Out of India. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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СКАЧАТЬ day and all night, only scurrying off to have a quick look at her own household, with her own old husband in it, and coming back within the hour. Durga suspected that, on these home excursions of hers, Bhuaji went well provided with little stocks of rice and lentils and whatever other provisions she could filch from the kitchen store. But Durga hardly cared and was, at any rate, in no frame of mind to make a scene. And when they asked for money, Bhuaji or the other relatives, as often as not she gave—quite absentmindedly, taking out her keys to unlock the steel almira in which she kept her cashbox, while they eagerly, greedily, watched her.

      At such moments she often thought of her husband and of what he would say if he could see her being so yielding with these relatives. She could almost imagine him getting angry—hear his shrill old man’s voice and see him shaking his fist so that the sleeve of his kurta flapped and showed his plucked, dried arm trembling inside. But she did not care for his anger; it was her life, her money, she sullenly answered him, and she could let herself be exploited if she wished. Why should he, a dead old man, dictate his wishes to her, who was alive and healthy and a devotee of Krishna’s? She found herself thinking of her husband with dislike. It was as if she bore him some grudge, though she did not know what for.

      The relatives sat in the house and got bolder and bolder, until they were giving their own orders to the servants and complaining about the quality of the tea.

      It was about this time that the tenants who had rented the place upstairs gave notice—an event that brought great excitement into the lives of the relatives, who spent many happy hours apportioning the vacant flat out among themselves (Bhuaji, of course, was going to move her old husband into one room, and she left the others to fight for the remaining space). But here suddenly Durga showed herself quite firm again: tenants meant rent, and she had no intentions, not even to spite her husband, of sacrificing a regular monthly income. So only a few days after the old tenants moved out, and the relatives were still hotly disputing among themselves as to how the place was to be apportioned, a new family of tenants moved in, consisting of one Mr. Puri (a municipal tax inspector) with his wife, two daughters, and a son. Their belongings were carried upstairs to loud, remonstrative cries from the relatives; to which Durga turned a deaf ear—even to the plaints of Bhuaji, who had already brought her old husband and her household chattels along and now had to take them back again.

      Durga had been worshiping her two images for so long now, but nothing of what Bhuaji had promised seemed to be happening to them. And less and less was happening to her. She tried so hard, lying on her bed and thinking of Krishna and straining to reproduce that wave of love she had experienced; but it did not return or, if it did, came only as a weak echo of what it had been. She was unsatisfied and felt that much had been promised and little given. Once, after she had prayed for a long time before the two images, she turned away and suddenly kicked at the leg of a chair and hurt her toe. And sometimes, in the middle of doing something—sorting the laundry or folding a sari—she would suddenly throw it aside with an impatient gesture and walk away frowning.

      She spent a lot of time sitting on a string cot in her courtyard, not doing anything nor thinking anything in particular, just sitting there, feeling heavy and too fat and wondering what there was in life that one should go on living it. When her relatives came to visit her, she as often as not told them to go away, even Bhuaji; she did not feel like talking or listening to any of them. But now there was a new person to stake a claim to her attention. The courtyard was overlooked by a veranda that ran the length of the flat upstairs. On this veranda Mrs. Puri, her new tenant, would frequently appear, leaning her arms on the balustrade and shouting down in friendly conversation. Durga did not encourage her and answered as dryly as politeness permitted; but Mrs. Puri was a friendly woman and persisted, appearing twice and three times a day to comment to Durga on the state of the weather. After a while she even began to exercise the prerogative of a neighbor and to ask for little loans—one day she had run out of lentils, a second out of flour, a third out of sugar. In return, when she cooked a special dish or made pickle, she would send some down for Durga, thus establishing a neighborly traffic that Durga had not wished for but was too lethargic to discourage.

      Then one day Mrs. Puri sent some ginger pickle down with her son. He appeared hesitantly in the courtyard, holding his glass jar carefully between two hands. Durga was lying drowsily on her cot; her eyes were shut and perhaps she was even half asleep. The boy stood and looked down at her, knowing what to do, lightly coughing to draw her attention. Her eyes opened and stared up at him. He was perhaps seventeen years old, a boy with large black eyes and broad shoulders and cheeks already dark with growth. Durga lay and stared up at him, seeing nothing but his young face looming above her. He looked back at her, uncertain, tried to smile, and blushed. Then at last she sat up and adjusted the sari which had slipped down from her breasts. His eyes modestly lowered, he held the jar of pickle out to her as if in appeal.

      “Your mother sent?”

      He nodded briefly and, placing the jar on the floor by her cot, turned to go rather quickly. Just as he was about to disappear through the door leading out from the courtyard, she called him back, and he stopped and stood facing her, waiting. It was some time before she spoke, and then all she could think to say was “Please thank your mother.” He disappeared before she could call him back again.

      Durga had become rather slovenly in her habits lately, but that evening she dressed herself up in one of her better saris and went to call on Mrs. Puri upstairs. A visit from the landlady was considered of some importance, so Mrs. Puri, who had been soaking raw mangoes, left this work, wiped her hands on the end of her sari and settled Durga in the sitting room. The sitting room was not very grand; it had only a cane table in it and some cane stools and a few cheap bazaar pictures on the whitewashed walls. Durga sat in the only chair in the room, a velvet armchair that had the velvet rubbed bare in many places and smelled of old, damp clothes.

      Mrs. Puri’s two daughters sat on the floor, stitching a quilt together out of many old pieces. They were plain girls with heavy features and bad complexions. Mr. Puri evidently was out—and his wife soon dwelled on that subject: every night, she said, he was sitting at some friend’s house, goodness knows what they did, sitting like that, what could they have so much to talk about? And wasting money in smoking cigarettes and chewing betel, while she sat at home with her daughters, poor girls, and wasn’t it high time good husbands were found for them? But what did Mr. Puri care—he had thought only for his own enjoyment, his family was nothing to him. And Govind the same. . . .

      “Govind?”

      “My son. He too—only cinema for him and laughing with friends.”

      She had much to complain about and evidently did not often have someone whom she could complain to; so she made the most of Durga. The two plain daughters listened placidly, stitching their quilt; only when their mother referred to the urgent necessity of finding husbands for them—as she did at frequent intervals and as a sort of capping couplet to each particular complaint—did they begin to wriggle and exchange sly glances and titter behind their hands.

      It took Durga some time before she could disengage herself; and when she finally did, Mrs. Puri accompanied her to the stairs, carrying her burden of complaint right over into her farewell and even pursuing Durga with it as she picked her way down the steep, narrow stone stairs. And just as she had reached the bottom of them, Govind appeared to walk up them, and his mother shouted down to him, “Is this a time to come home for your meal?”

      Durga, passed him in the very tight space between the doorway and the first step. She was so close to him that she could feel his warmth and hear his breath. Mrs. Puri shouted down the stairs: “Running here and there all day like a loafer!” Durga could see his eyes gleaming in the dark and he could see hers; for a moment they looked at each other. Durga said in a low voice, “Your mother is angry with you,” and then he was already halfway up the stairs.

      Later, slowly unwinding herself from her sari and staring at herself СКАЧАТЬ