by Frank Kusy
‘Well, it certainly made his day,’ I said with a dry smile. ‘Three pretty young girls working on him at once? I’ve never seen a happier naked fat man in my life.’
Nobody was smiling the following week. Everybody’s favourite resident, Miss Sherring, passed away. But it was not her death that disturbed us. It was what preceded it.
‘A few days before she went,’ John Gray told everybody at a general staff meeting. ‘Miss Sherring rang for me from her room. So I went up and enquired: “What is it, dear?” And she just looked at me, her normally sharp and intelligent blue eyes suddenly so glazed and vacant, and she said: “I...I don’t know. I forget.” It was really heartbreaking to see that. So I tried to cheer her up and offered: “Would you like to go to church...to pray?” But she just shook her head and replied: “Oh no, I don’t want to be solemn.”
*
The last person I expected to inspire me out of my gathering gloom was Bertie. He came upon me without warning in the dining room, where I was feverishly devising the coming week’s staff roster.
‘What’s wrong with you, Mr Kusy?’ he observed with a chipper tone in his voice. ‘You look sadder than a Monday morning!’
I glanced up briefly and was transfixed. It wasn’t just Bertie’s nose that was bright red. The whole of his face was bright red.
‘Oh, I know, I look a sight, don’t I?’ continued the bluff old pirate. ‘I just been out in the garden with Betsy, taking in the sun. I didn’t expect to be taking so much of it!’
‘That’s not all you’re taking so much of,’ I said drily, nodding down at the quart of rum hanging out of his side pocket. What does Betsy have to say about that?’
Bertie put a hand against the wall, to stop him swaying in the doorway, and gave an embarrassed giggle. ‘Everything in moderation, Betsy,’ I told her. ‘Everything in moderation.’ And do you know what she said? She said: “If you get much more moderate, we’ll never get you up the steps to the church!”’
I had to laugh. These two really were a caution.
‘So, how’s it going with the Pope?’ I asked him. ‘Is he still on his way over?’
Bertie’s beacon-like features twitched as he thought of a quick answer. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘We got a bit of a hiccup there. He’s ordaining a few cardinals or summat. But he’s promised us the Archbishop of Canterbury.’
There was a pause as Bertie’s eyes challenged me to defy this outrageous statement, and then we both laughed.
‘That’s better, Mr Kusy,’ he said with a final chuckle. ‘You needed that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did, Bertie,’ I smiled back. ‘Some days I wonder what I’m doing here. This is one of those days.’
‘What are you doing here?’ said Bertie, going suddenly serious. ‘You’re too young to be old. There’s a big, wide world out there – why aren’t you seeing some of it?’
‘I saw enough of it last year, when I tracked you down in Israel, remember?’ I grimaced. ‘That was the most stressful weekend of my life.’
‘Pah!’ said Bertie, his punch like face screwed up like a pugilist. ‘That was nothing! You stick around here much longer with us old farts and one day you’ll blink and it’ll all be over. It’s too late for me now, I’ve had my adventures, but it’s not too late for you. Get out while you can!’
I considered Bertie’s words carefully as I tramped back home later that day. What was keeping me in Clapham? Indeed, what was keeping me at the home? The Garden Fete we’d had the previous week had been the best ever, raising such a profit that Mr Parker declared the home free of debt for the first time in 12 years. It was clear to me that he, and it, could do without me for a while, that I really should take myself off for an adventure or two.
But where?
*
The answer to that question came from a very unexpected source. The first thing I did after speaking to Bertie – and for once I did it without a ‘should’ prompt from another Buddhist – was book myself into Trets, the Nichiren centre in France, for a week. I had been there as a ‘passenger’ earlier that year; now I decided to go there as a keibi or voluntary helper. ‘Ooh, this will be nice,’ I told myself. ‘I’ll have a nice little holiday in that cosy mountain-top retreat, get lots of chanting in, and decide where to have my big adventure!’
Talk about naïve.
In later years, when I saw the Doris Dorrie film Enlightenment Guaranteed I would recognise myself in Gustav, the well-meaning and equally naïve wannabe Buddhist who travels to a remote Zen monastery in Japan to ‘find himself’, only to find himself scrubbing the temple steps at 5 in the morning and going off the idea.
It was the same with me. I had never been a good sleeper, but the lack of sleep I experienced in that short week was phenomenal. The reason? I was supposed to get up at 5.30am and do a whole load of things I would never have thought of doing before – hoovering vast areas, gardening, washing floors, cooking for six to eight people, flower arranging, becoming a chalet maid, manning reception, patrolling the grounds, even trying my hand at being a locksmith.
And then there was Yves.
Yves was one of my corresponding keibis from France, and he was Jim Cowen with bells on. First off, he was the only one of us able to communicate with Mr Aramaki, the Trets caretaker, in both French and Japanese – which he thought entitled him to give the rest of us orders. Secondly, he gave me an order I absolutely hated: cleaning and hoovering (even the walls!) of all the rooms in the massive House of Europe. There were 32 of them, and it took me all morning to do just four.
‘I don’t know what I’m learning here,’ I seethed to Peter, my other British keibi. ‘But this being “told” business is getting to me. One more stupid order and I’m off back home!’
What got to me most was when, having finally finished cleaning all 32 rooms, Peter and I were detailed to do the ‘round’ of the Trets grounds in the pouring rain. Returning home cold, wet and splattered with sludge, we could see – through one of the tall, wide windows which ran right round the main building – Yves and his other French pal, Yousoo, sitting indoors all warm and comfortable. Yves even gave me a happy wave.
‘There must be a reason for this,’ observed Peter, scraping the mud of his boots. ‘He obviously has something very important to show us about ourselves.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I said, still seething on low boil. ‘Well, I’ve got something very important to show him about himself. Like he’s a mad, lazy, shock-haired Frenchman who seems to have come here not to protect the European Joshodo gohonzon – the prime point for peace in Europe – but to have himself a nice little holiday.’
The words stuck in my throat as soon as I’d said them. Oh dear, I was describing myself.
The next morning, with the grand total of just eight hours sleep in three days, I received personal guidance from Mr Aramaki. A lean, wiry man in his 40s, I was struck first by his huge buck teeth and then by his boundless enthusiasm. ‘No problem, no joy!’ he told me when I confessed my Yves problem. Then he took a spoon and dug it into a sugar bowl the wrong way up. ‘This is doubt,’ he said. ‘No can take out bad karma!’ Then he turned the spoon the right way up. ‘Now is faith. Now can spoon out karma, aaahaaaa!’
I nodded politely, and wondered what this had to do with me. I also wondered what he would say if I handed him a fork.
Mr Aramaki must have sensed my cynicism, because the next question he asked was: ‘How long you practice this Buddhism?’
‘About eighteen months,’ I replied warily. ‘Why, does it show?’
‘Aaaah! You are just baby!’ he said with a loud laugh. ‘You wait for ten years!’
I wasn’t sure I liked Mr Aramaki. He seemed to be on happy pills. Either that, or he was just plain rude.
‘I’ve been hearing a lot about “gratitude”,’ I ventured in a final attempt to get something out of this annoying little man. ‘Who or what should I feel gratitude to in my chanting?’
Mr Aramaki’s eyes twinkled mischievou
sly behind his thick round spectacles as he considered my question.
‘What is your life state?’ he said at last. ‘Which of Ten Worlds do you live in most?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied cautiously. ‘Anger perhaps, or Self-Absorption?’
‘Feel gratitude for that.’ laughed Mr Aramaki. ‘It could be worse!’
Matters between Yves and myself came to a head on the last day, when I was given the job of arranging a mountain of fresh fruit into neat little pyramids in front of the gohonzon. Gicho Yamazaki, the European leader of our organisation, was visiting, along with the Japanese Consul, the Mayor of Trets, and a whole load of other local dignitaries. It went without saying that the fruit had to look perfect.
But that fruit hated me. Every time I got it into tidy piles, they just collapsed and rolled all over the floor. In the end, fighting a losing battle with apples, oranges and grapefruit, I stuck them all together with sellotape. But it was all for nothing – on my return from a long patrol with Peter, I found that Yves had taken the fruit apart and put it back together his way.
‘It took me hours to do that bloody fruit!’ I raged at him. ‘Why couldn’t you leave well alone?’
Yves sniffed. ‘It was not good enough. If you want to know how to arrange ze fruit, you should go to India. Yes, I learn a lot about arranging ze fruit in India.’
India? All I knew about India came from the vintage Hollywood movies I had watched as a child: Gary Cooper leading a final heroic charge of the Bengal Lancers, Sabu plunging out of the rain forests at the head of a stampeding herd of bull elephants, Phineas Fogg rescuing the lovely Indian princess from the dreadful fate of sati, and English colonials sipping a hot toddy before venturing out for one last game of polo before tiffin.
At no point, in any of these films, had I seen anyone arranging fruit.
‘You’ve been to India?’ I said, my curiosity overcoming my rage. ‘What was that like?’
‘It is like ze fruit,’ said Yves, smiling at me for the first time in our acquaintance. ‘Some days you get ze oranges, some days you get ze lemons. But it is always colourful and full of flavour. Yes, you should definitely go to ze India!’
By some strange coincidence – or was it Fate? – Peter turned up to hear the last part of this conversation, and as it turned out, he had also been to India.
‘I don’t know about the lemons,’ he said. ‘But I got a letter from my best friend in India last week telling me: “I am sitting here, watching the oranges grow.” His name was Gopal and he picked me up on my first day in Delhi. He said he was a stenographer with the Education Department, but his real job – the one he thought much more important – was as guardian of a small Krishna temple in the Paharganj area. He took me there, down this maze of backstreets full of late-night markets lit up by coloured lights, and there were all these cows piled up outside, sound asleep. Then he introduced me to his family – his mother, his wife and his two children, all of whom were singing, playing the cymbals and chanting. None of them batted an eye when I arrived. They just smiled and took me in and made me chant with the children and let me join in their charming ceremony. Then they fed me – a very simple meal of chapattis cooked up on heated stones – and put me up in their home, which was like a lean-to garage with fold-down charpoy beds inside the temple grounds. I only stayed the one night, but there were tears in Gopal’s eyes as he bid me goodbye. He really did consider me his friend. I didn’t know what he meant about him “watching the oranges grow”, but it was so quaint, so typically Indian!’
In the silence that followed, as I digested this wonderful story, I felt the beginnings of a vital decision emerging from deep inside me.
‘This is so weird,’ I murmured. ‘All this week I’ve been fretting about orders and egos, and quite forgot what I had come here to find out. And in just five minutes listening to you guys, I think I know...I’m going to India!’
Chapter 15
Kevin and I in India
The reaction to my decision back in London was, to say the least, mixed. Anna and my mum were okay with it – despite obvious concerns for my health – and so was Dick Causton, who shook my hand vigorously and said: ‘So you want to see where this great religion of Buddhism began? Well, go out there and be like a sponge. Soak it all up. Then, when you get back, squeeze it all out. Produce something remarkable!’
But then there was Mr Parker. Mr Parker was most definitely not okay with it.
‘India?’ barked the irascible Chairman, his bushy eyebrows flared in disbelief. ‘What you want to be doing in India?’
‘Well, for one thing,’ I told him quietly. ‘I want to see the Bodhi tree. That’s where the Buddha got enlightened.’
‘A tree?’ fumed Mr Parker. ‘I’m not giving you six weeks leave to see no sodding tree! There’s enough trees in Clapham. Why can’t you worship one of them instead?’
It was no good telling Mr Parker that the Buddha hadn’t quite made it to Clapham. It was also no good telling him that six weeks was the bare minimum I needed to take in such a vast country as India. Instead, with more than a modicum of regret, I turned to him and said: ‘I’m sorry, I’ve really enjoyed my time here, but if you really can’t spare me for a few weeks, I’m afraid I’ll have to give you my notice.’
Mr Parker had that look again. The conflicted one. He wanted me to stay, I could see his jaws working as he struggled to say the words, but no, it was too much for him and his mouth snapped shut like a turtle.
‘Well, you got to do what you got to do,’ he puffed in exasperation. ‘I’ll draw up a letter of reference this afternoon. I’m sure we’ll manage without you.’
A sense of relief coupled with disappointment swept over me. Relief, that I would soon be shot of this ungrateful bully forever. Disappointment, that he had let me go so easily. Did he really think I was so expendable? Wasn’t he aware of all the extra work I had been putting in since the home evolved from a simple care facility into a complex nursing one? Not an hour of every day had passed lately without me on the phone to the Social or the Council – or indeed to the local staff agency – to negotiate the flood of ingoing or outgoing residents. Let alone all the fund-raising activities the grasping Chairman had piled on me to fund their additional care. My time and energy had been so stretched that I had had to ask John Gray to run me an ice-cold bath every morning to keep me awake.
Ah well, it was his loss. And twenty-three months of the most punishing job I was ever to experience had come to an end. ‘I’m sorry to see you go,’ said Bertie when I passed on the news, ‘but you’re doing the right thing.’ I wasn’t sure about that – my heart filled with sadness when I realised I would never see my elderly friends again: Miss Staddon, who had once been a court dressmaker; Miss Caitlin, who had manned an ak ak gun in World War II and (she said) shot down a German plane; Miss Lowry, who had once debutanted for the Queen; crafty old Mr Reitz, who sold vegetables to other residents at inflated prices, and of course Elsie and little Betsy, who had seen me through my hard, early days at the home and shared their lives and stories with me. Yes, I was really going to miss them all, but I had to be honest with myself.
It was time to move on.
*
Monday the 2nd of January 1985 saw me on a British Airways flight to Delhi, via Kuwait. And I came so very close to missing it.
‘Hey, Frank!’ Anna called after me as I leapt out of her car at Heathrow. ‘I think you might have forgotten something!’
I turned on my heels and regarded the small, black familiar object she was waving at me.
‘This just fell out of your pocket, you idiot,’ she laughed. ‘It’s your passport!’
From my prized window seat on the plane, as I fingered the errant passport, I found myself fondly thinking back to my final function at the home. Well, not at the home exactly, but at the little parish church just down the road from it. Bertie and Betsy had got married here, and Bertie had invited me to be his best man. It had been a small, modest affair
– just me and Mrs Hyde (Betsy’s daughter) and a few chosen staff members – and surprise, surprise, the Archbishop of Canterbury hadn’t made it. Instead, the happy couple got the Reverend Chauncey Shufflebotham, who gave such a marathon sermon that Betsy complained afterwards: ‘What a bloody long wedding – I couldn’t get to the toilet for two hours!’ Back at the home for the reception, Bertie gave a much shorter speech – ‘Best day of my life,’ he said, ‘except maybe the day Mr Kusy and I had a word with Moses up on Mount Sinai!’ Then Betsy cracked us all up by suddenly announcing: ‘Ooh, it ain’t half hot in here. I think I’m sweating!’ John Gray tried to correct her, saying: ‘Ladies don’t sweat. They perspire or they “glow”.’ But Betsy wasn’t having it. ‘Glow?’ she admonished him. ‘What do you think I am – a bulb?’
But there had been no doubt about it. Both Bertie and Betsy had been glowing with happiness when I last set eyes on them. It was a last and most treasured memory of my crazy years in Clapham.
Snapping back to the present, and looking out of my window at a glorious sunset, I found myself doing something I had not done for a long time. I began to write.
It had been three years since I had written anything – a misguided project called ‘The Conception Horoscope’ which no publisher would touch because it would have ruined the livelihood of all traditional astrologers who based their readings upon the time of birth, not the time of conception. Now, as I sat on that plane with half a day to kill, I began penning something which I thought publishers would touch...a diary. A diary that would eventually run 200,000 words and encompass all 144 days of my travels in India and Nepal.
‘Since boarding the plane,’ I started it dramatically, ‘there has been a slimy, crawling feeling of fear and apprehension in the pit of my stomach. My spirit feels bloody and torn, like a child ripped unsuspecting from the womb and thrust rudely into a new and frightening world in which it knows none of the rules. I chant to myself and the feeling passes. The gut-rolling feeling of dread gives way slowly to a feeling of anticipation and excitement – for the first time in my life, I realise, I am completely independent, alone and free. No supports (like on the kibbutz), no crutches, nothing familiar to lean on. All that I have is an address or two in Delhi, and the hope of a good following wind to get me there.’
