feeling so rotten?
In the past, in their years of happiness, he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way. Later, he began to miss his mark, and that was what happened that day. Before he knew where he was, with his sick eyes and head, she had jumped up from the mirror, crashed her hairbrush against the wall behind him, and stood above him in an attitude of menace. He squinted up at her, mocking and malevolent. Her silk robe, cut down from a sari, swung wide open, and her full breasts, unconfined by a brassiere, were before him. Her breasts had always been an exciting contrast to her small waist and slender arms, though not to her hips, which also swelled voluptuously. He reached up his hand to squeeze one breast, and remarked with a sneer that these fruits must have been damaged by being handled too often on too many weekends. All at once she was on top of him. She sat astride his chest and seized his hair and banged his head up and down. Even without a hangover, there would have been no way he could defend himself against her. At that moment, she was as irresistible, as inexorable, as the goddess Kali, who, with bared and dripping fangs, rides her victims to destruction.
The next moment—well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image—there she was, holy under a tree. It was only natural that on his daily visits he should continue to look at her with the same cynical, not-to-be-fooled expression—with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, in a most unreverential posture. She didn’t seem to mind. The eyes she raised to him were absolutely clear, inviting him to read what he would in them. Meanwhile, her other visitors, the pilgrims, came and went, touching her feet and taking her blessings. As they drew near, their faces became radiant, and they appeared to retain this glow as they departed. Farida’s handmaidens glided about, and now and then one of them sang a song of spiritual love while another accompanied her, plucking a slow, droning sound out of a lutelike instrument. If Farida felt the song was too low-spirited—and her handmaidens, so gentle and good, did have a tendency to droop—then she herself would chime in, giving more of a swing and lift to it, and snapping her fingers as if to say, “Come on, let’s get going!” Then everybody responded; voices rose, the drone hastened and took on melody, gentle smiles shook off melancholy, and at the end, when the women had finished in unison on their top notes, Farida said, “That’s better,” so that everyone laughed out loud, and this sound mingled with the last joyful notes still vibrating in the air.
At home, in her youth and heyday, Farida had always had this ability to make a party go. When things got too slow for her, she would turn up the record-player or replace the LP on it with a faster one to dance to. If her partner couldn’t keep up with her, she would discard him and try another and another, and if none of them could come up to the mark—“What a bunch of dummies!”—she simply danced by herself, with her slippers kicked off and her hair and gossamer veil flying, while everyone stood around her and applauded. In London, too, at the beginning of their life there, she and Farid had given terrific parties, cramming the flat with more people than it could hold, so that the guests spilled into the kitchen, where Farida was boldly throwing spices together. She was always experimenting with curries she remembered from her grandmother’s cuisine, and these usually turned out extremely well, filling the flat with their rich aromas. Everyone sat on the floor, eating with their fingers Indian style, while Farida picked her way among her friends, putting more delicious things on their already overflowing plates while Farid refilled their glasses, and both of them—Farid and Farida—talking in their high, excited voices, which could always be heard above the hubbub of their guests.
At that time it had been easy for them to enjoy themselves and make everyone else happy too. It was all done with no more effort than the way Farida made herself look beautiful; he never saw her do more than glance over her shoulder in the mirror, twisting her hair quickly into a coil on top of her head, or else deciding to leave it loose down her back, with a rose stuck in it. Later, however, this changed. It irritated him to watch the painstaking way she got herself ready to go to other people’s parties—by then, they could no longer afford to give them—painting larger lips and darker eyelids over her own; she had begun to wear curlers at night, and she got up with them in the morning, looking cross and ugly. And, just as she had to take pains over her appearance, she had to work harder to be successful at these parties. Now when she cried, “Come on, let’s get going!” no one seemed to hear her or pay attention. Her voice had become shrill, her laugh harsher and louder. When she had decided who was worth her attention at a party, she would hang on to his arm with her skinny hands. Often it was Sunil on whom she concentrated at parties. He was getting to be the richest and most successful of their circle. Once he had mooned after Farida in a dogged, hopeless way, but now he liked plump Scandinavian blondes, who sometimes perched on his lap. Farida, ignoring them, would bring some tidbit for him from the buffet table and dangle it above him until he opened his mouth to receive it; she cried, “Good boy!” and clapped her hands, while he chewed with indifferent relish. It sickened Farid to watch this, and perhaps it sickened Farida too, because when they got home she was in a rotten mood and turned her back on him and went to sleep as if she never wanted to get up again.
Somehow she did get up, every morning, and although all their projects failed, one after the other, she was always starting new ones. Elegantly dressed, meticulously made up, her jaw somewhat set, she went out each day in pursuit of some business she had just thought up that was certain to pull them out of their predicament. When they had been in London for about ten years (she was well into her thirties by this time), she decided to organize a line of Indian cocktail delicacies—samosas, pakoras, kebabs—to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores. She dealt with the very fanciest places, and only with their top directors; it was taken for granted that no secretary or any other underling could stand in her way when she presented herself, without an appointment but emanating an almost royal authority, and quickly sailed right into the innermost sanctum of these offices. And when she came out again she was invariably escorted by the director himself, smiling and flattered by her direct approach to him. She gave the impression that she was conducting the affairs of her own exclusive catering firm—which was true, in a way. What the directors did not realize was that she made all the delicacies herself, working alone in the makeshift kitchen of their flat, while Farid lay in bed and complained about the smell of her deep-fat frying.
She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes, which stood piled in their living room. She packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores, going from one to the other in a taxi. By the third week of this, she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, from her slow and expensive delivery rounds, and from the complaints that were beginning to come in. Also, it was becoming evident that the cost of the ingredients, the packaging, and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected, and one night when Farid again complained about the smell she marched into the bedroom with a pan of hot oil and threatened to pour it on him. He locked himself in the bathroom, and when at last he emerged he found her sitting on the floor with the deep-fry pan beside her. Her knees were hunched up and her head was laid on them; her hair was half uncoiled, and she was wearing an old cotton sari spattered with grease. He grew angry at the sight of her. “What are you—a cook or something?” he shouted, and when she didn’t answer or stir he worked himself up further. “No one asked you to do this kind of work. Tcha—what would your parents say, what would my parents say, if they knew?”
Still with her head on her knees, she murmured, “Then what are we going to do?”
“We’ll find something,” he said, her defeat making him strong. “We don’t have to put up with this nonsense. Get rid of all that filthy stuff.” He seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet. When she heard the firm way in which he flushed it away, she raised her head and wiped her eyes with the end of her sari and felt better.
But then it was his responsibility to raise some money to keep them going, and the only way he knew was to borrow from Sunil, as he had done so often over the years. Sunil received him in his Mayfair flat, and Farid looked
