The Pleasure Seekers (29 page)

Chotu next: who’s made it in spite of. Chotu, who’s in a regal black sherwani, who’s sitting on the mattress in front of the Singhania family, his legs curled under him, making him look quite small. The sisters Meenal and Dolly are squatting down on their fat knees to ask if he needs anything. One brings coconut water; the other brings lime juice. ‘Stop it,’ he barks. ‘Go and see if that damn pujari has arrived yet. Go and do something useful.’ The sisters leave him laden with beverages before waddling back into the crowd. Chotu picks up the lime juice and drinks it. Is he happy? Yes. It’s a happy-sad moment for him. He doesn’t once think of Rinky Damani. This, he is proud of. He thinks he has banished her so forcefully from his body and mind, he doesn’t realize she’s always going to be there – as soon as he wakes and before he sleeps – running through his blood, mocking him, because he lets her. But not here, not this evening. Not while they’re all waiting to witness something beautiful again, like they’d done on a cool January day in Anjar twenty-five years ago.

Mayuri and Cyrus: finally. Mayuri is going to become Mayuri Mazda. It isn’t as funny as she thought it would be. She can’t quite believe it. She’d decided this so long ago. She’d loved this boy for ten years! Ten long years. And there had never been any guarantee that it would come to this. It might never have if she hadn’t brought things to a head: ‘And how long do you think we’re going to keep this teenage thing going?’
What do you mean?
Cyrus, sweet Cyrus. Never thinking that she might want things differently. That they might have to grow up one day and do things for themselves. ‘Well, either we live together or we get married. I’m tired of running between your house and my house.’

So they lived together for a while in Cyrus’s room, in Darayus’s house next door to Sylvan Lodge, which was all a bit too close for comfort and not really what Mayuri wanted. Not those cupboards with the doors taken off the hinges and the helmets and the bags of tools lying around and the car posters on the wall, for chrissake. She wanted her own place on the beach, with long French windows and a veranda that opened out to the sea. Wood, windows, glass. She wanted to fill it with things from all over the world – the world they were going to travel soon: talavera plates from Mexico, enamel ware from Italy, lamps from Indonesia, bougainvillea everywhere. They’d get a dog or two, and Cyrus could have his garage with a broken-down jeep or a jag or whatever he wanted to put in there. And they could sit out at nights – she with her glass of red, he with his apple juice, and listen to the ocean and work out what they were really meant to be doing.

But for now it was all going to begin, because here she was, sitting cross-legged in her great-grandmother’s wedding sari – the exquisite red and gold sari that Bean had been determined to have, aired of its naphthalene, covering her long, chestnut braids. Here she was with a nose-ring and hennaed hands and feet, with tiny, traditional red and white dots painted along her forehead and down the sides of her face. Everyone is watching her and Cyrus, who’s the cleanest he’s ever been, who is this minute being excommunicated for marrying outside the Parsi community. But who cares? His parents are here – Neville and Farah – strangers in a way; ready to perform their parental duties as always, ready to accept whatever Cy demands, because they’re too busy living their own lives.
Cy wants to stay with his senile grandfather?
Fine.
Cy wants to get married?
Wonderful, we’ll be there.
Sigh. Sigh.

Cyrus, who at this moment isn’t thinking about his philandering father or his mother, who’s holding on for all the millions he’s worth; who isn’t thinking of the grandfather who’s doing as he’s been told to do for a change; who isn’t even thinking of Mayuri sitting next to him, even though she’s gleaming in that extraordinarily beautiful way of hers, looking at him as though he were the only person in the world. Cyrus is thinking of his life – the bigger picture of his life. He’s putting a ring on Mayuri’s finger. He’s drinking honey from her palms.

So the family is all here. There is only one missing space: Nerys.

Nerys, who has just had her second stroke, is sitting in her wheelchair in Tan-y-Rhos with Aunty Eleri, who’s trying hard not to look at the left side of her sister-in-law’s face. Nerys, whose three children have been taking turns to look after her – even Siân all the way from India. Nerys, who will die soon, as will Darayus, peacefully in her sleep, without any resistance.

Nerys will wait for Owen to return to Nercwys with the photographs. There’ll be no videotapes because Mayuri had wanted it intimate and private; she hadn’t wanted those camera fellows shoving lights into people’s faces while they were eating dinner. So what Nerys will see is not the continuity of that evening, not how the rain came down as if the skies were falling after it was all over – pulling up the shamiana and the bamboo poles as though they were tufts of grass. She’ll see imprints instead: of that bruised Madras sunset, snippets of bright colour, teeth and tears, a ring of seven girls twirling sticks – Bean heading them. Bean, who’ll be in London soon. Bean, who’ll come too late.

She’ll see the priest holding Cyrus and Mayuri’s hands, one on top of the other over the fire; Cyrus and Mayuri with flower garlands as thick as ten snakes around their necks; Cyrus and Mayuri bending at Ba’s feet, at Prem Kumar’s feet, at Babo and Siân’s feet, at Neville and Farah’s feet, at Meenal and Dolly and Chotu’s feet. Bending for blessings. Bending, bending, bending.

But Nerys won’t see the heavy salt air coming in from the ocean; the triangular patches of sweat spreading underneath the ladies’ arms despite the deodorant; the odd assortment of people who seem to appear out of nowhere – aunties and uncles from the Madras Gymkhana Club, employees of Sanbo Enterprises and Neville’s textile factory, Mr Mustafa from the OK Stores with his glinting gums, Manna with his destitute cheekbones floating through the crowds like a cloud, Ms Douglas in one of her grandmother’s lavender scarves, cornering Bean and saying, ‘You don’t have your mother’s auburn hair, do you?’

Nerys won’t see how the family gathers around the fire as the light of the first day of 1995 begins to diminish. She won’t see what happens when Owen brings out her silver locket for Mayuri – the one she’s worn around her neck ever since she was married – with the thumbnail picture of Bryn now safely removed and kept under the magnifying glass on the bureau downstairs. She won’t see how Siân, who’s been holding it all together until then, begins to weep, to convulse into tears. How this starts up an ululating from the women who’ve been practising for centuries, who know this deep inside them – this
too-muchness
of emotion – which try as they might they cannot contain. How it is this way sometimes at Indian weddings – whole ceremonies devoted just to this: to crying, to tearing your guts out, to saying goodbye to your daughter. Because there’s nothing as devastating as saying goodbye to your daughter. No. Not even saying goodbye to your son. It cannot be. Your sons will devastate you in different ways.

But when your daughters decide to do as Mayuri and Bean have decided to do – to change the direction of their lives, to pick themselves up and out of the house of orange and black gates – when they decide to do this simultaneously, it is about as devastating as it gets. When Siân starts up this wailing and cannot stop till it’s all washed out of her, the other women begin to think about their own private sorrows and they let it out and let it out until there isn’t a dry, smudgeless eye on that beach.

Mayuri, who’s the one they’re supposed to be crying for, is crying for all the changes that lie ahead, all the painstaking tiny red and white dots blotching her satiny face. Bean, who hardly ever needs an excuse to fall into self-pity, is holding her mother and crying.
Sorry
, it means,
I’m sorry
. Mehnaz is crying too, for something lost, never to be recovered, ruining her peaches and cream complexion. The aunts, the unibrows, the helpers, the hybrids, the friends, the faraways – every single woman on that beach is wailing as though the love of her life has just died in the most horrific way possible.

Every woman, that is, except for Ba. Ba is
not
crying. Ba has gone looking for Babo, who’s sitting by himself, watching the inky sea. He’s thinking about the first English love song he ever heard – Nat King Cole’s ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing.’ He’s thinking how that song used to play in his head over and over when his daughters were little, when they used to strip off their clothes and go running into the waves at Marina Beach while Siân and he held hands on the seashore. He’s remembering leaning over to his wife and saying,
Life really did begin in the ocean, didn’t it?

When Ba finds him she lowers herself on to the wet sand beside him. ‘Nobody said it was going to be easy,’ she says.

Babo lays his head in her lap.

‘Only fools and lovers never learn how to let go,’ Ba says, opening her mouth to the rain, moving her fingers out of habit through Babo’s non-existent curls.

‘It’s not what you think. It’s not that I don’t want them to go away from home, find love, live their lives as fully as they possibly can. It’s not even that I want them to remain eternally innocent. But what I want, what I really want to know is what I’m supposed to do with the space they leave behind? What am I supposed to fill it with?

‘You fill it with love,’ Ba murmured. ‘Like you have always filled it. With love and more love.’

PART THREE

Lewisham to Ganga Bazaar

1996–2001

23  One Foot In the Other Foot Out

The night before Bean left for London Babo sat on the tiled floor of the bottle-green bathroom and cried. He couldn’t sleep. Something resembling a dream, but refusing to behave like one, kept sliding in and out of his consciousness. He wanted to wake Siân and say, ‘Are we mad? For allowing our baby to go away? Off to stay with Bhupen and Mangala Jain in the city of London, the city we might have made our home a long time ago?’

Babo and Siân had thrown a barbeque bon voyage party that evening. The usual crowd – the Krishnamurtis and the Malhotras, plus the upstairs Singhania family, whose boys were also about to flee the nest. For the hybrids it was an emotional night. Shyam was leaving to embark on a five-year doctorate in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Bean was going off to do God-only-knew-what in London. Babo could not know that only a few hours earlier, Shyam had sweet-talked Bean into fucking against these very same walls.
A sympathy fuck
, Bean would tell Mehnaz later. But a fuck, nevertheless. Shyam Malhotra wasn’t the kind of boy Babo imagined his younger daughter with. Not that he could imagine either of his daughters with any man. But if he had to describe the ideal man for Bean, he would have aimed for someone taller, stronger, a little less clever.

Babo kept thinking about the evening. Three sets of cronies out on the veranda, eating kebabs and knocking back G&Ts and scotch sodas. Cyrus expertly manning the barbeque, while Mayuri and Siân soldiered back and forth from the kitchen with trays of skewered vegetables and marinated pieces of meat. It seemed like they’d been doing this for years: sitting on that veranda, telling the same stories. These were their mythologies in a way. How they had upped and left one country, fallen in love in another country, and then up and marched right back to the place they started from. Perhaps it’s inevitable, Babo thought, that our children suffer a similar displacement; that in order to understand the pattern of their lives here, they must go elsewhere.

More and more these days, as Prem Kumar and Chotu’s bickering escalated, Babo sat at his desk at Sanbo Enterprises and reminisced about his inauspicious London beginnings – getting gypped by that sardarji taxi driver as soon as he arrived, the whole brouhaha with Nat and Lila, the cafeteria ladies trying to fatten him up with cheese sandwiches and double helpings of custard. He yearned to feel all that again: the newness, the anonymity, even the utter loneliness.

Babo wondered about Bean’s reasons for upping and leaving the house of orange and black gates. Part of it, he knew, must have had something to do with that dreadful boy, Michael Mendoza, whose name was forbidden in this house, and who Siân had confirmed had disappeared with his divorced mother to live in Australia. Part of it must have had to do with the boredom of college life, where for four years Bean went and came home with a dull look in her eyes, with no new boyfriend or best friend of note, and a degree in English literature which she didn’t know what to do with. There must have been other reasons too, but Babo, struggling against the effects of too much alcohol, couldn’t guess at those just yet.

Babo got up from the floor and walked cautiously into the darkness to Bean’s bedroom door. Once, both his daughters had slept in this room in two cane beds under their grandmother’s knitted blankets. Then Mayuri became a teenager and insisted on claiming the guest room for herself, and for the past year and a half, ever since her wedding to Cyrus Mazda, she only ever came to spend the night when her husband was out of town. Tonight, after many years, Babo saw his daughters sleeping side by side again. He lingered in the doorway, watching their shapes on the bed. He thought of the old days, when Siân and he used to come home late from parties to find Mayuri and Bean sleeping on the floor with dolls in their hands, surrounded by remnants of a midnight feast. Sometimes, they were really asleep, exhausted from the excitement of being able to stay up as late as they wanted. But most times, they were only pretending, having seen the wash of lights from the Flying Fiat beam up against the grills of their bedroom window, keeled over any which way, knowing that Babo would pick them up and put them in their beds.