The Pleasure Seekers (18 page)

Chotu had emerged from these dalliances with no delusions. He knew he hadn’t experienced love, nothing even close to love. They had merely been episodes to relieve the monotony of masturbation. What he really yearned for was not marriage, but a grand love affair, something like what his brother had, that could sweep him into another sphere of understanding. But how could that ever happen living in a house like this, with parents like this?

Chotu got out of bed and stood in front of the bathroom mirror in his shorts. He examined the growth of his two-week beard. It made him look older, distinguished, capable of greatness. He had lost a couple of kilos from all the inactivity; his shoulders looked smaller, and his biceps a little deflated, but it was nothing that a hundred one-arm press-ups and a month back in training couldn’t fix. He slathered on a layer of shaving foam, relishing the minty softness of it against his face. Just as he was about to dip his razor into a mug of hot water, he changed his mind.
Let’s make it a day to remember
, he thought, rinsing the foam off. He stood underneath the cold shower for a few minutes and then buttoned up a long-sleeved shirt he had no intention of changing from once he got to work ‘From today we stand our ground,’ he muttered. ‘From today things are going to be different.’

In Anjar, Ba was remembering the dream she had had on the morning of Chotu’s birth. It was a bottomless, frightening dream that involved the mythological serpent, Ananta, coming upon the vast waters of creation and refusing to grow wings. ‘See,’ she had cried out in her dream. ‘These are the waters of creation, even the reptiles will one day sprout wings and fly like birds. Why won’t you fly? If you don’t fly, this child will never fly.’ But the serpent, Ananta, in his wicked, limbless way had only smiled and said, ‘We cannot
all
be vehicles of the gods.’

Ba had woken to see a cobra coiled in the branches of the jamun tree, and she had known then that this last grandchild would be serious and quiet, and worse, would know the failure of flight.

That morning, while the Patel family settled around the table to eat breakfast together for the first time in two weeks, Ba had that sensation again, of a thundercloud passing over a parched field, refusing to shed any drops. ‘Dear God,’ she muttered, as she made her way to the back of her compound to the bamboo grove. ‘Something will have to be done.’

For years the entire Patel clan had been trying to persuade Dolly to get married. But as Prem Kumar correctly noted, she was as stubborn and hard as a pellet of goat dung, and if any man was stupid enough to marry her, then God help him. As the years passed by, though, he was beginning to understand that if they waited any longer, the person to suffer most would be himself.

‘No more time-wasting now, Dolly,’ he said, at the breakfast table, ‘All your options have run out. After all these chocolate-and candle-making classes are over you’re going to Anajr to look for a boy.’

Among the many problematic and failed life choices Dolly had made so far was a stint at an ashram near Pondicherry, an entrepreneurial bakery venture with one of the famed dames of her college which collapsed after three months when the famed dame ran off with the head baker, and a half-hearted attempt at working with a deaf and dumb children’s project which Siân spearheaded for the Overseas Women’s Club. Dolly had even considered retiring from life entirely and becoming a Jain nun, but even she knew she wasn’t pious enough for such a vocation.

‘You know what? Fine! But I don’t want anyone short or fat, and he has to be rich and look a bit like Rajesh Khanna.’

‘Excuse me!’ Trishala said. ‘Have you looked at yourself in the mirror recently? You’re quite short and fat, and you don’t look like any great film heroine yourself, so you better say yes to someone soon, otherwise you’re going to be an old maid. How will you catch up with your sister?’

Chotu sat quietly, squirting lime over his papaya.
Sooner or later
, he thought,
Dolly will buckle, and then? Then, it will be just the three of us
. ‘Papa,’ he said aloud, ‘I want to discuss my plan for England. Have you thought more about what I said?’

‘Oof,’ Trishala groaned. ‘If it’s not one child giving problems it’s the other. Started again! Want to go to England! Want to go to England! As if it’s such a great place?’

‘Son,’ Prem Kumar said, clearing his throat. ‘I have thought about it, and your mother and I have decided that instead of going for studies – you’re too old for that now, no one does studies at this age, why don’t you go for a holiday instead?’

‘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.