As Sweet as Honey (22 page)

A series of casual hookups followed, but nothing amounted to much. He resolved to become a bachelor, set in his ways, attached to fuzzy slippers on the weekends and dinners at the pub round the corner. He wondered if he could learn to love a pipe as his father did, and spent time in tobacco shops, looking at displays of wood-grained ware. Tobacconists were solid places, he thought, with a hushed quiet, while their proprietors stayed back, only letting out a discreet cough to indicate their presence. In addition to pipes, one could find miniature chess sets, backgammon boards, and fine colognes (their names evoking another era with words like Bay Rum, Lord’s Favourite No 10, Truefitt & Hill), as well as soft leather pouches, tortoiseshell mustache combs, and, of course, an ample selection of cigarettes and cigars. In the end, he decided he wasn’t a pipe smoker, though he still liked to stop in the shops for a heady whiff.

Archer wanted him to visit Madhupur, set up a publishing company with island bookbinders. Instead, Simon stayed on in publishing in London for ten years, until he’d had enough and walked away. Now was the time to write his book. He would freelance for local newspapers, but that too became steady. He became “Simon Digs Up,” the roving horticulturalist, with a weekly nine-hundred-word column. Susan took him out to lunch his first-year anniversary on the job. She ordered champagne and told him that Archer sounded almost bubbly in his letters.

“Bubbly?”

“Happy. As if he’s taking stock of his life and likes what he sees.”

“And that’s cause for alarm?”

“It is, when he is living halfway around the world and has no intention of returning home.”

“Let him be, Susan. Doesn’t Archer deserve happiness? And can’t you visit to see him?”

“Pi? I don’t ever want to go to Pi.”

A month later came the wedding invitation, printed on saffron and red paper, most of it in Sanskrit. Sowbhaghyavati Meterling Marries Shri Archer. Blessings, blessings, and more blessings.

Looking at Oscar, he could see Archer’s dimples. He had stopped in front of a tobacconist’s. His mother said the baby looked exactly like Archer, but his father said he looked like Simon. Simon’s heart had opened to Oscar upon his birth; if he analyzed it, it was a combination of grief and joy and a tenderness he didn’t know he could feel toward a baby. He wanted to protect him, protect Meterling. Was he being macho? Male pride blustering up ineptly and uselessly, for how could he protect him from accidents, falls, a world that spoke its frustrations with bombs and violence? Just the other day, there was a bomb scare at Waterloo Station. Just like that, he had transformed from a carefree vegetarian in London to a concerned father and husband.

A stylish woman stooped to peer at Oscar, and then at Simon.

“Simon?”

“Estelle.”

“Where have you been all this time? Did you—is this your son?”

“Yes, he is, actually. I’ve become a dad,” adding hastily, “and a husband.”

“Well, that’s wonderful news! And so brave of you.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Really brave of you, Simon.”

“So, um, this is my son, Oscar.”

“He’s adorable, that’s why I stopped in the first place. Which hospital?”

“Oh, he was born on an island in the Indian Ocean,” he said, retrieving the toy that had fallen on the pavement.

“Didn’t your cousin—oh, I’m so sorry, I heard.”

“Well,” said Simon, without thinking about it, “this is actually Archer’s son.”
Damn
. Why had he said that?

“Oh, you and your wife adopted his son, that’s—”

“No—I mean yes, but he’s actually her son.”

“But I don’t understand—how can …?”

“Oh, it’s complicated.”

“You’re married to your cousin’s wife, I see—I think it’s—”

“I know, brave of me.”

“Noble, really. No—really. Practically medieval, if you think about it.”

She laughed—out of embarrassment, Simon hoped.

“Well …”

“Yes …”

“So good …”

“Absolutely.”

Damn
Estelle. And why did he ever feel the need to say this was Archer’s son? Now, the whole damn publishing industry would know. Well, so what if they knew? He had fallen in love with his late cousin’s wife. He adopted Oscar. It was simple. God, wasn’t it Estelle who used to tease him at Berkham’s with
“Simple Simon,” how did it go? The rhyme would enter his brain like a worm all day, he thought, and he wouldn’t remember the words.

“Oscar, what do you say we go get a slice of pie?”

They went to American Pudding, a well-lit café, and found a table. This was where many mothers and fathers came with their children, and the babble was loud. Then again, everything was loud in London, the buzz of a world city.

From his rucksack, Simon fished out a bottle of breast milk. Oscar was only semi-interested. A few more months and they could start solid foods. He met his pie with relish. Nearby, a six-year-old boy was squabbling with his sister over chocolate while their mother sat wearily in front of her tea.

“You took big bites and Mummy said we were to share.”

“She didn’t say anything about the size of our bites.”

“Mummy!”

Their mother had laid her head down on the table.

At another table, a kind of fathers’ group converged with assorted youngsters in nappies whose voices competed with one another.

“If I were back at work, I couldn’t afford the time—”

“I know what you mean. Here she’s getting promoted, and I’m left at home all day.”

“But who can afford the child care if we do get back to work? For godsake, Timothy, give the train to Jonathan!”

Oscar was now sucking his bottle with more interest. A dinner party. Simon had nearly forgotten.

That morning, he had risen early with Oscar, to find Meterling already up. She heated sesame oil in a small pan and, pouring it into a tiny bowl, handed it to him for the Diwali oil bath.

“You could come in with us,” he’d suggested.

“Not with the baby. My grandmother would faint.”

“We won’t tell her.”

But Meterling shook her head no, and so together, they bathed Oscar in the sink, massaging the oil into his skin so he gleamed.

“Look, he loves this.”

“A born pasha.”

Sometimes she felt, Meterling said, she could eat his toes, his plump legs and arms, he was such a dumpling.

They dressed him in his new striped blue onesie (the kurta was for the party) and tiny fuzzy socks. Simon received a shirt and sweater, while Meterling wore the new sari; she would change into something else while cooking. Oil baths, new clothes, sweets and lights for Diwali, Festival of Lights, to welcome wisdom and common sense in everyone.

Now Oscar wore a wool baby coat and baby shoes, a baby scarf and hat and mittens. A dumpling.

“I probably look like one, too, these days, the way your mother cooks,” Simon told his son. “Let’s go and get her flowers.”

38

T
here was an old florist’s off Marylebone High Street, and its bell clanged as Simon and the stroller entered. The woman who ran the place, Birdie Bee, looked like she had decided to remain sixty-five forever. Her silver hair was pulled back, her face refreshed with lipstick, and she wore a smock from whose pockets peered sprigs of something yellow,
and green marking tags. She crouched down to greet Oscar with the grace of a woman who had practiced yoga from the very start. Birdie used to sell seashells by the seashore, as she liked to tell people, in a small store in Blackpool. Then she married, moved to Oxford, and learned the city by bike. There was a photograph of a laughing, smiling girl in a tartan tam on a bicycle with a basket in front. After her husband was killed in the war, she came to London with her children to stay at her sister’s, and bought the shop dirt-cheap. She still rode a bicycle, with clips and a helmet and a basket in front.

In the center of the store, artfully arranged nosegays and bouquets, featuring dried pods and tight rosebuds, were featured on a table. The
Westminster Watch
described this as the place where the cabinet wives got their arrangements. On the back walls, a profusion of blooms fell from long metal buckets, arranged according to color. Where did one get lilacs this time of year? Yet there they were, cut bunches in water alongside wreaths made of bay leaves and lavender. Roses of every color had their own display, framed by hydrangeas and branches of evergreen.

“Parrot tulips,” she suggested at once when Simon described what he needed. “Look at these, just perfect for autumn,” gesturing to a row of flame-colored flowers with feathery tips. They were startling, maybe too showy, but it was Diwali, and they resembled lanterns in their way. In fact, Chinese lanterns made sense as well, plus winterberry. Birdie wrapped the flowers in brown paper and string and expertly tucked the package into the stroller, wishing him a good dinner as an early firecracker burst somewhere nearby.

Outside, the post-lunch crowd had thickened as shoppers hurried to the butcher’s, the cheese shops, the patisseries. World cities never slept, but they had rhythms, waves controlled
by business hours. Two major rush hours, a surge during lunchtime. Other than that, it was open to tourists and the self- or unemployed, who tarried on the sidewalks, waited at the gates for the guards to change or for a glimpse of the prime minister. He waited to cross the street with Oscar; his heart was immense. A year ago, he was miserable, about work, about love, and then the devastation of Archer’s death. Now, he had a marvelous life: a wife, a son. At the palace, the flag was up.

39

M
eterling kneaded the dough for chapatis and put it under a wet cloth in a bowl: after pinching them into a dozen or so little balls, Simon would roll them out into rounds, or near-rounds, and she would cook each one on a hot griddle. The boiled potatoes had cooled as she was making the dough. She rough-chopped them, and then coated them with a dry rub of turmeric, chili, and salt. Getting out a large pan, she popped black mustard seed in oil, sizzled cumin and asafetida, and threw in the onions Simon had chopped earlier. She added the potatoes, and after things had browned a bit, frozen spinach, and later, tomatoes. She covered the lid; in twenty minutes, she would have a wet curry. How easy it was to cook. In truth, if she did have a passion outside of her passion for Oscar and Simon, it would be cooking. She had met a food demonstrator at Sainsbury’s who cooked kebabs on an electric grill. She wouldn’t mind being a demonstrator—this is the way to make dosa, this is how to make pakoras. She knew there were Indian and Bangladeshi aunties who offered home
cooking to students far from home, naan for pickup, curry to go. Why couldn’t she do something like that, after Oscar was ready for a baby minder?

She would give herself time to dress. Last night, she had taken out a seam in her petticoat, thankful for the efforts of Mr. Wali, her family’s tailor, who always had the foresight to make three sets of stitches in his clothing, knowing his clientele’s need to adjust. She had not lost all of the pregnancy weight, and in London she tucked into more food than was necessary, tucked so it showed on her body. Now, in addition to being tall and brown in London, she was becoming large. She didn’t mind. She rinsed the rice at the sink. Still, the only large women society seemed to accept were pregnant ones; all others were seen as incapable of controlling their urges, lacking discipline. Susan went to the gym six days a week, ate a diet of “twigs and leaves” according to Simon, but she did look smashing (what a word, “smashing,” Meterling thought, smiling, because it was one of Thakur’s favorite words) in her tall boots, slicked-back hair, her artful clothes. Meterling added water, a bay leaf, cumin powder, and lit the gas underneath the stockpot.

“Indian women are lucky—the sari hides all the imagined faults of our bodies,” Susan had once said. Meterling hadn’t bothered to remind her that she meant “island,” not “Indian,” because Susan was speaking of her. In Britain, everyone assumed she was Indian, and she had begun to let it go. Auntie Pa would bristle, saying Pi had enough of an identity crisis without its own citizens contributing to it.

Why was it Susan and she were so awkward around each other? Uncle Darshan would say that it was the old way of sisters-in-law, but there seemed to be more to Susan’s hostility. True, they had not begun on best terms. What had she
said—“Did you have to needlessly ask him to dance?”? But sitting out the dance would not have prevented the aneurysm. It was waiting in his brain, building and readying to burst. Susan had been livid at the wedding, but meeting Oscar had changed that. She was not certain how to act around him at first, but Oscar, bless him, just grabbed her pinkie in his fist and would not let go. She was utterly charmed and then and there became his. Her mother-in-law, Nora, had not been won over so completely. Oscar was Archer’s child, and sometimes she made it emphatic, saying to Meterling “your child,” which caused Simon to shout, and John to pick up their coats and throw back an apologetic look.

“Yes, he is my child, but why should it bother her so much?” Meterling asked. “He is your child, too. Archer never knew him,” which led to tears she blinked furiously away.

Susan generally ignored Meterling, heading right to Oscar when she visited, bearing baby clothes and toys, which she tumbled onto any available surface. How easily women sting each other over men, when they should be embracing one another. Was any man worth the trouble? Yes, she had married Archer, and yes, she had married Simon, and yes, yes, yes, she was still here in the family, she had not gone away. Civility was the thin line between love and hate, was it not? Couldn’t Susan and she maintain détente—oh, couldn’t Susan just accept and move forward?

She looked at the next set of vegetables. Simon had cut the sweet potatoes into hexagons, and sliced the Brussels sprouts in half. He hadn’t complained that morning, singing as he wielded the knife, saying he always wanted to be a sous-chef. Curries in his post-university days meant takeaways, or cheap dinners in places full of plastic tables and luridly colored plastic chairs. Meterling had taught him, among other things, the sensuality
of eating, the slow process of letting the fragrance enter the nostrils, the anticipation of the tongue. He learned to take his time. They fed each other midnight samosas while Oscar slept in his crib. “Imagine if the erotic Indian miniatures featured food instead of phalluses,” she said, but Simon rolled his eyes. He said, “Sometimes, there are no substitutions, my love.” They had argued that point well into the night.