The Cambridge Curry Club (8 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Charity begins at home

D
IANA
W
ELLINGTON
-S
MYTHE LIVED
in England and dreamed of Tuscany. Summers were spent in their grape-laden villa outside Florence with her insolent daughter Imogen, silent son James and reticent
husband
Rupert. The Scrabble, draughts and chess were never unpacked, and returned to England in pristine condition during the last week of August. Imogen was growing breasts and James was growing restive, but Chianti at lunch and supper restored Diana’s partial tolerance of Rupert, pale and city pink in short sleeves. As tall as her husband, she was imperious in classic Armani, her blond hair, too intimidated by its owner to be curly, swinging straight down her neck. Her features struggled between boredom and equine haughtiness.

Father and son, mother and daughter strolled in silence to the village piazza in the evenings as the sun glinted on the window shutters of the white-walled houses, setting the red geraniums ablaze. They stopped for ice cream at the local gelateria overlooking a narrow cobbled street. Human nature was like gelati, the
elderly
man told the signora; at its best when it had more
flavours than one, the mellifluous pistacchio melting into the earthy brown of cioccolato, creamy vaniglia surrendering to the spicy strawberry red of fragola. It was the only counselling Diana would ever have.

On their way back to England from Florence, the family had dallied in Rome. Diana had shopped at Via Condotti; at Missoni, she abandoned the struggle into a size ten. Imogen, with her size six hips, swinging blond hair and pout, moodily twirled an orange and red flame-twisted scarf around her neck and stared
challengingly
at her mother in the mirror. They made their way to the Trevi Fountain. It had been drizzling, and the steps were wet as James and Imogen watched the scurrying tourists and their squealing slide toward the fountain, slippery peas posing in a pod. Imogen’s lips curved mockingly as Diana impulsively asked Rupert for a coin.

‘Euro or British, darling?’ he asked, reaching into his trousers as an Asian man offered him a dozen roses ‘
per la bella donna’.
As Diana watched, Rupert waved him away indifferently. For one brief, mad moment, there was nothing in the world she wanted other than a single red rose.

Diana had recently joined a private class of
Intermediate
Italian learners who shunned the courses offered by the Sixth Form Colleges of Cambridge and met in an elegant home on Grange Road instead. ‘Non parlo bene l’italiano,’ she began with uncharacteristic hesitation, placing the mandatory bottle of Barolo on the table in front of the teacher, an Englishwoman who had lived in Florence as an artist for many years. The man next to Diana leaned over and smiled a crinkly, warm smile of wealthy cologne. ‘Ma, Signora, non è
vero,’ he murmured. Diana had found a man to
contradict
her at last. Afterwards they talked of Tuscan
painters
’ light, and the next evening they walked along Quayside, continuing into Midsummer Common, past the cows flicking their lazy tails, along the water and past the houseboats, returning to an Italian café and its red-checked tablecloth.

‘Basta così stare insieme con te,’ Philip had declared soulfully. Being with her was all he wanted, staring into her grey eyes after the macchiato. Diana melted quicker than the chocolate mint the waitress had placed on the saucer. Romancing in Italian in Cambridge led her three mornings later to perch among several Chinese vases in the living room of a Newnham home as Philip poured out the tea.

‘Do you take sugar?’ he asked.

‘Don’t you think I’m sweet enough?’ was her arch reply.

The tray rattled. He trembled at the fires rising. ‘Non c’è nessuno come te. There’s no one like you,’ he said unconvincingly, brushing her fragrant cheek and neck. She smiled faintly. He nuzzled her ear and drew closer. She was as soft as a giraffe on eggshells and smelled of lavender and a linen cupboard. Philip had warm memories of Wendy Barton’s house in
Hampshire
. At seventeen he had stood with Wendy in her dark, fragrant linen cupboard lined with wooden shelves and piles of crisp white sheets and embroidered duvet covers. Wendy of the pert, round, shiny breasts; one silken orb had looked larger than the other in the dim golden light. He had wanted to ask her about the irregularity, bounce the weight of one and then the other, but her mother was laying out the tea and
shortbread
in the kitchen below, the radio rising in a ghostly murmur. Wendy must be all grown up out there
somewhere
in London, gym-slim, married to a banker, two children, St John’s Wood, golden retriever, thought Philip, and he kissed Diana forcefully, sweeping her of all resistance.

The thought of wicked Wendy in London, still asymmetrically desirable, fanned his ardour. He
continued
to hold Diana in his arms, breathing
endearments
into her ear as he kissed her with increasing passion. He licked her earlobe and they subsided backwards onto the sofa where she was directly
underneath
his grandfather’s portrait, which admonished the easy abandonment of Philip’s green-checked boxer shorts.

Philip attempted to lift her, but she was rather more heavy-boned than he had anticipated, and they sank deeper into the sofa. As they kissed, Philip nibbled her earlobe again. Diana’s skin felt warm and yielding. She unbuttoned herself swiftly out of her purple cashmere twinset and was in the act of unzipping her brown Italian boots when her mobile phone began to ring. It flashed the IndiaNeed number. Adroitly gathering her belongings and her control, she answered; she had never liked losing either.

Back in the shop, Swarnakumari hovered expectantly as Heera spoke. ‘Oh, good morning, Mrs
Wellington-Smythe,
it’s Heera from the shop. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it’s important. That’s why I’m ringing you. You see, we were just sorting the bags and we found—’

Heera turned to the others as she replaced the receiver. ‘D’you know what that Diana ki bachi said?’ She mimicked a clipped upperclass accent. ‘I’m sorry,
Helen, shop matters will have to wait. I’m on my morning canter.’

‘Lady Go
di
va,’ murmured Durga.

Diana had returned to Philip waiting unclothed and expectant on the sofa. He lay there patiently like a painter’s sylvan Adonis sans woodland wreath. At the hint of steel in her voice as she spoke on the telephone, he had hastily draped his boxer shorts over his upper thighs. His grandfather’s stern portrait relented, but the moment had clearly curdled. Philip had once been a King’s College chorister, wearing the Etonian collar, singing in a pure, high voice at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve. Then he sprouted hair on his chin and lost his voice, never to regain its power.

‘You look ridiculous, get dressed!’ Diana
commanded
in nursery nanny tones, and Philip obeyed, recalling his own nanny’s reign and rein of terror. Philip was resigned; he knew when he had been given his marching orders.

Diana’s grandfather had been given his marching orders after the Raj crumbled, and when he returned to England and to the impressive country manor in Berkshire, he had surrounded himself with antiques and artefacts acquired from India; a giant punkha fan of rosewood pinned to the wall, a peacock-shaped inlay table, figurines from Southern India, and the stuffed heads of tigers as sporting trophies. Diana’s father had joined the Foreign Service and travelled with his wife and without his child to Nigeria. It was left to the grandfather and nanny to instruct and educate Diana, a task they performed with admirable resolve.

Diana travelled to India when she was twenty-four. She had originally planned a visit to Brazil, fired by a previous encounter in London with a man of mixed German and Amazon-Indian blood, who smoked thin, twirled cigarettes of dubious origin, brushed his teeth with bark and wore no underwear. She soon tired of his caveman looks, halting English and neat bottom
shaking
to the samba beat.

India and a people’s raw display of emotions left her wary of the depths of dark, warm eyes. A hurried
coupling
with the Rajasthan tour guide would have been a mistake, and she had been wise to ignore his boyish charm and reject his gift of a sandalwood elephant, as she did the advances of the suave, handsome
businessman
at the Taj Hotel bar overlooking the Bombay harbour.

She had strolled out one evening from the
air-conditioned
splendour of the hotel lobby and into the world outside. A sticky blanket of heat had clung to her bare arms and legs as she walked under the arch of the Gateway of India, where King George and Queen Mary had once been welcomed with pomp and ceremony. Assailed by postcard-sellers, chattering footmen behind a queen’s train, she finally sat on a parapet overlooking the harbour with its bobbing boats and grey water that never turned blue. Beside her was a family of Indian tourists, and the children chattered excitedly, pointing to various landmarks. A toddler in a woman’s lap entwined his fingers into Diana’s scarf, imprisoning the tassels in his little fist, and she stared solemnly into his brown eyes before disengaging her scarf. She rose and walked back to her air-conditioned room. Diana had learned at an early age that attachment, especially
to pets and parents, led to heartbreak. IndiaNeed was born twenty years later as Diana’s apology to the country of her father’s birth.

‘How many times have I told her my name’s not “Helen”,’ stormed Heera, after Diana had abruptly terminated their conversation. ‘You know, girls, I don’t understand – what’s this English problem with names? I have a cousin, Ashok Binani, who lives in Edgware. He’s become quite fat now, but anyway, he used to be in the British Army – he was in the Falklands War – and d’you know what those English Army blokes called him?’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Bill.’ She repeated, ‘Bill. Now you tell me, d’you see any
connection
between “Ashok” and “Bill”?’

‘Well, Army Bloke Ashok didn’t have a choice, but what about the Asian population in Cambridge? Half of them call themselves Bill or Barry, Jill or Jane, and the other half’s like me, putting up with ridiculous versions of our names. I’m Der-ger, Dugga, Dooga or Dergay, take your pick and mix,’ laughed Durga, as she offered the other women a bar of Cadbury’s.

‘I just realised your husband’s a plumber, Eileen, and his surname is Watts. He should have been an
electrician
,’ teased Heera.

Eileen put away the basket of assorted skeins of wool and muttered as she munched a piece of milk chocolate, ‘He should have been a lot of things.’ She did not elaborate further on what might have been, nor on what might have been left.

‘Except for Lady Di, no one has problems with my name. How about you, Swarna?’ asked Heera.

‘People usually call me “Sara”’ admitted
Swarnakumari
.
‘But what to do? If they can’t say my name, they can’t,
na
?’

‘Or won’t?’ said Durga, licking her fingers. She loved chocolate with the passion that some women reserved for lipstick.

A name was nothing, thought Durga. She herself was nothing like her namesake in Hindu mythology – the Goddess Durga, protector of the good and the pure, and destroyer of the evil demon Mahishasura. According to legend, the combined energies of the gods created the feminine form of a ten-armed yellow-clad woman
riding
a lion. They hastily supplied her with weapons of destruction against the demon and she became
Durgashtini
or a mother goddess who destroyed evil and offered her devotees protection.

Names could be misleading; Durga’s aunt, whose skin was the colour of milk with a spoonful of honey, had been superstitiously nicknamed Kaali, ‘The Dark One’, as the first surviving child after three stillbirths. Was a name an identity, an anonymous cloak or a
terrifying
emptying of self? The extra ‘a’ that her Gujarati neighbour Anal Shah had hastily inserted between the ‘n’ and ‘l’ of his name after receiving a scholarship to Harvard was the linchpin between respect and ridicule, but Ajay Dikshit at Trinity, a Cambridge friend, had succeeded in solemnising a marriage with Emma Cockburn in front of an audience too solemn to titter during the exchange of vows.

Durga said, ‘So you mean Ashok is told, “Shoot the enemy, Bill!” and when the job is done and Ashok gets a medal, it’s “Well done, Bill!” and pat, pat on the broad back.’

Heera continued, ‘Exactly. I don’t think I told you
about Seema Tipnis; she was a receptionist to an eye specialist called Ramsbottom. Poor thing, she was so embarrassed to say this man’s name. After all, she’s Hindu – how could she refer to Lord Rama’s bottom fifty times a day? She told us his name was Dr Ramsey, but I found out, anyway.’

‘Naturally,’ said Durga.

‘Talking of names, funny how Asians born here just can’t pronounce Indian words the way we do,’ remarked Heera. ‘I once challenged a young Punjabi fellow to say “Pandit Ravi Shankar”. And do you know – each and every word sounded so strange from his mouth. I said to him straight, “If you can say the ‘a’ in ‘another’, why do you have to say it like ‘ant’?”’ Heera paused, puzzled. ‘But
you
don’t talk like that, Durga, and you have lived here all your life,’ she remarked. Distracted by the sight of Eileen carrying a pair of longjohns, she continued, ‘
Arre
, I thought I asked you to throw this pair of men’s thermals away. Why are they still here?’