The Pleasure Seekers (27 page)

Ah, Cyrus! With his toothy smile and eternally uncombed hair. When you looked into his extravagantly lashed, wounded deer eyes, now that the soda bottle glasses had been replaced by contacts, you’d see how Cyrus Mazda had the ability to make you fall in love with him. This was a simple truth. Not mad falling in love in the way Bean had fallen for Michael Mendoza; something truer than that. If you walked into a room of strangers, Cyrus would be the one you’d go to. If you were lost in the street looking for directions, Cyrus would be the one you’d seek out, because there was something so good in Cyrus, something so solid and inevitable about him, that he could melt even the strongest, most stubborn hearts.

Babo and Siân, for instance, who had strong, stubborn hearts, and every reason to be wary – they were putty in Cyrus’s hands. Whenever Cyrus came over to pick Mayuri up, Babo and Siân made sure they were both available in the sitting room. ‘Have you got something for me to eat, Aunty?’ Cyrus might say, ‘I hope it’s better than what you gave me last time’, Mayuri and Bean, never having seen their mother like this – all bashful and giggly over a teenage boy, scampering into the kitchen to bring out a lemon meringue or Victoria sponge on her best china, with a dessert fork and an embroidered napkin. Siân, who tut tutted about his cheek, but who was secretly pleased that this boy was in her house, this boy with the long, sad face like her father’s.

And Babo, who had been a love-struck father from the beginning, who found it difficult to relinquish any control when it came to his girls – Babo tolerated Cyrus at first, then warmed to him, then began to adore him. Babo talked about the prices of land or the abysmal state of Indian cricket, not caring that Cyrus didn’t really know anything about any of these things. He always asked how Darayus was getting on, and Cyrus always told him the truth: that his grandfather was getting more and more senile by the day, but was still doing the things he loved – messing about with his cars, feeding the local beggars. And finally, Mayuri would have to take him by the arm and drag him out the door, otherwise they’d be there all day, because this boy, who shone and beamed and didn’t threaten to rob you of anything you might hold precious – your money or your daughters – opened his arms to the world, and the world embraced him back.

And even Bean, who’d known him since his gawky ostrich years when Mayuri used to persecute them both; who’d sweated buckets and opened pores with him on the back seat of the orange Flying Fiat – even she had to admit that there was everything to love about Cyrus Mazda, and that Trishala Ba, in her dying days, must have got it wrong.

21  Chotu’s First and Only Flight

The speed and authority with which Rinky Damani appeared in Chotu’s life, destroyed it and then disappeared, was nothing less than remarkable. She appeared in foggy conditions on an early morning flight from Madras to Delhi in the late December of 1990. Chotu was 13,000 feet in the air, looking down at the world. He’d been in a state of philosophical pondering – a state he often found himself in when he was up in the sky. And the predominant feeling he’d been having that morning was this: that perhaps it was possible to live in the quiet, uncomplicated way he’d been doing, without the need for entangling himself with another person, without the need for ownership or belonging.

Because
look
– just look at the world below! The entire superstructure of a city reduced to a mere toyscape. Little toy cars moving about on little toy roads – noiselessly, aromalessly; little toy trees and little toy people. A city with a thousand years of history reduced to a view from a window. All its gates and gardens and towers, its monuments and markets, its politics, its ugliness, its many irregularities reduced to a fine palimpsest of design.
This
was the undeniable miracle of flight: not that it allowed you to travel great distances in small amounts of time, not the actual physics of getting 200 tonnes of metal to stay up in the air. No. It was the miracle of perspective. The fact that down there could be anywhere. Down there, where things were happening, where people were marrying and fighting and working and sleeping and defecating and cooking and crying and dying – down there where all those things that made up life were happening – could be anywhere in the world. And from where Chotu was sitting, it was a world without demarcations, a world perfectly capable of saving itself.

It was while Chotu was looking out of the window and thinking these thoughts that Rinky Damani appeared in his peripheral vision. What Chotu felt when he came in contact with this vision was that he’d finally arrived at the entrance of the world.

‘Sir,’ Rinky was saying, ‘Sir, could you please put your seat forward, we’re about to land.’

And when the vision leaned over to do it herself, to tweak the lever and push the headrest forward, Chotu, who could smell the perfume on her and see the tremendous shape of her beneath the constricting Indian Airlines uniform, felt something he hadn’t felt since he was twenty years old, about to visit Fifi’s House of Spices in North Madras for the very first time. He felt a rush of pure, unaccustomed lust.

Chotu had had his affairs, but he’d emerged from these affairs with no delusions. Those encounters had ignited nothing but a renewed conviction that man and woman weren’t meant to share their lives in the way they currently did – under the bonds and ties of legal documentation. He only had to look around to see the unhappiness, the oppression that marriage brought – binding people to each other senselessly on and on and on. What did it all matter when the world was threatening to fall apart? What madness was it to bring children into this world? For Chotu, the idea of having to sleep and wake up in the same bed with the same person day after day, night after night, was enough to make him want to jump out of a plane without a parachute, to fall into that dollhouse splendour and sink slowly into oblivion. Until. Until.

Until Rinky Damani appeared before him with her painted talons and multi-ringed fingers. Rinky Damani, who was like a Chola bronze – a Parvathi whose hips and breasts defied the mountains, who was ready for 10,000 years of coitus or more. Rinky, who could easily match those shalabhanjikas of yore – those tree nymphs who were so fertile, they could, with their mere feet, kick saplings into fruit-bearing trees; who as long as she kept kicking, would be surrounded by a jungle so thick, a vegetation so dense, the world would never have to worry about deforestation again. Rinky, whose face was all eyes and lips – mascara-caked eyes and lips that lay across the bottom of her face like two fertilizer-fed worms, perfectly pursed above the olive birthmark on her chin. When Rinky laughed it was like she was inviting you into her special world – the nostrils flaring ever so slightly and the head thrown back in abandon – thrown back despite the dark rings, the uneven skin, the double layers of foundation. Thrown back because she was a ball-buster and she knew it. Rinky Damani: the most sexually provocative thing Chotu had ever encountered.

The affair between Chotu and Rinky Damani was a relationship of noteworthy lopsidedness. Granted, Chotu had never been in love before, so it was impossible to know what to expect. But no one in his family expected this: mild-mannered Chotu, disposed to bouts of sulking and flashes of anger, suddenly giving voice. Babo couldn’t understand it. Was this the same brother he’d grown up with? Little Chotu? For the life of him, Babo couldn’t understand his brother’s attraction to this woman: she was brazen, tedious, rude, and it had to be said, a whole seven years older than him. Clearly, she was controlling Chotu in the most basic way possible: through sex. Chotu must have been getting it all the time, frequently, and in exciting locations. Why else would he alter his matador hairstyle and start wearing see-through designer Delhi shirts? Why else would he run circles around the country for this woman while she continued to insult him and his family on a regular basis?

As usual, Babo became the centre for complaints. ‘Did you know, bhai,’ Meenal said from Bombay, ‘The first time she saw the girls she asked them if they had a hormonal imbalance? Can you believe it? HORMONAL IMBALANCE. And when they said no, why? That witch told them that
these
days there is laser surgery to get rid of facial hair for ever. Can you believe it?’

Sitting around the dining table in the house of orange and black gates, Rinky Damani actually said to Siân that she was surprised she’d lasted so long in such a crackpot family. ‘I mean, both your sisters-in-law look like Ladies Club treasurers. And your father-in-law, oh my God, don’t get me started on him. He’s the worst. He treats Chotu like a child. I mean, Chotu – is there any worse way to stunt a man’s maturity? What a ridiculous pet name. Why not just call him Tejas? Why not just let him do what he wants to do?’

Never mind that Rinky was a pet name for Renuka. Never mind that Rinky was forty years old.

In spite of all her complaining, Rinky agreed to move to Madras and live in Sylvan Lodge as long as there could be a Delhi flat as well. She was full of ideas to renovate the top floor and redesign the whole look of the house. She even got Babo to invent a new shade of salmon pink paint with silver flecks so she could replace Trishala’s pista-green legacy. She went on shopping sprees, tried being vegetarian on Mondays, agreed to hand in her resignation a few months before the wedding, but most importantly, she spent hours and hours painstakingly planning their honeymoon because Rinky, who had never flown internationally before had only ever had one ambition in life: to walk into a Rolex shop and to be able to afford anything in it. Rinky was planning Switzerland because Switzerland was the playground of the rich; Switzerland was cuckoo clocks and Swarovski and everything India was not. And Chotu, all the while, kept handing her bundles of Rs 100 notes, despite Prem Kumar’s protests and Babo’s raised eyebrows, because he’d never been happier in his life.

And yet, on Tuesday 21 May 1991, the same day Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber, in the small town of Sri Perumbudur, fifty kilometres outside of Madras, barely six months after the love affair between Rinky Damani and Chotu had begun, it was officially over. Just like that. While the country revisited the turmoil it had seen after Indira Gandhi’s death, Chotu’s life fell apart.

On the Friday before the assassination, Rinky met the International Head of Nestlé Marketing on the Delhi-Bombay sector. By the weekend, she had vanished, leaving Chotu a wedding trousseau of considerable value, the gold and diamond Titan watch he’d bought her to rectify her tardiness, and two round-trip tickets to Switzerland. On the Tuesday of the assassination, the one-line note of apology arrived.

Dear Tejas
,

You know that in the end, it wouldn’t have worked out
.

Renuka

But Chotu didn’t know. How could he know? He felt like he’d been thrust into a cave, a cave emptied of light and filled with Rinky’s absences. How could he get used to the darkness and the shadows again after he had bathed and frolicked and made love to the light? The cave was full of despair, and the problem with this despair was that Chotu couldn’t give vent to it. It was there – every minute of every day – following him like a brooding thundercloud wherever he went. So there was nothing for him to do but wait in the cave surrounded by her things, waiting for a phone call that might come miraculously to save him, to confirm that it had all been a terrible mistake – that Rinky was being held for ransom, or had been taken seriously ill – anything but Rinky Damani heartlessly and deliberately abandoning him for another man.

And after months of sitting by a silent phone, and checking the letter box seventeen times a day, and the Indian Airlines office telling him that they really had no information about their previous employee Ms Damani – after months and months of soul-destroying despair, there was anger. Anger, because this was his life, and suddenly, it was diminished. Gone. Suddenly, he was left to confront the reality that was left: the insomniac father with the torn vest and dhoti sitting around the table with a
why don’t you ever listen to me
look in his eyes, the football sisters and pitying brother shuffling tentatively around him, waiting to catch him if he should fall.

Prem Kumar couldn’t begin to know how to deal with yet another lovesick son. He was older now, feeble and worn down, working only half-days at the office, and struggling through the endless nights by listening to religious songs on his Walkman. ‘Come and help him,’ he instructed his first-born.

But when Babo came over to Sylvan Lodge and tried to smooth over some of the madness that Rinky had left behind, Chotu, who wasn’t in the mood for reconciliation just yet, said, ‘Bhai, it is what it is, just let it be,’ and disappeared upstairs.

Inside his half-renovated room, Chotu’s suitcases lay about in the hope that Rinky Damani would summon him up as she used to summon him up before. Chotu lived in this state of transition for a few years – unable to stay, unable to go, unable to work, unable to fly. The only time he got any kind of comfort was at the Madras Gymkhana Club with his bhabi and his nieces. There, while the girls dived off the springboards and canonballed in the deep end, he remembered an earlier, purer time, when Bean and he spent their mornings patiently trawling up and down the length of this same swimming pool, and he tried to replicate that feeling now, by swimming his way into a state of meditation. And after unsuccessfully trying to swim the idea of Rinky Damani away, he’d come out of the water and sit with Siân under the sun umbrella with a fresh lime soda and say, ‘Bhabi, I really loved her. I know she was difficult at times, that she was overpowering and maybe spoke her mind too openly, but you know, she could be adorable. You should have seen the way she ate ice cream – like a little girl – letting it dribble all the way down her neck. And even though she ate meat, she really did love animals – in her heart, she did.’