For better or for worse

When Jill Lowe, a former debutante, hired a driver in India, she little imagined that she'd end up marrying him. Phil Reeves meets the unlikeliest of couples

Jill Lowe has one of those faces that looks as if it were created for the sole purpose of smiling. She radiates a blend of warmth and quiet subversiveness that makes one want to grin all day. There is a kindliness and a dignity, too, about her husband, Yadav, although he seems more restless, darting out on to their Delhi balcony to shut out a nagging morning breeze as we drink coffee inside.

"I can't really understand why people are so interested in all of this," says Jill. But the facts speak for themselves.

She is a former debutante who was presented at Court, as you might expect of a baronet's granddaughter, and is now 65. He is a driver and farmer, brought up in a peasant village among the mustard fields and brick factories of the north Indian state of Haryana. He doesn't know what his age is, although he thinks it is about 50.

His family, among whom Jill lived for seven years before moving to her apartment, dines on dal and chapattis, eaten sitting on the floor. They sleep on charpoys (string beds), and trudge off into the fields whenever they need to go to the loo.

The couple met while she was a tourist, rattling around in a white Ambassador car, and he was her driver, proudly showing off his country. The union of a man and a woman from opposite ends of the social scale, and of the world, would these days hardly arch an eyebrow in Kensington Court Place, where Jill was born, although London society in her grandfather's era would have been scandalised. But a rigid sense of social hierarchy, rooted in the caste system, still prevails in India, fusing with old-fashioned snobbery in Delhi, a city whose whisky-supping, golf-loving patricians seem to live in the era of P G Wodehouse.

So it took considerable courage for these two to become a married couple, and even more for Jill to publish a book about what she calls a "roadside love story", but this is not a starry-eyed riches-to-rags romance. Sir Francis Lowe, Jill's grandfather, made a fortune building housing estates in Birmingham. In 1898, he became Tory MP for Edgbaston. Although his obituary in The Times remarked that he "rarely intervened in debates" during his 30 years in the Commons, his political longevity was rewarded in 1918 when he was made a baronet. Eight years later, he retired to Brighton to enjoy his riches.

His second son, Arthur, was Jill's father. Arthur was a fine tennis player – he won the 1921 Wimbledon men's doubles with his older brother – who became company secretary to Moss Empires, operators of a chain of variety theatres and music halls. Jill recalls Arthur lunching at the Savoy with Gracie Fields ("She ate fish and chips, and drank port and lemon").

In Jill's debutante year, she met an impoverished law student at the Boat Race, ditched her boyfriend, converted to Catholicism and married him. Sixteen years and five children later, he had used up her inheritance, and been declared bankrupt. They split up. After a few years staving off poverty by working as a tour guide, and loneliness by taking lovers – "afternoon delights", in the words of one of her daughters – she set off for a three-month break in India. She was 52.

And so here we were, 13 years on, drinking coffee in a small flat in Delhi, discussing her marriage and her book.

I had hardly sat down before she had broken all the rules that should apply when an author seeking publicity meets a journalist: she joyously showed me the only two rude reviews published in the Indian papers (the others were all complimentary) on the grounds that they were "by far the most amusing".

One blasted her on a point so fantastically petty that it was obvious that the writer was troubled by some far deeper but unspoken issue. There were strains of the same subconscious unease in a milder, yet nonetheless startling, review by the celebrated Indian writer, Khushwant Singh.

The great man described meeting Jill and Yadav: "He is no Romeo. He is dark-skinned but well preserved. She is a genteel, soft-spoken lady, and looks younger than her years. She looks after him like a mother. She took him with her to meet her family in England, hoping he would settle down with them. He could not stand the English climate or the food, and flew back to Haryana. There is still not much meeting of the minds. I wonder how long the mutual infatuation will last."

This discomfort on the part of members of the Indian intelligentsia about their relationship – even though it has survived 13 years – was all too obvious in the early days of their romance. Jill says that Yadav was treated with "hatred and scorn" by doormen, waiters, and receptionists. In Ahmadabad, they were turned away from three hotels in a row after asking for a shared room. "I felt so humiliated, I would gladly have slept in a hen coop in the back yard of a brothel," Jill recalls.

This problem has receded with time. They now run a travel company, Delhi Day Tours. "I think these days, we look quite natural together. We don't get asked out to many Delhi dinner parties, because it just doesn't work. It is not that people are nasty. Neither side has anything much to say to each other. Sixty years ago, it would have been the same in England."

She talks of an "invisible cord" between them that began at an early stage and is strong enough to bridge their cultural differences.

These were legion. Yadav was thrust into an arranged marriage in his early teens (his first wife died at 27). He comes from a farming society with strict rules and traditions, which dictates that he must marry within his own caste, but not in the same village (a rule that did not apply to his second marriage). It is supportively communal, but disputes get settled in the traditional way: when Yadav fell out with a nephew over land, he ended up with a broken leg.

There is something else. Yadav is an intelligent, generous and humourous man. But he also has a serious drink problem. Neither of the two make any secret of this. In fact, it's an integral part of their story. "This is what life is like," says Yadav. "It happens to people every day, to Americans, to British. I think people understand that."

He hasn't read Jill's book. Had he done so, he would have found that his Western wife is unapologetically frank on the subject, describing her "white-hot hatred" at the quarter-bottles of Indian-made whisky she found squirrelled away in their home. "In the end, this is the main issue between us, so it is important to address it," she says.

That requires courage, of course. But these two have already proved that they have plenty of that.

'Yadav, a Roadside Love Story' is published by Penguin India