The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (33 page)

And tomorrow Christopher would arrive, with family in tow. She knew he had booked this holiday especially to see her, but the prospect filled her with dread. It would all start up again as if there had been no interruption … the blame, the resentment.
You always sided with Christopher, you and Dad, I was never the sort of daughter you wanted me to be
. Boarding school, no doubt, would rear its ugly head. Good Lord, Dorothy had been banished across the world at eight years old and she was all right. Well, maybe not all right, but she had survived.

And Theresa was so indiscreet. Had she no sense of decorum at all?
In our family nobody believed in talking
, she said. She had certainly made up for it since. At their first breakfast she had tried to explain Munchausen syndrome to Jimmy, the bearer, who was serving them Sugar Puffs. She believed that servants were people and should be included in the proceedings.

“I used to pretend I was ill,” Theresa told the old man. “Just to get people’s attention.”

“I don’t think he understands, dear,” said Evelyn.

“I used to limp on walks.”

“Theresa, they don’t have to
pretend
to limp here.”

She had to admit that Theresa seemed to have perked up since yesterday. That hug on the stairs had been something of a breakthrough. But Theresa was a turbulent woman and at a tricky time of life. It must be terrible to realize that the possibility of children had finally been extinguished. After all, without children, who would look after a person in her old age?

Who?
Evelyn ignored this thought. She gazed into the garden. Graham Turner put away his notebook and went indoors for his nap.

Evelyn touched the sparrow. It was rigid, either from fear or from death. Whichever reason, she would let it lie there a little longer.

“I keep thinking he’s going to burst out of the hotel booming
‘fooled you all!’
” said Douglas.

Evelyn presumed he was talking to his wife, but Jean had dozed off; he was talking to her.

When a man is not lord of his soul then this becomes his own enemy.

The Bhagavad Gita

“W
ith a rising population of eight million, Bangalore is one of the fastest-growing cities in Asia,”
read Christopher. “Listen, kids.
At the cutting edge of the technological revolution, Bangalore is a thriving modern metropolis with pubs, clubs and great shopping opportunities.
”

They were traveling on the coach from Mysore. Across the aisle, the children sprawled in their seats.

“Sounds promising, eh?” said Christopher. “If you’re all templed out.”

“Temples suck,” said Clementine.

“Buildings can’t suck, sweetheart,” he replied.

Beside him, Marcia flung back her head and glugged from the water bottle. He thought of her lips clamped around his cock.
That woman sucks me like chrome off a trailer-hitch
. Where had he heard that? Some film. His wife thrummed with energy. To be truthful, her demands on this holiday had been somewhat overwhelming—sucking, straddling, pressing his buttocks into her as she experienced her spectacular multiple orgasms. After each one he thought she had finished, but no, another was on its way. However soft and shrunken he had become, she still availed herself of his body; in fact it hardly seemed to matter whether he was inside her or not. Whether he was there at all. To be perfectly honest, she could be rubbing herself against a traffic post. The night before, she had summoned him into the shower. While attempting to pinion her against the tiles, he had slipped on a bar of soap and nearly ricked his back. Of course the noise she made was gratifying, but he worried that the children would wake up in the next room. India seemed to be having an unsettling effect upon her.

The coach had come to a standstill. The driver hooted. Outside the window was a truck stop, a scruffy place puddled with oil. Horn Please was painted on the parked trucks. Good Luck. Christopher’s fellow vacationers leaned into the aisle to see what was holding them up.

Beside him, truck drivers lounged on rope beds. How contented they looked! They lay there, smoking cigarettes. Sealed into his air-conditioned coach, Christopher felt thrust into intimacy with these strangers. The place reminded him of his flat in Clapham—undoubtedly squalid but somehow simple in its demands. Nobody asked anything of these men: they drove, they slept, they smoked without Marcia reacting as if she had caught them masturbating. Christopher had a sudden desire to wrench open the coach door and step into another life. Good Luck! He could climb into a gaudily painted lorry and drive away. In America his wife did the driving because she said he drank too much. In America he had screwed up his career and financially ruined his mother. In America his children treated him like a servant.

Christopher closed his eyes. He could step into another world and start all over again; the coach would drive on and nobody would notice he had gone. He would be like Jack Nicholson in that film, when he crossed the forecourt at the petrol station. In his new life, Christopher would have children who laughed at his jokes and a beautiful wife who called him Topher in her lilting Indian voice filled with love. Who would squeeze out his shirts in the river and straighten up when she heard his footfall, shading her face from the sun. He would be cherished.

The coach moved on. Christopher gazed at the passing countryside. His old life could evaporate, just like that. The lumber of it—the skis and pasta machines, the
things
, the
stuff
—they could disappear with a click of the fingers. Nothing had weight here; it was all insubstantial. He thought of the moths that fluttered in the wardrobe back in Sussex. One clap and they were smears of powder between his palms.

T
he coach shunted forward. Marcia closed her eyes. She was back in the temple at Halebib. A group of young men were wandering around looking at the friezes. Young Indian men, office workers maybe—short-sleeved shirts, oiled hair. They moved into the inner sanctum, and stopped.

Marcia lay on the plinth, her skirt bunched up around her waist. The stone was warm under her skin.
Look at me, a goddess of sex!
Her blouse was unbuttoned; with one hand she stroked her breast. She stroked with a gentle, circular movement; her forefinger brushed her hardening nipple.

Her legs were spread open. Luxuriously she pleasured herself. As she did so, she turned her head to look at the young men.

They stood there, gazing at her. Their hands moved to their crotches. Closing her eyes, she heard their collective breath … rasping, quickening …

“Mom, are we nearly there?”

Marcia opened her eyes. They were traveling through the outskirts of a city—open drains, apartment buildings topped with a scribble of TV aerials.

“Soon, honey,” she said.

“I’m thirsty.”

She passed the bottle of water.

“I want a
Coke
.”

Marcia closed her eyes again. Each night, in bed with her husband, she concentrated on different faces. As she lay there, gripping Christopher’s soft, middle-aged flesh between her thighs, it was a brown face that loomed above her; it was a big brown dick pumping inside her, making her cry out. And while she was doing it there were more men watching her; she brought them into the bedroom too. Those Kerala fishermen, naked except for loincloths, sat against the wall; they gazed at her open legs, her hips rising and falling. A row of sweepers, ravishing young men gray with dust, fondled themselves under their
lunghis
.

Everywhere in India men were watching her. Christopher never looked at her, not really. Too damn English. These men hungered for her; they brought her to life. They delivered up a new Marcia to herself—desirable, thrillingly pale, and beautiful at last.

F
or the rest of his life, Christopher replayed that moment. A number of years remained to him; the date of his death was written on a palm leaf, but he was ignorant of its existence. For the rest of his life, which was a long one, he remembered that moment when the doors of the Taj Balmoral sighed open and he stepped into the lobby. Muzak played. A turbaned doorman bowed and a woman stepped up to him. He supposed his family was with him, but they evaporated as if they had never been.

She wore a midnight-blue sari shot with silver. Of course she was beautiful, but then most Indian women were exquisite. There was something else about her—a yielding, ineffable sweetness, a grace. She lifted a garland of flowers. Christopher bowed his head and she laid it around his neck.

“Namaste,”
she said, placing her hands together. Her bangles, tinkling, shifted down her wrists. She bowed. You are my lord and master.

“Namaste,”
he said, sounding like a fool.

She was blessing him; she was making it all better. She dipped her finger into a pot and pressed it to his forehead. As she concentrated, the tip of her tongue protruded between her teeth. Her eyes met his and she smiled.

“Welcome to the Taj Balmoral,” she said. “We hope you enjoy your stay.”

Christopher had never believed in love at first sight; not until that moment. He simply felt accepted, in all his pallid clumsiness. Later she told him she was just finishing her shift. Five minutes later and she would have gone for lunch. Christopher, newly sensitized by love, had pictured the many obstructions he had encountered on eight days of Indian roads. Another herd of goats, another crashed truck, another holy cow just standing there. Another blithering comfort stop, and Aisha would not have stepped into his life with her marigolds and musky, dizzying promise of happiness. Such was the fragility of it all. Out of its chaos, India had delivered him up a miracle. It would bring suffering in its wake, but then India knew all about suffering, too.

R
avi had insisted on accompanying Pauline to Bangalore. “Of course you can’t go alone, not now.” Pauline suspected that now that her father was no longer in residence, The Marigold was a more attractive proposition. She couldn’t say this, of course, not when Ravi was being so supportive. He thought she needed him in her hour of grief.

In fact, her father’s death had affected Pauline less painfully than she had expected. It was the strangest sensation, the world without him in it, but Norman had led an enjoyable life entirely devoted to satisfying his own needs and had died at a ripe old age, waited on hand and foot by kindly staff and surrounded by pleasant companions. There seemed worse ways to go. Pauline was surprised at her own equanimity. Maybe she had absorbed some Indian fatalism without realizing it. In fact, it was Ravi who seemed more upset. She suspected this stemmed from guilt.

Sonny, too, seemed powerfully affected. Pauline couldn’t understand this. Was the busy little wheeler-dealer really that fond of her father? She knew that they sometimes had a drink together, but Sonny’s reaction to his death seemed out of all proportion; the man seemed genuinely upset.

Norman was cremated the day after they arrived and a small service was held at St. Patrick’s Church. Sonny snuffled throughout. Afterward they went outside. Pauline pointed at the gravestones: the young subalterns cut down in their prime—
Lawrence Lennox, Standish Wilson
—their wives and children too. “Look, typhoid fever and only twenty-two years old,” she said. “Only six.” She put her arm around Sonny’s plump shoulder. “Compared to them, my dad had a good innings.” Really, she thought, it should be Sonny comforting me.

She suspected that the true causes of his distress were the various crises that had gripped the hotel in the past few days. Dr. Rama had been sacked. The manager’s marriage had broken up and his wife had moved out to her sister’s. The cook, upset by Norman’s death, had gone on a drinking binge and hadn’t been seen for the past two days. The residents seemed unaware of these backstage dramas; meals had been cobbled together by Minoo and the kitchen boy, and Mrs. Cowasjee had all but retired from public life anyway.

“No doctor, no nurse,” whispered Ravi. “What happens if anybody gets ill?”

“They’ve always got you,” said Pauline.

Ravi didn’t reply. Along Lady Curzon Street the sun was sinking. They were returning from the church in a minibus Sonny had organized for the residents to pay their last respects. Tongas clopped home from Bangalore’s modest tourist attractions. Pauline looked at the skinny horses, at the concrete buildings molten in the evening light. The sunsets were so beautiful here they brought tears to her eyes. It seemed to be India, rather than her father, that had the power to make her cry.

Ahead lay the melancholy task of sorting out her father’s things. It would be an odd Christmas, celebrating with near-strangers. But no odder, she thought, than it must be for them.

E
velyn was having dinner at the Taj Balmoral with her son, his wife and Theresa. Her grandchildren, thank goodness, had been sent to bed. She had to admit that their behavior had disappointed her. Those two little darlings, Joseph and Clementine, had grown into American brats. She could hardly believe they were relations of hers at all, and, by the look in their eyes, she suspected they felt the same. Not a word of thanks for the gifts she had given them nor the slightest interest in their surroundings; all they did was whine that the TV didn’t work. How could children who had everything be so ungrateful? Indian children, who had so little, were by comparison enchantingly polite, even when asking for money.