The Pleasure Seekers (22 page)

‘I don’t care what you think,’ Mayuri said. ‘My Daddy told me there’s no such thing as heaven and hell, and that God is only something that people have made up to make them feel good about themselves. He says if he had a gun he’d line up all the religious leaders of the world and shoot them dead. And that all this religious stuff is a whole lot of mumbo jumbo jiggery-pokery.’

‘Oh, really?’ gawped Unibrow number one. ‘If that’s so then tell me, please, how did the world begin?’

‘From the beginning, EED-YOT.’

‘Who made it?’

‘It was just there, already.’

‘Mayuri, if you don’t shet-up right now you’re going to be reborn as a dog in your next life,’ shrieked Unibrow number two.

‘Fine. I don’t care, because you’ve already been born as an elephant.’

And with that no words were exchanged between the cousins for three days and three nights.

When Mayuri and Bean returned to Madras that summer, long after Ba had brought them together and said, ‘We should all make castles within ourselves from the stones thrown at us,’ and Bean had penitently gone to her cousins and said, ‘It’s OK, we can believe in different things and still be friends,’ Bean asked her sister if she really thought there was nothing out there.

‘Don’t you think that Taid is up in heaven with the angels like Selvi says?’ she asked, as they lay in their matching cane beds.

Because deep in her heart Bean believed there was more to it. There had to be. She
felt
something when she went to the Velankini church once a year for Christmas mass, and when Trishala Ba took her to the Jain temple in Kilpauk. Even when Siân dragged her to the Garden of Redemption to sit under the banyan tree to listen to Manna – Bean thought, there
must
be something. It can’t
all
be jiggery-pokery.

‘I don’t know all about what Selvi talks, Bean, but I believe what Daddy says. If you’re good then nothing else matters.’

‘But isn’t not believing the worst thing? Doesn’t it add up to being bad?’

‘I don’t think so, Bean. I think if there’s a God he’d know these things.’

‘But everyone believes in a God. Why can’t we believe in one too?’

‘Because the sky’s so high. Good grief! Didn’t you listen to anything I just said?’

‘Sure I did, May–May. Sure I did.’

Then, Mayuri, in a rare act of sisterly grace, pulled the sheets over their heads and said, ‘I know what, let’s play caravan-caravan.’

And just like that, Mayuri and Bean were walking the desert sands, starving and thirsty, down to their last camel, struggling and suffering together against sandstorms and heat. They kept walking through this desert until they found a garden where they were offered fruit and water, a place in the shade to rest their broken bodies.

Mayuri and Bean, pretending they’re a family together, read the map of the night sky and find their way across the desert. They climb out of their beds in vests and panties to lie down on the cool, mosaic floors. They lie down with flattened spines: head to foot, foot to head, pretending they aren’t afraid of being afraid, of not being this or that. They wait like incy wincy spiders, to begin.

And later, when they grow up and walk about barefoot in their lives, when they’re trying to understand the darkness and the divine beings that threaten them, this is what they remember: there was a beautiful time once; it was childhood. They carry it around inside them, thinking if only they hold on to it, if only they don’t drop it in the sand, it will stay inside them for ever, and they’ll be able to return to it whenever they need. Because Mayuri needs. Bean needs.

17  The Five Thieves of the Body

Almost three years after Prem Kumar’s original ‘in lieu of’ proposal, Chotu, realizing the stubbornness of his father’s will and the futility of continuing to dream of a foreign education, finally took him up on his offer. Before the onset of the 1983 monsoon, a week before his twenty-sixth birthday, Chotu, holding his first ever passport, took a flight to Bombay, and from there set off for the first stop of twenty-one: Paris.

The disaster of Chotu’s ‘in lieu of’ European holiday was something only Ba could have predicted, and did. On the morning of his return, Ba had another dream. This time the serpent Ananta rose from the ocean with an aeroplane wing in its mouth, and Bean was astride its thick neck, trying to throttle it with her knees. Ba’s first fear was that Chotu’s plane had crashed; that his young body would have to be dredged from the ocean floor, charred and blackened beyond recognition. She thought about her grandson moving against the night sky, falling helplessly into an ocean, and a fear so deep gripped her she felt physically ill for the first time in a decade. After telephoning Madras and hearing from Trishala that nothing of the sort had happened – Chotu had arrived safely, and had even put on a few kilos – Ba spent the rest of the day reassuring herself that she had been overreacting. But the anxiety persisted, only now she began to wonder if it wasn’t Bean who needed her help.

In Madras, Trishala gathered the entire family around the dining table for a welcome home dinner for Chotu. Prem Kumar sat at the customary head, Babo and Chotu sat to his left, Bean and Mayuri to the right, while Trishala, Dolly and Siân ran back and forth from the kitchen, serving them hot puris.

‘How was Germany?’ Babo asked wistfully, remembering that it was the place he and Siân were to go, before their dreams got cut short by Trishala’s faux illness.

‘Oh, it was good. Everything was wonderful,’ Chotu said, staring at his plate of food.

‘And what did you like about England?’ Siân asked, nudging a rasgulla on to his plate.

‘Bhabi,’ Chotu said, ‘to tell you the truth, I don’t know how you ever left that place to come here.’

‘Well, all’s well that ends well,’ Prem Kumar said. ‘I knew this would be a good idea.’

After a while, Chotu got up to leave the table. ‘I’m going upstairs to lie down. Maybe it’s jet lag or something. I don’t feel too well.’

Three days later, Trishala phoned Babo to say that Chotu was still doing the same thing: nothing. ‘Not eating, only sleeping. Is it possible this jetting has affected him so much? Come and find out what the matter is.’

‘Heavyweight, what’s the problem?’ Babo asked, as he sat on the red-brick terrace of Sylvan Lodge, smoking a cigarette. ‘Why aren’t you coming to work? What’s going on? Is something bothering you?’

‘Oh, bhai,’ Chotu said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. Can I just tell you about my “in lieu of” experience? Please? Twenty-one cities in twenty-one days, in the company of middle-aged Gujarati couples from Bombay with a cook on board to make sure there was absolutely no need to try any local cuisine. All middle-aged couples with school-going children, except for one widow, Mrs Triveni, who I had the pleasure of sitting with for the entire journey. I don’t know. It was ridiculous. I wish I’d never gone.’

By the end of the week the showdown that was threatening to happen, happened.

‘You thought you were giving me the chance to discover the world by putting me on a bus with a bunch of old, conservative Gujaratis to explore two thousand years of European civilization in twenty-one days? Have you ever understood anything I need?’

Prem Kumar was confused. To think! All the things he had done to help this child broaden his horizons. All right, so he hadn’t sent him to study abroad like he had sent Babo. But how could he have? After the irreversible loss of face with Falguni’s parents, Kamal and Meghna Shah. How could he have sent his only other son to England for studies and risked him coming back with a foreign wife?

Chotu decided to adopt a form of protest previously employed by Babo: the no-negotiation tactic. He announced a leave of absence from Sanbo Enterprises, started coaching the junior state cricket team, ate all his meals at Balaji Snacks down the road and spent more and more time at Babo’s house watching
Dynasty
with his nieces, which was the new family addiction.

‘I take it you don’t intend to become a partner with your brother in this business I’ve spent my whole life building?’ Prem Kumar asked, cornering him one day under the staircase.

‘That’s right.’

‘And how do you plan to support yourself? By coaching? Going like some second-rate schoolmaster from here to there, and then retiring with a pingy pension? What a sad life you’re choosing for yourself, son, and what about family? Don’t you want a family of your own?’

There was nothing further from Chotu’s mind. Aside from Babo and Siân, who had managed to create an oasis for themselves, all the other married couples he encountered looked utterly bored and frustrated with each other.

‘Well,’ Prem Kumar said, when Chotu offered no reply. ‘All I can say is, if every fool wore a crown, we would all be kings.’

‘And all I can say is it’s better to be one’s own king rather than a slave of another,’ Chotu said, before marching out and slamming the front door for the zillionth time.

‘Chotu,’ Ba shouted down the phone from Anjar. ‘I hear you’re going on a protest now, just like Babo. Very clever. Good idea.’

‘Nothing like that, Ba. I just don’t want to work with Papa in the office, that’s all.’

‘Good, good,’ Ba said, ‘I have a better idea for you anyway. I want you to coach Beena into a champion swimmer. Don’t worry, you can still do your cricket coaching business, just spend a few hours with her in the morning. Your niece is nearly ten, and still wetting the bed. All this nakra about ghosts is just an excuse. She needs a proper hobby. Not all this one-day wonder business with painting class and all.

‘And anyway, it’s probably better if you don’t go to work for a while. Take some time to think about your life. You’re not a baby any more.’

‘I know, Ba. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone.’

Ba wanted to tell Chotu about the serpent Ananta that had been visiting her for twenty-five years. She wanted him to understand that there was something beyond all this – there was bliss, there was beauty. She wanted to warn him about the five thieves of the body: greed, affection, desire, love, pride, who were always lurking around, ready to devastate the sanctity of the spirit and the mind.

‘Whatever you decide to do,’ she said, ‘Never renounce the world, Chotu, because it will be the world that saves you.’

And that is how Chotu started coming for Bean in Prem Kumar’s Ambassador at 5 a.m. every morning. He drove up to the house of orange and black gates and waited for Bean to hurry out with her school gear and Milo swimming bag. Bean, creeping out of the house, bleary-eyed, still straddling her world of dreams, sat up in the front seat beside Chotu as they drove all the way down the length of Marina Beach, which in those early hours, looked like a desert pressed against the city’s metallic sky. Bean gave in to the desolate morning: the dismantled merry-go-rounds, the horsemen and returning fishermen, the morning walkers trundling like pilgrims across the endless biscuit-coloured sand. Chotu taught her the names of the buildings lining the promenade – the Ice House, Queen Saint Mary’s College, the Senate House – while she counted the crows sitting on the statue of Gandhiji’s shit-spattered head.
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a letter, four for a boy . . .

At the Madras Gymkhana Club, Bean struggled into her Lycra swimsuit, fixed the ridiculous chinstrap swimming cap over her head, spat into her goggles and threw herself in like a seventy-pound cannonball. Those first few warm-up laps were like arrows to her heart; icicles of terror; a stinging in her ears that went on and on like a pressure cooker whistling. But after a while, as the rhythm of her breathing settled down, and the solid push of her feet against the sides of the pool propelled her forward and forward, as the sun rose overhead, warming and tanning the backs of her legs, Bean forgot everything. She bolted through the water, up and down, up and down, until she could hear her heart beating in her ears. Chotu, standing at the edge of the pool with a stopwatch, shouted, ‘PULL, BEAN, PULL.’ And hearing his sweet, deep voice asking for something only she could give, Bean pulled as hard and fast as she could.

After the training session, while Bean hoisted herself out with a powerful two-arm press-up and tip tapped into the changing room, Chotu would lay his watch on the table and glide into the water to swim a few lazy laps. Then, after gobbling down a quick breakfast, with the sun beating down on the city of Madras, Chotu drove Bean to school in time for morning assembly, while she sat beside him, tummy full, arms and legs like jelly, head resting against the window – knock knock knock, all the way there.

For four years the measure of Bean’s days began like this: a long, cool submersion into emptiness, where every fear she had in the world could be drowned. As much as she hated having to wake up with an alarm clock instead of Siân gently pulling her toes; as much as she hated the wet bathroom floor of the Ladies’ Room, and the dank smell of talcum powder the ayahs at the Gymkhana Club liked to douse her with before she changed into her school uniform; there was something about her mornings with Chotu that gave meaning and importance to her life.

As Bean meticulously paced up and down the swimming pool – her shoulders growing broader, her hair more like straw – a miraculous thing happened: her prayers were finally answered. Bean’s problem with the ghosts prowling along her bedroom walls finally dissolved. Siân put away the plastic sheets. Babo bought her a new, springy Blossom mattress. Selvi said, ‘Child, you growed up finally, like a big girl.’