Shuttered at home against the heat and dust, housewife Olivia reads books and plays the piano. Indian servants idle in the shadows waiting for her to want something. Olivia is deeply romantic, sympathetic to the suicidal beauty of a love like Juliet’s for Romeo or the self-immolation of grieving local widows. In no time at all Olivia falls under the spell of the ‘terrifically handsome’ local prince.

The granddaughter of Olivia’s husband Douglas is the book’s anonymous narrator. She too falls under strange spells and her story echoes Olivia’s in incident and location. Both women, to their shame but possible liberation, step into the heat and dust of India.

It’s 1923 in Olivia’s story and India is under British rule. Olivia’s husband is a local administrator and the expatriates pontificate about the good ol’ days and the useless locals, much as expatriates do today world over.

“She kept asking herself how it was possible to lead such exciting lives - administering whole provinces, fighting border battles, advising rulers - and at the same time to remain so dull.’ (15)

The Brits warn against going native or going ‘over to the other side’ as Major Minnies puts it.

“One should never, he warned, allow oneself to become softened (like Indians) by an excess of feeling; because the moment that happens - the moment one exceed’s one’s measure - one is in danger of being dragged over to the other side.” (171)

Well, there’s no danger of excessive feeling here: the climax occurs offstage, and the aftermath is dispatched in brief, impersonal words. Are we denied the emotional climax to illustrate how unsatisfactory the stiff-lipped, deeply-reserved position of the English is? Much is made of the weather: of the intensifying heat before the break and relief of the monsoon rains. Heat and Dust intensifies in this way, but the rain never falls.

Despite the English point of view, heat and dust is certainly where life is. But when both female characters embrace it, the narrative veil falls and the reader is denied the scenes to determine whether the sacrifice or bravery was worth it.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s writing is clear and playful, sharp and wry: all the flavours of the dishes Englishmen Harry and Chid can’t stomach. The death of the Indian beggar woman is as beautiful as death can be, and the book alternates elegantly between 1923 and the narrator’s journal entries 50-odd years later.

I was given some bits of rock sugar and a few flower petals which I did not of course like to throw away so that I was still clutching them on the bus back to Satipur. When I thought Inder Lal was not looking, I respectfully tipped them out the side of the bus, but they have left the palm of my hand sticky and with a lingering smell of sweetness and decay that is still there as I write. (13)

Perhaps the twist in the tale is that the climax is not where the reader expects. The narrator’s dramatic moment is the decision reached under the hands of Maji; for Olivia is it the same, but with the face of the Nawab’s mother inches from her own. Heat and Dust won the Booker Prize in 1975.

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