Read The Pleasure Seekers Online
Authors: Tishani Doshi
They made love in places they fell in love with, in places that would soon disappear. They made love even if they thought someone was watching. They made love. They made love. They made love. If they didn’t, there was always the threat that they’d fall apart. That something would come in to divide their bodies, to sever the string that connected them.
Some days, the connection was so light – barely a peacock feather distance of blue electricity between them. Other days it was like one river meeting another at the ocean’s mouth. And when they came back to Sylvan Lodge, it was always a slow trudging back. Slow, because Siân longed for a place of her own, for their two-year time limit to set them free, so she could fill showcases with things of her own choosing: not pictures of emaciated Jain saints, not glass ballerinas with fans.
In the summer of 1971, while Bangladesh was struggling to be birthed into existence, and the Russians and Americans were racing to see whose space orbiter would return to Mars first, Siân made two discoveries. The first was that she was pregnant. The second was a place called The Garden of Redemption, where a man called Manna preached every Friday.
The Garden of Redemption was a place full of birds: parakeets, kingfishers, sparrows, mynahs; and there were 100-year-old trees that provided sanctuary to the flying foxes and common jezebels and all the places of worship that lay tucked in the different corners of the compound. It was a community of sorts, ‘Nothing cultish,’ Siân was quick to tell Babo, who was wary of communities in general, and religious communities in particular. It was a place where Siân could walk; where she could try to understand the length and breadth of her new life.
So, Siân walked. Every day she watched the smouldering Madras sun set across the Adyar River, and it filled her with the hope that she was finally getting closer to finding her place in India. Sometimes, a surreptitious Redemptionist riding a bicycle in their customary crisp white uniform would gently sneak ahead of her, nudging her off the red paths, or a shy mongoose scurried by – a sign that money was coming your way. And always, when the moon was waxing, the jackals down by the river lifted up their heads and howled at the sky.
These walks were nothing like her walks back home, where all she’d had to do was step out of Number 10 with Aunty El’s dog, Gwythur. She’d been losing herself then, trying to find Babo in that cold, craggy air. It was all a bit ridiculous now that she thought about it – gathering bluebells and tramping across streams singing ‘Yesterday’, with Dylan Thomas tucked under one arm and a morose-looking black and white photograph of Babo under the other. How could she ever have thought to find Babo there, when he so clearly belonged here, amongst these moist mud paths and humid air, these brazen trees and flowers? Here it was easy: all she had to do was pick a single one of these flowers – jasmine, mimosa, frangipani – and crush the heady smell of it in her palms to feel like she was touching the inside of Babo’s smooth brown skin.
Siân continued to walk throughout the duration of her pregnancy even though every Patel woman she knew berated her about her daily exercises and offered their own individual dietary advice instead. She should be lying down, eating ghee-filled delicacies, having oil baths, painting, reading, singing, anything but
this
– putting her swollen feet into walking shoes and making half-blind Selvam drive her to that cracked community of Redemptionists.
‘Why?’ Trishala wanted to know. ‘Why must you jeopardize the baby? Why must you drink coffee when I keep telling you it will damage your uterus? Why won’t you understand that pregnant women are meant to be fat?’
Trishala, fluttering around Sylvan Lodge with all her nervous energy, thought
she
knew better than anyone else what the dangers of bringing a child into the world were, especially one born of mixed-caste, mixed-country, mixed-colour desire.
‘At least drink more milk,’ she’d say, indicating her own pitcher breasts. ‘Otherwise your child will go hungry.’
And even Ba, all the way from Ganga Bazaar, pestered her with regular missives. Was Siân soaking fenugreek seeds overnight and applying them with orange and lemon peel so that her breasts would grow? Did Trishala have rock salt at hand to hasten the delivery? Had Babo found roots of the gular tree, washed and cleaned them and inserted them into Siân’s vagina to see if they came out whole or if they broke inside? If they came out whole it would mean the birth of a son, if they broke inside they could be sure of a girl.
Siân broke and broke inside.
She persisted with her walks because there were still gaps she couldn’t understand, gaps that had something to do with her family – distant and untouchable. It had been a year and a half since she’d seen them, and when Siân thought about it, a feeling so oppressive grew inside her, making her run, tamarind underfoot, all the way down to the blue-gabled house on Dooming Street where an old lady played the piano, and parrots shrieked in the laburnum trees.
Siân made her first friend in Madras with the old lady who lived in the blue-gabled house. Her name was Ms Douglas, and after weeks of watching the young, pregnant foreigner with pink cheeks, leaning at the gate, listening to her play, Ms Douglas finally walked out and said, ‘Why don’t you come in and have some tea, dear?’
Siân discovered that Ms Douglas’s grandfather had arrived in India as a young missionary from England, and had almost instantly been distracted from his calling by a vivacious singer from Calcutta. The legacy of that marriage and the journey of how its descendants landed up from Calcutta to Madras was an intricately gloomy tale that Ms Douglas managed to tell within the first five minutes of meeting anyone. ‘It’s a difficult thing,’ sighed Ms Douglas, when the story was finished, ‘To grow up with the idea that home is a place you’ve never been to. But we were raised in a way to believe that England was always the better place, the place to return to.’
Listening to Ms Douglas practising her Nocturnes and Hungarian Rhapsodies were the only times Siân gave herself properly over to homesickness. It was something about that Eastern European music wafting out and communing with the tropical Madras air – something sad and ruinous – that made her think it was really her father playing for her, saying in his own mysterious way how happy he was that a little rosebud was growing inside her.
Every Friday, Ms Douglas and Siân sat across from each other in planters chairs under the magnificent white buttresses of the house, drinking Earl Grey tea and eating Marie biscuits. Ms Douglas told Siân all the secrets of her life: how her father had installed the Steinway in the front room when she was six years old with the purpose of making her into a world-class piano player like Chopin (who had also been six when he began lessons, and eight when he was touring and giving concerts). ‘But,’ sighed Ms Douglas dramatically, whenever she tried to explain her unsuccessful career as a pianist, ‘Without a proper teacher to guide me, failure was inevitable. And after Daddy died, well, I simply lost the will.’
Ms Douglas had had a brief affair with a man called Felix D’Souza who sang in the Santhome Cathedral choir with her, but three weeks after their engagement, when he got run over by a water tanker, she gave up all illusions of
that kind of life
. Then she met Manna and joined the Garden of Redemption, and it was here, she said, that she understood her life was meant to go in another direction.
‘I just took it as a violent sign from God, dear, so I took off my engagement ring and locked it in my grandmother’s ivory box and waited for salvation of a different kind! I still play, but nothing like a world-famous pianist. Besides, look at that poor Chopin. He died of TB in Paris when he was thirty-nine, and had to have his heart despatched to Warsaw in an urn – quite a sad ending for him, wasn’t it?’
Siân in turn told Ms Douglas about Sylvan Lodge, about the demented Parsi neighbour, Darayus, who sometimes sleepwalked all the way out of his house to knock on the front door and say, ‘Have you seen my son? I think he’s trying to kill me.’ About the thing she loved best about India – seeing the fisherwomen walking to the markets with their husbands’ catch on their heads, silver bells jingling around their dark, supple ankles. She told her stories about Nercwys, her father and mother and brothers. Over and over again, because Ms Douglas was slowly losing her mind and sometimes forgot who Siân was and where she’d come from.
Ms Douglas wanted to know if they had a piano at home? Had Siân or her brothers ever played? She wouldn’t believe that they’d not had a bathroom or electricity in the house till Siân was seven years old, or that Siân hadn’t been to a restaurant till she moved to the city of London. Because Ms Douglas believed that only India was made for the poor: not England, never England.
After tea, they sat under the banyan tree listening to Manna dissect the complexities of modern life. Manna, who was born with a smooth, ageless face and destitute cheekbones, who told them not to divide their life between living and dying.
‘Can you be free of Time?’ Manna asked. ‘Can you really know anything when you are so busy thinking and despairing? Take this sunset. So beautiful, you want to capture it and put it in a box for later. But can’t you just enjoy it now? Can’t you just appreciate the colours, the sudden beauty of it? And then let it go. Sorrow stems from the same place as pleasure. To understand it you have to hold it, and grapple with it, not try to run away from it.’
Afterwards Siân walked Ms Douglas back to her blue-gabled house, and left her feeling lighter, safer, sliding back into her life with all her stories and memories intact.
‘Wouldn’t it be sad if you came here one day and I didn’t recognize you, dear?’ Ms Douglas asked.
‘Oh, it’s not going to be like that with us,’ Siân said, and then she was off, through the gates, past the golden circle of laburnum trees, out of the Garden and into the world.
In December 1971, while India and Pakistan threw bombs at each other for thirteen days; while ten million East Pakistani refugees crossed over the border, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called for a long period of hardship and sacrifice, Babo and Siân boarded an Air India flight to London via Bombay and Rome to visit Siân’s family for Christmas. All the way over, Siân was anxious. She kept thinking back to those three silent months in Nercwys before she came to India, and of that one night when Nerys, barely raising her head from her knitting needles, had asked, ‘And what about children? Have you thought about what they’ll be like?’
What they’ll be like.
Siân had run up to her room and wept. She’d written to Babo about how she couldn’t wait to have children because they’d be so beautiful that people on the streets would have to stop and stare.
Would they, though? Would they?
Trishala had voiced her concerns too. She’d spent a lifetime thinking about this matter of progeny. She wanted clarifications on how the children were going to be raised. ‘Don’t be airy-fairy about these matters, Babo,’ she warned. ‘What kind of names will they have? What God will they pray to? What traditions will they follow?’ These were Trishala’s burning questions. To which Babo had said, ‘We’ll cross that fence when we come to it.’
Well, the fence was here now, and Siân was getting ready to scissor-jump it. ‘Love,’ she said, linking her fingers through Babo’s, forcing him to turn his head away from the window to look at her. ‘I’ve been thinking about the baby, and about us, and I think regardless of how things go in Nercwys, I’d like us to stay in India – on a permanent basis, I mean.’
‘But Charlie! That’s never been the plan. It was always going to be two years in Madras and then back to London. You know Fred is holding a place for me at the company. I don’t understand.’
But Siân’s mind was made up. After spending nearly two years in India, she was convinced it would be easier to raise a family there rather than anywhere else. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I couldn’t bear it if our children were teased because they were mixed race. It isn’t easy in England, you know.’
‘Charlie Girl, what are you talking about? You know I never experienced any ill feeling when I was in England. Besides, you talk as though everyone in India were so forward thinking, when you know they aren’t! People there stare, you know they stare. Their job in life is to stare. That’s as bad as name-calling, isn’t it?’
‘No, love, it’s different. You went to London as an adult. You were in highly controlled environments – at work, at the Polytechnic, at the YMCA. People weren’t always expressing the truth of what they felt. Of course you were going to be fine. But you didn’t have to go to school in England, did you? You didn’t have to deal with children. And besides, when people stare in India, it’s not done with any feeling of menace, it’s out of curiosity. For God’s sake, Babo, when we go to Nercwys, you’re probably going to be the first brown person they’ve ever seen! And let me tell you, it’s going to feel a whole lot different from how I felt as the first white person in Ganga Bazaar.’
‘Yes. Well, that’s 300 years of colonialism, isn’t it? The adoration of white skin.’
‘The point is, it makes practical sense to stay in India. You’re starting this thing with your father. Why don’t you stick with it? Why would you want to go and work for some company when you can be your own boss?’
‘Oh, I’m not even going to pretend I’m the boss,’ Babo said, turning back to face the window, out of which he could see the sun setting resplendently behind the aeroplane wing. ‘Can we just think about it, first? Can we just see how we feel after this trip? We can always change our minds later.’