The Pleasure Seekers (6 page)

‘Well, if that’s the case,’ Siân snapped, ‘I suggest you write a letter to your parents explaining the situation. It’s only right.’

But before Babo got around to writing the letter, Prem Kumar’s telegram arrived.

Nat and Lila had correctly surmised that 2+2 in this situation added up to 10. It was Lila’s idea to send the warning telegram.

‘It’s our duty, Natvar,’ she said to her husband, who thought Babo was quite right to get some of this young-blood thing out of his system before having to go home and carry out the inevitable.

‘Let it be, Lila. It will work itself out. It will fizzle like a faulty firecracker. They are from different worlds. East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Why should we involve ourselves?’

‘Don’t East is East faulty firecracker me! I’m going to send a warning to Trishala-behn because I couldn’t bear it if we were accused later of failing in our duty.’

‘Oh, duty-shmooty,’ Nat muttered. ‘Fine, you send it. Do your duty and then come and rub your husband’s legs. That’s your duty as well.’

Nat was the first person Babo telephoned when he got his father’s telegram. ‘Nat, I have to go home. Ma isn’t well. I got a telegram from Papa today but he doesn’t say anything about her condition except that it’s serious and I’m to go home as soon as possible.’

‘What? What do you mean, “condition”? You mean to say Trishala-behn is sick?’

‘Yes,’ shouted Babo impatiently. ‘It’s serious. Papa doesn’t say what it is or how serious it is, but only that I’m to come home right away.’

‘Arre, relax, Babo. I’m sure it’ll be OK,’ said Nat, in that too-nonchalant way of his that so irritated Babo. ‘Bapuji is probably overreacting, but anyway, we should arrange a ticket for you right away. Shall I call my friend Somnath, who works for Air India? He can try to get a good ticket for you. Do you want me to do that?’

Later that evening, Babo skipped his class at the Polytechnic for the very first time and went straight home with Siân after work. ‘It’s always the fear, you know?’ Babo whispered as they lay in bed together. ‘That something will happen when you’re far away. Don’t you worry about it? That something bad will happen to your family when you’re too far away to do anything about it?’

‘There’s no point beating yourself up about it, my love,’ Siân said, stroking the taut brown canvas of Babo’s back. ‘You’ll just have to wait till you get home and see how things are then. Don’t worry about me, darling. We’ve got our whole lives to go travelling together. You just get home soon and be with your family. They need you now.’

4  Sad to Say I’m on My Way

Babo’s departure from London was as unobtrusive as his arrival. When he left, it was on a day of pouring rain. There were no photographs, no garlands. There was only Siân in corduroy bell-bottoms and a rust orange shirt, her small rounded breasts heaving against the wall of his chest, her bony shoulders and arms flung around his tangle of curls.

‘Here,’ Babo said, pushing a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which he hadn’t had time to wrap, into Siân’s hands. ‘I wanted to give you something,’ he said, looking embarrassed because he’d never bought anyone a present before.

The prodigal son had exactly the same luggage he’d started with (minus a few letters, plus a pair of Wrangler jeans). On the journey back, though, hanging awkwardly around his neck, was his great-grandfather’s antique locket, which Babo held as if it were an amulet, capable of bestowing wonders. On the flight home Babo was tense. He paced about at the back of the plane smoking cigarettes, thinking about his mother lying in some hospital bed in some awful pea-green operation gown, her eyes cleared of kajal, the bindi from the centre of her forehead rubbed away. He thought of her dying of some horrible, unnameable disease, and out of pure desperation, he held the locket close to his chest and began chanting the prayer he’d given up on a long time ago: ‘Namo Arihantanam, Namo Siddhanam . . .’

By the time he arrived in Madras he’d been travelling for over twenty-four hours. He didn’t know what time or day it was. His nails were gnawed down to the nub and his eyes looked like a watercolour version of their usual metallic grey. When he saw his father at the arrival gates, grim-faced, and in the same beige safari suit he’d worn to drop him off nine months ago, Babo wondered how he could look exactly the same when so much in their lives had changed.

‘Papa,’ he said, bending to touch Prem Kumar’s feet, tears sliding down his face.

‘So, you’ve come home, son,’ said Prem Kumar, touching Babo’s head and then taking his luggage purposefully over to the taxi.

Babo asked, after what he deemed a reasonable time of waiting, ‘How’s Ma?’

‘She’s much better. We didn’t know how she was going to be for a while, but she’s much better now. News of you coming home has helped. She hasn’t talked of anything else for days.’

‘You mean she can talk?’

‘Of course, what did you think? That she was lying in a coma somewhere?’

‘Well, no. Well, yes. I thought she was very ill.’

‘It’s nothing that a doctor can’t cure.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ said Babo, as he began to look outside with eagerness for the first time.

Madras looked overgrown, like an adult man insisting on wearing small-boy shorts. After his months in London, it seemed dirtier, shabbier. There were new billboards and glossy storefront windows, but the flowers on the roundabout were dying and the trees were gasping for air. The traffic was moving of its own accord without paying heed to the coloured signals or the khaki-clad policemen waving their arms frantically at the intersections. And the people! There were people everywhere, slipping in and out of their lives for everyone to see. Babo, watching them as if for the first time, saw how far he’d travelled, how it was no longer possible to be one of
them
.

Finally, they were driving down Sterling Road, past Taylor’s Lane, where Babo used to play cricket and kabadi after school, and the Railway Employees Compound, where he first started smoking cigarettes with his college friends. Sylvan Lodge sat at the corner of the street, surrounded by droopy ashoka trees, perched like a wedding cake jhimak-jhimaking in a bright new coat of pista-green paint.

Trishala was standing at the gate with Meenal, Dolly and Chotu. They had been told nothing of their brother’s affair. As far as they knew, Babo was coming home for the summer holidays. Selvam was looking on from his usual post, leaning on his cane stick, a red towel wrapped around his bald head to keep the heat away. Trishala was tugging him away from the gate because he was blocking her view. Babo thought how well she looked, not at all as if she’d suffered or was suffering from any illness. If anything, she looked a little haler and heartier than when he’d left.

When Babo got out of the car, Trishala, who had been smiling unrestrainedly until then, let out a towering scream. ‘Look how thin you’ve become! Haven’t you been eating anything? Didn’t they feed you in that country?’

Meenal and Dolly stood around him shyly, as if he were a stranger who had briefly borrowed their brother’s form. He looked different now that he was foreign-returned. His hair wasn’t pasted down like before, it was more modern – a bit puffy, like a film star’s. And his face looked different, too, leaner. That thin boyish moustache had been replaced with a French goatee, and his eyes were filled up with something – God knows what – but they weren’t as soft as they used to be. Only Chotu pushed through boldly, demanding that Babo throw him up on his shoulders as he used to do. ‘Oof, you’ve grown big,’ said Babo, feigning hardship. ‘Ma, why do you worry about my weight when you already have one son who’s a heavyweight champion?’

Inside his mother’s kitchen, Babo sat unsuspectingly with his siblings on the floor, eating all the things he’d dreamed about since leaving. From time to time his mother would stuff something in his mouth – a sugary yellow penda here, a deep-fried chilli bhajjiya there. Babo chewed, sitting cross-legged, using his fingers, savouring all the different tastes exploding in his mouth: pungent raw mango coated with lime, warm ghee-spattered chappathis hot from the tava, spicy mushy cauliflower stalks and jaggery-sweet dal.

As Babo felt the strength of his mother’s wholesome food pass through his body once again, he tried to explain how vegetarianism was a strange concept in England, and Jainism as a religion, stranger still. He told them all about his saving graces – Fred Hallworth and Bhupen Jain, his friend at the Polytechnic, at whose house he enjoyed many a home-made meal. He said nothing of what the doctor had told him:
Son, if you want to survive in this country you better start putting a bit of meat into this body
. Nothing of how he desperately needed to survive in that country because he’d met someone in whom he’d found himself. He could talk with her about the injustices of war, the necessity of revolutions, and she could turn them into something as light as a summer breeze moving through a luminous green paddy field. He said nothing of how he’d begun his intoxicating and carnivorous adventures, or how he’d persisted with smoking.

And love? Babo said nothing of love. He sat basking in the comfort of his family – his opaque eyes shining and careening, careening and shining – while Prem Kumar, rummaging through his son’s briefcase in the hall, removed his passport and hid it high on the cupboard shelf for safe-keeping.

On his first morning home, Babo was still disoriented from the journey. His dreams had been hurried and forced, and Siân had been in them all, calling him back to her. Babo hadn’t thought that coming back would make him feel this way; that after months and months of longing, he could find so little to call his own, as though his whole earlier life had belonged to someone else. All he could think of were Siân’s green, saucer eyes, how he’d been accustomed to losing himself in them the minute he woke up. He wondered how home could feel like such an alien place when only a year ago all this had been his only reality.

Seeing his little brother, though, standing in the doorway with those broomstick legs and that matador middle parting with the flicks going to each side, managed to start a thump-thumping in his heart.

‘Were you scared when Ma was ill?’ Babo asked, patting the bed as a sign that Chotu should crawl up and join him on the bed, rather than hover in the doorway like a stranger.

Chotu looked at him blankly. ‘I’ve grown three inches since you left and Papa says that before he knows it I’ll be going to the factory with him. But bhai, tell me about the aeroplane flight. What does it feel like to be so high in the sky?’

Chotu ventured up to the bed and sat on the edge. When he saw Babo’s suitcase lying open with the last-minute bars of chocolate thrown on top, his eyes widened quietly, patiently.

Babo tried again. ‘So, when Ma was ill, did Meenal and Dolly look after you?’

‘Huh? Bhai, what do you keep saying about Ma being ill? The last time was when she ate all those puris on Diwali at Meghna-behn’s house. Thirty-seven puris she had and then she came home and vomited all night. Ha ha ha.

‘Anyway, listen, do you know that Papa has found a husband for Meenal? He lives in Bombay, and he’s a shipbroker.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, bhai, but this is the funniest part – Papa hasn’t said OK yet because his informant in Bombay told him that the shipbroker might have a limp.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know – he’s langda in one leg, but he hasn’t said anything about this in any of the negotiations. Naturally, Meenal doesn’t want to get married to a langda fellow so she’s been crying everyday. The Bombay informant is sure that he has a limp, though.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘God promise, bhai! I heard them talking about it during Sunday cards session. Vimal-bhai suggested that Papa go to Bombay himself and spy on him while he’s doing puja at the temple. That’s the best time to find out, no? When he’s wearing a dhoti – because then his legs will be exposed, and Papa can tell immediately whether he’s a langda or not. Can you believe it? Papa is going to Bombay and he’s going to stay in a hotel and spy on him. I wish we could go too.’

Prem Kumar hid behind the door, watching his two sons, wondering what his next tactical manoeuvre should be. He had let Babo sleep his first night in innocence, believing that everything was as it should be, that his family were ignorant of his misdemeanours, while he had lain awake contemplating the roads and roads of untravelled path that were stretching out before him. These were hard times, and he had to prove to his family that he was capable of steering them through. Most importantly, he had to guide his son back to the three jewels of Jain wisdom.

Through the slim crack in the door, Prem Kumar could see Chotu’s spindly legs dangling over the side of the bed, and he could feel Babo filling the room with the force he had carried from birth – as if he were the most important person in it. Prem Kumar still didn’t know what he was going to say to his son. He had woken early after his restless night, taken the neem stick outside to clean his teeth, attended to all his toilet functions, recited Navkar Mantra twelves times, and was at the door of his son’s bedroom at the appointed hour of 8 a.m.

‘Chotu,’ called Trishala. ‘Go with Selvam to pick up iddlis from Hotel Annapurna for breakfast. Hurry up. Go.’

As Chotu disappeared down the stairs, Darayus Mazda’s daily lament filtered through the air.
Oh! My family is breaking me into pieces. Oh! Here comes the great cloud of my family wanting to pick my bones and offer them to the vultures before my time . . .