Once again in her latest novel, as in most of her earlier work, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala explores the situation of foreigners in India and what India does to them. But unlike her earlier work (seven novels and three collections of short stories), here for the first time she adds an extra dimension of time, going back to the past for the confirmation of a pattern that she had so far traced only in terms of contemporary India.
It is a neatly structured novel, built up carefully with alternate extracts from old letters and recent journal entries, the two separated by the gap of half a century. The letters were written in the hey-day of the British Raj by the wife of a district magistrate, and the journal by a recent British traveller in India, the two heroines deliberately created as total contrasts. The soft and feminine Olivia, the letter writer, is surrounded by flowers, yellow chintz and piano music while the journal writing narrator emerges as a large, awkward flat-chested woman who roughs it out in India, living in a bare whitewashed room on top of a dingy shop. Yet the intended irony of the novel, inherent in its structure, is that in spite of these ‘polarities’, their lives follow exactly parallel courses. The recurrent pattern is unavoidable—both these women give themelves to Indian men at exactly the same spot, a local shrine where childless women come to pray for offspring. Both conceive, both try abortions by native methods, both fail, and then go to the hills to await childbirth. The men to whom they give their bodies may appear to be dissimilar, one being a Nawab, the other a government clerk, yet they have elements in common. Both are pathetically eager to please and entertain their English friend, both are dominated by their mothers, and strangely enough both have disturbed wives. Enumerated thus, the parallel between the two stories appears mechanical, but in the novel it is suggested more subtly.
A link is provided between the two stories by making the narrator a remote granddaughter of the earlier heroine—a rather complicated relationship, but adequate for the purposes of the novel because it gives the narrator access to a bunch of old letters. The curiosity generated by these letters makes her come to India where of course nothing is the same any more. … .