The Pleasure Seekers (14 page)

After everyone settled in with a plate of food and a glass of sherry, there was a long, painful silence, broken by Aunty El’s dog, Gwythur, who was trying as usual to hump one of the guests’ legs.

‘Doesn’t this remind you of the Queen’s coronation?’ Siân said, giggling. ‘Aunty El was the only person in the village who had a TV in 1953,’ she explained to Babo. ‘I remember all of us squeezing in here to watch it. I’ll never forget it.’

‘Aye, what a night that was,’ Aunty El said, cheering at the memory. ‘Everyone stayed well past midnight, drinking whisky and having a merry old time – even the young ones here,’ she said, pointing at Siân and her brothers. ‘These were here till I booted them out. And these scallywag boys, they just darted out of here like bats out of hell, leaving poor Siân to find her way home alone.’

As more memories of that night began to be exchanged, Babo felt the village of Nercwys relax. Backs sunk lower into chairs, old lady legs that had been primly crossed, slackened, and in some cases, even deigned to rest side by side rather than one on top of the other. After a few rounds of drink, handbags were tossed under chairs, pipes were lit up, and there was enough noise emanating from Aunty El’s front room to rival the crowd at an India–Pakistan cricket match.

It reminded Babo strangely of one of Prem Kumar’s Sunday card-playing sessions where aunts and uncles – carbon copies of one another – congregated to crow like cocks and hens in a farmyard. There was something very similar here, except in this Welsh-chintz version the sideboard was heaving with devilled eggs instead of dhoklas. And instead of the sizeable paunches and behinds that middle-aged Gujjus succumbed to, these men and women were powerfully stocky, more uniform in their roundness. But there was the same parochial pride and failings on display. The same aunts berating an unmarried girl to hurry up and get on with it. The same know-all uncle complaining that a son was spending money like a man with no arms.

‘You eat meat then, Bob? I thought Hindoos weren’t supposed to eat meat?’ Uncle Rhys wanted to know. ‘And you’re not averse to a bit of a snifter here and there?’

‘No, sir, misfit on all counts, I’m afraid.’

Aunty Idella, one of Nerys’s fourteen siblings, wanted to know about Siân’s earrings. ‘Did you get those done in India, then, love? Do all the ladies pierce their ears?’

‘Oh yes, even the wee babies have their ears pierced,’ Siân said. ‘It’s considered auspicious.’

‘Gosh,’ Aunty Idella remarked, ‘My Angharad asked me if she could pierce her ears when she was sixteen, and I told her she could wait till she was married in a house of her own if she wanted to do a thing like that.’

‘That’s only the half of it,’ Siân started, and then she went on to tell her family all about their wedding in Anjar and Babo’s grandmother, Ba, who lived alone in a house of peacocks and lizards, and the jeweller, Hira Lal, who put a needle through fire before putting holes in her ears. Siân talked and talked, she couldn’t help herself. It was an unburdening. But Babo sensed that the more she talked the less comfortable she was making her aunts and uncles. There was only so much newness they could take.

‘Why, yes, dear,’ they nodded. ‘Mmhmmm. Of course.’

But really, they were thinking, El was right! Only Siân could do a thing like that – go off to India and marry some bloke no one’s ever met, put hoops in her ears, and come back to tell tales like this.

Babo, looking at his wife that night, tried to imagine her growing up in the village of Nercwys. He thought of the picture he had on his desk at Sanbo Enterprises: Siân at four years old in her Welsh outfit – everything from the striped flannel petticoat to the apron, shawl and high black hat. There was a surreal quality about that photograph – her cheeks were touched up to match the candyfloss pink strap of the bag across her chest, and the ringlets that bobbed under the hat, though wild, seemed perfectly in place. To Babo it seemed that nothing about the four-year-old in that pewter frame corresponded to the woman sitting beside him.

Babo leaned back in his chair and wondered how things came together after all, how two beings fit, where all the movement and chaos of the world began. Because watching his wife that night, amidst her family, it seemed to him like she’d sprung from another place entirely – arrived chup chap from the realms of some other floating world to descend like a migrating bird softly into this one. He realized as well, that she’d been right after all. Their destiny was in India. And it was lying patiently across the horizon, waiting to be made.

10  He not Busy being Born is Busy Dying

The following summer Babo, Siân and their four-month-old daughter, Mayuri, moved into a house with orange and black gates at Number 20 Rutland Lane. Waiting at the gates was a dark, sturdy woman wrapped in a green polyester sari, with two giant gold studs shining on either side of her nose. The woman announced that she was Selvam’s sister, and that she’d come from the big house to help the foreign madam. Her name was Selvi, and Trishala, convinced that Siân would be incapable of being a good wife, mother and ayah all at once, had sent her along as a parting present. ‘Besides,’ Trishala confided to Babo on the phone, ‘Before this, Selvi worked with a Christian lady, and she converted also, so now she speaks very good English.’

‘I don’t believe she’s related to Selvam,’ was all Siân would say, because this woman was a good foot and a half taller than wizened old Selvam. Babo joked that perhaps it was the teachings of Jesus or the sudden intake of beef that had given her the additional boost over her brother. ‘Perhaps she’ll turn out all right, Charlie,’ he said, in an effort to cajole his wife, who was loathe to have a stranger lurking around her new house at this early stage in their adventure. On the subject of child-rearing though, Trishala would not be contradicted, so there was no option but to drag Selvi’s steel trunk through the orange and black gates and into the house for good.

In the house of orange and black gates, Babo and Siân ate bacon for breakfast. They made love on mosaic floors. They stayed up late watching cricket matches telecast from across the world – the black and white images from their shiny new television set coating their young bodies with a hazy, sepulchral light. Sometimes, the baby would murmur in the nursery, and Siân would hurry over to check, as she had done nearly every night since becoming a mother, to see if the child was still alive, still breathing. After putting her ear close to her daughter’s chest, feeling the reassuring up and down rise and fall of it beating against her ear, Siân would pad back to where Babo lay – sprawled out in his white kurta pyjama like some exotic brahminy kite, legs and arms instead of wings – and she would try to find a place among her husband’s entanglements: a safe, warm place which she could call home.

Babo and Siân discovered rhythms of living in this house which had been entirely impossible at Sylvan Lodge: days spent cocooned in the comfort of an air-conditioned room with Ella Fitzgerald moaning softly in the background, a paperback mystery novel or a dated
Good Homes
magazine in hand; the new baby, so small and pink and impossibly fragile, lying between them on their king-sized Kashmiri bed.

Selvi was given a room of her own behind the kitchen, which she kept neat and bare, except for two adornments – a poster of Baby Jesus in his crib which reassured her every morning that Jesus loved her, and a picture of her favourite movie star, MG Ramachandran, future Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, dressed in a cowboy outfit, leaping mid-air into the words
FIRST KING OF STYLE
. Her presence in the house, which had initially seemed overly invasive, soon tempered into something more tolerable. Not only was Selvi able to translate everyday Tamil phrases for Siân, she also maintained a scrupulous account of all household accounts on scraps of notepaper which she updated every Friday and kept paper-clipped in the fruit bowl in the kitchen. Whenever there was any discrepancy in the dhobi’s chit, or if ever the ironing man bungled up, like the time he misplaced Siân’s favourite Mangalgiri sari, Selvi would storm out of the house with a knife in hand, cursing and shouting, until the guilty party, for fear of losing the precious ju-jubs between his legs, beat a hasty retreat and avoided all future accounting errors.

Besides her ferocious temper, Selvi also had the extraordinary talent of throwing together the most arbitrary scraps of food to create delicacies, which once made, could never be repeated. Part of Siân’s emancipation from the tyranny of Sylvan Lodge had been to make forays into non-vegetarian Indian cuisine. Being a master chappathi-maker wasn’t enough. She wanted to know how to make kebabs and spicy meat curries, because Babo and she had just made a new circle of friends, and if they were ever going to do any entertaining at home, they were going to have to come up with something a little more exciting than daal and rice.

For a whole year, Babo and Siân’s life in Rutland Lane unfolded in a slow continuum of days, rooted around the brilliant orange flame-of-the-forest tree that towered between the gates in the front yard of the house. Siân’s days began and ended with Mayuri’s delicate powder rose smell, Selvi’s heady coconut oil and jasmine flower combination, and Babo – his layers of earth and mimosa, his Gold Flake-smoking fingertips. These smells began to permeate Siân’s consciousness so strongly that they came to replace her early memories of Sylvan Lodge, and define, somehow, the beginning of her real relationship with India and her new phase of motherhood. She began to understand how Babo and she were inextricably tied, how between them, they held the power of creation.

Those initial years passed seamlessly, without disaster or disease, punctuated only by the seasons that the city of Madras had to offer: summer, monsoon, a few months of cool reprieve until the January harvest season, and then summer again. There were no road trips in the Flying Fiat, no explorations around the countryside with Mayuri in tow. There was only the need to ground themselves into this house; learning the habits of the upstairs Singhania family, the next door Punjab Women’s Association and the kingdom of cats that populated the walls between them. There were Sundays at Sylvan Lodge, and an annual visit to Ba in Anjar. But other than that, it was just Babo, Siân, Mayuri and Selvi in the house of orange and black gates, and Siân would never remember a happier, more content time in her life.

By the time Apollo 17 landed on the moon, Siân had already joined the Overseas Women’s Club of Madras and made her first proper friends in India. There was Darlene Malhotra, née Adams, a paediatrician from Tennessee, who had met her husband, Praveen, at an Elvis Presley concert in Las Vegas, and after an intense LSD experience decided to get married and take six months to travel to India overland. And there was Janet Krishnamurti, née Miller, from Plymouth, who had been sufficiently seduced by Keshav, a Merchant Navy man, in 1956, to follow him on a ship all the way back to India, even though he warned her she’d have to share him with his overbearing, widowed mother who had always lived with him, and would continue to live with him until one of them died. The relationships that Babo and Siân forged with these two couples would become the core friendships of their lives. Twice a week at least, they’d meet on the lawns of the Madras Gymkhana Club to drink G&Ts and discuss everything from the situation in Vietnam to the new Bond movie playing at Casino. These were happy nights, filled with music, dance and drink – freedoms Babo and Siân had only ever experienced together in London.

This was also the time Siân threw herself into a blitz of charity work. Through the many social and charitable arms of the OWC, Siân found a way to deal with the overwhelming guilt she had carried around ever since she’d arrived in Bombay and seen those families sleeping on the pavements. She knitted blankets for the sick and taught English to slum children. She held the wrinkled hands of men and women abandoned by their families, and made embroidered table mats with the Little Sisters of the Poor. Siân loved them all, visited them in mental institutions and cancer wards, wept when she heard stories of how they were chained to their beds at night, felt delirious shivers of joy when orphaned children came scampering out to greet her, crying, ‘Aunty Aunty’. It seemed incongruous that her own child was no trouble at all; seemed happy to be slathered down with mustard oil everyday, and be bounced about on Selvi’s hefty thighs to the tune of old Tamil film songs.

It was at this relatively peaceful stage in their life when Siân discovered she was pregnant again. During this second pregnancy, things went much more smoothly. This time, in the privacy of her own home, Siân could sit for entire mornings in her kaftan reading
Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care
manuals, while Mayuri played with blocks on the veranda under Selvi’s vigilant eye. The barrage of advice from the ladies of the Patel clan was somewhat deflected towards Meenal, who was also expecting – her first – and who had come home a few months before the delivery, as custom dictated. With Meenal absorbing the full force of Trishala’s attention (and in truth, she was only too happy to be able to put her feet up and be hand-fed till she bloated out like a pot-bellied pig), Siân was free to continue with her everyday routines as long as she deposited Mayuri at Sylvan Lodge once a week with her small overnight case, so her grandmother could lavish undivided attention on her, and so Mayuri could play with her new friend – Darayus’s grandson, Cyrus, a gangly child with weak eyes, whose parents lived in America. In the evenings, Siân went walking in the Garden of Redemption, and every Friday she sat with Ms Douglas under the banyan tree and thought about what Manna was saying:
Do you know a thing just by naming it?
At nights, when Babo returned to her and they lay down with each other away from the pushing, poking and pulling of the outside world, Siân could finally consider quietness, and what it really meant in this country.