Read The Pleasure Seekers Online
Authors: Tishani Doshi
Finally, after two days of negotiation, Meenal’s shipbroker husband managed to find a driver. ‘Bhai,’ Meenal said to Babo, ‘People are managing to get through. It’s time for you and Bhabi to leave.’
Babo and Siân’s hazardous journey to Anjar began in a sky-blue Ambassador outside the gates of Meenal’s apartment building. While they waited for the driver, Prakash, to show up, Babo contemplated the pros and cons of another lapse into smoking. Siân and the unibrows stuffed the dickey of the car with boxes of medical supplies and crates of food and water, all organized by the local Jain Samaj.
At 11 a.m., Prakash arrived. He was a young man with a wide, honest face, marred only by a hooknose and a severe middle parting with equal amounts of frizzy hair pasted down on either side. The minute Prakash saw the sky-blue Ambassador, his wide, honest face closed up. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Why not?’ screamed Meenal. ‘Good-for-nothing fellow. I told you we shouldn’t have paid him money up front!’
‘Madam, there is no god,’ he said, pointing to the dashboard of the car. ‘You want me to make a journey like this with no god?’
‘But we don’t believe in the keeping of idols in our car,’ said the shipbroker. ‘We are Jains.’
‘Well, I don’t believe in simply risking my life,’ said Prakash, haughtily. ‘If you want me to drive, you better put in a god.’
Eventually, a plastic Ganesh with fairy lights was procured from a nearby shop and hastily installed on the dashboard, and only after Prakash made a solemn show of folding his hands and bobbing his head several times, did the sky-blue Ambassador finally lurch forward.
‘Go safely,’ Meenal said, touching Babo’s arm, reminding him of a moment they’d had years ago, on the red-brick terrace of Sylvan Lodge, when they had both been thin and innocent, and Meenal was pressing one of Falguni’s tear-stained letters into his hands.
Babo and Siân sat in the back of the car, holding hands across the Rexene seat. Babo was wearing his great-grandfather’s platinum locket – the one Prem Kumar had given him on the morning of his departure to London. The last time he had worn it was when he was flying home to Madras after Prem Kumar lied about Trishala’s illness. Babo had noticed it while packing for this trip; it was lying in an old cigar box, and seeing it so forlorn and forgotten, he packed it in his shaving case thinking Ba might like to see it again.
It had taken them twenty hours just to get to Ahmedabad from Bombay, and they still had a way to go, up the coast, past the Gulf of Cambay, through Sanand, Surendra Nagar, Rajkot, Tankara, Jetpur – towns whose names evoked a long-ago thump thumping in his chest. Babo had known their rugged shapes once; they had been as familiar to him as the blue-green filigreed network of his wife’s body. But all of it was strange now, alien territory.
The women of Ganga Bazaar arrived after days of searching. They came to sit on Ba’s stone floors. ‘What shall we do?’ they asked, not with tears in their eyes. There was no real energy for tears. But very simply,
Where do we go from here?
During the day, they went sifting through debris searching for things that could be used. Some cooked in the big steel pots recovered from the Amba Mata Temple. Still others, who could hold down a limb and sew a neat line of stitches across gashes without any anaesthetic, went with the doctors. At night they sat together in circles and shared the stories of the day. They talked about the workers in the crematorium who had used up two years’ supply of firewood already, and who were now just throwing bodies one on top of the other, burning them unnamed and unaccounted for. They worried about water. What they had wouldn’t last much longer, and there were already outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and dysentery. They talked in muted whispers, trying to portion out the collective guilt of their survival. ‘Why?’ they asked. ‘Why them, not us?’
Babo was going back now.
Back, back
. Past the sun-browned faces and salt flats. On and on till he was there, standing at the door of his childhood in Ganga Bazaar, where his grandfather was allowing him to count up his coins and organize them. Babo’s rusty-faced Bapa, who was stingy with his affections and his money with everyone except his favourite grandson.
Babo was passing it all – the proud cows of Gujarat, whose horns were the most beautiful in all of India. The rivers Tapti, Narmada and Sabarmati, the marshes and low-lying ranns that isolated Kutch from the rest of the country.
Babo was remembering how his Ba and Bapa had taken him to the Rann of Kutch one winter to see the flamingos. If any of the other children had asked, they’d have been belted and made to sit in the storeroom for the day. But because Babo was the preferred grandchild, because he buttered up his grandmother and whispered that what he’d
most
like to do was to see the pink-coloured flamingos like the ones in Africa, because of Babo’s desire, all of them – Meenal, Dolly, Trishala, Ba and Bapa – piled on to Suraj-bhai’s bullock cart and made the two-day journey from Ganga Bazaar to Khavda village, where after the monsoon, tens of thousands of flamingo colonies gathered over the water marshes to breed.
Babo wanted to share this memory with Siân: how he had told his sisters that flamingos left pink footprints in the sky, and how he’d promised two annas to the first person who saw one. Meenal had grown bored easily. After an hour of straining her neck she’d forgotten all about the flamingos. But Dolly had persevered – she’d stretched out on her back, head in Babo’s lap, eyes never leaving the sky in case a pink footprint should elude her. By the time they arrived of course, Dolly was crying because of a crick in her neck. When Trishala found out what had happened, she slapped Babo till he was pink in the face. ‘Pink footprints! I’ll give you pink footprints,’ she shouted, ‘Always making mischief.’ But Ba had made her stop just as she was getting started, and Bapa only smiled and called him a little badmash. Bapa had put Babo up on his bony shoulders so he could get a better view of that glittering pink net of feathers and wings spread over the water, and Babo, all these years later, still thought it was the most magical sight he’d ever seen.
Babo closed his eyes and tried to recall that image in his mind now. He needed it fixed there as an anchor to prevent other thoughts from forcing their way through. Somehow it was safer to dwell in the past, because the future ahead frightened him so much. What he wanted to say aloud to his wife was this: that everything would be OK. It had to be. He had only just made peace with his brother’s death. To even contemplate a world without Bean or Ba was impossible, unfathomable. Beyond any cruelty he could imagine.
Siân was looking out of the window stonily, the knot in her throat constricting and constricting, until he thought she would choke. All along she had refused to talk directly of Bean. She had stuck to the facts, to what the papers offered them.
The papers had talked of babies recovered from buildings, families clinging to each other with pinched faces and runny eyes, a man buried under his house, clutching a bag of 300 ancient gold coins. They wrote of the failures of electricity, water, medical facilities and telecommunications.
One reporter flying over the town of Anjar in a helicopter wrote how he’d actually been able to smell the dead. From all the way up there, he’d been able to smell the dead. And what he’d seen below was a broken land dotted with blue relief tents, vultures swooping and picking their way through the carnage.
But there were stories of hope as well. Babo had made sure to unearth those and present them to Siân. Stories of housewives who installed pandals in the open maidans and started community kitchens; phat-phatti drivers who converted their taxis and vans into ambulances; doctors who moved through the rubble day and night, treating victims with the few supplies they had; Hindus and Muslims lying down together to sleep on the floors of the houses that had remained standing.
And of course, there were the
just-plain-miracles
: a newly-wed couple who dramatically survived under the rubble of their four-storeyed apartment after thirty-six hours; an eighty-year-old man found lying in his bed under a mound of debris two days after the quake, complaining only of minor throat irritation and constipation; a twelve-year-old boy, Mohammad, who lost his entire family, and said it was an angel who spared him by singing in his ears day and night.
In all these miracles Babo hoped there would be his centenarian grandmother, a hermaphrodite called Ignatius, his pregnant daughter.
It was dusk by the time the sky-blue Ambassador rolled into the wrecked town of Anjar. Siân was thirsty. She hadn’t drunk any water since their last stop in Amroli, where the Ganesh on the dashboard’s lights had given out. She hadn’t spoken since the night before, when they stopped the car outside Ahmedabad for a few hours to sleep. They drove in silence, snaking through a darkening countryside under cloudless skies. All around, as far as Siân could see, there was rubble. Cracked buildings and fallen pillars lining the streets like a scene from the underworld.
The entrance to the village of Ganga Bazaar was crowded with people. ‘Are you sure?’ Siân asked: ‘Are you sure this is it?’ Because she had never seen it like this before. People wore frightened looks on their faces, and the sound of screams and cries filled the air.
As the car turned in to the main thoroughfare a policeman stopped them and asked if they were with an NGO or an international agency. Babo explained that his grandmother and daughter lived in Ganga Bazaar; that they hadn’t heard anything from them or their condition so they had driven here to find them.
‘Oh,’ the policeman said. ‘You’d better park the car and walk the rest of the way. As it is, the gullies are so small, but with all the cheap cement they use here in the villages, most of the houses crumbled in the first tremor itself.’
Babo and Siân walked, carrying a box of supplies each. They made Prakash stay with the car. They walked past looters and tricksters, past villagers who were lining up to intercept any incoming relief goods, past soldiers who were using explosives to bring down teetering buildings, past mourners calling out to their loved ones with incense in their hands to mask the smell of death.
Nothing will ever be the same again
. This was Siân’s only thought as they picked their way through the debris. Babo took out a torch from his pocket and shone the light ahead so they could see where they were going. None of the street lamps were working, and while there were stars in the sky, it seemed like even they were holding themselves back, scattering their light into other, safer parts of the universe.
Finally they reached a structure that was the only one standing in the entire street. It was Ba’s house, entirely complete except for the tin roof, which, Shakambari later told them, had flown off clean like a magic carpet. Babo and Siân walked to the front steps, following a path illuminated by oil lamps. They entered the room of swings and saw it was filled with women. Circles of women sewing pieces of material together in weak light, mumbling like bees.
It was Shakambari who noticed them first. ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she said, raising herself with considerable effort from the floor. ‘Come and see Hansa-behn. She was injured by a falling wooden rafter. She’s OK, but very weak.’
‘And Bean?’ Siân asked, ‘What about Bean?’
Shakambari fell silent. ‘I think it’s better if Hansa-behn tells you.’
Ba lay in the corner of her room on a mattress, her body turned to face the wall. Above her a group of red garoli lizards chewed softly, keeping watch over her.
Babo was immediately at her side. ‘Ba,’ he said, touching her frail arm. ‘I’m here.’
Ba turned to face him.
‘I can’t see you,’ she said. ‘It’s dark. I can’t see anything. What can I tell you? Ignatius and Beena left to see the doctor in Bhuj a few hours before the earthquake happened. We haven’t heard anything. No one is able to get out. And Babo, I can’t smell anything either. Everything is gone, vanished, just like that.’
That night, Babo and Siân slept next to Ba while the women lay on the floor of the room of swings like a line of suckling puppies, huddled together for warmth. Siân tried not to think about Bean, about the number of times she’d said to her, ‘Behave, behave,’ and the number of times Bean had done exactly as she pleased. Bean, who because she’d been born second, always thought she’d been loved less. Bean, who felt safest when she was sleeping between her mother and father, who had to be walked back to her bedroom in the middle of the night and have the lights switched on.
See Bean? There’s no Boochie Man. No snakes. Try to dream of beautiful things
. Bean, who knew to drag and drag till every bone had been dragged out of you.
Where was her family? Bean had something to tell them. It started with a drumming – thrum thrum thrum – like an old black and white film coming undone in front of her. And then everything had speeded up, gone all Charlie Chaplin topsy-turvy on her. Cattle and long-haired pigs running about madly. A man emerging from the rubble with a mutilated child in his arms. She couldn’t breathe, her heart refused to breathe in its cage. Thrum thrum thrum.
‘Hold on, Beena,’ Ignatius was saying. But what madness was this? Walls and ceiling crashing around her. Moving and shaking. People running in every direction. And then silence. Bean stopped hearing. She was on a boat out on the ocean, bob bobbing calmly, while underneath the surface all kinds of turbulent things were brewing.