[1927-]
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany, to a Polish-Jewish father and a German-Jewish mother. In 1939 the twelve-year-old Ruth, her brother and her parents fled from the Nazis to England. She quickly learned to speak English and was educated at Hendon County School in London. In 1948 Jhabvala became a British citizen. In 1951, after receiving an MA in English literature from the University of London, she married a Parsee architect named Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi. Thus Jhabvala was introduced to the country which has figured most prominently in her writing, and to a lifestyle which she initially found exciting but later tired of and described as being like ‘living on the back of an animal’.
Jhabvala began writing and publishing fiction in India. Her first novel, To Whom She Will (1955; published in the US as Amrita), is an elegantly written comedy of manners that examines the disparity between romantic love and the Indian custom of arranged marriages. Jhabvala, the mother of three daughters, was particularly struck by Indian cross-gender and cross-cultural relationships. Her 1965 novel, A Backward Place, tells of three European women and their reactions to the Indian society. In other works she dissects the local customs and manners from the unique perspective of a female expatriate. Her tone ranges from one of sardonic amusement to unveiled criticism, and there is a frank ambivalence towards India in her writing. In 1972 Jhabvala acknowledged that her status left her ‘stranded in the middle’ of the British and Indian cultures, and that ‘the central fact of all my work … is that I am a European living permanently in India’.
In 1975 Jhabvala published her Booker Prize-winning novel, Heat and Dust, which is the story of an Englishwoman who sacrifices her Western liberty for the love of an Indian prince. However, despite her acclaim as an ‘Indian’ writer, Jhabvala was becoming increasingly uneasy in India. In 1975, with her husband’s encouragement, she moved to the United States. Since then, she has divided her time between New York and London, collaborating on film and television scripts, while she continues to write fiction. Although the influences of her life in India are still covertly evident, in In Search of Love and Beauty (1983) Jhabvala focuses for the first time oh the German-Jewish background of her childhood and in Three Continents (1987) she explores her enduring feelings of exile.
As a screenwriter she has enjoyed a long-term partnership with the American film director James Ivory, and her many screenplays for Merchant-Ivory productions include adaptations of E. M. Forster’s Room with a View (1986) and Howards End (1992). In 1983 she received the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for her screenplay of Heat and Dust, Other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984 and two Academy Awards for screenwriting.
The following extract from Jhabvala’s novel Three Continents addresses the theme of loneliness and the degree of isolation which British society, in particular London, can impose upon an individual Jhabvala’s life and work have been a testament to displacement, but out of this state of homelessness she has created a remarkable body of work.
It was a strange time for me in London. Although everyone else was very busy working for the movement, I had nothing to do except wait for those few hours when Crishi came to be with me; if he came, that is. I went around on my own, traveling on the tops of buses, walking through the parks in the rain. I went to museums and looked at pictures and antiquities, and went to see films in multiple cinemas, and when one was finished, I went in another one. I was so crazy with sex at the time, I went to some porno ones too, and that was strange, with all those men in raincoats, sitting very still and concentrated. Altogether London was strange to me – very different from the way I had known it on my previous stays there. The streets, the stores, and especially the museums seemed to be full of tourists, busloads of them with camera equipment and foreign languages I didn’t always recognize. Sometimes it seemed to me that the only English people I saw were museum attendants and policemen directing the flow of travelers into the right channels. When I look back on that time it was very often Saturday afternoon with everything in our neighborhood of tall Edwardian houses shut tight, except for a little general store run by an Indian family who kept open late into the night though not many customers came, everyone having gone away for the weekend.
I could always visit the other house, where Bari Rani and the girls lived on a permanent note of high-pitched excitement. Usually they were getting ready to go out, and the baths were running and girls shrieking and charging into each other’s bedrooms to exchange articles of clothing, perfumes, and makeup. Sometimes I went along with them, but I contributed nothing to their shopping expeditions, not buying anything for myself and unable to give sound advice on their purchases; nor to their parties, where they never noticed that I wasn’t having as fabulous a time as they were. Their phones rang a lot, very often from Bombay, and the Bari Rani would talk for hours and had no difficulty hearing above the noise of the LPs the girls were playing. She often said to me, ‘We must have a long talk, Harriet,’ and I think she meant to, but it couldn’t happen because she was continually being called away to the phone or to advise on an outfit; or she was fighting with Teresa, the Indian Christian girl they had brought with them, who had been their nanny and now was their companion and help. Teresa had an Indian boyfriend, and so did all the girls. I had difficulty keeping the girls’ boyfriends apart because they were all handsome and polite and exquisitely dressed, and fantastic dancers, as were the girls. Everyone talked in a lilting English with Hindi phrases thrown in – they talked constantly but no one had to listen and in fact it all sounded the same, all on one high note, more like singing than talking.
The girls were a few years younger than I – the eldest, Priti, had her seventeenth birthday around this time – and I knew that, like everyone I had gone to school with, they were very interested in sex. They talked and read about it and discussed it, with each other and their friends; but here too I couldn’t contribute, for although by this time I thought of nothing else either, it was in a different way. They knew nothing about the kind of sex I was going through, and I didn’t want them to know; it was as though I were protecting them. Probably they thought I was frigid, as everyone usually did, and I preferred a hundred times to have them think that than to know the reality. Only Crishi knew the reality, and it amused him no end. ‘What would Aunt Harriet say?’ was his standard crack whenever he involved me in some act he knew about. Aunt Harriet was one of his favorite jokes – he had seen her only that one time at Grandfather’s funeral, but he made her into this sort of archetypal figure to which he claimed I would revert. Whenever I hesitated to perform some new thing he wanted me to do, he said ‘There, see, you’ve reverted already.’ He had many Aunt Harriet stories. He said she always had to wear a brooch on her blouse so people could tell which was front Harriet and which was back; and once he came with a very serious face, saying a dead woman had been found and they were about to carry her off to the mortuary when he saw her and cried ‘No wait stop! That’s no corpse, that’s my Aunt Harriet.’ And so on. The frigidity of Anglo-Saxon women was a favorite subject with him, and the more we did at night the more jokes he made by day.
Unable to stay another minute alone in the flat, or cope with the romantic-girl atmosphere in the other house, I would walk miles in the hope of tiring myself out and dropping off to sleep till Crishi came. It was getting into fall, damp and chilly, and though the leaves were still on the trees and still green for the most part, they kept being blown off and lay on the paths and were trodden into mulch. Sometimes I sat on a wet bench in Hyde Park and got even more wet from the leaves dripping down on me. Lonely men wandering by stopped, and some sat with me to talk but I didn’t answer them much, so they soon wandered off again, sadder than ever. One man – quite an old man with a hat on that he didn’t take off – lay down on the grass near me, and it took me awhile before I realized he was masturbating, so I moved. I thought it was terrible that people, and even old people, should have these sensations, and be tortured by them. Another man must have witnessed this and he followed me and offered to call the police. He said it was disgusting and such persons must be stopped. I said no it’s all right, and walked faster and he walked faster too, and then it seemed he had to protect me and wouldn’t leave me. He said London was a very dangerous place, very bad people around, and a girl like me shouldn’t be walking in the park. He said in his own country no girl ever walked alone, and if she did, she was picked up by the police and sent back to her family. He didn’t say which his country was but referred to it constantly, so that practically every sentence started with ‘In my country…’ He was short, muscular, dark in a Middle Eastern way. His clothes were quite clean and whole but looked as though he might have bought them secondhand, maybe found them hanging in a market on a Sunday morning. After a while, walking with me, he took my hand, very nicely and respectfully, so that I felt I had to leave it there. His hand was very very warm, even hot, as if the climate of his country were stored in it. The rain kept on squeezing down the way it does in London, out of spongy colorless clouds. All around us in the park were these magnificent tall old trees, and when we came out there were these magnificent tall old buildings looming up into the wet air. He kept on talking, about his country and other general topics, still holding my hand very respectfully; sometimes he tickled my palm but stopped at once when he saw I didn’t like it. We went down a tube station, and since he had only enough money for one ticket, I bought my own. It was a long underground ride, anonymous and ghostlike, as though I had just died and didn’t know where I was bound for and neither did the other people who got in and out as the doors slid open at the stations; there was an unending stream of them, all smelling damp as if in their grave clothes. I felt completely passive and had stopped noticing that he was holding my hand.
When we got off and emerged up a long escalator, it was still raining from the same drained sky and over streets and streets and streets of identical houses. They were smaller houses than the ones where we lived, and grimier, and there were more gaps where some had been torn down and weeds grew in their foundations. There were also more shops – laundromats, a few supermarkets, a few very small shops going out of business and others already gone and boarded up; every block had at least one Pakistani or Bangladeshi restaurant and a donna-kebab place. We turned in to a doorway beside one of these places and walked up a very dark staircase. On the first landing he stopped and kissed me and his lips were as hot as his hand. He said his name was Salim. There was a dense smell of kebabs and the oil in which they had been fried many times. We walked up one flight more and he unlocked a door and invited me into his room. It was poorly furnished but he kept it nice with a tablecloth and photographs. He had made his bed before going out and there was a blue cotton cover on it. A pair of dark trousers was folded over the only chair. He hung them in the wardrobe so I could sit down. There was an awkward silence, for it was difficult to find anything to say. He had a clock, ticking with a tinny sound, and this seemed the most prominent object in the room except for the wardrobe, which was a very bulky piece of furniture and leaned forward slightly as though about to crash down.
He made tea on a tiny portable stove he had by the open fireplace. The tea was very good, very strong with creamy milk and much sugar and some other taste that may have been cloves. I wished I could have drunk it and said thank you and good-bye, but of course that was not what we had come for on that long underground ride. I looked at the photographs that stood on the tablecloth as on a little altar. There were some old people, some children, some young men in military uniform; when I looked at them, he explained who they were and at the same time he put his hand on my knee. I moved this knee slightly and in my embarrassment asked more questions in fast succession. He answered them and put his hand back on my knee. I picked up a studio photograph of a young man – I thought it was he but he said no, it was his brother. ‘Dead,’ he said, and I had hardly made sounds of regret, when he added ‘Shot.’ He slid his hand farther up my thigh, and feeling shocked and sorry about his brother, I didn’t like to stop him. He leaned forward from the bed and pressed his lips on mine. His chin felt rough and stubbly – he may have shaved in the morning but probably needed to do so at least twice a day. He smelled like a person who tried to keep himself clean but did not have adequate bathing facilities. He was now breathing hard and tried to make me get off the chair and join him on the bed. I said ‘I must go. My husband’s waiting.’ I’m sure I sounded like Aunt Harriet. If I had had gloves, at this point I would have put them on.
I had forgotten how much stronger men are than women. It wasn’t that he was a rough or brutal man – on the contrary – but that his need was great. After all, he was away from his wife, his family, and lived alone in this little room in a rainy city of endless row houses. He even tried to argue with me – he said, quite reasonably, Then why did you come?’ I couldn’t say for the tea; I couldn’t say anything. I felt I had to go through with it. But anyway there was no choice anymore. Lying under him on the lumpy bed onto which he had thrown me, watching his contorted, sweating face, I stroked his cheek because I felt sorry to have roused him so far. He didn’t take long and afterward appeared to feel satisfied and grateful. I also felt grateful – that it was over, for one thing, and for another that I hadn’t enjoyed it: not at all, there had been no gratification of any kind for me. I realized that my ravenous need was not that of one physical animal for another but for one particular human being – for Crishi, for my husband, whom I loved.