East Into Upper East Read Online Free PDF Page B

But that day he persisted and she became angry, which was what he had wanted, for why should she be smiling that way when he was feeling so rotten?
    In the past, in their years of happiness, he had known just how to wind her up so that she flashed and blazed in a pleasurable way.Later, he began to miss his mark, and that was what happened that day. Before he knew where he was, with his sick eyes and head, she had jumped up from the mirror, crashed her hairbrush against the wall behind him, and stood above him in an attitude of menace. He squinted up at her, mocking and malevolent. Her silk robe, cut down from a sari, swung wide open, and her full breasts, unconfined by a brassiere, were before him. Her breasts had always been an exciting contrast to her small waist and slender arms, though not to her hips, which also swelled voluptuously. He reached up his hand to squeeze one breast, and remarked with a sneer that these fruits must have been damaged by being handled too often on too many weekends. All at once she was on top of him. She sat astride his chest and seized his hair and banged his head up and down. Even without a hangover, there would have been no way he could defend himself against her. At that moment, she was as irresistible, as inexorable, as the goddess Kali, who, with bared and dripping fangs, rides her victims to destruction.

    The next moment—well, it came twenty years later, but he had no intervening image—there she was, holy under a tree. It was only natural that on his daily visits he should continue to look at her with the same cynical, not-to-be-fooled expression—with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, in a most unreverential posture. She didn’t seem to mind. The eyes she raised to him were absolutely clear, inviting him to read what he would in them. Meanwhile, her other visitors, the pilgrims, came and went, touching her feet and taking her blessings. As they drew near, their faces became radiant, and they appeared to retain this glow as they departed. Farida’s handmaidens glided about, and now and then one of them sang a song of spiritual love while another accompanied her, plucking a slow, droning sound out of a lutelike instrument. If Farida felt the song was too low-spirited—and her handmaidens, so gentle and good, did have a tendency to droop—then she herself would chime in, giving more of a swing and lift to it, and snapping her fingers as if to say, “Come on, let’s get going!” Then everybody responded; voices rose, the drone hastened and took on melody, gentle smiles shook off melancholy, and at the end, when the women hadfinished in unison on their top notes, Farida said, “ That’s better,” so that everyone laughed out loud, and this sound mingled with the last joyful notes still vibrating in the air.
    At home, in her youth and heyday, Farida had always had this ability to make a party go. When things got too slow for her, she would turn up the record-player or replace the LP on it with a faster one to dance to. If her partner couldn’t keep up with her, she would discard him and try another and another, and if none of them could come up to the mark—“What a bunch of dummies!”—she simply danced by herself, with her slippers kicked off and her hair and gossamer veil flying, while everyone stood around her and applauded. In London, too, at the beginning of their life there, she and Farid had given terrific parties, cramming the flat with more people than it could hold, so that the guests spilled into the kitchen, where Farida was boldly throwing spices together. She was always experimenting with curries she remembered from her grandmother’s cuisine, and these usually turned out extremely well, filling the flat with their rich aromas. Everyone sat on the floor, eating with their fingers Indian style, while Farida picked her way among her friends, putting more delicious things on their already