picture?” he said. “Is it new? Oh, my God.”
“Listen, Farid, it’s from a very ritzy gallery in Brook Street,” Sunil said calmly. “It cost me a packet, I can tell you.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted. Except of course when it comes to his friends—then it’s a different story.”
“When have I ever said no?” Sunil said in dull resignation.
It was true, he didn’t often turn down his old friends, but that did not improve Farid’s feelings toward him.
Matters grew worse as the years passed and Sunil went up and Farid down. Farida began to go away for weekends. Farid suspected that she went to meet Sunil, but when he accused her of this she just laughed. What made him think that she would go to Sunil for anything but money, she said. And what made him think Sunil had any time left for her, now that Sunil was what he was and she was—well, she said with a shrug, anyone could see what she was now. Farid stared at her. She was now in her late thirties—they had been struggling along in London for a good fifteen years—and she had grown very thin. Her face, under her lacquered hair, was heavily made up. But beneath it all she was still Farida—just as, he realized, beneath all his bad feeling, and all his anger against her, there remained still the heart, the flower, of love. He kissed her hand and then her wrist, and then the soft skin of her inner arm.
She took advantage of his good mood to murmur that they would have to sell some more jewelry. “I need the money,” she urged. “For a new business—no, no, this one’s going to make it for sure, you’ll see. It’s in taxis for tourists.”
“What’s left to sell?” he asked.
She got out her jewel box, which was empty except for the one piece they had agreed never to sell. This was a single large and lustrous pearl in a gold setting. It was said to have been given by the last of the great Mogul emperors to Farida’s great-great-great-grandfather, who had been a nobleman at his court, and it had always been coveted by Sunil, whose own great-great-great-grandfather had been a moneylender’s clerk at the same court. Farida had worn the pearl on her forehead at her wedding, but that time only the bridegroom, Farid, had seen it, for only he was allowed to look under her veil. It was years later, in London, when Sunil caught his first sight of it. This was at a reception he was giving for an American buyer of table linen, to which Farida had come all dressed up. She was trying to start a business in batik table mats with matching napkins, and so was out to make an impression. Sunil had eyed the ornament, which was on a chain around her neck. When he tried to touch it, she put her hand over it and said, “Not for sale.”
“Let me know when it is,” he said in his phlegmatic voice, which he made even more phlegmatic when he was eager to acquire something at a bargain price.
Farid never knew at what price Sunil finally did acquire this ornament—the money soon vanished anyway in the tourist taxi business. He often wondered what Sunil had done with it. Had he sold it? Kept it? Hung it around the neck of a girl? Sometimes he asked him, but Sunil never let on. Actually, Farid was almost sure that Sunil had locked it away in the deepest and most secret of all his safe-deposit vaults, for Sunil—one had to admit it—recognized a thing of value when he saw it. It was greed, of course, but Farid knew that when it was a question of making money Sunil’s greed could be as subtle and unerring as anyone else’s taste and wisdom.
After several weeks at the holy place, during which he faced her every day, Farid had still not arrived at the expected showdown with Farida. He was even beginning to enjoy his visits to her for their own sake. They became the high point of his day. At first he had stood in line with all the other pilgrims awaiting their turn, but then he noticed that there was a time, just after the midday meal, when no one else was there and even the handmaidens had lain themselves to sleep. Although Farid enjoyed a siesta as much as anyone, one day he spruced himself up a bit, making the most of the strands of hair that lay across the top of his head and smoothing his bush shirt over his stomach. He looked down at his stomach and decided he had seen worse on men his age. Then he hurried—yes, hurried—across the empty compound that separated his quarters from her tree. The sun beat down on him from a fierce white sky, the paving stones burned underfoot, and a hot glare as tangible as glass permeated the air, but Farid hardly noticed. Once he reached his destination, the air felt absolutely different. The shade spread by the tree was as wide and cool as the interior of a shuttered house. The handmaidens lay asleep off to one side of the thick tree trunk, on the other Farida sat reading some ancient text. She was wearing big spectacles to read with but took them off quickly when he arrived. They had begun to have little conversations now.
“Look at you, how hot you are,” she said now, watching him wipe the perspiration from his face and neck.
“Naturally, a person gets hot,” he answered irritably. “Not everyone has the opportunity to sit under a tree all day.”
“At least you should wear a hat.”
“You know I never wear a hat,” he said still impatiently, though he didn’t feel that way at all. It was cool and peaceful under her roof of foliage.
The next day, he set out to find a hat in the little bazaar at the foot of the mountain. He was a well-known figure there by now—he always made friends quickly—and his quest for a solar hat made the shopkeepers smile. They said that only English-style sahibs like himself needed to protect their brains from the good Indian sun. It was not until he came to the end of the row of narrow booths that he discovered what he was looking for among a stock of cotton undervests, bottles of hair oil, and oleographs of gods and saints. As he put on the hat and looked at himself in a little metal mirror, his attention was caught by one of the highly colored pictures—a portrait of a saint that featured its subject against a traditional background of shrines, forests, rivers, and mountain caves. Farid would not have noticed this one except that it bore some resemblance to Farida. He looked closer and then realized that the saint in the picture actually was Farida. He stared at her, and it seemed to him that out of her painted background she stared back at him in the same way she did every day under the tree.
Suddenly he remembered that it was past the hour of his usual visit to her. He paid for his purchase and hurried back through the bazaar and up the path toward her tree. He didn’t even notice the stiff climb, which usually made him pant and stop several times. But when he came within sight of the tree he slowed down. He was approaching from the bazaar instead of from the ashram, and so it happened that he caught sight of Farida half rising from her place to peer anxiously along his usual path. He tiptoed up from behind her. “Were you expecting someone, Madam?” he said suddenly, and when she turned around he swept off his new hat and made a deep bow, at the same time tilting up his face to look into hers. Although she tried to hide her feelings with a frown, he knew that he had caught her out, and that was as satisfying as the showdown he had been hoping for.
For the next few weeks, Farid felt particularly light-hearted and happy. With his solar hat, bush shirt, and an alpenstock he had acquired, he looked every inch a Westernized Oriental Gentleman, but he didn’t feel that way. It seemed to him that he had shaken off that part of his life and was now as much at home with his surroundings as Farida, that he was at one with the little ashram, and with the other pilgrims, the shrines, the trees, the mountain paths, the water springs. He climbed up and down the hillside—a bit out of breath because of his smoking and because of not being very slim (as he politely put it to himself) but nevertheless feeling nimble and agile and certain he could go up as high as he wanted. He never did climb very high but found a small incline a little way up the mountain that flattened out almost into an overlook. He liked
