Little Memsahibs

TWO UNDER THE INDIAN SUN by Jon and Rumer Godden. 240 pages. Knopf, Viking. $5.50.

Fifty years ago, eight-year-old Rumer Godden began to write a novel. "Peggy," read one memorable sentence, "looked round and saw a tigiger and a loin roring at her."

"But she was in the garden," protested Rumer's kibitzing nine-year-old sister Jon. "There wouldn't have been a tiger or a lion."

"It doesn't matter," said Rumer. "This is writing."

The Godden sisters are now successful British novelists, and when Rumer (Black Narcissus, The River) and Jon (The Seven Islands, The Peacock) use India as a locale, reality still does not impinge on the writing. Seen through their eyes, the vast Asian subcontinent becomes a setting instead of a place, muddy rivers are transformed into revered waters, reeking slums smell of curry and spice, and lacerating poverty is unflinchingly accepted.

This collaborative childhood autobiography evokes dreamy days in a sprawling house in East Bengal, where the Goddens' father was a steamship agent, and where, as petted and pampered little memsahibs, they had syces to care for their pony, dirzees to whip them up frilly frocks, ayahs and bearers to care for them. But the sisters were perceptive little girls, and if life was mostly a carefree and sheltered idyll, there was also an awareness of spuming life outside their garden wall. They recall with remarkable clarity the sights and sounds of the bazaars, of steamer trips through the river jungle of the Ganges Delta, of the slow cycle of the Indian year, from Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, back again to the Moslem festival of Muharram. In a muted way there was tragedy, too. The sisters tell how Nitai, their meek sweeper, killed his beautiful daughter in a jealous rage after she moved in with Guru, the Godden family's gatekeeper.

It was not an ordinary childhood, and for all its special moments the sisters later agreed that it might have been better if they had been reared differently. "Better," said Jon, "but not nearly as interesting." Readers of this perhaps too romanticized, but still captivating memoir can agree. And they will also understand why it is that old Mother India never seems to let her adopted children go.

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