Table of Contents
Copyright
About Deborah Moggach
Snake Girl
Smile
Stiff Competition
Changing Babies
Selected Work by Deborah Moggach
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2013
This collection © 2013 Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited)
‘Snake Girl’’ © 1986 Deborah Moggach
‘Smile’ © 1985 Deborah Moggach
‘Stiff Competition’ © 1983 Deborah Moggach
‘Changing Babies’ © 1995 Deborah Moggach
The right of Deborah Moggach to be identified as the author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act of 1988.
The expression GOOD HOUSEKEEPING as used in the title of this book is the registered trademark of the National Magazine Company Ltd and the Hearst Corporation INC. The use of this trademark other than with the express permission of the National Magazine Company or the Hearst Corporation is strictly prohibited.
ISBN: 978-1-905563-81-4
Published by Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited), 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP
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About Deborah Moggach
Deborah Moggach is the author of numerous successful novels including the bestselling Tulip Fever. Her book These Foolish Things was adapted for the screen under the title The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and stars Judi Dench, Dev Patel, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith. Her screenplay for the film of Pride and Prejudice was nominated for a BAFTA, and her TV screenplays include the acclaimed Love in a Cold Climate and award-winning adaptations of her own novels Close Relations and Final Demand. She has also written two collections of short stories and a stage play.
Deborah has been Chairman of the Society of Authors and worked for PEN's Executive Committee, as well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in North London.
Snake Girl
What did Johnnie see in the gaudy Aisha, and she in him?
Everyone liked Johnnie. Always a smile, and first with the drinks at the Sind Club bar. Last to leave, too, but then he lived alone and where else would he go?
He would horse around with the kids, as well, at the Sind Club pool. His jokes were sometimes of a robust nature, for down in the bazaar he knew a supplier of plastic masks. Mothers liked him because they could dreamily give themselves up to the sun. Their children called him uncle and chased him, whooping, through the verandas. Turbaned bearers stepped aside. “He's never grown up,” parents said, as they sipped lime sodas under the dusty palms. “He's a child himself.” Sometimes, when they were posted elsewhere, as they inevitably were, they told their children to send him a postcard. Sometimes they remembered.
Nobody knew when he had come to Pakistan. He was simply one of the fixtures and fittings: a lean man in a beige bush-jacket, who could tell a newcomer where to buy the best Beluchi carpets and who knew all the reels for Burns Night. This happened once a year at the Consulate; he was paired off with career secretaries of uncertain age and American divorcees who chomped on menthol cigarettes and sometimes, unsuccessfully, asked him back to their place. There was Johnnie, blurred in the corner of a hundred snapshots, caught for ever in a lost episode in people's lives, before Washington, before London again, before their divorce and the dispersal of their growing children. “Isn't that him?” they'd point. Fixed, his face, eager to please in the blinking rabbit glare. Passingly, they felt curious.
He had an ageless, leathery look, from decades in the sun. He was a bachelor, and one of those innocents who survive surprisingly well in a devious country. How old was he: 45? 55? He wasn't secretive; it's just that if one does not offer information there are others more ready with their own, busy selves. Johnnie was a spectator, and one of that rare breed: a truly modest man.
He was British; a pilot with PIA. Few people knew his real name; he had been nicknamed Johnnie Walker on account of the whisky which in those days cost Rs 300 per bottle on the black market. At his shindigs there was always plenty of that, what with his airline connections and his legendary generosity. And plenty of home-made beer, which he brewed in buckets and called hooch. His cronies slapped him on the back; the Pakistani ones called him “old chap”.
Why had he never married? Jokingly he said that he'd missed his connection and the flight was never called. Besides, he was always somewhere else - Frankfurt one day, New York the next, standing the crew a drink in the bar of some intercontinental hotel. He wore the glazed bonhomie, the laundered pleasantness, of the permanently jetlagged. He returned with perfume for the plainest girls at the British Consulate, who thanked him wistfully. If people paused to wonder, they decided that his true love was planes - after all, the flight deck of a DC10 was simpler than any woman. And what could beat the romance of flying - lights blipping, that vast blue space above, arriving only to depart, the sweet angst of loss flavouring every encounter? He adored his job, that was plain; just look at his flat.
You had to duck to get into the living room. This was due to the model planes suspended from the ceiling. Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitoes - civilian and military aircraft, revolving slowly in the breeze from the fan. Otherwise his flat had a transitory air. It was situated on the new beach road outside the city: Route 43, that so far led nowhere. Apartment blocks had been built along it but in those days, the mid -'Seventies, they had not yet been completed; most were still concrete cells with electrical wires knotted from the ceiling, and a view of the sea. The parking spaces in front were edged with oil drums, from each of which drooped a bougainvillaea bush.
Hot wind blew, sand against concrete. Behind the flats stretched the grey desert.
“One day,” he joked, “this'll be the Third World's answer to Malibu beach.” People asked him if he felt lonely, living with the few other pioneers in Phase One, and he replied: “Me, lonely? With the best view in Pakistan?”
He said the sun setting over the Arabian Ocean was beautiful, but most sundowns he was to be found at the Sind Club bar.
Then in 1975, to everybody's surprise, Johnnie married. Gossip buzzed in the Sind Club bar; after all, there was little else to gossip about. “Young enough to be his daughter.” A nudge and a wink. “He's landed on his feet,” said Mr Bashir, from Cameron Chemicals. “Has he?” asked Kenneth Trimmer, from Grindlay's Bank. What did she see in him, and he in her? She was a small, gaudy Pakistani girl, seemingly sprung from nowhere. But then Karachi was used to arrivals and departures; the airport road was the busiest in the city.
Another nudge and wink. Above, the ceiling fans creaked. Along the walls bearers stood like waxworks. Beyond, the tree frogs whirred; beyond them, beyond the beach route and the apartment blocks, the hot wind blew in from the sea.
She had sprung from nowhere. At least, she was new to him. Music thudded from his lounge, where his guests gyrated under the swaying aircraft. There she was in his kitchen, buttering a slice of bread.
“You look starving,” he said.
She gazed up at him. She had large black eyes and shiny lipstick. “Someone said there was smoked salmon.”
“All gone.” A plate lay there, scattered with lime wedges. “I brought it back from London.”
“You'
re the pilot then?”
He nodded. He wanted to feed her up. He opened the fridge but by this stage in the evening everything had been eaten.
“Jam?” he asked. She nodded. She was wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt with spangles on it. Despite the make-up, and the indolent way she pushed her hair behind her ear, she looked so young. She ate greedily.
Her name was Aisha and she had come with Farooq and his crowd - young bloods who drove their Daddies' cars and went to the Excelsior Hot Spot. They knew the location of parties by a kind of radar.
And Aisha disappeared with them, with honking horns from down below and a slewing of tyres. Johnnie was left amongst the ashtrays, and when he moved to the window there was nothing but a huge moon silvering the sea. A string of street lights led to Karachi. He thought of flying, of cities laid out below like winking puzzles that sometimes made sense; he thought of his own back which was starting to ache whenever he leant over. He picked up a glass and straightened, with a grunt.
The next flight to London he bought back a packed of smoked salmon and put it in his fridge. And a few days later he found her.
It was downtown Karachi. Through a haze of exhaust smoke he spotted her outside the Reptile Emporium. Air crews bought shoes and handbags there; she was looking at the window display. He wanted to buy up the shop; he wanted to please her.
Nearby, a pavement kiosk sold cigarettes. But also, for those who knew, copies of Vogue and Penthouse could be produced from under the counter. He asked to see the selection. Inspired, he knew just what she wanted: a glossy copy of the Harrods Christmas Catalogue.
They sat in an open-air café behind the Metropole Hotel. Against the white glare of the sky a sign stuttered for 7-Up. She drank through a straw and pointed to photos of ostrich-trimmed nightgowns. “Ooh,” she gasped.
The next page was a festive table, laden with food; it glowed in the candlelight. “Look,” she pointed. There were two brushed children and their parents gathered around a pile of presents, which were wrapped in ribbon. Behind them an olde-world window was speckled with snow.
“I want to go to England,” she sighed.
He smiled. “It doesn't really look like that.”
Two street urchins came into the café and held out their hands.
“Backshish!” they demanded. She shooshed them away. Johnnie, however, gave them Rs 5 each - far too much. They sniggered and ran off. Today he felt foolish; he felt young.
Two months later they were married. He had never been so happy. Aisha sat on his knee and he told her about Singapore and Sydney. Her eyes widened; she stroked his cheek.
She liked jokes, too. One evening she put on a small black moustache.
Startled, he asked: “Trying to be Hitler?
She knew nothing about the Second World War. She replied: “Don't I look like Charlie Chaplin?” She loved the movies and could see the same ones again and again.
In their high apartment they gazed out at the sea; they ate smoked salmon and Bentinck's Bittermints. Some other windows were lit now, and sweetmeat sellers had set up their stalls on the sand. With his wife on his knee his flat became his home. He was no longer seen at the Sind Club; she thought it fuddy-duddy, with its shrouded billiards tables and relics of the Raj. She preferred the beach. Young men from the city drove out nowadays, their car boots clanking with crates of Bubble-Up and their radios blaring. The place was being developed into a seaside resort, of a minor nature. Fairy lights had been strung around a chicken-tikka café. Bold couples parked their cars and necked.
His own bearer had left, disapproving of this plump young woman who had bewitched his master. Neither Johnnie nor Aisha could cook, so the two of them went down to the beach café and sat on mismatched plastic chairs. They drank sweet tea while car radios played film music and the sea sighed, vastly. Young men ogled her; she shouted back at them - Urdu oaths which even Johnnie, an old trooper, couldn't understand.
Once he asked her about Farooq, who had brought her to the party, but she just shrugged. Farooq's family was in favour with the Bhutto government and involved in developing the beach; they had landed the contract to build a casino. One evening he and his friends arrived and dragged Aisha, squealing, to the water's edge. They sauntered back, their cigarettes glowing in the dark. Later she showed Johnnie the mark on her wrist where Farooq had gripped her. He was angry, but she shrugged. “Stupid Rooqi,” she said, with one of her baffling smiles. He felt pain, first for her and then for himself.
“In England she'd be called a scrubber,” said Shirley Trimmer, “But I like her.”
They were driving home from a Sind Club dinner-dance. “Not top drawer,” said her husband Kenneth. “But then, if one thinks of it, neither is he.”
It had been a stifling evening - an elderly band playing Frank Ifield tunes; polite wives in saris. She glanced at Kenneth. He was putting on weight. He had never been as pompous as this in England, but then in England he had never been a sahib.
She sighed and looked out of the window. Something was caught in the glare of the headlights. It was a camel, bedecked with beads. It turned its head slowly, like a puppet. She felt a rush of pleasure - the first, and last, of the evening.
Like her husband, Aisha was a lost soul, an orphan. Sometimes she talked about the past, but it was always the far past, when she was a child. Her father had been the assistant clerk of an irrigation scheme up in the north, in the Punjab. She talked about the ditches filled with brown water, the banks moulded like putty. She didn't use those words, but Johnnie pictured it.
He stroked her hair as she sat, curled in the armchair, and told him how she had adored her father and how she had followed him along the canals. He didn't know she was following him; he would have been angry. One day she lost him; she remembered looking down and seeing the water moving with snakes. Long, shiny snakes, they had coiled and knotted themselves in the water which was warm as soup.
Johnnie tilted her face towards him; her jaws worked as she chewed on her gum. He was filled with such tenderness that his limbs felt boneless.
“My serpent of old Nile,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“William Shakespeare,” he replied
She smiled, and turned the page of Movie Secrets.
“My snake girl,” he said.
She shivered. “Ugh! I hate snakes.”
Kenneth and Shirley Trimmer came out of the Reptile Emporium. It was May and the suffocating weather just beginning.
She was carrying her new snakeskin shoes. “You shouldn't have bargained!” she hissed.
“They respect you for it,” he replied. “You should understand by now.”
“Don't be condescending.”
“My dear, they're all on the fiddle.”
Only recently had he started calling her dear. She looked at him coolly. The subcontinent was turning him into the housemaster of a minor prep school. She should have suspected it.
Ahead she spotted Johnnie and his wife; Aisha wore luminous pink shalwar-kamize pyjamas and red high heels. She clung to his arm as they hailed a taxi.
“Don't they look happy,” Shirley said.
“Who?” He was not an observant man. She pointed them out. He said: “Obvious, isn't it. She's looking for a father and he's looking for a daughter. Won't last.”
There were damp semi-circles under his arms. She turned away and thought: But will we?
When Johnnie flew, he flew for his wife. Planes simply became vehicles to shorten the distance until he held her again. In foreign hotels his heart ached. He only found peace browsing in the gift arcades.
Sometimes he managed to get through on the phone - the lines to Pakistan were erratic - but often there was no reply. On his return he never asked her about this; he was too old to want to know the answer.
He returned, laden with gifts. Once, when he came home from a long haul and the phone had never answered, she gave him a present.
He unwrapped the box. It was a Mark V Spitfire, ready-
assembled. In fact he had one already, suspended near the kitchen door, but though she had tried to learn the difference between his planes she had never succeeded.
“Do you like it?” she asked. “There is a toy-wallah in Bohri Bazaar. I told him to make it for you.”
Deeply moved, he hugged her. How could he explain that the fun was in doing-it-yourself? For her, the fun was not-doing-it-yourself.
She didn't understand him. But what did that matter when in some obscure way, he could never find the words for it, they were two of a kind? He loved her all the more.
One day Shirley bumped into Aisha in Bhori Bazaar, the main bazaar of the city. Along the alleys, saris hung like flags; village women shuffled past, shrouded in bourqas like grubby sheets; a legless beggar sat on his trolley and the air smelt of incense.
”I'm going to London soon,” said Aisha. “I'm going to Oxford Street.”
Shirley grimaced. “It's awful. Tacky and crowded.”
Aisha gestured around. “But this is dirty and crowded.”
“No,” smiled Shirley. “This is romantic.”
Aisha wrinkled her nose. “You English people, you must be mad.”
He wanted to show her the world; on the other hand he wanted to keep her safe. For the first time in his career he thought of hijackers and metal fatigue. He blamed this for his reluctance.
But how her eyes would widen at the England she desired so fiercely: acres of separates at Marks & Spencer; fairy lights not over a tikka café but looped high around Harrods; clean, moneyed streets.
He himself had lived abroad for so many years that by now this was his England too. He too saw it from an air-conditioned transit bus; he had become an outsider. London was where you bought gift-wrapped jars of marmalade and where people still sometimes said I'm sorry. If you move from one scentless hotel room to another, cities blur. They become a fast flip of picture postcards and a memento, at the bottom of your suitcase, you forgot you bought.
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