Heat and Dust

Two women, fifty years apart, in the same small Indian town. In 1923 Olivia is the bored and childless wife of a British civil officer in Satipur, who befriends the local Nawab, a charming and financially ruined prince with connections to the bandits operating in his own territory. The friendship becomes an affair, and the scandal that follows removes Olivia from the record almost entirely.

In the early 1970s her step granddaughter arrives with Olivia's letters, intending to find out what happened. She takes a room above the bazaar, learns the town, and begins, without quite deciding to, to repeat the shape of the older story with a man of her own.

Jhabvala alternates the two and lets the reader draw the parallels, which are never insisted upon. The 1923 sections are cool, ironic and very funny about the Anglo Indian community's certainties. The modern sections are messier and more physical, full of hippies who have come looking for enlightenment and are mostly dysentery ridden and broke.

It is short, elegant and unsentimental about India in both periods, refusing the exoticism the material invites. Best for readers who like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and want a woman's account of the same country and the same failure to understand it.

At around 180 pages it is one of the shorter winners and one of the easiest to recommend from the prize's first decade. The two timelines are clearly signposted and never confusing, and the ending withholds judgement on both women, deliberately.