The Pleasure Seekers (11 page)

Here they were: Babo, clean-shaven, triumphant; Siân, glorious and soft like buttered honey. Shoulder to shoulder, clear and bright. Meenal, Dolly and Chotu, watching from the dark pupils of their eyes, wondering if their lives were going to have as much masala as their brother’s. Trishala reconciled: ‘Pretty, quite pretty,’ she conceded to her husband, who was busy outdoing himself, because hadn’t Babo warned them? Hadn’t he written to say:
If she doesn’t feel right, if it’s all too much, if she feels the slightest bit of discomfort, you’ll have to let us both go
. And didn’t they want to hold on to their son now that he was standing here in his grandmother’s house, open like a kingdom, showering the village of Ganga Bazaar with his requited love?

Where was Lilaj-bhai? Shouldn’t he have been taking pictures? So that later, their children could marvel at their parents:
how young and beautiful and strong and proud
. Later, wouldn’t they want to see where they came from? Which nose, which stubborn chin, which forehead, which finger, which wisp of curly hair, which touch of eye and skin and blood had mixed and mingled to make them?

Because they were standing now: Babo, Siân, Prem Kumar, Trishala, Meenal, Dolly, Chotu, Ba. And here were the missing spaces: Nerys, Bryn, Huw, Owen. This is how it was on that chilly brand-new 1 January morning in Ganga Bazaar, Anjar, in 1970, with the family gathered around. A wedding of miniscule size but momentous proportions.

Here was Ba watching from the bamboo grove, thinking
finally, finally
. Because these two looked to her like a dream from another life. She took them aside and told them three things:
look to the sky every day
– for the sun and the moon signify eternal devotion of husband and wife;
look to the sea
– for love flows deep and you must be prepared to flow deeper;
journey like the fish and the birds
– because it is only those who agree to their own return who can participate in the divinity of the world. She poured honey in their palms and made them drink from one another so they could give sweetness to each other all their lives. Then she revealed a lore for fulfilling desire in seven nights.

To Prem Kumar and Trishala she gently reminded that he (or she) who disturbs a marriage is reborn as a mosquito.

So this was a beginning here. An opening of a window. A letting go.

For Siân there was much learning to be done, much forgetting.

‘Don’t forget where you’ve come from,’ Bryn had said, ‘Don’t forget about us.’

But there were so many new things to learn. How to wear a sari properly; how to cook and care for your clothes, jewels, skin; how to choose the best vegetables in the market; how to make sanitary napkins; how to serve the men first; how to store water and save electricity. How to how to how to.

On their first night together as husband and wife, on cotton mattresses in Ba’s back room, Siân couldn’t get certain things out of her head – her mother and father, her two brothers, her aunts and uncles, Ronnie and Gwen and Dee. Where were they now? Could they feel her thinking of them? Was this how it was going to be from now on?
One foot in, the other foot out
. Would it always feel like you never belonged no matter where you went, who you found to love? And Babo, lying next to his wife, felt all this. Felt her blue-green veins fill up with a certain kind of sorrow that hadn’t been there before. It was something to do with time and distance, love and separation. It spread through her transparent skin and shone through her like snow.

‘You know what?’ she whispered to Babo. ‘My father bought me a round-trip ticket to India and back. He said, “If that young man isn’t there to pick you up, you get on the next plane and come right home.” He called you that –
young man
.’

And Babo, understanding it all, held her and said, ‘I’ve got you now, Charlie Girl. I’m never letting you go again.’ He knew if this was going to work, they’d have to make a world of their own together, because Siân couldn’t begin to understand this world right now – all the millions in it. The beggars who went about with slippers on their palms because they had no feet to walk on. The young men – brown and black-bodied, like ribbed horses – ready to fall upon their destinies like torrents of rain. And most of all, these women of Ganga Bazaar who were like jungles – dark wombs from which all life seemed to have emerged. How could Siân hope to gain entrance to their world of renunciations and wanderings? When they watched from beneath wooden beams with the keys to their houses gently pressing against their hips – ka-chink ka-chink ka-chink – which secrets would they agree to share with her, and which would they keep?

8  All I Want is a Room Somewhere

In the early days, Siân poured her life into letters. She wrote every week, telling her parents the things she was slowly discovering about herself and this country, about Babo’s peculiar neighbours and extended family. She steered clear of religion because she knew it would upset her father. So she said nothing of how Selvam, on Prem Kumar’s instructions, pasted a poster of all the Jain symbols on the godrej almirah in their bedroom so they could contemplate it every morning. Nothing of how she accompanied the family to the Jain temple in Kilpauk every Sunday and joined them with folded knees and hands to pray for the purity of their souls. Nothing of how she was learning to be the perfect Gujarati daughter-in-law from Meenal, who had been in training for years: wearing saris, rolling faultlessly round chappathis, knowing when to be silent and when to speak.

On the first Sunday of every month Siân booked a trunk call to her parents in Nercwys. Then she waited for Bryn’s measured voice and Nerys’s barrage of questions. It was the only way for her to pass through the bubble, to reach out and touch a life that used to belong to her. She never allowed herself to cry, never told them about the fear that continued to live in her, that it might have been a mistake after all, because here, in this country with its own raggedy beauty, there were times she could barely find herself, barely pick through the complicated layers of her young life and find the beginning which began, not here, but
there
– where they were. Elsewhere.

How different it is to live in a city by the sea. The air is filled with salt, with comings and goings. There are no fields, but cows everywhere! And people, thousands of them! Babo and I have claimed the second floor of Sylvan Lodge, which lies at the end of an avenue of yellow, holly-hocked portia trees. We have a large bedroom with bath attached, and there’s an adjoining terrace where I often go to watch the sunsets. It’s strange to be surrounded by people all the time, and still experience a kind of loneliness; different from my London existence, at any rate
.

She wrote of her daily battles in the kitchen with batter and dough, her attempts at creating a tiny patch of Tan-y-Rhos in the back garden of Sylvan Lodge, which were repeatedly thwarted by Selvam, who hurried out every time he saw her putting her hands in the mud. ‘Madam, no no. I am mali, I will do for you.’
For the better, I suppose, because roses wouldn’t do very well in this climate, wisteria never flowers, and geraniums only bloom in the cold season, which is hardly cold at all
.

I’m always a beginner here
, she wrote, trying to get to the heart of the melancholy that had set in ever since they’d taken up residence in Sylvan Lodge.
I am always beginning because I cannot surrender a part of myself. It’s difficult to explain. Everyone has been more than generous, more than patient, and yet, it’s a feeling of being marooned, of not having quite reached my final destination. I miss home, of course, and the both of you, and yesterday I saw two young lads cycling with the sun on their backs, and they looked to me so much like Huw and Owen – only darker, more carefree. I miss the smell of things. I really miss bacon. But listen to me go on. You mustn’t think I spend my days being morose. Far from it. Most days are so full with the business of living, I scarcely have a moment to myself. And there’s this country – so incredibly beautiful, and different from anything in the world. I can’t wait to go exploring
.

Later, when Babo’s devotion to Siân was momentarily superseded by his new Minolta Hi-Matic F, Siân sent regular packages of photographs home by registered post, hoping it would make things clearer. The pictures were square with thick, white borders: Siân and Babo in cycle rickshaws, in rowboats, on elephants and camels; Siân with ropes of jasmine and jewelled slides in her hair; Babo in bellbottoms leaning Hindi-movie-hero-style against rocks and pillars; the both of them posing in front of the Taj Mahal with their gleaming teeth – jhill mill, jhill mill.

What the pictures didn’t show was how in the early days Siân saw more of Trishala and the children than she did of Babo because Prem Kumar was always whisking him off to work. Everything that year was forced to take second place to Prem Kumar’s new company, which he named Sanbo Enterprises (an ingenious combination of Siân and Babo), as a sign that Patel & Sons were truly entering the spirit of a new generation. For that whole year the talk revolved only around permits and licences, overshadowing all other topics of conversation. Even Meenal’s upcoming marriage to the shipbroker, now that it was confirmed he didn’t have a limp, wasn’t given any priority, which is probably why the event itself turned into a decidedly damp squib affair.

‘Will you be all right, Charlie?’ Babo asked. ‘Have you got enough to keep busy with . . . you know you could always come and type up some letters for us if you’re getting bored.’

How could she tell him that what she wanted was the freedom to open the gates and jump into an auto rickshaw to Mylapore or Broadway to get the things she needed without someone constantly escorting her? To find a place where she could walk because she was tired of sitting around all day without moving, and God knows all the magazines Ronnie sent her from England said you needed to walk at least 8,000 steps a day if you didn’t want to turn into a fat cow? But there was no chance of solitude in Sylvan Lodge. Even closing the door to their bedroom didn’t ensure privacy. Anyone could open it at any time, and they frequently did. ‘Bhabi, come let’s do each other’s hair, no?’ or ‘Bhabi, Mummy is calling you because Harsha-behn is here from Baroda and she wants to meet you – yes, yes, you must put on a sari.’ Or ‘Bhabi, tell us egg-zactly what happens on your marriage night?’

Meenal and Dolly didn’t give her a moment’s peace. They wanted to experiment with her make-up, fawn over her whiteness and coloured eyes, try on all the modern clothes hanging in her almirah. Surprisingly, it was Trishala, despite the language barrier, who was most empathetic to Siân’s situation. ‘Stop following her like a tail,’ she’d bark at the girls. ‘Maybe she wants to read by herself without being stared at by you two.’

Trishala knew that the first years of marriage were the hardest. Hadn’t she spent two years with vegetables in her lap, wondering what it was all about? And Prem Kumar, rushing off to his silly factory at the crack of dawn and coming back late at night to eat and make small talk, as if it was easy – this making-a-family business. Trishala was convinced that it was a universal truth, regardless of where you came from and what the circumstances of your marriage were. Because, see – this daughter-in-law of hers, who was so full of love for Babo, who had travelled all the way from England to be with him – didn’t she look so fragile and sad sitting on the kitchen floor learning the names of vegetables in Gujarati as she sliced them up for lunch? To Trishala she looked like an orphan who’d been dumped in a house of strangers, and it worried her to see her like this. Besides, she was growing thin, too thin. Not good for childbearing prospects.

‘Ask if she wants to go shopping?’ she’d instruct Dolly, who was the appointed interpreter. ‘Ask if she wants to phone her mummy-daddy? Ask if she’s not liking the food? We can always make what she likes. She can teach us.’

Even Chotu, who had taken longest to adjust to his foreign bhabi, mainly due to his pubescent shyness, ran to her as soon as he came home from school, in an effort to cheer her up. ‘Come, bhabi, you can help me fly my planes,’ he’d say, pulling her by the hand up to the terrace where the two of them would test Chotu’s contraptions – each of them sailing beautifully over the railings and then promptly nose-diving to their death in the clump of ashoka trees below.

Only when Babo came home from work did something change in Siân. He continued to be the only space that didn’t need filling. Babo and Siân, holding hands in the darkness of night, disappeared to a different place – to a city with no name, a city where they knew no one and no one knew them. Where they understood their lives and each other. It was a place where Siân could hold him and he became the same Babo she’d held months ago, when they were alone and unattached to their families, when they were listening to the trains screech by her blue-walled Finchley Road flat. And when Siân needed this feeling again, she’d curl into the walnut shell of her husband’s body and say, ‘Oh love, can’t we go somewhere? Just the two of us for a while?’

And then they’d be off, escaping in their orange Flying Fiat. To hill stations and tiger sanctuaries, to the palaces of dead queens. Whenever Babo managed to disentangle himself from work, they’d be up, up and away like blistering bandits. Here they were on a houseboat in Kashmir, standing atop a desolate Rajasthani fort, tearing into chicken sizzlers in a lakeside shack in Ooty. Here they were in the coves of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, deserted and spectacularly blue. Babo raising himself against her: sha-bing sha-bang.