The Pleasure Seekers (10 page)

You must picture this: the wooden gates, the row of houses with the postage-stamp-sized lawns. A young woman standing at the gates with auburn hair blowing behind her, looking into the fields ahead of her as though this were her last chance, her only chance of making things right in her life. And she was going to go the other way. She was going to chase the pleasure.

The crash-bang feeling of home. Old skin waiting to be filled.

Siân, standing at the door to Tan-y-Rhos, surprising her father’s sister, Aunty Eleri, who relished other people’s problems like honey in her thumbs, who thought Siân was in over her head. Poor Aunty El, who’d come by for a cup of tea with her dog, Gwythur, whose eyes nearly fell out of the back of her head when she saw Siân standing there, pleased as pie. Her brother’s last chick who she’d heard had a place in London and was making big city money, had given all that up and was now saying, ‘Didn’t Mam tell you, Aunty El? I’m going to India to get married.’

Every time she told that story later in her life, Aunty Eleri’s doughy face would pinch up into disbelief; her eyes would roll full circle and then she’d say it, ‘Just like Siân to do something like that. Standing there sure as eggs, as if it was nothing. Telling me she was going off to India to marry some bloke no one had ever met, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.’

It was Aunty Eleri who would soothe Nerys when Bryn and Siân couldn’t find ways to reach her. It distressed her to see her sister-in-law like this: shocked beyond anything she’d had to survive so far. And she’d survived a lot: two world wars, the loss of five siblings out of fourteen, three stubborn children. But this, Nerys could not endure. Somehow, this only daughter deciding to abandon them made her so angry, she was afraid if she gave vent to it she’d never be able to speak again.

So there was a silence that weighed Siân down in Nercwys like never before. Only her father helped her escape. Together, they made day trips to Conwy Castle and the Valle Crucis Abbey to sit among the ruins as they used to do when she was a child. They packed egg sandwiches and coffee in flasks and drove off in Bryn’s Morris Minor to sit under a poplar tree in some nameless valley where they read poems from Bryn’s old, leather-bound volumes. And later, when Bryn read his daughter’s letters about Madras, he would always picture it something like Swansea, the town Dylan Thomas called the most romantic town he knew – ‘
An ugly lovely town . . . crawling, sprawling, slummed, unplanned . . . smog-suburbed by the side of a long and splendid curving shore
.’

This is how it went. Six months of waiting. Six months of understanding the inner workings of faith and the outer spheres of the world. Six months of time: hundreds and millions of awakening seconds and sleeping minutes. Six months of aching stretched out like the Sahara: lickety-split, snippety-snip, jiggity-jig. Six months of fading and blooming, stopping and starting. Six months of love: a breath, a deluge, an eternity; a single flake of snow.

7  The Centre is Everywhere

Siân was travelling the breadth of the world, hoping for the circle to close. Should she cry now, after so much? Should she walk to the edge of the earth and agree to fall? What childishness was this? What stupidity? To leave everything behind just to see the sun rise the other way around. Just to see a man who will strip you bare.

Standing on the platform at Chester station, the connections were already beginning to slip away. The centre of Siân’s life was being dragged from her and scattered. Nerys was holding her, weeping silently, as if the sorrow inside her was so great she could only hold on to it for so long before finally letting it go like a life-sized breath of air. The brothers Huw and Owen were standing by the bags, looking at her with a mixture of wonder and dread:
Go on then
, they seemed to be saying,
Go on then, if that’s what you want. Run into the dark. See if we’re going to follow you
. And Bryn, who sat across from her all the way to Euston and then to Heathrow, watched from beneath the broad expanse of his forehead until the aeroplane floated down the silvery runway, up, up and away, until his daughter finally disappeared like a prayer into a cottony wedge of sky.

All the eleven hours to Bombay, the Indian businessman sitting beside Siân put his pillow up against the window and slept soundly. Then, as the plane began its descent, he awakened as if by some internal tuning, cleared his throat, adjusted his tie and lifted the shutter to look outside. ‘Ah,’ he sighed, with great satisfaction. ‘Back home at last.’ And then looking over to Siân, ‘Your first visit to India?’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘And what is the purpose of your visit? You are coming in search of God? Some spiritual adventure? You are looking for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or someone like this? Something you cannot find in the West?’

‘No. It’s nothing like that.’

‘You are coming to travel, maybe? I hope not alone. Pretty lady like you travelling alone, not a good idea.’

‘No, no. It’s not like that.’

‘I see. Then what? Tell me, please. I am very curious. I am meeting all kinds of people in my profession, people from all walks of life. Basically, I am statistician.’

‘I’m getting married,’ said Siân, smiling despite her wish to remain aloof, because it was the first time she’d said it aloud to someone of no consequence; someone who couldn’t berate her or try to alter her decision.

‘Really!’ the statistician gawped. ‘Really! Well, that’s wonderful news, just wonderful. Tell me, why isn’t your “To Be” accompanying you? Are you going to be having some romantic English wedding in the jungles? Back to the Raj and all that?’

‘No. I’m getting married in Gujarat to a Gujarati man.’

‘My God! Don’t tell me. But I’m also a Gujarati man. Devesh Shah is my name.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Siân, trying to look beyond him to the country that was finally taking shape beneath her in broad swathes of brown and green, flanked by the ocean on one side, and by a cherry-silk sky on the other.

Siân and Babo were moving closer together. They were nearly there; ready to meet in a cluster of seven islands on the edge of the Arabian Sea. Bombay – queen of all India’s cities: a city of cages and slums, film stars and vagrants. A city Siân would want to forget about as soon as she landed in it because it wasn’t the India of her imagination. She’d imagined tree-lined avenues and mint-green houses. Lizards and peacocks. Not this. Not this.

Babo was standing in the arrivals lounge
sans
family, smoking cigarette after impatient cigarette. He had the keys to a new, orange-coloured Fiat Padmini in the top left pocket of his favourite linen shirt and a single red rose in his hand. His hair and beard remained uncut, untended, and by virtue of his unconventional but rather debonair look, a small gathering of uniformed airport staff had huddled around him trying to determine which famous person he could be.

Siân saw him first –
and it was gone
– just like that. The pain in her abdomen, the last thin line of crossing, the ability to be this and that, her whole previous existence.
Gone
. Because she was going to fall into this man. She was going to wrap her legs around his waist and drape her body around him. He was going to be so full of her that he wouldn’t be able to remember what his life had sounded like before she came to him.

‘Look at you!’ she cried, running towards him in her home-made maxi and headband, looking every bit the hippy spiritual-seeker her fellow traveller had suspected her of being. She was moving fast, faster, faster, until she was upon him, bony shoulders and all. And Babo, smiling and crying simultaneously, said, ‘Look at you, look how much more beautiful you’ve become!’

By the time Babo collected Siân’s bags and packed them into the dickey of the car, it was time to drive off appropriately into the sunset.
I must not get lost
, thought Babo, trying to concentrate on the roads, which seemed to have altered now that the light was fast disappearing. Siân, who had been talking incessantly about the flight and the journey from London, had suddenly gone quiet. She was looking out of the window, on to the streets.

Babo removed his hand off the gear lever and reached into Siân’s lap to extricate one of her hands. ‘You mustn’t get upset. You promised not to get upset.’

‘Look at them,’ Siân whispered, as they drove. ‘All of them settling in for the night together. Tiny children, dogs. Whole families. Who could imagine such a thing? And they have nothing. Not even a cardboard box for shelter.’

‘I warned you about this, Charlie. Didn’t I tell you it would be this way? Madras isn’t as bad as Bombay, of course, but still, it’s there. It’s everywhere. There’s no escaping it. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it eventually.’

‘Oh, I don’t think I could ever get used to this,’ said Siân, looking back in the direction she’d just flown in from. ‘How could I?’

And then, as if to cement the tremendous displacement she was already feeling, Babo drove his new car into the entrance of the very opulent Taj Mahal hotel. ‘Oh my!’ said Siân, looking up at the façade of the building, at the turbaned men with twirly moustaches who were greeting people as they stepped out of their chauffeur-driven cars. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hotel as grand as this in all my life, never mind stayed in one.’

‘Well, don’t get carried away,’ said Babo, ‘It’s only for one night. Tomorrow we drive to Anjar, where things are, shall we say, more rustic. And after the wedding, we go to Sylvan Lodge, which is no five-star hotel either. I decided to splurge on your first night in India since my monetary privileges have been reinstated.’

As they walked through the lobby and took the elevator upstairs to their room on the fifth floor, Siân finally unpursed her lips. ‘I feel like everyone’s staring at me.’

‘That’s because they are,’ Babo grinned.

‘Why? Do I look funny? Have I got something stuck in my teeth?’

‘No, silly. Because they like staring in general, and because you’re beautiful.’

Inside the room, Siân removed her shoes and walked past the bed on to the balcony, which had wooden shutters and which looked out on to a large archway.

‘That’s the Gateway of India,’ said Babo, positioning himself on the bed with a beer from the minibar. ‘Built to commemorate the visit of King George V.’

Siân stood there and watched, hypnotized by the pigeons and by the horse-carriages that were taking young lovers for a ride. All along the horizon ships were putting down their anchors in the harbour, and to the right, the streetlights glittered, defusing all the darkness of the pavements below. ‘There’s so much life,’ she said, turning to Babo, ‘So much – it feels like it’s bursting from within. There can’t be any place like this in the world.’

‘Come here,’ said Babo, ‘Come, sit by me.’

But Siân continued to stand pensively on the balcony, trying to reconcile herself with her surroundings. It was so strange. She was finally here. Babo was sitting just metres across from her, looking as though the six months between them had never happened, as though they’d always been together. But Siân could feel the distance growing in her again, she could feel that little something in the pit of her stomach, quieter now, but there.

‘Come here,’ said Babo, suddenly standing on the bed, doing his best cave man imitation, beating his chest and howling. ‘I want to devour you. I’m ready to devour you now. I’m going to have my way with you,’ he said, leaping off the bed to grab Siân, who squealed uncontrollably as he pulled her away from the balcony and flung her down on the pristine sheets.

Now that he had her underneath him, Babo burrowed his eyes into her and said, ‘I’m going to say it again. Look at you, you beautiful thing. Coming here so bravely all by yourself. All the way to India to marry ME! I must be the luckiest man in the world.’

‘And the hairiest,’ said Siân, giggling. ‘I have to say, this is pretty sexy,’ she murmured, running her fingers through his hair. ‘But this,’ she said, tugging his beard, ‘This is pretty scratchy, so there’s going to be no devouring until this is gone.’

That evening, before the first of three sha-bing sha-bang sessions and a romantic room-service dinner for two, Siân led Babo to the marble bathroom where she made him sit on a stool, shirtless, in front of the gilt-edged mirror, while she lathered up his beard and snip snipped it away. Babo felt nothing but her hands and the hot soapy water. He felt the sharp grazing of a razor against his cheeks, clearing and clearing, until a soft, new brownness shone through.

In Anjar, Ba was waiting for them to arrive. She could smell the Welsh girl coming closer. They were making a picture again: Babo and Siân in their orange Fiat – the ‘Flying Fiat’, as it would later be known. Siân was wearing a peacock-green sari that Trishala had picked out for her, and which one of the receptionist girls had secured into place with safety pins. Babo was trussed up in a bodacious rust suit with a rose in his buttonhole, Nehru-style. He’d had the mane mushrooming around his head tamed by the hotel barber, and then they’d set off. Babo and Siân: ready to rattle the cage of the world.

The rest of the Patel family were in a train moving towards Anjar, too. Meenal and Dolly, who had been playing wedding-wedding for weeks on the red-brick terrace with the neighbourhood girls – each fighting to be the beautiful foreign bride – twitching and chirruping in their new chanya cholis. Chotu – sole boy, coerced into playing his brother at these make-believe weddings – dressed for the first time in long pants instead of half-pants, spinning a cricket ball in his hands. Trishala, seriously practising what her husband had taught her to say, ‘Hellooo. Nice to meet you. So nice to meet you.’ And the children, giggling themselves silly, hearing the stiff English words from their mother’s mouth.