The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (21 page)

Pauline shuffled through the photos. One showed a lady, whose name she had forgotten, painting at an easel. Another showed four of the residents, all women, sitting in the garden. The photo was overexposed and somewhat blurred. She couldn’t work out what they were doing, if in fact they were doing anything at all. Nor could she recognize them; the women were as insubstantial as ghosts in their pale summer dresses. There were only a few of them then, the first arrivals, but already they had faded from her memory, outdazzled by the life outside the garden walls.

For during the afternoons, when her father was dozing, Pauline had explored the neighborhood. Most of the photos were of the children she had met in the streets. They had clamored around, jostling to get in the picture. In the photos their smiles were stilled, their hands outstretched for boiled sweets. They melted her heart. It was a feeling that made her legs weak, a feeling more profound than the desire she had felt for Ravi all those years ago in the Antoinette restaurant. Most of the children were boys; in one photo they danced in the water from a burst pipe. They were desperately poor, but how different from the shaven-headed thugs from the estate behind Plender Street, kids with men’s faces who smashed car mirrors as they swaggered down the street. Theirs was a different kind of poverty.
You take what you want from us. The British always have
. If only she could give them back their photos; these were probably the only photos that would ever be taken of them, proof of their existence. But how could she send them? She didn’t know these children’s names and addresses. She could hardly write to:
Two boys, c/o the Rubbish Heap behind the Paradise Cinema, Bangalore
.

She knew that she was going back. It wasn’t just her father’s presence that was pulling her there. Pauline replaced the photos in their bag and went downstairs.

Ravi was watching some cop drama. This mildly surprised her; he never watched that sort of thing. She could tell, by the back of his head, that he knew she had come into the room. She thought: He’s as miserable as I am.

She said: “Let’s go there for Christmas. Please, Ravi.”

Please say yes or I might go there and never come back.

“H
ave you heard from your charming daughter?”

“She’s fine,” said Norman. “Absolutely fine.” He was having a drink with Sonny in the Gymkhana Club. “Got a phone call yesterday. She’s coming out for Christmas.”

“Excuse me!” Sonny jumped up and ran after a man who was crossing the bar. Norman watched him gesticulating. The fellow couldn’t sit still. Their conversation had been interrupted twice already by Sonny’s mobile phone.

Sonny returned to the table. “Please—carry on.”

“You should calm down, old chap,” said Norman. “We’re the ones who’re supposed to be having the heart attacks.”

“What can I do? There’s nobody I can trust; everything I’m having to do myself. These people I do business with, they cheat me, they do another deal behind my back …”

Sonny rattled on. Norman wondered when he could bring up the subject he had come to discuss. It was a matter of some delicacy. A tiger’s head was mounted on the wall nearby; it stared glassily ahead, avoiding Norman’s eye.

“Any problems at the hotel? You must tell me, Norman old boy.” Sonny twinkled. “You are my spy.”

“They’re all obsessed by that bloody doctor. Got them in a twitter. You’d think the sun shines out of his arse.”

“Women!” Sonny shrugged.

Norman took a breath. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—”

“Please! A moment.”

Sonny jumped up and waylaid a group of men who were just leaving the bar. Norman subsided into his chair. The Gymkhana Club was a vast old building filled with potted palms and slaughtered animals. It was built for the British, of course, but now it was full of brown faces. Norman had been there a couple of times before, as Sonny’s guest—the only way a chap like him could get in nowadays. Relics of the Raj remained—photos of past presidents hanging in the lobby and a list of team members, inscribed in gold, fixed to the wall of the cavernous billiards room. Cockaded bearers, carrying trays of drinks, glided from table to table. From his sojourns in the tropics, Norman was familiar with clubs like this one. In the past he had found them reassuring. Now that he was older, however, a place like this made him feel as if he were already extinct.

Sonny returned to his seat. Norman lit a cigarette. “You’re a man of the world, old fruit,” he said. Almost family, in fact. The realization always gave him a jolt. “Must have knocked around a bit.” He knew Sonny had a wife, but the man never seemed to mention her. “Thing is, a chap can get lonely for a bit of female company. I’ve heard that the women in Bangalore can be very, well, accommodating. If you get my drift.”

Sonny was fidgeting. His eyes flickered around the room. Norman soldiered on.

“I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction. You know, make some sort of an introduction. Something of that kind. In the most discreet sense.”

“What?” asked Sonny.

“I’m looking for a friendly, experienced woman—”

“But you’re surrounded by women.” Sonny chuckled. “You could go bedroom-hopping, a different lady every night.”

Norman put down his drink. “You must be joking. Bit long in the tooth, aren’t they?”

“So are you, old chap.”

Norman shifted in his seat. Really, the fellow needn’t have put it like that. Had the man no tact at all?

Sonny, who seemed anxious to leave, called for the check.

Norman took an auto-rickshaw back to the hotel. It bounced over the potholes; the driver’s geegaws—little bells and mascots—swung on their strings. Norman crouched under the plastic canopy. The conversation had, of course, humiliated him. Didn’t Sonny understand that, when he reached a certain age, a chap might start experiencing problems of an intimate nature? The prostate op hadn’t helped, but to be frank he had been experiencing difficulties in the hydraulics department for some time now. Only a professional woman could help him—indeed, had been able to help him in the past. They had to be foreign of course—Nigerian, Thai, Malay. Only a different color skin could get his mojo working. Women like these knew how to satisfy a man; it was in their culture.

The rickshaw bounced along the road, past Cubbon Park. Norman gripped the rail as it swerved around a roundabout. In the middle sat a statue of Queen Victoria, spattered in bird droppings.

With women like that, a chap didn’t have to engage in embarrassing conversation; no demands of that nature.

And they didn’t laugh at him.

S
onny was fuming. He tried the number on his mobile again. No bloody answer, of course.

He leaned forward in his seat. “Guess who I met at the club,” he told his driver. “That rascal Freddie. He knows where that son-of-a-bitch P.K. has gone. The fellow looked shifty to me.”

They were speeding along MG Road, weaving in and out of the traffic. Jatan Singh was an adept driver; like many Sikhs he had a profound love of motors. For twenty years he had been working for Sonny, and he knew more of his secrets than anybody in Bangalore.

“He thinks he can give me the slip, the
haraami
,” said Sonny. “I’ll track him down, Jatanji, I’ll track him down and roast him alive.”

P.K., his erstwhile associate, had been eluding him for three weeks now. There had been a couple of sightings. Sonny’s brother-in-law had seen him at a ministerial cocktail party; somebody else had glimpsed him at one of his building sites, an office complex out beyond Defense Colony, but for all Sonny knew he could have flown to the States or to London, where he had business interests. P.K. was a crook, of course. By judicious bribes his company had landed the contracts for several major developments, including a residential building on a plot of land Sonny had bought on the Airport Road. All that was acceptable enough. The trouble was, the man had subcontracted the building work to his own brother’s construction outfit, which, by faking invoices, had used substandard materials.

“I’ll have his guts for garters,” muttered Sonny as the car sped along MG Road. Three weeks ago, when only half-completed, the bloody building had collapsed. Investigations had revealed that there had been too much sand in the cement, and now the
chootiya
had disappeared.

“Step on it, Jatanji!”

His mobile rang. It was a familiar voice. “Where are you,
mera chota beta
? Is your life so busy that you’ve forgotten your poor old mother, who has been sitting here waiting for you since an hour?”

Hai Raba!
He had forgotten that he was supposed to take her to the optician.

“No, I can tell you have better things to do,” his mother sighed. “I’ll tell Anand to call for a taxi—”

“No, Mummyji—”

“I can go alone, my legs will have to carry me—”

“Wait—!”

“They’re not giving me too much pain today, and I will tell Mr. Desai that you have more important things on your mind—”

“I’m coming! Give me ten minutes!” Sonny switched off the phone. “Turn the car round!
Jaldi!
”

Sonny sank back in his seat. And he had forgotten to pick up a box of
gulab jamuns
from her favorite shop, Darpan’s Electric Bakery. He had promised, when he left the house that morning.

Sonny’s temples throbbed. He pictured his mother, vast, steaming with impatience, waiting by the door. If only his wife could calm her down, but for the past week they had not been on speaking terms. Sonny could no longer remember the cause of this particular row nor, to be truthful, did he care. Something to do with the kitchen arrangements, no doubt.

After a prolonged and active bachelorhood Sonny had married, late in life, a woman he had thought would be no trouble—plain, self-effacing, grateful to find a husband at all. Her apparent pliancy, however, disguised a steely determination to get her own way. This was usually attempted by pleading illness, a technique with which, in his mother, she had met her match. Females. How could anyone understand them? Norman Purse, he could tell, was a fellow sufferer. Still, thought Sonny, bugger me if I’m going to be the chap’s pimp. What would happen if word got out, to Norman’s daughter or to Ravi-sahib? It would put Sonny in an embarrassing position. Besides, the fellow was too old for that sort of caper. He should be enjoying a peaceful retirement in his hen coop.

The Merc inched down Brigade Road. The street was clogged with traffic. At the intersection two buses blocked the thoroughfare, each refusing to budge. Men, clinging to the sides, dropped down onto the road to join in the argument. Sonny leaned out the window and yelled at them to get out of the bloody way.

Slumped back in his seat, Sonny gazed at Karishma Plaza. It had been his first property speculation; in a moment of filial piety he had named it after his mother. Twenty years had passed, however; the windows were rusting.

Across the street rose the wall of The Marigold. Bougainvillaea frothed over the top; behind it rose the flame trees. Sonny thought of the shady garden and its occupants, passing their twilit years in the safety of its compound. In England people dumped their parents in places like this; it was perfectly acceptable. Then they got on with their own lives. Sonny imagined this. It gave him an airy feeling, as if somebody had cut his strings and up he floated, into the sky. Horn blaring, the car shunted forward. He pictured his mother’s outrage if he suggested such a thing. Not just outrage—total incomprehension. Just for a moment, however, it seemed an excellent idea. He could visit her once a week and give her a box of
jalebis
instead of dreading the return to his own home.

For he did dread it. As the car drew nearer, he was gripped by the familiar feeling of guilt and suffocation. It grew stronger by the minute. He felt like a small boy—he, a man of fifty-two.

Suddenly, Sonny realized that he always felt like this. However busy he was, flying hither and thither across the globe, underneath it all he remained a son. Oh, he might look like a man, but appearances are deceptive. After all, this was India.

The person who is searching for his own happiness should pull out the dart that he has stuck in himself—the arrow-head of grieving, of desiring, of despair.

T
HE
S
UTTA-NIPATA

“H
i Mum, I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Here, in India.”

“What?”

“I’m here, in India!”

“Where?”

“Uttar Pradesh.”

“Utter
what
?”

“I’m in Uttar Pradesh!”

“You’re here?”

“In an ashram.”

“What?”

“I’m in an ashram! I’ll be with you for Christmas.”

“What?”

“I’ll see you at Christmas!”

“But I’m just wrapping your present.”

“What?”

“I was going to send it to you.”

“You can give it to me instead. Honestly, is that your only reaction?”

“What?”

“I said—”