When the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala passed away in 2013, an obit writer in The Guardian recalled meeting her at “a literary party” in the 1950s. Detecting a faint Indian accent and seeing her turned out in a sari, he asked her, “What part of India do you come from?” She answered, “I don’t come from any part of India. I merely live there. In Delhi.”
Oddly, this conversation came back to me while reading a new collection of her previously published short stories published this month, At the End of the Century: The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. For someone who happened to be “merely living in Delhi”, it is a reminder of her accomplishment in capturing the city as no other writer of fiction in Delhi has. In an introduction that makes you acutely aware of the need for a literary biography of Jhabvala, Anita Desai recalls her interaction with Jhabvala in the mid-1950s. In fact, Desai dates her introduction as 1955, the year Jhabvala published her first novel To Whom She Will . She also adds the location, Alipur Road, one of the main arteries of Delhi’s Civil Lines that was subsequently renamed Sham Nath Marg.
Writes Desai: “Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it — to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further to Quidsia Gardens. And, along the road, I’d see a young woman pushing along a perambulator with a baby seated inside it and a little girl dancing alongside.” In time, a friendship, and something of an apprenticeship, was struck.
Jhabvala, then not yet 30, had come to the city having married an Indian architect she met while at university in London. In fact, London had been something of a transit as her family had fled Nazi Germany, and eventually she’d leave Delhi too for a more permanent life in New York, where along with Ismail Merchant and James Ivory she was part of a trio responsible for films including The Householder (based on her own 1960 Delhi novel of the same name), A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day . Desai, herself half-German, was a student at Delhi University, and drawn into Jhabvala’s hospitable home of conversation and books, she found validation that their quiet lives could hold material for lasting fiction. “One day,” writes Desai, “she placed in my hands a copy of To Whom She Will … Holding it, I felt I had touched something barely considered possible — that the scribbling one did in one’s hidden corner of the world could be printed, published and read in the world beyond. Could our drab, dusty, everyday lives yield material that surely belonged only to the genius of a Chekhov, a Jane Austen, a Woolf or a Bronte?”
Among the stories is one of my favourites, A Lovesong for India , published in a collection of that name in 2011. In it, an Indian bureaucrat’s British wife “for the rest of their days… yearned for the districts of their early years”. To her, it had been “a recognisable India.” Uncannily, it’s Jhabvala who managed to give readers a sense of a recognisable Delhi, with characters like Prem, the young teacher of The Householder who’d be played memorably in the film adaptation by Shashi Kapoor, always measuring themselves against their unachievable ambitions. Ambitions, big and small, spiritual and material, drive her characters — but their inner life is placed amid very specific locations.
Looking into the mirror
In his big Delhi book Delhi: Adventures in A Megacity , published in 2010, journalist Sam Miller searches for the exact location of a stand out scene in The Householder in which Kapoor and Leela Naidu are quarrelling on the roof of their building with a gorgeous mosque in the background. He finds the building, which, along with its owner, has by now fallen on harsh times, and the shock of recognition that the mirror in a dusty room with his reflection is the same one which Naidu looked into in the film is perhaps the most startling passage in the book. Along with Desai’s introduction, it is an invitation to set out into Delhi’s streets for traces of Jhabvala, biographical and fictional.
