The Pleasure Seekers (24 page)

The granddaughters had been made to wait outside. They were holding hands in a line, standing in front of the showcases in the sitting room, in front of Trishala’s beloved emaciated Jain saints and glass ballerinas with fans. In the last days they had seen Trishala Ba lying in bed, very thin and very quiet. It was as if Trishala Ba had been taken away and some other woman had been made to lie in her place with a piece of gauze tied around her mouth so she wouldn’t swallow some microbe by mistake while offering her prayers. No more Indo-Burma notebooks or one-rupee coins. No more Sunday skit costumes from her Singer sewing machine. The granddaughters were praying, in whatever words they knew, that Trishala’s journey would be peaceful, that it would be filled with music.

Trishala was leaving her anger behind. She was removing all the garments of illusion and strapping on a girdle of wind, so she could fly all the way across samsara – that terrific deception of the human world – to the abodes of the gods. She was removing all the layers of karma, all the dust that coated her soul, before setting off on her final pilgrimage. She was cutting each tie, severing each painful connection: limb, child, husband, body, pista-green house, until she could cast off the memories and cross over the wilderness. Trishala, doing as her faith commanded, entered that unblemished land where purity was instantaneous.

19  When Your Heart’s on Fire, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Only once in all their long years of marriage did Babo and Siân lose each other. It began a few years after Trishala’s death, in the summer of 1987, when Mayuri finally allowed Cyrus Mazda to put his tongue down her throat, and it only really got resolved towards the end of that year, when Nerys got over her fear of flying and climbed on an aeroplane to visit her daughter in India.

The summer of 1987 was unrelenting. Madras in July was like a desert – heat thrashing down on a city gone dry, with no promise of coolness or reprieve. Every morning Babo scoured the newspapers, looking for a story that would reinstate his faith in humanity. But it was always more of the same: biscuit bandits on the run, mass suicides by farmers because of failing rains and rising debts, politicians destroying libraries, old folk dying of asphyxiation. Rampant thuggery, abscondings.

As if all this were not enough, his girls were going to Anjar for a whole month, leaving him alone in the house of orange and black gates. Babo, standing at his bedroom window, looked out of the grills. He saw his wife and daughters moving around briskly, oblivious to the heat. Everywhere, women were barking orders: Selvi, Siân, Mayuri, Bean. Young Cyrus, who had grown tall and handsome in an awkward, endearing way, was loading the car with boxes and bags. He was flashing smiles here and there uninhibitedly with his recently emancipated unbraced teeth. The girls were laughing with him: jhill mill, jhill mill. They were swatting mosquitoes off their summer-brown legs and laughing. Life was going on without him.

Babo wanted to rush over to his children and cradle them in his arms. He wanted to carry them high into the orange crown of the flame-of-the-forest tree, deep into its petals of fire where Bean once used to see ghosts hiding. He wanted to tell his daughters how they had come from him, how they
were
him, and he was them. How these were the ways people found to continue: to bear children – little bits of silver – who would carry the same noses and chins, the same foreheads and eyes, the same weaknesses for love. Because he could feel them moving away from him – Mayuri’s footsteps tapping out of the front door and tapping back in, only so she could drive around the city with Darayus’s long-faced grandson in his fancy cars; Bean, talking on the phone from morning to night to Mehnaz because
her
life was the most important thing in the world, never to be discussed with family, only with friends.

And his wife – he wanted to call her that –
his wife
, and tell her to come back to their city of refuge because she’d become a stranger in his life, in the house they shared and the bed they slept in. It had been so long since they’d touched each other as if their existence depended on it; so long since Babo had ba-ba-boomed like a firecracker. He wanted to carry her away too, and save her. But Siân didn’t need saving. She was busier than ever with her weekly commitments and charity cases. She now had a colour-coded timetable pasted up on the fridge in case she should forget where she needed to be, and with whom: pensioners and craft class biddies, swimming and bridge, SOS, AMS, Cheshire Home, Ms Douglas, Manna and the Garden of Redemption. Monday through Sunday chock-a-block.

Where’s the colour-coded box for me? thought Babo. Where’s the alone time with husband in all of this? Babo, looking out into the front yard, felt something he hadn’t felt since he was twenty-one, when he left his family behind and zing zing zinged all the way to London to discover alcohol and meat for the very first time. It was a strange feeling of disconnection. Of walking down the streets and discovering that there was nothing you could claim, nothing that belonged to you; that if you were to lift yourself out of the scene, it would continue on without you.

It was like lying down on the soft, immaculate Tokyo hotel room bed during those weeks when he had entertained the idea of expanding Sanbo operations overseas: the TV blaring in an incomprehensible language, the yukata, the green tea, the curious red bean sweets. He’d been adrift then, in a world where he couldn’t make his mark, and he’d known then, as he knew now, that without his girls he was nothing.

He knew, because he’d already found
it
all those years ago in the canteen of Joseph Friedman & Sons. The moment he’d seen the whirl of ribbon in Siân’s auburn hair – he’d caught hold of that moment and planted it in the ribcage of his soul, pinned it there like a spotted butterfly wing. Such beauty! And without it, such absence.

But lately it had been like waking up in a foreign country all over again. His family were here – scattered in the front yard, getting ready to abandon him without the slightest pang of thump thumping remorse. He wanted to go with them, so they could escape the mosquitoes and flies together. He wanted to load them up in his Flying Fiat and take them away like he used to: to Kanyakumari, the tip of India, where the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea all joined together, or two hours down the coast to Pondicherry just to eat fresh apple custard pies. Most of all though, he wanted to be able to sha-bing sha-bang with Siân like he used to – three times in a row, no problem, because at the heart of it, this was where things were falling apart.

Babo was approaching forty, and for the first time in his life, he was beginning to grapple with his mortality, his manhood. He could feel changes in his increasingly weighted-down, half-way-over-the-hill body – most of them having to do with Mr Whatsit. It had never been like this before. Babo remembered a time when just the sight of Siân’s exposed collarbone got him all excited – ushering him almost immediately to the brink, like in those early days in the blue-walled Finchley Road flat. Or later, in Sylvan Lodge, when they used to make love so quietly and for so long, that sometimes when they woke in the morning, still fitted somehow into each other, it used to seem to him as if their bodies had been created for this express purpose – to realize these sweet configurations.

These days it took a while for Mr Whatsit to get aroused, and even longer for him to reach the brink. They hardly ever locked themselves in for Saturday afternoon sessions any more. In fact, they hardly ever touched. It was as if they no longer needed to make their own world together at the end of a day. Even when Siân slid into bed wearing nothing but her emerald green satin slip, her marble body endlessly accessible to him, Babo felt, not a diminishing of desire towards his wife, but a diminishing in his own capabilities. Babo couldn’t understand how he’d grown so much older while his wife had remained so young, scarcely changed since the day she’d first arrived in India. The gap between her teeth had grown quarter micro-millimetre by quarter micro-millimetre, but the rest of her was still soft, achingly sexy. Yet most nights the only thing he could manage was to take hold of Siân’s body and cling to it like a drowning man holds on to a river branch, falling asleep with relief against the milky white smoothness of it.

Babo put it down to stress. Now that his mother was gone he found himself in the crossfire zone of his family. Not just the temper flares and differences of opinion that had resurged between Prem Kumar and Chotu, but Dolly calling from Baroda, complaining that life with her husband, Chunky, was quite unbearable, and Meenal weeping about some new failing in her body – some lump or growth which convinced her that she’d be the next to go.

And as if the immediate family wasn’t enough to deal with, Babo suddenly found that he’d become a magnet for maladies in general – ageing aunties called him from Bhavnagar and Porbandar to grumble about gallstones and diabetes, cataracts and colonoscopies. His father’s Sunday rummy-playing group, who had only ever been interested in betel-chewing and political banter, suddenly wanted to confide
in him
about their inflamed prostates and calcified testicles. As though
he
could advise them in any way, or even swap notes with them about their ailments. As if
he
were about to join them and become part of that club any time soon.

Siân and he had lost a parent each, and yet neither of them could communicate the depth of their loss to each other. Things were changing rapidly around them, and the thing that had always come easiest to them – the sha-bing sha-bang that had saved them in the past and brought them back to the centre –
that
lay just beyond their reach in a country they’d once lived in, but to which they had suddenly lost visiting rights.

Once, when they were in bed with the door safely locked so there could be no chance of the children coming in, Babo said, ‘Charlie Girl, what’s happening to us?’

He thought at first Siân might try to pretend that nothing was the matter; that she’d say ‘Hmm,’ and push it under the carpet like she did with most problems. But Siân looked at him straight on, as though she were seeing him clearly for the first time. ‘What’s happening is that you’re turning into your father.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You absolutely are. Look at you – you’re even sticking out your lower lip in that stubborn way of his. What’s happened is that you’ve lost all your spontaneity. When was the last time just the two of us went out to dinner? NOT to the club. When was the last time you surprised me in any way? You used to be all about those things. Now the only thing you’re interested in is your precious Sanbo Enterprises and your fucking stock of Johnny Walker.’

It was Siân’s use of the word ‘fucking’ that floored Babo. He’d never so much as heard his wife use the word ‘shit’ before, never mind ‘damn’ or ‘bloody’ or any of the other lower-ranking swearwords. It went against her strict Calvinist upbringing and sense of propriety. When, in the past, he made the mistake of cursing aloud, Siân always glared at him and hissed, ‘THE CHILDREN,’ as though he were pouring poison directly into their ears. So to hear her utter a profanity now, was not only an ominous sign of disintegration, it was in a crueller sense, a betrayal.

‘Daddy,’ Bean was saying, waving frantically at him, ‘Aren’t you going to come kiss us goodbye? We’re leaving soon.’

Babo, turning to leave the bedroom, caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, and saw how his wife has been right as usual. Trishala’s eyes, which had once been the centrepiece of his face, had sunk into the background, allowing Prem Kumar’s intractably wide nose and lips to emerge to the foreground. He
had
turned into his father. What’s more, this physical change had somehow made a difference to his very essence. It was why he could no longer sit through a late-night film at the Casino any more without his eyes closing halfway through. It was why he wasn’t performing the way he should have been in bed.

Was this a fate reserved for every man? thought Babo. To slowly transform into the father they had always assumed was far, far away from them? Babo wanted to halt this movement in its tracks. He wanted to be the man he’d once been, the man who drove his soon-to-be-wife to a five-star hotel in Bombay when he could scarcely afford it, and ravished her three times in a row on those white, pristine sheets. He wanted to do that to her now, to drag her inside and tell her not to go away from him. But he couldn’t, because he had become the kind of man he’d always despised: fearful and predictable.

It would happen this way, Siân would be in the kitchen or garden, and her mother’s voice would swish up as if from underwater, out of the crockery cabinet, or from between the springs of the settee. And always, Siân felt she must
do
something; save her mother from something terrible. While Babo had been slipping away from her, Nerys’s voice had increasingly slipped in – calling, prying, screaming, stammering – the same shrill, urgent supplication –
Siân, Siân!
– as though she were calling from under a trapped rock or had slipped on the bathroom floor, or worse, was drowning in the middle of the ocean.

Siân could hear Nerys now, as the train lunged up the west coast of India.
Siân, Siân
, following her like the wind.
What are those girls up to?
Siân thought.
Are they in her Sunday clothes? Are they stealing biscuits from the Cadbury tin? God forbid, are they pulling up her roses?
Even though Siân knew that the girls weren’t doing anything of the sort. The girls were almost grown-up and playing dominoes on the way to Anjar, but it felt, for a moment, that she was back at Tan-y-Rhos again; that her world was intact: husband, children, brothers, mother, father.