by Preethi Nair
‘Kavitha, why you can’t you learn to sing like the Cilla Black?’ my dad would ask her.
‘I am singing.’
‘This is not the singing, see, neighbours have written letters doing complaining,’ my dad said, producing letters that contained handwriting which appeared remarkably similar to that of his own.
‘This is all for Nina, so she will find a good man, coming from a good family,’ my mother replied.
‘No, only man who comes will be police.’
But she continued unabated by threats of the council charging her with noise pollution. Because, for her, if it produced the desired result it would all have been worth it.
When I arrived I knocked on the door as instructed. A short man opened it and took me to the dining room where he asked me to take a seat. He said that the Guru was with someone and would see me shortly. I was nervous and excited; seeing the Guru was the first positive step I had taken in a long while. Admittedly, I was also feeling slightly apprehensive, not about being in a stranger’s house but about what the Guru might say, so I focused on the decoration in the dining room and, like Lloyd Grossman, studied the clues and imagined what sort of family lived there. Half an hour later the man came back and led me to another room. I knocked on the door and went in.
Warm jasmine incense and soft music and candles filled the room, and on pieces of colourful silk stood statues of gods in all different sizes. The Guru acknowledged me by nodding his head and asked me to remove my shoes and take a seat opposite him on the floor. I did so nervously.
‘Date of birth?’ the Guru asked swiftly.
‘Fourth of September, 1972.’
He proceeded to draw boxes, do calculations, and then, like a bingo caller, he reeled off some numbers which, he said, were the key events that had marked my life: aged six, an accident with the element of fire which had left deep scarring. I looked at my right arm; it was well covered, how could he have known that? He continued: aged eighteen, a romantic liaison which did not end in marriage. At this point he raised his eyebrow. Aged twenty-five, another. I saw how this could look bad to a holy Guru who believed in traditional values and the sanctity of just one arranged marriage so I avoided eye contact.
‘A Western man?’ he questioned.
I nodded.
He shook his head. ‘It is being serious?’ he asked.
I nodded again.
‘Parents knowing?’
I shook my head.
‘Parents not arranging anything?’
Parents were very busy arranging things. Last week the hot favourite was a twenty-nine-year-old investment banker, this week it was thirty-one-year-old, five degrees accountant Raj, the letters behind his name rolling off the page.
The Guru stopped at age twenty-six, with the death of my best friend.
‘It will all change,’ he promised. I fought back the tears and then he touched the palms of my hands and they began to tingle, a warm glow that made his words feel safe.
‘Stagnant life now, unable to move forward, unable to take decision. See this,’ he said, nodding at my palms, ‘this is now flow but too much negativity in body for flow. Let it go. Let it all go.’ And that’s how the whole coconut-over-bridge routine came about.
It sounds bizarre now but he performed a ceremony that morning, asking permission from the gods to be able to treat me. The coconut he used in the ceremony was meant to represent me and he stained it with saffron. He did the same with my forehead so that the coconut and I were united. The river was supposed to represent new life. After mumbling a prayer, the Guru asked me to return after I’d thrown my coconut self off the bridge. I could have chosen anywhere where there was water, even the canal near where we lived, but I didn’t want the coconut to sink to the bottom and find a rusty bicycle, a portent of doom if ever there was one, so I chose London Bridge.
‘There will be a big change in you, Nina,’ he said as I left, coconut in hand. ‘Come and see me later this evening.’
After I hurled the coconut off the bridge I felt immensely relieved. I wiped the stain off my forehead and went to work, ready to caress Boo Williams’ ego. I got to work only to be told that Boo was too upset to get out of bed and would be in the following day instead. Still, I was unperturbed.
Richard, one of my colleagues, commented on how well I was looking.
‘I’m getting engaged,’ I replied.
When the coconut had left my hands all my decisions seemed so clear. I wanted to phone Jean Michel right away to tell him that I was going to marry him. I started to dial his mobile number but decided to wait for him to come back from his trip the next day and tell him in person. Everything that day at work was effortless. I knew I wouldn’t have to be there for long: once Jean and I were married I could think about other options. And my mum and dad? What would I do with them? If I looked at things optimistically, Jean could charm my mother – he could charm anyone, he was incredibly charismatic – and my mum, in turn, could work on my dad. Together we could make him come around.
Jean called me later that afternoon and I had to stop myself from blurting it all out.
‘I can’t wait to see you, ma cherie.’
‘Me too. When you’re back it’s all going to change. I love you, Jean.’
All I had to do was wait one more day and all the pretence could stop.
The Guru had given me the energy to make all obstacles appear surmountable and later that evening I returned to thank him for what he had done. He prescribed one more session for the following day, just to make sure I would keep on track. How I wish I had stopped there.
The next morning the Guru’s door was slightly ajar so I knocked on it and walked in. He had his back to me and was lighting his candles, humming away and swaying to Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York', which was playing loudly. It got to the alien bit when the Guru turned around. He looked startled when he saw me and immediately stopped the tape recorder, saying that he was sampling the music that was corrupting the youth of today, and promptly changed the cassette to a whinging sitar.
‘Sting is not a corrupting force,’ I said. ‘In fact, he’s against deforestation.’
The Guru glared at me when I said deforestation like he didn’t know what the word meant, but now I think about that look – eyes narrowing, brows furrowed – it was probably more that he remembered he had a job to do.
He signalled for me to sit on the floor and held my hands. They tingled with warmth again as he whispered kind words and then he began humming and chanting. Then the Guru asked me to lie down and he proceeded to touch me, moving slowly from my hands to other parts of my body, my neck, my feet; incantations and gods’ names being chanted all the while as he healed the negativity that shrouded me, asking me to let it go. As he unbuttoned my clothes and took off my top, his breath became rhythmic, his chanting louder, his beads pressed against my chest. I closed my eyes, wanting to believe that I was lost between the gods’ names and that none of this was really happening. It couldn’t happen; a holy man wouldn’t do this, he couldn’t do this, this wasn’t supposed to happen. His beard brushed against my skin, his fingers circled my mouth, I pretended that my trousers had not come down.
I have often asked myself why I didn’t get out of there sooner and how I had got myself into such a position. I didn’t want to believe what was really going on, because if I did, nothing whatsoever would make any sense – and the only thing at that point in time that I had left to hang on to was my belief. I didn’t want to believe what his dry, filthy hands were doing because I would have had to concede that whoever was responsible for sending me signs had sent this Guru, who was into an altogether different kind of spiritual feeling. Nobody could be that cruel.
As he placed his salivating mouth on my lips and pulled up his robe, I smelled him, and it was this that made something inside of me snap. He smelled of coffee. I kicked him, pushed him off me and managed to get out from under him before he used his magic wand.
‘No,’ I shoute
d.
‘You’re cursed,’ he screamed as I ran out of the door. ‘Cursed, and I will make sure of it.’
How I had sunk to such depths still remains a mystery but, essentially, that is where my journey began. I was confused and desperate, feeling wholly inadequate, riddled with self-doubt and dirty. I wanted to call Jean Michel and tell him but he would kill the Guru. So I tried to block it from my mind and pretend that nothing had happened.
The train I was on stopped. Some old man with the same rotten teeth as the Guru got on. It’s funny how that happens; reminders of the things you are trying most to forget. He smiled at me and I felt physically sick. My hands began to shake. ‘It didn’t happen,’ I kept saying to myself. ‘It’s all in the mind, it didn’t happen,’ and I reached into my handbag to get a mint. While I was fishing for it I found an envelope that was marked urgent.
It was a contract that I had looked over for a client, and which had been sitting in my handbag for the last two days. I had promised to send it back the next day and had completely forgotten. But today it was all going to change. I had to hold it together.
‘All change here,’ announced the driver. Although running late I was determined to buy a stamp, find a postbox, and personally post this letter. Posting it myself would be symbolic of my commitment to getting my life back on track. But, wouldn’t you know, there wasn’t a postbox in sight.
‘You’re cursed,’ I kept hearing, and the more I heard it, the more adamant I became that I would find a postbox and put everything behind me.
My boss, Simon, was slightly concerned when I arrived late. I was never late.
‘Is everything all right, Nina?’
‘Fine, just fine,’ I said, making my way to my desk.
I turned on the computer and looked out of the window. The buildings were grey and dreary and set against a grey winter sky. So many times I had sat looking out of this window, imagining the sky to be orange, wishing that I could soak up the rays of an orange sky, fly out of the window and have the courage to do something else, something that gave me meaning.
I had been working at Whitter and Lawson for the last three and a half years, representing all kinds of artists but mostly those who had issues over copyright or needed contractual agreements with galleries drawn up. I read somewhere that people work on the periphery of what they really want to do so that they don’t have to cope with rejection. So, someone who harboured desires to be a racing-car driver would be a mechanic on a racetrack but not actually drive the car. It was like this for me in a sense: I’d always wanted to be a painter and so I worked with artists. But my job wasn’t really about art, it was about making money, dealing with boosting egos. Feeling increasingly cynical and secretly thinking that I could do much better. But I couldn’t – it wasn’t really rejection I feared, it was disappointing my father and sabotaging his investment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
I’d known I wanted to be a painter since the age of six. My brain had always had difficulty engaging with my mouth and I was unable to fully articulate any emotion except on paper. So anything I felt, I produced in a swirl of finger-painted colours that nobody could quite manage to understand. When I found out that my sister wasn’t coming back I did more of the same. My parents didn’t hang the pictures on the fridge door with a magnet – they didn’t know that that is what you were supposed to do with the nonsensical pictures that your children produced. They didn’t even lie and tell me how good they were. Instead, the pictures were folded up and binned while my father would sit with me and read me bits from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, extracts that even he didn’t understand. He was preparing me for a career in law, or ‘love’ as he mispronounced it.
His career choice for me was not based on any longstanding family tradition. He was a bus driver and I think he just wanted to give me the best possible start, and make sure I would not have to face the instability that he had suffered. That’s why when the encyclopaedia man came round when I was young and sensed the aspirations my father had for me, he blatantly incorporated me into his sales pitch by saying that the books would set me on course for a high-flying career. My dad bought the whole set, which he could clearly not afford, taking on extra jobs like mending television sets so he could buy the entire set and receive the latest volume, year after year.
At sixteen, when I expressed a desire to go to art college he went ballistic and didn’t speak to me for weeks. When he did it was to say, ‘Nina, I have not sacrificed the life so you can do the hobby, the lawyer is a good profession. Not that I am pressurising you, not that I came to the England to give you the good education and work every hour and make sacrifices.’
Put that way I could clearly see his point. So I did an art A level without him knowing about it – just in case, by some miracle, he changed his mind. He didn’t and so I went to university to study law.
Whitter and Lawson was where I did my training, and I worked incredibly hard so that they would give me a job after I had finished; at least that way I could be around artists and connect with their world. Everyone around me said it was impossible, there were hardly any Indian lawyers representing artists and it was a place where contacts mattered. People said that I would need a miracle to be taken on by the firm but I busted my gut and worked every single hour I could, going out of my way to prove everyone wrong.
I remember making promises that I would do a whole series of things if I got the job, like give away ten per cent of my future earnings to charity and buy a Big Issue weekly. To whom these promises were made I couldn’t really tell you; maybe just to myself. So I should have known that the first visible signs of wanting out was crossing the road, making out like I hadn’t seen the Big Issue man when he was blatantly waving at me. But I pretended, pretended that I was lucky to have a job and make lots of money and be in that world. My dad always said this was what life was about – working hard, being disciplined, making money, surviving in a ‘dog eating the cat’ world. But then my best friend Ki died and none of that made sense anymore. An uneasiness began to set in.
Felicity, the PA, called me to say that Boo Williams was waiting for me in reception.
Ki disintegrated rapidly at twenty-five. She had felt a lump in her leg while she was away travelling but decided it was nothing. By the time she came back it had spread throughout her whole body. There was nothing anyone could do. I pretended it would be fine; didn’t even see the head scarf and the dribbling mouth and the weight loss. She whispered lots of things to me and I made a whole heap of promises to her. I’m not sure exactly what I said, I wasn’t really there so couldn’t remember any of it. Not until that moment, the moment I sat at my computer thinking about how I’d not taken responsibility for anything.
What I had promised her was that I would live my life passionately and do all the things I really wanted to, not just for me but for her.
The day she told me about her condition she dropped it in like it was something she forgot to mention on a shopping list. Ki had got back from Thailand a couple of weeks earlier, and we had spent virtually every day together since. That day we were off to Brighton, and her dad was in the driveway cleaning his car.
‘It’s hot weather, na?’ he asked.
‘Good, isn’t it?’ I replied.
‘Makes me want to go and visit some bitches.’
I looked at him as Ki came out. He continued, ‘Na, beta, saying to Nina we must visit some bitches.’
‘It’s beaches, Dad, beaches. Yeah, we’ll visit loads and we’ll make sure we do it soon.’
I remember thinking that comment was strange as she normally took the piss out of his mispronunciations.
‘Yours is into bitches, mine thinks I’m into porn,’ I said walking back in with her.
‘What?’
‘I didn’t realise that the Sky box downstairs was linked to the one upstairs, and I was flicking through it and lingered on a few porn channels and this lesbian talk show.
She looked at me.
‘It was just out of interest, didn’t know I was interrupting Mum and Dad watching their Zee TV. Then in the morning I heard my dad tell my mum to talk to me, to have a word, maybe marriage would straighten that out. So she just left a couple more CVs on the table.’
‘When will you tell them about Jean?’
‘Soon,’ I said.
‘Tell them soon, Nina, it’s not worth the wait. Do what makes you happy. You’ll make sure you’re happy, won’t you?’
I looked at her. Where did that come from?
‘I’ve got cancer, Nina, and it’s bad. Phase three, that’s what they called it. Don’t think they can do much with chemo but they’ll give it a go.’
She said it just like that, like she had bought some new trousers from French Connection and had forgotten to tell me.
She hadn’t told her parents. Outside, her dad was blissfully ignorant; bucket in one hand, sponge in another, cleaning his shiny silver car and talking about bitches, unaware that shortly his life would change forever.
I deluded myself that chemo would sort it. I knew if I bargained hard and made a whole series of promises, it would be all right. Right until the last minute I believed that. Even when she died, I held on to her, not letting go. Her dad had to pull me off her.
The phone went again. ‘Ms Williams is waiting for you in reception, Nina.’
‘I heard you the first time,’ I snapped.
My colleagues turned and looked at me. I never lost it. No matter what, I was always calm. Calm and reliable Nina, who worked twelve hours a day if necessary. Calm and dependable Nina, who did what was asked of her; who went to the gallery openings that nobody else in the firm wanted to go to.
I got up and went to reception to meet Boo. She was dressed in black and wore bright red boots, the colour of the dried tomatoes she had put into Venus de Milo’s sockets.
‘Sorry to have kept you waiting.’
‘Quite,’ she replied.
And that was it, the word that tipped me over the edge.