The Cambridge Curry Club (13 page)

Caught in the dance, they had failed to see they had toppled off the floor. When she argued for a new French-designed pre-heated toilet seat and ordered
pre-wrapped
counter pick-up presents for his friends, he should have seen that together they had already staled their infinite variety. He had wanted to read, write, teach, recite poetry, and Kathy, now as slim and indispensable to her interiors firm as dental floss to her teeth, hair burning brightly from lunch, talked with animation only of her therapist and wax, both Brazilian.

Her hysteria was timed to December, so
inconvenient
in the run-up to Christmas that, when she bravely continued to arrive at work, her employer increased her benefits package in gratitude. Roman obligingly timed his own less dramatic breakdown to the end of the semester, moving to a Buddhist retreat in Arizona.

‘I go to the back of the shop only for two minutes and there is a problem already. Swarna, you should at least have asked what these men were delivering! What is this big thing lying here right in the middle?’ asked Heera in exasperation as she poked at the object’s edges. She tugged a lever, and with a loud groan it opened like an accordion and settled amicably with four spindly legs folding out underneath.

‘Looks to me like a bed,’ volunteered the customer, peering over an album of Diana and the Supremes. ‘You know, one of those collapsible ones.’

‘But what’s this on the mattress? Some fool’s written in ink,
Pamela and John forever,’
cried Heera, vexed.

‘What are you going to do with it? It doesn’t look new at all,’ scoffed Swarnakumari.

‘No, it doesn’t. Pamela and John have spent forever on foam. And it will collapse if you sit on it,’ warned Durga. ‘It
is
a collapsible bed, though,’ she added reasonably.

‘Those are the same two names as on the sorting table,’ said Eileen.

‘That’s so naughty,’ admonished the customer, uneducated on either plot or characters, but keen to appear enlightened.

‘Naughty’. The word smacked of the nursery and the smack, thought Roman. He would use it one of these days; shuffle from one foot to another, a leg crossed over the other, and with a pained expression on his face and clasped hands he would concede, confess, ‘I’m naughty,’ and await his punishment. He was also
waiting
for an opportunity to add ‘Oops’ to his vocabulary. After a year out in the West where men were wild, and the saguaros grew tall and strong, where the giant
cactus
lived for two hundred and fifty years and grew to seventy feet, where time and space rolled out into the desert, there had been no opportunity to say ‘Oops’. Now he was ready. He would learn about civility and tea, crumpets and horses, rain and tweed, the grumble and apple crumble, ale and Britannia, conservatories and the colour magnolia, country rambles and brambles.

As Durga turned, her dark brown eyes met warm hazel eyes. ‘What’s so funny?’ she demanded.

‘It’s unreal. I’d heard about English charity shops and sweet old ladies, but this place is weird,’ Roman spluttered.

She looked at his springy dark hair, fresh, open face and rangy frame, at his mouth and tanned skin. Her smile widened and deepened, somersaulting over the collapsible bed, tumbling in the mattress, bouncing high on its springs and vaulting gracefully back.

‘I’m Roman Tempest,’ he said, offering a hand.

‘Then I must be Indian Storm,’ she replied, feeling the firm warmth of his grasp spreading into her own. ‘Why Roman?’

‘My parents loved
Roman Holiday
. Isn’t it a cool name?’

‘Yes. But it’s also cheesy – Mills and Boonish. Like a tall, dark, handsome stranger in a romantic novel.’

‘I
am
a tall, dark handsome stranger,’ he replied. ‘And romantic.’

‘I’m Durga,’ she said.

‘I’m Visiting Faculty, teaching an MPhil course in American Literature. Who are you?’

‘I’m a Townie now, but I did an MPhil in Modern Society and Global Transformation, Social and Political Sciences. Starting a researcher’s job in television in London in a fortnight,’ she answered.

‘Aren’t you the florist?’ interrupted Eileen suspiciously.

‘I’m Hermes at your service, madam. Messenger of Zeus. Or rather, of Sunflowers Florists, Mill Road. Behold my invisible cap, winged boots and caduceus. It’s a long story,’ he continued, but it was too late. Eileen shook her head dolefully and marched away.

Turning to Durga, he chuckled gleefully, ‘She thinks I’m nuts, doesn’t she?’

‘She thinks everyone is nuts,’ replied Durga. ‘What is a caduceus?’

‘The rod that Hermes carried, entwined by two serpents. He received it as a gift from Zeus when he invented the lyre. He used the shell of a tortoise for the lyre, by the way.’

‘Now
I
think you’re nuts,’ she confessed.

‘But nice? Please say I’m nice. You British love the word “nice”, don’t you? It covers everything, just like a tablecloth, or should I say “sari”? Hey, do you think I’m “interesting”, too? Because that’s not good,’ he said, reprovingly. “Interesting” is dangerous,’ he concluded.

‘Are you like this all the time?’ she asked.

‘I wasn’t before. Now I know it’s as important as carrying a dozen red roses.’

She laughed, and he felt he had always known the sound.

‘I get the feeling folks around here think Americans are brash and pushy, but I’m acting on impulse – I don’t usually do this – could I take you out to dinner and tell you all about the florist? It’s a
riveting
story, I promise, and will last until dessert,’ he pleaded.

She was silent. Sensing her hesitation, he retreated, ‘Okay, got the message. Step back, Roman, step well back. Naughty, naughty boy. That was too brash, too pushy. I’ll back off before I do something stupid. I’ve already been stupid, haven’t I, but I’ve also been nice, so there is something you could do for me, now that I’m here. Could you direct me to an old bookshop that’s supposed to be on this road somewhere?’

‘You must mean Browne’s,’ she said, trying to
suppress
her smile. ‘Turn left when you come out. It’s a few doors down, you can’t miss it.’

He was forced to move closer to her, as
Swarnakumari
brushed past, intent on fetching a measuring tape for the bed. ‘Do you have a picture of a desert, or a cactus?’

‘In here?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Well, why not? If you can have a collapsible bed, why not a cactus? Sounds reasonable to me.’

‘Why don’t you just go to a garden centre and buy a real one?’

‘The sensible solution. Of course!’ He smacked his forehead in a mocking gesture. ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Sure, I can do that, but I want a picture. Is that too much to ask? Can’t I have a look, no, what’s the right word, can’t I take a “little peek” among these cups and saucers, anyway? How about a guided tour of Buckingham Palace?’

Pausing in front of the men’s winter coats, he
confided
, ‘Have you ever felt so lonely for what you think you might lose that you think you need something tangible to remind you of it?’

‘You mean like crutches?’ she asked.

‘Crutches?’ He looked startled before recovering. ‘Never thought of it that way, but if you desperately want to talk about crutches, then I guess I need them, or maybe I just think I do. I’m from the East Coast. A smalltown boy who singed his soul in the big city, born again. Sounds very Jehovah’s Witness, doesn’t it? How interesting! My life was deadlines and dates and
publishing
papers. I was Icarus, flew too close. I also lost Kathy. We went to the School Prom together, that’s how long I’ve been with her. She told me in the end that I made her unhappy every single day, and I thought all I was doing was loving her. That was the
shock that shook the pear tree. Something was very wrong with my life, and I had to take it apart. I spent a year in a Tibetan Buddhist retreat in
Arizona
, and I found silence and space. Sounds very New Age-ish, and it was only a year, but it
has
changed my life. Anyway, back to Cambridge. It’s driving me crazy. I want a desert outside. I need those crutches – a picture, something, anything that helps me meditate on the colours of the desert. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I think I do, but I’m not sure I can help. I don’t think you will find anything in here.’

They wandered through the clothes racks,
unconsciously
distancing themselves from the others.

‘A picture of an
Echinomastus erectocentrus var.
erectocentrus
would do just fine,’ he said humbly, enjoying the bizarre intimacy of standing close to her next to a shelf of leather handbags while the rest were discussing the bed resting like a sleepy pregnant elephant in the centre of the shop.

‘That sounds obscene. Is it?’

‘That’s a needle-shaped pineapple cactus,’ he
continued
with a pained expression. ‘Me? Obscene? Haven’t you ever seen a barrel cactus? It’s an amazing flame of orange. Or a fish-hook, hedgehog, rainbow, the prickly pear and cholla, the night-blooming cereus, Arizona Turk’s head, golden beehive, pima pineapple, the organ pipe?’

‘I think that’s called showing off.’

‘I’m trying to show you that a man so desperately homesick for a cactus can be a safe dinner companion,’ he wheedled as they passed the china plates. ‘And scintillating company, too.’

‘That’s it, tour over. As you can see, no desert, no cactus.’

‘I thought you said you were a cactus.’ He regretted his runaway tongue.

‘What? Did I say that? When?’

Roman decided not to pursue the subject. There was something about her softness surrounded by prickles that
was
like a cactus.

‘Do you think they need some help?’ He watched Heera attempting to fold the bed, and strode forward. ‘I guess no one wants bedtime stories just yet. Where’s this Sleeping Beauty going?’ he asked, as he pulled the lever.

‘There is really no space in the shop,’ observed Eileen disapprovingly.

‘Precisely. We’ll put it outside,’ decided Heera.

‘Outside the shop?’ asked Swarnakumari, alarmed. ‘Someone might take it away.’

The idea had crossed Heera’s mind, and was in fact part of a plan. It was an easy – if illegal – way to dispose of unwanted items, for even the charity shop did have to reject and eject on occasion. Roman called on the male customer to assist in the removal of the bed; together they placed it slyly to partially conceal the Catnap window next door, and leave the IndiaNeed display visible. Unlike the vinyl-loving customer, Roman felt this was his cue to leave, but it was no ordinary departure; he no longer felt like the same man of the morning. He had something urgent to say to her, but it was too soon. He was reluctant to have her eyes spell a cool goodbye to the cactus-crazy American searching for a bookshop on Mill Road. Her
indifference
would be hard to carry away in the wind.

Roman noticed it was a changed wind, giving
direction
, no longer scattering the leaves into the cracks in the pavement. Pablo Neruda knew what he was feeling, and had said it so much better than he ever could. She and he were together in the autumn. He could not merely vanish; a tempest did not go quietly. ‘Tempest’ was ‘tempestas’; ‘tempus’ was time, and he would be Prospero, stirring up a storm into something ‘rich and strange’.

Durga wondered why she had agreed to go out with Roman Tempest. He had returned after propping the bed along the wall outside the shop. Running his
fingers
uncertainly through his hair, he waited for her response to his invitation, his eyes soft and warm, the accidental brush of their hands leaving them both awkward. They had arranged to meet the next day; she would accompany him to the American Cemetery at Madingley, and show him the Eagle pub, where
wartime
American pilots waiting for sorties had etched their names with cigarette lighters and their
girlfriends
’ lipsticks on the ceiling. Then they would go out for dinner. Another time they would visit the Samuel Pepys library at Magdalene College, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Fitzwilliam Museum. In the spring, they would visit the Botanic Gardens and walk in the Backs to admire the crocuses, daffodils, tulips and bluebells.

There was an important detail she had omitted to mention, did not see the need to mention: she was married.

CHAPTER NINE

Home is where the heart is

D
URGA STOOD RUEFUL
after Roman had left, a quiet tempest brewing. It had been stardust and shooting stars, she had met the stranger whose locked glance she had coveted in her dreams like a romantic fool, but he had been a pleasant interlude, nothing more. She would retreat.

It had been a spring day in South Kensington; the magnolia blossoms in the communal gardens were bursting into velvety bloom, and Durga was thirteen. Her parents informed her over lunch: her father, the manager of a leading Indian bank, was being
transferred
back to Bombay. The move had been
premeditated
; Durga was being whisked away from the temptations of drugs, cigarettes, sex and rock ’n’ roll in time for a dose of roadtested middle-class Indian values.

At the age of twelve Durga had sung and pirouetted in her room in their South Kensington flat overlooking the French café, reed-thin arms and legs, gawky in a short skirt. Pop would ruin Durga’s voice, argued Durga’s mother; Indian classical singing came from the pit of the stomach. Soon after their arrival in Bombay, Joshiji had been summoned for Hindustani classical
music lessons. He waddled in every week, his dhoti revealing smooth, hairless calves. Fondness for paan led him to clear his throat often as he transferred the
sodden
red wad to another cheek in order to teach Durga a simple taan. Reaching for her father’s old Time-Life books on the coffee table, he would dictate notation and hum the unfolding of a raag. Durga observed his
fascination
with the page displaying Sophia Loren in the famous black and flesh-striped transparent garment. She would deliberately pause and ask a question as his little eyes feasted and fastened on forbidden flesh, returning with reluctance to the musical composition.

A few months later, Joshiji was knocked down by a taxi during an act of worship at a roadside temple, and, shocked by the inexplicable interruption of his prayers, he became a recluse within the four walls of his Borivli home. Durga was merely relieved at the cessation of lessons, and the tanpura’s strings broke over time.

Mishraji was recruited to teach Hindi, and he arrived every Wednesday wearing a worn but spotless white shirt and trousers, travelling from his home in Kurla, high on a hill near a buffalo milk dairy, to leafy Malabar Hill for the tuition. Durga hated the lessons,
demonstrating
her contempt for her circumstances, the
language
and the country to which she had been unceremoniously transplanted by blotting the seat of his pristine trousers with ink. He merely smiled and proceeded with the lessons. Over time, his son and daughter-in-law commandeered his rooms in the humble tenement building, feeding him meagre
leftovers
; it was a cruel fate for such a mild-mannered man.

Miss Noronha, Year Nine teacher, was the school’s unofficial guide to puberty and adolescence; between
lessons there had been homilies on the evils of sitting on the floor and eating bananas during menstruation as both affected the flow, as well as the optimum angle of hygienic suspension over a public seat. Good things came to girls who waited before marriage, but Miss Noronha omitted to mention to her class that she had waited far too long. Durga’s marriage invitation to Miss Noronha was returned as
Addressee Unknown
. She heard two conflicting stories: Miss Noronha had left for
Australia
, and Miss Noronha was dead.

Miss Sathe was hired for Marathi lessons. She wore starched Finlay saris and lived in a tiny flat behind a temple ruin at Walkeshwar. A mousy, diminutive woman, she puckered her lips and emitted kissing sounds to denote assent and consent. It was one of life’s little ironies that she herself remained unkissed, although it was rumoured there had once been a middle-aged suitor in her life, a Hindi teacher called Mr Doot. On his first visit to her home he had found her ministering with clicking, puckered sounds to a cantankerous mother. His ardour cooled rapidly, but he tenderly left her his copy of a story by Munshi Premchand.

Durga’s new friend Anita was dismissive about the extra tuition, urging her to focus on the development of the body instead. She enjoined flat-chested Durga to follow a daily regimen of throwing her arms wide to the front and back to the accompaniment of the rhyme
I must and I must and I must and I must, I must and I must increase my bust.

At thirteen, Anita was already buxom in her
too-tight
PE shirt, drawing sly glances from the school caretakers. She loved erasers of every kind. The Indian
ones were boring, had no smell, so she bought imported Japanese ones by the dozen; her favourites were square and white with a green border carrying a letter of the alphabet and a picture. She perched them between her nose and lips to sniff their scent during lessons as she rocked on her chair. Anita had merely laughed when Durga asked if increased bust size was linked to the sniffing of erasers, making no denial. Anita did not attend Durga’s wedding either; she was erasing a messy divorce.

Durga remained unresponsive and sullen; on her aunt’s advice, an astrologer was summoned to her father’s executive flat near the Hanging Gardens. Poring over her horoscope, he had turned silent.
Whatever
the stars were planning for her future, champagne corks weren’t going to be popped.

‘But what about marriage?’ asked her mother, an academic, who had bestirred herself reluctantly from a scholarly essay on Vinoba Bhave to await the verdict on her daughter’s destiny. Displaying a deep scepticism towards astrologers, she demanded from their findings a scientific approach far more rigorous than they were willing to display.

‘Difficult.
Beti
, your life is a struggle. You will encounter bad luck after bad luck all the way through,’ he had announced to Durga between greedy slurps from the saucer of ginger tea. ‘You will also suffer from women’s problems,’ he pointed vaguely in the direction of Durga’s abdomen, ‘but later, much later, maybe at thirty, thirty-five.’ His baleful owl eyes gleamed as her mother slipped him an extra hundred rupees toward the dilution of planetary harm to the refined Maharashtrian family.

A stern, scholarly woman, she was happiest among her books. Durga remembered her seated at a little desk, head bowed nightly in a lamp’s glow, an avid expression on her face as she turned the pages, her tongue darting between her lips in fierce concentration. She ceaselessly fed her daughter the texts of the Vedas, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Sant Tukaram and Sant Gnyaneshwar, demanding nothing short of excellence from Durga, who dutifully collected the form’s silver badge every year. The school badges soon began to be made of a dull tin-like metal, evidence of the school’s declining moral standards.

Durga witnessed violent arguments between her parents as her ambitious father rebelled. Entertaining at home was an essential part of climbing the corporate ladder, he protested, but Durga’s mother stayed firmly on the ground. The only exceptions, she said, were
relatives
, whose frequent interruptions had to be borne with equanimity.

Under her mother’s influence, the family embraced asceticism; it was the poor and downtrodden who would receive its compassion. The modest approach of ‘simple living and high thinking’ was at odds with the new residences on Malabar Hill, where sprawling old bungalows and tree-lined grounds were being rapidly replaced by luxury high-rise duplex apartments
overlooking
the sea, and whose nouveau riche inhabitants roamed fearlessly in tooting cars.

Eighteen-year-old Durga took the single-decker bus from Hanging Gardens, rumbling slowly down from Malabar Hill past the dense trees of the Governor’s mansion, the flame of the forest trees and their
incandescent
rain-drenched blossoms pierced by the rare shriek of a roaming peacock in the dense undergrowth. Reaching Chowpatty Beach, she would look across the bay and Marine Drive with its Art Deco buildings, and the Manhattan-like skyline beyond. Staring into the murky water, she wondered if she would ever return to England.

Durga had soon realised that her parents were loosely bound by convention in a relationship vitiating both as they struggled for independence. She came to the
conclusion
that they should never have married. In the meanwhile, her father watched the promotion of his colleagues with bitter dismay, convinced that his
hermit
wife was the cause of his own stagnation.

‘You know what your colleague Verma does, don’t you?’ her mother erupted in self-defence. ‘He is always putting an arm around the ladies, and there is also something going on between his wife and your boss, as if you didn’t know. Did you think they were patiently counting bundles of five hundred rupee banknotes together every night?’ As Durga’s father remonstrated, she raged, ‘Why should we adopt their pretence and loose morals? For a career? Money? Will you be able to live with yourself if we do the same?
Aho
, do you remember where you have come from?’

Durga’s father was from a poor coastal Brahmin
family
. As a schoolboy, he had studied under the light of oil lamps; following a charitable system practised for centuries in the community, he was sent to a different household on a nominated day of the week for a free meal. A car once passed through the small dusty village with its magnificent mango groves, and an industrialist stopped to ask his way to a religious shrine. The boy
had been concise and clear in his directions, his eyes snapping with intelligence without fear. The
industrialist
had him transferred to a city school and paid for the family to move to Bombay.

Verma was undoubtedly popular with the ladies at the parties. His compliments on their saris and
jewellery
led to coy giggles over the risqué jokes as he moved closer to drop an arm around a waist, lightly tap a neck, or lean over to inhale a favourite perfume.

‘Well, well, what do we have here?’ he asked
interestedly
, roaming Durga’s small breasts and narrow waist with his gaze. ‘You have grown into a real beauty.’ When she failed to respond, he laughed, ‘Don’t you recognise your Uncle Verma? Come, give me a hug,
bete
!’ He enveloped her in a tight embrace and guffawed as she fled.

The director, a balding man from Jullunder, asked Verma’s wife to carry one of her husband’s ties to every assignation. She chose a different one each time, but either Verma’s collection was too modest or the trysts with the director too many, for Verma was obliged to hurriedly purchase a fresh stock of striped, checked and polka-dotted ties from the Akbarally’s at Flora
Fountain
. So strong were the ties of the Verma union that he was subsequently promoted to manager at the Delhi office while she remained in a Colaba flat, but a year later he was found hanging from the ceiling – by a tie his wife had never seen.

Durga could not have been more ripe for rebellion, a tomato ready to spew angry seeded pulp, but while her female friends flirted with male classmates in the
college
library and in the chapel and smoked cigarettes in the canteen or perched on the benches under the college
hostel trees, she remained protected by her mother’s idealism and the fiery reformist texts of the thinkers and educationists who had been her spiritual guides. She had also inherited her mother’s naiveté and trust.

At the age of twenty, Durga caught a chest infection. She visited a laboratory to collect an X-ray report. The grey-haired pathologist beckoned. Had she been
examined
recently? he asked. She should have a second
opinion
. The diagnosis was often wrong, he added jocularly. She should lie down, relax and let him reassure her. He asked her to undo her blouse, and stared at her small pert breasts, breathing noisily, his stethoscope
dangling
from his neck. He had straightened suddenly, and ordered her off the table. It was the equivalent of intoxication without the drink. It never occurred to Durga to complain; years later she heard the
pathologist
was under review for indecent conduct with a number of women.

Durga attracted the attention of several amiable young men; it was her classmate Vibhuti, striking a provocative pose in tight jeans and blouse, who told her about the ‘Durga Virginity Challenge’. The rich son of a Bollywood music producer had even offered free
canteen
batata wadas and chutney sandwiches for all if declared the winner. Who would have thought a swot would be such a draw? spat Vibhuti grudgingly, leaving Durga bewildered and angry. Difference was a terrible burden. So was conformity.

She met a young British backpacker roaming the back streets of Colaba behind the Taj Hotel. Her
nostalgia
for London and untried rebellion led her to agree to accompany him to the Elephanta Caves on the island across the harbour. As she waited at the Reception of
the Presto Hotel while he changed for the trip, two large cockroaches scurried up the peeling, damp walls latticed with the stench of stale onions. He returned from his room clad in denim shorts. The sight of his wobbly pale pink thighs unleashed a rising, bilious wave as she imagined she saw the two cockroaches climbing his flesh instead. She fled, leaving a bus ticket fluttering to the ground, one that he collected and
carried
home to Nottingham as a souvenir to show his mates. She was a dark-eyed beauty, he had said with the air of a conquest over the Balti meal; she had sobbed when he left for England, begging him to stay and be hers.