The frenetic freeway continued, every kilometre almost identical to the one before, but eventually they turned off it — although Annie personally would not have picked the rocky slope covered in litter as an off-ramp — and descended into a different sort of landscape.
Here the buildings were not as tall and the wide dusty streets were also filled with battling traffic, but they were at least haphazardly tree-lined. The shopfronts were enclosed, not shanty-like, although the sea of vibrantly clothed Indians was still in perpetual motion in front of them.
‘Nearly there, ma’am,’ Ali said, eyeing Annie in the rear-vision mirror again as they turned a corner, narrowly missing a straggling family of about twenty people of varying sizes who were crossing against the lights in front of them.
‘On this left, very famous Bollywood movie star’s house. Very famous. Lots of Bollywood stars stay here, madam. On this right, Arabian Sea.’
Annie hoped the Bollywood stars were better-looking than the sea; it was muddy and drab, its closest waves washing half-heartedly over jagged rocks near the road. A collection of rabid-looking dogs lounged in the shade of a dried-up tree circled by leaning motorbikes.
She really should have stayed at home even if all she did there was lie on the couch and stare out the window. This was all too … wrong, frightening, unfamiliar. She was just not the sort of person who went to India. She knew exactly what those women were like: they came home wearing coloured muslin tunics and meditating and eating vegetarian curries until their pores started to ooze so much garlic and turmeric you could smell them a mile off.
There had been one such Indiophile in the short-lived book club she’d belonged to when the children were younger: Sandra, or Sandrine. She’d hosted the group one night to talk about The God of Small Things, which Annie hadn’t even read, and had made a curry so hot that everyone apart from Sandra or Sandrine herself was catapulted into speechless hot flushes. She’d served beer instead of wine, and at the time Annie had thought her decor was gaudy, to say the least, all oranges and yellows and pinks.
Of course the colours made sense now, and Annie had only been in India an hour. With a pang she remembered that in those book-club days Sandra or Sandrine’s only son had just moved to the other side of the country and she’d been almost hysterically bereft without him.
The other younger mothers, including Annie, had been unsympathetic in a ‘come back when you’ve got a real problem’ sort of a way. They’d joked about how they couldn’t wait to get their children off their hands. A cheese board and something by Jackie Collins next time, thank you very much! Oh, the smugness of young mothers. She cringed even thinking about it.
She didn’t know what had happened to Sandra or Sandrine. Or the book club, for that matter. It had fizzled out. Or she had.
A family on a motorbike pulled up beside them — a thin collection of dark-skinned people wearing a blooming garden of colour.
A little girl, two at the most, was sandwiched between her father and an older brother, who was tickling her. She was wearing a synthetic Santa Claus hat despite it being May and thirty-five degrees.
The little girl wriggled around to escape her brother’s teasing, laughing so hard her little white teeth glinted like a pearl bracelet in her mouth. Behind them, her mother smiled and turned, catching Annie’s eye.
Annie smiled back, and the motorcycle lurched into the traffic and disappeared.
Little girls were little girls no matter where they were, and mothers were mothers. Annie would no sooner have ridden with their children on a motorbike than left them overnight in a casino parking lot, but the way a mother feels seeing her babies erupt in unbridled joy? The same, everywhere.
And the way a mother feels when her babies grow up and she doesn’t see them at all? Also the same. Just ask Sandra. Or Sandrine.
At the end of the seaside boulevard the road terminated at the entrance to their hotel, the Taj Lands End, a tall, plain building whose external gates were studded with security officers.
They stopped Ali with white-gloved hands, checked the boot, the hood and underneath the chassis of the SUV with a mirror on a pole.
‘Because of the terrorisms,’ Ali said, cheerfully.
Annie looked at Hugh.
‘There were a couple of attacks a few years ago, but nothing you need to worry about now,’ he said. ‘Honestly.’
At the entrance to the hotel lobby, however, Annie had to surrender her handbag to an X-ray machine and walk through a security scanner, causing the waves of panic that had been shimmying up and down her body like flappers’ tassels to return.
Just a few moments standing out in the searing heat and she was drained and anxious, but as she stepped out of the revolving door and into the pristine cool of the Taj lobby, the honking of horns was siphoned from her hearing, the hustle of the traffic replaced by the cool ballet of well-dressed staff and guests gliding across the vast marble floors.
She began to relax.
‘Welcome to the Taj Lands End,’ a handsome young man in hotel livery said to her, his eyes sparkling. ‘And welcome back to you, Mr Hugh Jordan. Very, very nice to see your beautiful wife has been able to come with you this time. Very nice.’
He wobbled his head from side to side as he spoke, which Annie had assumed was a made-up thing, but she’d noticed Ali, the driver, doing it too.
Hugh moved towards the check-in desk, but the young man, Mahendra, according to his name badge, shook his head, the ordinary way. ‘Oh, no need for such a valued customer as you, sir. Please, follow me, and I will take you and Mrs Hugh Jordan straight away to your room.’
‘Room’ was something of an understatement. It was a suite, with a vast king-sized bed, a writing desk, a walk-in closet, and a bigger bathroom than any at home. It had a view of an elegant curved bridge sweeping out into the Arabian Sea — which sparkled and glistened like a proper ocean from this vantage point — connecting the promontory on which the hotel sat to an island of skyscrapers on the other side.
‘Lands End is in Bandra,’ said Hugh, indicating the cityscape, ‘and that over there is South Mumbai. That’s the real deal.’
‘If there is anything I can do for you, Mrs Hugh Jordan, while Mr Hugh Jordan is here for his work,’ said Mahendra, ‘please just ring the front desk and I will do my best to make sure your visit to Mumbai is the most top quality it can be.’
She thanked him, still transfixed by the head wobbling, and, eyes still sparkling, he left.
‘Has he confused us with visiting royalty?’ Annie asked.
‘No, that’s just the way the hotel staff are here. Very nice, don’t you think?’
‘Very nice.’
They ate that night in the most tourist-friendly of the hotel restaurants, Hugh having his ‘usual’ of some sort of fragrant chicken curry while Annie played it safe with a club sandwich — no lettuce or tomato. She’d read that eating vegetables that weren’t washed properly was just as likely to end in the dreaded Delhi Belly as drinking the tap water, and she was not going to do either.
‘They seem to know you so well,’ she said, ordering a hot tea even though Hugh said the bottled water was safe. (Rhona had watched something on TV that claimed it was just swamp water in disguise, collected from the dripping drains of filthy slums by emaciated children and old women.)
‘I guess it’s their job to know me well,’ Hugh said, with a half-smile that made her think he was pleased to be seen, to be remembered.
He nodded at someone else behind her, and the half-smile turned into a full one.
I understand that, she thought, sipping her tea: the need to have someone really see you.
She was just surprised to recognise the same thing in her husband.
Chapter Five
Annie slept like the dead, her body desperate to be supine and still. She barely woke even when Hugh rose to go to work, mumbling her goodbyes and falling straight back into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When she finally did get up, she
pulled back the curtains and gazed out at the curved bridge and the spikes of South Mumbai across the water.
She could now see more flattened dull areas of low-rise housing on the rocks on the far side of the bridge, but in front of them brightly coloured fishing boats were bobbing in the waves like ocean ornaments, and out to the west of the bridge, past the hazy skyline, cargo ships moved like tiny bugs along the horizon.
As far as views went, it was pretty impressive. She hadn’t even known Mumbai was on the coast until Hugh mentioned it a few days before they left. She hadn’t really thought of India as a seaside destination. But then again, she hadn’t really thought of India at all.
She pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the massive window and looked down. There was a swimming pool nestled in the lush gardens eighteen floors below. It was round, with a mosaic star in the middle; a woman in a fluoro-green swimsuit was swimming lazy laps right through the middle of the star as she watched.
Striped umbrellas circled the pool like curls, with yellow and white towels laid neatly on blue loungers stacked on a terrace that faced out towards the sea. Coconut palms rimmed the area, and Annie thought that from ground level it probably looked like any five-star hotel pool anywhere in the world.
As she thought that, something caught her eye: a movement or a series of movements over the hotel fence on the patchy no-man’s-land that stretched out to the rocks and sea.
She squinted. She was of an age where squinting just came with the territory. The ant-like procession turned out to be children, walking single-file over what looked like rubble towards a large mud-coloured bank.
When they started disappearing inside holes in the bank, Annie squinted even harder and realised with a shock that it was in fact another slum, each hut a perfect shade of mud, some dug out of the side of a gentle rise in the land, and some shanties like the ones she’d seen coming in from the airport.
The pool might be generic, but she wondered how many other five-star hotels had a sprawling slum spreading like moss right over the fence.
She skipped breakfast, shy about going to the restaurant on her own, and instead went to the gym, where the treadmills faced out towards the ocean and she could imagine she was back home at the health club Daisy had made her join, and which she had been to only twice. Even then she’d only gone because Daisy went with her. How she’d admired her daughter’s easy confidence with the buff young men lifting ridiculously heavy weights, with the chunky receptionist, the tanorexic on the treadmill next to her. Time with her daughter had become so precious in recent years that she would happily spend an hour pretending to climb stairs just for the pleasure of doing it next to her.
There were no other white people working out in the Taj gym, just a very overweight young Indian man being put through his paces by a bored-looking trainer. The young man was running from one side of the gym to the other with the sort of lethargy usually only demonstrated by people lying on sofas.
He wore an expensive watch, and a thick gold chain around his neck, and Annie got the impression that it wasn’t his idea to be spending the morning sweating and pretending to lift barbells. The trainer had pretty much the same look.
The only other person in the gym was a sinewy woman of about Annie’s age, also Indian, who was doing step-ups at a frightening speed in front of a mirror in one corner. It was as though there could only be so much motivation in the room at one time and she’d used it all, leaving the fat young man with nothing.
Annie wound up the speed on her treadmill. Through no fault of her own she had always been slender, able to eat whatever she wanted — which was never that much — without growing out of her clothes. Thus she was not prone to vast amounts of pretending to climb stairs. In recent years, though, she had been surprised by a certain sponginess around her belly, her thighs, her hips, her upper arms. She didn’t weigh much more — well, not too much — but it was as though what she did weigh had given up paying attention. Her flesh was not bothering to hold itself together anymore, just as Eleanor’s skin had not bothered. There was probably a technical term for this, but it felt as though at a cellular level something had just rolled over instead of trying again.
Annie looked at the sinewy stepper, not an ounce of flab on her, her tight little biceps furiously lifting weights that would put a grown man to shame.
She pressed the ‘up’ arrow on the treadmill until it was going just a little bit faster than she was comfortable with. While she was here she could get fit: that was one thing she could do. She’d be crazy to waste the opportunity of having a huge well-equipped gym just a quick elevator ride from her room.
Buoyed by this, she managed another full three minutes on the treadmill before something clicked in her hip and it started to hurt. She limped on for another minute or two, but by then she was hot and bothered and dreaming of the enormous bathtub up in her suite.
She lounged in the tub’s soothing water for a full hour; and once she’d dressed and done her hair it was lunchtime. Still not game to venture to the restaurant on her own — quietly blaming jetlag — she ordered lunch in her room, again opting for the safety of a club sandwich. She felt fine so far, healthy as an ox other than the hip, and she didn’t want it any other way.
The meal was splendidly delivered by a beautiful-looking young man in a black tie and white gloves. When he smiled, Annie felt the whole room light up, as if her pleasure that what she ordered was what he had brought was not just a delight, but a miracle.
‘I’m so sorry, I have no cash for a tip,’ she said, at which the brilliance flickered a trifle. She supposed that begging happened inside the hotels as well as outside, and she would have given him something if she had it, but instead she was awkward, muttering her thanks and looking away as she waited for him to leave.
Actually, she had always been uncomfortable with tipping, even when she worked as a waitress during her student years and had been grateful for tips herself. It seemed so contrived to her to be extra nice to someone just to squeeze some more cash out of them. In an ideal world, being the normal amount of nice should have done it.
But the waitresses who did best at Crab & Co, where for three summers in a row she delivered jugs of beer and baskets of fried defrosted seafood, went way beyond the realms of normal. One of them stuffed her bra, another one took up the hem on her already obscenely short skirt, and a third changed her name label from Daphne to Daffy just so she had something fluffy to talk about. They flirted and simpered and bent over and fleetingly touched, but they could barely deliver a pepper grinder to the table without dropping it or putting it in the beer instead of the salad. Annie was probably the best waitress of all of them but she earned the worst tips.
‘Well, darling, you can’t eat principles,’ her mother said when she complained about this, ‘but you can certainly dine out on the memory of them, so good for you.’
WHEN HUGH GOT BACK to the Taj that night it was already late. He’d had a day of meetings, he said, and wanted to take her out somewhere. There was a Mexican place nearby that he had heard was pretty good.
‘Mexican food? In India?’ Annie was doubtful, so instead they ate in the Chinese restaurant above the bar on the hotel’s mezzanine floor.
She had vegetarian fried rice, which was very tasty, and which the waiter assured her was perfectly safe to eat. When the bill came, she asked Hugh how much he was going to tip and he explained that the service was included.
‘With everything?’
‘Yes, I suppose. What do you mean?’
‘With room service?’
‘Oh, yes, all the food, it’s down here at the bottom. See?’
‘So you never leave cash as well?’
‘Sometimes I do, but the waiters seemed a bit embarrassed by it. The thing about a country famous for its bribery is that the people who don’t take bribes are very keen you know that about them.’
‘India is famous for its bribery?’
‘Ask a taxi driver,’ Hugh la
ughed, and he looked properly happy, not like he was forcing it. ‘So you had a good day? Not too bored?’
‘No, not at all. It’s … nice here.’
SO NICE THAT THE NEXT DAY she did it all again, although this time she ventured down to the pool.
After no more than ten minutes on a yellow striped towel she was so hot that she slid into the cool sapphire waters for a round of lazy laps. The water was delicious, but she didn’t know how anyone lay out in the sun. As soon as she was dry she headed back to the icy air-conditioning in her room.
The same waiter — Valren, she noticed his name this time — brought her the same lunch and lavished on her the same lovely smile, which this time she at least returned.
After lunch, she lay on the bed, staring out the window at the Arabian Sea and the spikes of the curved bridge connecting Lands End to the rest of Mumbai.
She wished Rhona was there to talk to, lie by the pool with, or Daisy, even though Daisy had yet to grow back into wanting to be on holiday with her. If she ever did.
They did not have the sort of relationship Annie had always had with Eleanor. They were close, she thought, and cross words were rare, but they were not really friends.
Daisy was more — not aloof, exactly — but not inclined to include Annie in her life either. It hurt, sometimes, to think she didn’t rate very highly on the totem pole of Daisy’s priorities, not that she would ever let Daisy know that.
‘Don’t push it, my darling,’ Eleanor had once counselled her. ‘The things you want her to let you in on might be things you’re happier not knowing.’
Not for the first time Annie’s hand reached for the phone and she calculated the time difference before she remembered Eleanor, the person she wanted most to speak to, was gone.
Would she ever get used to that hole in her life? It didn’t matter where she was in the world, the emptiness still swelled inside her, inky and dull.
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