The Pleasure Seekers (15 page)

In those late midnight hours, she thought of her mother and father, who were waiting, growing patiently old, waiting for her.
Won’t you come again?
they said.
Soon, soon
, she whispered.
Soon, we’re all going to climb on a plane and cross the seas and come to Nercwys because it’s time now, isn’t it? Time for you to meet Mayuri and the new baby
.

Ever since they’d moved into the house of orange and black gates, Babo had spent a lot of time thinking about the choices a man makes: about where he begins and where he ends. He dreamed of London – all the excitement and movement he’d experienced there – of waking up every morning with a sense of conquering something. He thought of his old flame, Falguni, and wondered how husband-hood would have felt with her. Meenal had reported that Falguni was now living in Nairobi, married off to an ageing vegetable oil-producing millionaire. Thinking about her now, and her tear-stained letters, produced little jab jabs of guilt in Babo’s heart. Would this new phase of fatherhood have been different if he’d been a dutiful son? If he’d done all that had been expected of him? Would it have been any easier to understand? What would their life have been like if they’d gone back to London like they’d originally planned? If he’d accepted that job that Fred Hallworth assured him was always waiting at Joseph Friedman & Sons?

How delicately balanced this intricate choreography of living was. And yet, how little anyone really thought about it. Certainly
he
hadn’t had time to think about any of the choices he’d made so far. Everything had been react, react, react. And the worst thing about all these reactions was that they seemed to have pulled Siân and him in different directions. All of a sudden,
she
, who had been most plagued by separations, had suddenly found her place. As if
this
was what she was meant to do: spawn children, save the world. When in fact, there hadn’t been any time for planning at all. Babo hadn’t even got down on one knee to propose marriage. It had been decided: either-or, together-apart, and bang, they were married in Madras, ready to welcome baby number two.

As always, when Babo found himself struggling in unfamiliar territory, he turned to his grandmother for advice. ‘Ba,’ he moaned petulantly on the telephone, ‘Why is it that nobody can talk about anything other than the baby? Papa has gone mad – I’m sure of it. He was never so concerned with us when we were children, but you should see him now, smiling away like a king. And of course, Ma is beside herself. Two more grandchildren on the way, I don’t think she can stand the excitement. It’s as if her whole life has been leading up to this moment of becoming a grandmother!’

‘What’s the matter?’ Ba asked. ‘Don’t like being a daddy?’

‘No. It’s not that.’

‘Then, what? Your wife kicked you out of bed?’

‘No.’

‘Then? Just being a silly, spoilt fellow. Don’t like all the attention being diverted from you, is it?’

‘No, Ba. It’s none of that. I just didn’t imagine it to be like this.’

Babo’s whole life, now that he examined it in this new light, had zoomed ahead without him, and just as he was getting used to nourishing and protecting one extra being with her own set of chromosomes and aspirations, another one threatened to come along and make more demands of him. Siân was back on the yoga mat doing pranayama every morning, playing Mozart to the bump in her belly, bringing out her father’s Dylan Thomas poetry books for evening recitations. It was too much. All this change. For what? What did it really mean?

Babo had only been able to view fatherhood, so far, in terms of abstractions. When Chotu gleefully pointed out that Mayuri had the same grey eyes as Babo and Trishala had, and as Trishala’s mother, Gurvanthi, the temple cleaner, Babo supposed there was something quite magical in the way things continued. Having children was the closest humans came to immortality, he thought. But instead of feeling empowered by this idea, Babo felt diminished. He could feel the sand in his clock trickling down very quickly. He had only just started enjoying being young and reckless, staying up till three in the morning to drink with his friends, talking and dancing in each others’ houses without having to explain anything to anyone. How could all that possibly continue when there were two babies that needed looking after?

Besides, nothing in his own body had forced him to recognise the eventuality of actual birth. No hormones or glandular changes, no little alien in the womb feeding off his food and water supply for nine months. Throughout the entire pregnancy saga, Babo had been the sidekick, the sperm that had come up with the goods, the errand-boy who delivered kati rolls from Tic-Tac or jam doughnuts from Spencers, depending on Siân’s desires. And none of that really prepared him for the moment when he had to reach into the cradle and pick up his child for the first time. With Mayuri, it had been a feeling of being set afloat on the open seas without any compass to guide him. And the idea of having to do it all over again so soon petrified him.

It had taken a long time for Babo to carry Mayuri with confidence, before he could, like Chotu, toss her up and down in the air without worrying about breaking her into tiny pieces. The rewards had come slowly to Babo: hearing Mayuri say her second word, for instance,
Daddy
, sweetly and unexpectedly after her first word,
Mama
, showing right from the beginning Mayuri’s earnest will to furnish her parents with equal amounts of love. And when Mayuri was brought to him after her bath for her night-time Daddy snuggle – the soft, innocent sheen of Wipro Baby Shampoo emanating from her entire being – it was true, it touched a chord in him that nothing else could.

These were things Babo gradually came to enjoy, even depend upon. But nothing, nothing about the birth of his first daughter prepared him even remotely for the birth of his second daughter – Beena Elizabeth Patel, who from the beginning would only be known as Bean. When Bean burst upon the scene, Babo experienced something he’d experienced only once, long ago, in a canteen in London. It was something that reached far into the depths of his body, to that thin sheaf of muscle that lay like a leaf across his stomach. It went beyond fireworks and cataclysms. It was love at first sight, and it went something like this: ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom-boom-boom.

On 15 August 1973, in rooms 305 and 306 of the Lady Wellington Hospital, Siân and Meenal gave birth to two healthy girls. Meenal’s daughter, hereafter known as Unibrow number one, clocked in at the reasonable hour of 16:23, while Bean took five hours longer, tearing through laboriously at an impressive nine pounds nine ounces, her arrival inconveniencing not only her poor mother, the delivery doctor and the night nurses, who were unable to enjoy their Independence Day holiday, but also shattering her grandparents’ dream of a grandson.

‘Oh God,’ said Chotu, when he heard the news. ‘Three nieces! Why won’t someone have a boy for a change?’

‘She
should
have been a boy,’ scowled Trishala. ‘But I suppose God changed his mind at the last minute.’

‘Mama, can’t we put her back?’ Mayuri wanted to know.

In the beginning Bean was an angel. She didn’t need lullabies or Tamil film songs. She just slept. As long as she was fed at regular intervals at her mother’s breast, she was happy to lie like a slug in her cot, sucking brutally on her thumb. No matter what time Babo and Siân put her down, she slept through the night till eight the next morning, at which time she peered out of the bars noiselessly, waiting for someone, anyone, to lift her up and feed her.

‘Bean,’ Babo would whisper, while she lay curled on her side, thumb in her mouth, completely oblivious to the world. ‘Hey, little Kidney Bean, look! Daddy’s come to say hello.’

It amazed him how self-contained she was: a complete universe to herself. She didn’t care if she was cuddled or not, if the lights were left on or not. As long as she had her thumb and her stomach was full, she never made a peep. Everything about Bean’s birth was so much less of a fuss. With Mayuri there had been telegrams and presents, non-stop visitors, photographs, sweets, this, that. But with Bean, things were less exuberant. There were a few cards in the post, and a few telephone calls, but nothing really that Siân could wrap up in pink tissue and put away in her jewellery drawer for later, when Bean grew up and wanted to see how small her fingers and ankles once were. Apart from the staple gold bracelets from Trishala and a silver Tiffany cross from Bryn and Nerys, there was nothing like the booty Mayuri collected.

Six months later, Babo, Siân, Mayuri and Bean boarded the Navjeevan Express to Ahemadabad, and took a night bus to Anjar for Bean’s naming ceremony at the Amba Mata Temple. Ba’s house in Ganga Bazaar had been swept and scrubbed till the black stone floors shone like onyx stones. Jasmine garlands hung from the pelmets in the room of swings, and little brass urns filled with water and frangipani stood in every corner of the house. Ba, waiting on the front steps, could smell them long before they arrived. There was Babo’s rain cloud and bakul smell, which was the strongest, most intoxicating smell she knew. There was the smell of his Welsh wife – acres and acres of fresh cut grass. There was her great-granddaughter, Mayuri, who smelled of roots in mud – a potent, stubborn smell as hard as rubies. And there was the new smell, so nostalgic and varied, it brought tears to Ba’s creamy, diabetic eyes because it rose from the ashes of her own childhood. It was the smell of spices – her mother at the grinding stone, mixing chilli, turmeric and jeera for the entire year’s cooking; the smell of lolly ice – sweet and synthetic on a summer day; the sharpness of river water, brass, sex, blood.

By the time they walked into the courtyard, Ba felt as though she had relived her entire life. It had been like a drowning, chapter after chapter of small enlightenments and giant disappointments. ‘You took too long,’ she berated Babo, before he could touch her feet and ask for her blessings. ‘You forget I’m an old woman. You think I’m going to live for ever? Where’s Beena? Let me hold her. Put her in my lap so I can learn what I still see.’

Ba held Bean in her hands for a long time, inspecting her toes and fingers, marvelling at the roundness of her utterly bald head. Mayuri standing by, still unused to all the attention the new fat baby was drawing away from her, leaned over to whisper into Ba’s ear, ‘I don’t like her one bit, Ba. Selvi calls her a big fat bonda bajji, and she is.’

‘You should take some rest after this,’ Ba advised Siân.

‘I think I will. There isn’t much age difference between these two as it is.’

‘No,’ said Ba. ‘I mean, you will need to take some rest after this one. Perhaps you should stop. You see, there are only three kinds of women in the world: earth, water and fire. Mayuri is going to sink her roots deep. She will know what she is and what she wants, always. But this one, this Beena, she will change from earth to water to fire, again and again. She will want to move like water, forever taking a different shape, but she will also long to stay still. And she will have a temper. Oh yes, you will have to do something to reduce the fire in her. No doubt about it, this one will keep your hands full.’

Bean, who seemed to be listening intently, enthralled by Ba’s diaphanous hair, chuckled. Her first proper laugh.

Ba carried Bean to the Amba Mata Temple, where the priest chanted her name over and over again, birthing her into the world for a second time. Then, she was taken back to the house, bathed and dressed in new clothes, and arranged in Siân’s lap at a previously arranged auspicious hour so that Hira Lal, the jeweller, could daub her lobes with coconut oil and put golden circles in ears. Bean squealed so terrifyingly even the peacocks on the tin roof were stunned into silence. Only Ba, taking Bean into her ancient lap, had been able to stop her crying. ‘Laadli, oh mari laadli,’ she cajoled, sliding a soft, sugary bit of gur into her lips to silence her.

Babo, standing in the back yard by the well, smoking cigarettes and listening to the shrieks inside, felt a numbness spread through his body. He had spent all day walking around the gulleys and lanes of Ganga Bazaar, thinking how it was only four years ago when he had grown his hair and come here as an act of protest, when his whole life existed only in the imagination, in the future. When everything depended on the slim blue letter Neeraj-bhai, the postman, would or would not bring. He remembered the many hours at his table in Zam Zam Lodge, drinking endless cups of sugary tea, writing till his pen ran out of ink; the evenings with Ba, listening to stories of the love affair between Trishala’s parents, the great drought that followed, the many failing and restoring qualities a family could offer.

Looking through the window grills and the open doors of this grandmother’s house now, where garoli lizards plop plopped off the walls, Babo could see his wife sitting in a majenta silk sari with a big red bindi in the centre of her forehead, cracking coconuts and anointing the baby, as if she’d been practising her whole life to assume this role. He could see his grandmother in her widow’s white sari, holding his two daughters, perfect as jewels, and his heart suddenly lifted. This was a surrender after all, wasn’t it? Love was a surrender, and he had been resisting.

Babo walked inside the house and removed his Minolta camera from its dusty cover. He stood with the light of Gujarat at his back and took pictures of these four important women in his life. He stood for a long time at the door, listening to the shutter whirr, framing the white and majenta, the small dark eyes, the points of light. He thought about the rest of his family: Trishala, Prem Kumar, Meenal, Dolly and Chotu – how not so long ago, they’d been standing at the gates of the Meenabakkam Airport, waving goodbye to him the first time he left for England. How young he’d been; barely a trace of a whisker above his lips. But he’d known then that his life was for ever going to be changed. He had wanted to go to his family and claim them, each one of them, while things were still the same. Babo, overcome with a similar feeling now, wanted to tell his wife,
I understand. This is our life, our future has become our present. These two girls, this country. This is what we’re about
.