1977 (22 page)

of Lila whispering at some stage of their gigantic couplings, “Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi,

London, Rome, Paris, Cairo, New York, Warsaw, Prague, Washington—oh in those places

to be like this Franky, my tireless lover. Ah! What happiness you will give me world-wide.

What is Pankot but a beginning? What do we know of Pankot if we only know Pankot? Ah!

Ah!”

He sat up, stabbed by spears of revelation, blunt last night, razor sharp now. He groaned

and, driven by a demon, got out of bed, half-fell to his knees as if these were the only

supports he had left, then got to his feet and, naked, opened his door in to Lila’s room and

surprised Minnie in the act of stealthily clearing up the ruins of last night’s feast. She placed a

hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek of laughter and fled, foolishly forgetting to close the

door quietly so that Lila shrieked and sat up and stared at Mr Bhoolabhoy, then shrank back

because he was coming at her. He grabbed her shoulders.

He wanted to shout, the occasion called for it, but his voice came out cracked and hoarse.

“What did you say, Lila? Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Cairo? What are you up to, Lila? What are

you hiding from me? I will know. I
must
know. You must tell me. You will tell me. You have

sold the hotel. You did not consult me. Am I not your husband? Am I not entitled to give an

opinion? Are my wishes of no account? You will make what you call this real money. You

intend to go to all these places. You imagine I will go to them with you. But only I want to

stay in Pankot. Only I want an improvement here, an improvement there, decorators, new

furnishings, new table cloths, new cutlery, pukka fittings in all bathrooms, telephones in all

bedrooms, new typewriter, new letter-heading. Aren’t these modest wants, Lila?”

“Modest?” she shrieked. “Who is talking of modesty? Look at you! Stark-bollock, isn’t it?

Frightening me out of my wits!” She broke free, grabbed a pillow and smote him with it

smack in the genitals.

He groaned but grabbed the pillow—an instrument of punishment translated in a moment

into a comforter—and held it to his numbed parts.

“Lila,” he pleaded, eyes closed. “Lila, my love. All I want is to stay on here and manage the

hotel for you, for you, my Lila.”

“Liar!” she shouted. “You do not love me! All you want me for is one thing.”

In the passage between dining-room and kitchen, Minnie covered her mouth again and

then said to her fellow listener, Prabhu, “Management wanting it. Ownership not giving it.”

They went to spread the news among the other servants that there had been an intended

rape in Room 1.

“All you want,” Mrs Bhoolabhoy said, but now instinctively lowering her voice to a hiss, “is

hotel and church, church, hotel, what difference? There is nothing to be had from either.

The hotel is fit for nothing. Only the site is worth anything. So stay on by all means why

not? Like in the old days, perhaps we could brick you up alive when the new building starts,

to give place an auspicious start. Not that that would work. Only fine strong handsome

Punjabi boys were worth bricking up. If we bricked you up the whole building would

collapse even if we aren’t cheated by the man supplying the concrete. Now go to your room.

I do not want to see you again until you have come back to your senses, then I will deal with

you. What have I married? A fool? What was I when I married you? Also a fool? Dear God,

what a beginning to the day!”

She groaned and turned over and kept on groaning.

“What new building, my love?”

The iron had entered his soul. Only temporarily he supposed but it had entered. Be my

guest, he said to it, stay as long as you like.

“I am talking to you, Lila my love. I ask, what new building?”

She lay doggo. But he knew she was listening. He was also listening—to the still quiet voice

not of his conscience but of his commonsense which his passionate nature and wish for an

easy life had kept under restraint ever since his marriage.

“If you will not tell me what building, Lila, then I will tell you. It is the building you hoped

to put up when you bought the hotel from old Mr Pillai’s executors, but which you found

you could not put up because the people who would give planning and development

permission and permission to pull down the old place and people who would have lent you

the money were already in the pockets of the consortium, is that not it? And the members of

the consortium did not like you Lila because you had stepped in and bought the site before

they had quite made up their minds. You knew what was in their minds and hoped to profit

by it, instead of which they buggered you up by ignoring this site and building the Shiraz

opposite. But now they find they wish to expand because of the Nansera Development

project and heaven knows what else, so in the end you have been very clever, Lila my love,

because you have what they now want and they will give you what you want to get their

hands on it. The site is worth several times at least what you paid for it and hanging on to it

has cost you little. To you, Lila my love, it has always been a site, not an hotel. It has always

been the rupees you were thinking of, never the guests. The guests have been left to me, and

what am I?

“I will tell you what I am. I am the man who has maintained, what is it you call it, the

goodwill of the business, what is left of it. Single-handed I have maintained it Lila with no

help from you but more with hindrance. In Ranpur people say, So you are going to Pankot.

Shiraz is most modern, ring Shiraz, if you can’t get in there ring old Frank Bhoolabhoy at

Smith’s, he will see you are all right. It is true, Lila, my love. I grant you it does not amount

to much but that is not my fault. All the time I have been thinking I am maintaining goodwill

of the business to carry us through a bad time by being a good manager I have only been

caretaker of a development site. Now bulldozers come in. New monstrosity goes up. But the

good name of Frank Bhoolabhoy of Smith’s Hotel, Pankot, my Lila, will take a little longer

to ruin. I do not know whether goodwill has been considered in all your figurings and

workings and manipulations because all that sort of thing is beyond me. I am not an

intelligent man, and proof of this is that I do not want to go to Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi,

London, Paris, Cairo, New York, Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. What would a man like me do

in places like that?”

He waited.

“What indeed?” she murmured. “You are a fool.”

“I know, Lila, my love.”

She heaved herself up and round and looked at him.

“And fools are sometimes wise without knowing it which doesn’t make them less of fools.

The crooks! Perhaps they get away with too much! Tell Mr Pandey to be here in ten minutes.

Tell Minnie to come at once. Go and get dressed. I shall want you later.”

“I shall not be here, Lila. I shall bathe. I shall get dressed. I shall have a modest breakfast.

Then I have things to do. I shall not be available for the rest of the morning.”

“It is Monday!” she cried. “You
will
be here!”

“Sunday, Monday, what is the difference when all one has to manage is a site? I really

cannot stand here any longer with my sex in your pillow.”

He placed the pillow gently on the bed, turned, then turned back again to face her amazed

glance.

“What of the Lodge?” he asked.

“What of it?”

“People are living there.”

“Here also at least one person is living,” she said. “And she asks herself why? She asks

herself for how long? She asks what is the point? She asks why she has to live at all if she is

always to be surrounded by fools and crooks! Call Minnie.”

“Call her yourself, Lila my love. You are in better voice than I am.”

“You will pay for this, Frank Bhoolabhoy,” she shouted at his bare bottom.

“I know,” he murmured, “oh yes, I know.”

By the time he closed the door between them he was already beginning to because the iron

had melted and the prospects ahead were almost too atrocious to contemplate.

WHEN HE SLIPPED out of the hotel half-an-hour later it was in a spirit more of

desperation than of lingering rebellion. Used though he was to bad Monday mornings there

was usually the pleasure to look forward to of Lila’s midday departure for bridge at the club

and a convivial evening with Tusker. But today, even if Lila managed to despatch her

business with Mr Pandey in time for him to catch the midday train and for her to recover

sufficiently to welcome the idea of expending the rest of her temper over cards, he did not

think he could face an evening chatting amiably to a man whose days themselves might be

numbered and whose days at The Lodge certainly looked like being. He would not dare tell

him. And, who knew, perhaps what he had said to Lila that caused her to refer to her

prospective partners as crooks would spur her to actions that would delay completion of the

contract or even lead to its cancellation.

Wishful thinking, no doubt ; but any thought that gave a glimmer of hope had to be

cherished. He cycled to the bazaar and spoke to his old friend, Mr Mohan Lal the

photographer (Weddings, Home Portrait Specialists, Passport Photographs) and did a deal

with him to take a couple of time exposures of the interior of the church and a series of

exteriors. The deal was for a cut rate if Mr Mohan Lal was credited in Father Sebastian’s

magazine article, and for the shots to be taken today when the Sunday flowers on the altar

would still be fresh.

“I will send young Ashok right away,” Mr Lal promised, which Mr Bhoolabhoy knew

meant in about an hour. As for ‘young’ Ashok, he must be well over thirty years old. Ashok

was an untouchable, although you were supposed nowadays to call him a member of the

Scheduled Castes. He had been an orphan and a ragamuffin who as a kid ran wild in Pankot

picking up jobs here and there including jobs running errands for Mr Allah Din the previous

owner of the Paramount Photo Studio (motto: Time passes, a photograph Remains) who

had packed up in 1947 and gone to Pakistan. Mr Lal (coming the other way and leaving
his

studio behind) had been accosted by young Ashok on the first day he opened for business,

had let the boy make himself useful and, as he grew, begun to teach him the trade and the

art, until now, as Mr Lal’s Outside Man, he was a familiar face behind his camera at

weddings, christenings, coming of age parties and at grander occasions accompanying Mr Lal

to regimental sports days, receptions at the Shiraz and speech days at the Chakravarti

College. As an untouchable he was potentially a convert and Mr Bhoolabhoy wondered

whether he ought not to do more to urge him into the fold. Perhaps today a seed could be

sown because Ashok had never been inside the church.

Reaching Church road, Mr Bhoolabhoy dismounted and pushed his bicycle up the incline.

Once inside he inspected the vases of flowers. They were still in good fettle. It was a lovely

sunny morning. The church was full of light. It looked beautiful. The personal pride he took

in keeping it so was a sin Jesus would surely forgive him. He sat in the front pew and gazed

with love at the altar. As a youth he had wanted to take Holy Orders, but his father, although

a devout Christian himself, insisted on him following in his footsteps and learning the hotel

business.

Mr Bhoolabhoy Sr said that short of eternal life in Jesus’s arms he could want nothing

better for Francis than the managership, even ownership, of a seemly and decent hotel such

as he himself worked at as assistant manager. That was at the old Swiss Hotel in Mutti-pore.

Mr Bhoolabhoy Sr’s career had suffered from ill-health and lack of ambition perhaps.

Francis hadn’t inherited the ill-health but often felt he’d inherited the lack of ambition to the

extent that it seemed to have been fulfilled the moment old Mr Pillai appointed him manager

at Smith’s, just in time for his father to know and write him a letter of congratulation from

what turned out to be his death bed.

Mr Bhoolabhoy knelt to pray for the repose of his father’s and mother’s souls and for

peace to ease his own troubled mind.

But the harder he prayed the more troubled his mind became. Ah, so many sins! Not least

adultery in Ranpur, and occasions of fornication before marriage. Also the deadly sin of lewd

and lustful thought—once committed even here in St John’s when observing Susy Williams’s

neat little bottom as she raised her arms and stood on tiptoe to arrange some flowers better.

Then there were the sins of suspicion, of jealousy, greed and envy, and also of cowardice

which perhaps was the worst of the lot. Oh Lord, he muttered, when it comes to sin you