‘East into Upper East’

From East into Upper East: Plain Tales from New York, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s collection of Delhi-New York stories:

When Farid found her, Farida really was sitting under a tree. She was in a pure white sari, and she looked the way she always did: supremely elegant…

They had always had showdowns… In their youth these upheavals had ended in excited lovemaking… They lived in misery. Their flat was horribly cramped and always smelled of cabbage and mutton from their English neighbors’ cooking… the odors of Farida’s scents and lotions and of the dregs of Farid’s drinks… he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way…

When they had been in London… she decided to organize a line of… samosas, pakoras, kebabs to be sold in the delicatessen departments of leading London stores… She had bought a wholesale supply of cardboard boxes…. packed them with delicacies she had fried, and spent the rest of the day delivering them to the stores… she was exhausted from her hours of cooking, and from her slow and expensive delivery rounds… the cost of the ingredients, the packaging and the taxi were destroying the profit she had expected… [Farid] seized her pan, carried it into the bathroom and emptied it into the toilet…

The next moment — well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image — there she was, holy under a tree…

I’m just at the beginning of the book, but so far Jhabvala’s style is quiet and controlled, with greater emphasis on novel situations than characters. She tells more than shows, choosing sweeping summary over conversations which flesh out motivation and backstory.

Jhabvala won the Booker in ‘75 for Heat and Dust:

She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany to Marcus who was Polish-Jew and Eleanora Prawer who was German Jew…She… married Cyrus H. Jhabvala, an Indian Parsi architect, in 1951. The couple moved to Delhi… and they had three daughters: Ava, Firoza and Renana… Jhabvala, unlike Naipaul, wasn’t drawn to India by ancestry or, as in Forster’s case, by a desire to move beyond a complacent Western liberalism. She was in Delhi, as she wrote, only because her husband was there, and she was interested not in India but in herself in India. [Wiki]