The Pleasure Seekers, page 2
Babo had learned from the movies that the best heroes were the ones who were slick, suave and oftentimes cruel. So after his initial gaff at gawping, he whisked away one of Meenal’s less attractive friends and spent the whole night dancing with her. By six in the morning, when people started heading towards breakfast places with leaden feet, Babo, continuing in his nonchalance, sat at a separate table with all of Dolly’s sixteen-year-old friends, cracking loud jokes, boasting about being the first one to soon-be-getting-on-a-plane, and pretending to be bashful about his Bon Voyage picture which had appeared in The Hindu newspaper the day before.
Just before taking his sisters home, Falguni had crept up to him with her almond eyes brimming with tears. ‘Promith me that ssomorrow you will only danth wiss me,’ she said determinedly. But Babo, patting her dainty, milky hand, said nothing; gave her a mischievous wink, and left her to worry all day about his intentions.
Since then, they’d been passing secret messages back and forth through the willing and eager conduit of Meenal; the messages getting more and more fervent as the day of Babo’s leaving approached. Along with Trishala’s ring, Meenal had also pressed a long, tear-stained letter from Falguni, who promised that she would not path a thingle day in happineth till Babo returned to her from London.
Last night Babo had looked at his sister Meenal like he’d never looked at her before. She wasn’t beautiful. There was nothing very special about her at all. But she had that aura that only a young woman overflowing with innocence could have. Something so heartbreaking, it made him want to reach out and claim it for himself. It was nostalgic, looking at a girl like that – her clear face and untouched body draped in a chiffon sari, the puffy short sleeves, the hair tied back in double braids with ribbons.
All these events – even this moment with Meenal, were entering the annals of Last Times for Babo. Months and years from now he’d think about his sister like this on the terrace, looking at him wistfully with tears running down her cheeks, asking when he would come back to be married, and what if she were married before that? He would remember the magenta bougainvillea cascading out of the terracotta flowerpots, the air mostly still and quiet, telling her briskly that nothing in the world would happen until he returned. He remembered believing it, too, while they stood there, sister and brother, their feet on the red-brick terrace – Meenal, whose temporarily waif-like frame would disappear soon after her much anticipated marriage, and Babo in his crisp white kurta pyjama, his fingernails cut and filed, his hair glistening with the coconut oil that Trishala had lavishly anointed while listing the temptations he must resist while he was away: meat, alcohol, tobacco and most importantly, women.
Lilaj-bhai was trying to get the family organized. As soon as he’d seen the Ambassador roll through the departure gates, he had walked towards it jauntily with a foxy, betel-stained smile. He knew if he played his cards right, he could make a killing with the Patel family: families were at their weakest on occasions of departure and arrival. Deaths, births and marriages figured highest on the emotional range, of course. What were photographs after all, but a desire to capture some of those emotions, trap the feelings so you could pull them out later to marvel at?
Marriage was the greatest occasion of leaving and arriving. The girl departs one house and arrives in the other, and likewise, the family of the boy is, in a way, leaving an old life and entering into another. These moments that occupied the cusp were what Lilaj-bhai lived for, because this was when human beings were willing to forget about hard things like money and expense. And this moment here, with the Patel family on the pavement of the Madras Meenambakkam Airport, was an event Lilaj-bhai could plunder.
While Lilaj-bhai set up his equipment, Prem Kumar pulled Babo aside and slipped him his most prized possession – the locket of his grandfather, Babo’s great-grandfather, Kunthinath Paras Kumar Patel, whom Prem Kumar admired for two things: refusing to take up arms against the British because of his belief in ahimsa, and living a life of the highest virtue (eating only two meals a day, taking care of all the stray animals in the village and dying without any of his neighbours being able to whisper a single word of malice against him).
‘Your mother wanted me to give this to you, son. I hope you will wear it with the dignity that your great-grandfather did. And I hope it will give you the strength to make the right choices.’
The locket was a platinum globe the size of a fifty paisa coin with a faded reproduction of Lord Mahavir inside. Ba, Prem Kumar’s mother, and the grand matriarch of the entire village of Ganga Bazaar, had given it to him on the occasion of her husband’s death. She had meant it to be a symbolic passing over of reins. It had been Trishala’s idea to give the locket to Babo for good luck, and as a concrete reminder of home, although Prem Kumar knew that even if the locket possessed any ability to pass on guidance and virtue to its wearer, it would be wasted on Babo, who was more likely to wear a Dev Anand-style cravat around his neck than an old-fashioned, religious pendant.
Prem Kumar, who had a penchant for sayings, had initially thought to tell his son something especially historic at the final moment of farewell: All humans are miserable due to their own faults, and they themselves can be happy by correcting these faults. But now that the moment was here, Prem Kumar, realizing his wife had been right after all, found the words too solemn and artificially constructed, and allowed them to slide back down his throat.
Babo, standing close to his suitcase labelled with his cousin Nat’s address in London – NUMBER 172, FLAT B, BELSIZE PARK ROAD – looked at his family as though he were never coming back. Despite all his youthful inexperience, he knew that after this moment, things were going to change far beyond what he could imagine. He wanted to take each member of his scattered family and press them close to his chest, hold them there and make them realize the moment too.
Perhaps he would come back to Madras one day and everything would appear to be the same: the sky might meet the sea like an old lover; the people pushing past the railings towards their unknowable futures might still smell of dust and tobacco, rosewater and jasmine; the air clinging to his clothes might still be as heavy as tar. His family might even be lined up in a similar fashion: Prem Kumar in his beige safari suit buttoned up to the neck, Trishala in her giant-sized maroon sari flapping about like a tent in a storm, Meenal and Dolly like twin dolls in matching outfits, winking and sticking their tongues out at him. And Chotu, standing apart from them all, concentrating on the giant metal birds on the runway. They might all still be there, waiting for his return to free them. But Babo could feel himself changing already. He knew he was going to forsake all this for something else, something larger, something which for the moment he couldn’t touch.
For the moment he would stand with his family in the morning light with the sun shining through the rain-laden clouds. He would let Lilaj-bhai say, ‘OK, E-sherious look now please,’ or ‘E-shmile please,’ and take pictures of them together; stiff as dummies in a store window, arms at attention at their sides. And gradually, as they relaxed and lost consciousness of the camera, there would be pictures of Babo’s gleaming teeth and his family smiling along with him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world – to let this boy fly away from them for the first time in his life. Far far away. Zing zing zing in the sky.
2 Under False Skies
It took Babo three months and five days in London to forget about Falguni. There had been a lot to deal with since his arrival, and pining for a large-breasted girl with a lisp from Madras was only working as a deterrent to his ultimate goal, which was, as his father repeatedly reminded him every time he wrote or telephoned, to get the gold medal for the advanced course at the Polytechnic, and to make himself indispensable to Joseph Friedman & Sons.
In any case, Falguni’s letters were getting increasingly and irritatingly sentimental, demanding replies and declarations of love that Babo, with his current schedule, just couldn’t keep up with. How could he begin to describe his new life to her, or to anyone in his family, for that matter? It was all so utterly different from what he’d expected; nothing at all like the English movies he used to cut classes for and watch with his college friends in Madras. There were no Alec Guinnesses or Humphrey Bogarts walking around in London. No Gina Lollobrigidas. At least none that he could see in the London City Council hostel in Wandsworth where his cousin Nat had dumped him.
To start with, Nat and his wife Lila hadn’t even picked him up at the airport. Babo had waited, holding tight to his suitcase, senses on high alert. Every five minutes he looked down at the face of his new HMT watch to see if it was still working, and finally, after confirming that he had indeed been waiting for three hours and fifteen minutes, he found a sardarji taxi driver who agreed to take him to Nat’s address in Belsize Park for £3 – which was all the money he’d been allowed in foreign exchange by the Indian Government. In the forty-five minutes it took to reach their flat, Babo had worked himself into a teary-eyed rage, because he was already broke, and because to arrive in a new place with no one to greet you, was surely an inauspicious way to begin.
‘Where were you?’ shrieked Babo, to a surprised Lila, who answered the door. ‘Didn’t you get the telegram from Papa? I don’t understand. You’re my family! You were supposed to pick me up.’
Nat and Lila hadn’t received the telegram. They’d been informed that Babo was due to arrive at some point, but the exact details of that arrival had gone astray. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Nat, somewhat too nonchalantly for Babo’s liking. ‘You’re here now, isn’t it?’
Nat had grown fat during his time in London. Babo had last seen him four years ago at his wedding in Baroda, at which point he’d been a regular, plumpish Gujju boy with a regular head of hair. Now, though, he looked to Babo like a cabbage – devoid of any character, his features flattened into oblivion, and his hair, whatever was left of it, swept into a scary comb-over. To compensate for these deficiencies, perhaps, Nat talked louder and faster than before, and during the course of tea and snacks, he delivered Babo his second googly of the day. ‘Well,’ he said, reaching for his fifth vegetable cutlet, ‘We ought to sort out some accommodation for you, don’t you think?’
‘What do you mean? Won’t I be staying with you?’
‘Look at the size of this place!’ said Nat, gesturing to the grubby walls of the bedsit with his chubby arms. ‘There’s barely enough place for Lila and me as it is. Besides, this is England, Babo. In this country, they don’t live like sardines, not like back home where it’s all family-shamily all the time. Day in and day out, eating, sleeping, shitting in each other’s faces. You know what I mean? No privacy, only lunacy. I tell you, it’s the best thing about this country. Give it a few months and you’ll learn to enjoy your time alone. In fact, you’ll be thanking me.’
Even though Nat eventually proved to be right, Babo never really forgave him for turfing him out of Hampstead – haven of tycoons and film stars – on his very first day, and depositing him in the London City Council hostel in Wandsworth, henceforth the LCC, with only a loan of £5 and an A–Z to keep him company. His room was half the size of his parents’ bathroom in Sylvan Lodge, and it was windowless. If he stretched out his hands he could feel the partition cloth that separated his space from the next fellow’s, and if he stretched further, he could potentially topple the glass of teeth that would surely be sitting on the side table next door, because the average age of an LCC occupant was seventy.
On his own side table Babo kept his wristwatch, locket and a limited array of toiletries (toothbrush, tongue cleaner, toothpaste, shaving cream and brush, soap and hair oil which would later be exchanged for Brylcreem). The rest of his possessions – two suits, four shirts, one pair of trousers, four pairs of underwear and socks, two ties, family photos and Falguni’s letters – he fitted into his suitcase and stored under the bed. In his briefcase, he kept his passport, wallet and work papers. The one pair of Bata shoes he owned, black and perfectly polished, he removed and kept by the door as soon as he entered the room. For this room, and for a steady diet of toast, tea, boiled vegetables and custard, Babo would pay £4 15s a week, nearly half his weekly salary.
On his first morning in London Babo was up early, making his way to the communal toilets before anyone else so he could do his business in peace. He had with him the plastic mug that Trishala had insisted on packing because she’d heard that English people used scraps of paper to clean their bums instead of washing them, which Nat had later affirmed. After dressing and eating breakfast, Babo walked to the offices of Joseph Friedman & Sons according to the route he’d mapped and memorized from the A–Z the night before. He was so excited, his stomach kept doing jiggly-wrigglies, and halfway there he thought he might have to turn around just to use the toilet again. At 8 a.m. he arrived at the office reception with briefcase in hand and bowels subdued only to be told that no one from Exports had arrived yet. By the time Fred Hallworth finally rolled in to pump his hands up and down and say, ‘Wonderful, just wonderful to meet you,’ Babo had emptied and restored the contents of his briefcase a thousand times, and had started a letter to his father which began: Dear Papa, in England it seems, the first lesson I am to learn, is the art of waiting.
‘Let’s take you up to meet Joe, shall we?’ said Fred, ushering a bewildered Babo all the way to the eighth floor to the chairman’s office, where old Joseph himself was sitting in a swivel chair, smoking a pipe.
The chairman took one look at Babo and said, ‘You’ve brought the Indian summer with you, Bob. Is it all right if I call you Bob?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Babo blinked, not knowing what an Indian summer could possibly mean, but it was something he’d hear repeatedly over the next few months.
‘And when would you like to start working for us?’ old Joseph boomed.
Babo stood in front of him, beginning to feel a bit hot in his blue wool suit. ‘Today?’
‘Don’t you want to take a few days off, son? Get to know London a bit before you settle in for the daily grind?’
And that’s when it all came pouring out: Babo’s money woes; the cab driver, a fellow countryman who’d gypped him; his own cousin who hadn’t even bothered to pick him up at the airport – all of it in clipped, heavily accented English sentences, until the chairman, grasping the breadth of Babo’s distress, got up from his chair and planted fifty quid in Babo’s sweaty palms, saying that this was just something to start him off – it was a lot of money, sure, but he could see from Babo’s face that he was hard-working, and that he’d be nothing but an asset to the company. Furthermore, if he needed anything else, he shouldn’t hesitate to bother Fred Hallworth about it.
It was a kindness Babo hadn’t expected. ‘I’d still like to start today, sir,’ he said, before leaving the room, clutching the fifty quid tight.
Fred Hallworth turned out to be Babo’s great protector and champion in London. He was responsible for getting Babo’s photograph printed in the company’s September newsletter, with the headline ‘WELCOME TO JOSEPH FRIEDMAN & SONS DHARMESH PATEL’, which Babo promptly cut out and sent home to his father, knowing that Prem Kumar would place it lovingly in his file along with his college certificates, The Hindu Bon Voyage photograph and the company’s formal letter of employment.
There was something about Fred that was instantly likeable. He was a big, bearded man with hands like stone crushers and a voice that matched the pace and turbo of the zippy MG he tore around in, but he was also a surprisingly good listener, and in those early days, Babo found it comforting to be able to pile some of his concerns into Fred’s pliant, available ears. Fred had been to India many times, and he’d been supplying cement and raw materials to Prem Kumar for so long now, Babo felt he was the one person who understood exactly where he was coming from.
Every day they ate lunch together at The Brewer’s Inn, and every day Fred joked, ‘Fancy a pint of bitters, Bob? Or some steak and kidney pie?’ knowing that Babo would only laugh good-naturedly and say, ‘Not today, Fred, I think I’ll stick to my regular,’ which was a cheese sandwich and orange juice.
It took Babo a long time to stop calling Fred Mr Hallworth. It was easier if they were out of the office, but in the domain of Joseph Friedman & Sons, Babo always slipped back to the well-honed show of reverence he was used to reserving for his elders. The lack of rigidity between generations in England took a while to get used to. Back home for instance, Babo couldn’t imagine sharing a cup of tea with one of his professors, or addressing him by his first name. Imagine! Oh! Hello, Harindranath. Good morning, Subramanium! Unthinkable. More unthinkable for a teacher to light up a smoke in class, and for a student to follow. Yet, this happened regularly at the Polytechnic. Babo, despite his rebellious leanings, had at first been uncomfortable with the whole scenario because years and years of being a closet smoker had made it impossible for him to enjoy a fag in public. But, as Fred rightly pointed out, when in Rome, one should do as the Romans do. So, Babo trained himself to adopt the English custom of smoking during class until it began to seem like this was the way things had always been.
Everything was so continually surprising to Babo during those first few months in London that when he sent news home, he didn’t know where to begin. England is an amazing country, he wrote to his grandmother, Ba, in Gujarat. There are parks everywhere – all over the city. Sometimes, while walking to work, I get a strong smell of wet leaves, which in this season are turning colour and falling, and somehow it reminds me of Ganga Bazaar after the rains, and of course, of you, Ba.
