The following extract from Jhabvala’s novel Three Continents addresses the theme of loneliness and the degree of isolation which British society, in particular London, can impose upon an individual Jhabvala’s life and work have been a testament to displacement, but out of this state of homelessness she has created a remarkable body of work.
From Three Continents
It was a strange time for me in London. Although everyone else was very busy working for the movement, I had nothing to do except wait for those few hours when Crishi came to be with me; if he came, that is. I went around on my own, traveling on the tops of buses, walking through the parks in the rain. I went to museums and looked at pictures and antiquities, and went to see films in multiple cinemas, and when one was finished, I went in another one. I was so crazy with sex at the time, I went to some porno ones too, and that was strange, with all those men in raincoats, sitting very still and concentrated. Altogether London was strange to me – very different from the way I had known it on my previous stays there. The streets, the stores, and especially the museums seemed to be full of tourists, busloads of them with camera equipment and foreign languages I didn’t always recognize. Sometimes it seemed to me that the only English people I saw were museum attendants and policemen directing the flow of travelers into the right channels. When I look back on that time it was very often Saturday afternoon with everything in our neighborhood of tall Edwardian houses shut tight, except for a little general store run by an Indian family who kept open late into the night though not many customers came, everyone having gone away for the weekend.
I could always visit the other house, where Bari Rani and the girls lived on a permanent note of high-pitched excitement. Usually they were getting ready to go out, and the baths were running and girls shrieking and charging into each other’s bedrooms to exchange articles of clothing, perfumes, and makeup. Sometimes I went along with them, but I contributed nothing to their shopping expeditions, not buying anything for myself and unable to give sound advice on their purchases; nor to their parties, where they never noticed that I wasn’t having as fabulous a time as they were. Their phones rang a lot, very often from Bombay, and the Bari Rani would talk for hours and had no difficulty hearing above the noise of the LPs the girls were playing. She often said to me, ‘We must have a long talk, Harriet,’ and I think she meant to, but it couldn’t happen because she was continually being called away to the phone or to advise on an outfit; or she was fighting with Teresa, the Indian Christian girl they had brought with them, who had been their nanny and now was their companion and help. Teresa had an Indian boyfriend, and so did all the girls. I had difficulty keeping the girls’ boyfriends apart because they were all handsome and polite and exquisitely dressed, and fantastic dancers, as were the girls. Everyone talked in a lilting English with Hindi phrases thrown in – they talked constantly but no one had to listen and in fact it all sounded the same, all on one high note, more like singing than talking.
The girls were a few years younger than I – the eldest, Priti, had her seventeenth birthday around this time – and I knew that, like everyone I had gone to school with, they were very interested in sex. They talked and read about it and discussed it, with each other and their friends; but here too I couldn’t contribute, for although by this time I thought of nothing else either, it was in a different way. They knew nothing about the kind of sex I was going through, and I didn’t want them to know; it was as though I were protecting them. Probably they thought I was frigid, as everyone usually did, and I preferred a hundred times to have them think that than to know the reality. Only Crishi knew the reality, and it amused him no end. ‘What would Aunt Harriet say?’ was his standard crack whenever he involved me in some act he knew about. Aunt Harriet was one of his favorite jokes – he had seen her only that one time at Grandfather’s funeral, but he made her into this sort of archetypal figure to which he claimed I would revert. Whenever I hesitated to perform some new thing he wanted me to do, he said ‘There, see, you’ve reverted already.’ He had many Aunt Harriet stories. He said she always had to wear a brooch on her blouse so people could tell which was front Harriet and which was back; and once he came with a very serious face, saying a dead woman had been found and they were about to carry her off to the mortuary when he saw her and cried ‘No wait stop! That’s no corpse, that’s my Aunt Harriet.’ And so on. The frigidity of Anglo-Saxon women was a favorite subject with him, and the more we did at night the more jokes he made by day.
Unable to stay another minute alone in the flat, or cope with the romantic-girl atmosphere in the other house, I would walk miles in the hope of tiring myself out and dropping off to sleep till Crishi came. It was getting into fall, damp and chilly, and though the leaves were still on the trees and still green for the most part, they kept being blown off and lay on the paths and were trodden into mulch. Sometimes I sat on a wet bench in Hyde Park and got even more wet from the leaves dripping down on me. Lonely men wandering by stopped, and some sat with me to talk but I didn’t answer them much, so they soon wandered off again, sadder than ever. One man – quite an old man with a hat on that he didn’t take off – lay down on the grass near me, and it took me awhile before I realized he was masturbating, so I moved. I thought it was terrible that people, and even old people, should have these sensations, and be tortured by them. Another man must have witnessed this and he followed me and offered to call the police. He said it was disgusting and such persons must be stopped. I said no it’s all right, and walked faster and he walked faster too, and then it seemed he had to protect me and wouldn’t leave me. He said London was a very dangerous place, very bad people around, and a girl like me shouldn’t be walking in the park. He said in his own country no girl ever walked alone, and if she did, she was picked up by the police and sent back to her family. He didn’t say which his country was but referred to it constantly, so that practically every sentence started with ‘In my country…’ He was short, muscular, dark in a Middle Eastern way. His clothes were quite clean and whole but looked as though he might have bought them secondhand, maybe found them hanging in a market on a Sunday morning. After a while, walking with me, he took my hand, very nicely and respectfully, so that I felt I had to leave it there. His hand was very very warm, even hot, as if the climate of his country were stored in it. The rain kept on squeezing down the way it does in London, out of spongy colorless clouds. All around us in the park were these magnificent tall old trees, and when we came out there were these magnificent tall old buildings looming up into the wet air. He kept on talking, about his country and other general topics, still holding my hand very respectfully; sometimes he tickled my palm but stopped at once when he saw I didn’t like it. We went down a tube station, and since he had only enough money for one ticket, I bought my own. It was a long underground ride, anonymous and ghostlike, as though I had just died and didn’t know where I was bound for and neither did the other people who got in and out as the doors slid open at the stations; there was an unending stream of them, all smelling damp as if in their grave clothes. I felt completely passive and had stopped noticing that he was holding my hand.
When we got off and emerged up a long escalator, it was still raining from the same drained sky and over streets and streets and streets of identical houses. They were smaller houses than the ones where we lived, and grimier, and there were more gaps where some had been torn down and weeds grew in their foundations. There were also more shops – laundromats, a few supermarkets, a few very small shops going out of business and others already gone and boarded up; every block had at least one Pakistani or Bangladeshi restaurant and a donna-kebab place. We turned in to a doorway beside one of these places and walked up a very dark staircase. On the first landing he stopped and kissed me and his lips were as hot as his hand. He said his name was Salim. There was a dense smell of kebabs and the oil in which they had been fried many times. We walked up one flight more and he unlocked a door and invited me into his room. It was poorly furnished but he kept it nice with a tablecloth and photographs. He had made his bed before going out and there was a blue cotton cover on it. A pair of dark trousers was folded over the only chair. He hung them in the wardrobe so I could sit down. There was an awkward silence, for it was difficult to find anything to say. He had a clock, ticking with a tinny sound, and this seemed the most prominent object in the room except for the wardrobe, which was a very bulky piece of furniture and leaned forward slightly as though about to crash down.
He made tea on a tiny portable stove he had by the open fireplace. The tea was very good, very strong with creamy milk and much sugar and some other taste that may have been cloves. I wished I could have drunk it and said thank you and good-bye, but of course that was not what we had come for on that long underground ride. I looked at the photographs that stood on the tablecloth as on a little altar. There were some old people, some children, some young men in military uniform; when I looked at them, he explained who they were and at the same time he put his hand on my knee. I moved this knee slightly and in my embarrassment asked more questions in fast succession. He answered them and put his hand back on my knee. I picked up a studio photograph of a young man – I thought it was he but he said no, it was his brother. ‘Dead,’ he said, and I had hardly made sounds of regret, when he added ‘Shot.’ He slid his hand farther up my thigh, and feeling shocked and sorry about his brother, I didn’t like to stop him. He leaned forward from the bed and pressed his lips on mine. His chin felt rough and stubbly – he may have shaved in the morning but probably needed to do so at least twice a day. He smelled like a person who tried to keep himself clean but did not have adequate bathing facilities. He was now breathing hard and tried to make me get off the chair and join him on the bed. I said ‘I must go. My husband’s waiting.’ I’m sure I sounded like Aunt Harriet. If I had had gloves, at this point I would have put them on.
I had forgotten how much stronger men are than women. It wasn’t that he was a rough or brutal man – on the contrary – but that his need was great. After all, he was away from his wife, his family, and lived alone in this little room in a rainy city of endless row houses. He even tried to argue with me – he said, quite reasonably, Then why did you come?’ I couldn’t say for the tea; I couldn’t say anything. I felt I had to go through with it. But anyway there was no choice anymore. Lying under him on the lumpy bed onto which he had thrown me, watching his contorted, sweating face, I stroked his cheek because I felt sorry to have roused him so far. He didn’t take long and afterward appeared to feel satisfied and grateful. I also felt grateful – that it was over, for one thing, and for another that I hadn’t enjoyed it: not at all, there had been no gratification of any kind for me. I realized that my ravenous need was not that of one physical animal for another but for one particular human being – for Crishi, for my husband, whom I loved.
George Lamming
[1927-]
George Lamming, the only child of an unmarried mother, was born on the former sugar estate of Carrington Village, Barbados. He was educated on a scholarship at Combermere School and in 1946 moved to Trinidad, where he worked as a teacher until 1950. During this time, Lamming was involved with the Caribbean literary journal Bim, and was an active member of the independence organization, the Peopled National Movement. In 1950 he moved to England, coincidentally travelling on the same ship as the Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon. In 1951 Lamming became the host of a book review programme for the BBC West Indian Service in London.
Lamming published his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, in 1953. The book, which earned him the Somerset Maugham Award in 1957, reads as both a memoir of an individual’s childhood and the collective biography of a West Indian village during the decline of the plantation system. Lamming’s work ranges in tone from the despair of The Emigrants (1954) to the powerfully hopeful Season of Adventure (1960), and he explores the complexity of the West Indian experience as affected by the process of decolonization and national reconstruction. In Of Age and Innocence (1958), Lamming cites the immigrant experience in Britain as a catalyst for social and political change back in the Caribbean, and the non-fiction essays in his collection The Pleasures of Exile (1960) describe the experience of a writer moving from the Caribbean to a metropolitan culture.
Lamming is deeply committed to West Indian politics, and during a period of literary silence from 1960 to 1972 he remained involved in political developments. In 1965 and 1967 he was co-editor of the Barbados and Guyana independence issues of New World Quarterly, and in 1967 he spent a year as writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In 1972 he published two books within the same year, Water with Berries and the historical novel Natives of My Person. In 1974 he edited the anthology Cannon Shot and Glass Beads, which is a collection of black responses to white politics and culture. Since then, he has continued to be a political organizer and has lectured and taught in the Caribbean and overseas. In 1976 he received a British Commonwealth Foundation Grant, which enabled him to travel to major universities in India and Australia. Lamming has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954.
Lamming’s novel The Emigrants is, alongside Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, probably the most important contemporary novel of migration to Britain. The following extract reveals the West Indian characters’ deep love of Britain, and the powerful mythology of the country which they carry with them as part of their baggage. The importance of the moment of arrival is brilliantly captured, and one cannot help but feel that for these immigrants, life in Britain will never again be touched with such joyful innocence.
A Voyage
THE TRAIN
Look Lilian look de ol’ geyser quiet in de corner like de whole worl’ come to a standstill… he eyes don’t wink when he pull that pipe an’ he lookin’ only Gawd knows where he looking like he ain’t got eyes in his head … is the way they is in dis country… no talk till you talk. No speak till you speak, no notice till you notice, no nothin’ till you somethin’ … ‘tis what ah mean when ah says England … when you lan’ up in Englan’, ol’ man, when you lan’ up here.
Tornado,… but Tornado these people tell lies too bad. And we say back home you got to look hard to find the truth, but Tornado de truth doan’ even hide round here…. I go back where ah went to tell de woman she ain’t put sugar in de tea, an’ you know, ol’ man, you know she swear she put… in broad daylight Tornado she swear to my face she put as if she think ah doan’ know what sugar taste like, me, Tornado, who been eating sugar before ah drink tea, the woman tell me to the front o’ my face she put sugar in dis tea, taste it Tornado, taste it for yuhself an’ tell me if ah mad or she stupid.
Sugar ration, ol’ man, that’s why. If she say she put she put but what she put yuh won’t taste, partner, p’raps if you been lookin’ when she servin’ you might ah see somethin’ in the spoon, but what it is you won’t taste, not in yuh tea ’cause sugar ration in this country.
What ain’t ration in dis country Tornado is there anything ain’t ration in dis country.
Things haven’t been the same since the war. Where do you chaps come from? The West Indies? Been there several times myself. Had a nephew was a Governor there some years ago.
Would you have a cup of tea? With or without?
(What she mean with or without.)
Milk and sugar?
(What she mean milk an’ sugar.)
Good. Won’t be a minute.
Say Tornado what wrong wid dese people at all? You doan’ mean to say people drink tea when it ain’t got milk. They ain’t that poor un, un, Tornado, no tell me de truth, dey aint so poor they can’t spare a drop o’ milk in they tea, an’ what kin’ o talk is dis ’bout with or without. Is it ol’ man that they doan’ like sugar. What wrong wid dem at all. With or without. O Christ Tornado, will take a long time ’fore I forget dat… with or without.
They have funny taste, partner. You goin’ get some surprises. You wait.
’Ave ’alf pint o’ bitter John?
My name aint John.
Oh no ’arm meant. Jes’ gettin’ to know you. ’Alf a pint for me an’ my pal…
’Ere’s yours, John, an’ yours, darkie …
’E isn’t no darkie. ’E’s ’avin’ a drink with me, an’ that makes ’im my pal. Understand?
Well w’at you’d ’ave me say. Ah don’t know fercetn’t the guy’s name. Alllll the best.
Say Tornado. The thing they call bitter. You know what ah mean. Well ain’t it just like mauby. Same kind o’ taste an’ same kind o’ look in the glass. Is that they sell instead of rum? Where you go to get something strong.
You know larger beer in down town Port-o’-Spain. Well that’s what they call bitter. An’ you goin’ to swell yuh guts up wid it here, an’ it got a good advantage, ’tis the only advantage, ol’ man, it won’t ask you to trot. It goin’ leave you as sober as a gallon o’ mauby, an’ instead o’ vomit as you vomit back home, it’ll be pissing as you never piss before.
See the chap over yonder standin’ like a black Goliath. He win a football pool las’ year. Sixty thousand pounds. ’Tis w’at every spade hope to happen to him when he sen’ in the pools.
What spade got to do with it. What you mean by spade.
The spades? That’s me, an’ you. Spades. Same colour as the card. Ever see the Ace o’ spades, ol’ man. If ever ah win o’ football pool I’ll do just the opposite to what he do. Instead o’ settling down here I’ll go home. I’ll live like a lord. I’ll show Belmont an’ Woodbrook an’ the whole lot of bullshitters livin’ round St Clair, I’ll show them the difference between the rich an’ the rest. Ah got a feelin’ some one o’ we who make this trip goin’ win a football pool.
