one hand we have the Minister, who has chosen an active life in politics, and his daughter Mina who is following in his energetic footsteps. On the other hand we have the Minister's wife, who is the narrator, and the Minister's cousin Biju, both of whom lead intensely private, self-indulgent lives of leisure.

Surrounding the Minister's family—but at a safe distance—is an outer world of poverty and injustice. Through their repeated references to the underprivileged, the characters create an uneasy consciousness of this threatening world, of which we get only one short glimpse. The car gets stuck, and safely cocooned inside, Biju and the narrator witness the demolition of some slum dwellings:

Out of the car window we could see a squad of demolition workers knocking down the hovels made of old tins and sticks and rags, and the people who lived in the hovels picking up what they could from among the debris. They didn't look angry, just sad, except for one old woman who was shaking her fist and shouting something that we couldn't hear. She ran around and got in the way of the workers till someone gave her a push and she fell over. When she got up, she was holding her knee and limping but she had stopped shouting and she too began to dig among the debris. (61)

Their reaction to the scene is an indirect one: Biju “didn't say anything that time, but later in the day he was making a lot of jokes about the Revolution and how we would all be strung up on lamp-posts or perhaps, if we were lucky, sent to work in the salt-mines” (61-62).

There is more than a touch of Chekhov about Biju and the Minister's wife, two aristocratic people without the will or the wish to change their way of life, who sit around joking uneasily about the Revolution (“I don't know whether we really thought it would come. I think often we felt it ought to come, but when we talked about it it was only to laugh and joke” [61]). With no occupation in life, Biju and the Minister's wife spend much of their time together, largely cut off from the rest of the world. Significantly, Biju only reads the restaurant and cinema advertisements in the newspapers, together with the local news (54). He shies away from long and difficult plays, preferring lightweight musicals like My Fair Lady and Funny Girl (56). Both characters are subject to occasional bouts of melancholy, they both need pills to be able to sleep, and Biju has terrible nightmares about sudden personal catastrophes.

Although the Minister and Mina are extremely active members of society, they are not allowed to monopolize the moral high ground, because all of their actions are seen through the clear-sighted eyes of the narrator, who is not blind to her husband's pomposity and who recognizes in her daughter the earnestness of youth. Through her comments on her own life and the lives of the people whom she loves she comes across as a sympathetic character: unpretentious, observant and with an ironic sense of humor.

All through her story there are good-natured little digs at the Minister. To start with there is the way in which she never refers to him by name. All of the other characters—except the Minister's wife—have names, but, as she is the narrator, this is quite natural. Even Bobo Oberoi, who is only mentioned in passing as playing God the father in a play, gets a name, but not the Minister: to his daughter he is “daddy,” to her friends he is “Sir,” to Biju and even to his wife he is simply “the Minister” (with a capital letter), an indication that to them he has ceased to be a private individual and has become the public figure. This distinction ties in with his own view of himself: “When I think of my old age … I think mainly: what will I have achieved? That means, what sort of person will I be? Because a person can only be judged by his achievements” (62). By that token, his wife and his cousin can hardly be said to exist at all.

There is also the question of why the Minister is serving his country—for self-sacrificing or for selfish reasons. We are told that he likes being a Minister, that he starts the morning by making “an important face” and that he keeps up his air of pomposity for the rest of the day. It is true that he is very energetic. Exploiting two separate meanings of the verb “to serve,” Prawer Jhabvala turns the scene in which the Minister serves imaginary tennis balls across an imaginary net into a metaphor for how he “serves” his country. When Biju proclaims the ball “Out,” the Minister snaps “Absolutely in” (62); but in this case Biju is likely to be metaphorically correct, because it is more than hinted that the Minister, for all his activity, is perhaps not accomplishing a whole lot. His wife relates how even before he entered politics “doors banged behind him, his voice was loud and urgent like a king in battle even when he was only calling the servant for his shoes” (57). Temperamentally he is simply a very restless man who brings to politics the kind of energy he wasted in his youth on trips to Japan to study hotel management, or to Russia to observe the process of manufacturing steel; he never converted any of his houses into a hotel, never built the intended factory, and only introduced a new fertilizer to find that it killed off most of the crop (57). The scene in which he and Biju throw paper planes describes him well: he throws one “into the air with a great swing of his body like a discus thrower; but it falls down on the carpet very lamely” (68).

As a politician he is “keen to move with the times” (56), a kind way of saying that his opinions change with the newest fashions. One day the most important thing for India is doctors, the next day it is economists and political scientists. In the mornings his wife watches how he “struggles into his cotton tights; he still has not quite got used to these Indian clothes but he wears nothing else now. There was a time when only suits made in London were good enough for him. Now they hang in the closet, and no one ever wears them” (53). At a given point in his career, the Minister has clearly adopted a more Nationalistic stance as reflected in his substitution of traditional Indian clothes for the European garb associated with British colonialism. As so often in Prawer Jhabvala's works, clothes are important metaphors: although the Minister has changed his political spots his new political opinions are not entirely congenial since he still has to “struggle” into the new clothes every morning. And Mina, for all her patriotic views, still smells of Palmolive soap when she bends over to kiss her mother (53).

The Minister thinks in slogans and theories. Everything becomes an issue with him. He is not at all sensitive to people, either individually or collectively. To his mind the Revolution will not come simply because the Indian Parliamentary system is “the best mode of government” (61). Like his wife and Biju, he has no religious beliefs, but, unlike them, he makes a big noise about his views, lecturing his wife's aunt on how religion is “retarding the progress of the people” (66).

The contrast between the lifestyles of Mina and the Minister on the one hand and Biju and the Minister's wife on the other is suggested by the descriptions of what we might call their body language. The Minister, for example, is always active, on his feet, serving imaginary tennis-balls, throwing paper planes. His wife, on the other hand, always describes herself as sitting in chairs, reclining on sofas, lying in bed, details that underline the sedentary, uneventful life she leads. The same is true of Biju, except for the scene in which he dances a modern dance all alone in the garden and when he throws paper planes, although with far less energy than the Minister. Biju also enjoys mingling with the guests. However, none of these pursuits are what Mina would call “constructive” (55).

In terms of the three solutions to the problem of living in close proximity to mass poverty set forward by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Biju and the narrator have clearly chosen the third: they have withdrawn into a world of their own (that neither character is religious is specifically mentioned). Their withdrawal is emphasized by the imagery associated with them. Practically all the scenes take place within the confines of a room (“like two fish in an aquarium”) or a private garden at night. Mina and her father are forever coming into or leaving these enclosed areas. The scene with the music box, for instance, takes place in their shooting box (a word with connotations of restriction):

He [Biju] wound the music box again, and the sad little tune played. The thought of being together like this for ever—always in some beautiful room with a view from its long windows of water or a lawn or hot summer nights in a garden full of scents and overlaid with moonlight so white that it looked like snow—the thought of it was sad and yet also quite nice. (61)

In this description we find another element that helps to underline the secluded and protected quality of their lives—the association of subdued light with Biju and the Minister's wife. When she stays in bed in the morning the light streams into her bedroom filtered through the golden-yellow silk curtains, so that the light itself is honey-coloured. When they are in the garden the moon shines “with a silver light.” The clear light of day is never allowed to reach them, except when the narrator, as the wife of a Minister, is forced out into the world to give speeches, and when she wants to tease herself and lifts the yellow silk curtain to let the sharp light—and the truth—into the room. For the disarming thing about this character is that she sees clearly that the beauty of her existence, within the confines of her little world, is artificially created. Looking back to her days as a beauty she says:

If I don't look too closely and with the curtains drawn and the room all honey coloured, I don't appear so very different from what I used to be. But sometimes I'm in a mischievous mood with myself. I stretch out my hand and lift the yellow silk curtain. The light comes streaming in straight on to the mirror, and now yes I can see that I look very different from the way I used to. (54)

The minister on the other hand is associated with bright light. It is he who energetically draws the curtains apart when his wife is ill, thereby “dispelling the soothing honey-coloured light in which Biju and I have been all day,” and it is “a great harsh beam” from the Minister's car that breaks into the scene when Biju dances alone in the garden, in an elegant imitation of the newest dance of the young (67, 64). This is not the bright light of truth but of rationality, for the Minister has no redeeming quality of introspection; he has far too shallow a personality for that. When he looks in the mirror he likes what he sees, and his wife comments, “I wonder—doesn't he remember what he was? How can he like that fat old man that now looks back at him?” (60).

The opposition between the two poles within “Rose Petals” is not just a question of a private versus a public life. It is also an opposition between profundity and superficiality, between feeling and rationality. When Biju plays the music box again and again, in a beautiful room of red and gold full of images that suggest the passing of time and even death—the ormolu clock, the light reflected from the lake that made the walls appear to be “swaying and rippling as if waves were passing over them,” the prints of Venice—both Biju and the narrator think about time, aging, and death. The Minister refers to the tune made by the music box as “that damned noise” (60). He sees old age as something you face “head-on … a challenge that, like everything else, has to be faced and won” (62), as if he thought he had a chance of winning a battle against time and death.

It is this capacity for deep feeling and appreciation for what is beautiful that makes the Minister's wife and Biju see what the Minister can never see. When they accidentally witness the eviction of the poverty-stricken from their homes the Minister, who makes so many political speeches about serving India, is completely oblivious to what is going on and is only interested in the car. For him the suffering of the poor has become reduced to political slogans about “the changing times and building up India and everyone putting their shoulder to the wheel” (56).

What tones down the opposition between the two poles, and what holds this little world together is the all-pervading love—but not in any sense a blind love—that the narrator brings to all the members of her family: her daughter, Biju and even her husband. Her tolerance toward them all is akin to her tolerance toward herself:

There is a Persian poem. It says human life is like the petals that fall from the rose and lie soft and withering by the side of the vase. Whenever I think of this poem, I think of Biju and myself. But it is not possible to think of the Minister and Mina as rose petals. No, they are something much stronger. I'm glad! They are what I have to turn to, and it is enough for me. (68)

This passage appears at the very end of the short story, but the title “Rose Petals” has, of course, been there right from the start. Rose petals are of no obvious practical use, but they are things of great beauty and sophistication, associated with exclusiveness, fragrance, fragility and an airy lightness. They are also—like all things—transient, and when they “lie soft and withering by the side of the vase” their hour of dissolution is near. All these associations suit the lives led by the narrator and Biju, so that long before we reach the ending we have already made the connection between them and the central metaphor of the short story.

That this early realization does not detract from the enjoyment of the rest of the narrative, is due to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's restrained prose style, which is more subtle than it would appear to be on the surface. In the following passage, for example, she achieves two things simultaneously: she changes the direction of the story, and at the same time brings out the difference in character between Mina and her mother and Biju when she asks them whether they have no wish to do something constructive. Biju answers in the negative, and so Mina goes on to say,

“Well you ought to. Everybody ought to. There's such a lot to do! In every conceivable field.” She licks crumbs off the ends of her fingers—I murmur automatically, “Darling use the napkin”—and when she has got them clean she uses them to tick off with: “Social. Educational. Cultural—that reminds me: are you coming to the play?” (55)

The charm and delicacy of this moment of social comedy—affectionate, ironic and forgiving—is typical of Prawer Jhabvala. In such vignettes she achieves, momentarily, that accepting synthesis of vision that in her own person she could not achieve, when faced with what she has called “the horrors” of daily life in India (“Myself in India” 10).

Works Cited

Bailur, Jayanti. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Fiction and Film. New Delhi: Arnold, 1992.

Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Twayne's English Authors Series 494. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. London: Sangam, 1983.

Hayman, Ronald. The Novel Today. 1967-1975. Harlow: Longman, 1976.

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer. How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981.

———. “Introduction: Myself in India.” Jhabvala, How I Became … 9-16.

———. “Rose Petals.” Jhabvala, How I Became … 53-68.