Books: Saraswati’s Blessings

AHMED AND THE OLD LADY

by JON GODDEN 203 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

THE PEACOCK SPRING

by RUMER GODDEN 274 pages. Viking. $8.95.

In the pantheon of Hindu gods, Saraswati is the goddess of pen, ink and books. She must have given the young Godden sisters a double blessing. Half a century later, the ex-colonials are still writing with fecundity and style—often about their childhood in India. Jon, 70, has just produced her tenth novel; Rumer, 69, her 15th. Rumer has also written poetry, stories and children’s books. In addition, the Goddens have collaborated on two volumes: Shiva’s Pigeons (1972) and the highly acclaimed Two Under the Indian Sun (1966), a memoir of the years spent among the textures and atmospheres of India past. “If we children grew up with a sense of space in us,” they recall, “it was from that sky.”

That sky still frames their work and personae. In Jon’s Ahmed and the Old Lady, 80-year-old Leah Harding is traveling in the mountains of Kashmir in 1943. As the headstrong woman explores higher and higher—above the last town, above the encampments of the nomadic Gujar tribe, above the tree line —the air becomes cleaner and thinner and her life more elemental. The solitude and longed-for “power of seeing, really seeing” pull her onward. Leah’s servant, Ahmed, shares her drive, but he is eager only to leave behind a life of error. Despite their backgrounds the un likely pair draw closer until the purity of the landscape erodes their differences.

In The Peacock Spring, Rumer again evidences the profound understanding of children that she showed in The River and An Episode of Sparrows. Two adolescent English girls, Una and Halcy on, are called out to Delhi by their envoy father — only to discover that they are chaperones to his Eurasian fiancee. At first the book evokes the formal, secluded India of the diplomats: banks of flow ers, servants, gardeners, even a boy to beat dew from the lawn. It is a world of riding, parties and ease. Then Una and Ravi, a young Indian poet, fall in love — and the India of poverty, distances, dust, stenches, desperate class divisions, overcrowding, sacred rivers, rises from the mist.

Rumer and Jon were wrenched away from India and sent to school in England before they were ready to part from the reality and the symbols of a happy childhood. Probably this separation affected Rumer more seriously; it is she who seems obsessed with the torments of young people hovering on the steps of maturity. It is she who ar rests the mind with a metaphor for the land of contrasts, the country whose preening beauty cannot mask the terror that persists in life as in fictive reconstructions: “Do you know why the peacock gives those terrible screams?”

she asks. “He has looked down and suddenly seen his feet. He had been so busy admiring his train that he had for gotten he had them . “