The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (35 page)

“P.K.?” asked Ravi.

“He’s a big businessman here, apparently. He knows everybody.”

Ravi shook his head. “I live in Dulwich.”

The grandfather clock chimed midnight. As it did, Evelyn returned. She carried a package wrapped in festive paper.

“I looked after it for you,” she said, giving it to Pauline.

Pauline unwrapped it and withdrew a long length of cloth.

“It’s a sari,” said Evelyn. “A
baranasi
sari, for special occasions.” Theresa made a small movement, but Evelyn took no notice. “Your father was very fond of you,” she said.

“Was he really?” Pauline fingered the silk.

Evelyn nodded. “He talked about you a great deal. How glad he was you gave him a home, back in London.” She paused. “It meant a great deal to him.”

Pauline stroked the gold border. “I’m glad he was thinking of me.” She smiled at Evelyn. “I never thought he did, much.”

Ravi looked at the sari. It seemed a surprising present for the old man to buy. Maybe he had misjudged his father-in-law. He thought: How little we know of what lies in another’s heart.

“S
o you’ve had five wives,” said Theresa.

“I wasn’t married to two of them,” said Keith.

“Ludmilla and Maureen, right?”

Keith nodded. “Ludmilla didn’t last long. She was from Vladivostok.”

“And Shannon and Jordan are Sandra’s kids.”

He nodded.

The whole thing was complicated, painfully so. Theresa kept probing, however, like a tongue returning to an abscess. She thought of the thousands of times Keith had made love to other women.
Live in the present
, she told herself. His gold Rolex lay discarded on the bedside table.
Shed the past
. These afternoons in his hotel room, they stepped outside time. She wondered if he thought the same.

Keith took a swig of beer, leaned over and laid his lips against hers. She swallowed from his mouth.

The desire for possession stems from fear
, Swamiji said.
Attachment is illusion
.

“What went wrong?” she asked.

“Wrong?”

“You seem to have had a lot of failed relationships.” Oh dear, she sounded shrewish.

Keith shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.”

“That’s such an avoidance tactic.”

“It’s not a tactic, sweetheart.”

Oh God, maybe he wanted to watch football or something. Theresa soldiered on, however; she couldn’t help it. “You seem to have a bit of a problem with commitment.”

“They were shagging other blokes too. Sandra was banging her fitness instructor.”

A soul opened to God is opened to change within
, Swamiji said. Keith seemed in tune with that. And yet one’s dharma was to accept one’s condition, to live with it in complete acceptance. Theresa’s head swam. Honestly, the more she studied Hinduism, the less she knew. Which was the point of it, of course.

She said: “My problem is that my parents were too happy.”

“For God’s sake, woman.” He laid the icy bottle on her belly. She yelped.

“Life’s simple for you, isn’t it?” she said.

“Simple?” Keith drained the bottle. “It’s not simple, darling. It’s bleeding diabolical.”

By now she had learned a little of what had happened. Not a lot.
You don’t want to know
, Keith said, thrillingly. Big money was involved; property dealing, something like that. Theresa suspected that drugs came into it. Bangalore was riddled with corruption, right up to the ministerial level, and Keith had tracked down the man who had swindled him out of a great deal of money and who had shopped him to the police. He had crossed the world to find him, flying first to Delhi and then tracing him to Bangalore. The man was named P.K. and he had connections in high places. However, he was proving elusive.

“To be perfectly honest, darling, I’m at the end of the road.”

“Can’t you go back to England?” she asked.

“You must be joking. I’d get arrested.”

“What about your mum? Aren’t you worried about her?”

“Tell me about it.” Keith lit a cigarette.

“Can I have a puff?”

He passed it to her. “I’ve left messages for her,” he said. “See, I could get to Spain; I got friends there, they’d look after us. I want to get her there and then we could lay low for a while.”

How different it was from her childhood in Sussex! Theresa tried to imagine her own mother dodging the police and going to ground in the Costa del Sol with a bunch of crooks swigging malt whisky. She tried to picture herself there. Would such people find her counseling skills of use?

It was disorienting to be with a man whose life was in danger. It must have been like this in the war. Keith could step out of this hotel room and never return. P.K.’s thugs could be waiting around the corner. It cast an elegiac air over the most banal utterances. Just now she was all he had.

She said: “Most people I work with, their biggest problem is an eating disorder.” She thought of the people outside, picking through the rubbish.

Keith rolled on top of her. “You’re a great listener, babe.”

“It’s my job.”

“And a terrific fuck.”

They put their arms around each other. As he entered her she cried out. He made love so tenderly, his body said all the words they had never uttered. They both knew they were two strangers and this would never last.
Easy come, easy go
. Swamiji would have said it like this, if he had known the words.

T
he sun had slid down the wall. Outside, the muezzin called like a landlord.
Time, gentlemen, please
. They stood in the shower, gravely soaping each other.

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” she asked.

Keith shrugged. His hair was plastered to his face.
I adore you
, she thought.

“Come for Christmas dinner,” she said. “You mustn’t be alone.”

He lathered her arm. “I don’t want to get you into any trouble, sweetheart.”

“I hardly think a group of British pensioners has a hotline to the Indian mafia,” she said. “Do come, please. They’d love it; you could flirt with them. None of their relatives are coming—do say yes.”

He washed her with a focused thoroughness, like a boy washing his first bike. “Who’ll you say I am?”

“Just my boyfriend.” Theresa blushed. “If that’s what you are.”

Would The Last Person To Leave Please Turn Out The Lights.

N
OTICE IN THE
TV
ROOM
, T
HE
M
ARIGOLD

R
avi was cooking the Christmas dinner. Circumstances had forced this emergency measure; a new cook had been engaged but was not due to start work until the following week. With the help of the boy, Ravi had been busy all morning, chopping, peeling and basting the turkey that Minoo had bought in the Gandhi Market and transported home, as large as a guest, in the back of a taxi.

Ravi found a profound satisfaction in cooking. After the demands of his patients it had always restored him, to make dinner. Vegetables were silent. The bald body of the turkey demanded nothing of him except to be transformed into a meal. He was a creative man; in another life he would have been an old-fashioned wife, for his homemaking skills were superior to Pauline’s. He knew the secret of roast potatoes: parboil them, toss them in seasoned flour and then fling them into hot fat. As they spluttered he felt an unfamiliar sensation: joy.

“Garam pani lao,”
he told his young helper, Pramod, a listless youth who Ravi suspected was suffering from anemia. The boy was a vegetarian and could do with some red meat in his bloodstream.

Brussels sprouts being unavailable, they were cooking cabbage. The secret of cabbage was to blanch it in a little water, then toss it in butter, garlic and caraway seeds. Boiled cabbage, as Sonny had pointed out, smelled like an old people’s home.

“Ocha pani,”
Ravi told the boy. Pramod was a Tamil speaker, but they stumbled along in Hindi. Speaking it, Ravi felt himself reverting to a looser-limbed, more expressive version of himself, a young man he had long ago left behind. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his armpits sodden. Growing up in India, he had never romanticized physical toil; with no stretch of the imagination could the lives of the laboring millions be considered enviable. In his family, in fact, they weren’t considered at all. But today, as he heaved up a saucepan and dumped it on the burner, he felt a muscular pleasure in these simple tasks. He remembered passing a building site in Lewisham and hearing the workmen whistling.

Pauline hobbled in. She wore the sari her father had bought her for Christmas—that he had died while buying in an act of startling, and uncharacteristic, generosity. Ravi felt a wave of pity for Norman; for Pauline too, who looked so awkward in the sari—Englishwomen never knew how to move in them—and whose complexion was drained by the vibrancy of the color.

“How’s it going out there?” Ravi asked.

“Fine. They’re drinking Sonny’s special cocktails.” Pauline opened her hand to reveal a heap of coins. “I thought I’d put these in the puddings.”

“They might get stuck in their throats,” he said. “What happens if someone dies choking on a rupee?”

“What a way to go through life,” she replied sharply.

Ravi paused. Norman had called him a fuddy-duddy. Once he had crowed with triumph when Ravi picked up the safety leaflet on a train. But Ravi had only done it for something to read, to stop the old bastard talking. And now Norman had gone.

What the hell. If they died, they died. Ravi’s professional instincts had evaporated in the steam of cooking. This was India, after all.

“Sorry, darling,” he said. “Go ahead.”

Pauline shot him a look. She was a big-boned woman. In the sari she looked too wrapped-up, somehow, like an unsuitable Christmas present. She had tied back her thick auburn hair with a butterfly clip; it made her jaw squarer. Ravi was overcome with another wave of pity. Amid the fluster there was a stillness about her; a terrible sadness.

“Are you all right?” he asked. Silly question.

“It’s strange,” Pauline said. “I’m an orphan now. I’ve been shunted to the head of the queue.”

Ravi looked at his wife. He should put his arms around her but he was holding a chopping knife. There always seemed to be something in his hands. Despite her need, the simplicity of it, Pauline seemed as unknowable as a woman he had just met. Now that they were in India, would they finally lose each other? Or would they learn how to love each other, all over again?

D
inner was to be served at four. It was strange, of course, to spend Christmas Day with the temperature in the eighties, but by general consent this was preferable to the drizzle one experienced nowadays in England—white Christmases, like so much else, being a thing of the past. Besides, many of them had spent previous festive seasons abroad—Florida, Portugal. According to Jean Ainslie, she and Douggy had listened to their King’s College carols in seven different countries. It was still somewhat disconcerting, however, to hear “Good King Wenceslas” while a mynah bird screeched in the bougainvillaea.

Some of the residents had gone to church. Some had received phone calls from their families back home; there was an undercurrent of rivalry about who was summoned most frequently to the lobby. The awkward question of gifts had been solved by a lucky dip organized by Madge: each person contributing a small present to be rummaged for, at random, in the brass spittoon.

Now they sat on the veranda drinking cocktails made of rum and mango juice.

“Nice, but slightly viscous,” whispered Evelyn.

“Vicious?” asked Douglas.

“No. Viscous. I suspect they used a tin.”

The smell of roasting turkey drifted from the kitchen—turkey cooked by the real Indian doctor, not the sex one. In the dining room the tables had been pushed together to create the banquet effect. There were crackers. There were table decorations created by Stella and Hermione out of exotic foliage strewn with tinsel. Two extra places had been laid for the mystery guests, a source of speculation among the residents. One was Madge’s new gentleman friend. Her socializing with Sonny had borne fruit, for, although not a maharaja, Mr. Somethingunpronounceable was rumored to be a man of considerable wealth, a widower in the pharmaceutical trade whom she had met at a buffet for Nestlé.

“Never too late to have another crack at it,” whispered Douglas.

“I’m not sure about that,” replied Evelyn. “One does get a lot more reading done.”

Startled, he asked: “Think that’s a good swap?”

“No.”

There was a silence. They looked at each other.

The other guest, apparently, was Theresa’s new friend. He sounded like one of the waifs and strays to whom she devoted her professional life. “He’s here on business,” Evelyn told Muriel. “His family’s in England and he’s all alone, poor thing.”

“Should have your family round you at Christmas,” said Muriel bitterly.

“I’m so sorry about your son,” said Evelyn.

“Thought I’d hear from him
today
.”