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 severely around the place, which was sumptuously furnished with everything that money and bad taste could buy. “What’s that 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,