The Pleasure Seekers (33 page)

In November, Ba came to stay. The whole family needed to be together now, more than ever. It was monsoon season in Madras, and the roads were damp and porous from all the rains. They seemed to swallow ideas as if they were nothing.

Dolly and Meenal, who had left behind their diamond merchant and shipbroker husbands, shared their old bedroom downstairs in Sylvan Lodge. Ba was given the room next to Prem Kumar’s. Siân and Babo shut up the house of black and orange gates and moved into Chotu’s half-renovated room upstairs; the room where they had spent their two-year trial period in Madras.

Siân fell into long-forgotten patterns: knowing when to be silent and when to speak. She was a young bride again, wearing saris, shelling peas on the kitchen floor, looking for solitary places of comfort in the house because the doors could never be closed. Someone was always ready to storm through them to say, ‘Come, bhabi, let’s play cards, let’s
do
something.’ Or ‘Bhabi, come and help Meenal and me sort out Mummy’s old jewellery boxes – there’s such a lot of junk.’

Babo, when he came to her, no longer smelled of Gold Flakes or mimosa, but of formaldehyde – a clean smell of death.

Sometimes, in the middle of the day, Siân would panic because she couldn’t remember what Chotu had looked like when she first arrived in India. Nothing of what he was now reminded her of the shy, knobbly twelve-year-old he used to be. Now he was a stranger under sheets: thin lines for legs, and a face with no rim zim in it.

Ba found Siân huddled in secret corners. ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ she’d say. ‘Terrible and unnecessary – all this madness with hospitals. Tell Babo to bring him back home. Chotu should die at home.’

For weeks, Siân had been telling Babo to call Bean.
She deserves to know. Now. Before it’s too late
. But Babo hadn’t called. Saying it aloud meant squashing the only hope that perhaps everything would be OK.

Normality crashed into their days. There were still clothes that needed washing, food that needed cooking. Sometimes it began to feel like they were on one of their long, stifling family holidays – maybe Dolly and Meenal should call one of the Cuts and Curls girls to come and give them pedicures, maybe they could go sari shopping – because there was still boredom to deal with, endless hours of waiting. Only Chotu was missing, gone off on a trip somewhere, swimming with Bean, or on his ‘in lieu of’ European holiday. He’d be back soon, they were sure of it.

And then the guilt would strike. One of the sisters usually, sitting at the dining table after lunch, would crack open and let lose a store of remembrances, until Ba got up, pushing her plate away, and said, ‘This isn’t the way. This can’t be the way.’

In the evenings, Prem Kumar’s old card-playing buddies came to sit in the saggy brown sofas and slurp tea from saucers, talking of business and politics, never of death. Mayuri came later, after teaching at the Abacus Montessori School, to rescue Siân. Mother and daughter sat on Chotu’s bed, doing cross-stitch patterns – creations that wouldn’t be framed and hung on the walls, but folded away uselessly in some bottom drawer. It helped pass the time, and it helped not having to speak. Cyrus came for Mayuri after work at the garage, his long, sweet face and fingers smeared with engine oil. ‘Do you need anything, Aunty? Why doesn’t Mayuri stay with you? Really, it’s all right. Tell us, what can we do?’

But Siân wouldn’t allow it. This wasn’t the time for it in their life. Hadn’t they already had to deal with Darayus dying? Darayus, who had to be bathed and wrapped in white and packed in a cool box direct to Bombay so he could be taken to the Towers of Silence. ‘You go on home, love, both of you, get back home.’

Siân thought about her mother and father. They were in the cemetery in Nercwys, lying under the earth together, united in death: a stack of bones with wild daisies sinking roots into them.
Is this how a thing must end?
she thought. And Babo, and herself? How would they be united if she was buried and he was burned?

‘I want to be cremated,’ Siân told Babo, as the time drew nearer. Because she knew there was nothing that survived this world. Didn’t they know this already? Hadn’t their two daughters vanished – whoosh whooshed down the great banister of Sylvan Lodge, pushed open the orange and black gates and disappeared?

Babo told Siân, like he used to in her blue-walled bedroom in Finchley Road, how he didn’t believe in ideas of redemption or guilt. He remembered telling Trishala once, in a fit of adolescent anger, that the idea of reincarnation was the biggest escape of all. And he still believed it: after we died, there could be nothing.
A man is born and dies alone
. But he was carrying around a new hope these days: that in the ultimate dissolution on the funeral pyre,
something
would be left. Babo, after years of unbelieving, began to believe in the idea of the phoenix, in resurrection and ashes.

Siân found him under the stairs of Sylvan Lodge rearranging Chotu’s shoes, holding each of them close to his chest, marvelling at their size. ‘How did he get so much bigger than me?’ Babo asked. ‘And when? How did he grow to wear such big shoes and then shrink so much?’

When Chotu died they laid him out on the dining-room floor with turmeric sprinkled around to keep the ants away. The priest prepared Chotu’s body for death; created a passage for all the impure elements to pass through, so his soul could flee from the crown of his head. They had a funeral in the rain that lasted for hours, until fire won over water and the body burned to ash.

Bean was there to watch it all. She saw Prem Kumar totter over to Chotu on the dining-room floor to place the final garland of flowers on his wasted body. She saw Ba pouring honey over Chotu’s feet. When the men carried Chotu away, Bean slumped against the pista-green walls of Sylvan Lodge along with Mayuri, Siân, her aunts and the unibrows. After the funeral, she watched as Babo waded out to sea, knee-high in water, scattering the remains of his brother – the garlands, incense, ash, the burned-down cancers, burned-down rotten kidneys, burned-down stubbornness. She saw her father with his head in his hands looking up and down the dirtied shoreline of a city he had once loved, knowing it to be lost to him, just as his brother was now lost; weeping because it had to be on a day of rain.

Bean observed her aunts Meenal and Dolly, women who used to be girls once, slender as any beanstalk, grown sideways, expanded like planets with multiple rings. The aunts told Mayuri and her to look upwards. They gave them prayer beads and told them to pray for Chotu’s soul because if Chotu’s soul was still caught in the house, if it was still unhappy, then all kinds of terrible things could happen. Her aunts said that it was only after a man died that his soul could think about the acts of his life that had caused him pain or pleasure; only afterwards could he think about escaping the multiplicity of sorrows. Because a man must leave all that behind if he wants to move towards purity, and they must help him along, counting prayers on their fingers, clickety-click clickety-click, so his soul could know which way to turn, so his journey could be safe.

Bean and Mayuri sat on the red-brick terrace with prayer beads in their hands. Now that they were within touching distance of each other, they couldn’t really speak. Not of the letters, not of the fears. They couldn’t even speak of Chotu, whom they had watched in the final days, disappearing and disappearing until there was nothing left.

Back in the house of orange and black gates, Babo held his wife in all her hard and soft places. His daughters slept in the room next door. For a while, Babo had all his girls under the same roof again. In the mornings, after breakfast, Babo went to stand at the edge of the newly installed fish pond in the garden. There he lovingly drizzled nourishment down on its green surface, waiting for the little flashes of gold to come shluck shlucking from the reeds. ‘They’re waiting for me,’ he said happily, to Mayuri and Bean, counting their sparkling bodies to make sure the cats from the Punjab Women’s Association hadn’t been up to any mischief.

Babo found solace in rituals. At 11 a.m. he left for Sanbo Enterprises with his tiffin carrier and battered briefcase,
The Hits of John Denver
on automatic replay in his car stereo. After lunch, he called his wife, as he had done everyday of their married life, and said, ‘Charlie?’ expectantly, waiting for her to fill the silence with something, anything, that could take him from now till when he was home again. At nights Babo held his wife, and wondered how they’d shared their blood after all, secured their own immortality. Babo, who knew that making children was like making your own religion; who knew that darkness was an indispensable part of beauty.

And inevitably, when Mayuri moved back to her house on the beach, and Bean said, ‘Daddy, it’s time to go back to London now. Do you want me to stay? Just tell me, because if you do, I will,’ Babo wished she hadn’t asked, because it meant he couldn’t say yes.
Yes, stay with us, don’t ever leave
. Because losing this brother had been something like losing his own life, and the tears he wept into his wife’s marble body at nights were selfish tears of his own losing, separate from the temporary space Chotu had created.

Babo wanted his daughters to understand that the world was changing – lickety-split, snippety-snip – without his consent. All the roads had shrunk in size, suddenly merging into a single stony path leading surely and abruptly over the hills. He wanted to tell his girls that this is how he felt –
over the hill
and quite far away from where he really wanted to be, which was travelling somewhere in the world with Siân. Lying under a night sky bludgeoned with stars, with nothing to tie them to the earth except their own bodies. Nothing to drag them downwards. Nothing but the single thread of love between them, which had always been enough, more than enough.

26  If Something Ain’t Right It’s Wrong

Bean had been having dreams again. She was walking through the rooms of the house of orange and black gates with Mayuri, lying on the mosaic floors: head to foot, foot to head, learning to walk in darkness.

When Bean woke from this darkness in London there was still the same
shame shame puppy shame
between her legs; her sheets were still wet, but they were wet from other things. Every morning Bean clambered out to wash herself because love in this city was dangerous. There were men everywhere she looked. Men who needed and demanded, but who never stayed long enough for Bean to think, this is
it
, this is the Ekam Ba was talking about. After everything, when one of them got up to walk through the door, there was always a sigh of relief; it was never anything unbearable.

‘Give it a chance,’ Allegra was always saying, and she was right, because Bean blew through them like the wind; all her love affairs were so brief and second-rate, they may as well have never happened at all.

The Brazilian dancer was the oldest: forty-three. He had the most beautiful body Bean had ever seen – carved from gold, lithe, hairless. It was like a woman’s body, except instead of fully-fledged breasts he had two pale pink rosettes, ideal for suckling. When they made love the Brazilian dancer wanted Bean to suck hard on those rosettes, ‘Bite me, baby,’ he’d say, because it helped him come. At his age it took longer. Not like the Nigerian investment banker or the Greek musician, who were young and greedy and always ready to go. Not like the Russian rocket scientist, who liked to have sex once before dinner and twice afterwards when they were nice and giddily drunk.

The Brazilian dancer didn’t drink. He loved his body too much. He was always following some kind of stringent diet, compartmentalizing his food, weighing it out according to textures and colours.

‘Don’t you miss it?’ Bean asked.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘There was a time when I drank every day, smoked packs of cigarettes, and had endless shots of espresso. I’ve had my share of being nervous and high. Things are much clearer now. My body not only dances, it sings. But,’ he conceded, ‘It does help for flirting. It’s much easier to flirt with alcohol.’

The English actor knew all about flirting. He loved the bodies of women. He was always touching Bean in public, tracing the inner part of her thighs or the backs of her knees in taxis, gently guiding her along with one hand placed firmly on the curve above her bum. ‘This part is my favourite,’ he’d say, in bed, lifting Bean’s hair away and scraping the back of her neck with his perfectly-square, stubbly jaw. The backs of things, curvatures. After three months of solid courting, after fucking Bean vigorously and efficiently in every room of his Notting Hill mansion, he said, ‘Well, this has been so nice, hasn’t it? I’m going to miss you when I’m away.’ And then he disappeared to shoot a film, phoning once a week, then once a month, then dwindling down to nothing, until the memory of him faded into a pale litmus blue like the rest of them.

Only the Canadian rock-climber refused to leave in a hurry. He really fell for Bean. The first time they had sex in his flatmate’s basement bedroom, when he saw little drops of sweat form between her breasts, he told her she was the woman he’d been waiting for all his life. The rock-climber wasn’t the kind of man Bean usually went for. His body was stringy and powerful, marked with lusty patches of dark hair.

‘I didn’t think hairy was my type,’ Bean told Allegra. But what difference did ‘type’ make when it came to chemistry?

The rock-climber believed in making out like an avalanche: strong, hard and all of a sudden. Things between them might have lasted longer if it hadn’t been for the fact that he held Bean at nights in the same way – enveloping her so tightly, she could barely breathe. ‘I’m going back home to India,’ she finally lied. ‘My parents have found me someone to marry. I’m sorry.’