The Pleasure Seekers (4 page)

Once in a while, Babo would go all the way to Lewisham, to the house of one of his Polytechnic friends, Bhupen Jain, a fellow Gujju from Kenya, whose wife, Mangala, made the kind of food Trishala used to make at home. And at weekends he’d park himself at Nat and Lila’s, where the plan was for them all to cook together, except Babo was so bad at it, they suggested he do the washing up instead.

Babo would report all this to Trishala (except the vindaloo bit, which would upset her unnecessarily) because he knew that her main concern was food: was he getting enough of it, and was he keeping healthy? It was also Babo’s way of letting his mother know that people were being kind to him, and that he wasn’t experiencing antagonism of any sort.

A week before he’d left for London, one of Prem Kumar’s card-playing friends, Vimal-bhai, had come over and launched into a story of his own son’s experiences in England. ‘Babo beta,’ he’d said, ‘When you go to England, you mustn’t worry if somebody calls you a darkie, OK?’

‘Why?’ asked Babo innocently, ‘I am a darkie . . . See!’ he said, pointing to his nut-brown arms.

‘But they mean it in a not-nice way, son. Anyway, you don’t take it that way. You don’t let it affect you. You just get on with what you’re going there for. That’s the only way to beat them at their own game.’

Vimal-bhai’s advice had greatly agitated Trishala, who wondered whether Babo, with his over-sensitive nature, would be able to cope with any kind of aggression. But Prem Kumar had pooh-poohed her concerns, saying that Babo would have to develop a thick skin if he was going to succeed in a foreign country.

In fact, Babo had never once felt threatened in England. Everyone he’d met so far had gone out of their way to make him feel comfortable. If anything
had
been disappointing, it was Nat and Lila’s lacklustre welcome, which Babo made sure to recount in full to his parents. Later, Babo would sever all connection with his cousin and his wife, but that was for a treachery that was still to come.

To Falguni, Babo’s initial letters were all about how he was aiming to get rich quick by winning the football pools. The place where Nat and Lila lived was the ugliest building in Hampstead, but it was owned by an Indian who used to work in a petrol station, and had won the Treble Chance after fifteen years of playing the pools. Babo calculated that if he set aside a small amount every week for coupons, he too could eventually buy property in London. When Falguni pestered him about possible dates for an engagement, Babo felt his stomach go thud thud very dully – no jiggly-wrigglies or excitement of any kind. He responded by saying how amazing it was that so much could happen in the little time he’d been away from her.

After a while, twelve weeks and five days to be exact, Babo’s letters to Falguni finally came to a stop. About the time when he moved premises to the YMCA in Croydon, something big happened in his life, and when that thing happened, Falguni, who’d been fading fast, was irreversibly dethroned. Babo’s last letter to Falguni would be blunt and pitiless:
For reasons that I can’t explain right now, I suggest that you forget about me and carry on with your life. What you imagine between us will never happen
. And with that off his chest, Babo made a solemn fire in the washbasin of his new room, determined to burn all evidence of his past love so he could begin this new phase of his life untainted.

What happened to Babo on 25 November 1968, when he saw her standing in the doorway of the canteen in her white mini-dress, with a twirl of red ribbon in her hair, was a familiar feeling. He’d had it when he’d seen Falguni with her newly grown breasts at Navratri, and he’d had it recently at the Dominion Theatre when Liz Taylor batted her Cleopatra eyes at him. Babo was used to falling instantly in love. It was what he’d done throughout college – run away to the movies to see Meena Kumari or Sharmila Tagore smouldering in their shimmery clothes with their kiss curls and chori chori looks, singing
Akele akele kahan ja rahen ho? Where are you going to alone?
But this was different. This was a real-life girl with the tiniest gap between her teeth, smiling at him and saying, ‘So, I meet the culprit at last.’

Babo would find out that her name was Siân Jones. That she’d been working for the company for a year as one of the chairman’s secretaries. That she was from a small village in North Wales. That her father worked in a limestone quarry and her mother taught at a primary school. Later, Babo discovered that Siân looked most beautiful when she was drunk. That when she thought no one was looking, she had long conversations with herself. That the reason she’d come to London with her best friend Ronda was because she wanted something bigger than what her little village in Wales could offer.

For now, though, all he could say was, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you’re obviously the reason why we’re having to up our sugar ration around here,’ said Siân, pointing to the over-brewed cup of tea on the sideboard, to which Babo was adding his fourth spoon of sugar.

‘I’ve been spying on you for a while now,’ she said, laughing. There were little crinkles in the corners of her green eyes. To Babo, she looked like a fashion model out of
Vogue
magazine – her lithe 5 foot 5 inch frame leaning against the doorway like a feather.

‘So, where are you from?’

‘India.’

‘I know, silly. I saw you in last month’s newsletter, but where in India?’

‘From Madras. It’s a city in the south, on the coast. I grew up there, but originally my family is from Gujarat.’

‘Sounds lovely. You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime.’

Ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom boom boom.

‘Hey, I have to take this up for Mr Joe, but my friend Ronnie and I are having a party at our flat this Saturday. You want to come by? It’s 38 Canfield Gardens, right by the Finchley Road tube. See you there.’

And with that, she was gone, the twirl of ribbon in her hair fluttering like a red Monarch butterfly out of the canteen into some other space that Babo wanted to immediately follow her into.

That Saturday, Babo, who had never been to a proper party before, arrived at Siân and Ronnie’s Finchley Road flat with a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps. ‘Should I take some flowers?’ he’d asked Fred.

‘What? To some girl you met for two minutes in the canteen who casually invited you to a party? Erm, no, Bob. You want to take a bottle – any kind of alcohol will do.’

Babo hadn’t planned on tasting alcohol that night, never mind getting drunk; it just happened. He’d been sitting on the couch, nursing a tonic water, wondering when would be a good time to leave so as to catch the last tube home, when Siân plopped down next to him and said, ‘Let’s try some of this stuff you brought us, shall we?’

Babo didn’t have the heart to explain what he’d had to explain to so many people before: that he was a Jain; that Jains weren’t supposed to eat meat or drink or inflict violence on anyone or anything; that his mother would rather go blind than see him like this – with a girl, smoking a cigarette, about to down half a bottle of Schnapps. But, ‘OK,’ he said, ‘Let’s try it together.’

By the third shot, Babo felt like he was on fire. This must be what love feels like, he thought: a burning. A burning that starts in your stomach and spreads to the rest of your body, filling you up with the smell of peppermint and making you light. Siân, laying her soft, auburn head on his shoulder said, ‘You’re nice, you know? Really nice. I could tell from the minute I saw you. I’m glad you came.’

Babo wished she would lean against him for ever. He wanted to reach down and brush away part of her fringe that had fallen into her eyes. ‘I hope you don’t think this is too forward,’ he said, ‘But would you like to go for a movie with me sometime?’

After a lot of back-and-forthing Babo decided on
Dr Zhivago
at the Curzon Soho. ‘Are you sure?’ asked Fred, ‘Isn’t that a bit too heavy? Wouldn’t you be better off with something like
The Graduate
or
Some Girls Do
?’

Babo winced. ‘No no. Omar Shariff, Julie Christie, it will be perfect.’ He’d seen it the week before by himself, but he wanted to see it again with Siân just to see if she’d cry in the same places.

That evening, as they sat in the pensive gloaming of the theatre with their hands entwined like serpents, Babo felt something growing inside him. It was the city opening her arms to him at last, saying,
Welcome, welcome to London town
. And afterwards, when they went back to Siân’s blue-walled bedroom to lie down on the bed and undress each other, Babo would lie there next to her, not knowing what to do, but with a feeling growing inside, filling and filling him.

He had never been this close to a woman before. The most Falguni had allowed was hand holding, and once, just once before he’d left, she’d allowed him to kiss her on the lips, but even then, she’d kept them clamped shut so his tongue couldn’t explore that lovely, lisping area of her mouth. Now, with Siân lying next to him – her body, naked and white, exposed to him like a wheat field to the wind – Babo could only gape with wonder, too scared to touch in case she should disappear, or suddenly turn into sand.

Later and later, though, he’d get the hang of it. There would be fumblings and premature ejaculations. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry, it’s just that you’re so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful. Can we try again?’ And Siân would nod, guiding him into the temple of her body, until Babo learned to hold her long and hard while the trains screeched by beneath them.

‘I want to try meat,’ Babo announced to Fred one afternoon. ‘I’m serious. Anything. You suggest. If I want to live in this country – and I do! then I need to learn how to eat meat, isn’t it? You tell me, Fred, can I afford to keep falling sick like this? Can I afford to be unhealthy?’

‘Slow down, Bob. What’s going on? You know I can’t do that. Your father will kill me. Besides, this is your religion, your tradition. Why do you want to change anything now?’

‘Because I’m in love with her, Fred, that’s it. I want to marry her, and if I’m going to marry her and live here in London, then I’m going to have to live like people here. I can’t keep holding on to these traditions. It’s too difficult.’

Fred wasn’t entirely convinced but he started Babo off with a poached egg anyway. ‘Better take it slow, mate. No meat as yet, just eggs, and after that we’ll raise the bar with some sausages and bacon.’

Within the month, Babo had eaten his way through the food chain, discovering that there were things that suited him better than others – corned beef in sandwiches he quite liked, and shepherd’s pie with lots of gravy. Sometimes, when Fred ordered something particularly distasteful like liver or ox-tail soup, Babo would raise his head from his plate and say miserably, ‘I thought eating meat would make the food better here, but it’s just as bad, isn’t it? All of it, whether it’s vegetarian or not, it’s just bad.’

‘Afraid so, mate, but at least now you know you’re not missing out on anything. Anyway, like I always say, you got to try, try and try again. You never know, things just might get better.’

And he was right. By the end of the year, thing were looking positively peachy. Babo had managed to gain five kilos and defy every one of Trishala’s prohibitions: meat, alcohol and women – just like that.

3  All Straightness is a Lie

All her life Trishala had heard that English women were not beautiful. Nothing to worry about in that department. Babo, whose idea of beauty was Nargis – doe-eyed, lustrous and most definitely Indian – would not find white-skinned, horsy women attractive. No. She would not lose him to that.

But Trishala knew nothing about hubris, or knowing thyself, or any of the other ancient Greek wisdoms. She should have known better.

The morning she received the telegram from Nat and Lila, she’d been sitting on the kitchen floor with bitter gourds in her lap, very like how she used to sit in the first few years of her marriage, when she’d been desperately trying to conceive a child. It had been on the advice of her mother-in-law in Anjar, who suggested that holding fruits and vegetables close to the female genital area would help kindle fertility. Furthermore, if this didn’t work, she was to tie a piece of red cloth around the waist of the neem tree which stood outside the bedroom, to ensure that the tree withered up and passed on its proliferating properties to her womb.

The morning the telegram arrived Trishala wasn’t contemplating or hoping to conceive another child, obviously, but she was thinking of how best to prepare the bitter gourd, and also thinking how remarkable it was that the curlicue shape of the gourds reminded her so much of the new jewellery set she was trying to persuade Prem Kumar to buy for her from Bapalal’s.

When she opened the telegram, she wondered at first whether she’d be able to read it with her basic 6th Standard English, or if she’d have to ask one of the children to help her. Alarmingly, the words made themselves immediately understood – loud and clear, throwing her into an irreparable state of turmoil, not unlike the turmoil she’d suffered as a young bride.

Oh, it was all coming back to mock her now. That one reckless night in Anjar when Ba asked her what good cradling vegetables in her lap for sixteen straight months had done her.

‘What to do? Nothing is happening,’ Trishala had said.

The problem had really been Prem Kumar. He didn’t understand desire. When he returned at nights he touched her body with the same care with which he supervised the wiping down of his machines at the end of the day. He was careful with her different parts and compartments, never experimenting, knowing only what to put where and getting there in minimal time with minimal fuss. He couldn’t know about desire because he didn’t understand the body. He desired a son, yes; children, yes; a wife, yes; but it was the flattest, straightest desire in the world which started at a point somewhere by his toes and ran up the length of him to his head. It didn’t diverge, refract, expand or explode. And there needed to be some amount of explosion if Trishala was ever going to get pregnant.