Three Continents (23 page)

I got the impression that they were all—that is, the Rawul, Rani, and Crishi—more relaxed and at home in London than they had been in the U.S. That had been literally a new world for them, but here they were in their own old world. They seemed to have many connections here, unlike in the States, where they had only us and the followers and the rather weird people who were beginning to hear about the movement. In England many more people knew of it, and the Rawul sometimes lunched in the House of Commons with a member of an independent party, or at the Savoy with the leader of a new parliamentary group. Most of the followers I had known were left behind in the U.S. to carry on the work there and to look after Propinquity and the house on the Island. There was a different group of followers in London, and they didn't live with us but in another house, which had been taken for them in Earl's Court. I saw only isolated members when they came to clean our flats. There was also an office, so the movement was really separated from our domestic lives; and that may have been why the Rawul, Rani, and Crishi seemed more like a private family here, living in a big family flat where everything was comfortable and familiar to them.

It was in London that I discovered the Rawul had another wife. No one had mentioned her before but it was not as if she were being kept secret—at least not privately, though officially, as the leader of the movement, he had only one consort, and that was the Rani. But actually, legally, the Bari Rani, as she was called, was his wife; and so as not to get them mixed up, the Rani was actually called by her real name in England, and it was as Renée that I too began to think of her. The Rawul may have gone through some sort of ceremony with her—maybe the same as mine—but he had never divorced the Bari Rani. She too was living in London, not in
the same house as ours but one that was almost identical and in an identical square a few streets away. She had three teenage daughters called Priti, Daisy, and Baby, and the four of them came to visit us shortly after our arrival. Crishi had told me that they were very excited about our marriage and couldn't wait to see me. He advised me to wear some of my new clothes; he said they would be very disappointed if I didn't come up to their standard, which was high. As soon as I entered the room, there were these four pairs of eager eyes on me, but next moment they were tactfully lowered, for I had failed to take Crishi's advice. I didn't feel right in those clothes Barbara had bought for me. The visitors themselves were dressed and made up exquisitely—Crishi had told me they spent all their time shopping, and it showed. All four of them were bright and quick, with quick darting eyes and movements and voices. They had brought a lot of highly colored pastries for us, as well as the Rawul's favorite walnut cake. The mother, in her pastel diaphanous sari, was sipping tea out of a porcelain cup, and the girls in their pastel diaphanous dresses were sucking Cokes through straws. At first the four of them looked the same age—but of course with the mother the effect had been achieved artificially, or rather, so well was it done, artistically. She was older than Renée, but it seemed the other way around—maybe because of her chirping manner, the same as her girls'. Renée, placid and full-bosomed, appeared very mature beside her, almost indulgent, with a little smile playing around her lips as she listened to their chatter. The Rawul had added the dignity of a paterfamilias to that of statesman and English gentleman. He wore what is known as a smoking jacket, in midnight-blue velvet, and his girls called him Papa. There he sat relaxing in the bosom of his family—and I guess we
were
a family: The Rawul and Renée were the royal couple, with Crishi as their crown prince; which made me the crown princess, even if it was difficult for me to feel like one; and to complete our Oriental dynasty, there was another royal consort with another set of princesses; and around us, acting as household staff, were the various followers who had come up from the house in Earl's Court to serve our tea. Through the French windows we could see the flag of the Fourth
World, which had been hoisted from the little wrought-iron balcony—not an unusual sight around here, for other national standards proclaiming foreign embassies drooped over the wet and leafy square where English nannies had once wheeled their tow-headed charges in stately prams.

The flag was the cause of the first disagreement I witnessed within our extended family circle, which up till then had appeared to be, considering the circumstances, quite harmonious. From time to time the Rawul went to visit the other household—that is, his wife and children—and whenever he did, he wanted them to fly his flag from their balcony. He even sent over a follower to hoist it. The Bari Rani kept quiet about it for a while, but one day she refused to let the follower on her balcony, so when the Rawul arrived, there was no flag. They must have had a big fight about it because soon the Rawul came back home, looking flushed and uptight. The phone rang and it was the Bari Rani wanting to speak to him, but he wouldn't and sent Renée instead. She tried to be calm and diplomatic, but the Bari Rani slammed the phone down on her, and after a while she rang again, and again the Rawul sent Renée. This went on two or three times and ended in the Bari Rani arriving on our doorstep, in a state. Although so tiny, she looked commanding, and if the Rawul had wanted to evade her, he didn't have a chance. She ignored everyone else, including Renée, and continued her row with him. She told him that he could do what he liked in this house but not in the other one, where she lived with her children. Here the Rawul interrupted her to say that, wherever he happened to be, whether it was in this house or in that, for the duration of his stay it was his territory where his flag had to be displayed. That much respect was owed, he said, to him and his movement. “Oh respect,” said the Bari Rani, and she made her eyes glide over Renée, and from there back to him, and then she repeated “Respect,” and seemed for the moment to have got off the subject of the flag.

The Rawul, keeping his dignity, went back to it: “It's our emblem and we have to display it wherever we are—literally keep our colors flying.”

“And quite apart from anything else,” Bari Rani retorted,
“it looks so silly. Poor Daisy, she's dating her first boy (I want to talk to you about that), and when he saw that thing, he just laughed and laughed. She didn't know where to look, she said. She absolutely begged me, ‘Please, Mummy, please ask Papa to take it down.' Naturally, it's embarrassing for the child.”

“She ought to be proud of her father's colors displayed in his house.”

“
His
house? Well, hardly—any more than this one.” She half-shut her eyes in an insinuating way and pulled her sari closer around her shoulders. There was a pause—she seemed to be debating whether to go further or not and then decided yes: “I don't think this is quite what Daddy expected when he bought these properties for me. But of course there are other things he didn't expect either, and sometimes I'm almost glad he is no longer here to see everything I have to see.” Suddenly she turned to me. I had come downstairs to see if Crishi was there—he wasn't—and had got trapped when she entered and stood between me and the door. I felt even more trapped when she spoke to me: “You'll find out that everything is not what you expected. Perhaps you've found out already. . . . I'm used to it by now but—oh what a pity when young people are disappointed.”

I felt as if from behind me the Rawul and Renée were pushing me to answer her. They and I were standing on one side of the room, Bari Rani on the other; so when I said “I'm not disappointed,” it was as though I were replying to an adversary.

“Let's hope you never will be,” Bari Rani said, not at all like an adversary but sighing as one who wished me well.

“We're here to see to that,” said Renée, very energetically, and she came and stood beside me, with her arm laid around my shoulders. Now I felt like a pawn between them, but Bari Rani was not playing—I don't know for whose sake she gave up and turned with a last “Just get that thing out of my house!” and swept from the room.

Renée was indignant: “Coming here, making a scene—and in front of Harriet.” She dropped her arm from my shoulder: “I can't think why she should start in on you, unless of course you've been talking to her. Complaining or something.” Her
indignation was now directed at me, and it was about me she said to the Rawul: “After everything we've given her, and given up for her. Everything we've done to make her welcome. I hope you feel that,” she challenged me, narrowing her eyes. “How we've welcomed you with open arms. Like a daughter.”

“She
is
a daughter,” said the Rawul, shifting from foot to foot in embarrassment.

“Of course she is; who says she's not? My goodness, how much more could we possibly do for her than we've done already!”

Afterward I brooded about what she meant: Was it that they had given me Crishi? If so, even she had to admit that they hadn't given me all that much of him. When he was home, he was mostly with them downstairs while I was upstairs with Michael, if he was there, or usually alone. Even when Crishi came to me at night, by the time I woke up in the morning, he was gone. I argued, I yelled, I fought with him—he smiled, and it was as though he had only to put out one hand and brush me aside. The truth was, he couldn't lose with me. For those few hours he sometimes spent with me, I was willing to put up with all the waiting and frustration. I had no alternative. He had aroused me so completely that the sex he gave me—rationed out to me—was absolutely essential to me. Deprived of it, I was as if without breath and air. Really sometimes I lay there in such an agony of unfulfilled longing, I was fighting for breath. I was hardly a person anymore but just this fearful
need
. It is shaming to write this—to have allowed myself to be so overcome. I was furious with him when he didn't turn up, but when he did I flung myself on him in a fury of desire. I tore at him, I literally did. I was a starved animal and he laughed and liked it. I had no defenses at all—against him, against myself, against this sex. I don't want to say any more. Yes I blame myself but even now, looking back, I can see I couldn't help myself. Sometimes I think it would be better if people could have their full force of sexual desire when they are older and have learned some control to deal with it; but in youth, there is nothing between you and it, so it can become the devouring hunger it was for me at that time.

I wondered often about Michael. I knew Crishi had a strong effect on him—I had seen that current pass through him in Crishi's presence—but I couldn't imagine that he went through the same agonies I did. While I had never been sure whether Crishi went to Michael's room at Propinquity or on the Island, here in London I was sure he didn't. He came up to me for a few hours and then returned to the Rawul and Renée, while Michael remained alone in his room. But they were often together during the day—Michael had become Crishi's closest aide—and they could have gone anywhere and done anything. I don't know. That way Michael was a complete mystery to me. I knew he was homosexual and had met him with boyfriends, but I knew nothing about his true relations with them and with many others I did not meet. For me, in my thoughts, he was always alone—whether he was traveling the way he used to all over the world, or just living in a place and moving around in it: He was alone and aloof, walking with his head held high and not looking right or left, as if nothing concerned him. He looked pure and untouched; yet perhaps he did, like others, spend hours in men's toilets or went to the baths or whatever other places there are. The knowledge of it was there in my consciousness but unconnected with him as he was, not only in his essence but also physically—slender, upright, clean, and fair.

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.