Max lay on the beach, asleep. He woke to the sensation of Narayan trickling sand onto his chest.
‘Not content with blackening my karma for my next incarnation,’ Narayan said, a broad grin on his face, ‘you have to blacken my poor skin in this one. You have to drag me out to sunbathe with you, so that you, a white American, can be impressively dark brown.’
He laughed and dropped down next to Max, who smiled back at him.
‘Isn’t it perfect here?’ Narayan asked. ‘Didn’t I say it would be a paradise?’
‘It’s wonderful,’ Max said. ‘It really is.’
‘Yes, but Tammy wouldn’t think so. He’d say that the village had undernourished children and that someone had died of typhoid yesterday. I once asked him it he thought it was ever right to be happy in this country with so much misery around.’
‘What did he say to that?’
Narayan shrugged.
‘He goes on about the miserable poverty in India, hating the huge disparities of wealth, but these disparities exist throughout the world.’
‘In America especially,’ Max said. ‘What did he say about being happy in the midst of misery, though? It’s quite a question.’
‘He didn’t answer. Well, it can’t help the misery to add to it. What do you think?’
‘I think we have a right to happiness but that other people’s misery can often make that difficult to attain.’
‘People’s misery in general?’
‘Yes, but also the misery one’s own attempts to reach happiness can cause.’
Narayan fell into an absorbed silence. Max looked across at the temple. A single rock stood halfway across the beach. It had been carved with the outline of figure, which was much eroded by the wind and waves – the vestige of a god, maybe, scoured beyond the point of recognition.
‘You know what I hope for most?’ asked Narayan. ‘It’s for you to stay here with me. Clare could stay too, if she’s willing – or is that being absurdly unrealistic? Do you think you could ever give up LA?’
‘It depends on you. Could you ever give up Tamil Nadu?’
‘When I was in LA, I thought I could… when I first came back and I was really down. Now? Well… now I think I’d never leave if you would stay here with me.’
He brought himself up short, as if he hadn’t meant to say this.
What an admission, Max thought. It had come out so spontaneously, but it had the clumsy ring of truth. Narayan was never much good at polite pretence.
‘I’d love to stay here with you,’ Max replied. ‘But Clare would not, of course… not under those circumstances.’
‘And if she left, you’d be thinking all the time how you’d made her miserable?’
Max nodded.
‘Things are bad enough for her with the assassins still at large,’ said Narayan, ‘even though Tammy insists there’s little cause to worry. I feel enormous sympathy for her, but she resists my telling her so. I can’t get through to her any more. The reason’s obvious, and it makes me feel horrible.’
Narayan gazed at the sea, looking guilty and unhappy, as he always did when talking about Clare.
‘At least Clare’s making friends,’ he went on. ‘Maria’s taken a real shine to her, and vice versa. She seems fond of Vijaya too. She tried to kiss her this morning, although Vijaya avoided it for some reason. Odd.’
‘I thought she really wanted to come with us. Why didn’t you persuade her to.’
‘I think she felt Tammy didn’t want her to, not that she’d tell me if that was the case. We may seem close, but she’s very proud and reserved at times. Either she’s chattering and joking away or she cuts herself completely off. Well, anyway, Clare’s made quite a pal of Tammy. Maybe that’s half the reason for Vijaya being so strange this morning. Perhaps she’s jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ Max echoed.
‘She’s got absolutely no reason to be, of course. In all these years, he’s never looked at another woman. He’s obviously attached to Vijaya, even if it’s hardly a blinding passion. But then he’s never been blindly passionate about anything, except the problems of modern India, about which he makes me feel so ignorant and guilty. No, she’d never foolishly imagine anything like that between them. She might feel slightly jealous of Tammy having more in common with Clare than he has with her, though.’
‘That’s possible,’ Max answered briefly, feeling as if he was being probed.
‘I had a word with him a day or two ago… about when he’d be marrying Vijaya.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He was typically evasive. Not that I’m worried about whether or not he’ll ever marry her. It’s unbelievable he’d let her down at this stage. I only wonder about when.’
‘Well, you can ask him again some time,’ said Max. ‘Do you want to go for a swim?’ he then asked. He was keen to shake thoughts of Tammy and Clare from his mind because he was, at that moment, imagining something he really didn’t want to take shape in his head.
‘Why not?’ Narayan answered, quickly dismissing his preoccupations. ‘Come on then!’
As they walked down to the sea, Max spoke about something he’d been deliberating on for quite some time.
‘You know, I want to donate to famine relief in India. I have too much money, too many undeserved, ill-gotten gains.’
‘I hope you haven’t been taking my joshing too seriously,’ Narayan replied, casually kicking at a mound of seaweed. ‘About your vulgarly expensive lifestyle, I mean. We don’t exactly live in poverty ourselves, Vijaya and I. We have a fair-sized house and garden; and a car, however antiquated. They amount to relative riches here in India. Whether our gains are ill gotten or not, I’m afraid I’m greedy. I know the story of Jesus and the rich man, but I’m less of a true Hindu than you’re an ethical, agnostic Christian, as you describe yourself. I can’t see myself about to give up the things I have.’
They reached the sea and waded in. As they swam out, Max hoped he wouldn’t live to regret voicing his intention, although the thought of giving to such a cause gave him a distinct feeling of relief. A wave swelled towards them and they both dived beneath it. The sun pierced though the water to irradiate their bodies, which now touched and intertwined, their mouths joined in a slow subaqueous kiss. As they rose to the surface it seemed to Max that this moment of his happiness, transient as it might be, was a spot of time he would remember in the years to come. It would actively revive his spirits when he succumbed to the despair that sometimes dragged him down.
He’d always felt ambivalent about his inherited money, although he’d made full use of it – as anyone would, he thought. That little Christian story remained at the back of mind, sometimes like a nagging challenge, at other times an awkward inspiration. Was he capable of giving away most of his wealth? He’d miss the benefits it brought him and it certainly would prove quite a wrench.
But his spirits soared once more as he embraced Narayan again and they began to swim back to the shore.
Later Max began wondering about Clare and Tammy again as he recalled the scene with Vijaya when they’d been about to leave. Max had been in the garden with Clare, and Tammy was upstairs with Vijaya. He’d heard the sounds of a hushed argument and then a little stifled wail. He’d turned to Clare but she was hurrying away as if she couldn’t bear to hear it.
At this point, Narayan had appeared with Subramaniam, who’d told them of a dream he’d had that morning: ‘There was this procession descending to the sea to gather salt. A man was praying for peace and love. The dawn sun was ascending.’ Then he’d waited in the shade of a frangipani tree, happily chanting in snatches beneath his breath.
When Vijaya appeared at last, she was her characteristically amusing self, joking about the harpy aunt with whom she was to stay when Narayan had gone.
‘The Battleaxe phoned this morning, demanding to know why she’s not been allowed to meet these decadent Western guests. She asked if Clare chain-smoked and had a long black cigarette holde
r. She wanted to know if she made up her face in public, and if they talked about sex without interruption, and if they had they both gaily married and divorced several times already!’
Max thought that the bizarre practices of Western people – as seen through the jaundiced eyes of these viragos – had become for Vijaya quite a successful form of joke exaggeration. As they got into the car to leave, though, her joking petered out. Clare had tried to kiss her, but she’d turned her face awkwardly away, leaving Max to wonder what this portended.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Clare was lying on the beach, a short distance from the temple. Maria was with her, generously anointing the infant, and then herself, with sun cream. Earlier in the day, Clare had insisted upon knowing the child’s name – ‘assuming he has a name,’ she’d said – and was told it was Sam. Despite having rather reluctantly revealed this, Maria still referred to Sam as ‘it’ and called him by whatever other amusing names happened to appeal to her capricious nature at the time. ‘Let me rub some sun cream on your back as well,’ she said to Clare. ‘You know, you do have a gorgeous body.’
‘Thank you,’ said Clare, blushing a little.
‘No wonder Tammy finds you irresistible…’ Maria’s voice trailed off as she squinted to see into the distance. ‘My God, look at him! I hope he doesn’t swim out too far. There’s a nasty undertow on this coast, so I’ve heard.’
Clare followed Maria’s narrow-eyed stare and saw Tammy striding into the sea, being pushed back by waves as they broke against him. Eventually, he flung himself forward and began to swim.
Clare could not stop thinking about the cripple’s note, and what its omission of any reference to Tammy might imply. On the radio that morning there’d been an announcement that the police were getting closer to tracking down the assassins, whatever that meant in actual reality. Clare thought that if they really were on the verge of making arrests, it would make the assassins all the more desperate to strike at Tammy so as to silence him as a damaging witness. On the drive to Sandeha, she’d seen a number of motorbikes, each one causing her anxiety in case it could’ve been the two young men. But as she realised the riders were nothing like those she feared, she would relax, dismissing her anxieties, even embarrassed about allowing them to haunt her.
‘You’re crazy about him, aren’t you?’ Maria said, interrupting Clare’s thoughts. ‘As mad for him as I am for Antonio.’
‘Who? Tammy?’ Clare asked defiantly. ‘No! I most certainly am not.’
Having seen Vijaya in tears, Maria had been filled with an avid curiosity ever since. Clare resisted many of her questions, either answering them obliquely or not at all. But she did tell Maria about Max and Narayan, which Maria unconvincingly claimed to have guessed at already. Hesitant at first, Clare also found herself revealing the brief encounter between herself and Tammy. She soon wished she hadn’t, because Maria then became determined to urge her on.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Max has Narayan after all.’
‘But I feel very badly about Vijaya.’
‘You’ve no reason to,’ said Maria. ‘You’re not at all to blame for what’s happened.’
Nonetheless, Clare couldn’t get the sound of Vijaya weeping upstairs out of her mind. She recalled her own brief argument with Tammy afterwards.
‘I said I’d never marry her,’ he’d told Clare with very evident distress. ‘I respected her greatly but we were not compatible.’
‘You shouldn’t have told her that,’ Clare had replied, appalled. ‘It was cruel.’
They could not discus it further then because they’d had to join the others, who’d been waiting by the two cars, Tammy’s and Narayan’s. Vijaya had come downstairs then, feeling compelled to say goodbye. She’d joked about the wretched aunts who seemed to tyrannise her, however much she laughed at them, bravely covering up her enormous hurt regarding Tammy.
It now seemed that Tammy had changed his mind about swimming in the sea and was making his way back to shore. Clare watched him anxiously, wondering what he might do next. Sam was climbing all over her, joyfully exploring this newly acquired territory, trying to probe her mouth with his sticky fingers.
‘Stop him doing that,’ said Maria.
‘Oh no,’ Clare said, shaking her head. ‘He’s so affectionate. He doesn’t seem to know what an inhibition is, does he?’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Maria as she put a pair of binoculars to her eyes and began to focus on something over towards the temple, or perhaps on the temple itself.
‘A few self-respecting inhibitions wouldn’t do it any harm at all,’ she went on. ‘My God, Clare darling! Look! Max and Narayan are climbing the temple.’
She handed the binoculars to Clare. She set Sam down at her side, and raised the binoculars to her eyes. She had to adjust them slightly before she could make out Max stretching up his arms to find a handhold. Above him, Narayan was moving his hands and feet gingerly across the stonework.
Tammy was back on the beach and heading towards the temple himself.
‘Max isn’t good at heights,’ Clare said. ‘Presumably Narayan is. I hope he is.’
‘He’s strange, that one,’ said Maria. ‘A bundle of contradictions. What a fantastic body, though! It’s all that pumping iron, I suppose. If I writhed and grunted in a gym, heaving weights around, do you think I’d ever be reduced to a shape more like that? Oh baby, sweetie baby, tell me that it’s possible! Go on.’
Maria lifted Sam into the air, where he cooed benignly at her, before gently putting him down again. She beamed at Clare.
‘Antonio’s such a brute,’ she confided. ‘What a dance macabre the monster led me! And then I lost him, even after I bore him a son! Now, though, it seems it may not be for good. He sent me a text to tell me the Innamorata is goading him past endurance.’
‘The Innamorata?’
‘That skeletal creature he ditched me for, lured by the reek of her abominable loot. Apparently, she’s flying into screaming tantrums whenever he glances at another woman by accident, which probably happens only every half a minute or so, I’d say.’
Clare laughed. Sam was trying to remove the bung from a thermos flask that he’d pulled from the basket Maria had brought with them.
‘My gin!’ she cried out in simulated panic. ‘My chilled gin and tonic!’
She uncurled the child’s stubborn fingers from the bung, then unscrewed it and poured a dash of the contents into a cup.
Clare watched, astonished, as she gave it to Sam to drink.
‘It makes it so much better tempered,’ Maria gaily told her, although Sam sipped at it with a screwed-up face, obviously not approving of the taste at all. ‘Little angel monkey,’ she added, kissing the child lightly on his lips. ‘Monstrous little putto. Can you imagine it, Clare, painted on a Renaissance ceiling, all plump and rosy? Imagine its cherubic fat wings, and sweet little leer, hovering over some large sexy lady who is trying to forget her horrible butch lover and longing for some delicate, sweet substitute.’
Clare picked up the binoculars again and looked towards the temple. Tammy was now standing at its base, apparently readying himself to begin the climb. Max was halfway up, and Narayan was still above him. Clare thought it was typical of Max to want to climb this derelict temple, the element of danger adding to the romance of it, no doubt. Would they not be damaging its surface, though, however lightly? Was it not a form of desecration?
Tammy started climbing.
‘I think it’s boozing time,’ Maria announced. ‘Come on, let’s have some gin and tonic to celebrate the downfall of the dread Innamorata, cast into the outer darkness by the maddened animal.
‘Here’s to The Animal!’
‘I toast to him,’ Maria cried, handing a cup to Clare and taking a swig or two from her own. She gazed at The Putto – her current favourite name for him – but he wasn’t hovering over her with a sweetie leer at all. Instead, he was stumbling around in a most unfriendly sulk, letting off cross little squeaks
that Maria airily ignored.
Clare turned and noticed Subramaniam was approaching them, leaning on his stick, his shadow hobbling before him as if it lured him on across the windblown sand. She took a sip from her cup, and shifted her focus to the sea.
‘The tide’s coming in very fast,’ she said to Maria.
Narayan was nearing the crest of the temple. Max was directly below him, and Tammy was about halfway up now.
‘The temple’s much smaller than I’d imagined it over all these years,’ said Subramaniam as he reached the two women. ‘I pictured it covered with a hundred gods and heroes. Maybe the sea has worn them away.’ He sighed. ‘It’s more than fifty years since I last came here, you know, maybe even sixty. At my great age, time often seems so unreal; the distant past could have been in some other quite different life. Who knows what other lives I’ve led, or what other forms my wandering soul’s inhabited.’
He smiled gently at the two women, as if suspecting they were sceptical of such beliefs.
‘But reincarnation does pose problems,’ he conceded. ‘The idea of karma has its difficulties.’
‘Bad luck in this life being down to sins committed in a previous one?’ queried Clare.
‘Indeed, yes. I had a son who was born deformed. He died when he was only eight years old. I hated to think that was because of sins he’d committed in a past life. That’s so unjust. But no religion is perfect. All of them present us with their problems, in our search for transcendent meaning in this puzzling, often very painful, life of ours. So, so.’ Subramaniam paused reflectively before continuing. ‘I’m very happy to see the temple again,’ he said. ‘A reminder of my innocent youth. Why, though, are these young men climbing all over it? Is that entirely respectful of them?’
‘I was thinking the same,’ said Clare.
‘It is a religious building, even if it has been abandoned to the wind and waves. Maybe they think of themselves as the modern equivalents to those mythic heroes: Tammy with his economics, Narayan with his physics, a subject that tries to reduce the entire world to the whirling around of tiny atoms, lacking in both mystery and meaning. Oh but we’ve had such discussions, he and I.’
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