Pass Me The Paracetamol

Bye bye the Brits. But what will the locals do now? A question for philosophers, only it's the Indian upper class who must find an answer, which is difficult and confusing. Of course they struggle hard to find a solution. Who can blame them? Even philosophers ignore that most testing of problems: how fit an idea, its intimacy with the ideal, into life as lived. The question now urgent, after the festivities have finished, the Independence intoxication drained dry. How adjust to the mundane, submit one’s self to the ordinary? Each character in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Esmond in India has their own answers; none quite satisfies.

If possible, hide from reality; live in a fool’s paradise. For adolescents this is easy. A time when all things are a backdrop to our private stage, on which we play out our favourite roles; of knight, maid, lover, saint, bandit, whore. Safe inside the family home, the world outside, that city of stone and bricks, appears as malleable as plasticine between our heroic fingers. What places we’ll conquer! A town of temples, offices and barracks turned into a palace of cardboard and paper where we rule as king and queen. A beautiful world while it lasts, a few years for the majority of us; its climax our first love affair, which turns dream into reality, releasing its magic charms. Here an enchanted heroine walks out of this novel hand-in-hand with a hero. But no Mills & Boon this. As Shakuntala thinks of Esmond, Esmond thinks of his return to England, his bedroom bliss on the boat with Betty. Poor Shakuntala! In a paragraph never written the author to demolish this girl’s chivalric castle.

We all need dreams, life unbearable with none. But a difficult substance to handle. While we often play the fool, taking huge risks with our hopes, so losing them. The crucial time is in our early twenties, when in trying to live out the dream life becomes fragile and largely illusory, as the fantasies fail and reality reasserts its control. It is the moment we become adults; the character formed when in wrestling with a crisis we learn to carry the weight of the real. Hard times. Tough times. A time to prove one’s self on the obstacle course of one’s own suffering. Most get through, to lead a useful existence. The sorry ones...ah, the sorry ones...what's going to happen to Shakuntala, protected for so long by her parents? But that’s a story our author has chosen not to tell.

Intoxicated teenagers and lovesick buffoons are not the only characters who live in a world of ideas. There is another personality, deep within the upper classes who need ideas to govern their lives: the clever ones. Without meaning their existence is empty. A tightrope walk. Because such characters risk confusing the ideal with the real, sane concepts with mad concepts, to which they submit both their thoughts and actions. Instead of playing with some crazy notion they sacrifice themselves to it, which drains them of spontaneity, ossifying the mental organs. The idea no longer feeding but freezing their mind, which slowly melts away. The risks are huge. The payoffs equally large. The lucky ones to create a space where they enjoy the freedom of the mind, and feel the power of ideas to shape and fill their life; the home a scholar’s study or an artist’s studio; the office also a temple. Meaning. For a few odd souls it is as essential as the midday meal.

There are different kinds of meaning, some suited to action - religion or politics - others to the solitary life of contemplation: artist and sage. The first tends not to last long; illusions of political utopia or some next-corner-nirvana lasting less than a decade. Few strong enough to carry the burden of an idea throughout the entirety of their lives, especially when forced to carry it through crowds of the indifferent and the hostile. But for the short stretch...to belong to a movement, especially when young, when the emotions are fusing with the intellect sparking action...wowie zowie! A natural psychedelic, that in absorbing us into the idea, submerges ego into event, relieving us of self, unleashing its energy. But what happens when events end, the crowds disperse, the idea fades away....

Uma. Strong, practical, Uma, the size of most men, has not let the past interfere with the present; until now. She muses on her dead husband and the independence struggle; a time when, immersed in political activity, and surrounded by bright buzzy people, she was a happy, busy being; prison her holiday. Time must have a stop. Which starts reflection, that long slow train into deserted territory. If lucky, one is reborn, a new life to begin around a new set of ideas. Most do not have such charmed thoughts. Ram Nath, having retreated from society to find a mystic’s serenity, looks back with rueful affection to when he was buzzing with life; politics a hive of ceaseless, life-affirming, activity. All gone. Retirement to bring not the expected wisdom but emptiness. Life’s purpose evaporated, to leave a dried- up soul; just another old man around a house; a mope. But then, watching Lakshmi content for the first time in ages - she is preparing for the homecoming of Narayan - he enjoys an epiphany: it is in our most trivial preoccupations that we find our deepest meanings. Dip the self in daily tasks and all to be well. The ancient wisdom of the sages has returned.

It’s been pushed aside for quite some time.

Public and private. How get the balance right, especially at a time when the chimeras of the public realm permeate private space? Difficult in the 1950s, when, so many ironies to litter the streets of New Delhi, we can't cross the road without bumping into a paradox. Reverence for civil society an especially British thing, our very own religion; the middle class’s ambiguous gift to the globe. Thus to sacrifice the self to an idea of India is to take up an Englishman’s faith believing it one’s own. The belief in an Indian, in a citizen, thought as quintessentially indigenous and authentic, is, in fact, a foreign import, taken up by Western-educated leaders wanting to turn an ‘outmoded’ civilisation into some model out of the LSE. Problems ahead! Difficulties galore! as this European identity is grafted onto a truly Indian sensibility, one more customary and religious than political. A generation to suffer all the difficulties of cultural change; its inner tensions; that friction of ideas against realities; the thinning out of ritual life, when old customs and religions lose their value. I add the insane paradoxes of an ideology that hides the truth from its leading protagonists, who mistake artifice for authenticity. Turmoil of the spirit, for which material improvements rarely compensate. The post-independence generation, and this may be true of all revolutions, is a lost generation. A rickety bridge that a society must cross until it gets to the other side. It is to experience the disappointment of too exuberant hopes. We stare out of a window to watch the tracks of daily life tread a luscious meadow to dirt and dust. Ideas give the illusion of vast changes, when, for a short time, we are lost inside their conceptual labyrinths. Then we step out of this place of myth into a dirty street. The enchantment is over. Albeit we are in the 20th-century, where fables are believed banished. Change the metaphor! Ideas fast cars on the racing track. Whizz! Whee! Wonderful. Outside the stadium, our MG is stuck behind a heavy cart, pulled by oxen.

After the party, the hangover; India in the 1950s is struggling to cope with humdrum normality after the independence bash. Those whose world has gone topsy-turvy - Lakshmi - find it hard to adjust. ‘Why am I living in this poor neighbourhood with a husband who has no interest in the world?’ she asks herself. A big man in the Movement, Ram Nath has retired to anonymity and poverty; often the way with those who live inside an idea: the imperfect present always to let them down. Finding his mind unfathomable, she finds its effects incomprehensible. ‘Why is so!’ The question acute when characters like Har Dayal, who did nothing for Independence, are now big figures in government. Something has gone wrong, surely...no. Different times call for different personalities; an event an environment to which some so perfectly adapted they cannot adjust when the event ends. For those who flourished during the independence fight, or those dreaming impossible dreams, there is a feeling of defeat. Lakshmi has nothing but her own complaints to keep her company.

A time of ideas is different from a time of pay-checks. They call for different characters and different ways of looking at the world. This can be difficult to comprehend. A practical man of affairs is not likely to become a revolutionary hero, who in turn is hopeless in balancing the books. It depends on what you want. The heroic life is exciting, but will not last a lifetime, after which you must find another way of living; yet those who need a meaningful life are rarely happy exercising such schizophrenia: unity is all. If Lakshmi wanted comfort she married the wrong man; Ram Nath’s destiny to turn existence into a struggle; as he tries to fuse idea and reality together; almost impossible in public and private affairs. Only artists and gurus have this gift. Is Ram Nath an artist, a guru? If so, he’s little use to Lakshmi: most are poor and self-absorbed.

Blasted from a megaphone an idea injects people with extraordinary amounts of energy, carrying them far beyond the physical limits of their bodies and commonplace beliefs. It is why in times of radical upheaval, certain aspects of settled life, such as wealth and status, lose their importance. During a revolution we are defined by actions not background, by ideas rather than lineage; the charisma of presence abolishing a history of achievement. All ends when life returns to normal, and the social flux refreezes. Status returns, but in a changed and more self-conscious form. Independence, dominated by European ideas, with their egalitarian emphasis, disrupted the caste system, loosening up fixed graduations of rank, particularly at the top. India at its highest social levels now taking on aspects of class, which favours those who look after themselves; to sacrifice one’s self to some ideal no longer an honourable aspiration when utility defines the moral code. For a while ideas did rule; the radicals in the old elite in their element. Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Such ideas wonderful to stir a crowd, bring down a maharajah, kick out the British clerk and soldier. But once the deed done, those Brits on the boat home, a new kind of Indian will be in charge; the State favouring those with ambition, put to profitable use. Qualities that arise out of a tradition founded on otherworldly ideals, which cultivate the mind not promote the ego, to lose authority and influence; the brahmins pushed aside by businessmen. In time, perhaps a long time, a new social ideal will emerge, transforming the social field.

Lakshmi is very aware of her fall from grace; and is not happy about it. Har Dayal, though a success, is melancholic. He wants to be a saint, but protected by his own good sense and his wife’s strong hand, he did not surrender his comforts for the political struggle. Aloof during the tough times - keeping our values alive, is how he sells it - he reaps the rewards now, as he sits on government committees for the arts and culture; the new regime preferring pragmatists to dreamers and radicals. Nonetheless, he’s sad. Because he lacks the capacity to uphold the old ideals of the old India; measured against them he knows he is inadequate; it produces that sweet melancholy; a peppery romanticism adding piquancy to a sugary existence. Har Dayal laments his lack of idealism, his inability to follow the austerity of his friend Ram Nath. Bah! A whip of silk to caress his expensively clothed back. Riot. Prison. Exile. Not likely! He prefers to quote Shakespeare and live in a home his wife has made into a work of art. Confronted with the realities of Ram Nath’s existence - amongst the lower middle class - he knows it is not for him. He could not live here. His idealism is in the head. The safest place for an idea.

Shakuntala doesn’t understand such nuances. Unlike papaji she thinks ideas real things. And wants to act them out. Typical of her age and class, Shakuntala is the over-educated teenager who on first entering the world of ideas is spellbound by their miraculous promise of a magic-land where beautiful things must happen. She doesn’t grasp that the magic is lost when you leave those secluded walls. Or the risks an idealist takes. On the streets of New Delhi, Calcutta or Mumbai magical thinking is often taken for innocence, and is abused. Love in the head is all caresses and kisses and painless self-sacrifice. Love in the body, after that first amazing connection - an idea’s purpose, its evolutionary function? - is mostly the pains of human fragility, its longings, its doubts. Except in exceptional times, human behaviour is more likely to transform ideas, than ideas actions and beliefs; and although a big idea can overpower public affairs, it will eventually fall before zeitgeist and raumgeist, and the facts of individual psychology. Introduce the pure idea into daily life and cruel paradoxes arise; as Lakshmi discovered long ago.

Lakshmi is disillusioned with her new life; the dreams of independence twisted into a sad exile, its atmosphere of decline and failure. She wants Narayan to marry Shakuntala; even though he too lives for ideas not riches: her son works as a doctor in remote villages. There will be no marriage. For all the fine talk, Har Dayal cannot let his daughter face such a punishing trial of poverty.

‘It is true,’ Shakuntala said, ‘that I admire Narayan very much, as I would admire anybody who leads a life of idealism and sacrifices’; and she began to speak somewhat more slowly as she slipped deeper into the defensive, ‘I also wish to lead such a life, of course -‘

‘But everyone,’ he quickly cried, ‘must choose his own path, is it not so?’

‘You are the most wonderful Daddyji in the world.’

He took her hand and fondled it tenderly. ‘You see, my darling, H.G. Wells, the great English author, has said that for every man there is his own sufficient beauty. It means that we must, each one of us, find that way of life which brings the greatest contentment to our souls, do you understand, my love? For without contentment of soul we cannot lead a good life. Let us say that Narayan has found his sufficient beauty; but does it follow that this will also give contentment to Shakuntala and enable her to lead a good life?’

‘I think my ideals are different from his. Though of course I admire him very much... Daddyji, I love Art and Beauty and Poetry, how can I give these things up as I shall have to if I go and live with Narayan in a village to do good to the poor?’

‘You must never give them up, on the contrary you must base your life on them - ‘

Believe in ideals but not too much. Har Dayal fails to add this caveat - he has to mask his hypocrisy - and this will cost him dear, when, after novel’s end, he learns about Shakuntala’s shenanigans. The man a hypocrite, the reason for his success; for ideas are designed not to comprehend the world but to make it attractive and amenable. Ideals decorate a life; making him feel good, they impress friends and colleagues with his high-mindedness; an attitude de rigueur at the top of society, where one pretends a detachment from worldly things. Beautiful words; while others do one's ugly deeds. Such performances convince only those performing in the same play. Nevertheless, I don’t want to knock Har Dayal. Hypocrisy softens character and enriches the civilisation. Hypocrisy the great agent of cultivation.

To escape barbarism an elite must believe in harmless ideals; an important social restraint, overlooked by the cruder materialists and those radicals who think truth a societal good. Yet ideals create unstable tensions, especially amongst those youth determined to live out some idea. All sorts of problems! when, in a troublesome adolescence, self-interest fuses with idealism to create manic obsessions that take over a life, as innocents succumb to the false promise of a total transformation, religious or political. Most survive - the rich background is an adequate safeguard - although a few, in seriously indulging in the belief, lose control, wrecking their privileges. It’s why art and philosophy are better bets, a safer option, than politics and social reform: in pure thought we keep the ideal without losing our livelihoods or sanity. Shakuntala’s otherworldliness is of the aesthetic and romantic type. And there are good reasons to reject Narayan; a dusty village to take the bloom off not just her beauty but her sensibility and intelligence; prerequisites for happiness and fulfilment. This young woman needs to grow. A rich cultural environment - a cultured house in a cosmopolitan city - the one place this to occur. Ram Nath, in a moment of insight, reaches the same conclusion. Looking at himself with a penetrating eye he knows it was wrong to ask Har Dayal for his daughter. No longer belonging to that class, he is estranged from their ways of living.

The Schloss thinks again.

I have misjudged Shakuntala. Despite her intelligence she is a silly girl. Her talk of ideals is that of a teenager mushy over pop stars. What she really wants is a love affair. And has one with Esmond; so breaking a taboo, which if exposed will outcast her from this highly conservative society. (Remember those ideals: in some areas - around women - they remain very strong indeed.) We are never to know. The novel ends happily; Shakuntala, drunk with love, spinning fantasies of divorce and marriage, as she walks through the bazaar with Esmond. Poor sap! Her dreamboat to hit the rocks within paragraphs of the book’s last full stop: Esmond has decided to leave India; the reason for his happiness. For this man’s ideal is tarnished. An illusion has come to an end. When he married Gulab, Edmond was in love with an idea of India; but this long lost amongst the folds of his wife’s flesh. Ideas to last only if they float free of people. Poor Shakuntala. Soon to experience that most painful of losses; when her love-kite crashes to the ground.

After the excitement of the festival, we suffer the morning blues. It is the shock of living in a mundane world utterly alien to what previously imagined; disillusionment to quickly follow. Post-independent India is not the anti-colonial dream but business almost as usual. Little has changed, making one reflective. Even Har Dayal looks into the mirror of his vanity. Worse may follow, if he finds out about that Shakuntala has been doing in Esmond’s bed.

The ending is extraordinary, and suggests a feature of this class: their happiest moments grow out of fantasies which last but a short time. Face-to-face with the realism of the new India many feel let down. Only a lucky few - Har Dayal, who retains his illusions because he never touches realities - to live forever inside a fiction, preserved by his wife Madhuri, who runs the show. Alas, fictions can be taken too far. Shakuntala believes a fairy tale about love, and Har Dayal to pay the emotional price when he finds out, as he must - the plot’s logic tells us so - of his daughter’s foolishness. No-one to escape the Independence party without a headache. Not even level-headed Madhuri, who thought it a good thing for Shakuntala to mix with Europeans.

Schloss can’t resist a question.

Have I made a mistake...do I get the rich wrong? All ends happily here. Shakuntala. Lakshmi. And Madhuri, who believes she has seen off Ram Nath. Why not the future too? Elites usually find a way to stay inside the dream. Shakuntala can’t marry within caste? No problem! Invite a wealthy European, bedazzled by her beauty and vitalism, to ask for her hand. Book that flight to Paris! Even when the worst happens something to be salvaged from the wreck. Think about this scene.

Then he moved. She watched him from the bed. She watched him moving towards her and she saw that his eyes were fixed on her and then she noticed that his lips were moving and some sounds were coming out. She did not recognize the sounds. He never stopped looking at her and she never stopped watching him. When he came nearer, he stretched out his hands. His lips were still moving and he was repeating the same sound over and over again. He was very near now and she recognized that what he was saying was, ‘My dearie, my dearie.’ His hands were held out like a sleepwalker’s. One hand he laid, very reverently , on her breast, where it came swelling out of her low-cut blouse; he was still saying, ‘My dearie, my dearie.’ For a moment his hand lay on her flesh and she looked down at it because she could not believe it, though she felt it there.

But the next moment she leapt up. She stood pressed against the wall and her whole body was tense to attack. Her eyes were like fire. She advanced a step towards the servant, who at once drew back; her plump shining brown arms flailed the air. Then she flung back her head - mouth open, exposing all her sharp, strong teeth and the pink expanse of palate and tongue - before jerking it forward again to spit at him. She spat in one great spurt of rage. The servant gave a choked exclamation of both fear and surprise and put up his hands to shield himself from the evil she was spitting at him. All her softness and beauty had been transformed into one ball of tigress fury. The servant stood with his hands covering his face and his thin body trembling inside his dirty cotton clothes. She was yelling, ‘Out, out, get out, filth!’ slowly advancing upon him, so that he had to retreat backwards. When he reached the door, he turned suddenly and fled, quite silently.

What a scene! It happens because Esmond has no talent for servants; here selecting a man who does not know his place. Our Englishman knows a lot about Indian art and culture, but has no feeling for its people and customs. He is an aesthete, whose engagement with the arts and classics is superficial; this revealed in a conversation about Madhuri and Indira, her daughter-in-law, whom he admires for her beauty and poise, her eye for clothes, her taste in jewellery: women are like art, he says to Shakuntala, they exist to be decorative. No artist this. A guide or collector best describes the chap; his scholarship, I surmise, is weak. Such a character easily fools those with little feel for the arts, who need it wrapped around the personable. These Indian women, accustomed to a different kind of male, and with their own longings for the sensitive and beautiful, easily fall for his charm; the exoticism of the West. Attracted by the surface features - Esmond is handsome, witty, urbane - they mistake them for signs of a deeper, passionate nature. Not so. Such a persona is suitable for the brittle superficiality of the English Betty. Good for verbal fencing not a duel with swords. A continent away from his wife. What a tiger! Gulab, usually so passive, is here fired into action, by the most unexpected and unacceptable of acts. This a woman of instinct and sensuality who needs a man weightier than a bag of words. Esmond has let her badly down. This scene ends the marriage. She leaves him - he has already left her mentally - and goes home, to meet an an ecstatic Uma and her servant Bacchani. Knowing the marriage unhappy, they’ve wanted it finished for ages. It’s over now. Gulab is back! Even when the worst happens...there are rich consolations.

Gulab. Uma. Bacchani. A different kind of India. The ancient one of family, habit, custom; a slowly moving existence, one of the flesh and the feelings, that harmonise with a tolerant tradition. Such a life less likely to bring unhappiness than the surface glitter of the Europeans, whose ideas, spun so fast, prove false and ruinous.

Home. The novel’s muted theme. Ram Nath, through his own actions, has dropped out of his caste, and lives in alien territory, not altogether appealing. Har Dayal never to make such a domestic sacrifice. Whereas Shakuntala is moving out too quickly. Car crash! Uma’s home has been broken; but Gulab’s return will put it back together again. Home. A metonym for the past, for India itself. Only fools to give it up...then those second thoughts, when, after a wild night out, we find ourself in a stranger’s bed. What appealed in the dim lights of the bar...ah! now the veil of intoxication fallen, you see not a prince but an oink; sniffling and snoring through his drunken dreams of the evening’s escapade. That fabulous voyage into the Eden of your virginity now a daytime nightmare. I scramble out of the bed and rush half-dressed to the door....

Whoever enters the modern world struggles to adjust. ‘I must go forward.’ ‘No, let me stay put.’ If only so easy! Change breeds change, which can never be reversed; for to go back is to dress yesterday’s people in today’s clothes. Change has to be adapted to our ends. Madhuri’s youngest son, Raj, is engaged to an English girl, which is ok; the prejudice easily overcome because, the girl rich and respectable, to marry a foreigner is to be modern. For Narayan the old ascetic ideals take on a new form. Even Lakshmi comes to accept his choice; Har Dayal’s rejection and Madhuri’s cold reception has invigorated her: my son isn’t good enough for them! The old ideal, with its intellectual rise and implicit superiority, returns. And how! Hate sprites the soul. Living up to an idea the best way to look down on the pigmies of materialism. Accommodations must be made, are made, to new circumstances; this easier for the rich; their consciences more flexible, their ideals more open to change and adaptation, once they get over that initial, soul-rending shock and shame, its reflexive resistance (elites tend to be more idea-bound than the rest). India is settling down; the new absorbed into a past finding new ways to inoculate itself against the new’s influence. But one idea, a particular idea of India, has died. It is why the novel ends with Esmond. That festival is over. Home to England, where domesticity to reclaim its dominion.

I’ve forgotten Shakuntala! Poor Shakuntala. Love stories on paper are nothing like real love on street and in bedroom. What a come down! But this is a novel, and the author is playing tricks with heroine and reader. This no tragic figure, but a loved-up child, waving her magic wand. That wand to be snatched away when we put the book down.

Review: Esmond in India