The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (25 page)

“I have a friend like you in England,” Evelyn said. “A young woman who painted my nails. I was very fond of her. To most people one is quite invisible.”

A voice floated over the partition. “… you’ll find we’re a more competitive supplier than British Gas, Mr. Potter, and can reduce your quarterly bills by thirty percent.”

Evelyn said: “The thing is, I was married for a very long time. It’s quite a shock to come out into the real world. Until then you don’t think you’re old. You’ve been together for so many years, you’re somehow the same people as when you first met. You don’t notice the gray hairs.” She paused. “And having someone with you is so—well, distracting. In a comforting way. Them being with you, going on. It stops you thinking about dying.”

“Never mind, Mr. Potter,” said the voice in the next booth. “Have a good day and toodle-pip.”

Evelyn said: “You have so many choices when you’re young. Or at least you think you do.” She gazed down at Surinda, who was sitting on the floor. “Will you have a choice, dear? Will you be able to marry the person you love, or will somebody arrange it for you?”

“You think that’s really bad, don’t you?” said Surinda. “Like, weird.”

Evelyn shook her head. “It’s probably as good a way as any.” If only Christopher had listened to her, he would have married that nice Penny Armstrong-James who had adored him but finally, disheartened by his inertia, had gone off and married somebody else.

Oh heavens! She still hadn’t rung her son. That was the reason she had come to this office in the first place. A great deal seemed to have happened since then.

“Good night,” she said to the
chowkidar
who sat, wrapped in his blanket, beside the gate. He waggled his head. Somebody had told Evelyn how to say “good night” in the local dialect, but it had slipped out of her mind.

It was nearly midnight. Nights were beautifully clear here; the stars were so bright you could touch them.

Raise thine eyes to heaven

When thy spirits quail,

When, by tempests driven,

Heart and courage fail.

Evelyn thought: One day I shall die. I must learn the Indian words so I can say good night to my new friends.

She listened to the crickets trilling. Ahead loomed the black bulk of the hotel, most of its lights extinguished. She thought of the dramas that had taken place within it during the past few days, the dramas it must have seen since it was built in the middle of the last century—no, the century before the last one. Good Lord! It wasn’t just the days that were whizzing by. It was the years. The centuries.

A shape was approaching down the drive. She saw the glimmer of a white shirt.

“Mrs. Evelyn! You are out so late?”

It was Minoo. The gravel crunched as he walked up to her. They stood peering at each other in the darkness.

“Have you come to look for me?” she asked.

He was highly agitated. “Mrs. Evelyn, please accompany me.” He took her arm and turned her around, back toward the gates. “You, of all people—you will understand.”

“What’s happened?”

He held up something in front of her. It was a pair of shoes. “You recognize these items?”

She peered closer. They were the shoes he kept in his office.

“These shoes, madam, have brought me nothing but heartbreak.”

“Call me Evelyn, please.”

“In this country we express our devotion by bending down at a personage’s feet.” Minoo had stopped dead in the driveway. “The
Rig Veda
, it tells a good Hindu to prostrate himself, to say
I am like the dust on your feet
.” He paused, breathing heavily. “Yet the foot is the most impure part of the body! The head of primordial man gave rise to the high caste and his feet to the low caste. What confusion is that!”

From where they stood, in the garden, the lights in the bazaar were merely a flicker. Above them, in the offices, the windows blazed.

“I kept these shoes for sentimental reasons,” said Minoo. “My little shrine to love. But now I am at breaking point. My wife has brought me nothing but misery. Tonight she has sacked the cook.”

“What happened?”

“Norman-sahib was very upset. He took a bottle of whisky into the kitchen and they drank it together. Fernandez became drunk of course, he is a drunkard, you understand. He is a Christian. Then he fell asleep and there was no dinner cooking and my wife threw him out. Always she makes the servants unhappy, shouting at them and putting them against each other. That is all she does, that and sitting on her big bottom reading her magazines and never lifting a finger. You see, madam, I love this hotel, it is my family home, but Razia has no respect for it and no respect for me, and how can a marriage be happy when there is no respect?”

Heavens, he was crying! They were at the gates now. Evelyn saw his streaming face in the light of the passing cars.

“There there,” she said. “Surely it’s not that bad?”

“If only I had listened to my mother!” Minoo blurted out. “I should have married the woman of my parents’ dreams!”

Evelyn was suddenly overcome with such weariness that she longed to lie down in the dust. A few yards away a little family slumbered together, the children laid out like dolls beside their parents.

“What are you going to do with the shoes?” she asked.

“I shall give them away.”

Minoo strode across the road. A man on a bicycle wobbled and swerved. Evelyn hurried after the distraught manager.

“Who will you give them to?” she asked, catching him up. “Your beautiful expensive shoes?”

“I shall give them to the first person I see who deserves them.” Minoo stood at the crossroads. Shaking with sobs, he looked around wildly.

Then he spied the man on the trolley. He rushed up to him, arm outstretched, holding out the shoes.

Evelyn hastened over to Minoo and touched him on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t give them to him, dear. He hasn’t got any legs.”

Who everywhere is free from all ties,
who neither rejoices nor sorrows if fortune is good or is ill, his is a serene wisdom.

The Bhagavad Gita

T
heresa sat in her hotel room, trying to read.
“He who is in the sun and the fire and in the heart of man is One. He who knows this is one with the One.”
The room cost 150 rupees a night, cheap even by Indian standards, and there was only a dim bulb hanging from the ceiling.
“In the center of the castle of Brahman, our own body, there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus flower, within can be found a small space. The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe.”
Theresa squinted through her spectacles. These were a recent acquisition, bought from Boots in Durham before she left. She was aware of the significance of this purchase—another shunt into middle age, along with the flabbiness of her upper arms and of course the tummy. She always wore loose clothes in India, in this case
shalwar kameeze
pajamas that modestly covered her body. Even in England she had favored Indian dress and now she could see the point of it.

She was soon to be fifty. This was an alarming thought. During this trip she had noticed a change in people’s reactions. Men no longer tried to chat her up. Everywhere she went, of course, there were questions—“Where do you come from? What is your name please?”—but this was just the friendly curiosity one encountered in India. It was no longer sexually pressing. As she traveled from place to place, squashed on buses, sweltering on trains, people gave up their seats to her as if she were already her mother. Even the guru at that ashram in Benares who was notorious for the twinkle in his eye—notorious, in fact, for going farther than a twinkle in his union with his disciples—even he, during their private
satsang
, had treated her with impeccable gravity. This was, of course, liberating. True freedom came only through the transcendence of the flesh.

Theresa’s bowels ached; she had had diarrhea for the past week. Outside in the street was a placard: We Have Sought Perfection in Concrete. One needed a strong stomach to face the lavatory down the corridor. She knew she should eat something, but the thought of food made her nauseous. The only thing she could imagine possibly eating, ever, at some far distant point in the future, was a boiled egg with Marmite toast.

Exhausted, Theresa took off her flip-flop and inspected her foot. She had stood on something sharp in the temple of Hanuman, the monkey god who freed people from their troubles. The skin had been punctured. What happened if she got an infection and died, alone in a hotel room in a country where nobody cared for her? Where nobody, except her mother, knew her name? Even her mother didn’t count because the idea of Evelyn living in India was so bizarre that Theresa simply couldn’t picture it, not until she had seen it with her own eyes.

Theresa closed her eyes. She shifted into a cross-legged position on the bed.

“Om …” she said. “Om …”

She tried to pull the energy up, up from her toes through her diaphragm, through the chakras.
At the base of the spine lies kundalini, the coiled serpent power …
She tried to concentrate.

A vision, however, kept swimming into view: crisp white sheets on her bed at home in the Old Vicarage. The rattle of a tray approached and her mother was coming in, carrying the egg, the toast, and the latest issue of
Bunty
magazine.

“Om … om …”

The room was sweltering. She couldn’t open the window because the hotel was opposite the bus station and the noise was deafening. The exhaust fumes made her sick.

“Om … om …”

Crisp white sheets … a clean lavatory in a large, carpeted bathroom; a new roll of Andrex hanging within reach; more rolls of Andrex in a cupboard filled with large, soft bath towels … A bath …

Attachment was illusion. Attachment was fear. Theresa gave up and turned back to her book.
“Two birds sit on a tree. One gorges on the ripe fruit while the other sits serenely. The seasons change and the fruit disappears—”

Thumps and giggles came from the next room.

“The first bird flies round frantically searching for the fruit. The second sits patiently waiting for his friend to realize the delusion of attachment, of pain, sorrow and reliance.”

It was a Dutch couple; Theresa had seen them arriving with their backpacks. Their energy seemed inexhaustible; they had kept her awake most of the previous night. She needed to get some sleep because tomorrow morning she was catching the early bus to Kerala. Since her watch had been stolen, in Mumbai, she had lost track of time. Of course this was liberating, too, but there were certain disadvantages.

“The unchanging self is all that exists.”

The woman cried out. Last night Theresa had counted her orgasms—muffled screams, yelps, smaller squeaky noises, waves of these that went on for ages. It had been like counting sheep but without the desired result. How did the woman have so many orgasms in her?

A cockroach scuttled across the floor. Theresa gave up on her meditation and opened her exercise book.

“Dec. 16”
she wrote:

The ashram in Pattipurnam was a little disappointing, as after a two-day journey I arrived to find Swamiji was not in residence, having gone to Germany. However his presence could be felt in the holy atmosphere and of course a spiritual journey need have no goals. I shared a room with a pleasant woman from Des Moines who calls herself Prem. She has been in India for many months and described a visit to the Bench Swami in Tamil Nadu. He has been sitting on his bench for twenty-five years, in silence, his eyes closed. She sat with him for many hours. Finally he opened his eyes and she was filled with a powerful feeling of joy. Apparently he used to be a postman until he achieved enlightenment.

There is something childlike about the Babajis I have met. They emanate a sense of wonder and sweetness. They also have a delightful sense of humour. How we laughed when, during darshan, one of our number put up three fingers and asked: “Guruji, how many?” Swamiji, his eyes twinkling, said: “Four.” Most of my time however has been spent in meditation or just sitting quietly listening to the discourse. I have travelled for many miles, from one ashram to another, but as Sri Baba says, a journey has no beginning and no end—