The Pleasure Seekers, page 23
‘How was journey, Beena?’ Mangala Aunty asked. ‘All fine? You must be hungry. Shall I make you some garam-garam hot-hot bhajjiyas? Come in, come in. Last time you were still a baby, such a beautiful girl now. Come in, come in.’
Mr Jain unbuttoned his coat and hung it carefully in the closet under the stairway. He looked distinctly older – hair all gone, body stooped over at the waist, almost frail. But there was nothing frail about Bhupen Jain, Bean would soon discover.
‘You may not be used to having deadlines with your mummy and daddy in Madras,’ he started again, just in case she hadn’t been paying attention the first time around. ‘But in this house you are AUW-ER responsibility. Anything that happens to you is AUW-ER responsibility. So, let me repeat again: latest time of arrival at night is 9 PEE EM.
‘Tomorrow we go to corner shop and buy you travel card. I take you on the bus and train to London Bridge. We sit with A-Z and you begin to understand how to move around the town.
‘Don’t be forgetting about phone calls, Beena. Phone is very expensive in England. Ten minutes incoming, five minutes outgoing. No international calls direct from here, please.
‘Don’t worry, we buy you phone card for best rates to India so you can call your mummy and daddy, and Mayuri. How is Mayuri? Enjoying married life?’
While Mangala Aunty disappeared into the kitchen to make the bhajjiyas, Mr Jain showed Bean her room upstairs and advised her on the order of morning ablutions.
‘We are not rich people, Beena, not like your daddy.’ Cackle cackle. ‘So, we are having only one bathroom with commode in separate room. In the morning time, Deenu will go first, myself second, then you, then aunty. OK?
‘After shower, you take this cloth from sill and wipe down bath. You want I show you how? Same like morning window wiping in your room. Why? Because panes get condensation, wood gets wet, then rotten, then very costly to replace. I show you how. Very easy. Come, I show you how.
‘On weekends, you can teach me computer and help Aunty with house-cleaning. Any doubts, you just ask me, OK?’
No rules of any sort had been discussed with Babo and Siân before leaving. In fact, the only advice they’d given Bean was not to get too discouraged by Mr Jain’s apparent sourness, because he was exceedingly sweet and generous underneath. Bean supposed they were right. After all, he was opening his house to her, feeding her, helping her find her way and refusing to take a single pound in exchange, all because she was his best friend’s daughter, who was like his own daughter. And as long as she, unlike the real one, abided by the rules of his house, all would be well.
In the kitchen Mangala Aunty was popping batter-covered potatoes into spluttering oil and reassembling the crispy concoctions on a single neat square of paper towel to soak up the oil. Mr Jain directed Bean to the far end of the kitchen bench and squeezed himself beside her. Mangala Aunty brought the bhajjiyas to the table and parked herself directly facing them. These would be their permanent places.
Mr Jain ate his bhajjiyas like a goldfish, dipping them in a circle of tomato ketchup and glubbing them down without any evidence of masticating. Bean, avoiding his watchful gaze, swirled her two bhajjiyas around on the plate in front of her.
‘Dieting or what?’ Mangala Aunty said, smiling her goofy smile again, plonking two more bhajjiyas on Bean’s plate.
‘Puppy,’ Mr Jain told his wife. ‘Don’t give if the girl doesn’t want.’
And then turning to Bean, ‘It’s not nice to waste, is it, Beena?’
Bean, reeling from the use of the word ‘puppy’ between sourpuss Mr Jain and his wife, managed to croak back, ‘You’re absolutely right, Uncle. My grandfather always says, the less we waste, the less we lack.’
For the first few weeks, Bean spent every evening with Mr Jain at the kitchen table with the evening papers, circling all the possible jobs she could apply for. ‘Don’t be so high and mighty, missy,’ he scolded, if Bean grimaced at the word ‘secretary’ or ‘receptionist’. ‘When you’re starting out you can’t afford to be so choosy.’
During the day, Mangala Aunty took her around the neighbourhood: ‘This is Woolworth’s, this is Boots (your mummy loves Boots), this is Waitrose (too expensive), this is W.H. Smith (you might like because of books, no?), this is bingo place for old people, this is local leisure centre (Mr Jain and me get for free because of senior citizen), this is library, this is job centre. This is Sainsbury’s – we do shopping here. Anything you want, just put in trolley, OK? Don’t feel shy, OK? Everything all right?’
Bean bought a monthly travel card for six zones. She rode in double-decker buses and took long walks in all the different hills of the city: Primrose, Notting, Muswell, Denmark, Parliament, Lavender, Haverstock, Herne, Forest, Tower. She browsed through second-hand bookshops on the Strand, and sat in pubs writing long letters home, sketching the old men around her who had nothing to do but drink beer and watch football all day.
From Ba in Anjar, Bean felt a distance she had never felt before.
Ganga Bazaar is the furthest place in the world from London. If I close my eyes and try to remember your house, try to imagine the warmth there, it’s impossible to do. I’m going to come and see you soon, don’t worry. I just don’t know when. I’ve started working, so I suppose I should stick with it otherwise I’ll be called a one-day-wonder, as usual. But I don’t know, Ba. I’m still trying to find my place. I remember you once telling me that there were only two mistakes to make on this journey of life: not going all the way, and not starting. So, here I am, trying to make a start. It’s difficult, but it’s a beginning.
She missed her bedroom in the house of orange and black gates; her mother and father and Selvi; but most surprisingly, she missed her sister. Bean had never imagined that she and Mayuri could be friends; that time and distance could change a person; that after all, the bonds of blood were thicker than water.
Mayuri had transformed from a tyrannically hard child to a soft-spoken woman, unafraid of admitting her dependencies, of finally saying to Bean, ‘Of course, I need you too.’ How was that possible? What’s more, Mayuri didn’t seem to remember any of the cruelties of childhood. ‘Did I really do that, Bean? Did I really say that if you wore lipstick your lips would turn black? Did I really say that if you touched the whiskers of a buffalo you’d get thrown to heaven seven times and back? How bizarre! I don’t remember any of it.’
More, more, Bean wanted to tell her. You were mean beyond belief. But nothing mattered now that they were grown up and changed and wandering about in their lives, because Mayuri was the only one who had known her from the beginning. And Bean wished she could summon up her sister now, even if it was just for a cup of tea in a nearby café, even if they could sit wordlessly under a midnight-blue sky heaving with stars, multiplied like rabbits, just so she could understand how she had travelled that long distance from there to here.
Do you remember coming here when we were little, May? It’s funny how memory works. I remember this house being such a glorious escape, such a comfort. Now it all feels a bit jaded. Everything’s shrunk, including aunty and uncle, with all the misfortune they keep going on about.
Mangala Aunty is sweet, but she’s been trained well. I have to tell you about the umbrella she lent me as soon as I arrived. My first day of work, and it’s pissing down with rain, so Aunty very kindly offers me her brolly. The saddest thing you ever saw – all the spokes going here and there, turned a million times inside out in the rain. And it was so carefully packed up in this Tesco bag, it must have been fifteen years old, at least! Anyway, I went out and bought two new umbrellas that day, and you should have seen her face when I presented one to her – tears in her eyes. Of course, misery-moo was like, ‘There’s no need to waste money Beena, you should be saving for the future.’ A fucking umbrella for godssake!
It’s really depressing in a way, having to think about money so much when you’ve never had to think about it before. And London is such an expensive city, ridiculously so. I wish I could get my own place, but at the moment, I just can’t afford it. So I’m going to have to deal with the Jains – all of them. Did I tell you about Deenu, the son? You remember him? Well, anyway, I’m pretty sure he’s gay – he’s got this love of all things designer, and he overdoes it on the cologne like nothing. Besides, he’s forty and still living at home with his parents! Anyway, he’s the prince of the house – comes and goes as he pleases in his BMW. Runs a restaurant in Richmond. I hardly see him. Sometimes we collide in the kitchen at breakfast and he says the exact same thing to me each and every time, ‘All right, Beena? Getting on OK?’
The daughter, Indrani, from what I gather (because they don’t talk too much about her), still hasn’t returned from her get-rich stint in Guatemala with the English boyfriend. Mama said that she disappeared with a chunk of Mr Jain’s retirement money a while ago – so I guess she’s done a runner.
Anyway, they’ve still got her pictures all over the house – graduation pictures of both kids – at least four in every room, in case you missed the point. Oh, and the mantelpiece, I have to tell you about the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It’s got this giant Taj Mahal in the centre, flagged by the Eiffel Tower on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other. It’s TOO tacky.
Every Indian family’s living room I’ve been taken to so far is exactly the same. LOOK, they all seem to be saying, see how far we’ve come – all the way from our village in the boondocks. But we’ve been to Paris, we’ve been to New York, we own a house in London. God! Don’t ask how I’m going to survive the next few months because every time I walk into this house I feel like I’m on high alert, like they’re watching me all the time to see what I’ve been using and how much. Only yesterday, I was up in bed early, reading with my lamp on, and who pushes the door and walks in but old sourpuss himself. Guess what he tells me? Beena, I hope that light hasn’t been on ALL night. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! They make me watch TV with them every night. There’s this quiz show – Who Wants to be a Millionaire – and it’s hilarious because whenever any of the contestants decide to risk their money and go for the jackpot, Uncle hides his head behind a cushion and says, Puppy, I can’t watch any more! Is the answer correct?
Bean wrote all this to her sister, imagining the delight on Mayuri’s face when she saw her letter sitting in the jute bag that hung on the gate of the house she and Cyrus had rented by the beach. A small white house with two-bedrooms and a garden where they grew tomatoes and basil and sometimes threw fancy-dress parties. Bean could almost see her sister shaking with laughter, and then sitting down at her writing desk.
Mayuri’s news from home was predictable at first, about the heat, or the difficulties she was having with the children at the Montessori school where she taught. And then slowly, as the distance between them grew wide enough to accommodate the truth, she began to reveal things Bean could never have imagined.
Sometimes, when I’m lying across from Cyrus in bed, it’s as if I don’t know him at all. I can recognize all the parts of him – the long, gangly legs, the pale arms, the nose he hates so much. It’s a picture I know and love, but sometimes, how can I explain it? I’m standing outside this picture. I’m looking at this man I call my husband, and he’s a stranger to me. Do you know how terrifying that is? Sometimes, when he has his arms around me, I have to move out from under them and retreat to my own side of the bed. Just so I can breathe. This happens only in flashes, of course. On a daily basis, we move and work like one of his well-oiled cars, knowing exactly how to please and irritate one another. But when it does happen, it’s the saddest thing in the world. I used to believe in destiny, but I don’t know any more, Bean. Now I only believe in what you create.
Sometimes I think of Mama and Daddy, about those Saturday afternoons they’d lock themselves in the bedroom. I remember us standing outside and hollering for them, and Daddy coming to the door, all dishevelled, saying how we had to run along and play because this was their “alone time”. I wonder if they ever had their moments of doubt. They must have, but how amazing that they never once made us feel it. But tell me about you. Have you met any nice men? There must be lots of nice men in London.
Oh, there were men. Men and more men. Everywhere Bean looked there were men. Bean watched them on her way to work, dressed like crows in their dark suits and briefcases, and she wondered whether there was a life to be made with any one of them. With that man reading the paper so devoutly – that fine-looking, upstanding man who might be cheating on his wife with a young girl in the office who totters in on spiky heels with blow-dried hair? Or how about that stranger there – leaning against the pole, devouring his just-picked-up photographs from Snappy Snaps? If it wasn’t for the way he clutched the leather satchel under his arm, or the stoutness of his fingers, Bean might have approached him and said, ‘Let’s get off at the next stop and walk the streets together. Let’s build a house and start a life.’
Bean was looking for someone to come rushing in to meet her at the end of the day in a blue long-sleeved shirt and ironed trousers. Someone who would gather her into his arms and take her to a place they could call home. She was waiting for someone to push open the door and enter her life, but it hadn’t happened yet. Not yet.
Once a month Bean went to visit her Uncle Huw and Aunty Carole in Brighton, and allowed her cousins Gareth and Ed to parade her around town as the exotic cousin visiting from India. Or she took the train to Nercwys and stayed with her Uncle Owen, who was suffering terrible arthritic pains, but was still spending all day in the garden watching his trees grow.
In Nercwys Aunty Eleri wanted to tell her stories of when her mam was young and daring and had dashed off to London and then dashed off to India. ‘Look here, love, that’s her before she went away,’ Aunty El said, pointing to her favourite photograph of Siân, standing at the gates of Tan-y-Rhos, looking at the fields ahead of her – her hair so long and beautiful that Bean, looking at it, wanted to say, Mama, Mama, why did you ever cut it? ‘Your mother’s something else, I tell you. All the rest of us getting older by the minute, and she just looks the same. Hasn’t changed a jot.’
Bean pored over Aunty El’s immaculate photo albums, searching for pictures of her sometimes summers. There were so many that when Bean looked through them, she couldn’t remember the exact order of what happened when. There were pictures of her first trip when they were all standing like a row of perfect pins at the front door: Babo, Siân, Mayuri, Nain, Aunty El, Taid and baby Bean in Taid’s arms. There were old black and white ones of Nain and Taid: Nain with her curls so tight they bobbed up under her hat like springs; Taid looking exactly like Siân in a man’s suit with that same long, serious look. There were pictures of Uncle Huw and Owen with their heads full of hair, smiling as if one of them had just told a joke. There were so many pictures of Bean and Mayuri in smocks and frocks, sitting on wombles and bicycles and on their uncle’s shoulders, in swimsuits at the Sun Centre in Rhyl, on ponies at the beach in Kinmel Bay, that when Bean looked at them she could never remember ever having been so small, so precious.
At her grandparents’ grave, Bean sat trying to work out how part of them were part of her, how part of this village was part of her. Because if she understood this, she thought, perhaps she’d understand where she fitted into the rest of it – into this mist and rain, these houses and cars, these people walking their dogs, leading their lives.
And my life? Bean wanted to ask. Where’s my life in all of this? Is this my real life or is it just a prelude to something before I return . . . Return to where? Why do I always feel like I’m visiting wherever I go? Why? Why? Because the sky’s so high. Is this how you felt when you first came to India, Mama? Is it possible you still feel this way? One foot in, the other foot out.
24 A Great Sin Can Enter Through a Small Door
Within a month of her arrival in London, Bean signed up with a temp agency called Working Angels, who were so impressed with her words per minute and Excel skills, they immediately sent her out to financial and media organizations all over the city, where she stuffed envelopes, despatched media packages and updated computer databases; where no one bothered to learn her name because she was only going to be there for a few days or a week, tops; where by the time she worked out where the fancy pens were stocked and who in IT to call if there was a problem, she had to wave a quick adieu and disappear through the revolving doors.
As it grew colder, Bean began to learn the city underground. The elaborate connect-the-dots system, which had at first seemed confusing, now began to appear in her dreams like a giant earthworm, burrowing under the surface – picking people up in one place and spitting them out in another. For a long time she travelled like a slave to those dots, going from point to point without having any idea how it all connected above the ground, finding out only later how sometimes it was easier to just get out and walk: Green Park to Piccadilly Circus for instance, or Holborn to Chancery Lane.
Bean loved the trains and the people who travelled in them. What possibilities there were lurking under each of their lives, what chances escaping into the air! What amazed her most was the sense of decorum that prevailed; nothing like India with all its abundance of chaos and noise. Here, nobody complained if the train halted for five minutes between stations. At most, there were raised eyebrows, a brief glance up from the columns of the newspaper, but otherwise, people seemed oblivious, little islands unto themselves. Once in a while, though, there were slip-ups – some poor fool trying to jam himself into the carriage while the doors were closing, thinking those two minutes between trains were going to change his life. And once, at Baker Street, Bean saw a man try to kill himself by jumping on the tracks – an incident that rattled her so badly, she quashed all her dominant Indian sensibilities, stopped elbowing to be first and began standing far behind the yellow line until the train came to a complete and final stop.
