‘Have I ever introduced you to Lord Bijlani?’ asked Heera, linking her arm in Bob’s, guiding his reluctant feet across the room.
‘A peer?’
‘Arre no, jaan, his first name is “Lord”. What clever parents – why didn’t they call him “Lakhu”? This way, everyone thinks he’s an MP sitting in the House of Lords. Anyway, he’s in the manufacturing business, he makes leather seats for luxury cars. He was also in some insurance scam. His bossy mother lives with him and everyone knows she sits on his head, so he can’t find a wife,’ whispered Heera in a tumble of words.
Lord Bijlani wore a black leather jacket and tight leather jeans; his fitted shirt was unbuttoned to display a gold chain. He squealed and kissed Heera soundly and roundly on both cheeks. Was the leather of his jacket the same as the fabric of his car seats? wondered Bob, as he offered him a drink, aching to hear the cool voice at the other end of the telephone. On his way upstairs, he was stopped by a man with greasy hair and piercing eyes. ‘I am Dr Sridhar T. I cure incurable illnesses,’ he announced, thrusting a visiting card into Bob’s hands. He moved away, but returned an instant later. ‘Slight spelling mistake in card. Printing was done in India, but do read.’
Bob read obediently: People loose valuable things in life. Without Health life is nothing. Patient cured includes many Business magnets, many M.PS, M.L.A’s. Successful treatments by Dr. Sridhar T for Intestine disc’s, gynaecological disc’s, sexual disc’s, baby of choice.
Dr Sridhar was a ‘world-renowned miracle doctor’ visiting England. His previous surgery had been conducted three evenings a week at a school hall in his Indian hometown. A new patient entering the hall was presented with a token and seated among a few hundred people in perpetual motion. The newcomer was then sent to men and women in white coats in a tiny room, and Dr Sridhar stepped forward. As the patient opened his mouth for a mandatory inspection, several heads peered in as one, notes were taken, glances exchanged and little white pills prescribed by Dr Sridhar, to be taken twice a day after meals. Despite the fact that only the tongue was on display, the patient came away feeling undressed.
Dr Sridhar’s wife, Manjula, was a tall woman with a face the shape of the full moon. Placid and calm, she bore her sister-in-law’s harassment with equanimity. Radiant in her third month of pregnancy, she initially dismissed a mound of curly human hair, red chillies and a doll stuffed with pins on her pillow as a childish prank. When she gave birth to a deformed child, Manjula shrieked it was the hand of voodoo, but remained unsupported in her conviction. The baby died within days, and a year later Manjula became the wild-eyed mother of a healthy boy, but still slipped into postnatal depression, a condition that remained undetected by her husband. She attempted suicide, mistakenly swallowing the pills he prescribed to his patients instead of the sleeping pills purchased for the overdose, but survived, recovering the calm of thin ice. Manjula was living testimony to both the failure and success of her husband’s little white pills.
Bob slipped away from the doctor, excitement driving him upstairs.
‘I know it’s you, Bob,’ accused the voice.
Bob stared silently out of the window, telephone in hand.
‘We can’t go on like this. You know that. Tell her. Tell her now.’
O Romeeeo, O Romeeeo, wherephore art thou Romeeeo, wailed the cross-legged ‘Shakespeare’ as Bob wandered in a daze into the hallway and into his study. Eight children were on the carpet watching a Bollywood film in a room overflowing with laundry baskets, books and a computer on a tiny table. A photograph of Heera in a bridal sari stared back at his shuttered eyes as a plate of tikkis and chutney hovered over his shoulder. ‘There you are, jaan,’ chided Heera. ‘Why are you here? There are so many people you must meet – how can you neglect your guests? Come outside, come look after them.’
A voice yelled, ‘Heera, forget your bak bak. Talk later, go to the kitchen, your kebabs are going to burn.’
Heera peered into the oven and retrieved a steaming tray of kebabs. ‘This is Sam. She works at Smith’s. You know, the curtain shop on Burleigh Street. She’s the one with the tattoo on her thingy,’ said Heera on her way out to serve the kebabs.
‘Shall I show you my tattoo?’ challenged the girl called Sam.
‘That’s entirely your decision,’ replied Bob.
Sam swiftly unbuttoned her blouse for an instant to reveal a black rose tattoo nestling between her Wonderbra-enhanced breasts, before turning to the aloo tikkis in the microwave. ‘I used to work in a salon on Green Street. I do hair, nails, mehndi, threading and facial. I used to do full body wax also,’ she continued archly. ‘You know – full. Where does she keep her pickles?’
The young woman hunted in a cupboard. She walked closer to Bob, scrutinising his face. ‘You need to look after yourself. If you don’t, who will? Anyway, I’m saving up for a boob job now.’
Bob felt no obligation to respond.
‘What’s that about boobs? Take some of mine, they’re too big.’ Heera turned to Bob, who was perched on a kitchen stool. ‘Jaan, again hiding? Sam, what magic are you working on my husband? Leave him alone. Come, jaan, look who’s here – it’s Manoj Daryanani!’ she announced flirtatiously.
Manoj Daryanani was a tall, slim man with an unlined face. Dressed in a spotless white kurta pyjama, he greeted people from afar with folded hands, backing away as if from contamination.
‘Jaan, look after Manoj, give him some pakoras,’ advised Heera.
‘No fried things! He has a problem, you know, with his digestion,’ warned Manoj’s wife, a silent fellow sufferer.
Charlie and Barry waved their whisky in wobbly unison. ‘And do you remember what Karnani said at the end of the shareholders’ meeting?’ asked Charlie. ‘That he must thank people “on the backside”.’ The two men roared at an old joke, the ice in their glasses rocking in merriment. Another voice roared from the carpet, reaching a crescendo:
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones
An elderly Englishman declared as he waved a kebab in his listener’s face, ‘I do agree, without Asian medical personnel, the NHS would collapse.’
When shalla we three meet again
In thunder, lightning,
Orrrr in rain?
When the hurrrlyburrrly’s done,
When the battle’s losht and won.
Heera hurried over to ‘Shakespeare’. ‘Brahma-ji, you must be so tired, dinner is served on the table.’
‘Su-er.’
Bob turned to leave the room. ‘Where are you off to, Bob? Aren’t you going to cut the cake?’ cried his sister Sarah.
‘You’re a lucky man, Bob,’ observed his cousin Jonathan.
‘Heera’s a lucky woman to be married to my brother,’ contradicted Sarah. ‘Let’s raise a toast to the happy couple.’
‘Speech, speech!’ clapped a woman with flaming henna-dyed hair and blue clanging bangles on her wrist.
Bob put his arm around Heera and addressed a speck on the floor. ‘She’s everything to me.’
A murmur went round the room. ‘Ah, bless.’ Heera sniffed, before twisting herself out of his embrace to cry, ‘Who wants tiramisu, who wants apple crumble, who wants ice cream and who wants rosogulla?’
‘Mustn’t be naughty!’ vowed Sarah, a hand fluttering over her abdomen, as she greedily surveyed the desserts. ‘Ooh, shall I give in this once?’
‘Wouldn’t you rather have the cake and eat it, too?’ asked her husband Brian sourly.
Sarah always surrendered to her sweet tooth, but rarely to her husband. She had persuaded him to exchange their house in Royston for a dilapidated farmhouse outside a Tuscan village, hoping to convert the barn and stables into luxury tourist apartments. The legalities of the transfer of property deeds were as much a nightmare for Brian as working the ancient water pump and cleaning out the well. He harvested the grapes and olives and struggled to find a match for broken kitchen tiles. She never wanted
sex, only olives by the truckload to sell in the local market. He was ready to return to England, but Sarah refused. He wished he could write an autobiography with the title My Grapes of Wrath.
‘Anyone for coffee?’ Heera approached Manoj Daryanani, who asked for a glass of hot water. His wife explained, ‘For his voice.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ queried Heera.
‘He sings.’
‘Wah ji, you are a gayak, you are a singer, and you did not even tell us! That means you must perform for us right now. Yes, yes, I’m not taking a “No” from you. It’s my anniversary, you have to please me. Come on, ji,’ cried Heera persuasively.
Manoj Daryanani, who needed a straight-backed chair, now occupied the carpet so recently vacated by ‘Shakespeare’. Heera carried out a harmonium and a pair of tabla, but he looked disdainfully at the instruments and waved them away as he cleared his throat. ‘Hari, meri itni suno,’ he intoned. It was the first line of a devotional song.
‘Why don’t you sing a film song instead? How about “Yeh Shaam Mastani”?’ suggested Barry, now on his third Scotch and viewing the world through heavy-lidded eyes. Barry was recovering from a disagreement earlier that day with his teenage son. The drink would dull the pangs of parenting.
He ached to leave it all and return to India. Perhaps he was not too old; he might still find a job in an Indian company. Life wouldn’t be the same, of course, none of the luxuries they took for granted in England, but at least he would never again feel the fear, the black pounding of his heart as he discovered the cannabis hidden behind his son’s physics textbook. It was still not too late to take his son back to India. Ari was a good boy in bad company, but what would Shanti say? It would kill her, the way she pampered that boy, as if he were a prince from Patiala. It was all her fault, spoiling him, letting him think he could do whatever he wanted, money from his mother any time, so what if Dad didn’t give it to him, the manipulative little bugger went to Mummy. ‘Come to Mummy, son, Mummy understands her beta.’
He had told Ari from the very beginning, ‘Yes, it is hard to live in this British society. You can’t be mediocre if you want to be accepted here, you have to show you are the best at something – swimming, maths, science, computers, something at least – then they will admire you. But instead you have become a zero, a nothing, a charsi, a drug addict, and what do you think, just because you can fool your mother, you can do the same with me? You will know what your father is made of if you ever touch that stuff again.’
‘Yes, why don’t you sing “Yeh Shaam Mastani”,’ repeated Barry jovially, as he hitched his trouser waistband.
Manoj Daryanani frowned at Barry’s levity. Thirty minutes later, during his rendition of ‘Raag Bageshree’, the bolder members of the audience had already escaped via the conservatory door. Those who remained trapped leaped with unapologetic haste after the last prolonged note and scattered, beads of a strung note onto the carpet.
The guests disbanded at the moment that the Trinity College clock struck midnight over Great Court. Heera surveyed the empty living room with satisfaction. She had already guessed Sarla’s gift by its contours; always the same Indian wrapping paper bought in bulk and the same box of chocolates without an expiry date or manufacturer’s label from a shop in Wembley. Sarah and Brian’s gift was olive marinade.
Bob was lying on their bed, staring at the ceiling. What was it that ridiculous little man ‘Shakespeare’ had recited about a tide in the affairs of men taken at the flood, and was this such a time, to submit, release the torment and anguish within and allow it to take its course, let it take him to good fortune or to defeat? Or would he regret it forever afterwards, and would the shame be a torment far greater? Would he be forever damned, or should he plunge, surrender?
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
The crumbling sensation in his throat all evening turned to fuzzy warmth as he remembered. The meeting had been in a small conference room. As the executives streamed in, Bob’s secretary hurriedly handed him a copy of the Finance Director’s memo before the heavy oak door closed. Bob nodded to his colleagues, his eyes roaming the room, a swelling bubble of excitement as he recognised the dark, bent head of a man reading by the window. The man turned and looked at Bob, eyes a cool smoky grey that clashed and tumbled into his own, and Bob turned from the flint of the other man’s gaze to take a seat at the table. As the diminutive Finance Director talked, a powdery thirst invaded Bob’s throat, and he reached for a jug of water, staring involuntarily at the golden hair on the wrist of the man beside him. The lights dimmed as they looked at the first chart in the PowerPoint presentation on the wall at the far end of the room.
Bob felt tingling heat on his thigh as the brushing movement of a hand left its searing imprint. He continued to stare at the wall. As Adam teased Bob’s ankle with his own, Bob grappled this new, daring reality while tortured angels tumbled and frolicked in a forbidden fountain, resisting banishment. At the end of the meeting, he hurried towards the door. A cool voice behind him asked if he would like to stop by at the pub. Without meeting Adam’s eyes, Bob mumbled that he had to get home. ‘Another time, then,’ Adam had said smoothly, turning away. ‘No, wait!’ flung Bob. It was a strangled, torn sound.
As Heera entered the bedroom, she knew something was wrong, something far worse than unwrapping stale chocolates from Sarla for the third consecutive year. She had found Bob pacing the room, a half-empty whisky glass in his hand. He never drank upstairs, and usually shared a pot of Chinese green tea with her before retiring. He told her he had something important to say, but that it could wait until she was ready, and she had looked at him, wordlessly taking her perspiration-stained pink nightgown and matching robe from the room, returning drawn and anxious a few minutes later.
Afterwards, she had asked Bob in the dim bedroom light why he had chosen their anniversary to tell her. All he could say, standing ridiculous and pale in his faded blue striped pyjamas, was that big occasions made his decisions seem smaller. He had finally found the handle to the door of his closet, and he was coming out. He could no longer conceal, only reveal; he would not hide, he would announce with pride – he was a bisexual.
Then Bob crumpled at the hurt she would feel, the disgust and repulsion, her accusations of trickery and fraud. He had never meant to deceive or dissemble, he beseeched, he was fragile and frail.
If he was frail, so was she, Heera thought fiercely. It wasn’t only her depleted hormones that needed replacement; she needed implants of reassurance. He had never really been by her side, she decided; she had been living with a phantom, hollow, filled with straw, lit and brought to life by another. What had he expected her to say? she thought dully, head exploding, as she lay awake in the dark. What did he think she would do with his revelation? And it had to be a coincidence, one of those amazing ironies of life, that her cousin had told her of Javed’s divorce and of his forthcoming visit to England.
Bob had a dream that night; he was a boy in his father’s cottage near the moors, running home through the heath to his mother, who was wearing a blue and white floral dress. She scooped him into her arms for a warm embrace, and he hugged Adam back. Heera responded sleepily. As suddenly, his arms fell away from her, and he turned on his side again, heart thumping in the darkness, afraid that she might be awake.
It was Adam who banished Eve from the Garden of Eden.
CHAPTER THREE
The customer is always right
THE WIND PROWLED for new victims as cyclists wobbled, their nostrils filled with the sniff of fresh bread snaking out from the bakery on Mill Road. The smoke from its blackened chimney was whirled away over the grey rooftops, and three doors down from IndiaNeed the handpainted sign Wright and Sons, Bookbinders since 1930 flapped noisily above the entrance to the shop. A young man in a black leather jacket and merino russet scarf announced his arrival;
inside, an elderly man shuffled towards him in the dim light, weaving through stacks and piles of theses, glue, buckram, bookbinding tools and overalls. The young man took delivery of a Cambridge thesis bound in black, pressing it proudly to his chest as he left.
The blonde florist arranged the blooms in buckets on the rack outside the Sunflowers Florists shop, waiting for her boyfriend to propose. The wind spotted two Pakistani women walking slowly past the solicitor’s firm towards IndiaNeed, and playfully buffeted the elderly lady and her stick into the shop. Abandoning her mother, the younger woman swooped on the soft toys, gathering armfuls of teddy bears that were as suddenly dropped back onto the shelves.
‘One ear or two – does it really make a difference? Arre, tell the child that they are special designer teddies. Doesn’t that expensive Steiff teddy always have a button only in one ear? See, I am giving these to you at a special discounted price. One for a pound,’ urged Heera.
The young woman needed little persuasion; the one-eared toys were shiny and new. Shabbier toys were always removed by the volunteers and despatched to the skip, along with the reject clothing that often only missed a button or a thread. A firm regularly collected the contents of the skip and paid the shop fifty pence per bag. Heera’s neighbour was an airline manager, who offered to send the reject bags to any charitable institution in India free of charge, but Diana Wellington-Smythe’s grey eyes had narrowed at the suggestion; she was convinced the contents would be distributed or even sold among Heera’s relatives and friends.
The elderly Pakistani lady examined a furry black monkey lying in a basket next to her chair. Its giant tail had been mistakenly sewn on in front, and she looked at the freak toy in silence. Swarnakumari frowned and whispered, ‘This is not good, Durga. What will that lady think of us? I thought we had thrown that dirty thing away. Who put it there again?’
The Cambridge Curry Club Page 3