gloried in being nothing in herself and living only by his will. And she looked like nothing too, sort of drained of everything she might once have been. At home her cheeks were probably pink but now she was quite white, waxen, and her hair too was completely faded and colourless. She always wore a plain white cotton sari and that made her look paler than ever, and thinner too; it seemed to bring out the fact that she had no hips and was utterly flat-chested. But she was happy – at least she said she was – she said she had never known such happiness and hadn’t thought it was possible for human beings to feel like that. And when she said that, there was a sort of sparkle in her pale eyes, and at such moments I envied her because she seemed to have found what I was looking for. But at the same time I wondered whether she really had found what she thought she had, or whether it wasn’t something else and she was cheating herself, and one day she’d wake up to that fact and then she’d feel terrible.
She was shocked by my attitude to the guru – not touching his feet or anything, and talking back to him as if he was just an ordinary person. Sometimes I thought perhaps there was something wrong with me because everyone else, all the other disciples and people from outside too who came to see him, they all treated him with this great reverence and their faces lit up in his presence as if there really was something special. Only I couldn’t see it. But all the same I was quite happy there – not because of him, but because I liked the atmosphere of the place and the way they all lived. Everyone seemed very contented and as if they were living for something high and beautiful. I thought perhaps if I waited and was patient, I’d also come to be like that. I tried to meditate the way they all did, sitting cross-legged in one spot and concentrating on the holy word that had been given to me. I wasn’t ever very successful and kept thinking of other things. But there were times when I went up to sit on the roof and looked out over the river, the way it stretched so calm and broad to the opposite bank and the boats going up and down it and the light changing and being reflected back on the water: and then, though I wasn’t trying to meditate or come to any higher thoughts, I did feel very peaceful and was glad to be there.
The guru was patient with me for a long time, explaining about the importance of his mission and how Henry ought to come here and write about it for his paper. But as the days passed and Henry didn’t show up, his attitude changed and he began to ask me questions. Why hadn’t Henry come? Hadn’t I written to him? Wasn’t I going to write to him? Didn’t I think what was being done in the ashram would interest him? Didn’t I agree that it deserved to be brought to the notice of the world and that to this end no stone should be left unturned? While he said all this, he fixed me with his great eyes and I squirmed – not because of the way he was looking at me, but because I was embarrassed and didn’t know what to answer. Then he became very gentle and said never mind, he didn’t want to force me, that was not his way, he wanted people slowly to turn towards him of their own accord, to open up to him as a flower opens up and unfurls its petals and its leaves to the sun. But next day he would start again, asking the same questions, urging me, forcing me, and when this had gone on for some time and we weren’t getting anywhere, he even got angry once or twice and shouted at me that I was obstinate and closed and had fenced in my heart with seven hoops of iron. When he shouted, everyone in the ashram trembled and afterwards they looked at me in a strange way. But an hour later the guru always had me called back to his room and then he was very gentle with me again and made me sit near him and insisted that it should be I who handed him his glass of milk in preference to one of the others, all of whom were a lot keener to be selected for this honour than I was.
Jean often came to talk to me. At night I spread my bedding in a tiny cubbyhole which was a disused storeroom, and just as I was falling asleep, she would come in and lie down beside me and talk to me very softly and intimately. I didn’t like it much, to have her so close to me and whispering in a voice that wasn’t more than a breath and which I could feel, slightly warm, on my neck; sometimes she touched me, putting her hand on mine ever so gently so that she hardly was touching me but all the same I could feel that her hand was a bit moist and it gave me an unpleasant sensation down my spine. She spoke about the beauty of surrender, of not having a will and not having thoughts of your own. She said she too had been like me once, stubborn and ego-centred, but now she had learned the joy of yielding, and if she could only give me some inkling of the infinite bliss to be tasted in this process – here her breath would give out for a moment and she couldn’t speak for ecstasy. I would take the opportunity to pretend to fall asleep, even snoring a bit to make it more convincing; after calling my name a few times in the hope of waking me up again, she crept away disappointed. But next night she’d be back again, and during the day too she would attach herself to me as much as possible and continue talking in the same way.
It got so that even when she wasn’t there, I could still hear her voice and feel her breath on my neck. I no longer enjoyed anything, not even going on the river or looking out over it from the top of the house. Although they hadn’t bothered me before, I kept thinking of the funeral pyres burning on the bank, and it seemed to me that the smoke they gave out was spreading all over the sky and the river and covering them with a dirty yellowish haze. I realized that nothing good could come to me from this place now. But when I told the guru that I was leaving, he got into a great fury. His head and neck swelled out and his eyes became two coal-black demons rolling around in rage. In a voice like drums and cymbals, he forbade me to go. I didn’t say anything but I made up my mind to leave next morning. I went to pack my things. The whole ashram was silent and stricken, no one dared speak. No one dared come near me either till late at night when Jean came as usual to lie next to me. She lay there completely still and crying to herself. I didn’t know she was crying at first because she didn’t make a sound but slowly her tears seeped into her side of the pillow and a sensation of dampness came creeping over to my side of it. I pretended not to notice anything.
Suddenly the guru stood in the doorway. The room faced an open courtyard and this was full of moonlight which illumined him and made him look enormous and eerie. Jean and I sat up. I felt scared, my heart beat fast. After looking at us in silence for a while, he ordered Jean to go away. She got up to do so at once. I said, ‘No, stay,’ and clung to her hand but she disengaged herself from me and, touching the guru’s feet in reverence, she went away. She seemed to dissolve in the moonlight outside, leaving no trace. The guru sat beside me on my bedding spread on the floor. He said I was under a delusion, that I didn’t really want to leave; my inmost nature was craving to stay by him – he knew, he could hear it calling out to him. But because I was afraid, I was attempting to smother this craving and to run away. ‘Look how you’re trembling,’ he said. ‘See how afraid you are.’ It was true, I was trembling and cowering against the wall as far away from him as I could get. Only it was impossible to get very far because he was so huge and seemed to spread and fill the tiny closet. I could feel him close against me, and his pungent male smell, spiced with garlic, overpowered me.
‘You’re right to be afraid,’ he said: because it was his intention, he said, to batter and beat me, to smash my ego till it broke and flew apart into a million pieces and was scattered into the dust. Yes, it would be a painful process and I would often cry out and plead for mercy, but in the end – ah, with what joy I would step out of the prison of my own self, remade and reborn! I would fling myself to the ground and bathe his feet in tears of gratitude. Then I would be truly his. As he spoke, I became more and more afraid because I felt, so huge and close and strong as he was, that perhaps he really had the power to do to me all that he said and that in the end he would make me like Jean.
I now lay completely flattened against the wall, and he had moved up and was squashing me against it. One great hand travelled up and down my stomach, but its activity seemed apart from the rest of him and from what he was saying. His voice became lower and lower, more and more intense. He said he would teach me to obey, to submit myself completely, that would be the first step and a very necessary one. For he knew what we were like, all of us who came from Western countries: we were self-willed, obstinate, licentious. On the last word his voice cracked with emotion, his hand went further and deeper. Licentious, he repeated, and then, rolling himself across the bed so that he now lay completely pressed against me, he asked, ‘How many men have you slept with?’ He took my hand and made me hold him: how huge and hot he was! He pushed hard against me. ‘How many? Answer me!’ he commanded, urgent and dangerous. But I was no longer afraid: now he was not an unknown quantity, nor was the situation any longer new or strange. ‘Answer me, answer me!’ he cried, riding on top of me, and then he cried, ‘Bitch!’ and I laughed in relief.
I quite liked being back in Delhi with Henry. I had lots of baths in our marble bathroom, soaking in the tub for hours and making myself smell nice with bath salts. I stopped wearing Indian clothes and took out all the dresses I’d brought with me. We entertained quite a bit, and Ramu scurried around in his white coat, emptying ashtrays. It wasn’t a bad time. I stayed around all day in the apartment with the air conditioner on and the curtains drawn to keep out the glare. At night we drove over to other people’s apartments for buffet suppers of boiled ham and potato salad; we sat around drinking in their living-rooms, which were done up more or less like ours, and talked about things like the price of whisky, what was the best hill station to go to in the summer, and servants. This last subject often led to other related ones like how unreliable Indians were and how it was impossible ever to get anything done. Usually this subject was treated in a humorous way, with lots of funny anecdotes to illustrate, but occasionally someone got quite passionate; this happened usually if they were a bit drunk, and then they went off into a long thing about how dirty India was and backward, riddled with vile superstitions – evil, they said – corrupt – corrupting.
Henry never spoke like that – maybe because he never got drunk enough – but I know he didn’t disagree with it. He disliked the place very much and was in fact thinking of asking for an assignment elsewhere. When I asked where, he said the cleanest place he could think of. He asked how would I like to go to Geneva. I knew I wouldn’t like it one bit, but I said all right. I didn’t really care where I was. I didn’t care much about anything these days. The only positive feeling I had was for Henry. He was so sweet and good to me. I had a lot of bad dreams nowadays and was afraid of sleeping alone, so he let me come into his bed even though he dislikes having his sheets disarranged and I always kick and toss about a lot. I lay close beside him, clinging to him, and for the first time I was glad that he had never been all that keen on sex. On Sundays we stayed in bed all day reading the papers and Ramu brought us nice English meals on trays. Sometimes we put on a record and danced together in our pyjamas. I kissed Henry’s cheeks which were always smooth – he didn’t need to shave very often – and sometimes his lips which tasted of toothpaste.
Then I got jaundice. It’s funny, all that time I spent travelling about and eating anything anywhere, nothing happened to me, and now that I was living such a clean life with boiled food and boiled water, I got sick. Henry was horrified. He immediately segregated all his and my things, and anything that I touched had to be sterilized a hundred times over. He was forever running into the kitchen to check up on whether Ramu was doing this properly. He said jaundice was the most catching thing there was, and though he went in for a whole course of precautionary inoculations that had to be specially flown in from the States, he still remained in a very nervous state. He tried to be sympathetic to me, but couldn’t help sounding reproachful most of the time. He had sealed himself off so carefully, and now I had let this in. I knew how he felt, but I was too ill and miserable to care. I don’t remember ever feeling so ill. I didn’t have any high temperature or anything, but all the time there was this terrible nausea. First my eyes went yellow, then the rest of me as if I’d been dyed in the colour of nausea, inside and out. The whole world went yellow and sick. I couldn’t bear anything: any noise, any person near me, worst of all any smell. They couldn’t cook in the kitchen any more because the smell of cooking made me scream. Henry had to live on boiled eggs and bread. I begged him not to let Ramu into my bedroom for, although Ramu always wore nicely laundered clothes, he gave out a smell of perspiration which was both sweetish and foul and filled me with disgust. I was convinced that under his clean shirt he wore a cotton vest, black with sweat and dirt, which he never took off but slept in at night in the one-room servant quarter where he lived crowded together with all his family in a dense smell of cheap food and bad drains and unclean bodies.
I knew these smells so well – I thought of them as the smells of India, and had never minded them; but now I couldn’t get rid of them, they were like some evil flood soaking through the walls of my air-conditioned bedroom. And other things I hadn’t minded, had hardly bothered to think about, now came back to me in a terrible way so that waking and sleeping, I saw them. What I remembered most often was the disused well in the Rajasthan fort out of which I had drunk water. I was sure now that there had been a corpse at the bottom of it, and I saw this corpse with the flesh swollen and blown but the eyes intact: they were huge like the guru’s eyes and they stared, glazed and jellied, into the darkness of the well. And worse than seeing this corpse, I could taste it in the water that I had drunk – that I was still drinking – yes, it was now, at this very moment, that I was raising my cupped hands to my mouth and feeling the dank water lap around my tongue. I screamed out loud at the taste of the dead man and I called to Henry and clutched his hand and begged him to get us sent to Geneva quickly, quickly. He disengaged his hand – he didn’t like me to touch him at this time – but he promised. Then I grew calmer, I shut my eyes and tried to think of Geneva and of washing out my mouth with Swiss milk.
I got better, but I was very weak. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I started to cry. My face had a yellow tint, my hair was limp and faded; I didn’t look old but I didn’t look young any more either. There was no flesh left, and no colour. I was drained, hollowed out. I was wearing a white nightdress and that increased the impression. Actually, I reminded myself of Jean. I thought, so this is what it does to you (I didn’t quite know at that time what I meant by it – jaundice in my case, a guru in hers; but it seemed to come to the same). When Henry told me that his new assignment had come through, I burst into tears again; only now it was with relief. I said let’s go now, let’s go quickly. I became quite hysterical so Henry said all right; he too was impatient to get away before any more of those bugs he dreaded so much caught up with us. The only thing that bothered him was that the rent had been paid for three months and the landlord refused to refund. Henry had a fight with him about it but the landlord won. Henry was furious but I said never mind, let’s just get away and forget all about all of them. We packed up some of our belongings and sold the rest; the last few days we lived in an empty apartment with only a couple of kitchen chairs and a bed. Ramu was very worried about finding a new job.
Just before we were to leave for the airport and were waiting for the car to pick us up, I went on the terrace. I don’t know why I did that, there was no reason. There was nothing I wanted to say goodbye to, and no last glimpses I wanted to catch. My thoughts were all concentrated on the coming journey and whether to take air sickness pills or not. The sky from up on the terrace looked as immense as ever, the city as small. It was evening and the light was just fading and the sky wasn’t any definite colour now: it was sort of translucent like a pearl but not an earthly pearl. I thought of the story the little saintly old woman had told about Krishna’s mother and how she saw the sun and the moon and world upon world in his mouth. I liked that phrase so much – world upon world – I imagined them spinning around each other like glass balls in eternity and everything as shining and translucent as the sky I saw above me. I went down and told Henry I wasn’t going with him. When he realized – and this took some time – that I was serious, he knew I was mad. At first he was very patient and gentle with me, then he got in a frenzy. The car had already arrived to take us. Henry yelled at me, he grabbed my arm and began to pull me to the door. I resisted with all my strength and sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. Henry continued to pull and now he was pulling me along with the chair as if on a sleigh. I clung to it as hard as I could but I felt terribly weak and was afraid I would let myself be pulled away. I begged him to leave me. I cried and wept with fear – fear that he would take me, fear that he would leave me.
Ramu came to my aid. He said it’s all right Sahib, I’ll look after her. He told Henry that I was too weak to travel after my illness but later, when I was better, he would take me to the airport and put me on a plane. Henry hesitated. It was getting very late, and if he didn’t go, he too would miss the plane. Ramu assured him that all would be well and Henry need not worry at all. At last Henry took my papers and ticket out of his inner pocket. He gave me instructions how I was to go to the air company and make a new booking. He hesitated a moment longer – how sweet he looked all dressed up in a suit and tie ready for travelling, just like the day we got married – but the car was hooting furiously downstairs and he had to go. I held on hard to the chair. I was afraid if I didn’t I might get up and run after him. So I clung to the chair, trembling and crying. Ramu was quite happily dusting the remaining chair. He said we would have to get some more furniture. I think he was glad that I had stayed and he still had somewhere to work and live and didn’t have to go tramping around looking for another place. He had quite a big family to support. I sold the ticket Henry left with me but I didn’t buy any new furniture with it. I stayed in the empty rooms by myself and very rarely went out. When Ramu cooked anything for me, I ate it, but sometimes he forgot or didn’t have time because he was busy looking for another job. I didn’t like living like that but I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid to go out: everything I had once liked so much – people, places, crowds, smells – I now feared and hated. I would go running back to be by myself in the empty apartment. I felt people looked at me in a strange way in the streets; and perhaps I was strange now from the way I was living and not caring about what I looked like any more; I think I talked aloud to myself sometimes – once or twice I heard myself doing it. I spent a lot of the money I got from the air ticket on books. I went to the bookshops and came hurrying back carrying armfuls of them. Many of them I never read, and even those I did read, I didn’t understand very much. I hadn’t had much experience in reading these sort of books – like the Upanishads and the Vedanta Sutras – but I liked the sound of the words and I liked the feeling they gave out. It was as if I were all by myself on an immensely high plateau breathing in great lungfuls of very sharp, pure air. Sometimes the landlord came to see what I was doing. He went round all the rooms, peering suspiciously into corners, testing the fittings. He kept asking how much longer I was going to stay; I said till the three months’ rent was up. He brought prospective tenants to see the apartment, but when they saw me squatting on the floor in the empty rooms, sometimes with a bowl of half-eaten food which Ramu had neglected to clear away, they got nervous and went away again rather quickly. After a time the electricity got cut off because I hadn’t paid the bill. It was very hot without the fan and I filled the tub with cold water and sat in it all day. But then the water got cut off too. The landlord came up twice, three times a day now. He said if I didn’t clear out the day the rent was finished he would call the police to evict me. I said it’s all right, don’t worry, I shall go. Like the landlord, I too was counting the days still left to me. I was afraid what would happen to me.
Today the landlord evicted Ramu out of the servant quarter. That was when Ramu came up to ask for money and said all those things. Afterwards I went up on the terrace to watch him leave. It was such a sad procession. Each member of the family carried some part of their wretched household stock, none of which looked worth taking. Ramu had a bed with tattered strings balanced on his head. In two days’ time I too will have to go with my bundle and my bedding. I’ve done this so often before – travelled here and there without any real destination – and been so happy doing it; but now it’s different. That time I had a great sense of freedom and adventure. Now I feel compelled, that I have to do this whether I want to or not. And partly I don’t want to, I feel afraid. Yet it’s still like an adventure, and that’s why besides being afraid I’m also excited, and most of the time I don’t know why my heart is beating fast, is it in fear or in excitement, wondering what will happen to me now that I’m going travelling again.