The Pleasure Seekers (3 page)

For the moment he would stand with his family in the morning light with the sun shining through the rain-laden clouds. He would let Lilaj-bhai say, ‘OK, E-sherious look now please,’ or ‘E-shmile please,’ and take pictures of them together; stiff as dummies in a store window, arms at attention at their sides. And gradually, as they relaxed and lost consciousness of the camera, there would be pictures of Babo’s gleaming teeth and his family smiling along with him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world – to let this boy fly away from them for the first time in his life. Far far away. Zing zing zing in the sky.

2  Under False Skies

It took Babo three months and five days in London to forget about Falguni. There had been a lot to deal with since his arrival, and pining for a large-breasted girl with a lisp from Madras was only working as a deterrent to his ultimate goal, which was, as his father repeatedly reminded him every time he wrote or telephoned, to get the gold medal for the advanced course at the Polytechnic, and to make himself indispensable to Joseph Friedman & Sons.

In any case, Falguni’s letters were getting increasingly and irritatingly sentimental, demanding replies and declarations of love that Babo, with his current schedule, just couldn’t keep up with. How could he begin to describe his new life to her, or to anyone in his family, for that matter? It was all so utterly different from what he’d expected; nothing at all like the English movies he used to cut classes for and watch with his college friends in Madras. There were no Alec Guinnesses or Humphrey Bogarts walking around in London. No Gina Lollobrigidas. At least none that he could see in the London City Council hostel in Wandsworth where his cousin Nat had dumped him.

To start with, Nat and his wife Lila hadn’t even picked him up at the airport. Babo had waited, holding tight to his suitcase, senses on high alert. Every five minutes he looked down at the face of his new HMT watch to see if it was still working, and finally, after confirming that he had indeed been waiting for three hours and fifteen minutes, he found a sardarji taxi driver who agreed to take him to Nat’s address in Belsize Park for £3 – which was all the money he’d been allowed in foreign exchange by the Indian Government. In the forty-five minutes it took to reach their flat, Babo had worked himself into a teary-eyed rage, because he was already broke, and because to arrive in a new place with no one to greet you, was surely an inauspicious way to begin.

‘Where were you?’ shrieked Babo, to a surprised Lila, who answered the door. ‘Didn’t you get the telegram from Papa? I don’t understand. You’re my family! You were supposed to pick me up.’

Nat and Lila hadn’t received the telegram. They’d been informed that Babo was due to arrive at some point, but the exact details of that arrival had gone astray. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Nat, somewhat too nonchalantly for Babo’s liking. ‘You’re here now, isn’t it?’

Nat had grown fat during his time in London. Babo had last seen him four years ago at his wedding in Baroda, at which point he’d been a regular, plumpish Gujju boy with a regular head of hair. Now, though, he looked to Babo like a cabbage – devoid of any character, his features flattened into oblivion, and his hair, whatever was left of it, swept into a scary comb-over. To compensate for these deficiencies, perhaps, Nat talked louder and faster than before, and during the course of tea and snacks, he delivered Babo his second googly of the day. ‘Well,’ he said, reaching for his fifth vegetable cutlet, ‘We ought to sort out some accommodation for you, don’t you think?’

‘What do you mean? Won’t I be staying with you?’

‘Look at the size of this place!’ said Nat, gesturing to the grubby walls of the bedsit with his chubby arms. ‘There’s barely enough place for Lila and me as it is. Besides, this is England, Babo. In this country, they don’t live like sardines, not like back home where it’s all family-shamily all the time. Day in and day out, eating, sleeping, shitting in each other’s faces. You know what I mean? No privacy, only lunacy. I tell you, it’s the best thing about this country. Give it a few months and you’ll learn to enjoy your time alone. In fact, you’ll be thanking me.’

Even though Nat eventually proved to be right, Babo never really forgave him for turfing him out of Hampstead – haven of tycoons and film stars – on his very first day, and depositing him in the London City Council hostel in Wandsworth, henceforth the LCC, with only a loan of £5 and an
A–Z
to keep him company. His room was half the size of his parents’ bathroom in Sylvan Lodge, and it was windowless. If he stretched out his hands he could feel the partition cloth that separated his space from the next fellow’s, and if he stretched further, he could potentially topple the glass of teeth that would surely be sitting on the side table next door, because the average age of an LCC occupant was seventy.

On his own side table Babo kept his wristwatch, locket and a limited array of toiletries (toothbrush, tongue cleaner, toothpaste, shaving cream and brush, soap and hair oil which would later be exchanged for Brylcreem). The rest of his possessions – two suits, four shirts, one pair of trousers, four pairs of underwear and socks, two ties, family photos and Falguni’s letters – he fitted into his suitcase and stored under the bed. In his briefcase, he kept his passport, wallet and work papers. The one pair of Bata shoes he owned, black and perfectly polished, he removed and kept by the door as soon as he entered the room. For this room, and for a steady diet of toast, tea, boiled vegetables and custard, Babo would pay £4 15s a week, nearly half his weekly salary.

On his first morning in London Babo was up early, making his way to the communal toilets before anyone else so he could do his business in peace. He had with him the plastic mug that Trishala had insisted on packing because she’d heard that English people used scraps of paper to clean their bums instead of washing them, which Nat had later affirmed. After dressing and eating breakfast, Babo walked to the offices of Joseph Friedman & Sons according to the route he’d mapped and memorized from the
A–Z
the night before. He was so excited, his stomach kept doing jiggly-wrigglies, and halfway there he thought he might have to turn around just to use the toilet again. At 8 a.m. he arrived at the office reception with briefcase in hand and bowels subdued only to be told that no one from Exports had arrived yet. By the time Fred Hallworth finally rolled in to pump his hands up and down and say, ‘Wonderful, just wonderful to meet you,’ Babo had emptied and restored the contents of his briefcase a thousand times, and had started a letter to his father which began:
Dear Papa, in England it seems, the first lesson I am to learn, is the art of waiting
.

‘Let’s take you up to meet Joe, shall we?’ said Fred, ushering a bewildered Babo all the way to the eighth floor to the chairman’s office, where old Joseph himself was sitting in a swivel chair, smoking a pipe.

The chairman took one look at Babo and said, ‘You’ve brought the Indian summer with you, Bob. Is it all right if I call you Bob?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Babo blinked, not knowing what an Indian summer could possibly mean, but it was something he’d hear repeatedly over the next few months.

‘And when would you like to start working for us?’ old Joseph boomed.

Babo stood in front of him, beginning to feel a bit hot in his blue wool suit. ‘Today?’

‘Don’t you want to take a few days off, son? Get to know London a bit before you settle in for the daily grind?’

And that’s when it all came pouring out: Babo’s money woes; the cab driver, a fellow countryman who’d gypped him; his own cousin who hadn’t even bothered to pick him up at the airport – all of it in clipped, heavily accented English sentences, until the chairman, grasping the breadth of Babo’s distress, got up from his chair and planted fifty quid in Babo’s sweaty palms, saying that this was just something to start him off – it was a lot of money, sure, but he could see from Babo’s face that he was hard-working, and that he’d be nothing but an asset to the company. Furthermore, if he needed anything else, he shouldn’t hesitate to bother Fred Hallworth about it.

It was a kindness Babo hadn’t expected. ‘I’d still like to start today, sir,’ he said, before leaving the room, clutching the fifty quid tight.

Fred Hallworth turned out to be Babo’s great protector and champion in London. He was responsible for getting Babo’s photograph printed in the company’s September newsletter, with the headline ‘WELCOME TO JOSEPH FRIEDMAN & SONS DHARMESH PATEL’, which Babo promptly cut out and sent home to his father, knowing that Prem Kumar would place it lovingly in his file along with his college certificates,
The Hindu
Bon Voyage photograph and the company’s formal letter of employment.

There was something about Fred that was instantly likeable. He was a big, bearded man with hands like stone crushers and a voice that matched the pace and turbo of the zippy MG he tore around in, but he was also a surprisingly good listener, and in those early days, Babo found it comforting to be able to pile some of his concerns into Fred’s pliant, available ears. Fred had been to India many times, and he’d been supplying cement and raw materials to Prem Kumar for so long now, Babo felt he was the one person who understood exactly where he was coming from.

Every day they ate lunch together at The Brewer’s Inn, and every day Fred joked, ‘Fancy a pint of bitters, Bob? Or some steak and kidney pie?’ knowing that Babo would only laugh good-naturedly and say, ‘Not today, Fred, I think I’ll stick to my regular,’ which was a cheese sandwich and orange juice.

It took Babo a long time to stop calling Fred Mr Hallworth. It was easier if they were out of the office, but in the domain of Joseph Friedman & Sons, Babo always slipped back to the well-honed show of reverence he was used to reserving for his elders. The lack of rigidity between generations in England took a while to get used to. Back home for instance, Babo couldn’t imagine sharing a cup of tea with one of his professors, or addressing him by his first name. Imagine!
Oh! Hello, Harindranath. Good morning, Subramanium!
Unthinkable. More unthinkable for a teacher to light up a smoke in class, and for a student to follow. Yet, this happened regularly at the Polytechnic. Babo, despite his rebellious leanings, had at first been uncomfortable with the whole scenario because years and years of being a closet smoker had made it impossible for him to enjoy a fag in public. But, as Fred rightly pointed out, when in Rome, one should do as the Romans do. So, Babo trained himself to adopt the English custom of smoking during class until it began to seem like this was the way things had always been.

Everything was so continually surprising to Babo during those first few months in London that when he sent news home, he didn’t know where to begin.
England is an amazing country
, he wrote to his grandmother, Ba, in Gujarat.
There are parks everywhere – all over the city. Sometimes, while walking to work, I get a strong smell of wet leaves, which in this season are turning colour and falling, and somehow it reminds me of Ganga Bazaar after the rains, and of course, of you, Ba
.

To his father he wrote about the preciseness of English life.
You would like it here, Papa. Life here is very orderly. Cars go in straight lines, no one uses the horn, they have zebra crossings where all traffic stops automatically so pedestrians can travel safely, and there are absolutely no animals on the road at all – not even dogs! Some adjustments are harder to make of course; the food, even English people will agree, is horrible, and the weather, I’m still finding very cold. Also, life in the LCC is very dull. It’s full of old fogies who do nothing all day but play cards. There are a few young fellows who live here, but they smell unbearably because I think they only shower once a week and live in the same clothes day in and day out. Anyway, the good news is that Mr Hallworth is going to arrange accommodation for me at the YMCA in Croydon, where for only 15 shillings extra, I can get a larger room with a window and a washbasin, and the same weekly meal plan. There’s also a billiards table and regular Scrabble nights, so I’m looking forward to it as I’ll get to make friends my age and it will make me feel less lonely
.

Being on his own was one of Babo’s biggest challenges. All his life he’d been surrounded by people – family, friends, neighbours, servants. And while technically the upstairs bedroom in Sylvan Lodge had been assigned to him, he never actually slept in it alone. Chotu invariably dragged his mattress upstairs, or sometimes shared the bed with him, and when cousins came to visit, which was fairly often, a whole gang of children would spread their sheets on the floor and keep each other awake by telling ghost stories all night.

In London, by the time Babo finished his classes at the Polytechnic at 8:30 and made his way back from Elephant & Castle to stomach a few boiled vegetables and crawl into bed, the feeling he was left with, more than any sense of moroseness, was a stultifying boredom that he’d never experienced before. The only thing that salvaged those early evenings for him was listening to the Hitachi transistor that Nat had managed to wangle from work. It was a peace offering, which Babo had grudgingly accepted, and given place of prominence on his side table. Late at night, while the geriatrics snored and rattled around him, Babo tuned into the All-India Radio Station and listened to the news and the occasional Hindustani recital, low and long, because it was the only immediate connection he had to home.

Apart from the loneliness, Babo despaired about the food. He couldn’t understand how something that had been so irrelevant to him in the past could suddenly become such an obsession. The canteen ladies at the LCC felt sorry for him because he was frequently ill and getting skinnier by the day. To compensate for his meagre main courses, they loaded him up with double helpings of custard and rice pudding, but still, Babo dreamed of food. More than Falguni, more than his family, Babo dreamed of food. Every morning he’d wake up hungry, wishing it was Friday, because Friday was pay day, and Friday was when Fred took him to The Star of India for a good feed: vegetarian thali for Babo and mutton vindaloo and butter naan for Fred.