December 5, 2004

“Should one want to try to become something other than what one is?” Ruth Prawar Jhabvala asked this question in one of her previous novels. In My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, her latest novel, she seems to have chosen to answer this question in an exploration of nine alternative paths her life might have taken.

The nine imagined lives are set in nine “potentially autobiographical” stories, each thematically related and placed in different cultural contexts. Although each story is narrated by a different fictional character, Jhabvala states in the book’s apologia that “the I of each chapter is myself.” “Even when something didn’t actually happen to me,” Jhabvala writes, “it might have done so. Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was.” The experiences of her personal life reflect intensely in her work. Born in 1927 in Germany to Polish-Jewish parents, Jhabvala grew up in England, married an Indian architect and moved to Delhi in 1951, where she lived for more than 25 years before moving permanently to New York. Drawing upon her Central European sensibility, an English education and her life in India and New York she produces a unique body of work informed by such diversity.

Jhabvala, who has been called “a connoisseur of divided souls”, seems interested primarily in the exploration of existential issues such as cross-cultural displacement and spiritual restiveness. Her’s is a colourful world of displaced people where “everyone is moving freely as refugees or emigrants or just out of restless curiosity”. In the introduction she elusively alludes to a sense of wanting to feel exiled in order to return in search of another place or a person. She speaks of an endless search for “Someone better, stronger, wiser, altogether other” but then also asks “does such a person exist and, if so, does one ever find him?” In keeping with her ideas of spiritual yearnings, Jhabvala’s characters are all beset with some sense of lost promise or of unfulfilled love.

In “Life” the first chapter, this is revealed in songs sung for “the friend who will not come, not even now at the end of our lives of unrequited longing”. The story of a destitute, “Life” traces a failed life of an old woman who leaves New York for India because that is the only place she can afford to live in. In her final days the protagonist spends her days among tombs in a ruined pavilion where she begins to assume an aura of a saint. Reflecting such existential emptiness all the main characters are looking for spiritual guidance from poet-saints or philosophers or mystical concepts. Whether it be the narrator in “Life” who compiles an unfinished thesis of a Hindu goddess saint or a refugee philosopher from Nazi Germany who is interested in “the reversal from the Western tradition of technology, the excarnation of spirit into matter, to the Hindu concept of Maya” in “My Family” or the daughter of a Jewish refugees from Berlin in “Menage” wanting to be a Buddhist nun because “it seemed a practical way out of the impasse of human life”, they all yearn overtly and search for some sort of a spiritual heartland. Such quests mostly, inevitably lead to India.

Exoticisms of India provide a superficial escape for the characters but such escapism repeatedly ends in disillusionment. India is the mystical land, which never really delivers the desired spiritual fulfillment, as Jhabvala makes it obvious that the characters are in love with their own illusions of a promised land that will satisfy their restless yearnings rather than the place itself. “India was this place to be free”, where one could be “far away from home and other people’s expectations” as the narrator in “The dancer with the broken leg” puts it. In many instances the characters come to symbolize India itself. For the half-Indian and half-British narrator of “A choice of heritage” it is the enigmatic grandmother, or the dubious Indian businessman in “Gopis”, who is likened to the Krishna, the god of love or the mystic Brahmin in “Pilgrimage”.

But India for all its seductions is repulsive too. Jhabvala had once professed “how intolerable India — the idea, the sensation of it — can become” to someone like her. She speaks dispassionately of the “great animal of poverty and backwardness” and uses vivid imagery such as of “interstate buses, piled on top with baggage and bundles and maybe a crate of chickens, some of them dying on the way” and “crowded with farmers, clerks, pregnant women carrying infants, and children vomiting out of the barred open windows through which dust and pollution flowed in”. Amidst such squalor and misery her characters make cynical references to “a God who had no idea what was going on in a world He claimed to have created but simply left to its own rotten devices” and come to conclusions such as that “no hopes were ever filled in this life”. Severed from their religious moorings, family origins and melancholy with their disenchantment with India, eventually, most of the characters seem to slip away into a permanent spiritual exile.

The nine stories do not attempt to cover Jhabvala’s life at all. There is no mention of her successful career as a fiction and screenplay writer. Her novel Heat and Dust was awarded the Booker Prize and her screenplays won the Academy awards for the famous adaptations of E.M. Forester and Henry James’s novel. These stories perhaps share certain attitudes and circumstances with the author.

Although Jhabvala reproached herself in her earlier writings for “a deplorable tendency to constant self-analysis”, she passes such propensity on to her latest characters who too are preoccupied with “the constant analysis of their own feelings and their attempt, on the one hand to control themselves and, on the other, not to suppress but fully to release their impulses — all this involved them in a maze of conflict from which they couldn’t find an exit.”

My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past
By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Shoemaker & Hoard
ISBN 1593760280
277pp. $25

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