Coming of Age

REMEMBER THE HOUSE (241 pp.)--Santha Rama Rau--Harper ($3).

The intertwining of two processes--the coming of age of a sensitive .girl and the coming of age of an equally sensitive nation--makes a compelling novel. Santha Rama Rau, who writes English (Home to India) with the flourish of conquest, portrays newly freed India through the mind of Indira ("Baba") Goray, daughter (as is Novelist Rau) of a rich and respected Indian politician. The story transpires in Bombay, in the hill country of the north, and among the elaborate Victorian palaces of the Indian rich on the Malabar Hill. Baba and her sophisticated schoolgirl friend turn their wary eyes on the fantastic events in which, trancelike, the Indians accepted the Nehru raj from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy. Baba teeters girlishly between the superstitious past (as a child she had retched over a dead fish's eye, which she tried to swallow in order to summon up strange powers) and the dull independent future, symbolized by her dull, enlightened father, who talks like an instructor in social science.

Dinner After Dinner. As Baba moves to her formal Indian betrothal, the characters of Nehru's India pass her eye. With the cruelty of youth and the precision of familiarity, Baba ticks them off. There is the strangely pathetic princeling drinking his schooners of champagne and serving a New Year's meal consisting of a complete Western dinner followed by a complete Indian dinner. There are the bony peasants, the compounds full of servants and relatives related in intricate ways, the Congress politicians sidling for jobs, Goanese musicians with their "desperate nattiness," mystical followers of that "tough realist," Gandhi, and--most exotic of all--the Americans.

Baba and her friend have a private word--hysteria--for anything of which they disapprove. It is a word they use particularly often in reference to Americans. Yet Baba finds herself entranced by two Americans--Courtney and Alix Nichols, who betray the un-Indian heresy of being in love in the romantic Western pattern. Alix is also a recognizable U.S. type in that when Indian servants place a chair of honor for her, she insists on sitting on the ground. She will love the Indians, if it kills her--and them. Soon, of course, she is an expert on saris and embarrasses everyone by insisting on wearing one at an East-West social function. Most comical of all, the Indians' rich, aristocratic, complexion-conscious Brahmans and Parsees of Bombay resent her modish suntan.

More Than Diplomats. Thus, cleverly, Santha Rama Rau puts in a novelist's terms an Indian psychological dilemma, which in the terms and the person of Nehru irritates the West: just as the British were disliked more for their law and the incorruptibility of their lawgivers rather than for their conquest, so Americans seem to be disliked and resented for their quixotic good will rather than their "dollar imperialism." In the presence of envy, gratitude is impossible.

The most famous novel with Indian-Western relations as its theme is A Passage to India. Forster's story was essentially the tale of an English spinster, and Remember the House is an Indian's story, but it faithfully endorses Forster's strong plea for simple human contact; it may be that, if the contact is ever truly made, the credit will be as much due to novelists like Santha Rama Rau as to diplomats and statesmen like her father, Sir Benegal Rama Rau, onetime Ambassador to Washington and Deputy High Commissioner in London. At any rate, in Remember the Home Miss Rau does much to make the myriad faces of India plainer to the Western eye.

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