My Nine Lives by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Page A

exchanges between judge and lawyers, but she had a good view of Vijay among the other accused. He looked rested after his stay at home, freshly shaven, in his shiny suit and broad tie; he was completely sober, in a way she had never seen him in New York, facing the judge with an expression simultaneously proud and submissive to fate’s decree. At this hearing, bail was revoked for most of the accused; and amid the ensuing pandemonium—relatives wailing, lawyers protesting—Lucia managed to fight her way to the front of the crowd watching the prisoners being led to the vans outside. When Vijay was led past her, she managed to touch his sleeve. She hardly felt the angry push by the policeman to whom he was chained: for at that moment Vijay turned his face to her, and he smiled at her the way he used to—with affection, grateful for her love and puzzled by it, and also in apology for himself, his own condition. It was only a second beforehe was dragged on, with a passage being cleared for him among the clamoring, pushing crowd. The next time she tried to see him in prison, she was again refused admission, and the time after that she was told that he had been taken to hospital.
    Since this was not the prison hospital but a general one, it was easier for her to see him. She was used to Indian hospitals, having had to go for a series of rabies injections after a stray dog had bitten her. The crowds and smells, the mutilations, the red stains that may have been blood or betel juice were not so different from what she had witnessed in other places, such as the railway stations where she had sometimes spent the night. Vijay was behind a screen put up around his bed, and she had to walk the length of the ward, stepping around patients on the floor for whom beds had not been found. It was very crowded, not only with patients but with their families surrounding them. Again it was not so different from the railway station, each family picnicking on food brought in little pots.
    When Lucia reached the screen at the end, she found a policeman sitting outside it on a stool; he had a rifle but was asleep, so she slipped quickly around the screen and was alone with Vijay. He was lying under a blanket on a bed as narrow as a plank; probably it was a plank. He was hooked up to some sort of machine, which took up almost the entire space and appeared to be very old, for it both wheezed and pounded noisily. Vijay himself made no sound at all, he didn’t even seem to be breathing; maybe the machine was doing it for him—Lucia felt that she and the machine were alone together. It occurred to her that Vijay might already have gone, have died, without anyone knowing; she put out her hand to touch his face but at that moment the policeman erupted behind the screen, shouted loud abuse and pushed her out. She walkedaway without protest, feeling she had seen and accomplished nothing; some of the patients or their family members called out to her, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. During all this time in India, she had never managed to understand a word of any language, only signs and gestures, which she may have misinterpreted.
    The one thing she had kept in the course of all her wandering was the key to my apartment, and she went straight there on arrival in New York. When I returned from the office, I found her asleep on the sofa, still in the thin cotton rags in which she had traveled around India. All the color had faded from her hair and from her face, with only her eyes ringed with kohl; the soles of her feet were black with the mire and dust of the continent she had traversed. She slept for a long time, and when she got up, she was still exhausted. She stayed with me for two weeks, and I thought she had no plan for anything further, but it turned out that she had.
    She was going to stay with her mother in Connecticut—she made a face to show how distasteful this prospect was to her, but “