The Difficult Genius of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

The first Ruth Prawer Jhabvala story I ever read is also the scariest. In “Aphrodisiac,” published in The New Yorker in 2011, a newlywed woman from a rural part of India, accompanied by her childhood nanny, begins life with her new husband’s family, a cosmopolitan clan in Delhi. Their presence seems eerily to link to misfortune. The story keys into themes familiar to those whose lives are often defined by them—Indians, on the subcontinent and abroad: class friction; mother-in-law tension; a belief in supernatural forces, no matter one’s bent of education; a comfort with a range of feminine representation, from evil to saintly.

I read the author’s byline and pictured a young woman of mixed heritage. As a second-generation American born to Indian parents, I thought I saw an emotional peer, a fellow straddler of worlds. The story felt at once at home in The New Yorker and cut from one of the Indian folktale collections I read as a kid, stocked with poisoned nipples and villainous in-laws. It also echoed the class-oriented violence commonly relayed in Indian newspapers, in the vein of the 2008 Man Booker–winning novel, The White Tiger, about a servant who turns on a master, written by the former journalist Aravind Adiga.

I was wrong on the particulars. Jhabvala, who died in 2013, at 85, two years after the publication of “Aphrodisiac,” was, of course, neither a Millennial nor a bearer of Indian blood. She was, however, a master interlocutor, her identity an endless source of confusion for readers who wondered, as I did, what sort of person could pull