Like Birds, Like Fishes: And Other Stories

by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, India

207 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a British and American novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.
In 1951, she married Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala and moved to New Delhi. She began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the Diplomatic Service and Overseas List of the 1998 New Years Honours and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.

Reviews

[Rasma Haidri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I dunno, if you are going to only read one book in your life, make it this one. She is a master of subtlety, and though not Indian herself she has divine insight into the pathos ridden contrary chaos that is that place.

[Lorraine McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable, colorful, poignant collection of short stories set in India, skillfully crafted & a joy to read.

[Lisa]

Excellent story teller ... in the same vein as Somerset Maugham

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine collection of stories by Jhabvala, perhaps better known as the screenwriting member of the troika which comprises Merchant Ivory films. All of these tales but one are set in the subcontinent and feature characters struggling with the expectations of the modern Indian family. The title story is about a young man smitten with the rude, unhappy young wife of a neighbor: he longs to take her away where they will find happiness together, just like a friend of his who chucked it all over to live "free and happy like birds and fishes." In a nutshell, every tale is about this idea of being free and happy by leaving behind social expectations. Some are stronger than others, but all take up this theme in one way or another, mostly with success. Particularly strong tales include the opener ("The Old Lady") about a widow who having achieved a modicum of peace with her life presides over a riotously dysfunctional family of children whose failure to see her happy detachment as a form of saintliness emerges in the words of a grandchild; another story of a widow ("The Widow") endowed with fortune and will enough to resist, for a time, the expectations of her family about the kind of life she should live; and the story of a man with many daughters on the day of the birth of another child ("Sixth Child"). Perhaps it takes a society as stratified and coded as India's and an observant writer who is simultaneously inside and outside such a culture (Jhabvala was actually a Pole from Germany who married an Indian) to be able to render these conflicts as movingly and in such detail as Jhabvala does here.

[AshleyS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family, and gendered societal rules, as a prison.

Delicately observed and uncompromisingly realist.

All of the stories here are about Indian families, and the tension between society's expectations and an individual's exigencies. Almost every story in this collection revolves around the problem of getting away from a family home due to an over-bearing patriarch or matriarch; providing for a lazy relative; or making the most of an imperfect marriage.

And often, the selfish, loud, and forceful overpower the representative of hard work or common sense.

I want to read more!

Personal highlights
A loss of faith: the weak child grows up and finds belonging and self-respect (and supports his family) in his job at a clothes shop. But a tendency to follow his mother's advice leads him into a marriage that threatens to spoil everything.

Lekha: The narrator helps the new young wife of her husband's boss to fit in, but is rewarded with behaviour she finds scandalous and ultimately has the opposite outcome that she wished for: the possibility that her husband will be passed over for promotion.

[Andrew]

Eleven short stories published in 1963 which capture something of human variety, though the majority are set in post-war & independent India...where everything is now perfect! (Joke!).
But the family politics & constant squabbling over assets dominates the stories, written by a Polish ex-pat who became something of a celebrity, winning the Booker Prize in 1975 for 'Heat and Dust', later a very good film about India & its cultural & social complexities.
My favourite story however is simply about refugees...now subjects of Her Majesty the Queen, called 'A Birthday In London'...some of the people that helped to make London such a cosmopolitan city before the advent of mass immigration from the 1960s onwards. A lost world of survivors who regarded England as a home from home...having no home to return to. Lessons learned.