Elizabeth had gone to spend the afternoon with Margaret. They were both English, but Margaret was a much older woman and they were also very different in character. But they were both in love with India, and it was this fact that drew them together. They sat on the veranda, and Margaret wrote letters and Elizabeth addressed the envelopes. Margaret always had letters to write; she led a busy life and was involved with several organizations of a charitable or spiritual nature. Her interests were centred in such matters, and Elizabeth was glad to be allowed to help her.
There were usually guests staying in Margaret’s house. Sometimes they were complete strangers to her when they first arrived, but they tended to stay weeks, even months, at a time – holy men from the Himalayas, village welfare workers, organizers of conferences on spiritual welfare. She had one constant visitor throughout the winter, an elderly government officer who, on his retirement from service, had taken to a spiritual life and gone to live in the mountains at Almora. He did not, however, very much care for the winter cold up there, so at that season he came down to Delhi to stay with Margaret, who was always pleased to have him. He had a soothing effect on her – indeed, on anyone with whom he came into contact, for he had cast anger and all other bitter passions out of his heart and was consequently always smiling and serene. Everyone affectionately called him Babaji.
He sat now with the two ladies on the veranda, gently rocking himself to and fro in a rocking chair, enjoying the winter sunshine and the flowers in the garden and everything about him. His companions, however, were less serene. Margaret, in fact, was beginning to get angry with Elizabeth. This happened quite frequently, for Margaret tended to be quickly irritated, and especially with a meek and conciliatory person like Elizabeth.
‘It’s very selfish of you,’ Margaret said now.
Elizabeth flinched. Like many very unselfish people, she was always accusing herself of undue selfishness, so that whenever this accusation was made by someone else it touched her closely. But because it was not in her power to do what Margaret wanted, she compressed her lips and kept silent. She was pale with this effort at obstinacy.
‘It’s your duty to go,’ Margaret said. ‘I don’t have much time for people who shirk their duty.’
‘I’m sorry, Margaret,’ Elizabeth said, utterly miserable, utterly ashamed. The worst of it, almost, was that she really wanted to go; there was nothing she would have enjoyed more. What she was required to do was take a party of little Tibetan orphans on a holiday treat to Agra and show them the Taj Mahal. Elizabeth loved children, she loved little trips and treats, and she loved the Taj Mahal. But she couldn’t go, nor could she say why.
Of course Margaret very easily guessed why, and it irritated her more than ever. To challenge her friend, she said bluntly, ‘Your Raju can do without you for those few days. Good heavens, you’re not a honeymoon couple, are you? You’ve been married long enough. Five years.’
‘Four,’ Elizabeth said in a humble voice.
‘Four, then. I can hardly be expected to keep count of each wonderful day. Do you want me to speak to him?’
‘Oh no.’
‘I will, you know. It’s nothing to me. I won’t mince my words.’ She gave a short, harsh laugh, challenging anyone to stop her from speaking out when occasion demanded. Indeed, at the thought of anyone doing so, her face grew red under her crop of grey hair, and a pulse throbbed in visible anger in her tough, tanned neck.
Elizabeth glanced imploringly towards Babaji. But he was rocking and smiling and looking with tender love at two birds pecking at something on the lawn.
‘There are times when I can’t help feeling you’re afraid of him,’ Margaret said. She ignored Elizabeth’s little disclaiming cry of horror. ‘There’s no trust between you, no understanding. And married life is nothing if it’s not based on the twin rocks of trust and understanding.’
Babaji liked this phrase so much that he repeated it to himself several times, his lips moving soundlessly and his head nodding with approval.
‘In everything I did,’ Margaret said, ‘Arthur was with me. He had complete faith in me. And in those days – well.’ She chuckled. ‘A wife like me wasn’t altogether a joke.’
Her late husband had been a high-up British official, and in those British days he and Margaret had been expected to conform to some very strict social rules. But the idea of Margaret conforming to any rules, let alone those! Her friends nowadays often had a good laugh at it with her, and she had many stories to tell of how she had shocked and defied her fellow-countrymen.
‘It was people like you,’ Babaji said, ‘who first extended the hand of friendship to us.’
‘It wasn’t a question of friendship, Babaji. It was a question of love.’
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed.
‘As soon as I came here – and I was only a chit of a girl, Arthur and I had been married just two months – yes, as soon as I set foot on Indian soil, I knew this was the place I belonged. It’s funny, isn’t it? I don’t suppose there’s any rational explanation for it. But then, when was India ever the place for rational explanations?’
Babaji said with gentle certainty, ‘In your last birth, you were one of us. You were an Indian.’
‘Yes, lots of people have told me that. Mind you, in the beginning it was quite a job to make them see it. Naturally, they were suspicious – can you blame them? It wasn’t like today. I envy you girls married to Indians. You have a very easy time of it.’
Elizabeth thought of the first time she had been taken to stay with Raju’s family. She had met and married Raju in England, where he had gone for a year on a Commonwealth scholarship, and then had returned with him to Delhi; so it was some time before she met his family, who lived about two hundred miles out of Delhi, on the outskirts of a small town called Ankhpur. They all lived together in an ugly brick house, which was divided into two parts – one for the men of the family, the other for the women. Elizabeth, of course, had stayed in the women’s quarters. She couldn’t speak any Hindi and they spoke very little English, but they had not had much trouble communicating with her. They managed to make it clear at once that they thought her too ugly and too old for Raju (who was indeed some five years her junior), but also that they did not hold this against her and were ready to accept her, with all her shortcomings, as the will of God. They got a lot of amusement out of her, and she enjoyed being with them. They dressed and undressed her in new saris, and she smiled good-naturedly while they stood round her clapping their hands in wonder and doubling up with laughter. Various fertility ceremonies had been performed over her, and before she left she had been given her share of the family jewellery.
‘Elizabeth,’ Margaret said, ‘if you’re going to be so slow, I’d rather do them myself.’
‘Just these two left,’ Elizabeth said, bending more eagerly over the envelopes she was addressing.
‘For all your marriage,’ Margaret said, ‘sometimes I wonder how much you do understand about this country. You live such a closed-in life.’
‘I’ll just take these inside,’ Elizabeth said, picking up the envelopes and letters. She wanted to get away, not because she minded being told about her own wrong way of life but because she was afraid Margaret might start talking about Raju again.
It was cold inside, away from the sun. Margaret’s house was old and massive, with thick stone walls, skylights instead of windows and immensely high ceilings. It was designed to keep out the heat in summer, but it also sealed in the cold in winter and became like some cavernous underground fortress frozen through with the cold of earth and stone. A stale smell of rice, curry and mango chutney was chilled into the air.
Elizabeth put the letters on Margaret’s work table, which was in the drawing-room. Besides the drawing-room, there was a dining-room, but every other room was a bedroom, each with its dressing-room and bathroom attached. Sometimes Margaret had to put as many as three or four visitors into each bedroom, and on one occasion – this was when she had helped to organize a conference on Meditation as the Modern Curative – the drawing- and dining-rooms too had been converted into dormitories, with string cots and bedrolls laid out end to end. Margaret was not only an energetic and active person involved in many causes, but she was also the soul of generosity, ever ready to throw open her house to any friend or acquaintance in need of shelter. She had thrown it open to Elizabeth and Raju three years ago, when they had had to vacate their rooms almost overnight because the landlord said he needed the accommodation for his relatives. Margaret had given them a whole suite – a bedroom and dressing-room and bathroom – to themselves and they had had all their meals with her in the big dining-room, where the table was always ready laid with white crockery plates, face down so as not to catch the dust, and a thick white tablecloth that got rather stained towards the end of the week. At first, Raju had been very grateful and had praised their hostess to the skies for her kind and generous character. But as the weeks wore on, and every day, day after day, two or three times a day, they sat with Margaret and whatever other guests she had round the table, eating alternately lentils and rice or string-beans with boiled potatoes and beetroot salad, with Margaret always in her chair at the head of the table talking inexhaustibly about her activities and ideas – about Indian spirituality and the Mutiny and village uplift and the industrial revolution – Raju, who had a lot of ideas of his own and rather liked to talk, began to get restive. ‘But madam, madam,’ he would frequently say, half-rising in his chair in his impatience to interrupt her, only to have to sit down again, unsatisfied, and continue with his dinner, because Margaret was too busy with her own ideas to have time to take in his.
Once he could not restrain himself. Margaret was talking about – Elizabeth had even forgotten what it was – was it the first Indian National Congress? At any rate, she said something that stirred Raju to such disagreement that this time he did not restrict himself to the hesitant appeal of ‘madam’ but said out loud for everyone to hear, ‘Nonsense, she is only talking nonsense.’ There was a moment’s silence; then Margaret, sensible woman that she was, shut her eyes as a sign that she would not hear and would not see, and, repeating the sentence he had interrupted more firmly than before, continued her discourse on an even keel. It was the other two or three people sitting with them round the table – a Buddhist monk with a large shaved skull, a welfare worker and a disciple of the Gandhian way of life wearing nothing but the homespun loincloth in which the Mahatma himself had always been so simply clad – it was they who had looked at Raju, and very, very gently one of them had clicked his tongue.
Raju had felt angry and humiliated, and afterwards, when they were alone in their bedroom, he had quarrelled about it with Elizabeth. In his excitement, he raised his voice higher than he would have if he had remembered that they were in someone else’s house, and the noise of this must have disturbed Margaret, who suddenly stood in the doorway, looking at them. Unfortunately, it was just at the moment when Raju, in his anger and frustration, was pulling his wife’s hair, and they both stood frozen in this attitude and stared back at Margaret. The next instant, of course, they had collected themselves, and Raju let go of Elizabeth’s hair, and she pretended as best she could that all that was happening was that he was helping her comb it. But such a feeble subterfuge would not do before Margaret’s penetrating eye, which she kept fixed on Raju, in total silence, for two disconcerting minutes; then she said, ‘We don’t treat English girls that way,’ and withdrew, leaving the door open behind her as a warning that they were under observation. Raju shut it with a vicious kick. If they had had anywhere else to go, he would have moved out that instant.
Raju never came to see Margaret now. He was a proud person, who would never forget anything he considered a slight to his honour. Elizabeth always came on her own, as she had done today, to visit her friend. She sighed now as she arranged the letters on Margaret’s work table; she was sad that this difference had arisen between her husband and her only friend, but she knew that there was nothing she could do about it. Raju was very obstinate. She shivered and rubbed the tops of her arms, goose-pimpled with the cold in that high, bleak room, and returned quickly to the veranda, which was flooded and warm with afternoon sun.
Babaji and Margaret were having a discussion on the relative merits of the three ways towards realization. They spoke of the way of knowledge, the way of action and that of love. Margaret maintained that it was a matter of temperament, and that while she could appreciate the beauty of the other two ways, for herself there was no path nor could there ever be but that of action. It was her nature. ‘Of course it is,’ Babaji said. ‘And God bless you for it.’
‘Arthur used to tease me. He’d say, “Margaret was born to right all the wrongs of the world in one go”. But I can’t help it. It’s not in me to sit still when I see things to be done.’
‘Babaji,’ said Elizabeth, laughing, ‘once I saw her – it was during the monsoon, and the river had flooded and the people on the bank were being evacuated. But it wasn’t being done quickly enough for Margaret! She waded into the water and came back with someone’s tin trunk on her head. All the people shouted, “Memsahib, Memsahib! What are you doing!” but she didn’t take a bit of notice. She waded right back in again and came out with two rolls of bedding, one under each arm.’
Elizabeth went pink with laughter, and with pleasure and pride, at recalling this incident. Margaret pretended to be angry and gave her a playful slap, but she could not help smiling, while Babaji clasped his hands in joy and opened his mouth wide in silent, ecstatic laughter.
Margaret shook her head with a last fond smile. ‘Yes, but I’ve got into the most dreadful scrapes with this nature of mine. If I’d been born with an ounce more patience, I’d have been a pleasanter person to deal with and life could have been a lot smoother all round. Don’t you think so?’
She looked at Elizabeth, who said, ‘I love you just the way you are.’
But a moment later, Elizabeth wished she had not said this. ‘Yes,’ Margaret took her up, ‘that’s the trouble with you. You love everybody just the way they are.’ Of course she was referring to Raju. Elizabeth twisted her hands in her lap. These hands were large and bony and usually red, although she was otherwise a pale and rather frail person.
The more anyone twisted and squirmed, the less inclined was Margaret to let them off the hook. Not because this afforded her any pleasure but because she felt that facts of character must be faced just as resolutely as any other kinds of fact. ‘Don’t think you’re doing anyone a favour,’ she said, ‘by being so indulgent towards their faults. Quite on the contrary. And especially in marriage,’ she went on unwaveringly. ‘It’s not mutual pampering that makes a marriage, but mutual trust.’
‘Trust and understanding,’ Babaji said.
Elizabeth knew that there was not much of these in her marriage. She wasn’t even sure how much Raju earned in his job at the municipality (he was an engineer in the sanitation department), and there was one drawer in their bedroom whose contents she didn’t know, for he always kept it locked and the key with him.
‘I’ll lend you a wonderful book,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s called Truth in the Mind, and it’s full of the most astounding insight. It’s by this marvellous man who founded an ashram in Shropshire. Shafi!’ She called suddenly for the servant, but of course he couldn’t hear, because the servants’ quarters were right at the back, and the old man now spent most of his time there, sitting on a bed and having his legs massaged by a granddaughter.
‘I’ll call him,’ Elizabeth said, and got up eagerly.
She went back into the stone-cold house and out again at the other end. Here were the kitchen and the crowded servants’ quarters. Margaret could never bear to dismiss anyone, and even the servants who were no longer in her employ continued to enjoy her hospitality. Each servant had a great number of dependants, so this part of the house was a little colony of its own, with a throng of people outside the rows of peeling hutments, chatting or sleeping or quarrelling or squatting on the ground to cook their meals and wash their children. Margaret enjoyed coming out there, mostly to advise and scold – but Elizabeth felt shy, and she kept her eyes lowered.
‘Shafi,’ she said, ‘Memsahib is calling you.’
The old man mumbled furiously. He did not like to have his rest disturbed and he did not like Elizabeth. In fact, he did not like any of the visitors. He was the oldest servant in the house – so old that he had been Arthur’s bearer when Arthur was still a bachelor and serving in the districts, almost forty years ago.
Still grumbling, he followed Elizabeth back to the veranda. ‘Tea, Shafi!’ Margaret called out cheerfully when she saw them coming.
‘Not time for tea yet,’ he said.
She laughed. She loved it when her servants answered her back; she felt it showed a sense of ease and equality and family irritability, which was only another side of family devotion. ‘What a cross old man you are,’ she said. ‘And just look at you – how dirty.’
He looked down at himself. He was indeed very dirty. He was unshaven and unwashed, and from beneath the rusty remains of what had once been a uniform coat there peeped out a ragged assortment of grey vests and torn pullovers into which he had bundled himself for the winter.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ Margaret said, ‘that this old scarecrow is a terrible, terrible snob. You know why he doesn’t like you, Elizabeth? Because you’re married to an Indian.’
Elizabeth smiled and blushed. She admired Margaret’s forthrightness.
‘He thinks you’ve let down the side. He’s got very firm principles. As a matter of fact, he thinks I’ve let down the side too. All his life he’s longed to work for a real memsahib, the sort that entertains other memsahibs to tea. Never forgave Arthur for bring home little Margaret.’
The old man’s face began working strangely. His mouth and stubbled cheeks twitched, and then sounds started coming that rose and fell – now distinct, now only a mutter and a drone – like waves of the sea. He spoke partly in English and partly in Hindi, and it was some time before it could be made out that he was telling some story of the old days – a party at the Gymkhana Club for which he had been hired as an additional waiter. The sahib who had given the party, a Major Waterford, had paid him not only his wages but also a tip of two rupees. He elaborated on this for some time, dwelling on the virtues of Major Waterford and also of Mrs Waterford, a very fine lady who had made her servants wear white gloves when they served at table.
‘Very grand,’ said Margaret with an easy laugh. ‘You run along now and get our tea.’
‘There was a little missie sahib too. She had two ayahs, and every year they were given four saris and one shawl for the winter.’
‘Tea, Shafi,’ Margaret said more firmly, so that the old man, who knew every inflection in his mistress’s voice, saw it was time to be off.
‘Arthur and I’ve spoiled him outrageously,’ Margaret said. ‘We spoiled all our servants.’
‘God will reward you,’ said Babaji.
‘We could never think of them as servants, really. They were more our friends. I’ve learned such a lot from Indian servants. They’re usually rogues, but underneath all that they have beautiful characters. They’re very religious, and they have a lot of philosophy – you’d be surprised. We’ve had some fascinating conversations. You ought to keep a servant, Elizabeth – I’ve told you so often.’ When she saw Elizabeth was about to answer something, she said, ‘And don’t say you can’t afford it. Your Raju earns enough, I’m sure, and they’re very cheap.’
‘We don’t need one,’ Elizabeth said apologetically. There were just the two of them, and they lived in two small rooms. Sometimes Raju also took it into his head that they needed a servant, and once he had even gone to the extent of hiring an undernourished little boy from the hills. On the second day, however, the boy was discovered rifling the pockets of Raju’s trousers while their owner was having his bath, so he was dismissed on the spot. To Elizabeth’s relief, no attempt at replacing him was ever made.
‘If you had one you could get around a bit more,’ Margaret said. ‘Instead of always having to dance attendance on your husband’s mealtimes. I suppose that’s why you don’t want to take those poor little children to Agra?’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ Elizabeth said hopelessly.
‘Quite apart from anything else, you ought to be longing to get around and see the country. What do you know, what will you ever know, if you stay in one place all the time?’
‘One day you will come and visit me in Almora,’ Babaji said.
‘Oh Babaji, I’d love to!’ Elizabeth exclaimed.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, spreading his hands to describe it all. ‘The mountains, trees, clouds . . . ’ Words failed him, and he could only spread his hands farther and smile into the distance, as if he saw a beautiful vision there.
Elizabeth smiled with him. She saw it too, although she had never been there: the mighty mountains, the grandeur and the peace, the abode of Shiva where he sat with the rivers flowing from his hair. She longed to go, and to so many other places she had heard and read about. But the only place away from Delhi where she had ever been was Ankhpur, to stay with Raju’s family.
Margaret began to tell her about all the places she had been to. She and Arthur had been posted from district to district, in many different parts of the country, but even that hadn’t been enough for her. She had to see everything. She had no fears about travelling on her own, and had spent weeks tramping around in the mountains, with a shawl thrown over her shoulders and a stick held firmly in her hand. She had travelled many miles by any mode of transport available – train, bus, cycle, rickshaw, or even bullock cart – in order to see some little-known and almost inaccessible temple or cave or tomb: once she had sprained her ankle and lain all alone for a week in a derelict rest-house, deserted except for one decrepit old watchman, who had shared his meals with her.
‘That’s the way to get to know a country,’ she declared. Her cheeks were flushed with the pleasure of remembering everything she had done.
Elizabeth agreed with her. Yet although she herself had done none of these things, she did not feel that she was on that account cut off from all knowledge. There was much to be learned from living with Raju’s family in Ankhpur, much to be learned from Raju himself. Yes, he was her India! She felt like laughing when this thought came to her. But it was true.
‘Your trouble is,’ Margaret suddenly said, ‘you let Raju bully you. He’s got something of that in his character – don’t contradict. I’ve studied him. If you were to stand up to him more firmly, you’d both be happier.’
Again Elizabeth wanted to laugh. She thought of the nice times she and Raju often had together. He had invented a game of cricket that they could play in their bedrooms between the steel almira and the opposite wall. They played it with a rubber ball and a hairbrush, and three steps made a run. Raju’s favourite trick was to hit the ball under the bed, and while she lay flat on the floor groping for it he made run after run, exhorting her with mocking cries of ‘Hurry up! Where is it? Can’t you find it?’ His eyes glittered with the pleasure of winning; his shirt was off, and drops of perspiration trickled down his smooth, dark chest.
‘You should want to do something for those poor children!’ Margaret shouted.
‘I do want to. You know I do.’
‘I don’t know anything of the sort. All I see is you leading an utterly useless, selfish life. I’m disappointed in you, Elizabeth. When I first met you, I had such high hopes of you. I thought, ah, here at last is a serious person. But you’re not serious at all. You’re as frivolous as any of those girls that come here and spend their days playing mahjong.’
Elizabeth was ashamed. The worst of it was she really had once been a serious person. She had been a schoolteacher in England, and devoted to her work and her children, on whom she had spent far more time and care than was necessary in the line of duty. And, over and above that, she had put in several evenings a week visiting old people who had no one to look after them. But all that had come to an end once she met Raju.
‘It’s criminal to be in India and not be committed,’ Margaret went on. ‘There isn’t much any single person can do, of course, but to do nothing at all – no, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at nights.’
And Elizabeth slept not only well but happily, blissfully! Sometimes she turned on the light just for the pleasure of looking at Raju lying beside her. He slept like a child, with the pillow bundled under his cheek and his mouth slightly open, as if he were smiling.
‘But what are you laughing at!’ Margaret shouted.
‘I’m not, Margaret.’ She hastily composed her face. She hadn’t been aware of it, but probably she had been smiling at the image of Raju asleep.
Margaret abruptly pushed back her chair. Her face was red and her hair dishevelled, as if she had been in a fight. Elizabeth half-rose in her chair, aghast at whatever it was she had done and eager to undo it.
‘Don’t follow me,’ Margaret said. ‘If you do, I know I’m going to behave badly and I’ll feel terrible afterwards. You can stay here or you can go home, but don’t follow me.’
She went inside the house, and the screen door banged after her. Elizabeth sank down into her chair and looked helplessly at Babaji.
He had remained as serene as ever. Gently he rocked himself in his chair. The winter afternoon was drawing to its close, and the sun, caught between two trees, was beginning to contract into one concentrated area of gold. Though the light was failing, the garden remained bright and gay with all its marigolds, its phlox, its pansies and its sweet peas. Babaji enjoyed it all. He sat wrapped in his woollen shawl, with his feet warm in thick knitted socks and sandals.
‘She is a hot-tempered lady,’ he said, smiling and forgiving. ‘But good, good.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She’s an angel. I feel so bad that I should have upset her. Do you think I ought to go after her?’
‘A heart of gold,’ said Babaji.
‘I know it.’ Elizabeth bit her lip in vexation at herself.
Shafi came out with the tea tray. Elizabeth removed some books to clear the little table for him, and Babaji said, ‘Ah,’ in pleasurable anticipation. But Shafi did not put the tray down.
‘Where is she?’ he said.
‘It’s all right, Shafi. She’s just coming. Put it down, please.’
The old man nodded and smiled in a cunning, superior way. He clutched his tray more tightly and turned back into the house. He had difficulty in walking, not only because he was old and infirm but also because the shoes he wore were too big for him and had no laces.
‘Shafi!’ Elizabeth called after him. ‘Babaji wants his tea!’ But he did not even turn round. He walked straight up to Margaret’s bedroom and kicked the door and shouted, ‘I’ve brought it!’
Elizabeth hurried after him. She felt nervous about going into Margaret’s bedroom after having been so explicitly forbidden to follow her. But Margaret only looked up briefly from where she was sitting on her bed, reading a letter, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ and ‘Shut the door.’ When he had put down the tea, Shafi went out again and the two of them were left alone.
Margaret’s bedroom was quite different from the rest of the house. The other rooms were all bare and cold, with a minimum of furniture standing around on the stone floors; there were a few isolated pictures hung up here and there on the whitewashed walls, but nothing more intimate than portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Ramakrishna and a photograph of the inmates of Mother Teresa’s Home. But Margaret’s room was crammed with a lot of comfortable, solid old furniture, dominated by the big double bed in the centre, which was covered with a white bedcover and a mosquito curtain on the top like a canopy. A log fire burned in the grate, and there were photographs everywhere – family photos of Arthur and Margaret, of Margaret as a little girl, and of her parents and her sister and her school and her friends. The stale smell of food pervading the rest of the house stopped short of this room, which was scented very pleasantly by woodsmoke and lavender water. There was an umbrella stand that held several alpenstocks, a tennis racket and a hockey stick.
‘It’s from my sister,’ Margaret said, indicating the letter she was reading. ‘She lives out in the country and they’ve been snowed under again. She’s got a pub.’
‘How lovely.’
‘Yes, it’s a lovely place. She’s always wanted me to come and run it with her. But I couldn’t live in England any more, I couldn’t bear it.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean.’
‘What do you know? You’ve only been here a few years. Pour the tea, there’s a dear.’
‘Babaji was wanting a cup.’
‘To hell with Babaji.’
She took off her sandals and lay down on the bed, leaning against some fat pillows that she had propped against the headboard. Elizabeth had noticed before that Margaret was always more relaxed in her own room than anywhere else. Not all her visitors were allowed into this room – in fact, only a chosen few. Strangely enough, Raju had been one of these when he and Elizabeth had stayed in the house. But he had never properly appreciated the privilege; either he sat on the edge of a chair and made signs to Elizabeth to go or he wandered restlessly round the room, looking at all the photographs or taking out the tennis racket and executing imaginary services with it; till Margaret told him to sit down and not make them all nervous, and then he looked sulky and made even more overt signs to Elizabeth.
‘I brought my sister out here once,’ Margaret said. ‘But she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand anything – the climate, the water, the food. Everything made her ill. There are people like that. Of course, I’m just the opposite. You like it here too, don’t you?’
‘Very, very much.’
‘Yes, I can see you’re happy.’
Margaret looked at her so keenly that Elizabeth tried to turn away her face slightly. She did not want anyone to see too much of her tremendous happiness. She felt somewhat ashamed of herself for having it – not only because she knew she didn’t deserve it but also because she did not consider herself quite the right kind of person to have it. She had been over thirty when she met Raju, and had not expected much more out of life than had up till then been given to her.
Margaret lit a cigarette. She never smoked except in her own room. She puffed slowly, luxuriously. Suddenly she said, ‘He doesn’t like me, does he?’
‘Who?’
‘“Who”?’ she repeated impatiently. ‘Your Raju, of course.’
Elizabeth flushed with embarrassment. ‘How you talk, Margaret,’ she murmured deprecatingly, not knowing what else to say.
‘I know he doesn’t,’ Margaret said. ‘I can always tell.’
She sounded so sad that Elizabeth wished she could lie to her and say that no, Raju loved her just as everyone else did. But she could not bring herself to it. She thought of the way he usually spoke of Margaret. He called her by rude names and made coarse jokes about her, at which he laughed like a schoolboy and tried to make Elizabeth laugh with him; and the terrible thing was sometimes she did laugh, not because she wanted to or because what he said amused her but because it was he who urged her to, and she always found it difficult to refuse him anything. Now when she thought of this compliant laughter of hers she was filled with anguish, and she began unconsciously to wring her hands, the way she always did at such secretly appalling moments.
But Margaret was having thoughts of her own, and was smiling to herself. She said, ‘You know what was my happiest time of all in India? About ten years ago, when I went to stay in Swami Vishwananda’s ashram.’
Elizabeth was intensely relieved at the change of subject, though somewhat puzzled by its abruptness.
‘We bathed in the river and we walked in the mountains. It was a time of such freedom, such joy. I’ve never felt like that before or since. I didn’t have a care in the world and I felt so – light. I can’t describe it – as if my feet didn’t touch the ground.’
‘Yes, yes!’ Elizabeth said eagerly, for she thought she recognized the feeling.
‘In the evenings we all sat with Swamiji. We talked about everything under the sun. He laughed and joked with us, and sometimes he sang. I don’t know what happened to me when he sang. The tears came pouring down my face, but I was so happy I thought my heart would melt away.’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said again.
‘That’s him over there.’ She nodded towards a small framed photograph on the dressing-table. Elizabeth picked it up. He did not look different from the rest of India’s holy men – naked to the waist, with long hair and burning eyes.
‘Not that you can tell much from a photo,’ Margaret said. She held out her hand for it, and then she looked at it herself, with a very young expression on her face. ‘He was such fun to be with, always full of jokes and games. When I was with him, I used to feel – I don’t know – like a flower or a bird.’ She laughed gaily, and Elizabeth with her.
‘Does Raju make you feel like that?’
Elizabeth stopped laughing and looked down into her lap. She tried to make her face very serious so as not to give herself away.
‘Indian men have such marvellous eyes,’ Margaret said. ‘When they look at you, you can’t help feeling all young and nice. But of course your Raju thinks I’m just a fat, ugly old memsahib.’
‘Margaret, Margaret!’
Margaret stubbed out her cigarette and, propelling herself with her heavy legs, swung down from the bed. ‘And there’s poor old Babaji waiting for his tea.’
She poured it for him and went out with the cup. Elizabeth went after her. Babaji was just as they had left him, except that now the sun, melting away between the trees behind him, was even more intensely gold and provided a heavenly background, as if to a saint in a picture, as he sat there at peace in his rocking chair.
Margaret fussed over him. She stirred his tea and she arranged his shawl more securely over his shoulders. Then she said, ‘I’ve got an idea, Babaji.’ She hooked her foot round a stool and drew it close to his chair and sank down on it, one hand laid on his knee. ‘You and I’ll take those children up to Agra. Would you like that? A little trip?’ She looked up into his face and was eager and bright. ‘We’ll have a grand time. We’ll hire a bus, and we’ll have singing and games all the way. You’ll love it.’ She squeezed his knee in anticipatory joy, and he smiled at her and his thin old hand came down on the top of her head in a gesture of affection or blessing.