Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Author:Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619028227
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2016-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

12 June. I keep getting letters from Chid. I was surprised on receiving the first one as I did not think he was the type to look back and remember people. The letter started off not with a personal salutation but in black letters: Jai Shiva Shankar! Hari Om! He wrote: “It is the light around our body that controlls our mind. A pure true un-harmfull mind is a place of perfect HAPPINESS. So it is the perfect PURE TRUE and UN-harmfull mind – that is Heaven.” It went on like that for most of the letter except that somewhere in the middle he wrote “We are here in Y Dharmsala. A Pure place except the priest who tries to cheat and rob us.” And at the end there was another line: “I forgott my drinking mug send care Y Sri Krishna Maharaj Temple Dharmsala by registered post express.”

His subsequent letters conformed to the same pattern: a lot of philosophy with somewhere in the middle a couple of factual lines (usually to do with being “cheated and robbed”) and at the end a request. They are interesting documents and I am keeping them, with Olivia’s letters, on my little desk. They make strange company together. Olivia’s handwriting is clear and graceful, even though she seems to have written very fast just as the thoughts and feelings came to her. Her letters are all addressed to Marcia, but really they sound as if she is communing with herself, they are so intensely personal. Chid’s letters are absolutely impersonal. And he always writes on those impersonal post office forms which seem to constitute, along with stained and illegible postcards, the bulk of the mail that crosses from one end of India to the other. They always look as if they have been travelling great distances and passed through many hands, absorbing many stains and smells along the way. Olivia’s letters – more than fifty years old – look as if they had been written yesterday. It is true, the ink is faint but this may have been the quality she used to blend with the delicate lilac colour and scent of her stationery. The scent still seems to linger. Chid’s crumpled letters, on the other hand, appear soaked in all the characteristic odours of India, in spices, urine, and betel.

Inder Lal is always eager to hear Chid’s letters. He comes up to my room in the evenings so that I can read them out to him. He likes all that philosophy. He tells me that Chid’s is a very old soul which has passed through many incarnations. Most of them have been in India and that is why Chid has come back in this birth. But what Inder Lal doesn’t understand is why I have come. He doesn’t think I was Indian in any previous birth, so why should I come in this one?

I try to find an explanation for him. I tell him that many of us are tired of the

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