The Pleasure Seekers (35 page)

Bean sat with Allegra and explained it away. She had already recognized him for what he was long before all this. A few weeks ago at the park, sitting shirtless on a wooden bench, the river flowing by – he wasn’t the young-old boy she loved. There was the slight belly, the beginnings of hair on his stomach, the pale skin from too many hours in the office. No. she couldn’t imagine any kind of permanence with him at all. And what kind of man did this to you anyway? Made you believe in something and then dashed it to the ground?

‘I won’t say I told you so,’ Allegra said, ‘Actually, I will. I
told
you they never leave their wives, Bean. Never. And three children? Forget it!’

When Bean let go it wasn’t a procedure, it wasn’t slow. It was immediate: an epiphany. Because it was the only way she knew to confront her illusions. This was how the universe explained itself to her: in one second, between breaths. Not with a whimper, but a bang.

Bean could see her life ahead, waiting for her to catch up with it. She was going to pick up her skirts and race across the sand to where it was dancing, where it was saying,
Where have you been walking without me?
She was thinking of going back home and staying.

Home. Home.
Mayuri writing to her from across the sea with terrible news of her own.
I’ve had another miscarriage, Bean, the second this year. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but Cyrus is desperate to have children, and I’m not even sure I want them. The whole thing is so tedious – having to have sex at a particular time, and in particular ways, the constant checking and worrying. I don’t know, it takes the joy out of everything. And if the doctor says that I can’t, for whatever reason, carry a baby to term, Cyrus wants to adopt. But I don’t know, Bean. I want my own flesh and blood. I miss having you here. Don’t you miss home? Won’t you come home?

As though home were something so solid and fixed into the ground there could be no denying it. As though you could just say the word and know exactly what it meant.

Bean knew how it would be when she finally wandered into that Madras city air smelling of dust and tobacco, rosewater and jasmine. Everything would be familiar again: that old woman selling coconuts with the broken voice, that man with the hernia sitting at the corner of their street, those children playing in the gutter with sticks.
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig
.

But a part of Bean was still standing outside looking in, saying.
There’s no such thing as home. Once you’ve forsaken it and stepped out of the circle, you can’t ever re-enter and claim anything as yours
. How could you? When you’ve portioned off yourself in such a way? It was always going to be like this: when you walked down the cobbled streets of one city, your mind was always going to be in the folds of another. Hadn’t Bean tried? Hadn’t she gone away to recover parts of herself, and failed?

Bean had been losing the lines and boundaries for some time now. She wanted a place that was magical and warm, and even though Babo and Siân were calling her back to the house of orange and black gates saying,
Come back, come back, we have things to talk about
; even though Mayuri kept saying,
Cy and I miss you
, Bean knew she couldn’t go back to Madras just yet.

Bean needed the heartbeat of another person to help her through the night. She wanted something definitive to happen to her. Something like an Asda delivery truck swiping you off the road, allowing you to understand your whole life for one shining, brilliant moment. She wanted to go to Ganga Bazaar, where the doors were always open, where Ba would be sitting like a white-haired goddess with ointments to soothe her soul.

‘I’ve left him, Mayuri. I’ve finally come to the end of it. I have to leave this place.’

‘Sometimes the right thing is the harder thing to do, Bean.’

‘There’s something else.’

How to say it? Isn’t it ironic? I’m knocked up again. There’s a little seed growing inside me, Javier’s little seed, and this time I’m going to keep it
.

‘Promise you won’t tell Mama and Daddy. I don’t want them to know, not yet.’

‘Have you told him, Bean? He deserves to know.’

There was a beginning of a dream that came to Bean before she left London. It was thin and transparent and she could see herself and all the future glistening like soft, glowing lamps behind its curtains. Javier was walking along a shore. He was holding lilies in his hands, bringing them to her. It was Bean’s chance – to look at that picture and let him go. To take the flowers and say,
Let’s not do this now
. There, in one of the coves, the wife was demanding explanations, the children were crying.
It’s OK
, Bean wanted to tell them.
Because Daddy’s taken his mid-life crisis and throttled it
. Bean saw him walking away, smelling of lilies and light. She took this image of him: those long sleeves rolled up to the elbows, those changeable hands through which she’d fallen. He was floating by.

28  Living After the Fall

This was a strange kind of wilderness, this in-between place of no places. Bean was travelling the world; flying to the city of cages and slums, the city of Bombay that Siân had wanted to forget about as soon as she landed in it because it hadn’t been the India of her imagination. Bean would leave it too. She’d hop on to a train to Ahmedabad and take a night bus to Anjar exactly as Babo had done as a young man, stopping to pick rain clouds along the way for Ba.

To reach the village of Ganga Bazaar you had to pass through long stretches of silence, through desert mounds of rubble and stone, past caves and lightless caverns. You had to steer your way through the dreams of childhood. Bean, accustomed to these surreal terrains, settled herself by the window to witness them. She unwrapped her dinner – jeera aloo, pickle, chappathis and a packet of buttermilk. For weeks, ever since her morning sickness had passed, this is what she’d craved most: the taste of dry, homemade spice on her tongue. Her fellow passengers were spreading newspaper squares and eating too, anxious to fall back on the hard plastic length of their seats.

Bean ate quickly and made her way down the corridor to catch the last of the sun. She wanted to stand at the door and watch the countryside go by. In this light she could barely make out the difference between the shady babul trees and the handsome, cylindrical teaks – but they were out there, under the vast skies along with the umbrella jamuns and their deep, purple-black fruit. When they were children, going to Anjar for the summer, Mayuri and she had stood like this, by the open doors, with Siân standing right behind them, telling them to hold on tight.

What Bean saw now was an endlessness that went on and on: cotton and groundnut fields, unruly grasslands, temples, mosques, minarets, tombs. It was a landscape that belonged to no one – no king, no one moment in history. Bean stayed enraptured in this spell until they stopped, and the overpowering stench of urine and rush of hawkers invaded, but the minute they were moving, it was hers again – this entire swaying, intoxicating country, pulling away as they rushed forward.

At nightfall, Bean returned to her seat and tried to sleep. She had been travelling so long now, out of the lush forests of Maharashtra into the desert of Gujarat. Such dryness, impossible for the mind. Bean wished for rain. For overwhelming flood and deluge to come crashing through this place. For tiny streams to carve the hide of this parched earth. Because she’d already left one desert behind – the hissing urban desert of London. She’d left Javier on the front lawn of his house on Elsworthy Road, carrying Rosie around on his feet like a penguin carries its chick. Javier, in the faded English autumn light, who kept stepping in and out with his ideas of love and marriage.

Suppose Javier had been able to convince her that
Love was always new, Love was an eternity
, would Bean have been able to make her life there? To leave her home and family like Siân had done for Babo all those years ago?
For sure she would. For sure
.

Bean wouldn’t have had to think about it. Bean, who was so convinced she was Daddy’s girl, but who had none of Babo’s steadfastness, who in the end, had turned out exactly like Siân, plagued by separations. It was why Siân was always saying ‘Behave’ to Bean, never to Mayuri, because Siân knew if someone said to Bean,
Come to where I am, make my life sparkle
, Bean would do exactly what she had done. She’d abandon them all and go. But Mayuri was different. Mayuri wanted to stay rooted to her earth, bound to her blood.
Blood. Blood
. Bean didn’t believe in blood.

Ba explained it all to her later. She told Bean you could never be afraid of your own blood; that you could have a yearning for someone long after they’d disappeared from your life, but you could also yearn for them before they were born: Javier, her unborn child. Ba told her to recognize these two worlds as one; to be easy and light so when the moment came you’d be ready to plunge. You wouldn’t have to go stooping around the edge with no fizz fizz in your step. You could dive straight in without smashing your head on rosewood floors. You could come back up to the surface with pockets full of pearls.

Otherwise, it was always going to be this way, wasn’t it? Chasing close, but not close enough. All this time between the picking up and letting go. Wasn’t it through these cracks that a human being could fall? Like Icarus – too close to the sun: melted wings and pasty-white legs, disappearing into the water for ever.

In Amroli the bus halted for a late-night toilet stop. An old woman across the aisle held out her hand and asked if Bean could help her outside. The woman’s hand felt soft to touch, pruned, as if it had come from water. Bean took it and guided her to the thatched hut on the other side of the road where cows were usually kept, where they would have to squat, one in each corner, lifting their skirts to relieve themselves.

When they were finished, Bean took the old woman’s hand and led her back across the street, where children had abandoned their skipping ropes for the day. On the derelict verandas, mothers and fathers slept on charpoys, hoping for a soft caress of midnight breeze. The only sound came from the night birds – spotted owlets and nightjars – and from the laughter of young men playing cards under dusty peepal trees. Back on the bus, Bean relinquished the old woman’s hand and watched as she faltered back to sit by her husband, a wizened, slack-jawed reed of a fellow, and Bean, seeing them side by side together, thought only this: how tired they must be of living with each other.

All night, as they moved towards the village of Ganga Bazaar, Bean felt the old woman’s hands on her. They humbled her with their deterioration. Chotu Kaka’s hands had felt like this in the end, except his deterioration had been quicker, crueller.

The bus arrived in Ganga Bazaar at dawn when the jackals were returning to their lairs and the first rays of the sun were lighting up the periphery of the village like a smudgy line of burning coals. Bean got off with the other passengers and dragged her suitcase through the familiar crepuscular lanes, over potholes and along skinny drains, past the Amba Mata Temple with the sugar-cane fields blowing softly in the distance, past Zam Zam Lodge, past rows of concrete, tin-roofed houses where all the doors and windows were open, and where the tulsi plant grew copiously in courtyards, filling the air with its magical powers.

Everywhere Bean looked there were women: picking stones from rice, hanging their bright skirts and odhnis to dry, oiling and combing each other’s hair, waving a greeting as she passed by.

In the old days the women of this town would have had a field day ghus-phusing; they would’ve closed their doors and averted their eyes if they’d known that an unmarried woman with child was among them. But Ba had trained them well. Ba, who had understood the true nature of reality in her fifty-third year, and who had been teaching the women of Ganga Bazaar ever since; whose sister eloped with a Muslim boy, and whose grandson married a white woman. Ba would teach Bean too, how to separate love from betrayal, anger from abandonment. She’d pick up all Bean’s broken pieces and help her find her way home.

Bean felt like she was entering a mirage. These women looked to her like they existed from before time began: as if they had sprung, as the myths told, from cremation grounds, from the mouths of conches and the undersides of oars. These women walking about busily with their hair unbound, with keys ka-chink ka-chinking from their hips, with charcoal kajal in their eyes and bright red kumkum in the centres of their foreheads – they looked to Bean as though they really turned into tree-sprites and blue-faced boat women at night; as though they could spring lotuses from their necks, part their oblong legs and give birth to all the vegetation of the world.

Ba, sitting on the front steps of her house under the shade of the jamun tree in her white widow’s sari, was cutting pomegranates, carving the red seeds out of the skin and placing them in a steel bowl beside her. Her creamy eyes squinted in the light. Her diaphanous knee-length hair lay plaited loosely down her back like a rope of glistening snow.

Everything around her was abundant, mysterious, despite the dryness, despite the heat. In the courtyard, peacocks milled about, pecking the ground for grain. Through the open doorways Bean could see red garoli lizards chewing plaster from the walls. The morning sun was rising like a siren, beating down on the tin roof with her curled up fists, extending rays of light to the bamboo grove and Ignatius’s shack all the way at the back of the compound.