Using their charm and their contacts, Farid and Farida had attempted to set up a business importing hand-loomed Indian textiles. It failed to prosper, and they became impresarios for visiting Indian musicians and dancers, and when these turned out to be unreliable and ungrateful they tried, in succession, ready-made Indian garments, hand-crafted Indian jewelry, Indian lampshades, Indian bedcovers, and Indian table linen—all those indigenous handicrafts by which others of their countrymen, far less gifted than Farid and Farida, made their fortunes in London, Paris, and New York. Ten years passed, then fifteen. They were still living in the temporary flat they had rented, and the landlord began trying to get them out. Farid was drinking. Farida stayed out late and went away for weekends; their erotic quarrels had turned into bitter fights. They had no money, they hated each other. One night, she packed up and returned to India. He stayed on, drank on—and survived, but only just.
After he had heard that she had become a holy woman, he kept muttering, “We’ll see about that.” He didn’t know what he meant; he was a person impelled by instinct rather than thought. This impelled him one day to go to Sunil’s elegant offices, where he had to wait in the outer reception area before finally being admitted, as a special favor to an old friend. Sunil sat behind his desk and looked at the watch on his hairy wrist and said, “Ten minutes, Farid.” Although he was without charm or contacts or aesthetic sensibility, Sunil had become rich from the very handlooms and handicrafts that had broken Farid’s back and spirit. When they had all been students together in Delhi, Farid and Farida had laughed at Sunil, who was ridiculously in love with Farida. At that time, when Farid was slim and beautiful, Sunil was fat and ungainly. He hadn’t changed, but now he had the best tailors and shirtmakers to help him, and he exuded confidence and eau de cologne. Farid still addressed him in the condescending tone that he and Farida had always used toward him. Sunil was too busy to notice. He got rid of Farid within the scheduled ten minutes, though not without handing over the check to cover the air fare to India and expenses. Sunil had also heard about Farida, but he didn’t laugh at the news. As was his habit, he would wait and see.
When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant. Trust her, Farid thought bitterly. Apart from her astonishing situation, she really was the same Farida—God knew how she did it. She was now in her fifties, but sitting there in the lotus position she looked as slim, lithe, and upright as ever. Her hair—dyed, no doubt—was black; her skin was clear and shone with a radiance that could only be the result of the best cosmetics, applied, he knew, with consummate skill. She was surrounded by four or five handmaidens, as exquisitely draped in orange as she was in white, and pilgrims came and went, touching her feet in reverence. She sat on the deerskin traditional to holy people, and someone stood behind her waving a fly whisk. If a fly happened to land on her, Farida waited for it to be flicked off. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she fingered a string of prayer beads in the same way, it occurred to Farid, that she had once fingered her pieces of jewelry, before they were sold off, one by one, to cover her expenses in London.
Farid regarded the scene from a distance. The tree—a huge banyan—spread its foliage over Farida and her handmaidens, but the people lining up to see her had to stand outside in the sun until it was their turn to be admitted into the shade of the tree. Farid watched her as she dealt with the pilgrims. To some she spoke at length, while others she only lightly touched as they bowed down to her; a few favored ones were handed some holy talisman by a handmaiden. But everyone appeared to come away fully satisfied, for Farida radiated blessing. Farid couldn’t help admiring her; he had often told her that she would have made a first-rate actress. At last he approached the tree and lined up with the other pilgrims. When it was his turn to be led up to her, he didn’t bow, like the others, but stood and looked down at her, one hand on his hip. She looked up at him and met his cynical smile with an ambiguous one of her own. She made it seem as if she had been expecting him, even after twenty years. They kept on looking at each other, and he felt the challenge that had always lain between them.
She looked away first, turning around to a handmaiden to murmur some command. Straightaway, he was led off and installed in a whitewashed little cell in one of a chain of plain brick structures that rambled all over the mountainside. These constituted an ashram, and of course the accommodations were of the simplest, but everything was clean, pleasant, and orderly. He decided to stay on, at least for a while. There was little expense to him, he discovered—in fact, none at all—which was just as well, because Sunil’s money wasn’t going to last forever. He couldn’t say he was uncomfortable. Within a day or two, he realized that he was being treated as an honored guest. Regular meals were brought to him on a tray, and there was always someone hovering around to see if he needed anything; someone even brought him his cigarettes from the bazaar. He decided to treat the whole thing as a holiday—a well-deserved one, at that, for God knew he’d had a pretty rough struggle to keep himself going, while Farida apparently had experienced no difficulty landing on her feet. She was his wife, after all, and if good fortune had come her way it was no more than right that he should have some modest share of it.
The days passed as evenly for him as they did for everyone else. The place had its own rhythm. It was a traditional sacred spot—almost as sacred as Banaras—and there were other holy people like Farida living there. They were Hindus and she was a Muslim, but that didn’t matter. Allah and Ishwar were equal here, and no one questioned which of them was responsible for the mountain peaks rising against the immaculate sky, or the sun that set in orange glory on one side and rose in pink effulgence on the other. Cymbals and temple bells rang out at regular intervals, and everyone hurried smiling to a variety of little white shrines and temples adorned with flags and garlands. Not Farid, of course—he didn’t go in for anything like that. Instead, he took little walks in the mornings and the late afternoons, climbing up a green path till he got tired and began panting, which was quite soon. At night, he slept on a string cot in his whitewashed cell. They had given him an old electric table fan, which kept him moderately cool, though he could have wished it made less clatter. When he got tired of the vegetarian meals they brought him, he wandered down into the little bazaar at the foot of the hill and ate a meat curry at one of the stalls there and had some worldly conversation with the shopkeepers and customers. Once, he went into the town cinema, together with the other town loafers, and saw one of those long, loud Hindi films, which he enjoyed more than a sophisticated person like himself should have. Once a day, he visited Farida under her tree. When she asked him whether everything was to his satisfaction, he replied with a shrug that suggested he neither asked for nor got much. Altogether, he conveyed the impression that he was doing her a favor by being there at all.
He was waiting for a showdown with her. He expected it. They had always had showdowns—explosions ignited by the fuel of their fiery temperaments. In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking, but later, during the years in London, the showdowns had become a release from the tensions not of love but of failure and frustration. They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors’ cooking. (They themselves had given up on cooking and only opened cans and frozen packets.) The flat also held the odors of Farida’s scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid’s drinks.
It was no wonder that, in their last years together, Farida had gone away as often as possible. She told him she went to follow up useful contacts—though these were vague by now, for they no longer had definite plans but just lived on in the hope of something turning up. It was when she came back from one of those expeditions that they had had their final quarrel. He had been alone in the flat all weekend, drinking. His eyes hurt, his head felt huge, and now he lay on the bed watching her brush her hair in front of the mirror. He could see her smiling to herself in a secret, sensuous way. He began to taunt her, asking her questions about where she had spent the weekend and taking pleasure in trapping her in discrepancies. Actually, she wasn’t very careful about her excuses any more and presented them to him with a take-it-or-leave-it indifference. But that day he persisted and she
