The Pleasure Seekers (26 page)

Bean would wait, because there was nothing like falling into the sinful layers of his body. It was terrible, really. When Bean thought about it later in her life, everything about the first boy who put his Whatsit into her Ms Sunshine was terrible.

Didn’t everybody say it? Didn’t she say it herself?
What a fool. What a fool
. What a fool for letting him do what he did to her. And what did he do? He saw her floundering; saw it in her eyes. It was easy. She was so young, so compliant. She was dancing at her first party in a low-waist leopard-print dress with padded shoulders, her grown-out hair pushed away from her large forehead in a bright red headband, her strong swimmer legs stuffed into distressingly white ankle boots.

She was dancing with Mehnaz, who was dressed from head to toe in tangerine orange. Bean and Mehnaz, who had put away their dolls, who had spent three straight days in front of the mirror deciding what they were going to wear, who were pretending to have the time of their lives, pretending not to be terrified.

So it was easy for the boy to come over and put his hands on Bean’s skin, to take hold of her heart and slip it into his pocket, to take it out whenever he wanted to squeeze squeeze squeeze. Because Bean had been brought up to believe that there was no life possible without love; that love, when it came, would be devastating and difficult.

If Prem Kumar had known, he’d have said it was the same old story again – of a fish trying to swim on land. If Ba in Anjar had known, she’d have said that this was a danger a long time coming.

But Ba didn’t know and Bean didn’t know any better. For now Bean was sitting in the bay window listening for noises and dreaming of giving herself to Michael Mendoza. She was listening out, not for the Boochie Man or Dick Whittington on his way to becoming Mayor of London, but for the sounds of sleep.

Here was Mayuri in what used to be the guest room – sleeping with the sheets pulled up to her neck, her economics and accounting books piled neatly on the study table, pictures of Cyrus Mazda looking uncomfortably down at her from the walls. Here were Babo and Siân, spooning like old times in their Kashmiri bed. Here was Selvi stretched out like a corpse on the dining-room floor, her bountiful chest rising and falling under the Khaitan fan. Upstairs were the Singhanias, snoring like a family of water buffaloes. Outside was Bahadur, drunk as a skunk, in the cane chair under the flame-of-the-forest tree.

Here was Bean, sneaking past them all so she could slide behind Michael Mendoza on his motorbike and ride back to the house of his divorced mother; to the dark shrine of his room with the Black Sabbath and Skid Row posters, the tightly drawn curtains, the salty smell of teenage sex and testosterone.

Bean lay down amongst it. She laid her young body down on his filthy bed and allowed him to touch the space between her legs, to carry that space away for ever.

The first time ‘it’ happened, Bean was so ashamed she made Michael leave the room and sent him a note under the door.
Don’t you think we’ve done something wrong?

Afterwards, when Bean couldn’t get enough, when they were fucking in the bed, on the floor, in the shower, in cars, in corners of parties, Michael Mendoza would remind her of those early concerns in his most plaintive voice possible: ‘We shouldn’t, we shouldn’t, really, we shouldn’t!’ While Bean, wrapping her legs tighter around him, begged him to shut up and do it, just do it.

If Michael had loved Bean, she’d have been sailing. She’d have been out on the open sea with dolphins. Because all Bean had ever wanted in life was affirmation: from her family, from God, from the world. All she really believed in was life-affirming love; something like the love she saw between Babo and Siân.

So when Michael Mendoza, a half-Goan, half-Malayali boy, made her sit on his bed in her bra and knickers, and said, ‘I like looking at you like this,’ it was inevitable that Bean would fall; fall hard.

And when he took her from behind, saying it was better than racing his bike, better than smoking weed, better than anything in the world, Bean came to believe that he was the only person who could banish the never-ending worries. Bean believed that as long as she was ready and willing, Michael Mendoza would arrive at the gates every night to help her escape.

But after every escape there had to be a return. And the return was always trickier. The return made Bean’s heart quiver like a whiskered bulbul, darting this way and that. Any minute now, she thought,
any minute
Babo would appear before her, blocking the door in his striped pyjamas; eyes bleary, curls dishevelled, saying,
Bean, what is it? Where are you coming from at this time of night? What have you been doing?

And after six months of sneaking out and sneaking back in, six months of exacting deception, six months of
I’m going to see a film with Mehnaz, I’m staying over at Mehnaz’s, Menhaz and me are going shopping
– there was trouble.

When the trouble arrived and Bean had to push her breakfast away to run to the toilet to retch, it was Mehnaz who made the appointment at the Jayalakshmi Ladies Clinic in Alwarpet; who got into the auto rickshaw with her; who told her to make up a name and lie about her age. And when the urine test came back, when they found out that it was really true – that Bean was undeniably pregnant at the horrifyingly inappropriate age of sixteen – it was Mehnaz who scavenged the money and stood beside Bean while they anaesthetized her and removed what needed to be removed.

‘Don’t you think we should tell your mother?’ Mehnaz asked, even though she knew there was no way Bean would ever tell.

‘How?’ Bean replied. ‘How can I disappoint her? I can’t.’

And when it was all over, and Michael Mendoza arrived to see her in the hospital room, in his usual hoodlum gear – in torn jeans and bracelets around his wrists – smiling his irreverent smile, trying to rub her there between the legs, saying it was OK now, it was all OK; and Bean, seizing that poignant moment to get some clarification – because this
would
be the moment to hear it – asked, ‘Do you love me, Michael? Do you?’ and Michael Mendoza said, ‘I’m not sure I know what love is, but you’re the closest I’ve come to it,’ when all this bullshit was going on, the usually placid Mehnaz was standing outside, fuming.

I’m not sure? I’m not sure?
Meaning to say what? she wanted to ask. Meaning to say that it wasn’t enough for someone to give her body and soul like this in return for some measly words. Meaning to say that if you could lie about other things with such sophistication, couldn’t you come up with something better than this? Michael Mendoza – you good-for-nothing son of a second-rate weasel.

So it was Mehnaz who gently suggested to Bean that perhaps she should stop seeing Michael Mendoza because it was no secret he slept with other girls. Perhaps it wasn’t cool any more for Bean to be the Queen Bee in his harem. Perhaps she should aim higher.

It was Mehnaz who walked her out past the nurses in their starchy green uniforms, Mehnaz who took Bean to her own pink-papered room and tucked her into bed, and helped change the cotton wads between her legs where it was bleeding – where it would bleed for several days. It was Mehnaz who allowed her to sleep till midday, who brought her buttered toast in bed, and returned to the house of orange and black gates with her, because they had to put on a show for Babo and Siân. They had to pretend that everything was all right, especially for Siân, who always knew when something was wrong.

And later, after exhausting themselves with phoney laughter, after Mehnaz had to go home because Aunty Sherize complained she never saw her daughter any more, Bean, following an early instinct for security, walked into her parents’ bedroom and found her mother sitting in the corner, crying for only the second time in her life.

‘I hope we raised you right, Beena,’ Siân said, not looking at Bean but somewhere beyond.

And Bean, holding back the tears, buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and said, ‘Of course everything’s all right, Mama. I don’t know what you mean. Of course everything’s going to be all right.’ But knowing in her shattered sixteen-year-old heart that nothing was right, that nothing would be right for some time to come.

Bean would have liked to tell Mayuri the truth. She would have liked to tell her sister how the first time she felt something
down there
was when they were watching
The Key to Rebecca
in Babo and Siân’s bedroom on the sly, and Mayuri had gone chi chi and switched it off just when it got steamy. Or how it felt when Michael Mendoza put his head between her legs. Or something about the trouble that followed.

But Bean couldn’t bring herself to say anything, because Mayuri, who went through the world with a sense of indignation, with an angel’s sense of right and wrong, would have looked at her as though she’d betrayed the universe, as though she’d utterly failed as a human being.

Mayuri, whose love for Cyrus was so above-board and acceptable that no one had to ghus phus about it behind closed doors; who walked with Cyrus as though they’d been married for twenty years – standing respectfully apart, with only the occasional leaning in, to tuck a strand of hair back into a braid, or to sweep a straggling crumb away from the lips. Everyone who witnessed these two, carrying on without any of the usual teenage dramas and jealousies, with the quiet dignity that only comes after years and years of comfortable adult intimacy, thought it was so sweet, so unbelievably sweet that two childhood friends should become lovers.

Mayuri and Cyrus sitting in a tree
.

K I S S I N G
.

First comes love, then comes marriage
,

Then comes the baby in the baby carriage
.

Except that Mayuri and Cyrus weren’t lovers, not even close. Despite the fact that Mayuri regularly came home with Cyrus’s trademark coconut scraper love bites on her alabaster neck; despite the fact that there may have been moments of weakness over the years when Mayuri inadvertently allowed Cyrus to put his hand up her shirt to fondle a breast or two, there was no doubt that Mayuri was resolutely and vigilantly holding tight to her virginity.

How did Bean know? Because she’d been rummaging around in Mayuri’s room and discovered five years of Indo-Burma notebooks hidden in her chest of drawers. Five years of meticulously dated shenanigans between Mayuri and Cyrus, inscribed in Mayuri’s, virtuous, soldier-straight fountain pen handwriting. Everything from Mayuri’s early tyrannical days to the miracle of first realizations: first hand-holding and first under the table knee-touching. These notebooks were an unfolding of love. Everything from Mayuri despairing about having to change her name to Mayuri Mazda (if and when), and Cyrus telling the unhappy story of his parents on an upturned boat one full-moon night, to their first disastrous attempts at tongue-kissing in the ashoka grove at Sylvan Lodge. There were softenings and hardenings, gentle rubbings against each other in the ocean, light tracings of inner thighs and hands held over the gear lever driving home. There were simmerings and bubblings. There were even a few midnight expeditions to sneak out and lie down with each other on the beach, but there was absolutely no record of a first sha-bing sha-bang, of a hello Ms Sunshine, of any kind of explosion. Bean, after combing through 350,000 words, searching for something to justify her own chicanery, was quite sure that nothing in the lifelong romance between Mayuri and Cyrus had ever come close to penetration.

It made no sense at all. Cyrus went to an all-boys school, he had no sisters, his female cousins lived in America; the only access he had to girls other than Mayuri and Bean were the mighty-shouldered, moustachioed he-women who rowed with him at the Madras Boat Club every morning. By all accounts, he should have been gagging for it like any regular eighteen-year-old boy. He should have been pursuing Mayuri like a sex-starved rabbit, but he wasn’t. In fact, if Mayuri’s account was to be believed, Cyrus wasn’t very interested in any of the normal eighteen-year-old activities: parties, smoking, drinking. The occasional party he went to, on Mayuri’s insistent cajoling, he moved about disconnected from the crowd, taller than anyone else at 6ft 3, with his hands stuffed in his pockets, while everyone around him drank and threw up and fought and danced. Cyrus never drank or fought, and if he ever danced, it was in a carefree, non-sexual way – not trying to rub his you-know-what against you like other boys.

Cyrus got his pleasure from other places: Cyrus rowed and played tennis and fixed cars in the garage with Darayus and lifted weights and even took yoga lessons to stretch out his gangly, giraffe limbs.

Cyrus was in a constant state of work and movement, sweating in dirty jeans and half-sleeved shirts. It was as if he was trying to pretend he wasn’t the son of a millionaire textile owner who’d emigrated to America and left two Jaguars in the garage for his son to play with. It was as if he was trying to pretend he hadn’t had a life of privilege, that his grandfather wasn’t senile, that his parents really loved each other. Because Cyrus would have swapped his life of privilege in a flash. He would have preferred a life of hard work and diligence, and parents who were the salt of the earth, rather than high-faluting society types.

So Cyrus forced his Parsi white body to turn golden brown in the sun, and worked his hands till they were permanently calloused and smeared with engine oil, and drove a revamped Maruti 800 like all the other upper middle-class kids his age. Only late at night when he was alone, or occasionally if Mayuri was with him, would Cyrus take the old Jaguar E-type or the XJS out for a spin with the roof down, when there was no one in the streets to ooh and aah with envy. And even then, he tried his hardest not to enjoy it: the V-12 engine, the sleek bonnet, the oval headlights, the utter thrill of driving a machine that was so fast and so beautiful.