Always Out of Place

In these nine stories, enduring ties are slowly formed with perfect strangers. In the first chapter, “Life”, the narrator gives up her routine of research and discovery in India to attend to her step-mother in New York. Elsewhere, in a matter of moments old assurances vanish. In “Springlake”, three vagabonds through a life of privilege — now aging — watch in puzzlement as their mentor forms an alliance with their young daughter/niece, banishing them from their home and comforting ambiguities. In both cases, the narrator easily reconciles herself to changes in rhythm and destiny. She is uncomplaining and calm.

Those are the ways of perpetual travellers perhaps, to be curious but never to cling. Writes Jhabvala in her introduction: “Although I felt at home wherever I happened to be, at the same time I held back, almost deliberately, from being truly assimilated. It was as though I wanted to feel exiled from some other place and to be free to go back to or in search of it.”

These “potentially autobiographical” chapters are also a natural progression for Jhabvala. In her last published work, a collection of short stories (East into Upper East) almost a decade ago, she seemed to have exhausted a lifetime’s leftovers, storylines thought of but never pursued, locales visited so often once again brought alive. The Old Delhi of her novels that has long disappeared, for instance, was resurrected. Here, in My Nine Lives, she lays bare the mechanics of her fiction. Her stories have always been character driven. In these stories, she returns to herself. She begins with her own coordinates, and courageously — through fictional could-have-beens — explores her engagement with place and person.

What’s next, one is tempted to ask. A straightforward autobiography? That would be intriguing, but given Jhabvala’s body of work, it may be too predictable a task.