The Pleasure Seekers, page 14
‘But I don’t want to go for a . . .’ Chotu started, hating the whine in his voice.
‘Just listen to me, Chotu. We already looked into all the details. Trishala, go and get that pamphlet. Go, go. It’s all done. Just think of it as an “in lieu of” trip. In lieu of studying, you get to go for holiday. Lucky, na? Just say when you want to go and we’ll book you for a full European vacation: twenty-one cities in twenty-one days. Imagine that!’
Dolly looked at her father and scowled. ‘I don’t believe this. I have to waste my time meeting and greeting one pathetic character after the next to possibly spend my life with, while Chotu gets to go abroad for a holiday, if you please! Such unfairness in this house, I tell you.’
‘If you’re lucky your husband will take you to Europe on your honeymoon, so stop complaining,’ Trishala interjected, thrusting the pamphlet into Chotu’s hands.
Chotu received the Big Ben Travel brochure like a blessing. He opened the first glossy page and examined the groups of brown faces standing in front of familiar world landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, St Paul’s Cathedral. The itinerary proposed on the following pages was staggering: Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Bonn, Prague, Lisbon – in out, in out. Chotu studied the pamphlet intently, his bearded face getting smaller and tighter. Then he pushed his breakfast away, got up and walked out of Sylvan Lodge without saying a word.
14 Sometimes Summers and the Question of Suffering
Every three years Babo, Siân, Mayuri and Bean got on an aeroplane and flew across the ocean to see Nain and Taid in Nercwys. Mayuri and Bean loved their sometimes summers even though they were under strict instructions to mind their Ps and Qs, eat with their knives and forks, not talk with their mouths full, help clear up the table and wash up because there was no Selvi to help. It didn’t matter because everyone made a big fuss over them. Uncle Owen took them horseback riding in the fields everyday, and Aunty Eleri secretly slipped them change to buy Smarties from the post office.
On Sundays Taid played the organ at church and Nain took them to Sunday School where they had to sit still and be on their best behaviour. If they were good Nain made hot Ribena as a treat and gave them two chocolate McVities biscuits from the Cadbury’s tin when they came home. But they weren’t to run around without shoes or make too much noise, and most of all they weren’t to bother Nain when she was knitting in her chair or working with her roses in the garden because if they did, she’d screech ‘Siân, Siân,’ and then Siân would come rushing out and say ‘For heaven’s sake,’ and bundle them up in sweaters and send them to the playground down the street.
The playground down the street had bigger slides and better swings than those they were used to in Madras. Bean and Mayuri walked down the street on either side of Siân, dressed in matching army-green overalls but different coloured jumpers – Bean’s hair cut short like a sugar bowl with a fringe, and Mayuri with two chestnut braids down her back. In the playground they played with the neighbourhood children who were white and ginger-haired, or white and blonde-haired; whose skin freckled in the sun, whose nails were so impossibly pink. They played as if in a crater of the moon, swinging and sliding about while the black and white cows watched from afar. Long after the other children left, Mayuri and Bean continued to play until Babo came to fetch them. ‘It’s late,’ he’d say, ‘NINE-O-CLOCK! Way past your bedtime. Wee Willy Winky’s been looking for you.’
They laughed at him and called him a liar-liar, because the sky only looked like a 6:30 blue. But Babo showed them the face of his watch, and the girls, seeing proof of his claim, understood that Time must live where Ba said it did after all – in that invisible space between the eyes. It could be whatever you wanted it to be. A million years could pass like a second. A day could seem as impossible to get through as all of the seven oceans.
Babo walked with them under the summer Nercwys sky which was so big and full of stars, so much more than in Madras, or even in Anjar, that when they asked why it was so, he said it was because the stars in Wales were actually rabbits; they multiplied like rabbits.
Mayuri and Bean couldn’t understand the machinery in this country. The watches lied and the televisions were magic. Mayuri wanted to take Nain’s TV back to Madras so she could watch Rainbow instead of Wonder Balloon. Bean wanted to take the big kitchen clock back so she could get rid of the nights in the house of orange and black gates, because in Nercwys the nights were never long, and there were never any nightmares.
In Tan-y-Rhos Mayuri and Bean got to take baths together in a proper tub with soap bubbles and face towels, not like their bucket baths at home. Here, they could sit till their skin pruned, till Babo and Siân dragged them out, creamed them up and put them to bed – Mayuri on the top bunk because she was the oldest, and Bean on the bottom because she slept so hard she often fell off the edge.
In the mornings, before anyone woke up, Bean was at the window, pulling apart the curtains to see what kind of day it was going to be. And it was on one such day in the spring–summer of 1981, when Mayuri was asleep with a fever and the rest of the house was sleeping too, that Bean peered outside the window panes and saw the world changing colours right in front of her eyes. She ran straight to Babo and Siân’s bedroom even though she had been told to stay out.
‘Daddy, Mama, wake up! I think it’s snowing!’ she screeched.
Siân turned over crossly and said, ‘What are you talking about, Bean? It’s April!’
But Bean pulled Babo by his hands and took him to the window even though he was only wearing his VIP underpants, and when he opened the curtains, he could see too – the green fields were being covered with a blanket of white. ‘Yes, indeed!’ Babo laughed, ‘You’re right, Kidney Bean. It’s snowing. Imagine that!’
Bean put on her woollies and raced outside without even bothering to bring in the newspaper or milk bottles for Taid. She left Mayuri and her melon face inside to sulk on Siân’s lap in the front room.
Nain, Taid, Uncle Owen, Babo and Bean made a snowman, using bits of coal for his eyes and a turnip for his nose. It was wonderful – just like the scene from The Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy and Lion are sleeping in the deadly poppy fields and snow starts falling all around them. ‘Unusual weather we’re havin, ain’t it?’ Lion says to Dorothy. And Bean, all that April day, even though the snow stopped falling almost as soon as it had begun, kept singing, ‘Oh we’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz,’ until Mayuri said if she didn’t put a sock in it, she would never let her use her make-up glitter again.
Later that night, after Babo and Siân had wiped down the girls’ faces with hot towels and put them in flannel pyjamas, Bean wriggled up the ladder to tell Mayuri that playing in the snow hadn’t been so much fun without her after all. She pushed the little coal button snowman’s eyes into Mayuri’s palms, and Mayuri took them and slid them chup chap under her pillow, but still said nothing.
Even when Mayuri was feeling better, and Taid drove her into Mold in his Morris Minor to get her a present for missing out and being a good girl about it, even when Mayuri had her new doll, Tessa, tucked permanently under her arm, and they all watched Lady Di get out of a glass coach like a real princess in a bouffant lace gown with puffy sleeves, Mayuri wouldn’t forgive Bean, and she wouldn’t return the snowman’s eyes either. This was Bean’s first lesson in suffering.
When they returned from Nercwys that summer, all Bean could think about was suffering. Everywhere she looked it was there – staring her in the face. She couldn’t help noticing how the people in Madras had very little compared to the people in Nercwys. She thought about all the suffering in the world: the pictures on TV of families standing on the roofs of their houses, caught up in cyclones and earthquakes; families living in countries of war, living among the ruins of their homes with broken faces and bloodied hearts. She thought about the stories Trishala Ba had told her, of Gautam Buddha and Lord Mahavir, who renounced their kingdoms and went in search of Enlightenment so they could ease the suffering of the world. She thought of how it must have been for Siân to leave her house and family and country behind to come zing zing zing all the way to Madras. Most of all, she thought about how it would be if something terrible happened to Babo, Siân and Mayuri, leaving her all alone in the world.
‘You’re just being morbid,’ Babo said, when she asked about Babo’s final will and testament, his life insurance policy, what the back-up plan was in case the house of orange and black gates burned down in a fire. ‘You’ve got an over-active imagination, Bean. Nothing’s going to happen.’
But Bean saw things happening around her all the time. Every day, on the way to school, when she wasn’t forced to sit between the crater-faced Singhania brothers because Mayuri insisted on sitting in the front with the driver, she looked out of the window and counted the number of unfortunate people she saw: beggars, lepers, raggedy children, monkey-men, snake-charmers – there seemed to be an awful lot of them in the city of Madras.
And then there were the gypsies who lived by the Aavin Milk ’n’ Ice Parlour past the Adyar Bridge, where every Friday after school, they were allowed to get creamy pink softy cones. The gypsies sat huddled around cooking fires under mango trees, and their children – barely as old as Bean – went about with hardly a scrap of clothing on them. The girls wore grubby panties, and the boys walked around starkers, showing off their little Mr Whatsits. And the boys and girls, both, had long, bright, sun-bleached hair that shone like knotted haloes around their heads. How could they live like this? thought Bean. Where did they sleep at night? What did they eat?
Mayuri said that the gypsies ate squirrels and whatever else they could lay their catapults on. Cyrus Mazda confirmed this: he’d once seen a gypsy bring down three squirrels – tup tup tup – from the tree outside his bedroom window. Besides which, Cyrus also confirmed that it was the gypsies who had stolen Mrs Jhunjhunwala’s beloved Persian, Fluffy, and eaten him for dinner. The thought of poor Fluffy being skinned and roasted on one of those cooking fires made Bean feel quite ill.
‘A man’s got to eat,’ Babo said. ‘It’s a dog eat dog world, Bean, and a man’s got to feed his family.’ Babo was always saying things like this – that people created situations for themselves, that an awful lot of despair in the world was due to just-plain-laziness, that fatalism was the noose around which the masses of this country were kept in poverty.
For all his talking, though, Babo never actually did anything. It was Siân who spent her days with the underprivileged – which meant people who had less than them. It was Siân who dragged Mayuri and Bean to the Andhra Mahila Sabha school, where she taught English to kids with no arms and legs. Kids who came crawling out any which way they could, on trays and in wheelchairs, lolloping along the floor like strange animals. ‘See how they’re smiling?’ Siân always said, bending to pick one of them up – little Venkatesh, usually, who was her favourite, and had a weird thing bumping out of his back. ‘Even though they have no mama or daddy to look after them. See how brave they are?’
Bean smiled and patted one or two of them casually on the head, but what she couldn’t bear to say to her mother or Mayuri, was that it horrified her. They horrified her, just as the ghost she’d seen scraping along Sterling Road with its twisted feet had. She knew it was awful and unforgivable, but if she was really honest about it, what she’d like to do more than anything, was to never see the AMS school again, and to play with her best friend Mehnaz in her room of toys for ever. But Bean couldn’t say it, because she knew that admitting this would mean disappointing Siân, and somehow, disappointing her mother was far worse than disappointing anyone else in the world, even her father.
Bean had heard all about the love story of her parents from Ba in Anjar. How Babo met Siân in London, how they had a testing period of six months apart before Siân finally came to India to live happily ever after. But Mama was the braver one, Bean thought. No matter how much she loved her father, Mama was always the braver one because she left everything behind to be here with us.
Siân really was like no other mother Bean knew, and it was mainly to seek her approval that Bean persisted in her quest for goodness. She shared all her toys with Mayuri even though Mayuri didn’t share back, and she put aside half her pocket money to give away to the blind children at the Clarke’s school, because they didn’t give her the creeps as much as the AMS kids. But every now and then, Bean had a serious lapse. The capitalist side of her nature unleashed itself, usually at Shastri’s Fancy Stores, where the object in question was another thing she didn’t need – a stainless steel kitchen set or a mask-making kit. Bean began with little hints, a bit of loving fingering, a few tears, and when none of that worked she went for the floor – thumping her fists and arms, wailing that for all the good things she’d done, this was just a small thing Siân could do for her in return.
Whenever this happened Siân disappeared with Mayuri following like a tail, leaving Bean hollering on the floor as if she wasn’t her child. Ten minutes later Siân would return. ‘Are you done? Ready to go home now? Ready to behave?’ And Bean nodding, subdued, would take her mother’s hand out into the world, where suffering was inevitable and where her selfishness was exposed for all to see.
In September 1981, on a perfectly ordinary Madras day, while Bean and Mayuri were playing Lady Di, wrapping mosquito nets around their heads as veils and clip clopping around on Siân’s high-heeled shoes, a phone call came in the middle of a Saturday morning that altered life in the house of orange and black gates for a long while.
‘It’s Uncle Owen,’ Mayuri said, putting the telephone receiver to one side, and marching up to Babo and Siân’s bedroom door. ‘He says he needs to speak to Mama. Something bad has happened.’
Mayuri and Bean stood outside their parents’ door, wondering what to do. Saturdays were off limits to them. It was the day Babo and Siân locked themselves in their bedroom doing God-only-knew-what for hours and hours. Sometimes, the girls didn’t see their parents till evening, when they rolled out in kaftan and kurta pyjama to drink tea on the veranda before getting ready to meet the hybrids at the Madras Gymkhana Club. Often, the only evidence that any kind of life carried on inside that room, was the low, consistent drone of the air-conditioner, and the occasional glimpse of a long, white arm reaching for one of the breakfast or lunch trays that Selvi left on the floor outside their bedroom.
Mayuri and Bean stood at their door and knocked.
Nothing.
They knocked harder. Wham bam. Wham bam.
‘Mama,’ Mayuri screamed. ‘Telephone call for you. It’s Uncle Owen and he says something bad has happened. Can you hurry up and come out, please?’
Knock knock knock.
‘Mama. Hurreeeee.’
Finally, Siân emerged, wearing one of Babo’s shirts, and Babo followed with a bath towel wrapped around his waist, the scanty curls of hair on his chest glistening. They ran into the dining room where the red telephone receiver still lay on its side. Siân picked the phone up and held it close to her ear, her auburn hair falling in jagged shafts across her forehead. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God,’ she kept saying.
The girls watched as Babo stood behind their mother and put his arms around her shoulders.
‘Of course, I’ll be there, I mean, I have to . . . wait for me.’
When Siân put down the telephone she told Mayuri and Bean to wait for her in their room. Then she took Babo’s hand and walked back to their bedroom, where they locked the door for what seemed like a whole day. Mayuri told Bean she was 99 per cent sure they would not be going to the Madras Gymkhana Club for dinner that night, and she was right. By seven o’clock Selvi had laid the table for two, and Mayuri and Bean were eating chicken frankies with tomato sauce under the whirring Khaitan fan. When Babo and Siân finally came to them, fully dressed, Siân’s eyes were red, and Babo had that look on his face when he’d done something wrong, like smoked cigarettes inside the house, or called someone a bloody basket.
‘Sit down, girls,’ Siân said, indicating the matching cane beds. ‘Now listen to me. Mama’s got to go away for a while. I’ve got to go home because Taid has died. Do you understand? I’ve got to go home, because my family needs me.’
Home, Bean wondered, Isn’t this home? Here, with us. Aren’t we family? Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Bean?
15 All You Need is Love
All the way over on the flight, Siân kept thinking, maybe it’s not true, maybe it’s like the time Prem Kumar tricked Babo into coming back to Madras, saying Trishala was in hospital. Maybe Bryn hadn’t really cycled home from work one day to sit down in his favourite chair and die without even having a cup of tea first.
Bhupen Jain picked her up at Heathrow and took her hand in an honest, heartfelt way. He told her what a difficult thing it was to lose a parent you had abandoned. He had left his own ageing parents in a dilapidated house in Baroda. He could understand what she was going through. Could he, though? Could anyone?
Bhupen told her that life had been hard for him too. The paint course he had done with Babo at the Borough Polytechnic had come to no good. Nobody wanted to hire someone with no technical experience, and no one was willing to give him that experience unless he worked for free. But how could he work for free when he had two children to support? Indrani, who wanted to take ballet lessons instead of bharatanatyam, and Deenu, who was more interested in Spanish than Sanskrit.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d had another robbery at the post office. They were thinking of selling up, moving to some other line of business, but what were they equipped to do other than this? They were unskilled traders who knew only what their fathers and their grandfathers had done before them – how to convert one rupee to five to fifty to a hundred by means of the slow diligent qualities of persistence and parsimony.
