The Pleasure Seekers (8 page)

Ba had been able to smell Babo all the way from Amroli. It was a special talent that had come to her in her fifty-third year when she lost her husband to tuberculosis and her knee-length hair turned white overnight. She discovered then that she could smell human defilements and devotions from over the hills and far away, which was a good thing, because she was an old woman now, severely diabetic, and her once bright, black eyes were slowly going blind. Ba believed it was life’s way of compensating: to take with one hand and give with the other. This was the law of the universe – to remain in constant balance; which is why, no matter how many hardships she’d had to face, and there had been many, Ba had remained a true seeker, believing that no matter how bad the situation got, around the corner, salvation would appear.

‘Tell me,’ she called from her place on the front steps, ‘About this English girl that has made a tyre puncture in your heart. Is she beautiful?’

Babo walked up to his grandmother and touched her feet to ask for her blessings. It amazed him, as it always did, how she had not changed since he’d last seen her. Ever since he could remember, his grandmother had looked exactly the same. ‘She’s not English, Ba, she’s WELSH.’

‘Welsh,’ Ba repeated softly, savouring the foreign word on her tongue. ‘Welsh. It sounds like a kind of wind – a wind that rushes through the forests and shakes all the leaves off the trees.’

Now that Babo was close to her and she could see him better, Ba touched his head and said, ‘What’s this? Is this the new fashion in England? To walk around like a jungli with uncombed hair? And this?’ she said, tugging his beard, ‘Is this the fashion too? Or is this what WELSH girls like?’

‘It’s my sign of protest,’ said Babo proudly. ‘I’ve taken a vow for six months that I won’t cut my hair or shave until I see Siân again.’

‘Oh! So you’re on strike. Very good. But why do we have to suffer just because you are suffering?’

‘Because I’m your favourite grandchild?’

‘Oh yes, there is that. There is that indeed. Well, tell me. Tell me from the beginning. I want to know everything.’

Babo, on the first night of his self-imposed exile in Ganga Bazaar, told his grandmother the story of his last nine months in England. He told her about the meeting in the canteen and the gap between Siân’s teeth which he’d wanted to disappear into for ever; about how his life in London, which had been quite difficult at first, had changed the minute love entered: it had suddenly become light and fragrant, like rose petals constantly falling around him from the sky. He told her of the conspiracy and lies spun between Nat and his parents to get him to come back home; about how every day spent away from Siân made him feel like he was shrinking into a handful of molecules, smaller and smaller, until he thought he might just vanish.

Babo laid his head down on his grandmother’s lap – a childhood position he returned to with ease, and talked and talked while Ba, leaning against the walls of her house, murmured ‘Mmm’ and ‘Then?’ intermittently, her moon-white hair shining in the night.

That night, everything around them was silent. It was as if all the animals and trees that normally sprang to life after the sun went down, were waiting to hear what would unfold next in Babo’s story. Babo and Ba stayed like this for a long time, building a bridge of remembrance between them, until at some point after midnight, Ba smelled the rain coming. ‘We better get inside,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought us thunderstorms for the next three months.’

In Madras Prem Kumar was getting increasingly impatient. He lay awake at night, wondering if he’d done the right thing by allowing Babo to go to Anjar. He wanted his family as it used to be: seamless. And he wanted Babo returned to them, flaws and all, as he was in the past, because this new Babo had torn the space around them, shown his family the door. Prem Kumar, facing the obstinacy of this door, didn’t know if he must stand still and wait, or push it open and make some noise.

He wrote what he thought was a conciliatory letter to his son, telling him that there was a polish for everything that became rusty, and that the polish for the heart was the remembrance of God. Babo did not respond. If Prem Kumar had had any inkling of the kind of talks that were taking place between grandmother and grandson, he would have quickly summoned Babo back. But as it was, he was unaware, once again, of how a woman continued to bend Babo out of shape.

Babo’s mornings in Ganga Bazaar were spent in Anjar’s only hotel, Zam Zam Lodge. Every day, before walking over to Zam Zam with his writing materials, Babo went to the courtyard in the back, drew a bucket of water from the well, stood in his VIP briefs and used whatever concoction of turmeric and hibiscus flower Ba had left out for him to wash with. Ba was always up at four, bathed and dressed in her staple white widow’s sari. She swept and swabbed the house, clearing away the red, rubbery garoli lizard skins and the blue-green peacock feathers. By the time Babo emerged from his deep, dream-ridden sleep to offer his services, she would have already decorated the entrance to the house with powdered rice flour patterns, tended to her plants and prepared the food for the day. ‘Go, go,’ she said. ‘Go write your love letters. There’s nothing to be done around here.’

Babo walked quickly through the small lanes of Ganga Bazaar so as to avoid being waylaid by a well-meaning neighbour. At Zam Zam he sat at the table reserved for him, chain-smoking and drinking endless cups of sugary tea, filling at least ten front and back foolscap pages with heartfelt declarations. He pressed frangipani petals between the pages or sprigs of tulsi, and wrote day after day of their enforced separation because it was the only thing that kept him going. Siân in return wrote back, not quite as profusely as Babo, but more poetically, in neat blue aerogrammes that the postman Neeraj-bhai delivered.

Some days, when Babo was feeling particularly morose, he went wandering the poorer parts of Anjar, trying to convince himself that there was greater suffering in the world than his. He told Siân of all this, too: of the destitute beggar woman who sat outside Zam Zam with no one in the world to look after her, and the toothless men who sat under the trees, watching the world spin by from the tops of their rolling eyes. It terrified him to see people this way: old and alone, without the slightest trace of happiness on their face.
How do human beings lose themselves so entirely?
he wrote to Siân, and then proceeded to try and answer his own question.

For Babo it was simple. He needed to be with Siân and wake up with her every morning. He wanted to be light and free like they’d been in London, skipping down to the cinema if they felt like it or spending all afternoon in a sha-bing sha-bang haze. Mostly, he didn’t want his life to slip by him. He didn’t want someone telling him how he should live. He wanted a life that would be like lightning, striking the surface of water – joyous and ethereal. He wrote pages and pages like this. And Siân, from her Finchley Road flat, responded in simple, inky words:
Dreamed of you last night. You came to me and we washed together before eating in the light
.

When Babo walked back to Ba’s house in the afternoons, he let the rain soak through his skin, holding his writing materials and Siân’s letter for the day secured in a plastic bag against his chest. If it was a good day, Neeraj-bhai would hand over one of Siân’s aerogrammes with his 100-watt smile, and Babo would take this to the back of the house, where a bamboo grove had sprung up in the recent showers, and stay there, turning the sheet of paper over and over in his hands until he had memorized every word.

Some days Siân’s letters went missing in the entrails of the Indian postal system, and then, Neeraj-bhai appeared at the door with a hangdog look on his face and each of his triple chins juddering, to say, ‘Sorry, boss, no luck today, maybe tomorrow?’

In the evenings the ladies came in all shapes and sizes to sit around his grandmother like a fanfare of trumpeter swans. Every day they had a different project: Mondays they cooked in giant steel containers to feed the poor at the Amba Mata temple; Tuesdays they powdered red garoli lizard skins so they could make tie-dye scarves for themselves; Wednesdays they made pappads for Poppat-bhai’s shop; and so it went. Through the week there was talking, singing, wailing, complaining – a real hullabulla of voices and competing emotions. But rising above them all was always Ba, with that girlish voice of hers, her laughter tinkling over them like bells.

When the women of Ganga Bazaar saw Babo spying on them through the window grills, they shouted, ‘Ey, Babo, come and sit with us! What’s the matter? Are you frightened of us? Or is your heart breaking too much?’ And Babo, without so much as a
hello–goodbye excuse–me–please
turned from them and disappeared into the back room to revise the chemical formulas and equations he’d learned at the Polytechnic.

Only after the women left, and the jute mats had been rolled away, did Babo venture out to Ba. They sat together with their dinner under the early stars, talking above the sound of the crickets in the undergrowth. Ba told him stories of the ancestors Babo knew so little about. She related all the love-marriage scandals she knew of, including her own sister’s story – how she ran off with a Muslim boy from the neighbouring village never to be seen again, and the story of Kanta-behn’s son, who fell in love with his dark, pockmarked cousin, Damyanti. Babo listened intently, secretly believing that his love-story scandal was going to be the most beautiful of them all.

‘Did you love Bapa?’ Babo asked one night, during the week of the British postal strike, when there had been no news from Siân for ten days. ‘When he died, did you ever feel like you would die too because he was gone? Did you miss him in that way?’

‘It wasn’t like that for us, Babo. There are so many ways of loving a person. With us, it was a gentle thing, nothing like what you’re feeling now. What you have, it’s something rare. We call it Ekam. They say that you may experience it once in your life or not at all. Some have described it as entering into a dark cave with no beginning or end. Some have said it’s like feeling your heart burn on a slow fire. This Ekam, once you have it, you’ll believe that you can eradicate all the guilt in the world, all the pollution and misfortune.’

‘Did you ever feel this Ekam with anyone else?’

‘No,’ said Ba wistfully, ‘That remains for me in another lifetime. But your other grandparents – your mother’s parents – they had this special kind of love. The people in Ganga Bazaar still talk about it – the love between Ravi Lal Mehta and the temple cleaner Gurvanthi. It ended in tragedy, though. She died giving birth to your mother, and he went a bit mental after that.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Babo. ‘What if my love ends in a tragedy too? What if she grows tired of waiting, and I’m left with this feeling, my whole life unfulfilled. I will die, surely I will. Tell me, Ba, can you die of sadness?’

‘You can die for all sorts of stupid reasons, including a scorpion bite,’ said Ba, gently leaning over to flick away the scorpion that had been edging closer and closer to Babo. ‘Now go to sleep. You’ve found what most people never find. Be happy. And Babo,’ she said, before turning to blow out the lantern, ‘You really must stop watching so many movies. You’re getting very filmy these days.’

‘It’s a burning, Ba,’ Babo whispered, before falling asleep. ‘Love is definitely a burning.’

As Babo slept, Ba stroked his curls and thought of her husband, who had died early of a disease they had no names for then, and her son, who seemed to have entered the world with a set of values and a consciousness she’d played no part in shaping. These were men she should have loved, but in reality, their absence or presence had played such a peripheral role in her life. This grandson, though, with all his desires – he stood at the centre of her world, and she wanted him to be released. She wanted his love for the Welsh girl to unfold like a lotus and gleam. It would happen. The girl would come. But until she did, Babo would have to wait, and Ba would wait with him; standing, breathing, knock knock knocking beside him.

6  This is the World. Have Faith

38 Canfield Gardens
,

London

15 October 1969

Darling
,

I received your letter dated 28 August only yesterday! I hope you’ve managed to sort out the beard situation by now! I can’t believe you’re being so stubborn about this, love. I mean, hasn’t everyone already accepted that I’m going to be in India by the end of the year, unless something dreadful happens between now and then – like one of us dies or something? There’s no need to keep your vow – which was, in any case, something to antagonize your parents with. I think Ba is quite right in saying that if you’re going to persist with this beard business you must take care to groom it instead of letting it go helter-skelter. I must admit, though, I would love to see what you look like now. I can just picture you two under the trees – Ba oiling your beard and then plaiting it up! What a sight you must look. My own little sadhu
.

What very different lives we’re leading at the moment. In some ways, I’m jealous of you. You’re cocooned in some magical place, buoyed up with this incredible love that your grandmother seems to emanate. Meanwhile, I’m in London – and the talk here is WAR. All the time. Vietnam, the Middle East. I’m sick of it. Nixon and Spiro and that fool Harold Wilson. Shameful. There’s a National Moratorium anti-war demonstration taking place in Washington DC today – I’m sure you must be getting regular bulletins even in Anjar – so I won’t prattle on except to say that it continues, this unrelenting greed and violence
.