East Into Upper East (11 page)

“Katharine.” He considered it. “Yes, Katharine is seriously English.”

He stood close beside me; his breath was very sweet. Waves of deliciousness welled up inside me: so this was love, falling in love, the real thing.

“But you know what?” he said. “I prefer Kitty. Because I don't believe you're so very English. You're sensitive, understanding—in a way the others aren't. You know what I think? I think you're more like us. You're really Indian.”

“I wish I were.”

“Really? You wish that? Why, Kitty? Please tell me.”

His eyes, dark pools melting in moonlight, were fixed on me.
Perhaps from that moment a new intimacy might have arisen between us. But we were interrupted.

“Sanjay? Are you here?”

It was Pushpa, the fat girl whom no one liked very much. She stepped closer and peered to make us out: “Oh, it
is
you. What are you doing up here? Listen, I have to go and my car hasn't shown up. That new driver is completely unreliable, I've told Daddy again and again, but of course it's me who'll get the scolding if I'm home late.”

“I'll drop you,” Sanjay said at once.

“Sorry to break up the tête-à-tête,” she said with an unapologetic laugh.

“Oh yes, you should be sorry. Kitty and I were on the verge of solving all the problems of the world, weren't we, Kitty? Wait a sec while I get my car keys.”

We trooped down the stairs. I left shortly after they did, driving my little Morris Minor through the ancient city gates of crumbling masonry that led from Old to New Delhi. I wasn't disappointed but very excited. The city was asleep, people were stretched out on the sidewalks, some on string cots, others on tattered cloths spread on the ground or on handcarts from which in the day they sold peanuts and bananas. On one side the turrets and bastions of the Red Fort stood massed in shadow, on the other the dome of the great mosque was veiled in a reflected light, dimly white but with the moon in its first quarter glittering beside it, a diamond-hard scimitar.

Pushpa was different from the other girls. They were all bright and intelligent, but she was brilliant. She was among the first women to pass the Indian Administrative Service exam and was at present with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Before that, she had been sent out to a district in central India, where she had been responsible for administering vast areas of land and a rural population of several hundred thousand. This had given her a very authoritative manner and a loud voice that drowned out every argument. She was respected for her brains, but she was not popular. Sanjay's sister Gita was positively hostile to her. She warned Sanjay that Pushpa was “out to catch him” (this was the phrase she used).
Sanjay just laughed in his easy charming way and said, Don't worry, he had no intention of getting caught before his time. As a member of the élite foreign service, he was of course a highly desirable match; very good offers kept coming for him, from landowning and even royal families of their own caste. These offers were rejected out of hand by his two sisters. They were none of them in a hurry to give up their carefree life in their own house. And besides, they were radically opposed to the concept of arranged marriages—at least, the two girls were: both of them were determined to marry only for love. Sanjay's attitude was more ambivalent.

The subject of arranged marriage was among those often discussed by these friends. It came under the category of tradition versus modernity (spinning wheel v. steel plant), though with a more personal edge to it. Some agreed with Gita and Ratna that only the free choice of a love match was acceptable to a modern educated Indian; others urged the wisdom that their elders would bring to the selection of a suitable mate. Pushpa was among those advocating a middle course. By all means, she shouted, meet each other, get to know each other, make your own decision, but for goodness sake, nothing rash, no elopement! Let parents have the say to which they were entitled. Since her argument was delivered more cogently and more loudly than anyone else's, it prevailed with some who wavered in their opinion. These included Sanjay. Much annoyed, his sister Gita tossed her shoulder-length dark auburn hair and said that
he
could do what he liked but
she
wasn't going to let herself be led like a lamb to slaughter. This caused laughing protests that they were talking about marriage not slaughter. The wit among them—it was Ratna's future husband—called out: “Isn't it the same thing?” Amid more laughter, Gita stamped her foot: “I thought we were having a serious discussion!” Then she turned to me: “What do you think?”

They often did that—asked for my opinion as that of an impartial outsider. Now too they all turned toward me and Sanjay said, “Yes, let's hear your side of this highly interesting question.”

Although I felt myself stupidly blushing, I spoke up bravely: “Well of course, I could only marry if I were in love.”

“But how would you
know
?” Sanjay said, frowning the way he did when he wanted to get to the root of a problem.

“Oh, I would know all right. That's easy.”

“Too easy,” put in another brilliant young man (later India's ambassador to France). “Who was it said, ‘Many people would never have been in love if they hadn't heard others talk about it'?”

“That's utter and complete rubbish,” Gita said, and Ratna felt even more strongly: “It's horrible. I hate cynicism.”

Pushpa's voice was firmly raised again: “And supposing you were what you call in love with the wrong person—someone completely unsuitable? Like an uneducated person, or someone from a different class or caste or a different race?”

Gita challenged her: “If Kitty fell in love with an Indian—is that what you're asking?”

Then Pushpa challenged me: “Would you marry him?”

“Of course I would. If he asked me.” I laughed away my own embarrassment: “This is purely theoretical—probably I'll never marry. I'm supposed to be a career woman.”

“So am I,” said Pushpa. “But I hope and trust I shall also be a good wife and mother.”

And Gita murmured, “Keep on hoping and trusting till you find some blind fool to ask for you.” Only one or two girls heard her, and it made them titter. Secure in their own beauty, they could afford to be patronizing about Pushpa. She was squat and overweight, and her arduous studying—it was not easy to pass the IAS exam—had weakened her eyesight, so that she was the only one of the girls who had to wear glasses.

After that one almost romantic moment on the roof of his house, I never again found myself alone with Sanjay. Yet others in our group were not shy about being alone with each other. They even managed to sleep together—making secret sexual arrangements seemed to be almost a tradition among them (and other arrangements too, when a girl got accidentally pregnant). Sanjay was different; there was something aloof about him, as though he were cautiously keeping himself for his future. He was always more than polite to me—tenderly so: he worried about my health, that I shouldn't eat anything outside or drink unboiled water. “You don't have the stomach to deal with our stout Indian germs,” he told me (but I never once got sick). When the weather turned in November
and we were still sitting out on the lawn, he would hurry inside and get a shawl for me to wear. It irritated Pushpa: “She's not made of glass,” she said. A little later she herself would start shivering, so that Sanjay had to go in and get another shawl.

Whenever there was a party, Gita and Sanjay argued about inviting Pushpa. “Why should she come?” Gita said. “She's not such a great friend of ours that she has to be around our necks every time.”

“She's both a friend
and
a colleague,” Sanjay answered. “It's important, Giti—we have to stick together, all of us in the services.”

“That's no reason for the rest of us to be bored to death.”

But Sanjay, usually so sweetly yielding with his sisters, was adamant on this point: he could not, would not offend anyone who might in any way be involved in his career. He was ambitious, yes, but not only on his own account. He sincerely felt that the good of his country depended on people like himself and Pushpa, in charge of its development and progress.

On her twentieth birthday, there was a party for Ratna. It was also an unofficial engagement party, for she and the witty young diplomat who was Sanjay's colleague had come to an understanding. On the day of the celebration, an electrician fixed festive lights in the trees, and Gita ordered a birthday cake so enormous and white that it might as well have been a wedding cake. Good wishes and gifts were heaped on Ratna, along with a lot of teasing. Slight and slender, almost frail—her sister Gita, though also slim, was far more robust—she laughed and blushed; she kept hiding her face in her palms and also leaned forward so that her long hair veiled her completely. There came a moment when it was absolutely necessary for her to be alone with her happiness, and she slipped away as soon as she saw us absorbed in our usual topics of conversation. That never took long: the problems of India were always with us, and no birthday party could make us forget them.

At this time Indian foreign policy tended to lean toward the Communist bloc, and as a representative of the other side, it was up to me to urge the advantage of joining us. Of course they jumped on me—as usual, I had to hear about the decadence of the West and the evils of our capitalist system. But they didn't keep up the attack for long. It was a delicacy in them—I was a guest and outnumbered, and Sanjay was the first to drop the argument and to drift away. The only one who didn't let go was Pushpa; it was not in her nature to let go
of anything important to her. And she really did have strong feelings on the subject, as she did on most Now she became very heated, going beyond the subject of Eastern versus Western political alliance to the perennial matter of the evils of imperialism and how an independent India must free herself totally from the yoke of the West. She had every kind of argument at her fingertips—for instance, the relative figures of the cotton trade before and after Independence—and though I always enjoyed a good debate, I felt at a disadvantage against Pushpa. After all, as she kept reminding me, it was her country that had suffered injustice and mine that had inflicted it. She had raised her voice and others became uneasily aware that the light-hearted spirit of the birthday party was being disrupted. Soon Sanjay came back to us, smiling, a sociable host with a glass of champagne in each hand. But Pushpa said, “You know I don't drink that stuff.”

Sanjay went right on smiling: “Then let us drink your health—and the health of the Eastern bloc. Kitty, shall we?” While he and I clinked glasses, he said to Pushpa, “I'll get you some pineapple juice.”

“I don't want it.” Her face, already puffy from arguing, swelled up even more and her eyes swam as though with tears. Tears at Ratna's party! I felt guilty to have caused them and tried to touch her hand in a friendly gesture. She snatched it away and hid it behind her back, like a fat and angry child. Sanjay and I exchanged helpless glances—she saw us, and now the tears not only filled her eyes but came rolling down her cheeks. She said she wanted to go home.

“But Pushpa, we haven't even cut the cake yet!” cried Sanjay.

“I can't wait. I have to go. I promised Mummy—she's not well.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Is it her blood pressure again?” When Sanjay solicitously touched her naked arm, she did not move it away. She said, “I suppose that goddamn driver's disappeared again.”

“Stay a bit,” Sanjay pleaded. “We'll light the candles, cut the cake—Ratna, where's Ratna? Kitty, please call her—”

“No! I have to go!”

Her voice was so loud, her anger so disproportionate that Sanjay had to save the situation. “I'll take you,” he said quietly.

She calmed down instantly, and while he left to get his car keys, she adjusted her sari in preparation for departure. Arranging it over one shoulder, she explained to me: “I get so carried away, I can't help it.”