The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (19 page)

Remember, you are everything or you are nothing. If you are everything, then your heart is so big it can hold all of humanity within itself, you have no jealousy or narrowness. You are in the heart of every creature and every creature is in your heart. There is only bliss.

S
WAMI
P
URNA

I
t was his wife who organized it. Of course Christopher had planned to visit his mother at some point, but it was Marcia who suggested a date and sorted it out.

“Christmas in India!” Marcia said. “Evelyn’ll be thrilled. And it’ll be great for the kids, an awesome experience.”

So Marcia took it in hand. She downloaded holiday packages that included Bangalore on their itineraries and settled on an up-market company that specialized in cultural tours. South India Highlights included Mysore, the temples at Halebid and Belur, “with their intricate carvings of dancing figures, animals and friezes,” and a two-night stay at the five-star Taj Balmoral Hotel, Bangalore. “A spacious city with many parks and gardens,” she read, “… now a thriving business center, known as the Silicon Valley of India.” Within a few days it was all set up, including an optional extra: a week at the Colva Beach complex, Goa, where they could unwind before returning to the States.

Christopher felt his usual mixture of powerlessness and gratitude. The woman was so damned efficient. Not only did she hold down a demanding job in a top-flight brokerage firm, keep herself fit with a punishing regime at the gym, and organize the children’s own packed schedules, she had also masterminded yet another makeover of the apartment and was negotiating to buy some real estate up in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, as a retirement home for her father and stepmother. Marcia was an exemplary daughter in this respect. Christopher attributed it to her Jewish and Italian blood. She came from a large achieving family where it was taken for granted that children cared for their parents.

This made Christopher feel guilty, of course. So did the fact that she was paying for this holiday; Marcia was a generous woman in this respect. Of course, she earned more than he did; when they met, in fact, she had been his superior, though upon moving to New York she had transferred to another firm. His sister, Theresa, who had never liked Marcia, assumed that she was bleeding him dry with her high-maintenance lifestyle. Christopher had only half-heartedly disabused her of this; after all, a man had his pride.

It was a Saturday in November and he was taking Clementine to Central Park. His daughter was eleven, going on sixteen. She had wanted to go to the beauty place to have her eyebrows done, but he had insisted she try out her new Rollerblades. Marcia had stayed behind to help Joseph with his math.

“
Kirsty’s
had her eyebrows shaped,” said Clementine.

“That doesn’t mean you have to,” he said. “Stay a child for a bit longer.”

“Duh?” Her face said
Don’t be a dork, Dad
. It was a new expression—curled lip, pitying smile.

They walked down Madison, past the fashion shops. Christopher wished she would slip her hand in his, but she had recently ceased doing this.

“Are you looking forward to India?” he asked.

“Yuk. India’s gross.” They were passing Ralph Lauren. Clementine caught her reflection in the glass and held in her tummy.

“You’ll see some marvelous sights,” he said.

“India’s full of poor people. They’ll smell like Constancia.”

“That’s not nice. Anyway, Constancia’s from Haiti.” Constancia was their maid. “And you’ll see Granny Greenslade.”

“You said she was doolally,” said Clementine.

“I didn’t! I don’t even use that word.”

“I heard you talking to Mom.”

“I just said she was a little vague. She
is
seventy-three.”

“Gross.”

“Stop saying that, sweetie.” He thought of the fortune they spent on her education.

“She can’t even
email
.”

“Just because you spend half your time glued to the screen.” He was sure Clementine was spending it in some unsuitable chat room, probably run by a pedophile. He remembered his mother’s face as she gazed at the laptop he had given her.
“Christopher dear, it’s too late for me to learn.”

Clementine stopped outside a Starbucks. “I want a Frappuccino.”

“Not now. Afterwards.”

She groaned. They trudged on. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? Clementine’s state-of-the-art Rollerblades weighed a ton. Nowadays, Christopher felt like a pack mule, carting his children’s consumer durables from one activity to another. Maybe his daughter should be carrying the Rollerblades herself—earned pleasure, all that English stuff. The trouble was, he wouldn’t dare suggest it. She wouldn’t have a clue what he was talking about and would gaze at him with that Elvis sneer that was becoming so familiar.

Christopher’s daughter unnerved him. Nowadays she seemed to regard him with contempt. In fact he felt this about the rest of his household, too. It was a struggle to retain any dignity at all in a place where even the maid seemed to treat him with condescension. In Haiti, no doubt, men were still men. Over the years the suspicion had been growing that he was surplus to requirements. Having inseminated his wife—it had been a late marriage for both of them and time was running short—he felt he had little to offer a woman who was so very capable of doing everything else herself.

Once he had found this stimulating. When they met he was thirty-nine, working in the City and living in bachelor squalor in Clapham. He had his routine—squash on Tuesdays, the pub on Fridays. In fact, with his Golf GTI convertible he considered himself quite a man-about-town. One by one, however, his friends had deserted him; the pub crowd had dwindled, picked off by the sniper fire of the opposite sex.

That he himself hadn’t found the right girl was due to inertia. He realized this when Marcia blazed into his life with her power suits and organizational skills. She had been transferred to the London office for six months and for some reason made a beeline for him. Maybe the old biological clock was ticking, for—not to put too fine a point on it—she was no spring chicken. She had been too busy working her way up the corporate ladder to think about starting a family. Nor, he had to admit, had he found Marcia that attractive on first meeting—sallow skin, heavy features and the thick eyebrows her daughter was to inherit. He, however, was powerless, drawn by the force-field of her personality. What a bracing contrast she was to his conventional English upbringing!

Within a week he’d surrendered himself up to her flashing eyes and vigorous lovemaking. Within a month she had moved in and sorted things out.
“You take your WASHING home to your MOTHER?”
He remembered so well that slack-jawed, pitying look. He had become familiar with it over the years, particularly when the various investments he had made, on his family’s and his mother’s behalf, had gone so very wrong. Of course the market had been depressed since 9/11, but he had to admit that he had made some unwise decisions. Still, they were all right, weren’t they? A comfortable lifestyle on the Upper East Side, and his mother settled in a home that didn’t drain her finances and that had many advantages compared to its equivalent in England. And her letters sounded cheerful enough, all the little comings and goings. She had been twittering on about some new sandals. For the old, the world shrank to their immediate surroundings; it scarcely mattered where they were. It was as if they were babies again; apparently her hotel even served jelly and custard.

They walked past the Met. An elderly woman sat on its steps. She was surrounded by plastic bags and held an empty Styrofoam cup. A well-dressed woman, she bore a faint resemblance to his ma.

Christopher felt a lurch of guilt. How easy it was to persuade himself that everything was all right! He had always been good at self-justification. In fact—to be really, truly honest—he had reduced his mother to penury. She deserved a contented old age in the bosom of her family and what had he done? Fuck all. Off he’d buggered to New York and weeks went by when, absorbed by his own distracting life, he didn’t think about her at all.

The woman’s gaze met his.
What have you done?
Christopher fumbled for his wallet.
I gave you life itself, and you dumped me like a bag of rubbish
. A police car sped past, its siren wailing.

It was then that he realized his mistake. The cup contained dregs of coffee. The bag lady was simply an exhausted shopper.

Christopher had barely paused, thank God. Nobody had noticed.

I
n Central Park, Christopher strapped his daughter’s skinny legs into the boots. She tottered along the tarmac. She managed to do even this as if humoring her old dad, as if this hour with him was just an interval before she got back to her real life.

“That’s the girl, Clem! Great!” He heard his own voice, over-boisterous. She wobbled. He held out his hand, but she was determined to do it alone.

Three black dudes sped past. One carried a ghetto blaster; music thumped out. People were biking, jogging, practicing obscure Eastern postures. Marcia was a New Yorker. He loved this energy in the city, the utter lack of self-consciousness. The trouble was, he couldn’t let himself go. He felt as if he were an onlooker at his own life, watching his actions from a distance. At this moment he was a father having quality time with his daughter—overreacting, overenthusiastic, his voice booming with false bonhomie. He could see that it was a beautiful autumn day—foliage on fire, the twin spires of the San Remo building rearing into the sky—but all he was thinking was how to describe it later to show Marcia he had noticed.

One of the black guys swerved and turned with consummate grace. He was simply himself; he wasn’t split in this awful English way. Christopher thought: If only I could fuse myself together. His sister Theresa, who was into all that Indian stuff, went on about wholeness, about shedding the something to reach a higher state of awareness. She had even sent him a book, printed on what looked like lavatory paper, written by a Bhagwan thingy and with the passages on stress underlined. Theresa meditated; she did yoga. How come, then, that she was the unhappiest person he knew?

“Can we go now?” asked Clementine.

“What, already?”

“We’ve been here for ages.”

She steadied herself on a bench and bent to undo her boots. At that moment one of the black guys drew up, with a hiss, and came to a standstill beside her.

“Hey, you stopping so soon?”

He held out his hand. Clementine blushed pink. She hesitated, glancing at her father. Then she slipped her hand into the large black one and they were off.

Christopher watched them Rollerblading side by side—Clementine tiny, the man huge. She was laughing—really laughing, childish shrieks of excitement. The man slowed down for her. His red T-shirt matched her jacket.

Sitting on a bench, Christopher watched them. Or, to be accurate, he watched himself—a middle-aged man, paunchy now, wearing gray tracksuit bottoms with a vinaigrette stain on the knee—he watched himself watching his daughter spirited away by a black god and laughing for joy.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of the mind.

D
HAMMAPADA

D
r. Rama had a powerful effect on the female residents of The Marigold. During November several of them became ill. Their complaints were not life-threatening but were apparently beyond the scope of Mrs. Cowasjee, whose area of expertise, indeed, was somewhat limited. Dr. Rama would be summoned to attend to the patients in the privacy of their rooms. Later, when they compared notes, they discovered that he had put them all on antibiotics, but that didn’t lessen him in their esteem. After all, antibiotics were meant to cure practically everything, weren’t they?

“Dr. Rama, what a charmer,” crooned Stella, gulping down the pills with a glass of boiled water. She was quite alone in the world. “To be frank, it’s him who’s the best tonic.”