The Pleasure Seekers (16 page)

PART TWO

The House of Orange and Black Gates

1974–1995

11  So this is Where

So this is where they begin. This is where they really begin. This is where Siân gives birth to two girls who enter like winds: one warm, one cold, one squealing, one quiet. This is where they call themselves family: Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Bean.

Outside is the flame-of-the-forest tree that stands as a witness to their life.

Next door is the Punjab Women’s Association on whose walls a whole generation of tabby cats make love and brawl through the night.

Down the street is the Okay Stores where Mr Mustafa sits and smiles with gold glinting out the back of his red gums; where Selvi buys kitchen supplies, and the girls fight over mango magic popsicles.

Upstairs are the Singhania family, whose young boys kneel by the white, paint-chipped grills to see Bean prancing out of the bathroom like a naked fury, whose red bicycle Mayuri borrows to teach herself the lesson of perseverance.

Outside are the orange and black gates that guard the comings and goings, the growing limbs and broken toenails, the girls and boys, boys and girls.

Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Bean: always seeking, trying to claim the beautiful things of the world as their own. They swing on the gates and open them when they should remain closed, slip out and slip back in, thinking no one has seen and nothing has been taken amiss.

Every Sunday they go to Sylvan Lodge, where the girls run first to the staircase to kick off their shoes before marching into Prem Kumar and Trishala’s bedroom. Trishala Ba gives them brand-new one-rupee coins and an Indo-Burma notebook each, and Prem Kumar smiles at them, only slightly, with his betel-stained teeth, and asks if they’ve learned how to make chappathis yet.

Dolly Fie, before she gets married to Chunky Fua in Baroda, takes them in her lap and tickles them in turns until they nearly wee their pants and have to run and do half-bum half-bum on the potty upstairs. Chotu Kaka, who is always playing cricket in the maidan, or on the terrace, flying planes, takes them on his strong shoulders so they can try to see the sea from where they’re standing. But what they see won’t be the sea, but the long, portia-lined avenue of Sterling Road, dotted with yellow rickshaws and cars and motorbikes and bullock carts. And, outside the gates, half-blind Selvam painting another sign in chalk-dust to keep the demons away.

Next door, Darayus Uncle teaches his grandson, Cyrus Mazda, what each tool in his garage can do. Cyrus, with the protruding, coconut-scraper teeth and soda bottle glasses.
Cyrus the Great, born on a plate
. When Cyrus is done working in the garage, he climbs over the wall and begs to be allowed to join the Sunday Club, of which Mayuri is president. Mayuri charges Bean and Cyrus twenty-five paisa membership fees and makes them swear an oath of allegiance. Then she makes them write down all the gory things that happened in school that week:
Lalit poked his finger with a compass on Monday. Kaveri got hit in the head by a shotput. Mrs Subramanium fainted in assembly
. When they get tired of writing they race up and down the red-brick terrace till the girls are out of breath and pink in the face from trying to keep up with Cyrus’s ostrich-long legs.

Afterwards, they sneak downstairs to get water from the earthen pot, and they find everyone sleeping as in Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom: Prem Kumar and Trishala Ba lying tidily on different sides of the bed; Mama and Dolly Fie in the air-conditioned room; Daddy and Chotu Kaka on brown sofas in the living room, snoring like fire engines – rim zim, rim zim.

Mayuri slides her hands into Babo’s kurta pocket and steals the keys to the orange Flying Fiat and asks Cyrus and Bean, ‘Do you want to do something grown-up and fun?’ Then she opens the doors and puts them in the back seat and winds up all the windows, leaving only the tiniest crack of air to come through. She makes them sit like this for half an hour till sweat pours down their foreheads, and Cyrus’s soda-bottle glasses steam up, and Bean starts to whinge. ‘If you don’t let us out I’m going to tell Daddy, May-May.’ And Mayuri says, ‘You want to be grown-up and see how it feels like in a sauna, don’t you?’

Finally, Mayuri opens the doors and lets them out and they all tear around the pista-green walls, pretending to be trains. They go fastest at the back of the house where the servants’ quarters are, and the washing stone, and the washing line, and the drain that runs along the house where Prem Kumar cleans his teeth with neem sticks every morning. And when Cyrus decides he’s had enough of Mayuri’s tyranny, he leaps over the wall and goes back home. The girls tear around some more till Siân calls them in for Bournvita and bread-jam, and sure enough, Bean has dirtied her clothes and scuffed her knees, while Mayuri is pristine – plaits intact, pockets full of change.

Inside, the grown-ups sit around the oval dining table with sleep marks on their faces. Trishala picks pomegranate seeds for them – one by one, painstakingly pink and small – which they stuff in their cheeks all at once and C-R-U-N-C-H, till the sweet juice comes running down their throats. Babo and Prem Kumar pour milky-brown tea into saucers and shluck shluck from them like goldfish. Siân rushes in and out of the kitchen in her sari because Sunday is not only Sylvan Lodge day, but sari day and beach day. And when Babo says it’s time to go, they run up to the top of the stairs and whoosh down the wooden banister so Chotu Kaka, standing at the bottom, can catch them. They grab their shoes and run out of the door waving,
Aujo aujo, goodbye goodbye, see you next Sunday
.

And they do this and do this and do this till they’re grown up and changed, but for now everything is still light, feathery-light.

For now Babo drives them to Marina Beach, where they buy paper windmills and balloons. Mayuri and Bean strip off their clothes and dash into the waves while their parents sit holding hands on the shore, warning them not to go in too deep. Then Babo drives them to The Drive-In Woodlands, where they sit on the bonnet of the Flying Fiat in their swimming costumes and towels, their wet, childish hair sticking out around their faces in all directions. They shovel down iddlis with coconut chutney and sambar and run to the monkey bars in the playground while Babo and Siân sit in the car and eat their dosas demurely like film stars. And after all of it, Babo comes for them again, scoops his girls into his arms and lets them choose ice creams from the Dasaprakash counter: a different flavour every time for Bean, the same steadfast vanilla for Mayuri.

As they drive back to the house of orange and black gates, Bean and Mayuri pretend to be asleep in the back seat like snails, legs and arms interlaced. At the gates, Babo beeps and beeps till drunken Bahadur gets up from his cane chair and lets them in. Then Babo and Siân lift them, one for one, and take them up the marble steps, through the front door, straight to their bedroom with the matching cane beds and the blankets that came all the way from Nain’s knitting needles in Nercwys. Siân draws the floral curtains. Babo switches off the lights and says,
Goodnight, little beanstalks, goodnight
, pretending he doesn’t know that his girls are really awake, suppressing their smiles, giving chori chori looks to each other across the dark. In the morning Selvi will take a jar of oil to their mangled, sandy hair. Siân will take a comb to it. But for now they’re left to sleep in the islands of their beds, their young bodies surrendering quickly to sleep. These are the nights without nightmares, when no one has to run anywhere to feel safe, and morning, when it comes, is cool and dry and peaceful.

12  There are no Divine Beings who Threaten us

It was a Sunday in April when Bean saw her first ghost. She was six years old, hiding in the ashoka grove in Sylvan Lodge. The grown-ups were inside, sitting around the dining table drinking tea, and Mayuri and Cyrus Mazda were playing a restaurant game on the terrace. Bean felt safe in the grove, alone, among the warm green leaves, her bare feet in the mud. She decided to sit there for a while, drawing noughts and crosses in the sand, until someone noticed she was missing and came to find her.

Bean had been running away for some months now. Usually because Mayuri was being mean, or the upstairs Singhania boys were being pains in the bum. Sometimes the desire for attention was nothing Bean could name – it was just a feeling of such utter isolation that when it hit her, the only thing to do was to run out the back door, past Selvi’s room and over the wall to the Punjab Women’s Association, where she hoped to find solace with one of the kindly hostellers.

The first time Bean ran away, it was by accident. Her best friend, Mehnaz, invited her to come home after school to play in her apple-shaped swimming pool, and Bean, unthinking, had happily clambered into the car-pool van behind her. Three hours and many mutton pakoras later, Mehnaz’s mother, Aunty Sherize, came home from shopping and shrieked when she discovered that Bean hadn’t informed anyone of her whereabouts. She made a couple of necessary phone calls, and then said to Bean, ‘Sweetie, you’re always welcome here, but you
have
to ask your mother first.’ Then she despatched Bean home in one of Mehnaz’s father’s Rover cars. When the Rover car drew up to the house of orange and black gates, Babo came running out to gather Bean into his arms and press his bearded face into her chlorinated hair. ‘Never do that again,’ he said. ‘If you love Daddy, and don’t want him to have a heart attack, you’re never to do that again.’

Siân marched her into the bathroom and said, ‘You never think it through, do you? Why don’t you think about other people for a change, and the trouble you put them through?’

Bean thought about that first transgression as she watched the last of a fiery Madras sun disappear behind apartment buildings.
Of course
she felt bad about worrying everyone, especially Babo and Siân, but there was also something so wonderful about knowing you’d been missed.

‘Did you think I’d been kidnapped too, May-May?’ she’d asked her sister as they lay side by side in their beds that night.

‘You’re a STYOOPID-EEDYOT girl,’ Mayuri shouted, sitting upright, flicking her two plaits impatiently behind her head. ‘Do you know that while you were having a gala time at Mehnaz’s house, Mama and Daddy were in the police station filling out forms, thinking you might be dead? And that while all the teachers went searching the school compound for you I had to sit in the princie’s room with mosquitoes biting and nothing but a Thums Up to drink?’ As Bean leaned back to digest this information, Mayuri fired her parting shot. ‘And anyway, you’re adopted, Bean, so who cares if you get kidnapped?’

Bean scooped up a handful of leaves and sighed. It was so hard to know where you belonged. She had spent hours in front of the full-length mirror in her parents’ bottle-green bathroom, examining her face, searching out the similarities between Babo, Siân, Mayuri and her. It was all a mystery, the way features blended into one another; why this way and not another?
Why? Why? Because the sky’s so high
. How come Mayuri had inherited Babo’s grey eyes and she hadn’t? How come neither of them had Siân’s auburn hair? How come she had got stuck with boring brown eyes and boring brown skin?

‘Baby-kutti,’ a voice whispered, interrupting Bean’s reverie. ‘What are you doing hiding in there? Come out, I want to show you something.’

‘Go away, Selvam, I don’t want to see,’ Bean said, drawing the corners of her mouth as low as they could go.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to see?’ Selvam said, poking aside the bushes with his walking cane. ‘It’s a ghost, baby-kutti, one of Yama’s creatures. I’ll show you if you come here.’

Bean wriggled out speedily, wiping the sand off her overalls. She had never seen a real live ghost before, but the Singhanias’ servant girl had told her all about them – the midgets in the pantry who hid in the biscuit tins, and could swallow up your soul in one bite if you let them; the chudail who slept in the cobwebbed cradle in the attic; Madhavi Rani, who chased cars at midnight, her face like a plump pumpkin at the driver’s window. Even though Bean unreservedly acknowledged the presence of ghosts in the world, to this day she had never actually seen one.

Parking herself on the sand next to Selvam outside Sylvan Lodge, she waited expectantly. At first Bean couldn’t see anything, only the long row of yellow-flowering trees that were slowly being enveloped by dusk. But, ‘Sshh baby-kutti, watch and see,’ Selvam persisted, and sure enough, a woman emerged from the branches, floating by with blue-green fingernails and grassy hair. The ghost had ribs like an old piano board, rotted black, shifting darkly under the torn shreds of her sari. Her breasts poked through the folds like withered fruit, and her eyes bored straight down the length of Sterling Road right at Bean.

‘See her feet?’ Selvam hissed, grabbing Bean into his bony lap. ‘See how they’re turned backwards at the ankle? That’s how you can tell she’s from the netherworlds.’

‘Ma,’ the ghost said, stretching out her skeletal hands as she came towards Sylvan Lodge, dragging her feet behind her. ‘Maaaa. . . .’ But before the ghost could get any closer, Bean sprang up from Selvam’s lap screaming, ‘Getawaygetawaygetaway’, running through the gates, all the way up to the front door, ringing and ringing the doorbell because even though she wasn’t talking to Mayuri or Cyrus Mazda, she had to tell them all about this.

‘Oh, please!’ Mayuri said, when Bean gestured for the fifth time how the ghost’s feet were twisted at the ankles. ‘You’re such a baby, Bean, to believe everything Selvam tells you. But fine, if you want me to go and see, I suppose I can.’