by Jon Stock
6
Monday morning at the clinic was always depressing, but I felt more dejected than usual as I looked down the list of appointments. A name that would normally have made me smile instead left me resentful and angry. Susie was booked in at eleven o’clock with her daughter Jumila. I was not cross with her, but she reminded me of Jamie’s visit the previous night. His cigar smoke had still been there at breakfast, hanging behind the curtains, lingering in the cupboards, much like his own influence, which I was finding increasingly difficult to shake off. I would be polite, of course, and as helpful as I could, but Susie would detect a change in my manner. She was too knowing to be deceived. And I wouldn’t be able to confide, as I normally did, and she would feel hurt. I had been prepared for deceptions, but not so soon and with people so close.
“Raj, whatever is the matter?” she said, the moment she walked into my room. “You look terrible. Come, tell me.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to say,” I replied, avoiding her look. Jumila came round the side of my desk with a toy umbrella.
“Raj, look what Daddy gave me,” she said, opening it.
“It’s bad luck you know,” I said, “opening an umbrella inside.” I clicked the umbrella shut and passed it back to her.
“Is it? Why?”
“Because it never rains indoors. But if you open your umbrella it will rain and rain, and we’ll all get very wet.”
She wasn’t convinced by my explanation and opened the umbrella again, spinning it around on the floor. I knew Susie was scrutinising me.
“It’s Priyanka, isn’t it?” she said. “She hasn’t returned your call.”
“I haven’t rung her,” I replied, twisting on my seat at the mention of her name.
“Why ever not? She’s a lovely girl. You seemed to be getting on so well.”
“Is Jumila okay?” I asked, failing to change the subject with any tact. Susie looked at me again, realising she was making no progress.
“Well, since you ask, she’s not, actually. I think she might be diabetic.”
Susie was not one to make a fuss without good reason. Frank told a story of the time when she had refused to take Kashmir to the doctor’s after he had fallen out of his treehouse and complained of a sore arm. “Stop fussing,” she had said, giving him an aspirin. Three days later, she relented – Kashmir was still in some pain – and it turned out that he had broken his arm in two places. Ever since then, she had been a little more cautious, though not much.
I distracted Jumila with more stories about umbrellas and drew a sample of her blood, watched by Susie.
“Call her up again,” she said. “And if she doesn’t ring, I’ll invite you both over to supper next week. Okay?”
“How’s Frank?” I asked, desperately wanting this game to stop.
“He’s fine. Busy as ever. Lots of meetings at the British Council today. It looks like they’re finally going to sponsor his show.”
“That’s wonderful news.”
“Did he ring you last night? He said he was going to.”
“He might have done. I’m having trouble with my pager.”
I was lying. He had left two messages, but I hadn’t returned the calls. Jamie’s smoke had still been turning in the light.
“He wants to invite you over on Saturday for some carrom. Boys’ night in.”
“I’ll have to check. I think I’m on call.”
“On Saturday?” she asked, suspiciously.
I told her I would ring Frank later and she left with Jumila and her umbrella, sensing, I knew, that all was not well.
Just before lunch the phone rang and it was Priyanka, soft and easy and confident. I suspected Susie’s hands at work, but I was still pleased to hear her voice, scanning it for clues that we might pick up where we had left off. In my mind I hadn’t included Priyanka in Frank and Susie’s set. If Tapash had called, I would have made my excuses, but Priyanka was out of Jamie’s range and I vowed to keep her that way, in the fresh air.
“Are you free for dinner?” I asked, far too hastily.
“When?” she said.
“Tonight?” I could hear the receiver moving against her ear.
“Actually I was ringing to say that I have to go out of town for a few weeks, maybe longer. My mother is sick and I must go home to care for her.”
My heart sank.
“When are you going?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Then you can still do supper tonight.”
She paused. “If it was early, perhaps we could meet for a short while,” she said.
“Great. I’ll pick you up at six. Why don’t we try Sagar?”
I was showing off but it worked. Sagar was a south Indian joint popular with south Indians, which was always an encouraging sign. Better still, she had heard about it but not been there. I should have rung Susie to thank her but all our calls were listed and Jamie wouldn’t have been amused if he saw Frank’s number showing up the day after our meeting.
“I can’t wait to be out of Delhi, to be honest,” Priyanka said, pushing a piece of idli around her plate. The restaurant had yet to become crowded. A few hours later and the queue would be round the block. It was even busier at lunchtimes.
“It’s getting hot, isn’t it?” I said. “42.5 yesterday.”
I winced at my own words. Why was I talking about the weather? I was becoming a Delhiwallah. Everyone in the capital talked about the temperature as summer settled in, chronicling the smallest rise.
“It’s not just the heat,” she said, giving me the benefit of the doubt. “It’s the people, the traffic, the selfish attitudes, that I don’t like. There’s no generosity, no cooperation.”
“No civic sense,” I added, looking at her eat the last bit of idli. A tiny crumb was resting on the corner of her mouth. She pushed it in gently, licking her finger.
“Not bad,” she said. “Not bad at all.”
“I told you it was a good place.”
“Will you ever come to Kerala?” she asked.
“I don’t know. If I am sent. I have no plans to go there. Why?”
“You could taste real idli, and sambar, and vada.”
“Are you going to be there for long?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Something wasn’t right. I feigned indifference but I could feel my jaw starting to collapse. We both tried to act as if I hadn’t asked the question, as if the words hadn’t left my mouth.
“How well do you know Frank?” I asked, managing to change the subject, trying to keep things together.
“Frank? I met him in Kerala, a couple of years ago. I was writing a story about foreigners who make India their home. He was on holiday at the time, staying with a British couple who live in Cochin. I sometimes think he understands India better than we do.” She paused. “I suppose I’m closer to Susie.”
“They were very good to me when I first arrived, very parental,” I said, wondering why I was asking these things. She had to be kept pure, away from all the deception.
“They’re like that, they hate seeing anyone unhappy here,” she continued. “It’s like you become their responsibility. Sometimes I think they feel responsible for the whole of India. God knows why. We don’t.”
“Is it true he’s applying for Indian citizenship?” I asked.
“Why don’t you ask him?” she said, mildly surprised, detecting for the first time, perhaps, a hidden agenda.
“Will you write when you’re away, tell me all about the beautiful south?” I asked.
“I’m hopeless at letters. Writing all day at the office, I’m out of words by the evening.”
“Call me, then. I’ll ring you back.”
She smiled, said nothing. Like me, she was probably aware, suddenly, that we were talking as if we had known each other for years. It was one of those early defining moments when a relationship was either acknowledged for the first time, or pushed away.
“I’m glad
I met you, Raj,” she said, looking into her empty glass of lassi.
“Me too,” I said, hoping we were about to acknowledge. But she paused, too long for comfort, and then she pushed.
“My parents think they have found someone,” she continued, not looking up. Her tone was subdued.
“Found someone?” I asked.
“A husband.”
I tried to take in what she was saying. She was talking about an arranged marriage. This didn’t happen any more, I told myself, not amongst sassy, cosmopolitan journalists. In the plains of rural Rajasthan, perhaps, but not in Delhi, not in Priyanka’s world.
“I thought…” I trailed off, not knowing where to start.
“You thought I wouldn’t approve of something like arranged marriages,” she said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you’re thinking. They’re backward, retrogressive, tribal.”
Why were we suddenly cross with each other?
“Do you know who he is?” I asked, realising that I had been thinking all those things and worse.
“I know of him.”
“And is he…” I paused, searching for the right word. “Is he nice?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“I mean…” All I could think of was my English teacher at school who used to circle “nice” in red ink and say that the only nice things in life were biscuits. Priyanka was right. What I meant was that I hoped he was a bastard and it didn’t work out.
“I trust my parents,” she said, with an air of finality.
We had lost the intimacy of our earlier conversation. She talked about her work, I mentioned the clinic, but our exchanges were hollow, without conviction. The bill was brought to the table in a small dish made of woven banana leaves. We both seemed relieved that the meal was almost over.
“It’s not how you imagine,” she said. “It’s arranged, not forced. There’s no pressure or anything like that.”
“Of course there is,” I replied. Instead of getting angry, she turned her head away and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye. Last weekend I had watched couples in the open plazas of Dilli Haat, sitting in tears, inconsolable. I had imagined them to be wrestling with the realities of arranged marriages and dowry shortfalls and hilarious sexual problems. But what did I know?
“I’m sorry,” I said, touching her forearm. My hand rested there for a while, stroking the soft, downy skin.
“There’s no reason why you should understand,” she said, slowly removing her arm.
“Yes there is. I should make a point of understanding. I’m sorry.”
“We will meet a few times. If nothing clicks, that’s it. Nobody gets hurt. The search will start all over again.”
“Your parents won’t mind?” I asked, grateful for any crumbs of comfort.
“The broker will. He’s hired to find a suitable partner.”
“We employ people, too. They’re called divorce lawyers.”
I was sounding like a bad comedian. I felt desperate and didn’t know what to say so I said nothing, let her do the talking. She explained that her family were orthodox Nairs, very traditional when it came to marriage. If his thalakuri, or horoscope, didn’t complement hers, the match was a non-starter. Once a boy had been found, she would only be able to meet him before the wedding in the presence of a family member. Most of the courting, she said, took place on the phone and bills could be enormous. She knew of one boy who had got engaged and then had to return to America for two months. It had cost him over 2,500 dollars to get to know the girl he was going to marry.
We were silent for a while as a young boy cleared our table. Both of us were unnaturally interested in him, watching as he wiped the table up and down, hoping that he might say something to help us out. His arms were short and he could only reach the far end of the table by lunging across, his bare feet almost leaving the floor.
“I’ve got some friends who had love marriages,” Priyanka said.
“Are they still together?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“But it’s not something you’d ever consider.”
She looked at me, smiling faintly before turning away.
“Love marriages don’t have a particularly good track record in the West, do they?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. Two out of three survive.”
“Come, challo, let’s go.”
Ravi took us to her house in a leafy part of Defence Colony. I hated goodbyes and duly made a mess of our farewell. I leant forward to kiss her on the cheek as she offered a hand. We laughed nervously, caught between two customs and then she suddenly put her arms lightly round my shoulders and gave me a gentle hug. Before I had had a chance to respond she was gone, leaving me waving weakly at the door as it closed.
I thought about my mother on the way home, something I had done much more of since my arrival in India. I had never been close to her, even when she was dying. It must have been much harder for her than it was for my father to bury her Indian past. She had worn salwar kameez indoors, a sari on Sundays, but my father asked her to wear dresses and skirts if she went further afield. She had always obliged and if it hadn’t been for the occasion when, as a child, I stumbled into the spare room and saw her doing puja in the corner, I would never have known there was any conflict. She had snapped the cupboard doors shut like a guilty child and told me to leave the room, but not before I had glimpsed the warm lights of forbidden gods, wrapped in twists of incense.
She had been a weak woman who had retreated into herself in Edinburgh the more my father grew in confidence and stature. She had never stood up to him, or challenged him, particularly about his other women, who were numerous, and I had often felt contempt rather than pity for her. On those occasions when we had all gone out together to cocktail parties or dinners, I had been embarrassed by her creased smiles and diminutive figure, always a step behind my father, as if being shielded from the world.
During the past few weeks, my feelings towards her had changed, a sadness replacing the anger. We had never talked about the puja incident, but when she lay dying, five years ago, I had asked her why she had been so secretive about her faith. “Promise me you will one day visit India,” she had whispered.
7
We were driving down a quiet, private road in an expensive residential area of West Delhi, somewhere near the airport. Even Ravi, with thirteen years’ experience of working for foreigners, as he never hesitated to remind me, was impressed. It was not possible to see much from the road, but when the guardhouses were bigger than the average person s home, it was a sure sign that a palace lurked somewhere behind the high walls.
The area was very green, too, which was a good barometer of wealth during Delhi’s arid summers. How long the water table would survive was anyone’s guess, but at least their lawns looked pretty. We pulled up outside a broad set of black gates, flanked on either side by two watchtowers reminiscent of Berlin during the Cold War. The intended air of menace was reduced, though, by a mass of red, white and orange bougainvillea cascading down the faded brick walls as far as the eye could see.
I had yet to come across genuine menace in Delhi. Despite the best efforts of chowkidars, the warnings about dogs and the razor-wire walls, most of the capital’s posh colonies, try as they might, seldom possessed the belligerent paranoia of a smart suburb in somewhere like Johannesburg. In India there were too many loiterers for that level of deserted privacy, too many sweepers wandering down the roads, too many gardeners snoozing on the verges. Even here, the St George’s Hill of Delhi, there was a busy chai stall on the corner, barely fifty yards away.
Perhaps it had something to do with the chowkidars themselves, who were not generally known for their imposing physical presence. Mrs Bakshi insisted that they were recruited solely for their ability to nod off in the afternoon heat while appearing vigilant. To be fair, chowkidars were not helped by the weapons supplied to them; most were equipped with sticks and
whistles, which they blew at night, the sound carrying across the high walls to other guards, who whistled back, reassured that they were not alone in the wee hours, as the Indian newspapers called them. Outside the smarter houses and some of the bigger banks, the guards carried rifles, which looked impressive, but closer examination revealed them to be pre-Second World War Enfields with corks stuck on the end to keep the dirt out.
We were waved through the gates by two guards, who smiled and saluted before telling Ravi where to drive. Behind them, chatting over chai with another guard, was a policeman holding an altogether more serious weapon, a semi-automatic machine-gun, which usually signified the presence of a VIP, probably a politician, or his son, or an uncle.
Our hosts today were a wealthy Indian couple whom Jamie knew well. He had virtually insisted that I come along. I would have preferred to have been playing carrom and drinking Mr Tricky’s Stemillion with Frank and his friends, but that was why Jamie had invited me. The couple whose lawns were unfolding before us had family connections with a sheet steel conglomerate, but they themselves were arms dealers. It was becoming clear as we took the perimeter road around the estate that these weren’t lawns but two, possibly three, cricket pitches, and we had yet to set eyes on the house. There were several summer follies dotted across the landscape, shaded by clusters of eucalyptus trees. Two more twists and turns, through a small forest, and there it was: a magnificently ugly blue castle, complete with parapets, a drawbridge and a moat. Even Ravi found it strange.
“English home?” he asked.
“I suppose so,” I said. “We call it a castle.”
We were directed towards some shade where there was a long row of glistening four-wheel-drives, the preferred expat vehicle: Tata Safaris and Sumos, Mitsubishi Pajeros, and a white Land-Rover, which I recognised as Jamie’s. Four-wheel-drives seemed to provide expats with a sense of security, another layer to shield them from the realities of India, until they broke down and no one in the village knew how to fix them.
