The Pleasure Seekers (21 page)

For all his apparent irreverence, nobody doubted Ignatius’s loyalty to Ba. She had saved his life when others had been happy to let him wither up and die. At the age of fourteen, when Ignatius ran away from the Catholic orphanage in Mundra where his parents had dumped him as a baby, he had been rescued by Ba, who found him half-starved and mute with fear at the bus station. She had brought him to her house and taught him how to make the hair fall away from his legs and arms; how to smooth turmeric and rosewater on his skin to soften it; how to pick the bristles off his beard without leaving any scars. And when the breasts wouldn’t grow and the blood between the legs wouldn’t come, it was Ba who comforted the disconsolate Ignatius and told him that a swan could never swim away from its own whiteness, meaning to say that he was what he was, and we are what we are, and because Ignatius was
unable
to bring life into this world either as man or woman, he was
enabled
with other powers that ordinary people couldn’t have, and these powers had to do with preservation – that second most important principle of the universe.

When Ignatius turned seventeen and decided to leave for the big city of Bombay to find his destiny, Ba let him go, and told him that whenever he wanted to find his way back to her, all he needed to do was follow the wind. After five years of working at Bombay’s VT railway station with a band of belligerent hijras, Ignatius, embittered and worn down, reappeared on Ba’s doorstep ready to start anew.

Ignatius learned from Ba how women were the true inventors of the world: the original creators, the tillers and sowers, the nurturers and warriors. He learned about magic and science, and all the other ways to control illusion which Ba used to bring the women of Ganga Bazaar back to their bodies after they’d worked in the fields and in the streets – bending, sweeping, spinning, swabbing. Because your body is your universe, didn’t you know?
Your body is your universe
.

In the lead-up to Dolly’s wedding, Ignatius’s body went into overdrive. He sat in the back yard knocking pieces of wood together so that the guests would have tables and chairs to sit at after the ceremonies at the Amba Mata Temple. He constructed an elaborate thatch and bamboo covering over the tables and chairs to lessen the effect of the sun’s intensity. He helped Ba and Trishala decide the menus for the various functions and, along with the triplets Rukku, Munnu and Tunnu, decorated the entire house with garlands of rose and marigold. Most importantly, though, Ignatius spent all night working under the light of an electric bulb, wearing the thick-framed glasses he was too vain to wear during the day, sewing real strings of gold into Dolly’s wedding sari.

Six months earlier, when Trishala had arrived in Ganga Bazaar, determined to find Dolly a groom, it was Ignatius who had taken matters into his own capable hands. ‘Trishala-behn,’ he said. ‘Is that daughter of yours driving you crazy? Don’t worry about it. I’ll find her a nice man. No problem. Chak-a-chak. Just send them to me and I’ll inspect their goods before giving the thumbs up.’

For two weeks a long troop of possible candidates trotted in and out of Ba’s open doors. Every day Dolly cried to Ba about how she hated Anjar. There was nothing to do, only old people sitting around chewing paan and gossiping about people she couldn’t care less about. ‘Sorry, except you, of course,’ she added, with a touch of remorse. No cinemas, no shops, only Zam Zam Lodge with its limited enticements – an ice-cream counter with twenty-four flavours that was out of bounds for her, and a fortune teller with his parrot who sat on a faux-jewelled dais in the playground.

‘How Babo-bhai ever managed to stay here all those months without dying of boredom, I don’t know,’ Dolly moaned.

Trishala was distraught and her dishevelled condition reminded Ba of that oh-so-long-time-ago when she had been struggling with Prem Kumar’s flat-footed desire, trying to conceive a child. Ba had counselled her then; told her to put vegetables in her lap, and to dance in the rain. Now she had come with another problem: to make Dolly accept a match before it was too late.

Finally, they settled on a diamond merchant from Baroda by the name of Chaitanya, pet name Chunky, who wasn’t chunky at all. In fact, he was unusually skinny, looming several inches over Dolly with his only film-star attribute – an outrageously untidy mop of Shammi Kapoor hair.

Now at last, the wedding that Trishala had hoped for Babo and then for Meenal came to fruition, with more hoopla and tha-ra-rum-pum-pum than even she could have imagined. For three days there was non-stop singing, dancing, praying, eating and almost no sleeping. Trishala basked in the envious congratulatory words that came pouring forth from everyone, and lied through her teeth to whoever would listen. ‘I
knew
all along that Dolly would find a good husband. Nowadays thirty is not so old to get married. We have to change our mindset and be forward thinking, isn’t it?’

In reality Trishala’s relief was so immense that she felt the weight of all the jalebis she’d consumed in recent weeks drop off her sizeable saddlebags almost instantly. She floated around Ba’s house, admiring her own granddaughters, who were behaving like good girls by diving at all the grown-ups’ feet with reverence as she’d instructed them to do. She shouted loudest and most enthusiastically when Babo and Chotu lifted Dolly on their shoulders for the garlanding ceremony – where the groom and bride compete to see who gives in first to the garlanding, setting the tone for the rest of their married life; and she showed her delight by kissing both sons repeatedly when they held Dolly up long enough so she could win. Even Prem Kumar, who relished being difficult at the best of times, toed the line by shutting up about how much money all this was costing him, and when it was all finished, filled her heart with joy by saying, ‘You did the right thing with this, Trishala. After all, love is an ideal thing, but marriage is a real thing.’

When Dolly finally departed with her new husband, taking with her an extensive wedding trousseau that included fifty-one saris, five gold jewellery sets and a sexy honeymoon negligee, the whole village let out a collective gasp of relief. Ba’s house emptied out almost as quickly as it had filled up. Trishala, Prem Kumar, Meenal and her shipbroker husband, Babo and Siân, Chotu, the spinster sisters from Bhuj and all the other aunties and uncles, gathered up their belongings and departed in the space of a single morning. Only Ignatius and the four great-granddaughters stayed, all set to squabble for the remainder of their summer vacation.

After everyone left, Ba walked around her compound to survey the carnage of Anjar’s grandest wedding. All around were torn pieces of paper and plastic; giant vessels which the ladies of Ganga Bazaar would scrub with Vim powder before hauling them back to the Amba Mata Temple; coconut husks and banana skins; branches, leaves, red garoli lizard skins, peacock feathers. Ba could smell the lingering camphor from the marriage pyre, the sickening smell of leftover vegetable oil, dying jasmine. She could smell Dolly’s tears and Trishala’s sulphuric gunpowder anxiety hanging like a shroud over everything. But rising above it all, there was another smell, the smell of fallen apples, a rich, sweet, failed smell of something unfamiliar, yet disturbingly familiar; a smell that permeated through the rafters of her room of swings, and stayed.

‘Ruination,’ Ba said to Ignatius, who had come out to look for her. ‘Can you smell the ruination, Ignatius?’

Ignatius, finding Ba’s hand in the dark, turned her around and guided her through the threshold of her front door. ‘Perhaps that’s life,’ he said, ‘Perhaps that’s how life smells when something rotten is about to happen.’

For a fortnight after Dolly’s marriage to Chunky, the cousins played wedding-wedding non-stop. They wanted to use Ba’s old wedding sari, wrapped in tissue and naphthalene balls in the tin trunk as a prop, but Ignatius said if they dared go near it, he’d chop off their hands and feed them to the peacocks. Ignatius made them costumes instead: four garish, interchangeable swathes of mirrored cloth, which they slipped over their heads like pillowcases, and kept in place with ropes of silk around their waists.

Every night, while the cousins slept on mattresses in the front room where three long, wooden swings hung from the ceiling, Bean crept out on the veranda and manoeuvred her way into the soft, withered bow of Ba’s body. For Bean, being in Anjar was like living in an Enid Blyton story, except instead of a magic faraway tree there was the tree of flying foxes behind the Amba Mata Temple. And instead of picnics on rolling green meadows with sticky gingerbread and ham rolls, there was dinner under the jamun tree with Ba hand-feeding them balls of spicy tamarind rice in turn.

The only problem with Anjar were her fatty bumbalatti cousins, who always wanted to know things like what
egg-zactly
did Mayuri and Bean eat at their British grandmother’s house.

‘First of all,’ Mayuri barked, ‘She’s not BRITISH, she’s WELSH, OK? And second of all, we eat whatever we eat here, STYOOPID.’

Unibrow number one, who shared Bean’s birthday, who was already twice Bean’s size, owing to Meenal’s fondness for using liberal quantities of vanaspathi ghee in all her cooking, was especially probing. ‘Tell me, nah,’ she’d say to Bean, sensing a softer target while Mayuri was otherwise occupied, ‘What do you
really
eat in your Welsh nani’s house?’

Bean was petrified that one day, in a moment of confusion, she’d tell the truth; and that the truth would generate disastrous consequences. The mere mention of the words ‘chicken’ or ‘fish’, caused the unibrows, who were devout Jain girls, to make a face as though someone were strangling them. Imagine then, if Bean spilled the beans, exposing Babo, Siân, Mayuri and her as a family of meat-eaters! They’d fall into irreparable disgrace, and worst of all, no one would ever trust her with a secret again.

Every morning and evening, much to Bean and Mayuri’s joint disgust, both unibrows demanded one hot tumbler of milk, which they claimed made them strong and fair, and which they chugged down in a single, steady glug. Afterwards of course, they suffered terrible gas, which they happily expelled by lifting their bottoms in the air – prr prr prr – so the smell could drift freely from underneath them.

‘EXCUSE ME!’ Mayuri would say admonishingly, pinching her nose with one hand, and waving the air around her frantically with the other.

‘Huh?’

‘You’re supposed to say “excuse me”. It’s rude to break wind in public.’

‘I’m not breaking anything. What are you talking about?’

Even though the unibrows were more fluent in Gujarati, the cousins spoke in English at the request of Meenal, who wanted her girls to be cosmopolitan. While Bean and Mayuri’s Gujarati suffered as a result, their better command of English gave them the upper hand in most activities.

When the cousins got along, they had a grand time – bum-skating vroom vroom across Ba’s black stone floors like meteors. They were allowed the run of the house and could play wherever they wanted except by the well in the back courtyard, which was out of bounds after the tragic incident of Sampurna-behn’s drowned child some years ago. They played shop-shop in the pantry, and shipwreck-shipwreck in the room of swings. In the front courtyard, where the peacocks were always pecking at grain, the cousins drew hopscotch grids and played seven stones under the trees. And if they ever got too bored to move, or too worn out to imagine a new game, there were always the garoli lizards for entertainment. All you had to do was say ‘SHOO MANTHAR’ and they plop plopped off the walls like red crystal raindrops to the ground.

But that summer, as post-wedding gloom descended on the village of Ganga Bazaar, the cousins discovered that most of their childhood games had lost their sparkle, and try as they might, none of them could be resuscitated. It was in the wake of this stupor that Mayuri suggested a god-god skit at bathtime. The idea was good enough; they each got to choose whichever god they wanted to be, and instead of sticking to a mythological script, they could make up their own special powers. But when she presented her idea to the unibrows, they sat in all their hefty nakedness on plastic stools and knitted their eyebrows into one deep, flat hairy line apiece.

‘My mummy says that God will punish you if you disrespect him,’ Unibrow number one said.

‘And you will die and go to hell,’ added Unibrow number two for good measure.

The unibrows knew everything about God and God-worship. They’d been initiated at an early age at the Adishwarji Jain Temple in Bombay, so they knew exactly when to ring the bell, how many times to circle the garba griha, when to kneel and fold their hands, but most importantly, they had the words – the special words to prayers that tumbled off their lips like waterfalls, gathering and gathering force, until Bean was sure they got channelled straight into the skies above and on to the gods sitting on golden thrones, who were ready to grant whatever you wished for, as long as you knew how to ask for it. It was like having the password to the Secret Seven: without it you couldn’t be part of the club. But no matter how badly Bean wanted to be part of God’s club, she’d rather die than have to ask the unibrows how to join.

‘It will be fun,’ Bean cajoled, ‘You can be Sita or Lakshmi – the richest, most beautiful goddess in the world. Or you could be Durga on her tiger, wreaking havoc upon her enemies.’

But the unibrows, intent on resistance, folded their arms across their pippy, pubescent breasts and remained vehemently opposed.

‘Mayuri, do you know that a day in hell is equal to one hundred human years?’