The Pleasure Seekers (7 page)

Prem Kumar, listening to this wailing, felt again a brotherhood with his Parsi neighbour. He understood too, the endless weight of suffering a family brought; the eternal ties that bound one to one’s wife and children, and which obstructed the way to Enlightenment. But nevertheless, he thought,
Duty is Duty
, and muttering these noble words, he walked into his eldest son’s room and froze.

‘Papa?’ Babo asked hesitantly. His father hadn’t entered his room since? Since he couldn’t remember. It was not a thing he did.

Prem Kumar felt like he was in one of those Hindi films that Babo loved so much, where someone was always dying or fighting or falling in love. In this film the father was entering the son’s room, and each step forward was like a knife wound to the stomach. Tears were threatening Prem Kumar in a very real way and he struggled to fight them, because to go into battle with tears streaming down your face was a sure way to lose it. He had prayed in the morning, not for any favours, for it was against the Jain religion to pray for favours. He’d prayed for insight and the strength to rid his soul (and Babo’s) of the thorns of deceit that had lodged themselves deep into their skin.

‘Son,’ he said, in his most solemn voice. ‘We know about the girl. Natvar and Lila have told us. Why have you kept such a secret from us?’

In all families there is a time of awakening, when the self is detached from the body and one can experience one’s family without actually being a part of it. Babo, because he was jet-lagged, and because his ideas of love were stronger than anything he’d ever had in his life, was experiencing such an awakening on the first morning of his return to Madras.

Here was his father, who’d always been a distant figure – a person who was never questioned, never touched. Here was he: raw and brash. There was no doubt in his mind of his righteousness, his love, his complete consternation at his bloody cousin who had done the unspeakable by snitching on him. Oh! The grudges were accumulating in Babo’s mind like building blocks. They were falling one on top of the other – dhishoom dhishoom, crashing and colliding, leaving no room for anything else in his brain.

‘There’s nothing to explain then, is there, Papa?’ said Babo. ‘Except that I am going to marry her.’

Trishala, who had been perched outside the door all this time like an elephant trying to hide behind a potted plant, let out a squeal: a high-pitched, wronged-mother squeal. Bursting into the room, not on her cue (her cue came later in case Babo should need consoling once Prem Kumar had shown him the error of his ways), Trishala marched up to her son and gave him a resounding slap across the face.

‘What about Falguni, huh? What about her, you selfish boy? Do you think of no one but yourself? What about Kamal-bhai and Meghna-behn whom we’ve promised . . . Don’t you deny it, you scoundrel, you knew that this was waiting for you. And now, and now . . .’ she spluttered, ‘You go and find some white woman, some girl from God knows where to fall in love with, someone who doesn’t know anything about us, our customs, our culture, nothing. Someone who is not even’ (and here she paused for dramatic effect) ‘a Jain? How can we accept it? You tell me, how can we accept it?’

Trishala was about to launch into another session of breast-beating when Prem Kumar stopped her and motioned her to sit on the bed. ‘Your heart, my dear, please take care of it and sit down.’

Babo was suddenly empty. All the air had been sucked out of him. This is what it felt like to be turned inside out and thrown into the heart of a tornado. But he was strangely calm as well. Everything was out in the open now. Everything was ready to begin. He was tempted to launch into his own tirade. He had many tirades stored up for such days about parochial-mindedness and about God, but this wasn’t the time or place to enter those murky territories. His argument was very simple. He was following everything his faith had instilled in him: maitri, pramoda, karuna, madhyastha – love, joy, compassion, tolerance. Ultimately, wasn’t the purpose of life according to Jainism to realize the free and blissful state of our true being? To remove all bondages in the process of purifying the soul? Didn’t his love for Siân purify his soul? Hadn’t she put him in the most blissful state of his life?

‘I want you to know that I’m going to marry her. No matter what you say, I’m going to marry her. You’ve already lied to get me here, you can do anything you want, but you can’t take away how I feel for her. Her name is not white woman, it’s Siân. I love her and I’m going to marry her and that’s all there is to say about it.’

Prem Kumar felt the world loosening around him. From the moment Trishala placed that blasted telegram in front of his plate, and from the moment of waking from that first and only dream, he’d known that this business wouldn’t end well. And because there was loosening, there was need for immediate hardening. Rock-stone-hardening.

‘Fine, then, if that’s the way you want it. But I’ve taken your passport away, so you can forget about going back to that godforsaken country of colonizers. Let’s see how long this great love of yours lasts while you’re on the other side of the world.’

With that said, Prem Kumar yanked Trishala off the bed by one flabby, bangled arm, and led her out of Babo’s room, into the obliterating silence of Sylvan Lodge.

5  God Made Truth with Many Doors to Welcome Every Believer Who Knocks on Them

Barely a week after the passport palaver, the entire Jain community in Madras had heard about Babo’s failure to keep good on his betrothal with Falguni Shah. News travelled like a virus, rapidly and insidiously, so that even Babo’s grandmother, Ba, all the way in Anjar, had already heard some version of the white woman story before Babo got a chance to tell her himself.

Babo decided that the only place he’d rather be, other than back in London with Siân, was at Ba’s house in Ganga Bazaar, where he’d spent all his childhood summers. To make this announcement, he marched downstairs at 8 a.m., where his family were gathered, putting on their assorted footwear for the day, and announced in his most self-righteous voice, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. There’s no point trying to talk me out of it. I’m going to stay with Ba.’

To Babo the village of Ganga Bazaar in Anjar had always been a magical place where time ceased to have any meaning. He remembered going there as a child with his mother; taking the train to Bombay and then an onward train to Navlakhi Port, where they’d climb on to a dhow and cross the open mouth of the Gulf of Kutch until they hit the shores of Kandla. In his parents’ time they had to take a bullock cart from Kandla to the village of Ganga Bazaar, but Babo only ever remembered taking a bus or a taxi for that final, exciting leg of the journey. The journey from Madras to Anjar took so long, and was so full of adventure, that Babo, thinking about it now, was filled with the idea that anything he wished for could happen.

It was exactly what he needed now. He was going mad in Madras. His father refused to speak to him, and had instructed the whole family to do likewise, although they flouted the rules when Prem Kumar was out of sight; Trishala especially, who waited till the house was empty before she settled in for her daily attempt to knock sense into her son.

‘Beta, why don’t you see Falguni one more time? Maybe if you see her, everything you once felt for her might return? It’s been a long time. There’s no harm trying, is there? You never know what can happen. Shall we do that? No need to tell Papa or anything. I’ll just tell Meghna-behn to bring Falguni over, and if you still think it can’t work out, then we’ll forget about it.

‘Do you want to see some photographs of other girls? Much prettier than Falguni, and cleverer too. See – how about this one? Pretty, no? Just like Saira Banu, her eyes are.’

And when all this judicious coaxing failed, ‘Look, Babo, you can’t sit like this for ever doing nothing and saying nothing.’

But Babo intended to do precisely that. He was building a wall around him to preserve his memories. Already, the picture of Siân in his head was slowly disappearing. It was hard to believe that not so long ago they’d been lying in bed, naked – Siân utterly touchable and sha-bing sha-bangable – talking about what they were going to see in Germany and beyond. And now, Babo was reduced to solitary pleasures in the bathroom with the help of his trusty hand, which offered temporary relief, but was nothing compared to the bliss of Siân’s body.

He’d written to Siân every day,
every single day
, explaining the situation at home and reassuring her that he was steadfast in his love. But it would take two weeks before any of his letters reached her, and possibly a whole month before he heard back. Who knew what could happen between now and then? She might decide it was all too complicated. She might decide that Merv the Perv, the other curly-headed boy in the office, who was always flirting with her, or her ex, Clive the carrot-top, who was always sending her soppy letters from Nercwys, could do for her what Babo, so many thousands of miles away, could not.

Babo wished there was a quicker way to contact her. If he could just book a trunk call and hear her voice, he could let her know that he was thinking of her constantly, that their love would prevail. But Prem Kumar had unplugged the telephone and locked it away in the cupboard along with his passport. So Babo was left to do the thing he hated most: to wait. In a neither-here-nor-there limbo land, he was forced to wait.

All that remained in Babo’s control were his letters. He armed himself with packets of foolscap paper and a dozen bottles of blue Brill ink, and locked himself in his room, where he wrote not only to Siân, but also to Fred, Bhupen and his friends at the YMCA, who were anxious to hear news of his return. There were projects waiting for him at Joseph Friedman & Sons, and a gold medal waiting to be claimed at the Polytechnic. There was an entire life which he had meticulously created in London. Babo wasn’t about to relinquish that life so easily.

To combat his parents, Babo took on a mode of defiance they had never encountered in him before: he refused to cut his hair or shave his beard, boycotted meals, lounged about in his kurta pyjama all day, and sent Selvam out to buy packets of Gold Flakes which he smoked flagrantly on the terrace at all hours so the neighbours would be sure to see. He did all this, not only as a form of protest to his parents’ foolish objections, but also to prove the determination of his love for Siân.

Only Chotu managed to penetrate Babo’s stubborn walls. At night, he came upstairs with his pillow and blanket, and waited patiently outside the bolted door until Babo relented.

‘Bhai, what are you doing? Can’t I come in to sleep with you?’

‘I’m writing. Go away.’

‘But I won’t disturb you, bhai, promise. I don’t want to sleep with Meenal and Dolly, they ghus-phus the whole night and I can’t get any sleep. Pleeeez?’

Finally, Babo would unlock the door and allow Chotu inside, but only if he agreed to sit in the room quietly with his lip zipped. Chotu watched in fascination as his brother, a whole ten years older than him, and with a life clearly more interesting than his, lay sprawled out on the bed filling pages and pages with his untidy handwriting, his hands smeared all the way up to his elbows with ink. What could he be writing to his girlfriend for so long? Chotu wondered. How many possible ways were there to say I love you?

A million, clearly, and Babo was going to find a way to say them all.

After a week of Babo’s dissident behaviour, Prem Kumar and Trishala, realizing that their son meant business, negotiated a deal.

IF
after six months Babo
still
wanted to marry Siân, they would accept her with open arms, provided they stayed in Madras, in Sylvan Lodge, for a period of TWO YEARS. After which,
IF
they wanted, they could return to London. And
IF
after six months, for whatever reason, things didn’t work out, Babo would have to marry a girl of his parents’ choice, and this subject would never be raised again.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Babo asked his parents, who were staring at him like two owls on the sofa. ‘No hanky panky, and backing out on your word if it goes my way?’

‘No hanky panky,’ Trishala repeated solemnly.

‘And you’ll welcome her with open arms? You’ll treat her as you should? Like she’s a princess who’s coming to stay in your home?’

‘Like a princess.’

‘Fine,’ said Babo, marching back upstairs, allowing himself the tiniest crack of a jhill mill smile. ‘It’s a deal.’

Prem Kumar would have the last word that night, though. Not spoken words, as he still wasn’t speaking to his son, but written words, pious words, copied out from the Bible no less, to prove that he was a fair and open-minded man:

IN THE LAST DAYS, MEN WILL BE LOVERS OF THEM­SELVES, LOVERS OF MONEY, PROUD, DIS­OBEDIENT TO PARENTS, UNTHANKFUL, UNHOLY LOVERS OF PLEASURE RATHER THAN LOVERS OF GOD.

This, he copied out in terse, black capitals and slipped under Babo’s bedroom door on the night of his second departure.

In the house of Prem Kumar’s birth in Ganga Bazaar, Anjar, the doors were always open. It was a house without furniture, without clocks, where instead of chairs, wooden swings hung from the ceiling, and instead of tables, meals were eaten cross-legged under the shade of the jamun tree on the veranda. In the evenings, when visitors came to see Ba, jute mats were spread on the black stone floors in the room of swings to accommodate them all, and at night, after they left, Ba would lay her cotton mattress down either inside or out, depending on the time of year. Red garoli lizards lived and died on the walls of this house, chewing plaster, plop plopping softly, while peacocks howled on the tin roof above. It was a child’s paradise, and at one point early in the century, fifteen people had lived in this house, but for some years now, Ba had lived here all alone.