The Pleasure Seekers (30 page)

Standing there, on the night of Bean’s departure, Babo wondered if his daughters were giving chori chori looks to each other across the dark.
I can see, you know!
he wanted to say.
I’m not a fool
.

As he turned to go back to his wife in bed, Babo caught sight of Bean’s suitcases standing upright by the door, and the knowledge that all her most precious belongings had been carefully packed and locked away like this almost made him cry again. In a few hours Bahadur would pack these cases in the dickey, Selvi would stand at the gates and beat her big breasts in grief, and Babo would drive his girls through the still-sleeping streets of Madras all the way to the Meenambakkam Airport.

Bean rolled over a few moments later and opened her eyes. She couldn’t sleep either. Every time she closed her eyes, images of Shyam bombarded her retinas. Shyam whispering how much he had always loved her. Shyam promising to write to her from Baltimore. What had
that
been about, anyway? A last-ditch effort to be filled by something – to be able to touch and take something as hers? Because nothing filled her any more. Nothing at all. Not her family, not her life, not this city of Madras, which had become, in recent years, a city of absences.

Bean couldn’t say herself what her reasons for leaving were. There was a vacancy in this house of her childhood that she couldn’t get used to now that Mayuri was living with Cyrus in a house of their own. Mehnaz was off, pursuing motherhood with a vengeance in Bombay. Her other friends – Parvathi, Saira and Immaculate, were all either married or on their way to being married. And the unibrows – well, they were already certified aunties, which left Bean as usual, hovering, waiting for someone to point the way.

Instead of waiting for something to happen, Bean had decided it was time to seek it out; to go off on her own adventure like Dick Whittington and his cat, on a quest to conquer the city of London. All Bean really knew of London were bits and pieces patched together from childhood memories – riding atop the red double-decker buses with her cousins Gareth and Ed, ice-cream cones from the ice-cream van, walking into Hamley’s, with Siân saying, ‘Behave, don’t be greedy now,’ and Bean, nodding and saying ‘Yes yes,’ but breaking her promise instantly because she’d never in all her life seen such beautiful toys.

What Bean was really hoping when she left Madras in that August of 1996, was to find love: the kind of love Babo and Siân had found in London. And for the first three months that she lived with Babo’s old friends Mangala and Bhupen Jain in their modest, three-bedroom, red-brick house with attached sunroom and garden in Lewisham, this is what Bean went looking for: love, pure and simple. Ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom-boom-boom.

Bean should have known. She should have known the minute she saw Mr Jain’s sourpuss face at the arrival gates in Heathrow to welcome her. The minute Mr Jain, after briefly enquiring about the state of everyone’s health and wealth in Madras, started complaining about the exorbitant cost of airport parking. The minute he launched into his litany of rules.

If Bean had known she’d have to live in a freezing, cheerless house where nobody smiled and everything was counted; if she’d known how difficult it was going to be to get a job and open a bank account; if she’d known there’d be so much to deal with during those first three months – not just learning bus routes and rushing home to sleep in sweatshirts and socks, but Nerys and Darayus Mazda passing away in their sleep, within days of each other. If Bean had known that at the end of all this there would be still be the incident with Mr and Mrs Jain’s forty-year-old son, Deenu, to contend with, she would have turned right around and flown back home.

But it was too late for that now. Because now she was busy looking out of the window where it was raining a soft, swish swish, late summer London kind of rain. She was letting Mr Jain’s words fall over her with the sounds of Kishore Kumar playing from the Oldies Goldies Sunshine radio station, where in between the firstly, secondly, thirdly and fourthly, Mr Jain was allowing himself briefly to digress and croon along, ‘Yeh tere pyar ki hai jadugari.’

Mangala Aunty was standing at the door of 32 Sunnydale Road in a chiffon floral sari and pink wire-rimmed Gandhi glasses, smiling goofily, waving a rose-coloured kerchief that had seen infinitely better days.

The house was nothing like Bean remembered it to be. It looked smaller, squashed between two similar houses in a crescent at the end of a shaded street. Bean remembered a palace of spices, of coming here during her sometimes summers after all the weeks of having to use knives and forks at Tan-y-Rhos, after all the steak and kidney pie. Here, Mayuri and she were allowed to tear chappathis into deft little triangles with their fingers, to mash rice balls, ping-pong size, down their throats until Siân said,
No more, no more, you’re going to be sick
, and sent them up the carpeted stairway to sleep in the guest room till it was time to wake up and fly zing zing zing all the way home to Madras.

‘How was journey, Beena?’ Mangala Aunty asked. ‘All fine? You must be hungry. Shall I make you some garam-garam hot-hot bhajjiyas? Come in, come in. Last time you were still a baby, such a beautiful girl now. Come in, come in.’

Mr Jain unbuttoned his coat and hung it carefully in the closet under the stairway. He looked distinctly older – hair all gone, body stooped over at the waist, almost frail. But there was nothing frail about Bhupen Jain, Bean would soon discover.

‘You may not be used to having deadlines with your mummy and daddy in Madras,’ he started again, just in case she hadn’t been paying attention the first time around. ‘But in this house you are AUW-ER responsibility. Anything that happens to you is AUW-ER responsibility. So, let me repeat again: latest time of arrival at night is 9 PEE EM.

‘Tomorrow we go to corner shop and buy you travel card. I take you on the bus and train to London Bridge. We sit with
A-Z
and you begin to understand how to move around the town.

‘Don’t be forgetting about phone calls, Beena. Phone is very expensive in England. Ten minutes incoming, five minutes outgoing. No international calls direct from here, please.

‘Don’t worry, we buy you phone card for best rates to India so you can call your mummy and daddy, and Mayuri. How is Mayuri? Enjoying married life?’

While Mangala Aunty disappeared into the kitchen to make the bhajjiyas, Mr Jain showed Bean her room upstairs and advised her on the order of morning ablutions.

‘We are not rich people, Beena, not like your daddy.’ Cackle cackle. ‘So, we are having only one bathroom with commode in separate room. In the morning time, Deenu will go first, myself second, then you, then aunty. OK?

‘After shower, you take this cloth from sill and wipe down bath. You want I show you how? Same like morning window wiping in your room. Why? Because panes get condensation, wood gets wet, then rotten, then very costly to replace. I show you how. Very easy. Come, I show you how.

‘On weekends, you can teach me computer and help Aunty with house-cleaning. Any doubts, you just ask me, OK?’

No rules of any sort had been discussed with Babo and Siân before leaving. In fact, the only advice they’d given Bean was not to get too discouraged by Mr Jain’s
apparent
sourness, because he was exceedingly sweet and generous underneath. Bean supposed they were right. After all, he was opening his house to her, feeding her, helping her find her way and refusing to take a single pound in exchange, all because she was his best friend’s daughter, who was like his own daughter. And as long as she,
unlike
the real one, abided by the rules of his house, all would be well.

In the kitchen Mangala Aunty was popping batter-covered potatoes into spluttering oil and reassembling the crispy concoctions on a single neat square of paper towel to soak up the oil. Mr Jain directed Bean to the far end of the kitchen bench and squeezed himself beside her. Mangala Aunty brought the bhajjiyas to the table and parked herself directly facing them. These would be their permanent places.

Mr Jain ate his bhajjiyas like a goldfish, dipping them in a circle of tomato ketchup and glubbing them down without any evidence of masticating. Bean, avoiding his watchful gaze, swirled her two bhajjiyas around on the plate in front of her.

‘Dieting or what?’ Mangala Aunty said, smiling her goofy smile again, plonking two more bhajjiyas on Bean’s plate.

‘Puppy,’ Mr Jain told his wife. ‘Don’t give if the girl doesn’t want.’

And then turning to Bean, ‘It’s not nice to waste, is it, Beena?’

Bean, reeling from the use of the word ‘puppy’ between sourpuss Mr Jain and his wife, managed to croak back, ‘You’re absolutely right, Uncle. My grandfather always says, the less we waste, the less we lack.’

For the first few weeks, Bean spent every evening with Mr Jain at the kitchen table with the evening papers, circling all the possible jobs she could apply for. ‘Don’t be so high and mighty, missy,’ he scolded, if Bean grimaced at the word ‘secretary’ or ‘receptionist’. ‘When you’re starting out you can’t afford to be so choosy.’

During the day, Mangala Aunty took her around the neighbourhood: ‘This is Woolworth’s, this is Boots (your mummy loves Boots), this is Waitrose (too expensive), this is W.H. Smith (you might like because of books, no?), this is bingo place for old people, this is local leisure centre (Mr Jain and me get for free because of senior citizen), this is library, this is job centre. This is Sainsbury’s – we do shopping here. Anything you want, just put in trolley, OK? Don’t feel shy, OK? Everything all right?’

Bean bought a monthly travel card for six zones. She rode in double-decker buses and took long walks in all the different hills of the city: Primrose, Notting, Muswell, Denmark, Parliament, Lavender, Haverstock, Herne, Forest, Tower. She browsed through second-hand bookshops on the Strand, and sat in pubs writing long letters home, sketching the old men around her who had nothing to do but drink beer and watch football all day.

From Ba in Anjar, Bean felt a distance she had never felt before.

Ganga Bazaar is the furthest place in the world from London. If I close my eyes and try to remember your house, try to imagine the warmth there, it’s impossible to do. I’m going to come and see you soon, don’t worry. I just don’t know when. I’ve started working, so I suppose I should stick with it otherwise I’ll be called a one-day-wonder, as usual. But I don’t know, Ba. I’m still trying to find my place. I remember you once telling me that there were only two mistakes to make on this journey of life: not going all the way, and not starting. So, here I am, trying to make a start. It’s difficult, but it’s a beginning
.

She missed her bedroom in the house of orange and black gates; her mother and father and Selvi; but most surprisingly, she missed her sister. Bean had never imagined that she and Mayuri could be friends; that time and distance could change a person; that after all, the bonds of blood were thicker than water.

Mayuri had transformed from a tyrannically hard child to a soft-spoken woman, unafraid of admitting her dependencies, of finally saying to Bean, ‘Of course, I need you too.’ How was that possible? What’s more, Mayuri didn’t seem to remember any of the cruelties of childhood. ‘Did I really do that, Bean? Did I really say that if you wore lipstick your lips would turn black? Did I really say that if you touched the whiskers of a buffalo you’d get thrown to heaven seven times and back? How bizarre! I don’t remember any of it.’

More, more
, Bean wanted to tell her. You were mean beyond belief. But nothing mattered now that they were grown up and changed and wandering about in their lives, because Mayuri was the only one who had known her from the beginning. And Bean wished she could summon up her sister now, even if it was just for a cup of tea in a nearby café, even if they could sit wordlessly under a midnight-blue sky heaving with stars, multiplied like rabbits, just so she could understand how she had travelled that long distance from there to here.

Do you remember coming here when we were little, May? It’s funny how memory works. I remember this house being such a glorious escape, such a comfort. Now it all feels a bit jaded. Everything’s shrunk, including aunty and uncle, with all the misfortune they keep going on about
.

Mangala Aunty is sweet, but she’s been trained well. I have to tell you about the umbrella she lent me as soon as I arrived. My first day of work, and it’s pissing down with rain, so Aunty very kindly offers me her brolly. The saddest thing you ever saw – all the spokes going here and there, turned a million times inside out in the rain. And it was so carefully packed up in this Tesco bag, it must have been fifteen years old, at least! Anyway, I went out and bought two new umbrellas that day, and you should have seen her face when I presented one to her – tears in her eyes. Of course, misery-moo was like, ‘There’s no need to waste money Beena, you should be saving for the future.’ A fucking umbrella for godssake!

It’s really depressing in a way, having to think about money so much when you’ve never had to think about it before. And London is such an expensive city, ridiculously so. I wish I could get my own place, but at the moment, I just can’t afford it. So I’m going to have to deal with the Jains – all of them. Did I tell you about Deenu, the son? You remember him? Well, anyway, I’m pretty sure he’s gay – he’s got this love of all things designer, and he overdoes it on the cologne like nothing. Besides, he’s forty and
still
living at home with his parents! Anyway, he’s the prince of the house – comes and goes as he pleases in his BMW. Runs a restaurant in Richmond. I hardly see him. Sometimes we collide in the kitchen at breakfast and he says the exact same thing to me each and every time, ‘All right, Beena? Getting on OK?
’