heat & dust

Heat & Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Harper & Row, 1975)

This engaging and enjoyable book presents two different narratives of English women in India, set fifty years apart.  In 1923, Olivia, the wife of a British bureaucrat , falls in love with the Nawab of Khatm and (probably) conceives a child with him; she ends up scandalously leaving her husband and “going over the other side” (after aborting the baby).  Fifty years later Olivia’s husband’s granddaughter (he remarried after divorcing Olivia) journeys to India to explore Olivia’s story, which she has read about in letters Olivia wrote to her sister back in England.

The book does a good job of interlacing both these narratives.  The worlds are vividly evoked as are the characters in both sections.  Jhabvala is an intelligent, economical writer; the reader admires her deftness and confidence.  The book, which  is less than 200 pages, at times seems overly compact: the woman in the 1970s section is a bit of cypher, and some of the compression and elision feels undernourishing.  A bit more food on the plate would be welcome, delicious as it is.