The Cambridge Curry Club (22 page)

Vivek was no longer in the matchbox business; his family had acquired a chain of luxury hotels. He was married and had a baby. She had met him in London at a café overlooking Green Park. Roman watched her face closely as she said Vivek no longer did silly things, and was content. Life had moved them both along.

She talked of her research for the television documentary on charities and her role as a Thursday volunteer in the shop, marking time before the job in London. Her eyes glinted as she talked of the customer searching for electric blankets, and the bizarre death of an elderly lady who was to have been the shop’s newest volunteer.

‘What do you think it was Arthur always used to say?’ she asked, waiting patiently for his reply.

‘Is this a trick question? Somehow, I get the feeling my answer is important to you. I guess I should make Arthur say a whole bunch of witty stuff about kings and round tables, but basically, I think he used to say that the true love of a man or a woman was all the blanket anyone would ever need.’

She shot him a smile, and he felt he had passed a test as challenging as a driving test for British roads. He had a teaser of his own, he said, retaliating. A road sign near Stamford in Lincolnshire announced
St Martin’s Without.
Without what? He chuckled and spluttered before she could answer.

‘Oops, I’ve just thought of what St Martin could be without. How interesting. Roman, you naughty, naughty boy!’ He slapped his wrist. ‘Okay, drop that one. Tell me how to get off a roundabout.’

‘You have to know where you’re coming from. And you have to know where you are going,’ she said slowly.

She drew sharp, witty portraits of Swarnakumari, Heera and Eileen, saying she would probably never meet them again once she started work, blinking fiercely, unwilling to let him see her face, but in the end the words tumbled in tearful laughter as she recounted the bizarre events of their last day at the shop. In the end it seemed as if her entire life was about letting go of everything, she said wryly, dust to dust, rot to rust, what must end must.
I must and I must increase my bust
had failed too. She spoke of Atul’s
family
, of his mother, sister Archana and cloying cousin Shreya, and the time that had passed, sand in a glass between her and her husband, was the unease of strangers in a lift between floors.

‘I wouldn’t be so hard on your sister-in-law Archie,’
he said. ‘Why should she be the one stuck holding the weepy Oedipal mother-in-law while you guys have fun in Cambridge? She just needs to get a life. What she really needs is a man. If Archie babe were back home, I’d fix her up, but say, why doesn’t that woman you told me about, the fat scheming matchmaker, get her together with the moody guy in New Jersey who shouts and yells?’

He laughed at his own wit, and then quietened. ‘I have a confession to make – I shouted and yelled a lot. At Kathy. I also yelled into the desert. It was ugly.
I
was ugly. Shouting is cowardice, isn’t it? A fear of losing control, so you end up losing all control. But maybe Archie babe should still give it a shot with the New Jersey dude if she’s got a pair of sturdy earplugs.’ Roman continued, ‘Sounds like the green-eyed cousin with the secret uterine infection needs a man too. Is she a first, second or third cousin? These things matter.’

‘I’m not sure. I’m not sure he likes her that much, either,’ Durga’s tone was edgy.

‘He does, but I guess it’s just not the right time, right place.’

She had turned prickly, and Roman wondered why, and what he could do. He would always feel he had been to blame for what happened with Kathy, but he had laid his own demons to rest: they had been
pulverised
and scattered somewhere over San Francisco and Arizona. Atonement, repentance, penitence for all things past, he was going to Durga in wonder and in trust, and he could never have imagined that he would meet her, only known that when he did she was real. Nothing and everything was wrong about her
marriage, but it was not for him to decide its thudding dullness or its sanity.

A month and a half later, Christmas shoppers thronged Market Square, hungrily sniffing the warm smell of doughnuts at a corner stall. Durga hurried towards Roman, who was waiting near a Guildhall festooned with golden lights.

‘What’s up?’

‘How do you know something’s up?’ she replied.

‘Whatever it is, I want to hold you and wish it away,’ he said.

‘This is too big. There was a phone call from his sister in the middle of the night. Atul’s rushing back to India. His mother’s unwell, and apparently she’s been like this for a long, long time with a mysterious
ailment
, but Archana didn’t tell him, and the mother’s been having all sorts of tests and examinations, and the doctors there think it’s time Atul should be with her for reassurance. I’m fine with him going to hold her hand, of course, but the thing is, Archana says his dad wants him to stay on and take over the Maternity Clinic and not return to Cambridge at all. Atul has finished his fieldwork and case studies, you see, so technically he could stay on in India and complete from there. It’s all very confusing, a big mess. He’s busy checking flights and packing.’

‘What about you?’

‘What about me? Got to go, too,’ she said dully. ‘He says I should follow after we’ve sorted out everything. There’s the flat we’re renting – we have to give notice. I was going to start my new job …’ She looked at him, eyes moist. ‘I’m such a loser. I’ve just drifted through
my life, a Peter Pan of academia. I’ve done nothing with my life but study one thing after another – foreign languages, English and German Literature, Political and Social Sciences. Even being at Cambridge was so weird. I thought it would be different, but I was never part of student life at all. And now, just when I thought I’d be doing something for myself in London, it’s all changed. Back to Pune.’

He caught her wrist and stopped outside Great St Mary’s Church, but she twisted free, eyes brimming. ‘And you – what am I doing with you? My life’s already complicated. I’m
married
. I’m supposed to be thinking of my querulous mother-in-law in a creepy ancestral house in Pune. Where does this thing with you lead? Nowhere.’

He held her close, speaking earnestly. ‘As I see it, you’ve got a choice. Maybe for the first time in your life. You don’t have to do what he wants you to do. He’ll cope – the clan’s there, and they need
him
right now, not you. And maybe he and they don’t really need you in the long term, either, and maybe you don’t need him? Think about it. You can choose to go or not go, you can choose to be or not be with him. As for this thing with me, if it bothers you that much, you can choose to end wherever and whatever you want. You don’t
have
to do anything.’

Durga stood at the window of her flat, looking at the neatly parked cars in the street below. Despite Roman’s stirring words, she would go to India, remain by Atul’s side and nurse his mother. Roman belonged to a society that encouraged individuals to seek their own paths, one in which a path that did not lead anywhere could
be dropped, she reasoned. But could a relationship, a marriage be dropped simply because it was dull? Her own parents had worked at staying together, and wasn’t marriage about imperfections and warts and fissures and cracks and packs of Band Aid? It was ironic, deeply ironic, she thought, that it was she, not Swarnakumari, who had travelled across the world with a suitcase packed with tradition and values, too afraid to unlock and unpack its contents. And now it was to be carried back, handled with care across the Arabian Sea and over the craggy Deccan mountains to Pune, to be set down with an obedient sigh to mop a moping brow.

In the end she discovered it was quite simple. It was not about his family; it was Atul she found boring and boorish and not the man she thought he would be. Now that she had met Roman, she would no longer think miserably about the years and the life stretching ahead with Atul. Roman could not last, passion did not last; she would soon find something she didn’t like about him. Perhaps he needed more space than she did, and in any case there were worlds to cross, and it was no longer easy to stay flippant – and what if he went away at Christmas, in the spring, one day, never to return? Far better to leave first, to hold on to the memory of him on a hot, hellish night in Pune when the mosquito bites and the angry red blisters on her skin became too much to bear. Then she would never let him go.

That evening she told her husband she could not leave Cambridge in a hurry. There was the flat to vacate, bank balances to be transferred, belongings to be shipped. They would understand in Pune, if he would. She needed time.

Atul left the next day, obediently following the
thoughts that had already arrived safely in India before him. His chinos were waiting in his father’s cupboard on the shelf below the Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky. An unwilling Nikhil had carried them a year earlier to Delhi, from where they accompanied a Grant Medical College friend a month later to Pune, along with Atul’s instructions to his mother to have them dry cleaned. His frugal sister gave them to the dhobi instead, who arrived every Monday with the bundle of the previous week’s washed and ironed clothes.
Squatting
expectantly in the hallway, the wrinkled man looked expressionlessly at the pickle-stained chinos. Customers often expected miracles he could not deliver.

Upgraded to Business Class for his cleancut looks and air of authority, Dr Atul Patwardhan was seated next to an attractive, wealthy young woman with natural cleavage and symmetrical white teeth, the kind that bit into an apple or flesh leaving a perfect dent. She was from Goa, and suffered from chronic thyroid
problems
. She felt completely at ease discussing her
condition
with the polite, handsome doctor. She listened to his advice and fluttered near his shoulder.

He thought of Durga and the feel of her silky hair and the look on her solemn, puckered face. He thought of her with the sudden panic of having abandoned his hair-trimming scissors that he wished he could have carried on board, but should at least have packed into his luggage. His companion leaned over comfortingly. The French red wine had complemented her meal.

Roman chose the same day to place his hand over his heart and bend a knee on the cold stone floor of a
college
archway. He had prepared to recite a long passage
from Thoreau, but in the end the words were his own. He shivered, but he would stay on that stone until he froze, he declared, the damp grey cold seeping into his bones, turning hot blood into icy deliberation; he would stay there on that stone and become a
stalagmite
, which was more or less the same shape as a cactus. The word ‘stalagmite’ was derived from the Greek
stalagmos
or ‘something dropped’, he told her with
chattering
teeth. Was she ready to drop something else and take his heart instead? His was a healthy heart, bronzed and glowing: would she hold his heart in hers and take both into the Mumbai monsoon?

He swore that he did not care if he never saw another cactus again, unless it was with her by his side, and a desert was only a desert unless he saw it with her
colours
, and what they really needed was a collapsible bed, because they would travel to the ends of the earth together for the rest of their married lives, because that was what he was proposing – marriage – or why would he be on his knees turning to stone on the stone, and he didn’t care if the three Furies from Pune pursued him through tempest, wind and fire, if Tisiphone, Alecto and Megaera castrated him with their tongues for his abduction of Durga, his goddess whom he adored, his protector of the good and pure, destroyer of evil, destroyer of the demon Mahishasura, destroyer of negation, at whose feet he worshipped, humble and devout.

He paused for breath. His knee was soon going to be frost-bitten, he warned. He was no match for a dishy doctor, he admitted, but if she was going to choose, he thought she should know that he, Roman, was pure, delectable, melting, swirling, sinful, brownest of
brown chocolate. She had laughed, heard the sound in the echoing courtyard, and her eyes were soft as she said she loved chocolate, how did he know, she needed time.

Eileen lived on David Street, an arterial road near the charity shops. She had witnessed the transformation of IndiaNeed into the pizza and kebab takeaway, Bytes4U, with loyal disapproval. The overpowering smell of charcoaled kebabs sent her scurrying to the newsagent to purchase her first lottery ticket – after apologising to the spirit of her Catholic mother.

She had stood in the shop, a wispy-haired woman lost in calculations before she carefully made her
selection
, and was only mildly surprised at the winnings of twenty thousand pounds. Danny Watts was delighted; it was a neat little sum for retirement, and they could even nip across to the Algarve every year, two weeks in the sun, quiet hotel by the beach, half-board. Her silent response was to seek an interview with the loans department of her local bank, where she impressed the manager with her figures and forecasts. Six months later, in the hall of the church round the corner, she was running a successful after-school club called Kids Love Maths with a year’s waiting list. She had been saved by numbers.

The hairdresser James (Juan) had dreamed of the Costa del Sol every Christmas as he went home to his cantankerous mother in Glasgow instead. Then on another windy morning two days after IndiaNeed closed, a Spanish woman visited his salon; he carefully highlighted her blond hair as she chattered, and forgot his accent as he watched her smile in the mirror. Events moved along so rapidly that, shortly afterwards, he
accompanied her to Barcelona, instructing the estate agent to advertise the sale of his salon.

Mr Khan of Waterford Way already owned two
takeaways
in Cambridge. He knew his neighbours resented the parked delivery van outside his residence, but Mr Khan had other things on his mind and his eye on Mill Road, and once the salon was on the market he lost no time in making a successful bid as a cash buyer. The salon space was ideally suited to an Indian restaurant.