Of Marriageable Age (31 page)

It was Savitri's turn to stroke his face. 'David, you're so naive. Of course your mother was good to me. I know it and I'm immensely grateful. If it weren't for her I'd have been married to some clubfooted cook in Bombay years ago. Remember?'

They smiled together at the memory and David squeezed her hand, now enclosed in both of his.

'What if I were clubfooted?'

'But David, you know that's not the point. I'd love you if you had four arms and eight legs!'

'Like one of your Hindu gods?' David let go of her hand and waved his arms in the air as if he were an octopus.

Savitri's smile faded. 'Don't make fun of our religion, David, please don't. None of the gods has eight legs and if they have four arms it's just symbolic. Just as the gods themselves are symbolic. I wish I could interest you more in my religion. It's not what you think. Not if you go deeper.'

'Oh well. When we're married you can teach me.'

'That's what I'm trying to tell you. She'll never let us get married, in spite of all her tolerance and liberal ideas. She can only be good to me because she knows, she thinks, she's better. I'm the poor little girl she raised up. I'll never be her daughter-in-law! The mother of her grandchildren!'

David took both her hands in his now and drew her close.

'I don't believe you, Sav. She's not that way. She loves you almost as a daughter and she'd love to have you as a daughter-in-law and I know, I just positively
know,
that when she finds out about us she'll be delighted and we'll get engaged and in a few years we'll marry. You wait. She always gets what she wants.'

'You're wrong, David. Maybe you have to be one of us to feel these things . . .'

'Don't argue, my darling. I can't bear arguing with you. It's such a waste of time. And time is so short. Listen, there’s the gong for supper and I have to go but I'll see you tomorrow. We'll sort this all out, and you'll see: you won't marry this chap, never, ever!'

'David, promise me you won't talk to your mother!'

'But why not? That's the best, the quickest way to put an end to this betrothal thing. If my mother agrees, then your father —'

'Please, David, don't let's discuss it. Just promise you won't tell her. Not yet. Let's wait. Please. Do it for me!'

'I'll promise if you give me a kiss!'

Savitri smiled and pecked his cheek. David chuckled and pulled her close.

'No, silly. A proper one.'

And he tried to kiss her properly, but she pulled away.

'I told Amma we'd go to the Ganapati temple for evening
arathi,'
she murmured, and swung herself out of the tree-house and down the rope ladder. He followed her down; grabbed her wrist. She pulled away; he pulled her back.

‘David…’ she murmured, but whatever else she wanted to say she couldn’t, for his lips were on hers, pressing, urgent; and his arms around her waist. She struggled for a moment, and then her body went limp against his but her lips urgent and responsive, locked to his… and then she pulled away again, gasping for breath; turned and ran.

‘Savitri!’ he called. She stopped, turned, waved, and turned away and ran on. David watched her go. The blue of her sari flashed in and out of sight as she fled along the winding path home, and he watched her go until she disappeared behind a bougainvillea bush, and he grinned to himself with all the faith and the exuberance and the idealism and the megalomania that is youth.

24

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

NAT

London, 1960-1964

N
AT DISCOVERED
W
OMAN
. He didn't have to marry to do so, for each one was his bride. They offered themselves to him: he could take his choice, and the longing ache within him was stilled, for he found in London a garden of earthly delights. Women here were not rare out-of-reach orchids but a riotous summer-bed of flowers nodding in the sunshine, inviting, pleading to be plucked. They brought fulfilment to his starved senses. He drank their intoxicating nectar, drowned in their overwhelming fragrance. He made bouquets of them, works of art, perfumed garlands to wear around his neck. He worshipped them, no longer with his soul, but with his body.

The first time, of course, had stunned him. That an ordinary woman — that is, a woman who was not a whore — could be so quick and so willing, so eager even, to offer him her body! Before marriage! Without even a
promise
of marriage! But this was the era of Free Love, and Nat was too polite to show his shock, too charming to betray his embarrassment, too tolerant to condemn, and, of course, too gracious to refuse such a precious gift. Instead, his mind scurried into fast forward and his body, with all the impulses held so long in abeyance, followed suit. And though his body was the bait, the first offering at the shrine of womanhood, he soon discovered that it was not his body they truly wanted; they were after his soul. And Nat, raised to share his all, gave willingly.

Women adored him for the sweetness of his disposition, for his guileless, almost child-like openness, his humour and generosity and for the fact that he truly, genuinely,
loved
them, each one of them, that he was genuinely in search of what he called the Inner Goddess and fell to his knees before Her in each new English woman.

Women of all kinds loved him, and he was all things to all women.

Younger girls found in him greatness and strength, the hero of their dreams, the fairy-tale prince they could look up to, which made them feel great and wonderful and unique themselves, as if they could do anything and be anything, as if the wavering, rickety structures of their personalities, lacking foundation, at last found an inner structure, through him.

Older women, turned brittle by battling a hostile male-dominated world, laid down their arms. Their sharp corners turned round, their prickly thorns fell off, and they flourished and blossomed as never before. For Nat could see, and summon, the Goddess within each one, and raise her to life through the ashes of discontent and bitterness.

But in time Nat grew choosy, and a certain preference for younger goddesses of perfect, or near perfect, face and form established itself. Nat told himself and explained to all who would listen that outer beauty was the logical consequence of inner beauty; that the body of a beautiful woman was the outer symbol of the Inner Goddess, demanding love; that the act of love was in fact an act of worship; that there was no difference between profane and sacred love, between Eros and Agape, or, in Indian terms, between Kama and Bhakti. The body of a beautiful woman was an altar to which he brought his love-offerings. And he, in turn, possessed that mysterious, elusive charisma which made of his own body a beacon.

For, of course, Nat himself was beautiful. His skin was the creamy colour of
café au lait,
but glowing as if layered with a veil of gold, and around his oval face fell thick, heavy, bouncing black curls. He was tall, lean, sinewy, his body strong yet supple, and he moved with the languorous grace of an Afghan hound, regal almost, with an economy of energy in which perfect relaxation merged with perfect control. His eyes were huge and soulful, deep dark pools which showed great emotion and promised answers to all mysteries, heavy-lidded, veiled enigmas, and his black silky eyelashes were the envy of women, wasted on a man, they said; but no, not when that man was Nat. He dressed casually, preferring wide trousers with deep baggy pockets, over which he wore long pastel T-shirts in summer and thick woolly Norwegian sweaters in winter. He also favoured white long-sleeved Afghan shirts embroidered with shiny white flowers down the front, and over that a Kashmiri waistcoat. Sometimes he wore a turban, for the touch of mystery it added. An exotic glow radiated from him, invisible to the physical eye but sensed by women, which drew them to him as to a warm fire after a walk through snow and sleet.

In Nat, East met West in a perfect, seamless synthesis: the mysterious Orient untrammelled by convention, released into and made available for the modern world. For he personified both, embodied both. The Indian connection served him well, and to be fair it must be said that it forced itself upon him. Invariably, the girls he met would inevitably refer, giggling, to the
Kama Sutra
and ask him what he knew of it, which was, at first, virtually nothing. Then came the questions about Tantra yoga, and about the erotic temple statues of Khajarau, and Nat made it his business to educate himself in all these subjects. It was his duty as an Indian, for every Indian knows that the Western mind is gross and needs guidance in the ways of love, away from the crudeness of mere physicality to the spiritual heights it is capable of. Nat knew intuitively that what a woman really seeks is not physical enjoyment but spiritual unity with her man, to melt into his being and he into hers, and he found his women starved for love like this, wandering, lost, in a wasteland. Once they discovered him they could never go back; after loving Nat the crude pokings and pantings, the gross lurchings and thrustings of lesser men seemed ludicrous. Nat was a gardener, watering their thirsting souls with nectar.

He had his difficulties with men; or rather, men had their difficulties with Nat, since it was they who built walls around themselves. Nat had no walls. But he soon discovered that he was different from other men, which is why they built walls. Nat did not play their games. He had no need to work at building a personal image, bigger and better than everyone else's. Nat, having grown up with the lowest of the lowliest, and serving the lowliest, having been taught from the very beginning that he was no better than the meanest beggar, had a natural humility, a humility which did not debase him — on the contrary. For where English men spent their lives adding layers to their egos, in the hope of appearing strong, Nat's ego was so thin as to be transparent, allowing the great love and generosity which formed the core of his being to shine through, and that was the secret of his great charisma, and his greatness. He was Krishna with his flute; women were his
gopis,
dancing all for him.

Nevertheless, even that thinness of ego was enough for the seeds of dissatisfaction and self-indulgence to take root and grow in, and finally to flourish.

A
S FOR HIS STUDIES
—what a bore. The indifference he had known at Armaclare College grew to alarming proportions at University College. At Armaclare his mind had drifted off to fantasies of his own invention; here, the realities taking place in his spare time provided much more lurid detail. Learning was dull, dead; it was in his spare time that life really began, and his irritation at having to waste his time like this, being duty bound to get an education, as Doctor had drummed into him, lamed his memory, his attention span, his concentration, his motivation.

And yet. Sometimes, at night, in the spaces between waking dreams and sleep, he remembered India. Home. A place where the peace was so ineffable it seeped through body and soul and mind, holding a personality together as a cinema screen held moving pictures. A song of such sweetness, singing in the lonely stillness at the back of his being. Sometimes tears came, tears at beauty, lost, it seemed, for ever, torn apart by a hunger for life that grew the more he fed it, into a jarring, grasping monster over which he had no control. He wept like a little boy. Is this really me? Who am I? But new mornings came with new food for the monster, and Nat forgot his tears and flung himself at life.

Nat soon found that living with Sheila and Adam cramped his style, and early the following year he moved into the Notting Hill Gate flat of a fellow student, another Indian in his third year of law, a rather studious fellow from Gujarat who shut himself in his room and did not interfere with Nat's goings-on. And anyway, this fellow usually spent the weekends with relatives in Windsor, perhaps because the weekends grew increasingly busy with all the comings and goings of Nat’s girls. Nat had a room to himself in the flat, quite small, but suitable to his purpose, which more and more became not so much learning but loving. Like a lost traveller emerging from the desert he felt he had to make up for lost time, for the years of his young life spent in forced deprivation of sensual enjoyment. He felt a certain resentment towards his father for having so deprived him.

O
N THE OTHER
hand his father was, after all, providing the financial means for his stay in London, so in his letters home (which in time grew shorter, more compact and less frequent) Nat chose to keep quiet about his new-found lifestyle, feeling certain that Doctor would disapprove, maybe even whistle him home. Home! The village was no longer his home. What a narrow little world that had been, how empty of all the joys a man needs to be a man, how empty of love…

'
H
APPY
B
IRTHDAY
!' The door flew open and a gaggle of girls fell into the flat, giggling. They all wore mini-skirts, which to Nat's great pleasure were growing shorter by the month. They were all gorgeous, and they all loved Nat. Two of them were students, the rest of them simply girls he had met at various discos and brought home. Over time they had met each other, outgrown their initial bitchiness, and even become friends, members of the exclusive and very special society of Nat's Lovers, and Nat prided himself on the fact that now they weren't jealous of each other. Each knew that to know Nat, to love Nat and know his love, was to abandon all possessiveness, all claims of having him for herself alone, because Nat's heart was so big it could hold them all. None of them noticed, and Nat least of all, that over the glowing embers that Nat had brought from India a layer of grey ash was beginning to form, imperceptible to all but the sharpest eyes; and Nat, whose eye should have been sharp, was too young, too inexperienced, too distracted to be aware of the change.

His guests had brought drinks, records, and gifts; they celebrated Nat's twentieth birthday with great gusto, much laughter and jokes, dancing into the small hours till one by one five of the girls collapsed on the carpet. Nat covered them with blankets, of which he kept a good supply, and retired with the sixth girl, the latest to join the club and his Radha of the moment, into the bedroom, where they read poems of love to each other, poems so moving they brought tears to Nat's eyes, and to hers.