“I have lived,” Jhabvala said, “like a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests.”
The cuckoo is a parasitic bird that deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds, who then raise its hatchlings with their own. Imaginatively, this is where the writer must be: embedded in the private worlds of other people.
For Jhabvala (1927-2013), this came naturally; hers was a life of permanent exile. Born into a German-Jewish family in Cologne, she fled to England in 1939. After university, she married an Indian architect and moved to Delhi, where she raised a family and began a prolific fiction-writing career.
Years later, she uprooted again, this time moving to New York, where she settled close to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the filmmaking team for which she wrote more than 20 screenplays, two of them Oscar winners.
[extract of a book review titled Disinheritance by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala [by Sam Sacks, WSJ, 4-12-2025].
The extract above is a brilliant review of this latest collection of fictional stories written from 1957 to 2011 by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, published in 2025.
In these 17 stories, she observed, inter alia, the Indians of India.