The Pleasure Seekers (25 page)

‘When you were children you used to like to stand at the door, watching the trees and telegraph poles rush by,’ Siân said to Mayuri and Bean, who were sitting on the berth across from her. ‘Shall we go do that now?’

‘Oh, it’s too hot, Mama,’ Mayuri said, looking up, giving her fringe a little flick with her fingers.

‘And anyway,’ Bean chimed in, ‘We’re in the middle of a game now, Mama, please!’

Siân turned to watch the countryside as the wheels of the train laboriously zigzagged across little villages and towns. She wanted to catch hold of one of those sparkling images out there – that woman squatting by the wood fire with a covered head and a jewel-box face, that lone man riding his bicycle between fields of bright golden mustard – because everything felt tentative now. Her daughters teetering threateningly on the brink of adolescence. Babo temporarily lost to her. Even her mother calling to her. Siân wanted to bring them in from the world: the outside world that dimmed and glowed, hissed and spat, tore and restored.

On the morning after Babo’s family left for Anjar without him, there was a harsh, incessant ringing at the doorbell. Selvi, who had taken a few days off to settle some land affairs in her village, had left him all alone in the house, forcing him to rise from his bed and answer the door himself. At first, Babo thought that it was Siân returned, saying the girls could manage on their own; Ba was there to look after them as she always was. But when the ringing persisted, Babo knew it couldn’t be Siân because she had her own key, and if she really wanted to surprise him, there were simpler, sexier ways of doing it.

So Babo dragged himself to the door preparing to vent his anger at the milkman or whoever the imbecile was, for disturbing his sleep so early in the morning. But there in front of him, was a stranger – a young sardarni with a face like a peach, her never-cut hair spread like a bed sheet around her face, black kohl from the night before still in her eyes. She was standing barefoot in the frame of his front door in a loose kurta and pyjamas.

‘Do something about your cats,’ the sardarni said, jabbing her fingers towards the wall that divided the house of orange and black gates and the Punjab Women’s Association. ‘I can’t sleep. It’s impossible. I tell you, I can’t sleep with all the racket they’re making.’

Babo noticed, then, that the sardarni had a slight lisp – a slow, seductive ‘sss’ that rolled off her tongue when she said ‘
ssss
leep’. He noticed as well the substantial curve of breasts under her kurta, which in this strong morning light, and because they were unencumbered by a bra, he could see swelling through as peachily as her face. Obviously she’d come straight from bed without bothering to put slippers on, to march up to his front door to complain. Both the lisp and the epic dimensions of her breasts reminded Babo of Falguni – his old love, whom he’d ditched most cruelly in London, and never seen since. But it was more the pleading nature of the young woman – the
promith me that ssomorrow you will only danth wiss me
look, that was making the sardarni, at that moment, utterly irresistible.

In the seventeen years that Babo had been married to Siân, he’d not so much as glanced at another woman, never mind entered into any kind of compromising fantasy involving himself, his wife, another woman, or any combination of the above. Siân had been the first and only woman to take true possession of Babo’s heart, and when they’d taken claim of each other, there had been no place even for the actresses that Babo had once so ardently loved – the Liz Taylors and Madhubalas – even they had faded into a shimmery kind of haze never to be called on again to say,
Akele akele kahan ja rahen ho?
Even the light flirting that always carried on between their hybrid friends – Darlene particularly, who after a few drinks always liked to position herself in Babo’s lap and drawl, ‘You’re sooooo lucky, Siân, you don’t know what you got, girl’ – even
that
was harmless, and for Babo at least, had been as enticing as one of his sister’s landing themselves in his lap.

The point is, Babo had never strayed, never wandered, never so much as peeked in a direction away from his wife, because for all these years his wife had been the breath and the life, the everything. This morning, though, with this agitated sardarni standing in front of him, Babo felt desire building in the hitherto dormant Mr Whatsit, and this reaction – while it was positive, anatomically speaking – was certainly not a sign made in the right direction or at the right time. In fact, the mere occurrence of it shook Babo to his very foundations, for he was nothing if not a principled man.

‘But they’re not my cats,’ Babo said, discreetly adjusting his kurta. He ran his fingers distractedly through his curls and wished more than anything for a cigarette right then. ‘They live in your compound and they come and go as they please. They aren’t our responsibility at all.’

‘But how do you stand it? I’ve been here a week and I haven’t been able to sleep. Not a single night.’

Stand. Sleep. Single. Sssss-sss-ssss
.

‘One minute,’ said Babo, leaving the sardarni at the door, and re-emerging with a box in hand. ‘At one point, when my daughter was young she had the same problem. In fact, it was very serious. She had nightmares for years because of those cats. So our family doctor gave us a large stock of earplugs hoping they would relieve the situation. Maybe you can try them and see if they help?’

‘Oh!’ the sardarni said, lowering her eyes, suddenly looking very bashful. ‘You don’t look at all like you could be the father of grown-up children. You’re very youthful-looking. Thanks for these, though, really,’ she said, taking the box gingerly, and then turning to go back the way she’d come, her peachy buttocks swaying gently from side to side – dhamak dhimak, dhamak dhimak – as she disappeared slowly from sight.

This encounter was the closest Babo ever came to cheating on his wife for the entirety of their marriage. The effects of the desire that the sardarni stirred up, though, were far-reaching, extending well beyond that long desert of Babo’s fortieth year, when she appeared like a mirage to stir him from his mid-marriage crumblings. Later, whenever Babo heard the sound of cats mating, Mr Whatsit would respond Pavlovian style to the peachy memory of the sardarni’s front sides and back sides, filling with such desire that he’d turn straight away to his wife’s body, no matter what time of night, and sha-bing sha-bang.

More immediately, though, the sardarni’s ego boost left Babo simultaneously so refreshed and guilty that he was left with no other option but to change his life in the only way he knew how: by listening to what his wife and daughters had been telling him for some time now. Not to, not to, not to.

He stopped sitting out on the veranda with his scotch and sodas every evening, eliminated fried foods and restricted his intake of high-calorie snacks to a handful of cashews. He started waking up at six in the morning to go walking in the Loyola College compound. When he met their hybrid friends at the Gymkhana Club at weekends, he steered clear of the biscuit-layered chocolate cake and nutty-boy ice creams even though this seemed to disappoint Keshav and Praveen more than his recently adopted teetotal habits. ‘What’s got into you, yaar? Don’t tell us you’re missing your wife so much? Or that in this old age God is finally finding you? Is this some kind of religious fast?’

Even Chotu, who was increasingly retreating into a world of his own, noticed a radical change in his brother. ‘Bhai, why are you losing weight like this? Is Selvi not feeding you at home? Do you want to come and stay with Papa and me in the meantime?’

‘You silly goat,’ Ba said, bellowing down the phone all the way from Ganga Bazaar. ‘It’s your birthday in one week. Why are you going to sit in your house all alone when your family is here? Is that what you make so much money for? So that you can sit on it like a hen hatching eggs?’

So Babo, without too much deliberation, packed a small suitcase and told Selvi to go off to her village for the week. He left Prem Kumar and Chotu to throttle each other at Sanbo Enterprises if they wished, and got on the first flight to Bombay, from where he would take an onward train to Anjar – all so he could surprise his wife and save their marriage.

By the time he arrived in Ganga Bazaar, Ba had already smelled the bakul flowers in his hands, and the rain clouds that inevitably followed her grandson wherever he went. ‘Come and see,’ she shouted to the girls, who were lounging about on the swings with magazines. Siân came, too – drawn to the front door not by any discriminating sense of smell, but to a voice that had been calling for some time now.

It wasn’t necessary for Siân to say anything. Her eyes gave Babo all the approval he needed. She was looking at him the way she’d looked at him when she’d got off the plane in Bombay after those six terrible months apart, and wrapped her body around him, determined to be the only light in his life. But now, instead of running towards him, she stayed rooted to the spot and said, ‘Well, well. Don’t you think your daddy looks handsome, girls?’

And just like that, the inevitability that one day they would both be orphans, that they might allow that peacock-feather connection of electricity between them to slip away, all those weights lifted, and it was like rose petals falling from the sky again. And Ba, who heard them in the corners of her house, softly rocking the earth of Ganga Bazaar into a million pieces, marvelled that they had the same jhimak jhimak sheen as when they drove into Anjar all those years ago, showing the villagers their first motor car and their first white person. It was a fearlessness then, and it was a fearlessness now: the ability to dissolve into love.

We must all be ready to die for impossible love
, thought Ba.
Because love shouldn’t need proof of time or remembrance. Love should always be new. Love should be an eternity
. And when Babo and Siân left with their two daughters amidst thunderstorms to go back to their city by the sea, Ba understood how Ekam was always Ekam.
They have been through fire. Now they will lift each other up and fly again
.

That Christmas, when the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M.G. Ramachandran, India’s first actor-turned politician, husband of three and father of none, went tottering into the sunset with his furry cap and dark glasses, leaving in his wake a spate of state-wide riots; when the Patels’ most faithful vanguard of domesticity, Selvam, disappeared for ever without so much as a
hello – goodbye – excuse me please
; when Nerys took to the air and came all the way to India, the voices in Siân’s head finally stopped.

Babo and Siân drove to the airport on a tropical December Madras night with Mayuri and Bean giggling with excitement on the back seat, holding garlands of fresh jasmine and bouquets of red roses. Babo, Siân, Mayuri and Bean stood at the arrival gates of the Madras Meenambakkam Airport, watching as Nerys arrived in India for the very first time in her sixty-year-old life, wearing a brand-new Debenhams knee-length polka-dot dress and a wide-brimmed sunhat even though it was the middle of the night.

Nerys, who said she’d never fly because she didn’t trust anything with all that metal up in the air. Nerys, who was never afraid, who was only amazed by this huge and devastating country: how she could put something on to wear for just a few hours, and how, by the next morning, the thing was washed, cleaned, ironed and ready to wear again; this movement of people: watchmen, ayahs, drivers, sweepers, gardeners – who worked mostly invisibly in some magical cycle of constant renewal – how all this sustained itself. Nerys, who returned to Nercwys after three months in India, content never to leave her village again, content to know how her granddaughters slept every night, how they looked under those blankets of hers, how her daughter lived like a princess after all. Content with the things she could tell Bryn to ease the furrows in his brow if he should ever come back to her.

Siân ran towards her mother, who was striding bravely past the sea of brown faces of taxi drivers and parking ticket collectors as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Her mother was finally saying ‘Siân, Siân’ in a voice that wasn’t haunting or calling for help. Nerys was standing in front of her, miraculously, allowing her two worlds to meet for a moment. And Siân held this moment – this picture of her teenaged girls draping their Nain with flowers, her clean-shaven husband walking over and stoutly planting two polite kisses on either side of his mother-in-law’s face.

Babo manoeuvred them away from the crowds and drove them back to the house of orange and black gates, which was decorated with silver tinsel and lit with lamps. Inside, Perry Como was singing, ‘There’s no Christmas like a home Christmas’, and the girls, even though they no longer believed in Santa, scattered the idea of Christmas all over the house with their glistening eyes and their bodies and minds as pure as bells.

20  Love is Always Love

When Bean was sixteen she began to sneak out of the house every night to sleep with a boy called Michael Mendoza. Every night she sat in the bay window of the room she no longer shared with Mayuri, her eyes drifting between wakefulness and sleep, waiting for Michael to flash his torch light against her window so she could hurry outside and they could up, up and away.

Michael came for her on his Yezdi motorbike, riding down Rutland Lane with the engine switched off, slithering up to the orange and black gates like a silent creature from the sea. He never told Bean exactly when he was coming, and if Bean asked, he’d say she must wait without questions. If she really loved him, she’d wait without questions.