The Pleasure Seekers (19 page)

And then there were the gypsies who lived by the Aavin Milk ’n’ Ice Parlour past the Adyar Bridge, where every Friday after school, they were allowed to get creamy pink softy cones. The gypsies sat huddled around cooking fires under mango trees, and their children – barely as old as Bean – went about with hardly a scrap of clothing on them. The girls wore grubby panties, and the boys walked around starkers, showing off their little Mr Whatsits. And the boys and girls, both, had long, bright, sun-bleached hair that shone like knotted haloes around their heads. How could they live like this? thought Bean. Where did they sleep at night? What did they eat?

Mayuri said that the gypsies ate squirrels and whatever else they could lay their catapults on. Cyrus Mazda confirmed this: he’d once seen a gypsy bring down three squirrels – tup tup tup – from the tree outside his bedroom window. Besides which, Cyrus also confirmed that it was the gypsies who had stolen Mrs Jhunjhunwala’s beloved Persian, Fluffy, and eaten him for dinner. The thought of poor Fluffy being skinned and roasted on one of those cooking fires made Bean feel quite ill.

‘A man’s got to eat,’ Babo said. ‘It’s a dog eat dog world, Bean, and a man’s got to feed his family.’ Babo was always saying things like this – that people created situations for themselves, that an awful lot of despair in the world was due to
just-plain-laziness
, that fatalism was the noose around which the masses of this country were kept in poverty.

For all his talking, though, Babo never
actually
did anything. It was Siân who spent her days with the underprivileged – which meant people who had less than them. It was Siân who dragged Mayuri and Bean to the Andhra Mahila Sabha school, where she taught English to kids with no arms and legs. Kids who came crawling out any which way they could, on trays and in wheelchairs, lolloping along the floor like strange animals. ‘See how they’re smiling?’ Siân always said, bending to pick one of them up – little Venkatesh, usually, who was her favourite, and had a weird thing bumping out of his back. ‘Even though they have no mama or daddy to look after them. See how brave they are?’

Bean smiled and patted one or two of them casually on the head, but what she couldn’t bear to say to her mother or Mayuri, was that it horrified her.
They
horrified her, just as the ghost she’d seen scraping along Sterling Road with its twisted feet had. She knew it was awful and unforgivable, but if she was really honest about it, what she’d like to do more than anything, was to never see the AMS school again, and to play with her best friend Mehnaz in her room of toys for ever. But Bean couldn’t say it, because she knew that admitting this would mean disappointing Siân, and somehow, disappointing her mother was far worse than disappointing anyone else in the world, even her father.

Bean had heard all about the love story of her parents from Ba in Anjar. How Babo met Siân in London, how they had a testing period of six months apart before Siân finally came to India to live happily ever after.
But Mama was the braver one
, Bean thought. No matter how much she loved her father,
Mama was always the braver one because she left everything behind to be here with us
.

Siân really was like no other mother Bean knew, and it was mainly to seek her approval that Bean persisted in her quest for goodness. She shared all her toys with Mayuri even though Mayuri didn’t share back, and she put aside half her pocket money to give away to the blind children at the Clarke’s school, because they didn’t give her the creeps as much as the AMS kids. But every now and then, Bean had a serious lapse. The capitalist side of her nature unleashed itself, usually at Shastri’s Fancy Stores, where the object in question was another thing she didn’t need – a stainless steel kitchen set or a mask-making kit. Bean began with little hints, a bit of loving fingering, a few tears, and when none of that worked she went for the floor – thumping her fists and arms, wailing that for all the good things she’d done, this was just a small thing Siân could do for her in return.

Whenever this happened Siân disappeared with Mayuri following like a tail, leaving Bean hollering on the floor as if she wasn’t her child. Ten minutes later Siân would return. ‘Are you done? Ready to go home now? Ready to behave?’ And Bean nodding, subdued, would take her mother’s hand out into the world, where suffering was inevitable and where her selfishness was exposed for all to see.

In September 1981, on a perfectly ordinary Madras day, while Bean and Mayuri were playing Lady Di, wrapping mosquito nets around their heads as veils and clip clopping around on Siân’s high-heeled shoes, a phone call came in the middle of a Saturday morning that altered life in the house of orange and black gates for a long while.

‘It’s Uncle Owen,’ Mayuri said, putting the telephone receiver to one side, and marching up to Babo and Siân’s bedroom door. ‘He says he needs to speak to Mama. Something bad has happened.’

Mayuri and Bean stood outside their parents’ door, wondering what to do. Saturdays were off limits to them. It was the day Babo and Siân locked themselves in their bedroom doing God-only-knew-what for hours and hours. Sometimes, the girls didn’t see their parents till evening, when they rolled out in kaftan and kurta pyjama to drink tea on the veranda before getting ready to meet the hybrids at the Madras Gymkhana Club. Often, the only evidence that any kind of life carried on inside that room, was the low, consistent drone of the air-conditioner, and the occasional glimpse of a long, white arm reaching for one of the breakfast or lunch trays that Selvi left on the floor outside their bedroom.

Mayuri and Bean stood at their door and knocked.

Nothing.

They knocked harder. Wham bam. Wham bam.

‘Mama,’ Mayuri screamed. ‘Telephone call for you. It’s Uncle Owen and he says something bad has happened. Can you hurry up and come out, please?’

Knock knock knock.

‘Mama. Hurreeeee.’

Finally, Siân emerged, wearing one of Babo’s shirts, and Babo followed with a bath towel wrapped around his waist, the scanty curls of hair on his chest glistening. They ran into the dining room where the red telephone receiver still lay on its side. Siân picked the phone up and held it close to her ear, her auburn hair falling in jagged shafts across her forehead. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Oh my God,’ she kept saying.

The girls watched as Babo stood behind their mother and put his arms around her shoulders.

‘Of course, I’ll be there, I mean, I have to . . . wait for me.’

When Siân put down the telephone she told Mayuri and Bean to wait for her in their room. Then she took Babo’s hand and walked back to their bedroom, where they locked the door for what seemed like a whole day. Mayuri told Bean she was 99 per cent sure they would not be going to the Madras Gymkhana Club for dinner that night, and she was right. By seven o’clock Selvi had laid the table for two, and Mayuri and Bean were eating chicken frankies with tomato sauce under the whirring Khaitan fan. When Babo and Siân finally came to them, fully dressed, Siân’s eyes were red, and Babo had that look on his face when he’d done something wrong, like smoked cigarettes inside the house, or called someone a bloody basket.

‘Sit down, girls,’ Siân said, indicating the matching cane beds. ‘Now listen to me. Mama’s got to go away for a while. I’ve got to go home because Taid has died. Do you understand? I’ve got to go home, because my family needs me.’

Home
, Bean wondered,
Isn’t this home? Here, with us. Aren’t we family? Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Bean?

15  All You Need is Love

All the way over on the flight, Siân kept thinking, maybe it’s not true, maybe it’s like the time Prem Kumar tricked Babo into coming back to Madras, saying Trishala was in hospital. Maybe Bryn hadn’t really cycled home from work one day to sit down in his favourite chair and die without even having a cup of tea first.

Bhupen Jain picked her up at Heathrow and took her hand in an honest, heartfelt way. He told her what a difficult thing it was to lose a parent you had abandoned. He had left his own ageing parents in a dilapidated house in Baroda. He could understand what she was going through.
Could he, though? Could anyone?

Bhupen told her that life had been hard for him too. The paint course he had done with Babo at the Borough Polytechnic had come to no good. Nobody wanted to hire someone with no technical experience, and no one was willing to give him that experience unless he worked for free. But how could he work for free when he had two children to support? Indrani, who wanted to take ballet lessons instead of bharatanatyam, and Deenu, who was more interested in Spanish than Sanskrit.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they’d had another robbery at the post office. They were thinking of selling up, moving to some other line of business, but what were they equipped to do other than this? They were unskilled traders who knew only what their fathers and their grandfathers had done before them – how to convert one rupee to five to fifty to a hundred by means of the slow diligent qualities of persistence and parsimony.

Bhupen hadn’t had much luck converting his money. He wondered why he had ever come to a country that was so cold and unforgiving in the first place. So his children could take ballet and Spanish, of course. So he could write to his parents in Baroda and tell them he was a proud house-owner, upstanding pillar of the community, President of the Jain Association.

Siân wanted to tell him it was different for her. She had learned the secret of surviving in a foreign country. It had something to do with love. She’d been on the brink of understanding for so long. And what she had discovered was this: love can’t be fear, love can’t be violence, love can’t be anything we name or anything we can’t bear.

The two weeks Siân spent at home after Bryn’s funeral reminded her of the time she spent in Tan-y-Rhos pining for Babo all those years ago. Except this time, there was no Bryn to take her away for poetry and picnics, only her friend, Ronnie, returned to Nercwys to marry Ken Davies, owner of The White Lion. Huw and Carole came up from Brighton with the twins, and Owen was there too, grown suddenly old and more withdrawn. There were no fervent letters from Babo at his makeshift desk in Zam Zam Lodge, telling her that the whole world hinged on their love. There was a phone call instead:
Come home soon, Mama, we miss you
.

There were still spaces and spaces between her mother and her, still so many silences. Every morning, she and Nerys worked in the rose garden, their gloved hands deep in the earth.
If you dig deep enough, you’ll get all the way to China
. Isn’t that what Bryn used to tell her when she was a little girl? Siân had dug and dug but reached India instead.

Siân spent her days looking for Bryn. She wandered to their secret places alone, at twilight, waiting for her father to appear in the half-light, half-dark. She wanted to know if the God he believed in and loved so much had saved him in the end, or if on the last day, he had given up his ideas of eternal life and everlasting punishment. She kept looking for him in valleys with midnight-blue ridges and silver flowers, wondering if he’d found a home in the roots of the black poplar tree or if he was that ancient owl staring at her from a solitary branch. Was he happy to be something so simple and unrecognizable?

Never forget where you’ve come from
, Bryn had said.
Don’t forget about us
. But Siân had allowed everything to fade; she had packed it all away in the bottom drawer of her heart and began a beginning halfway across the world. And now that she was back in the house her father had brought her to, a month after she was born, in the coldest winter of the century, there was nothing to do but run to the graveyard in the chapel where he lay under the earth; to sit by his side and weep.

She sat in that autumn scene, tracing the letters on Bryn’s headstone, reciting
Under Milk Wood
, in spite of herself, the rhythm of the lines falling like a field stream, like a long, suffocating snowdrift from childhood. She wondered about her daughters so far away in Madras, how they were ever going to remember their grandfather or guess at the breadth of his generous, patient love.

When Siân finally returned to the house of orange and black gates she was a changed woman. Everyone could see it. Not just because of her new hairstyle – a perm, which Babo, Mayuri and Bean jointly hated. It was something more, as if someone had climbed inside her and switched off all the lights. She was always tired, sleeping well into the morning and going to bed right after dinner, barely able to make it through the one episode of
Mind Your Language
the girls were allowed to watch. When she wasn’t resting she exhausted herself by marching around the house with a duster, or getting on her knees with an old toothbrush to clean the cracks between the bathroom tiles.

In the first week of her return she removed every piece of fabric in the house and gave it to the dhobi. The mosquito nets from the window grills, the curtains and lambrequins, the upholstery covers and antimacassars, the sheets, pillowcases, bedspreads, blankets – all were bundled up and sent away, leaving the house looking a little forlorn and bare. She got the rubbish man to collect the old newspapers and bottles that had been piling up in the storeroom for months, and she made Selvi sit on the veranda and polish all the brass pots and figurines till they shone.