The Pleasure Seekers (20 page)

Siân couldn’t catch hold of this new feeling. She wondered if it was grief, this dull, insistent thing that circulated in her blood and refused to leave. But grief couldn’t last this long, could it? Grief expelled itself in intense gut-wrenching fits, and she had done most of that already in Nercwys after seeing her father laid out in a coffin, after understanding that she would never hear his voice again. This was different. This was re-entering your life and being suffocated by it.

Siân started to feel it as soon as she landed in Madras – that cruel, oppressive struggle of the day-to-day. The wave of humidity that immediately deflated her new curls – so buoyant in Nercwys, limp and frizzy here. The stale sweaty smell of porters, the nausea of bidis and spit and smoke. Everything she had once admired about India – the persistence of life, the triumph of the human spirit – wilted in the presence of so much grot. Now it all seemed like a mindless scramble to survive. And for what? As she drove home from the airport, the poverty hit her with renewed vigour – those mothers with scrawny babies at their breasts, who came up to the car and tapped at the windows, the outcast and the maimed, the rag-tag children. What on earth could be done for them?

Even in the sanctuary of her own home, everything looked faded and a little sad, despite her and Selvi’s cleaning binge. Siân surveyed her home. Every object was there because
she
had put it there, lovingly, and with pride, and yet, it all seemed so inadequate. The golden-yellow settee and glass-topped table, the Wedgwood plates on the dining-room wall, the twenty-five-volume
Time–Life
nature series, sold to her by a charismatic door salesman, stacked in the rosewood cabinet. Even the framed print of Brueghel’s
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
, which she had bought in London a long time ago because it enchanted her, positioned now between the girls’ matching cane beds; even those pale white legs disappearing into water couldn’t restore her.

And it wasn’t just in the things. It was Selvi’s pomposity in taking charge of the household, and Mrs Singhania’s malicious gossiping, and Bahadur’s perennial drunken stupor; human flaws which she’d put up with quite happily before, suddenly setting her on edge. It wasn’t the individual failings that bothered her, but her dependence on them. The fact that she needed them, along with the driver and the ironing man and any number of other people, just to get things done. Her whole life seemed suddenly crowded, impinged upon, eternally dusty.

And then there were those letters, hers and Babo’s. Babo’s sprawling notebooks and her faded blue aerogrammes, all neatly filed in chronological order in two Sanbo Enterprises folders in the bottom drawer of the rosewood cabinet. Did she dare go there now?
Of course we’ll have children, darling, and they’ll be so beautiful, people in the streets will have to stop and stare
. Really? Really? Because here was Mayuri looking distinctly unbeautiful, walking into the house for the umpteenth time with no shoes on her feet and broken toenails from riding that infernal bicycle. And Bean, pouting in the corner, going on about her imaginary ghosts. Siân wanted to scream,
Can’t you just be quiet and listen for a change? Selfish creatures! Can’t you just do something right?

‘You’re spoilt,’ she badgered them. ‘That’s the problem. You think Selvi’s always going to be around to do things for you. Well, let me tell you, you’ll have to learn eventually. From now on you’re going to make your own beds. I always did, so why can’t you? And you can hang your towels on the line to dry instead of throwing them on the floor.’

‘But Daddy doesn’t even step into the kitchen to make his own tea!’

‘Daddy is also the only person in this house who has a job and makes money, so let’s not forget about that. Besides, you’re children. Children don’t get to make the rules.’

Babo felt this new brittleness in his wife, but he waited, because the hunger between their bodies was still raw, still present. At nights, when he held her, she wouldn’t speak of her father, or his passing. ‘Not yet,’ she said, when he pressed her, ‘I can’t just yet.’

She wanted to preserve an idea in her mind, that being this far away, she could pretend Bryn was still alive, taking pleasure in the things that brought him joy. ‘Because the awful truth is,’ she finally told Babo, ‘I loved him best. I always loved my father best.’

She sat with Manna in the Garden of Redemption, hoping to make sense of things.

‘If we understand our own births and deaths,’ Manna said, ‘We’ll know what to erase and what to put forward.’

Siân didn’t know what that could possibly mean. She was thirty-four years old. A wife, a mother, a half-orphan. She didn’t know what erasing or putting forward had to do with living or dying. ‘When we disappear, what kind of spaces do we leave behind?’ she asked.

‘What are you seeking, and why?’ Manna countered. ‘The minute you think you’ve found something, haven’t you already lost it?’

Wasn’t it simple? Wasn’t what Manna saying simple?

All beauty created by man is destined to disappear with him
.

A month after her return, Siân shut herself in with her best friends and talked about what exactly they had given up when they decided to get married and live in India. They sat in Darlene’s living room, huddled around a low wooden table on divans, talking about their losses, their fears of the future.

Jan hadn’t been home since she got to India in 1958. Initially, it was because they couldn’t afford it, but afterwards, the need, which had seemed so visceral at first, diminished into a wistful fancy. Her parents had died early, in quick succession, and after getting over the shock of that, there was no need, really, for going back. ‘My life is here,’ Jan said simply. ‘I wouldn’t know where to begin if I went back to England.’

It was different with Darlene. She came from a family of six, and all her brothers and sisters had married and bought houses within a five-mile radius of her parents. They got together as often as they could – Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, even just regular weekends, and they often telephoned to tell her how much they missed her, and how much she was missing out. ‘It just kills me,’ Darlene said. ‘To think if anything happens, I’m two whole days away from Tennessee.’

‘Well,’ said Jan, ‘I’ve thought about it, and God forbid, if Keshav goes first, I’m going to stay in India. I’ll probably take to the hills and preside over the local library. And if I’m lucky, my children will come and visit once a year. But I’m quite sure I’ll die in an ivy-trellised cottage full of cats with no one but my manservant to watch over me.’

Darlene sighed. ‘I suppose we all die alone, no matter where we are. No less lonelier here in India than anywhere else.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ Siân said, patting Darlene’s hand. ‘You’re right.’

Siân told them how, only the day before, she had taken Bean and Mayuri to see her old friend, Ms Douglas. They had been fidgety the whole time, begging to play in the garden rather than sit in Ms Douglas’s blue-gabled house and drink tea from chipped cups and saucers. ‘I suppose there’s something eerie about that place if you’re a child, but still, I’ve always found solace there, and I guess I kind of hoped they’d feel it too.’

Siân supposed there was something about Ms Douglas herself that didn’t exactly endear her to children – so thin and corroded, always repeating herself, slapping those twiggy wrists of hers, the dentures slipping in and out of her mouth.

‘But all they wanted to know as soon as we left was how come Babo hadn’t sent someone to paint her house, and why did Ms Douglas have so many jars of Champion oats in her kitchen, and wasn’t it sad that Ms Douglas was losing her mind and was she going to die soon?

‘ “Why’s it sad?” I asked them. “Where else is she going to go? She’s got no family. Her brothers are dead. She manages on her monthly pension, what’s sad about that?” And then I said, “What do you think is going to happen to me when I get old?” And they both looked at me, incredulously, as if the thought had never occurred to them, and you know what Mayuri said? She said, “It’s different with you, Mama. It has to be. You have family. You have Daddy and Bean and me.” ’

Siân thought about this as she drove back to the house of orange and black gates. When she walked through the front door, she saw Mayuri and Bean dancing in their nighties to the new
Top Ten
tape she had bought them. She watched them jiggle their limbs like marionettes, jerking their hips this way and that, singing,
I love a rainy night
, their faces shiny and clean like plums. When they saw her, they immediately stopped dancing and ran to her. ‘Mama, you’re home! Read to us. Read to us.’

‘OK!’ Siân laughed. ‘Let’s get into bed and read together, OK?’

Siân leaned against the pillows and started reading aloud from
Anne of Green Gables
. She struggled to keep her voice steady as she read, because
this
was something, wasn’t it? Mayuri and Bean, their two damp heads pressed close on either breast, their thin brown legs lying protectively over hers. They relied on her to explain things. This is what she had chosen. And all she could offer them was some hope of beauty, some way of seeking it. Because they loved her as simply and unconditionally as Babo did. And this fierce, this maddening love was the only true thing in her life.

Here’s another picture: Siân in a red dress and gold sandals waiting on a beach where Babo has arranged for a cottage and a hammock for the night. Babo is driving out into the streets of Madras with Mayuri and Bean on the back seat of the Flying Fiat, kissing them at the gates of Sylvan Lodge, where Trishala is breezing about like a bonfire, saying, ‘Come in, my little laadlis. See what I’ve made for you.’ Babo races back along the shoreline of the city, going further and further south till it narrows and clears, until it’s almost desolate. Later, when the dark and pale of their undersides are gleaming like crabs in the moonlight, he whispers, ‘Tell me a secret.’ And there’s nothing to tell, because he holds all of her entirely, completely, in the endless summer of his palms.

16  Ignatius and the Unibrows

The marriage of Dolly Patel to Chunky Shah took place over three pomp-filled days in Anjar, Gujarat, culminating in a teary reception in Ba’s house on 5 July 1982, a day before the longest lunar eclipse of the twentieth century. At the start of that month Ba’s house was invaded by women. Trishala and Dolly arrived first from Madras, fat and flush with wedding fever. Then a band of spinster sisters descended from Bhuj to present themselves in all their miserable spinsterly glory as examples in case Dolly should try to back out at the last minute. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Trishala’s old friend, Meghna-behn, mother of the lovely, lisping Falguni, made a courtesy call to deliver sweets to celebrate the arrival of her fifth and final grandchild: a boy. It was the first conversation the two friends had had since Babo broke off his engagement in 1969, and the tension between them was enough to stun both the red garoli lizards and the peacocks sauntering along the tin roof. Besides this, there were the usual constants in Ba’s life: the thoroughfare of Ganga Bazaar ladies who came unfailingly every evening for their daily activities, and, lately, Ignatius.

Ignatius: a lady-boy hermaphrodite of startling beauty, with padded bosoms and a fake plait.

Of all the assaults on the sanctum of Ba’s house, Ignatius was the only one whose presence Ba tolerated, in fact, relied upon. ‘Save me from this madness,’ she whispered, when Shakuntala-behn started up on the benefits of a purely milk and mango diet, or if the triplets Rukku, Munnu and Tunnu began arguing about who was eldest, and therefore whose word should be taken as final.

Ignatius worked as a seamstress at the New Pinch Boutique in town, and had for the last few years taken up residence in a thatch shack in the thicket of the bamboo grove in Ba’s compound. To his name he also had a small room on the top floor of Hira Lal’s jewellery store, where he sat by the east-facing window grills and did most of his intricate stitching work. He moved between these two residences constantly and effortlessly, so much so that if Ba hadn’t been in possession of her rarefied sense of smell, she’d never have been able to monitor his comings and goings. But as it was, Ignatius signalled his arrival with a never-ending testosterone trail of male admirers, who crept past the sides of Ba’s house after midnight and left their slippers outside Ignatius’s makeshift door.

The relationship between Ba and Ignatius was something of an enigma to the women of Ganga Bazaar, who held Ba in the highest esteem – not just because her hair had turned completely white in her fifty-third year, conferring upon her an automatic mantle of wisdom, but because she had meticulously shown over time the merit of her unconventional ways. By contrast, Ignatius was boisterous and uncouth, always flirting shamelessly with their husbands and sons. And while it’s true that he had the remarkable talent of being able to fix anything from a broken television to a broken heart with his lady-boy fingers, there was something about him that unsettled them.

Ignatius, conscious of their discomfiture, always absented himself from Ba’s evening sessions. ‘Who wants to hear a bunch of old women cackle?’ he’d say, disappearing to perform his ablutions at the well. After they left, Ignatius would reappear, freshly powdered and flowered, to help Ba roll the mats away. ‘Finished dispensing with advice, oh holy one?’ he’d tease, before taking out dinner on two steel plates and resting them under the shade of the jamun tree.