The Pleasure Seekers (36 page)

‘The wind has been good to me today,’ Ba said, smiling her crooked, bow-shaped smile.

Bean dropped her bags and went to sit with her face against her great-grandmother’s breasts. She stayed there for a long time because there was something old and safe there, something like sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor in Sylvan Lodge with Trishala hand-feeding her and Mayuri in turn; something like hiding in Selvam’s lap while the ghost with grassy hair and her feet turned backwards at the ankles scrape-scraped along the portia-lined avenue of Sterling Road.

Every evening in Ba’s front room of swings, jute mats were spread along the black stone floors so people could come and exchange bits of gossip and information, or simply to sit and listen, as Bean did. Most of the visitors were women: Shakambari and Shakuntala-behn, Malini-behn, Durga-behn, Bhavna-behn, the triplets Rukku, Tukku and Munnu. The occasional man passed through too – Vinod-bhai the goldsmith, Moti Lal Mehta, the village head, who came for an elixir to soothe a bout of indigestion or for counsel on how to silence his nagging wife. But the person who came everyday unfailingly was Ignatius. Ignatius, who had taken it upon himself to be the father of Bean’s unborn child.

‘Do you think she’ll mind that her father’s a girl?’ Ignatius asked one day, cackling in that paddy-husk voice of his. ‘At least I’m a pretty girl, no, Beena? If I was ugly I would understand; it might be difficult for the child to accept. But I think I’m quite pretty, maybe even prettier than you. What do you think?

‘Arre, stop looking like you’ve swallowed a spider. You think
your
trouble is the end of the world? Just because some bastard fellow didn’t leave his wife and family for you, you think it’s the worst thing that’s going to happen in your life? Let me tell you something – you try waking up and realizing that everyone is different from you; that the whole human race is divided into those who have cocks and those who have pussies, and very few who have a mini cock and a mini pussy. You think you have problems being half and half? Try being me for a day. See what you can do with these useless shrivelled-up pieces of flesh. Then see the walls come tumbling down.

‘Let me see what he looks like, anyway. This hero of yours. You have a photo? Let’s see what’s so great about him.’

‘Arre, no!’ Ignatius squealed, when Bean took out the only picture she had kept of Javier and herself, standing by Lake Windermere in anoraks – Bean’s face blurred in profile, kissing Javier’s cheek, Javier looking straight at the camera, smiling his uncertain half smile.

‘This is him? Now I understand what they say about true love being blind,’ he chuckled. ‘A bandicoot is lovely to his parents, and a mule is pretty to its mate. But surely, Beena, you could have fallen in love with someone a little younger, no? I think you should be happy that you’re rid of the motherfucker. He would have treated you exactly as he treated his wife. Such men are never to be trusted, always thinking with the snake in their pants. I’m telling you, Beena, be happy that you’re having a baby. What a blessed thing, to be having a baby.’

In the many months Bean spent in Ba’s house, she felt her twenty-seven-year-old body expanding and changing, slipping through the moorings that connected her to the outside world. Her body transformed day by day, moved with a heaviness she’d never felt before. There was a substantial boost to her breasts, her bum.
Oh no!
thought Bean,
The fatty bumbalatti genes have arrived
. Everyday, she measured the circumference of her thighs and hips. What would the Brazilian dancer have said about this assassination of the body? Her mood swings grew so erratic that the only person who could talk to her without setting off a flood of hysterical laughter or tears was Ba.

‘This has been happening since the very beginning, Beena. There is nothing new about what you’re doing except it’s the first time you are experiencing it. But this is old. As old as it gets.’

‘I don’t understand anything any more, Ba. I can’t sleep. I can’t concentrate. I feel inconsolably sad most of the time. I thought there would be joy, so much joy. But mostly it’s something like shame. I haven’t been able to tell Mama or Daddy about it yet. Only Mayuri knows.’

‘But there can be no shame in the body, Beena. Because the universe was born out of Desire. Desire was the first seed of the mind. When we procreate, we are creating universes of our own.’

Bean already knew this. She’d been hearing it for ever: what exists in the universe exists in the human body.
Your body is your universe
. There were rivers and stars, sun and moon, oceans and mountains and places of pilgrimage in the body. To know the body was to have the ability to realize great bliss. Bean knew all this but still she felt shame–
shame shame puppy shame
– unpurifiable shame. Not just the shame of Javier, but the shame from before.

None of the women of Ganga Bazaar had pestered Bean, not a single one. Ba had warned them well in advance. So, while they were all dying to conjecture whether she was going to have a boy or a girl, dying to lift up her blouse and touch the tight drum of her belly, dying to offer a pearl of their own wisdom in Ba’s house, none of them did anything except for Shakambari, who slipped Bean some unnamed roots and herbs and told her to put them under her pillow, ‘Don’t ask
how-what-why-where
now, I’ll explain to you later, just do it.’

Only Ignatius had been given free reign. He sat with Bean everyday, massaging her feet and shoulders, trying to get her to shake off her sadness, because this was the closest he was going to get to being a parent in this world and he’d be damned if he was going to let Bean ruin it for him.

In those blackest of black Anjar nights, Bean cried for Javier. When she first arrived, in the ninth month of the new millennium, when she had still been able to feel the rocking of the bus that brought her – the jabber and chatter – she’d felt him in her blood, refusing to go away.

My kids are lovely, you know. I love my children. They have my blood running through their veins
.

Fi Fie Fo Fum.

When I’m not with you, I feel my blood running the other way. Have I let you down? Tell me the truth. Have I let you down?

When Bean thought about him now, all she could feel was the blood rushing to her head, exactly like that counting game Babo and she used to play; when he used to put her on his lap and lean her all the way down to his toes.

Down down down to the bottom of the sea, how many fishes can Bean see?

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen
 . . .

Yes. It was exactly like that childhood counting game, wasn’t it?

It was like seeing monsters and angels walk hand in hand together, or a single white-tipped shark moving into the horizon of your eye for a second and then disappearing into whiteness. Like Javier standing in the doorway saying,
I see you everywhere
, and walking straight through him.

In those early weeks Bean asked Ba why love was so important. Why it bound us so. Because there was still a body blustering through her, and even though she’d let it go, Bean still wanted to bask in it, capture it.

‘Love means to worship the deity in your body,’ Ba told her. ‘It means not to struggle with the world.’

How could Bean explain that her melancholy over Javier had been replaced with something far more serious? An anxiety more concrete: an earlier misdemeanour involving Michael Mendoza and the Jayalakshmi Ladies Clinic in Alwarpet? How could Bean explain to these preservers of the body that she’d laid herself out like a piece of meat to have something removed from her, something she was now trying to nourish and protect.

Sixteen.
Bean had only been a girl. A little girl. And they had been so secretive and chup chap about it. Michael Mendoza and Mehnaz, taking her to the place where they shaved her pubis and shone light into her eyes. ‘You won’t feel a thing,’ they said. But Bean had felt everything. She had woken up with cotton wedges between her legs the colour red: the colour of woman, of creation. Bean had run away from Michael Mendoza, she’d thrown away her rattles and rhymes. Chak-a-chak. She’d gone to sleep with a flat, childless tummy. Siân must’ve known. Mayuri must’ve known. But they wouldn’t say anything because this was her family, and it had always been about sugar and spice and all that’s nice.

Bean was worried because she thought they might have damaged something
downthere
when she was sixteen, when she’d been so eager to have everything removed. She was worried that there might be something wrong with her. Bean had thought she’d never tell anyone, but here, in the village of Ganga Bazaar, where anything was possible, she was going to tell because she needed to know from Ba and Ignatius: was she going to be able to have her baby?

Ignatius and Ba said nothing. They picked her up and took her outside. They removed the wooden planks that covered the well and lowered Bean down on a stool, shouting to her from above, ‘Remove everything and stay there for a while – under the water. Hold on to the grips.’

‘But what . . .’

‘No buts, Beena, just remove everything and stay there under the water.’

Bean removed her tie-die bandhni skirt and cotton blouse, she lowered herself in the water till her new womanly breasts were submerged, till those fiery circles of her eyes were drowning. She stayed for a while in that deep blackness until she heard voices of children whispering under the surface of the water – a whole classroom of them, chanting,
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again
.

Michael Mendoza was there too, sitting in the dark cave of the well with his dimpled cheek and marcasite eyes, still holding on to her fist-size pounding heart.
Wasn’t it strange to see him here?
But Bean was used to seeing people where they didn’t belong. She was shrinking, falling back into that sixteen-year-old frame: the slim hips and soft spine. She was telling him how he’d drawn fire from her. She didn’t know it at the time, but the first one who did that to you would haunt you for the rest of your life. ‘You are a permanent ghost in my life,’ she told him.

Michael Mendoza was sitting in his black T-shirt and painted jeans, smiling.
If we wanted
, he was saying, we could will ourselves back into that time again. She could be waiting for him in the bay window of her room. He could be that same boy for her, and this time, they wouldn’t have to put cotton wedges between her legs; this time, they could keep it. But Bean wouldn’t be ravished this time. She wouldn’t allow him to wash in and out of her, licking the salty wounds of her body.

‘It’s all right, Beena, I’m bringing you up now,’ Ignatius yelled from the top of the well – an apparition in an apple-red petticoat and blouse, drawing her body up with his lady-boy fingers and wrists.

Ignatius carried Bean inside the house where Ba was sitting with a pile of sundari mangoes, scooping out the flesh so Bean would have sweetness and strength. ‘The seeker is the starting point,’ Ba said, ‘So don’t try and escape it, don’t doubt your ability to shine alone.’

Ignatius wrapped Bean in a cotton towel. He was telling her that everything was going to be all right because he had seen a child hiding in the hibiscus shrub. A little girl with knee-length hair and gauzy grey eyes, shedding all kinds of golden light.

29  All should Speak Apart to the Homesick Heart

In the house of orange and black gates, Mayuri sat in her parents’ bedroom, waiting for Siân to return from the Garden of Redemption. It was time to speak of things; to tell. Three weeks ago, Babo, Siân, Cyrus and she had gone out to celebrate the new year and their respective wedding anniversaries. Cyrus had booked a table at the city’s most expensive restaurant, where they ate miniscule portions of food with copious amounts of champagne. Mayuri had wanted to say something about Bean that night, but seeing her mother so radiant in a navy silk dress with chunky lapis lazuli beads gleaming around her throat, seeing Babo look at her so intently, made it difficult.

In an earlier time, it wouldn’t have been difficult. Mayuri would have told because it was the right thing to do. But right and wrong wasn’t what it used to be, and besides, her parents looked so happy and strong, now that the weight of Chotu’s death had finally begun to lift. Babo and Siân had space for each other in their lives again. After years of staying put they were thinking of making trips – far-flung, romantic ideas like going on a jungle safari in Africa, or a cruise in the Mediterranean.

Of course, news of her miscarriages had hit them hard. Especially, Siân, who was dying for a grandchild. She had wept openly when Mayuri called her – the first time, when it happened in the middle of the night, and more recently, when the cramps and bleeding started at school. ‘Maybe you should take some time off work and rest at home?’ Siân said. ‘You need to take care of yourself, love.’

Mayuri had told her that Cyrus and she were taking a break from the baby-making business. ‘It’s not worth it, Ma. It’s ruining our relationship.’
And, Ma
, she wanted to say,
You’re going to be a grandmother after all, except it’s not going to be mine
. And then she thought of Siân’s withering disappointment, of her disapproval of Bean taking ‘that path’ with a married man. What did she expect? What were people going to say? All of it. So Mayuri stayed silent.