The Pleasure Seekers (5 page)

‘If you are looking to hit a six run,’ Ba told her, ‘You’re going to have to take the top position.’

So, one night, in the middle of those November thunderstorms of 1946, Trishala anointed herself with the potion of herbs and oils Ba had given her, while telling her (and this had been so unnecessary), that it would peak Prem Kumar’s penetration powers. She elongated the corners of her eyelids with extra kohl to make them glisten like raindrops on the feathers of a crow. And then, when she heard the peacocks dancing on the roof, as Ba instructed, she raced out to the courtyard, opened up her nightie and let the rain fall on her breasts and trickle through the thin cotton while she danced like a siren from a legend. She even unbuttoned her nightie and stepped right out of it to make sure that the rain fell into her, making something grow in her as it did the earth.

Later, she aroused her comatose husband by placing his hand on her wet breasts and another between her wet thighs. She licked the tips of his fingers and guided them to places he’d never ventured before. She straddled him like a goddess in the throes of war and took from him the nectar that she needed.

Something had moved inside her on that November night of great passion and cunning. Trishala felt a child being conceived: a son, who would know and remember all these things; who’d believe that people were meant to love like this; to cling to a body in the middle of the night, to turn over in sleep and grope for the soft parts of another.

The next morning Prem Kumar and Trishala, both equally startled by the events of the previous night, convinced themselves it must have been a dream, and never brought it up with each other in conversation. Moreover, they certainly never attempted anything like it again. Besides, Trishala found she’d stored up enough fertility in the space of that one evening to give birth to three more children in a more conventional manner.

Seeing the telegram now, though, Trishala understood that sometimes we pay for the sins committed in this lifetime without the luxury of being able to defer them to the next. How could she be so surprised with the news that Nat and Lila sent? Hadn’t she preordained this already? Willed her own Babo to stray off the path? This first-born, this child of desire – how could he have chosen any differently?

And yet, it was horrific. Impossible to bear! Trishala shut herself in her bedroom and prayed for an hour. She prayed to the adorable, the emancipators, the preceptors, the deans and the saints. She prayed for an answer to her misery, for surely this was misery, to have to trudge to Prem Kumar and show him this telegram.

Should she wait till he was home from the office, bathed and fed, settling with his betel-nut box for his one luxurious moment of the day? Drop the telegram in his lap while he was sitting cross-legged in his brown armchair and say, ‘See! Read what your son has done!’ Or should she run to him immediately and wail into his chest about how their beacon of light, their eldest joy, was soon going to become their greatest source of sorrow?

Trishala decided to wait.

Prem Kumar arrived home later than usual, irritated and exhausted from the daily arguments with labourers who always wanted more from him: more wages, more time off, more bonus, more than he could give. He walked in with his paint-streaked shirt, removed his chappals, marched straight to the bathroom for his evening ablutions to rid himself of the smell of turpentine, changed into his customary house clothes – dhoti and vest – placed his bottle-thick glasses back on the bridge of his fat nose, and parked himself on the kitchen floor, expectant and hungry for his dinner.

Trishala swished up to him, holding the telegram in her hands. ‘News regarding your son,’ she said peremptorily, plopping the telegram by his empty steel bowl.

Prem Kumar fingered the telegram with caution. He was of the idea that telegrams were dangerous things. Too often than not, they were the bearers of bad tidings, and this one was to be no different.

BABO SEEING ENGLISH WOMAN stop LOOKS SERIOUS stop WHAT SHALL WE DO stop

Trishala hovered like a suicidal moth beside her husband, waiting for his response. He looked truly surprised. Obviously, he hadn’t given any thought to this as Trishala had. He’d thought of education, money, work. He hadn’t set aside contingencies for emotion.

‘What a fool boy,’ he said simply, folding the telegram and placing it to one side. After a tense moment of silence, he snapped, ‘Am I getting fed tonight or am I performing some fast that I don’t know about?’

Trishala went wordlessly to the stove for the steaming vessel of dal dhokri and placed it on the hot plate. She scooped the soupy concoction into his bowl, filled his glass with warm water from the earthen pot and took her usual place by his side.

Normally, it was Prem Kumar’s habit to wrinkle up his nose and find fault with whatever was placed in front of him. Melons and cucumbers made him burp; tomatoes gave him gas; too much salt gave him swollen legs; too little salt made his eyes water; food not cooked slowly enough or long enough made his fingernails develop white streaks; coconut in any form gave him a headache; and curds that hadn’t set exactly right made his left eye twitch uncontrollably.

Sometimes, when his complaints became unbearable, Trishala would grow sullen and say that if he loved his mother’s cooking so much, he should have married her instead. But mostly, she did things in secret, without her husband knowing – picking the best curry leaves, tempering the mustard seeds just so, carving out the rotten parts of vegetables and depositing them in the pit at the back of the house, making sure all the time not to harm a single fly or ant in the preparation of Prem Kumar’s meal, so they could both be righteously absolved of any wrongdoing.

Today she watched with extra trepidation while her husband ate slowly and efficiently, chewing each morsel repeatedly before slurping it down his throat. He finished the entire bowl without comment and waited. It was his habit to wait five minutes before deciding on a second helping.

‘What a fool boy,’ he said, again. ‘Can I have some more, Trishala?’

She served him with anger this time. ‘What a fool boy, what a fool boy. What a fool husband! Is that all you’re going to say? Do you realize what this means?’

‘Wife dear, I’m fully aware of what this means. It means that our son is incapable. That he is short-sighted and is looking only to the path on which he treads and the wall on which he leans. We will have to bring him back.’

‘And what about all the money we’ve spent? What about his studies? What about poor Falguni?’ she screeched.

‘Trishala, please stop this senseless screaming. Nothing in the world means a thing if a man has no roots. Do you understand? Babo always had that streak in him. I didn’t think he would act on it, but he has. He has strayed away from what he knows and accepted a different way of thinking. Once a man does that, he’s already lost. But if we want to preserve any sense of respect for this family, he must come back. We’ve already arranged with Kamal-bhai and Meghna-behn that Babo will be betrothed to Falguni on his return. What will we say to them? We must think of family now. Nothing else. Money is not important. Education can be taken up anywhere.’

Jointly deciding that this was an emergency of the highest order, Prem Kumar and Trishala sent off a telegram to Babo the very next day.

MOTHER IN HOSPITAL stop SERIOUS stop RETURN ASAP stop

This job done, they waited.

Babo had grown lazy about visiting Nat and Lila at the weekends. While he still travelled the same route north every Friday after class, instead of going all the way to Hampstead, he got off at Finchley Road so he could spend his two free days with Siân. Lila often telephoned at work to pester him, ‘Are you really studying that hard, Babo, or have you found yourself a girlfriend? Come over, na? We’re making bhel puri this weekend.’

Even Nat deigned to call once. ‘Babo, are you all right? Anything troubling you? Have we offended you? Done something wrong? You’ll let us know, won’t you? Your bapuji keeps writing to ask how you’re getting on and I don’t know what to tell him because I haven’t seen you in so long. Listen, why don’t you come over on Sunday? The West Indies are playing Australia. I got a brand new transistor from work, which is just A-class superb. What do you say?’

Babo went, grudgingly, out of a sense of obligation more than anything else. Not because he felt they deserved it. No. They’d abandoned him the day he’d arrived; he’d never forget that. Besides, he was enjoying his ‘alone’ time as Nat had rightly predicted, so why didn’t they just take the hint and leave him be? He went because he knew if he didn’t, the next time his father phoned, he’d have something to say about it. So to avoid that headache, he turned up late on a Sunday morning and hung around just long enough to eat some lunch, skulking and looking at his watch the whole time. Then he dashed out of the door saying, ‘Aujo aujo, see you soon,’ not even bothering to mask the insincerity in his voice.

By the time he received the telegram from his parents in June, Babo and Siân were well on their way. Barely a month after their meeting, at the ‘How Exotic Can You Be?’ Christmas party at the Finchley Road flat, Babo had leaned into Siân while dancing to Otis Redding’s ‘The Dock of the Bay’ and said, ‘Charlie Girl,’ (for he’d taken to calling her that), ‘I hope you know that I love you very much, and that I intend to marry you.’

Babo was dressed as a prince from the Arabian Nights – moustache and beard grown especially for the occasion, and a proper turban borrowed from a Rajput boy at the hostel. Siân had come as a belly-dancer in billowy red pants and a glittery boob tube with smoky black kohl around her eyes. They made a fine picture: Babo and Siân, starkly contrasting with each other, their features neither blunt nor sharp; their full lips and soft skin.

For New Year, Fred had invited them to his club in Surrey for a dinner-dance casino night, where Babo made a killing on the one-armed bandit. It was exactly like in his dreams – money spluttering out of the machine, ka-chink ka-chink – except these were only pennies, not enough to buy himself a property in London, but enough to give his travel fund a substantial boost. ‘Well, you can’t stop now, Bob,’ Fred had said, ‘You’ve got to keep going. Maybe move on to Black Jack?’ ‘No, no,’ said Babo hurriedly, collecting the coins and taking them to the exchange counter like a good Gujju boy, ‘I’ve had enough now. I know when to stop.’

All through the New Year, Siân and Babo made plans for what they would do that summer when Babo was finally free of his Polytechnic classes. They were planning to hitchhike all over Europe, starting with Germany, because Babo had found out through his extensive network of friends at the YMCA that to get the best youth hostel discounts and cheapest train fares, you had to join the German Association. Siân found an old Baedeker’s in a second-hand bookstore, which for a while became their most treasured possession. Babo and Siân spent most weekends canoodling on the couch saying
Ich liebe dich
to each other, dreaming of all the places they were going to explore together, and how they were going to be changed by these places.

On the Saturday before the telegram arrived, Babo and Siân bumped into Nat and Lila at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead at a showing of
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
‘Well, hello, hello,’ said Nat, trundling over and planting his arms around Babo’s neck. ‘You’ve become a stranger to us these past months, Babo, and I can see why,’ he said, looking appreciatively at Siân. ‘Is the lovely lady a work colleague or a college friend?’

‘We work together,’ said Siân, extending her hand to Nat and then to Lila. ‘And you are Babo’s cousins?’

‘Yes yes, all in the family. So, what are you doing after the film? Why don’t you come over to our house? We are only nearby.’

‘OK,’ said Siân, ‘That’s very nice of you to offer,’ even though Babo was squeezing her hand desperately, trying to signal otherwise.

‘Didn’t you want your cousins to know about me? Is that what this is about? Am I supposed to be a secret?’

‘Of course not,’ said Babo miserably. ‘You just don’t understand. Things are so different in my family. These people are supposed to be my cousins, but they’re just waiting for me to do something wrong. They revel in it – other people’s miseries. Anyway, now they know, so there’s nothing to do but go along with it.’

‘Oh, I see. So there’s something “wrong” with me now, is there? Some cause of misery. Tell me exactly what it is, because I can try to rectify it, really.’

‘It isn’t that. It’s not about you at all. Well, OK, maybe it is. You see, I’m expected to
do
certain things as the oldest child of my family, as the son. My parents have huge expectations of me. One of the things I’m expected to do is marry this girl they’ve chosen for me . . .’

‘Ah, ah, ah,’ Siân interjected, because Babo had already revealed to her in great detail the whole Falguni story. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but you chose her too, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, yes,’ Babo snapped. ‘But that was a long time ago and so very different from anything I feel for you. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to go about this. What I’m supposed to tell my parents and when, and how. I don’t want that idiot cousin of mine blurting out anything before I get the chance to say anything to them directly. They’ll be disappointed, of course, but they’ll see when they meet you, they’ll see how wonderful you are, and how right we are together, and in the end, I’m sure it’s only my happiness they’ll think about. I love you so much, my Welsh Valley Girl. I love you. Never doubt that.’