The Pleasure Seekers (32 page)

The incident with Deenu happened in November 1996. The Stonewell’s crew had started early at the pub because Tom was going back to Oxford to take up a job with the NHS, and Bean was going to train up to take his place. There were celebrations all around.

‘Fuck the old man,’ Allegra said, when Bean got up to leave at eight. ‘Fuck him, fuck him. Just go home when you damn well please. What’s he going to do anyway? Tom,’ she bellowed, ‘Get Senior Editor Bean here another Chardonnay.’

Bean, carried away with the idea of possible revolt, downed her third glass of wine, and her fourth, thinking it would be OK, just this once, owing to her promotion and all.

For the first time, Bean stayed out till last call, till they were rolling out of the pub towards the tube station. The Spanish architect hadn’t shown up, but his English partner, George, the not so exciting half of the two-man team, had.

‘I just knew he wouldn’t show, darling,’ Allegra slurred, ‘This just isn’t his thing – he’s too old for this, probably has a nice Spanish girl to go home to.’

Bean saw how the city changed at night; how people weren’t decorous at all; how with a little bit of alcohol in them, English people were suddenly emboldened and set free.

By the time she ran up the length of Sunnydale Road it must have been after midnight, because when Mr Jain opened the door, letting her freeze out in the cold for a bit, he looked down at his watch and pronounced, ‘Three hours ten minutes late,’ his face all pinched up like a garden tool – corroded and cruel.

Bean unzipped her boots in the dark corridor, leaving her socks on to keep her warm. She hung her coat in the hall closet and put one light on in the kitchen, where her plate lay like a solitary moon on the table. She ate the food cold, without joy; rinsed out the dishes, soaped them down and stacked them on the draining board. She walked upstairs, feeling her way in darkness to the bathroom, where she washed her face with cold water, brushed her teeth and wiped down the sink. Then she went to the lavvy, pulled the flush shortly and waited for the gurgling to subside before opening the door. Again, in darkness, she padded back to her room, put on her pyjamas, jumper and night socks, and climbed into bed. Bean slept. She slept like she always had, with difficulty and some dread.

Later, there were sounds of flushes and taps. This house was so cold, so unsecretive. Bean, shivering in bed, could hear Mr and Mrs Jain next door – their symphony of snores and windbreakers. Later, much later, the door opened, scrape scrape scraping against the carpet.
Ah
, thought Bean.
Someone’s come to fix the heating. Finally
. But this man hadn’t come to fix the radiator. No. He got into bed and started smoothing down Bean’s hair. Bean couldn’t understand it. Why was Deenu cradling her as though she were his child?

Did I ask for you? Did I call out your name for you to be here?

Bean was awake now, looking at him with charcoal eyes. She could smell the aftershave on him, the toothpaste and alcohol.

‘All right?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Yes.’ Bean said, automatically.

He touched her cheek, and then gently, again, ‘Are you all right?’

Nothing. Bean couldn’t speak.

‘You’re wonderful, you know? So wonderful.’

Nothing.

Deenu turned his body towards Bean; she could feel him harden against her leg. Bean wanted to choke, scream, something – but there was only a bird caught in her throat, saying,
no no no
. Deenu must have heard the bird, too, because he looked at her confusedly and said, ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘Yes,’ Bean said. It was all she could say.

‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry.’

Deenu rose from the bed, turning so the bald plate of his head shone through his thinning hair in the moonlight. He scraped her door open and shut, scraped the door to his room open and shut. Bean heard him shuffle over to his bed on designer socks. Then there was only noiselessness.

‘I’m telling you, it came out of nowhere!’

Bean was standing in the telephone booth by the Lewisham Leisure Centre, trying to tell Siân about the incident with Deenu.

She was trying to explain to her mother that she had done nothing to encourage such behaviour from Deenu. NOTHING. From the beginning, their relationship had been perfunctory:
All right? And how are things going? And do you need help with your CV?
Nothing more than that. If anything, Deenu had seemed apologetic for his parents: for his mother’s careful storing of plastic bags and counting of vegetables in the fridge, for his father’s fussing about in the garden like an old clockwork toy in his frayed sweaters and 1970s trousers.

Deenu of the no-curfew – who existed outside the framework of his father’s rules; who paid the mortgage and provided two off-season annual tickets to Baroda; who, compared to the runaway daughter, shone.

‘Hush, hush,’ Siân said. ‘Sweetie, listen, we have some really bad news to give you.’

But Bean wasn’t listening to her mother. She wanted Babo. She wanted to ask,
What are you going to do about this, Daddy? Tell me, what are you going to do?

‘Baby, listen to me,’ Siân said, ‘Please, listen. Chotu Kaka is very ill. He started having trouble swallowing a few months ago, and the doctors, they did all these tests on him, and, well, it’s really serious, Bean. Cancer of the oesophagus. He’s on his second round of chemo, but the cancer has already spread.

‘Bean?

‘Bean?’

There was that bird again, stuck in Bean’s throat. ‘Why did you wait so long to tell me?’ she whispered.

‘We wanted to, we really did, but it was all so sudden, and you were trying to settle in. It’s just been a nightmare, the whole thing. Daddy’s practically living in the hospital. The prognosis isn’t good, love. Six months. The doctor said six months, if he’s lucky.’

‘I want to speak to Daddy. Can I please just speak to Daddy?’

Poor Babo, trying to deal with his dying brother, trying to deal with the news that his daughter had been violated by his oldest friend’s son. What could he say?
Maybe Deenu really was sleepwalking like he said. Maybe it really was a terrible misunderstanding. Couldn’t Bean work it out? Couldn’t she?

What could he offer?
Come home? Come back? Go and stay with your Uncle Huw? Go and stay with your Uncle Owen?

No more uncles
. Bean was adamant.

Well, what are you going to do then, Bean? Tell me what you want to do.

Bean was going to pack her bags and get on the next flight to Madras.

25  Where There are Graves There are Resurrections

In the six months it took Chotu to die, the only person he wanted close was Babo. ‘Bhai,’ he’d say, ‘Don’t leave me. When are you coming back? Why don’t you stay?’

Babo didn’t know whether he was coming or going, but he was moving all the time: from home to hospital to Sylvan Lodge. His days were measured out between tea breaks and radiation sessions. He suffered a brief but intense lapse into smoking. It was his only respite from the claustrophobia of the hospital and its waiting rooms.

Every morning at the Apollo Cancer Hospital the well-wishers arrived. Babo began to recognize them over the days – their penitent faces, their paltry comforts of pillows and magazines. The well-wishers went first to the temple on the ground floor to beg a miracle of God, then to the pharmaceutical counter to buy the promise of a miracle and then to talk to the doctors, who reminded them this was final-stage cancer they were talking about – better not expect miracles, better prepare for the inevitable.

How practical the avenues of death were, Babo thought, sucking on his Gold Flakes. After all, no matter how bad it got, someone had to think about settling the final papers, paying the hospital bills, filing the obituary with the newspaper, organizing the death certificate. Someone had to do all that and still manage, despite all death’s dehumanizing, to grieve. Babo watched them all – those who were alive and those on their way to dying – people who used to be lovers once, who at some point in their lives must have thought they were invincible. At night, when he lay beside his sick brother in a hospital bed, Babo thought about ruined bodies, a mad unleashing of them – dhishoom dhishoom.

‘What do you think of Dr Rangaraj?’ Chotu wanted to know. ‘Do you think we should go with his diagnosis, or should we try something different?’

Chotu was all about trying. Every evening, after all the daily reports and test results were in, he held the sheaf of papers in his hands, stroking them as though they were maps waiting to be deciphered. He spread them out on the bed in front of him, the coloured graphs and X-rays, and surveyed them. As if life could be as simple as that. As if all you had to do was lay all your cards down and choose: which way should I send this?

In those days there was no talk of Rinky Damani, no talk of the past. ‘When I get out of here, bhai, I’m going to travel. I’m going to see the world. I should have done it a long time ago.’

‘Oh, there’ll be plenty of time for that, heavyweight,’ Babo said cheerily, ‘Plenty of time.’

When Dolly and Meenal came to relieve him in the afternoons, Babo went home to shower and change, to lie down with Siân on their king-size Kashmiri bed and sha-bing sha-bang. After all the lovemaking, Babo wanted to talk about his childhood. He wanted to name the events, single them out and name them, because he thought if he didn’t, they might disappear along with Chotu.

So Siân listened to how Babo got punished for the time he carried two-year-old Chotu on his shoulders all the way to Marina Beach just so they could see the fishermen going out in their catamarans. How they used to play cricket in the gullies around Sylvan Lodge, and sometimes, if there were enough of them, they went to the ground in Barnabas Road where they could have proper boundaries and stumps.
Before going to England
, Babo sighed, because whether it was true or not,
this
event had been identified as the turning point for his entire family.
Before going to England
, Babo used to take Chotu to play against the Akash Ganga Colony boys and they’d thrash them hollow, even though Chotu was only tiny then; broomstick-legged tiny.

‘And you remember when we took him to Bombay, Charlie? When we saw Lance Gibbs in the lobby of the Taj, and Chotu went up to him for his autograph. You remember what we saw afterwards? That man with the rogallo glider jumping off the Express Towers? You know what I told Chotu when we saw that? I said, “It makes you want to believe in something, doesn’t it? A man flying in the sky like that.” And do you know what Chotu said? He said, “Of course, bhai, what’s there not to believe in?” ‘

But Babo didn’t know any more. He wondered what there was to believe in now that they were losing people in speedy succession: Bryn, Trishala, Nerys, Darayus, and now Chotu. The sadness pulled around his eyes and cheeks, dragged at the corners of his mouth, stole years and years from him, just like that.

It was the same look Prem Kumar harboured behind his bottle-thick glasses, sitting in the front room all day, welded into his dilapidated brown armchair. Now that work had been suspended at Sanbo Enterprises, there was nothing for Prem Kumar to do but hold court in Sylvan Lodge with the despondent relatives who passed in and out like a procession of deadbeats. He refused to go to the hospital. ‘I’ll wait till my son comes home,’ he insisted, even when Babo told him there was a chance Chotu might never be well enough to come home. But hadn’t he done all this before with Trishala? Hadn’t he wandered around the corridors of hospitals only to listen to the lies of doctors? Did he have to go through all this again with his own son?

No. Even if Trishala hovered around his insomnia-plagued nights, bristling like a typhoon, admonishing him for his fears; even if his mother, all the way in Anjar, kept phoning to tell him he would never die in peace, never reach siddhashila – that place where all the pure jivas went to experience their true nature – if he didn’t go and spend at least one night by his son’s bedside, he still couldn’t do it.

In the mornings, after Sonam, his nurse, brought him his neem stick to chew on, he imagined going to the hospital and surprising Babo, imagined telling him, ‘Son, go home, eat, shave, rest – get that horrible smell off you.’ But then he thought how it would be to see Chotu, propped up in bed against a hard-backed pillow, looking like all the air had been sucked out of him, and he couldn’t do it.

Babo told him that the kidneys were threatening to give up, that Chotu had refused a bedpan. Would he be able to help his son – a grown man, to the toilet? Prem Kumar’s knees shook violently at the thought. What would he say to Chotu, anyway? Chotu, who was more stubborn, more self-righteous than Babo, more like Prem Kumar than either of them cared to admit? How were they going to continue after all of this was finished? This long nightmare that started with Trishala’s breasts and now lived in the corroded walls of Chotu’s oesophagus.

No. It was easier to sit cross-legged in the armchair in his frayed vest and dhoti with his betel-nut box by his side. Babo could continue to bring him reports –
every blessed word
– the doctors uttered. And in the evenings, when the conversation turned increasingly maudlin, and Dolly and Meenal cried so much, killing off their brother before he was ready to go, Prem Kumar could gruffly steer everything back to his own ill health and failings – his urinary infection and the insomnia which was making his daily life so very painful.