The Pleasure Seekers (17 page)

To Bean, Mayuri was like the girl with the curl in the nursery rhyme. When she was good she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid. When Mayuri was good, the sisters could play together for days without any flare-ups, transforming their bedroom into any place they wanted. With Siân’s bundle of old saris and scarves they could be damsels in distress, or twins separated at birth, changing outfits every few minutes, exactly like the heroines in the Hindi movies. Mayuri’s world was all about fighting dacoits and making up skits for the Sunday Club like
The Tailor of Baghdad
or
Calphurnia’s Adventures in Abyssinia
– all more exhilarating than anything Bean herself could ever imagine. But all it took was for one of Mayuri’s school friends to come over and
poof
, the spell was broken. Mayuri would lock herself in the guest room with all the toys and Abba tapes, and if Bean begged to be let in to play, she’d scream like a banshee through the keyhole, ‘Don’t AGGRA-VATE us, Bean, go and find your own game to play.’

It was worst when they were with the hybrids. It wasn’t just that Bean had to get dressed up in a proper frock and patent leather shoes, and sit patiently at a table on the lawn of the Madras Gymkhana Club while Siân and Babo talked to their friends. It was that Mayuri ganged up against her with the hybrid Rachel. Rachel was Bean’s nemesis. She was a first-ranker, a high-jump champion and could blow a Big Fun bubble gum twice as big as her face, and for all these reasons Bean hated her.

Rachel’s mother, Aunty Jan, had come to India from England a long time ago, and had made the two-week journey by ship. ‘I cried all the way, every day,’ she once told Bean, ‘thinking I was making the biggest mistake of my life.’

Bean thought she probably
had
made quite a big mistake, because she’d never been able to go home since – and all to get married to Uncle Keshav, who had a face full of fur and tattoos of his old girlfriends etched like poison ivy into his arms. Every time he saw Bean he got hold of her cheeks as if they were doorknobs and said, ‘Hi, girl, can I get you a drink?’

The person Bean liked most in the Krishnamurti family was Rachel’s brother, Rahul, who was a full twelve years older, with dark blond hair and sea-blue eyes. Every once in a while, when Mayuri got too uppity, Rachel would take hold of Bean’s hand and say, ‘Come on, let’s you and I go and spy on Rahul,’ and the two of them would creep up to the window grills of the billiard room (where only people over eighteen were allowed) and watch Rahul playing snooker with the other big boys. Usually, though, prissy Ms Rachel had no time for Bean, and so Bean was left with the other hybrid child, Shyam Malhotra, who belonged to Aunty Darlene and Uncle Praveen.

Aunty Darlene was American, so she spoke different from Siân and Aunty Jan. She was super-tall with frizzy hair, and she always had something funny to say. Her husband, Uncle Praveen, by contrast, was dour and sausage-bodied, and even though his eyes crinkled up when he laughed, he often looked like someone had just died. Everyone always said how strange it was that the two of them should produce a child like Shyam.

Bean once overheard Selvi describe Shyam as the ugliest half and half she’d ever laid eyes on. ‘Sometimes, all this mixing gives bad results,’ Selvi snorted to the Singhanias’ servant girl, who concurred that Shyam was the saddest specimen of a little boy she had ever seen.

Siân said that the reason Shyam was sickly and grey in complexion like old people was because he was a ‘surprise baby’. When he came into the world, it was much earlier than expected, and he very nearly died. This is why he was small for his age and plagued by an overall thinness: thin in body, eyes, nose, ears, and especially thin in the lips, making him look like a mean little matchstick. But Bean didn’t give two hoots about Shyam’s appearance. He was still the best tree climber she knew, and besides, he always took her side in everything.

Bean wished Shyam was standing with her right now outside the gates of her grandparents’ house so he could help her find the ghost and prove to Mayuri and Cyrus Mazda that she was not a liar liar lipstick. Selvam, her only alibi, had conveniently laid himself out on the floor of the servants’ quarters for a quick nap before his night duty, and there was nothing in the world that Bean could say or do to make Mayuri believe her.

Every night after the sighting of the ghost on Sterling Road, Bean stayed up listening for the sickly scrape-scraping sound of ghosts signalling their entrance into the human world. But all she could hear were the cats mating on the wall of the Punjab Women’s Association. To Bean, they sounded like an orchestra of babies dying. Keening and wailing with horrific intensity, equal in revulsion, only to P. Vetrivel scratching his nails down the blackboard in class. There were other sounds too – rustlings and slitherings in the corners of the bedroom, making it impossible for her to sleep. When her eyelids finally succumbed to exhaustion, she fell into a sleep so deep and troubled, that inevitably, at some point in the night, her legs parted gently for a warm stream of wee to pass between her pyjama legs.

When Bean slept, even the most benign things took on a malevolent nature. Her toys, who were so gentle and unmoving during the day, threw off their sheets and threatened to poke her eyes out with sticks. Even her favourite story-book character, Dick Whittington, on his way to becoming Mayor of London, stood like a sentry at Babo and Siân’s bedroom door with his billowy knickerbockers and his menacing cat, holding a spear in case she should try to sneak by him. Bean, quivering in her non-existent boots, spent most of her nights edging around her sheets, looking for a dry patch to sleep in, and only when she was on the very brink of despair, did she rise up in a brief spurt of courage and make for her parents’ door, launching herself squarely between them in bed.

‘For goodness sake, it’s all rubbish.’ Siân always said. ‘You’re too old to sleep with us now.’

Babo would put on the lights and say, ‘See, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Try to dream of beautiful things.’

Sometimes, she even tried her luck with Selvi, stretched out on her jute mat on the dining-room floor. But Selvi wouldn’t have any of it either. ‘Lord, what kind of craziness you got in your head, child? Just off the light and go to sleep.’

But Bean knew that ghosts could hide from grown-ups. They could fold themselves in half and slide into a chest of drawers, or casually slip into the thin space between the wall and the bookshelf, ka-chink ka-chink ka-chink. Or they could shimmy through the window grills and hide in the flame-of-the-forest tree until there was darkness in the house again. Really. It was no use. Once you knew that you lived in a house of ghosts, once you could see and hear them plain as day, there was nothing to do but live in a constant state of torment, until they came to get you.

And if the ghosts didn’t get you then the Boochie Man would. It was Mayuri who told Bean about the Boochie Man, who climbed the walls of their room at night. When they lay next to each other after lights out, it was Mayuri who began telling the scariest story of all.
See, there on the toy shelf where Teddy and Panda are sleeping? The Boochie Man is creeping among them, slipping daggers into their throats, and Bean, he’s going to get you next!

Mayuri told her these things and then dreamed of fairies and Ferris-wheels. She woke like a perfect child in crisp, white sheets with sugar at the corners of her lips, while Bean woke up in a cold patch of wee, the soggy evidence of shame between her legs.

13  Love in the Time of Chicken Pox

Upstairs, in his bedroom in Sylvan Lodge, Chotu lounged in bed and scratched his armpits languidly. For two weeks he had been confined, with only regular visits from his mother and sister to relieve his boredom. Trishala spent the morning anointing him with various concoctions of oatmeal and calamine, allowing herself to be temporarily distracted from her main task in hand: to find Dolly a husband. When Dolly came home from candle-making or chocolate-making class, depending on which day of the week it was, she filled Chotu’s ears with all the obsessions of her not-so-young life: why was her hair falling out so much? Who did so-and-so think she was wearing a miniskirt to the movies? What would the effect on her figure be if she ate only one meal a day for the next three months? When Trishala and Dolly collided in his room, they bickered as women do when they have lived under the same roof for too long. Only for a few hours in the afternoon, when the house rested, and late at night, after Prem Kumar had stuck his head round the door to give him work updates and news of Babo and family’s vacation in Anjar, did Chotu have time for himself. This he used to watch Hindi movies and re-read his favourite
Hardy Boys
books.

On this bright July morning, the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, Chotu lay in bed examining the remnants of the dew-shaped welts that had until recently covered his legs, back and arms like a swarm of rose petals. It hadn’t been as bad as Jignesh-bhai, the fat-lipped family doctor, had predicted. He had missed cricket, of course, and for a few days he thought he would die from not being able to scratch his wounds, but after the itching subsided, and his body made its slow way to recovery, Chotu reflected that this illness had forced him to put his life into perspective.

Chotu looked around his bedroom at the things that normally brought him joy: his cricket trophies, smartly lined up in a specially built glass showcase; his latest model aeroplane, lying unfinished on the desk by the air-conditioner; a poster of Zeenat Aman from
Don
hanging sexily next to his most prized possession – a framed autograph of Lancelot Gibbs, the greatest bowler in the world, whom Chotu had met in a lucky encounter in the Taj Hotel in Bombay. If he had to name the feeling that was rising in his chest that morning, Chotu’s first inclination would have been to say despair. But after letting the weight of that word settle on his tongue, he decided to slide it to one side, and replace it with another word: frustration. Because he was twenty-three, and what had he achieved? Nothing, really. He had graduated from college with a mediocre 78 per cent. He might have had a stellar cricket career if Prem Kumar had allowed it, but instead, he was looking at a future of working indefinitely at Sanbo Enterprises – a thought that brought him no comfort.

There was nothing about Sanbo Enterprises that Chotu liked. Not its location, in a dead-end off a turning from Hunter’s Road; not the yellowing office building and its grimy floors; not the neighbours – a wig-making factory and a religious printing press; not even the monkeys that frolicked in the guava trees between the properties. Everything about his job was distasteful to him. He didn’t like having to wear good clothes to work and then change into paint-smeared, soiled trousers and shirts like Prem Kumar and Babo. He didn’t like the proximity of his desk to the canteen. He didn’t like his father’s old-fashioned notions of running a business. And he didn’t like how Babo conveniently shut himself in the invention room, leaving Chotu to deal with boring administrative details. The only saving grace that Sanbo Enterprises offered was the secretary, Bhanumati, whom Chotu had been carrying on with since the beginning of the year. But even that, in recent times, had lost some of its zing.

Chotu had not been lucky in love. Like many of his college friends, his first sexual experiences had been with the whores of Fifi’s House of Spices. After he learned what he’d gone there to learn, he had had a couple of discrete affairs. First, there was Uma, an Assamese girl with a moon face and diminutive but dextrous hands, who came to Sylvan Lodge once a month to give beauty treatments to Trishala and Dolly. Uma’s specialities were eyebrow threading and pedicures. For one whole summer Chotu pursued her hotly, following her to her permanent place of work, Cuts and Curls, marvelling at how tenderly she’d handle the fat arms and legs of the housewives who came to her. For days he watched as Uma stood above them, threading away all the unwanted hair, massaging the rolls in their necks. He loved the way she put their feet up on her lap – scrubbing, filing, pumicing, picking out the dirt, smoothing, painting, making them as beautiful as they could possibly be, and he would have watched her for all eternity if Pamela Anne, proprietor of the beauty salon, hadn’t told him to bugger off unless he had some serious intentions.

At the time Chotu’s intentions were serious, very serious. He waited till Uma finished her shift, and then took her to Marina Beach, where there were groping sessions and passionate declarations of lust. Once, very delicately, during a late-night movie, Uma put her magical hands down Chotu’s pants in the dark, which excited him so much he spilled Campa Cola all over himself. But in the end, they both agreed, it wasn’t anything close to love, and there had been no consummation.

Then there was Soumya, the yoga teacher at the Madras Cricket Club, who was svelte and snub-nosed, and could bend herself into all kinds of pliable postures. Soumya was married to Major Narayanan, but this didn’t diminish her enormous sexual appetite. She went through pool boys, cricket players, retired servicemen and mah-jong players as efficiently as if they were part of her daily yoga practice. With Chotu, the fling lasted a fortnight, more than her usual allotted time. ‘You’re eager,’ she told him, when he had her pinned against the wall of the clubhouse like a butterfly. ‘A bit too eager.’ And shortly afterwards, his ardent overtures were spurned in favour of a restrained spin bowler from Saidapet.

And then, of course, there was Bhanumati. Bhanu could type seventy-five words a minute and whip up a mean masala tea. She was the last person Chotu expected any kind of romantic liason with until they attended an industry conference for Resin and Pigments at the Congress Grounds, where she was taking shorthand notes. When Bhanu laid a hand on his knee and said, ‘Boss, if you want we can go somewhere else,’ Chotu discovered she had a far wider array of talents at the disposal of her scrupulous, click clacking fingertips. Underneath her demure exterior, Bhanu was a fairly standard, sex-obsessed convent school product. For six months they went at it every chance they got in the cobwebbed archival room and the middling hotel rooms Chotu hired for the purpose. Everything was perfect until Bhanu started getting kookoo ideas about marriage. The day she showed up with her astrological chart, Chotu had to tell her the truth: that while he enjoyed
being
with her, there was no way that he could
be
with her. And with that another door closed.