by Helen Harris
Prem’s decline was swift and awful. Although he stepped up his visits to the temple even further and adopted a frankly crackpot raw food regime, the disease continued its cruel progress. By Christmas, the writing was on the wall and when Sylvia travelled up to Leicester in the New Year to see Prem, possibly for the last time, she found him a shadow even of his former grey self. She had hesitated whether or not to go but Ruth said it was the right thing to do and so, one cold and especially unpleasant January morning, she boarded a train at King’s Cross, bolstered by a railway cup of tea and a hot bacon sandwich.
Naisha met her effusively at the station, her vigour and talkativeness apparently undiminished by her husband’s illness. She drove Sylvia to their home where Prem was languishing in a reclining chair, attended by a number of relatives who kept popping in and out, bringing Tupperware boxes of home cooked food.
“I haven’t had to cook for weeks,” Naisha observed happily as she served Sylvia a delicious lunch entirely out of Tupperware boxes. Poor Prem barely ate and barely spoke either although he gave Sylvia a number of sad saintly smiles.
Naisha drove her back to the station in the late afternoon. She thanked Sylvia warmly for making the journey and hugged and kissed her excessively. Sylvia supposed that they were both equally glad to see the back of each other.
On the train, Sylvia grew rather weepy; how lucky Naisha and Prem were to have the chance to say goodbye to each other.
In the last minutes of Sylvia’s visit, Naisha announced, “At least we can all be comforted by our children’s happiness, isn’t that right? And Prem is praying that he will live to see another grandchild.”
Sylvia was shocked by this announcement. As far as she was concerned, Anand was utterly perfect and, really, there was no need for another grandchild. Only having had the one child herself, somehow her imagination couldn’t go any further. But Naisha, as usual, was one step ahead.
In the final months of poor Prem’s life, the issue of the second grandchild became uncomfortably pressing. Naisha kept repeatedly urging Smita to try and get pregnant again before her father passed away. “Give him the comfort of knowing another grandchild is on the way,” she pleaded, apparently sublimely immune to charges of emotional blackmail. Sylvia couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for Smita, in spite of everything; it must be horrid to be put in such a situation especially after the timing of her first pregnancy had been so overshadowed by the death of her father-in-law. Jeremy flatly refused to discuss the issue with Sylvia at all.
But Naisha’s pleading was to no avail and, after six more months of suffering, Prem died in the summer of 2007, leaving a larger silence where his silent presence had been. With hindsight of course, Sylvia realised that what must have been troubling Smita during those months was not producing good news but concealing bad.
After Prem’s death, naturally they all saw a good deal more of Naisha. She came down to London more often and Jeremy and Smita made more trips up to Leicester to spend time with her. Sylvia felt sidelined. Even though it was perfectly obvious that Naisha was not as devastated by her husband’s death as might have been expected and the optician’s was oviously a great distraction, still she now had the status of the newly bereaved widow and, consequently, first call on their attention and on Anand.
During Smita’s trips to the US, Naisha sometimes came down to stay, supposedly to help out with Anand although Sylvia suspected that her presence added to Jeremy’s burdens. When that happened, of course Sylvia didn’t get to see Anand at all and when she did finally see him again after Naisha’s departure, he always had a few unfamiliar new words and habits which owed nothing to Sylvia. Naisha’s claim that the little boy needed glasses made Sylvia particularly indignant.
The less she saw of her little golden boy, the more she yearned for him. Her flat felt completely empty without him; his bedroom waited silently, his ranks of toys and books lay untouched and whatever the latest extravagance which she had splashed out on – the immense plastic water wheel, the inflatable turtle family for the bath, the trampoline which took up far too much of her sitting-room – it all seemed to mock her, like extravagant decorations put up for a party which had not happened.
What troubled Sylvia most was the fear that Smita had now won. Until her father’s death, terribly sad, Prem was such a nice chap, Jeremy had had an edge; his poor mother was recently widowed, allowances had to be made. Now, of course, that advantage was lost and Sylvia knew, knew in her bones that Smita and Naisha were together so ruthless, in the tug of war which was marriage, their side would inevitably win and Anand would become theirs.
Sylvia watched Smita gaining the upper hand and Jeremy, the fool, letting her get away with it. She did her best to right the balance in Jeremy’s favour; she lured Anand with all the old songs and nursery rhymes which he loved – Naisha’s activities were all educational – she bought him ice creams in Regent’s Park and forbidden chocolates and Smarties when they went shopping. One summer’s day, she secretly whisked him off to the seaside without consulting anyone. She gave him his first sight of the sea. But nothing made any difference of course; Smita was in control now and Sylvia had to sit and watch as relations between Jeremy and Smita seemed to go from bad to worse. Still nothing led her to expect the shattering announcement which Smita made just before Anand’s third birthday.
As her plane took off from Heathrow, Smita’s spirits soared. The huge thrust of the engines and the fairground ride pressure which pushed her back in her seat added to her excited feeling of escape. Beneath the grey clouds, her annoyingly clingy little boy and her incredibly irritating husband were beginning another boring day but she, she had got away and ahead of her lay another brilliant week of freedom in New York. Her happiness, only very faintly tinged with guilt, was such that she decided to enjoy absolutely everything, even things which she would normally have scrupulously denied herself. It was rather early in the day for a drink but what the hell? As soon as the cabin crew came along with the trolley, she was going to treat herself. Something mixed with tomato juice or orange juice might feel a bit healthier and anyway it would help her to relax later on.
But first of all she had to go through her notes. The success of the trip – and so the guarantee of a string of future trips – depended on her performance for the US clients. So far, everything had gone really well each time but in this business you were only ever as good as your last presentation. That was especially true in the US where things were even more ruthless and employees even more dispensable than in London; Smita loved it. She found the atmosphere energising and the people she worked with fun and attractive. On the plane, she felt herself changing each time into a more vivid version of herself; brighter, sleeker, more focused. She became in fact the person she could have been if she hadn’t saddled herself with a husband and a child before she turned thirty. She had done it for all the right reasons, of course; work-life balance, plus she had wanted to redefine herself, to get right away from the suburban Leicester mode.
Marrying Jeremy had seemed such an obvious thing to do at the time. But she turned out simply to have swapped one version of dull for another; Jeremy wasn’t actually who she thought he was. At least, before Anand came along, he had been close. Their first two or three years had been ok. But as soon as she had Anand – why even beforehand – Jeremy had revealed this awful traditional side. He wanted Smita to be a stay-at-home mother or at the very least to work part-time. He never stopped moaning about the harmful effects her lifestyle was supposedly having on Anand – which was bullshit – and you could tell that he thought he was a much better parent than she was with all his touchy-feely nonsense.
Naturally, his nightmare of a mother goaded him on from behind the scenes. It was all Sylvia’s fault anyway; if she hadn’t been such a useless mother herself, then obviously Jeremy wouldn’t have such a ridiculous idealised concept of what a mother should be.
But Jeremy had got Smita wrong too. He must have imagined that once they had a bab
y, she would turn into a traditional Asian mummy who lived only for her little boy. She was expected to transform somehow into this loving nurturing person who would pop out two or – for God’s sake – even three kids and just forget about everything else. Well, no way. Her job mattered more than ever now. It was her only way out.
She sipped her Bloody Mary and allowed herself to miss Anand briefly. He really was the cutest little boy ever and she loved it that he was getting more and more like her side of the family all the time. When she came back in five days’ time, for all her New York high, she would be desperate to hold him. She would come running up the stairs, with the latest toy from FAO Schwarz and Anand would rush towards her as fast as his chubby two-year-old legs could carry him, calling, “Mum-Mum-Mum-Mum-Mum.” She would hug him for at least a minute and that moment would be absolutely perfect. But in the background Jeremy would be standing, looking reproachful. They would greet each other guardedly and then, soon enough, one or other of them would say the wrong thing and set the other one off and the whole miserable business of not getting on would start all over again.
Smita bent down to pull her laptop out of her carry-on bag and opened it on her knees. Enough; time now to focus on the job ahead of her. The vodka hadn’t fuddled her yet. She would work for two hours and after lunch she would doze for two hours and then it would be nearly time to land and she could forget about everything but work for five amazing days.
Smita had been coming to New York for just over a year now and this must be her sixth or was it her seventh trip. But the exhilaration she felt on arriving had not got any less. If anything, it had increased because now she knew what was ahead of her and she looked forward to it from one trip to the next.
First of all, there was the momentous sense of arriving somewhere really important which you felt as you waited in the massive queues at Immigration. Even if people grumbled at the wait, there was still this sense that, well, the wait was worth it because you were about to arrive at basically the centre of the world. Wherever you had come from, whatever your profession, New York was the top. The beefy officers in the Immigration booths took their job so seriously too; when they okd you and stamped your passport and welcomed you to New York, Smita always felt this great kick of achievement. God, it was nothing like Heathrow; people shuffled forward towards the passport booths there, depressed and disappointed before they had even entered the country. They could already tell, from the scruffiness and from the other people’s faces, that they had arrived somewhere second-rate.
In New York, you came out of the airport and stepped straight into one of those yellow cabs, familiar from every film you had ever seen, with its wild driver from Haiti or Afghanistan – or once even Gujarat – and he sped away with you towards the skyscrapers of Manhattan which rose up spectacularly in the distance. Every time, Smita marvelled that she was there, with her job and her status and her four-star hotel room booked, speeding towards appointments and meetings and colleagues, dinners in the latest restaurants, working breakfasts and all the wonderful heart-racing fun that was New York.
She would think of the important people in her life and imagine that they were sitting there in the taxi with her. She would show them what she had achieved and they would all be incredibly impressed and proud of her. With a lurch, she thought of her father, Prem, now undergoing chemotherapy in Leicester Royal Infirmary. He had never been to New York and maybe now he never would. With all his unworldliness, maybe he wouldn’t be that impressed by it. But he would still beam if he saw his daughter stepping out of the taxi, the door held open for her by the uniformed doorman of the Marriott Hotel.
This time, there was something else to look forward to. Gravington Babcock’s US associates had recently hired a new partner. Everyone spoke incredibly highly of him; he was really smart, he had been poached from a rival firm for a supposedly huge salary because he had this amazing track record plus he was apparently really fun to work with. Smita was especially curious to meet this new star because he had the good old Gujarati name of Abi Desai.
Her flight landed on time at two o’clock and the luggage came out quickly too. The queues at Immigration were pretty bad but she was still out of the airport by three thirty. In the taxi, she rang London to say goodnight to Anand so she wouldn’t have to think about home anymore that day. Anand refused to talk on the phone which sometimes happened. She tried not to feel rejected and gave the nanny a hard time instead over what Anand had had for supper and whether she had gone over his flashcards with him. As soon as she dropped her phone back in her bag, it beeped with a text message. That was what Smita loved about the US: the energy, the drive, not a moment was wasted. It would be the New York office; they knew she was on the ground and they wanted to get in touch with her. But the message wasn’t what she expected: “Call Greg asap” or “Santinelli needs 2 talk”. It was from Abi Desai himself inviting Smita for drinks with the team in a bar near the office at six thirty. She texted back “Sure great c u there” and then corrected it to “c u all there”. She sat back in her seat and looked out at the dramatic cold grey sweep of the East River. Her trip was off to a brilliant start.
Of course it was a challenge looking her best straight off the plane and when it was already after eleven o’clock at night for her. But concealer worked miracles and she decided to walk the few blocks from her hotel to the bar, which she knew, thinking that the New York winter cold would wake her up. She had underestimated how very cold it actually was. It was mid-November and the store windows were all already decorated for Christmas. The freezing air hit her with a shock as she walked out of the hotel and for a moment she considered ducking into a taxi. But no, the walk would do her good. She drew her coat closer and adjusted her pashmina around her neck. She walked quickly, happy and excited despite the cold and enjoying the feeling of being one with the crowd of fast-walking New Yorkers on their way home. She watched them for signs of the latest craze – things moved so fast here – and was amused to notice that earmuffs seemed to have made a comeback. Well, that was one trend she wouldn’t be taking back to London; on a grown woman she thought they looked totally silly.
A vicious wind attacked her at the first intersection, whistling down the deep canyon between the buildings. Her hair was going to be a complete mess by the time she got there and she was already completely chilled. She dashed across the street to get out of the wind the second the sign said “Walk” and she speeded up her pace. But the few blocks she remembered turned out to be nine or ten and by the time she arrived at the bar, she was windswept and absolutely frozen. Still the walk had buoyed her up even more. New York was so wonderful: the brilliantly lit, artistically decorated store windows, the smart busy people hurrying along and all the way there the familiar New York street furniture, the fire hydrants and the steaming subway vents. Smita loved everything.
She darted into the cloakroom to deal with her hair without spotting her colleagues but when she emerged, they were all just arriving and they greeted her warmly. Abi Desai wasn’t with them. For a moment, Smita felt terribly disappointed but someone explained that he’d been held back dealing with something and he’d be along right away.
They settled around a big table and someone got drinks. Everyone began filling Smita in on the big make-or-break meeting with the new clients the next day. She was so caught up in listening to what they were saying and laughing at Greg Meyer’s anecdotes about all the near disasters which had plagued this project that she didn’t see Abi Desai come in. She only noticed him when he was right by their table and making his way round to shake hands with her. She felt caught out because the one thing which no one had thought to mention to her was that he was incredibly good-looking.
They shook hands. Abi had a good strong grip. He drew up another chair and sat down perfectly naturally next to Smita.
As soon as he joined the group, the atmosphere changed noticeably. Even though he appeared so relaxed and friendly and on the level, it was obvious he was in char
ge. There was no more office gossip or jokes about near disasters. Like the others, Smita felt herself straining to make a good impression. Her second drink was mineral water. Abi asked her politely about her flight, about the weather in London and, showing that he wasn’t just making small talk, about the health of a colleague at Gravington Babcock who was recovering from open heart surgery. Nothing personal but nothing about the next day’s meeting either; it was clear this was some kind of bonding, team-building time and it was clear too that it was Abi who set the rules here. But he wasn’t in the least bullying; he did whatever it was he was doing lightly and apparently effortlessly, teasing one of the guys who had decided to have braces on his teeth at the age of twenty-eight and telling a hilariously funny story against himself about an eccentric old lady in his neighbourhood who had set upon him recently while he was out jogging. Everyone seemed to love him; they roared with laughter at his jokes and vied for his attention.
He didn’t stay long. After less than forty-five minutes, he excused himself and as soon as he had gone, the atmosphere relaxed once again and a couple of the guys invited Smita to have dinner with them. She imagined Abi must have a long way to travel home on a suburban commuter train. He doubtless lived in some picture-perfect New York suburb in an ultra-modern architect-designed house which would make the penthouse in Belsize Park seem tiny. There would be a huge state-of-the-art kitchen for his beautiful Gujarati-American wife who spent her days making modern ghee-free versions of Indian meals and raising their two model kids.
The week went really well, the new clients praised Smita’s input, the deal was done, everyone in the New York office was on a high – and it was catching. Smita sat in on a series of meetings chaired by Abi and had a chance to observe how he operated. It was so impressive; he always seemed so informal and friendly yet he could apparently make everyone in the room do exactly what he wanted. It was impressive but it was also a bit uncanny. He seemed such a nice guy, he was always smiling and joking but he was obviously incredibly tough underneath.
