The Pleasure Seekers (2 page)

He watched her as he watched everything, knowing it would be a long time before he saw any of it again. But after half an hour of mustering up such an intense look of concentration on his face, Babo felt himself being assailed by a great and sudden need for sleep.

Prem Kumar, still irritated with his sleepless night, noticed with distaste that the dashboard of the Ambassador was cluttered with pictures of gods: Baby Krishna, Jesus Christ, Guru Nanak, Gautham Buddha, even Lord Mahavir – the twenty-fourth thirthankara and Great Hero of the Jain religion; they were all lined up, side-to-side, shimmering in gaudy benevolence. The taxi driver, who was obviously trying to cover all bases by appeasing the gods simultaneously, had already infuriated Prem Kumar by smoking bidi after bidi at the gates of Sylvan Lodge, leaving poor Selvam, their half-blind watchman, to pack the luggage in the car. Clearly, he was a fellow who completely lacked any grasp of Right Thought, Right Action or Right Understanding – the basic tenets of the Jain faith that Prem Kumar had tried to instil in all his children but particularly in Babo.

Sometimes it seemed to Prem Kumar that Babo came from a different family. He never openly mocked his father or disagreed with him, but Prem Kumar knew for a fact that his son did not pray, did not recite Navkar Mantra thrice a day (which was the minimum number prescribed), did not believe in ideas of penance and certainly didn’t believe in the idea of denying the self pleasure.

Once, when Babo was twelve, he rounded up all the neighbourhood children and his siblings (including two-year-old Chotu, whom he carried on his back), and walked them five kilometres to Marina Beach, thinking it would be a grand idea to go out to sea with the fishermen in their catamarans, and to swim with dolphins. When Trishala returned to Sylvan Lodge from her shopping to find her children disappeared, she began a stupendous wailing at the gates with all the other neighbourhood mothers joining in, thinking that demons and asuras had collectively carried their children away. Hours later, when Babo finally returned like Alexander the Great crossing the River Jhelum to conquer King Porus with an army of brown-faced children burned by the midday sun – their clothes wet from sea water, their pockets full of shells – Prem Kumar, who had been summoned back from work, took his son upstairs and gave him the whipping of his life. Trishala went to him later of course, with soft words, saying that as Babo was the eldest, he was the vehicle for all Prem Kumar’s aspirations; it was his responsibility to guide the younger ones, not to tickle their fancies and imaginations. She tried to feed him the samosas she’d prepared for him tenderly with her fingers, but Babo became a wall of stone. He bore his grudges like a turtle – for ever. He’d pretend to shrug them off and carry on as if everything were normal, but inside he never forgot things, especially actions that were charged against him unjustly. There were stores of memories just like this one, that he kept locked inside his chest, which remained like fresh wounds on the surface of his body.

Despite all their differences, though, Prem Kumar knew his son was a good boy. That at least he believed in ahimsa – non-violence to all living beings, and the idea of truth – because it was the most important idea of all. According to Prem Kumar, everyone had to find their own truth, for without it, life would remain a useless circle of deception and conflict. If one had the wisdom to follow this truth, then one could hope to break the bonds that tied one to the suffering of this world, and attain moksha – the final liberation. But the problem with the young, thought Prem Kumar, was that they were unwavering in the idea of their own invincibility.

Prem Kumar glanced back at Babo, who was on his way to finding out all these things, whose head was nodding against the glass of the window – knock knock knock. And in an extraordinarily open gesture of love, he looked at his sleeping son and smiled.

At the airport the family disembarked, carrying their allotted pieces of luggage. Dolly and Meenal stood in matching green checked maxis and blouses, holding the getting-ready-for-camera gear: talcum powder, comb, mirror, hand towel. Chotu stood separately with the basket of snacks and tea flask, staring at the ground so he would not shame himself by crying in public like his sisters. Trishala was pushing through the crowds in her new maroon sari and matching maroon glasses, balancing rose garlands in one hand and puja tray in the other, hollering at the girls to hurry behind her and stay close. Prem Kumar, pulling crisp notes out of his wallet, was lecturing the taxi driver on the ill consequences of smoking, while simultaneously keeping an eye out for another lazy, unreliable man – Lilaj-bhai, who had been hired to take photographs of Babo’s going-away ceremony.

Babo was being preened, made to stand in the light for the photograph session. Meenal was fussing with his hair, trying to get his curls to stay in place. Meenal: second in line, quietest of all four children, given to short bursts of emotion and long periods of introspection, weeping copious tears, as was the tradition of all Patel women when it came to interactions with their men.

‘You won’t forget about us, will you, bhai?’ she said, picking up his hand and stroking the chunky gold ring on his left finger, which she’d given him the night before on Trishala’s instruction.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Babo, just as he’d said the night before when Meenal had found him on the terrace, sneaking his last fag of the day. ‘I wish I could forget about you,’ he’d said, ‘but I’ve lived with you for nineteen years now, so it looks like we’re stuck for life, doesn’t it?’

When he saw Meenal’s well-powdered face shrink like a deflated balloon, he’d immediately reached out to pull her plaits and said, ‘Oy, sour puss, why all this drama bazi? Didn’t I promise to write to you?’

‘And to Falguni,’ Meenal replied, tittering.

Babo had been thinking of Falguni when Meenal had burst in on him. He had fallen in love with her during the festival of Navratri, when for nine consecutive nights, all the people of their community, young and old, gathered in a large hall to celebrate and worship the three supreme aspects of the Goddess Durga. The religious significance was lost on Babo. For him, it was enough to celebrate. It was also one of the few legitimate ways to meet a girl.

Babo had noticed Falguni on the very first night. He’d known her for years, of course, because she was the daughter of Prem Kumar and Trishala’s closest friends, Kamal and Meghna Shah. That night, though, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time, standing next to Meenal in a bridal-red ghagra with coloured glass bangles all the way from her slim wrists to her elbows. She was a milky-skinned girl with almond eyes, a willowy waist and a thick river of black hair, which she kept demurely plaited. But her biggest attraction was the peculiar structure of her teeth which forced her to lisp her words and confuse her s’s for th’s. For this reason mainly, and for the fact that within the span of a few short months Falguni had developed a sizeable pair of breasts, Babo found himself hanging around her with a clutch of other admirers.

Babo had learned from the movies that the best heroes were the ones who were slick, suave and oftentimes cruel. So after his initial gaff at gawping, he whisked away one of Meenal’s less attractive friends and spent the whole night dancing with her. By six in the morning, when people started heading towards breakfast places with leaden feet, Babo, continuing in his nonchalance, sat at a separate table with all of Dolly’s sixteen-year-old friends, cracking loud jokes, boasting about being the first one to soon-be-getting-on-a-plane, and pretending to be bashful about his Bon Voyage picture which had appeared in
The Hindu
newspaper the day before.

Just before taking his sisters home, Falguni had crept up to him with her almond eyes brimming with tears. ‘Promith me that ssomorrow you will only danth wiss me,’ she said determinedly. But Babo, patting her dainty, milky hand, said nothing; gave her a mischievous wink, and left her to worry all day about his intentions.

Since then, they’d been passing secret messages back and forth through the willing and eager conduit of Meenal; the messages getting more and more fervent as the day of Babo’s leaving approached. Along with Trishala’s ring, Meenal had also pressed a long, tear-stained letter from Falguni, who promised that she would not
path a thingle day in happineth
till Babo returned to her from London.

Last night Babo had looked at his sister Meenal like he’d never looked at her before. She wasn’t beautiful. There was nothing very special about her at all. But she had that aura that only a young woman overflowing with innocence could have. Something so heartbreaking, it made him want to reach out and claim it for himself. It was nostalgic, looking at a girl like that – her clear face and untouched body draped in a chiffon sari, the puffy short sleeves, the hair tied back in double braids with ribbons.

All these events – even this moment with Meenal, were entering the annals of
Last Times
for Babo. Months and years from now he’d think about his sister like this on the terrace, looking at him wistfully with tears running down her cheeks, asking when he would come back to be married, and what if she were married before that? He would remember the magenta bougainvillea cascading out of the terracotta flowerpots, the air mostly still and quiet, telling her briskly that nothing in the world would happen until he returned. He remembered believing it, too, while they stood there, sister and brother, their feet on the red-brick terrace – Meenal, whose temporarily waif-like frame would disappear soon after her much anticipated marriage, and Babo in his crisp white kurta pyjama, his fingernails cut and filed, his hair glistening with the coconut oil that Trishala had lavishly anointed while listing the temptations he must resist while he was away: meat, alcohol, tobacco and most importantly, women.

Lilaj-bhai was trying to get the family organized. As soon as he’d seen the Ambassador roll through the departure gates, he had walked towards it jauntily with a foxy, betel-stained smile. He knew if he played his cards right, he could make a killing with the Patel family: families were at their weakest on occasions of departure and arrival. Deaths, births and marriages figured highest on the emotional range, of course. What were photographs after all, but a desire to capture some of those emotions, trap the feelings so you could pull them out later to marvel at?

Marriage was the greatest occasion of leaving and arriving. The girl departs one house and arrives in the other, and likewise, the family of the boy is, in a way, leaving an old life and entering into another. These moments that occupied the cusp were what Lilaj-bhai lived for, because this was when human beings were willing to forget about hard things like money and expense. And this moment here, with the Patel family on the pavement of the Madras Meenambakkam Airport, was an event Lilaj-bhai could plunder.

While Lilaj-bhai set up his equipment, Prem Kumar pulled Babo aside and slipped him his most prized possession – the locket of his grandfather, Babo’s great-grandfather, Kunthinath Paras Kumar Patel, whom Prem Kumar admired for two things: refusing to take up arms against the British because of his belief in ahimsa, and living a life of the highest virtue (eating only two meals a day, taking care of all the stray animals in the village and dying without any of his neighbours being able to whisper a single word of malice against him).

‘Your mother wanted me to give this to you, son. I hope you will wear it with the dignity that your great-grandfather did. And I hope it will give you the strength to make the right choices.’

The locket was a platinum globe the size of a fifty paisa coin with a faded reproduction of Lord Mahavir inside. Ba, Prem Kumar’s mother, and the grand matriarch of the entire village of Ganga Bazaar, had given it to him on the occasion of her husband’s death. She had meant it to be a symbolic passing over of reins. It had been Trishala’s idea to give the locket to Babo for good luck, and as a concrete reminder of home, although Prem Kumar knew that even if the locket possessed any ability to pass on guidance and virtue to its wearer, it would be wasted on Babo, who was more likely to wear a Dev Anand-style cravat around his neck than an old-fashioned, religious pendant.

Prem Kumar, who had a penchant for sayings, had initially thought to tell his son something especially historic at the final moment of farewell:
All humans are miserable due to their own faults, and they themselves can be happy by correcting these faults
. But now that the moment was here, Prem Kumar, realizing his wife had been right after all, found the words too solemn and artificially constructed, and allowed them to slide back down his throat.

Babo, standing close to his suitcase labelled with his cousin Nat’s address in London – NUMBER 172, FLAT B, BELSIZE PARK ROAD – looked at his family as though he were never coming back. Despite all his youthful inexperience, he knew that after this moment, things were going to change far beyond what he could imagine. He wanted to take each member of his scattered family and press them close to his chest, hold them there and make them realize the moment too.

Perhaps he would come back to Madras one day and everything would appear to be the same: the sky might meet the sea like an old lover; the people pushing past the railings towards their unknowable futures might still smell of dust and tobacco, rosewater and jasmine; the air clinging to his clothes might still be as heavy as tar. His family might even be lined up in a similar fashion: Prem Kumar in his beige safari suit buttoned up to the neck, Trishala in her giant-sized maroon sari flapping about like a tent in a storm, Meenal and Dolly like twin dolls in matching outfits, winking and sticking their tongues out at him. And Chotu, standing apart from them all, concentrating on the giant metal birds on the runway. They might all still be there, waiting for his return to free them. But Babo could feel himself changing already. He knew he was going to forsake all this for something else, something larger, something which for the moment he couldn’t touch.