The Pleasure Seekers (23 page)

Even Chotu seemed to put the disappointment of his European vacation behind him as Bean went on to win bronze medals in the under-10 and under-12 state championships. He agreed to return to work at Sanbo Enterprises as long as he could be absolved of all administrative duties and collaborate with Babo in the invention room. He continued to indulge in harmless flirtations and threatened to move into an apartment if Trishala or Prem Kumar ever brought up the M word. ‘When I’m good and ready,’ he warned them, ‘I’ll find a bride of my own.’

For a long time Ba believed her timely dream had saved both Bean and Chotu. But when Bean, at the age of thirteen, decided to trade in her swimming cap for a tennis racquet, convinced that she was going to be the next Martina Navratilova, Ba saw that old, sad look creep back into Chotu’s face. Even though Chotu told Bean, ‘You have to do what you want to do, Champ, don’t worry about me,’ Ba knew that this new sorrow would give the five thieves a space to enter. Greed, affection, desire, love, pride. They had been standing at the periphery, waiting for their chance to slip through the gates of Sylvan Lodge, chup chap, when no one was looking. They had been waiting for a while; ever since Chotu had been given a tiny, tethered leap instead of a proper, fully-fledged soaring. And once the thieves forced their way inside your home, how could anything ever be the same again?

18  This Place is a Dream. Only a Sleeper Considers It Real

On the morning of 31 October 1984, at 0900 hours, the precise moment when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s security guards were pummelling her body with bullets, Trishala complained to Prem Kumar of an electrifying pain in her right breast. Prem Kumar, who was particularly partial to Trishala’s right breast, it being the closest available to him for suckling, immediately summoned Jignesh-bhai, the family doctor, who scootered over to Sylvan Lodge with doctor’s bag in hand.

After an hour of groping, Jignesh-bhai removed his hairy hands from Trishala’s blouse and shuffled sadly into the living room to give Prem Kumar his diagnosis. ‘I can’t be knowing this for sure,’ he said, spluttering through his sausage lips, ‘But your wife has a cyst in her right breast which may or may not be cancerous, which may or may not be successfully operated upon in our clinic.’

Prem Kumar, hearing this news, allowed his knees to tremble slightly. At the gates of Sylvan Lodge, he exchanged a steely handshake with Jignesh-bhai, which Prem Kumar misunderstood as a sign of solidarity, but which in fact, was the doctor’s way of saying that he was an inexperienced blunderbuss, wholly incapable of dealing with something on this scale.

In the bedroom Prem Kumar found Selvam sitting on the floor next to Trishala, weeping his half-blind eyes out while Trishala consoled him gently, patting his bald head like a drum. ‘I’m telling you one thing,’ she snapped as soon as she caught sight of her husband. ‘There’s going to be no more doctor’s hands going up this blouse again. If I have to go, then I’m going with my breasts in one piece.’

By noon the city of Madras had collapsed. Schools sent home children, workers fled from offices, shops pulled down their shutters, layabouts and workaholics vacated the streets to position themselves by a radio or a television to hear what further insanity would unfold in the capital.

Mayuri and Bean rushed around Sylvan Lodge in their blue and white pinafores, excited to be here on a Wednesday which felt like a Sunday; excited that they’d been made to leave school at break time while the teachers hugged each other and said
tragedy, tragedy
over and over again; excited that there were policemen on the streets, and death in the air. They were breathing it all in and whooshing down the banisters with it.

Babo, Chotu and Siân soldered themselves into the saggy, brown sofas in the front room, watching the television screen like hawks. It was confirmed: the country was going mad. Indira Gandhi had died after receiving sixteen bullets in her chest and abdomen shot by two of her Sikh security guards. Stores were burning, soldiers were shooting, thugs were looting, mothers were clutching children to their breasts.

Trishala, watching all this confusion, made Prem Kumar and Selvam swear to say nothing of Jignesh-bhai’s visit that morning. ‘There’s enough to cope with at the moment,’ she said stoically. ‘Let’s not add my worries to the top of the pile.’

So they sat together, a family bound to despair, eating dinner in front of the television in silence, while teary-eyed newscasters from Delhi gave them updated bulletins from the capital. They watched Indira Gandhi’s sole surviving son, Rajiv, being embraced by members of the Congress Party. He was telling the people of this nation,
his
people, to restrain themselves, to not let their emotions get the better of them.

Meanwhile, Sikhs were hiding, Sikhs were burning, Sikhs were cutting their hair and running for their lives.

This was 1984, the year of Orwell’s black-white, outer-inner prophecy, when lies became truth, and ignorance became strength. This was the year the Patel family learned that justice was not equal for all. The year of massacres, mammograms and malfunctions. The year of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The year Babo and Siân woke up every morning to see things in the world dying.

It was the year Trishala slunk around the hallways of Sylvan Lodge, braless and sore, in tailor-made vanity blouses with big wads of cotton stitched into where her right breast used to be – her munificent right breast, which she’d agreed to relinquish only because they said there would be a chance to save the left one. When, after countless treatments which made her hair fall out and her voracious appetite dwindle, they took her left breast too, Trishala put her sizeably shrunken foot down and demanded to be taken home so she could die with dignity.

It was the year Trishala stopped speaking without so much as a goodbye speech except for a final word of warning about the romance that had begun to bloom between Mayuri and Cyrus Mazda from next door. ‘That boy has the deceptive nature of a crow. If I were you, I’d nip this thing in the bud.’

A year of itching, burning, peeling, blistering silence.

A few weeks after Trishala’s second mastectomy, Babo and Siân found Mayuri sitting in bed, refusing to go to school.

‘When I grow up I want to be a maid,’ she declared. ‘You don’t need maths or chemistry for that, do you?’

‘And will you like being a maid?’ Babo asked. ‘Will you like mopping floors and cleaning toilets and living in a small, dingy room all by yourself?’

‘Yes I will,’ Mayuri insisted. ‘That’s exactly what I want to do.’

‘What a relief,’ said Siân. ‘That means we don’t need Selvi anymore. We can just keep you in the house for ever and pay
you
to do all her work. And Bean can have the bedroom all to herself.’

Mayuri’s eyes brimmed over with petulant tears. ‘What does it matter?’ she screeched. ‘I’m going to die anyway, so I won’t be able to do any of those things because I’ve got a lump in my breast just like Trishala Ba, haven’t I?’

Mayuri, at thirteen, was checking her panties every single day, hoping for a stain of blood because most of her friends had already had their period and had started wearing bras while she still wore girly cottony vests. It hadn’t helped that Siân never sat her down to tell her any of the things she should expect from her impending womanhood. Mayuri’s friend Sunaina’s mother was a doctor, and she had given Sunaina a sex-education manual that explained
everything
, using all the proper words and diagrams. Why couldn’t Siân be more like her, instead of all this la-la Redemptionist stuff? As far as Mayuri was concerned, it was all well and good for people to believe in whatever they believed in, but if she was dying, her parents had an obligation to sit up and take note of it, and understand that she had better things to do than go to school.

‘If you
do
die,’ Bean asked, patting Mayuri sorrowfully on the arm before she left for school, ‘Will you leave me your party frocks in your will?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mayuri sweetly. ‘You won’t be needing party frocks in the slums, because that’s where you’ll be when Mama and Daddy dump you after I’m gone.’

Jignesh-bhai was summoned to put his hairy hands up Mayuri’s vest to examine whether her mosquito-bite-sized breasts did indeed contain a life-threatening lump that they should all be worried about. This, Jignesh-bhai did assiduously, while Mayuri turned a deep, self-conscious shade of magenta.

‘I can see where you think you might have had a problem,’ said Jignesh-bhai sincerely. ‘But really, there’s no lump growing in your breast. You are absolutely A-OK, Number One Fantastic, ready to go to school again. Nothing to worry about. No problem.’

‘But,’ he said, to make sure that Mayuri understood he was treating her case with utmost seriousness, ‘You must conduct regular self check-ups, especially with your family medical history, if you know what I mean.’

Mayuri nodded wisely, buttoned up her shirt and walked outside to tell her mother and father, who’d been made to wait in the sitting room, that all was well with the world, her breasts were not infected, and she’d be returning to school the next day so she could aspire to be something higher than a common maid.

Afterwards, Siân took Mayuri to Fountain Plaza to buy her first bra – a 32 AA which was white and thick-strapped, and which sported an embroidered red rose in between its pointy boobs. Mayuri was so pleased with this purchase that instead of wearing it immediately, she placed it prominently on her bed so when Bean came home from school that day, she’d realize that her sister had finally, in the space of one eventful morning, become a woman.

In the months of Trishala’s illness Babo stopped noticing the world around him. His skin developed moles in places where there was once only softness. His grey eyes became opaque, hardened with fatty deposits and disillusion, unable to receive light like they used to. His body began to lose elasticity, and hair started sprouting in new, undesirable places. He decided to quit smoking, swap cigarettes for Polo mints – which he ate compulsively, activating a dormant Gujarati sweet tooth, which led to a thickening in his once twenty-eight-inch waist. There was all this slowing down – slow and slower.

Babo, in those months, found himself looking up diseases in books, imagining tumours and mutations growing inside him. His nights were filled with pictures of bodies ridden with ailments so complicated and cruel, their names fell down on him like heavy trunks, opening and closing: leprosy, leukaemia, kaposis sarcoma – opening and closing, showering all kinds of malignant portents on top of him. It was an unleashing: a mad, furious thing that kept going and going – dhishoom dhishoom – kicking, ripping, denting.

Prem Kumar spent those final months in consultation rooms and doctors’ offices. Long after his wife resigned herself to dying, Prem Kumar continued to believe that a miracle would change everything. Every morning he woke with a new plan: urine therapy, heat therapy, reiki, pranic healing, acupuncture, castor oil, vegetable juice, soup. Trishala, lying depleted and dispirited on her side of the bed, told him to leave things be. ‘Let me go,’ she said, ‘We will meet in our next janam.’

Something old and sad began to grow inside Prem Kumar, tugged like a root, following him everywhere he went. The future loomed ahead like a black cloud devoid of any shape or substance. It was unforeseeable, to imagine living without this woman who had berated and cajoled him for forty-five years. He had chosen her so long ago, in the village of Anjar, for the simple reason that she had eyes through which the light of God could be seen. Trishala had had little by way of dowry or prospects. Her father had lost all his money in senseless stock speculation, and her mother had died giving birth to her. But her misfortunes had given her a bit of fire that none of the other girls had. And of course, there were those eyes; those gauzy, grey eyes.

Towards the end Trishala kept her eyes closed, hoping to prevent her loved ones from seeing anything like fear or anguish in her. All she asked for was a bit of morphine, which Jignesh-bhai administered once a day, to ease the unbearable pain. At nights, Prem Kumar lay awake listening to his wife’s laboured breathing, and wondered how tricky a thing love was after all: to arrive where it had never existed. He stretched his hand out in the dark to touch the body which had once been so plump, the breasts so full. ‘My love,’ he whispered, when he was sure she could not hear him, ‘How good you have been to me, and how little I have given you.’

On the night of Trishala’s death, the planet Mars was closer to the earth than it had been in 60,000 years. If you’d been standing on the red-brick terrace in Sylvan Lodge, you would have seen it shining like a star with its own red halo, the whole surface of it – deep, subterranean red, with rivers running through it like the unwritten desires of the body.

The dogs of Sterling Road barked through the night. They stood at the gates of Sylvan Lodge and howled and howled at the red planet in the sky. Darayus Mazda, next door, sensing always the terrible immanence of death, stood on his balcony waiting to see what further mischief his family were planning for him. Ba, all the way in Anjar, could smell it too – the smell of fallen apples. She knew, before anyone phoning to tell her, that the five thieves had come for Trishala’s body.

Downstairs, in Trishala and Prem Kumar’s bedroom, the family were praying – reciting Navkar Mantra, bowing down to the liberated souls who had reached a state of non-attachment: the sadhus and sadhvis, the upadhyayas who taught the scriptures, the arihants and the thirthankaras. The family’s heads were all bowed low, even those of Babo and Siân, asking those supremely unattached people to guide Trishala to that spotless holy region, free from all the suffering of the world.