The Pleasure Seekers (39 page)

Ignatius put her down in a place where there was still walls and a roof. He cleaned her forehead and shoulders with the end of his dupatta, and laid his ear down on her distended stomach. ‘What a thing to have happened,’ he said, click clicking his tongue, and then walked back out into that madness with a crowbar in his hands. Mansuk-bhai was going with him, sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

Are you going to war? Is this what’s happening here?
Bean wanted to ask.
Who are we fighting? Don’t leave me alone. Come back!

But Ignatius was gone already, his silver bangles clacking menacingly in the morning sun.

Bean needed to find Mayuri. She wanted to tell her that they’d been living their lives together after all. She wanted to go whooshing down the banister of Sylvan Lodge again with matching denim skirts so they could slide. Vroom vroom, so they could fall.

She wanted her father and mother to hold her hands and walk through the broken rooms naming things: table, chair, cupboard, mother, father, sister. Would it be that simple to learn them again? To make them whole?

What Bean smelled now was the smell of paint. Her father’s factory during Diwali, a 500-wallah bomb going off for what seemed like hours – phat-a-phat phat-a-phat. Diwali. The God Ram bringing the Goddess Sita back to the kingdom. The triumph of good over evil. The unibrows, the lamps, oil baths, new clothes. Selvi and Selvam, dark and polished like coffee beans, collecting their gift-wrapped presents from Siân. It was about beginning the new year, about being protected. Her mother and father, Siân and Babo, an amalgamation of their names on cans of paint, spread on the walls of people’s homes, surviving monsoons and marriages. And what of those houses now? Collapsed, crumbled. All fallen down.
Ladybird ladybird fly away home, your house is on fire, your children all gone
. Babo, in his paint-smattered shirts. Siân, the milky smell of love between her breasts. Mother. Father.

This was it
, thought Bean. The moment I asked for: my moment of blinding clarity. Forty-five seconds of it. Bean hadn’t thought of Javier. She had thought of her baby, of Ba. Of what Babo, Siân and Mayuri would do without her in the world.

For four days she’d been living in darkness. It reminded her of the Madras cyclone of 1984 when they’d been trapped in the house of orange and black gates. No school. No office for nearly a week. Only rain pounding down on telephone wires, hacking off branches of trees. Bean hadn’t been scared of that darkness. Siân and Selvi had filled the house with candles. Babo had taught Mayuri and her how to play Rummy. All day they played cards, gambling with pistachio shells first, and then with twenty-five paisa coins. ‘Never doubt the Gujju genes in these girls,’ Babo had laughed when Bean and Mayuri cleaned him out. At night they slept together like a perfect family: Babo and Siân on either side of their Kashmiri bed, Bean and Mayuri tucked between them. And then the inevitable happened – the rain slowed down and finally stopped. The lights came back on again, uncomfortably bright. They fell back into their daily routines, slept in their own beds. Soon afterwards, Selvi found Bean at the power box, trying to disconnect the electrical mains. ‘What’s the matter with you, child? Gone mad or what?’ But Bean couldn’t help it. She’d fallen in love with the idea of darkness, even though it was the same darkness the Boochie Man roamed around in.

This was a different kind of darkness. Barely any food or sleep, the smell of rot and decomposing flesh around them. At nights, there was mostly quietness, but once in a while, a gurgle of laughter from some black corner, an illicit sound, almost. Strange, thought Bean, even at a time like this, we must laugh, and somewhere perhaps, a husband and wife, lucky to be alive, or a pair of lovers, were holding each other and making love, as they must.

Bean folded her hands across her stomach. She could feel the baby kicking inside. Soft, insistent thud thuds.

Forty-five seconds. That’s all it took to change your life.

Bean didn’t remember when Ignatius came back for her. It might have been a few hours, or a day. ‘It’s OK,’ Bean told him, ‘Lola is fine. I can feel her.’

‘We’re getting out of here,’ Ignatius said. ‘Now. Come on, let’s go. I found someone to take us. An old lover. Trust the past to come up with a solution. Come on, Beena. There, I’ve got you.’

Ignatius carried Bean into a bright yellow Ashok Leyland lorry. It was daybreak, and even though the roads were piled high with stone, and the sky seemed to have holes in it, the sun still shone through as if nothing had happened. All around them was the aftermath of struggle. It was exactly like in that poem about suffering Bean had learned in school: the dogs go on with their doggy life, and everything turns quite leisurely away from the disaster.

Ba heard it first – a towering roll of thunder that tore through the air as though the sky were clearing its throat – khat phat, khat phat, preparing to regurgitate all it had been witness to. Then she began to smell. First an intoxicating drift of bakul flowers and wet grass, and then from afar, wafting over the long kilometres of rubble, past the bodies and howling jivas of jackals and peacocks, children and neighbours, there was the smell of spices and lolly ice, brass, sex, blood.

Ba threw off the covers and rose from the mattress she’d been lying on for so many days and nights. Her legs felt unsteady, like columns of water. She inched her way down the corridor, wondering about the walls of her house. These walls that were still standing. It must have been the red garoli lizards that saved them – chewing for all those years, leaving behind traces of their saliva along the walls, binding everything tightly together.

At the basin, Ba stood, unplaiting her long, white hair. The mirror above the basin had fallen and cracked. There was no water coming out of the taps, but there was a bucket of water on the floor, full to the brim. They had been rationing the well water: two mugs per person per day. It was all they had to drink, clean themselves with, clean wounds with, cook.

Ba pulled up a plastic stool to the bucket. She removed her clothes quickly and hung them on the bathroom hook. Then she sat down, her lungs making dangerous rattling noises as she lowered herself. She scooped up one mug of water and dipped her fingers into it. The water was cold. She dipped her fingers in again and splashed a few drops on her face. Her eyes stung with joy.

Ba remembered as a young girl, going to the river to bathe with her friends. Wading in fully clothed and then plunging their heads under the surface until their bodies were immersed. The feeling of water on your skin. Was there anything more sensual, more erotic than this? She wanted to feel that now; to dissolve into a similar kind of bliss. She poured a mug of water over her head. Then another and another, until her hair stuck to her body like a river plant. She gasped and shivered, the coldness of it, the cleanness of it. Again and again, she poured, until there was nothing left. Then she wrapped a towel around herself, reached for a clean blouse, which she put on with difficulty. The scars on her shoulder still hurt, and the gashes on her forehead and collarbone where the rafter hit, hadn’t healed. Within a few minutes, she was dressed again: hooks fastened, sari retied.

Before leaving, she groped along the bathroom shelf for her comb and a silver box of kajal. She ran the comb through her hair, untangling the knots, feeling long strands come away in her palms. Then she opened the silver box and stuck her ring finger in. She needed no mirror to find the lower rims of her eyes, to mark them with blackness.

Ba walked out, making her way through the room of swings to the front door. There were noises coming from outside. She could hear Shakambari and Durga-behn arguing about how much chilli powder to put into something. She could hear Rukku saying, ‘No, no not like that, cut it this way, we need to make as many tents as we can.’

When she was finally at the wooden doorway, trying to position herself so she wouldn’t appear shaky, the women of Ganga Bazaar suddenly noticed her and let out a collective shriek. ‘Hansa-behn, what are you doing? Why have you got up like this?’

‘Go and fetch Babo,’ she said. ‘Tell him not to go anywhere.’

Babo and Siân were getting ready to leave for Bhuj in their sky-blue Ambassador. ‘What is it?’ Babo asked, rushing to her. ‘Are you all right?’

Ba could hear the red garoli lizards plop plopping off the walls. The tin roof was gone though, she was sure of it, taking the peacocks with it.

‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘They’re coming, Babo. They’re coming home. I can smell them. Come sit with me. Come,’ she said, pulling Siân’s hand. ‘Sit with me, and wait.’

Ba sat on her front steps, looking straight ahead, her diabetic eyes curdling and stilling, her diaphanous hair unplaited, wet and open to the contaminated air.

When those first drops began to fall, Ba knew they were here, walking up to the front steps. Babo and Siân were up and running, trampling over the surface of the earth as if it were a carpet of butter-yellow pendant flowers. Ignatius was coming towards her, raising those tender arms of his like the wings of a red dragon. Bean was with him, laughing through the heavy sheets of rain.

It would be all right now, thought Ba. Her story was done. The women wouldn’t need to go naked into the broken fields to attach themselves to ploughs. They wouldn’t have to drag themselves across the parched furrows to make the earth fertile again. They could cover their bodies with mud instead, lie down in it, open their mouths to the fallen world.

Acknowledgements

In the many years it took to write this book there have been an inordinate number of people who kept me afloat emotionally and economically. These, I’d like to thank: my entire family in India and abroad, who made me understand how ‘love, having no geography, knows no boundaries’; my friends who opened their hearts, homes and kitchens to me (you know who you are); Ameet Gheewala and David Miller, my first readers, who convinced me there was a story to be told somewhere in the morass of my first draft; my stellar team of editors – Gillian Stern, Victoria Millar and Audrey Cotterell, who helped shape and reshape my words when I could no longer bear to look at them; everyone at Bloomsbury, but in particular, Alexandra Pringle, who gently reminded me of the value of slowness, and who believes, like me, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

I must also thank Beatrice von Rezzori for a stay at the Santa Maddalena Foundation where I experienced the rare joy of two back-to-back 5,000-word days, and DW Gibson at the Ledig House International Writers Residency for providing me with a room of my own when I most needed one, and the Arts Council England for a generous grant.

Finally, thanks are due to those constant guides who have lent their philosophy, poetry and wisdom to many of the chapter headings and characters in this book: Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Nietzsche, J Krishnamurti, Epicurus, Bob Dylan, Dinah Washington, Leonard Cohen, The Beatles, Chandralekha, Gautama Buddha, Mahavir Swami, Harry Belafonte, Khalil Gibran, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dylan Thomas, Jalaluddin Rumi, Goethe, W. H. Auden, Li Po, Albert Camus and Bhavabuti.

A Note on the Author

Tishani Doshi is a poet and dancer based in Madras, India. Her first collection of poetry,
Countries of the Body
, won the Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection in 2006.
The Pleasure Seekers
is her first novel.

By the Same Author

Countries of the Body

For my parents, the original pleasure seekers.

Copyright © 2010 by Tishani Doshi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except

in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Doshi, Tishani, 1975-

The pleasure seekers / Tishani Doshi.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-60819-277-9 (paperback)

1. East Indians—Fiction. 2. East Indian students—England—London—Fiction.

3. Interracial marriage—Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction.

5. Intergenerational relations—Fiction. 6. India—Fiction.

I. Title.

PR9499.4.D67P57 2010

821’.92—dc22

2010000737

First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2010

This e-book edition published in 2010

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-277-9

www.bloomsburyusa.com