Roman noticed it was a changed wind, giving direction, no longer scattering the leaves into the cracks in the pavement. Pablo Neruda knew what he was feeling, and had said it so much better than he ever could. She and he were together in the autumn. He could not merely vanish; a tempest did not go quietly. ‘Tempest’ was ‘tempestas’; ‘tempus’ was time, and he would be Prospero, stirring up a storm into something ‘rich and strange’.
Durga wondered why she had agreed to go out with Roman Tempest. He had returned after propping the bed along the wall outside the shop. Running his fingers uncertainly through his hair, he waited for her response to his invitation, his eyes soft and warm, the accidental brush of their hands leaving them both awkward. They had arranged to meet the next day; she would accompany him to the American Cemetery at Madingley, and show him the Eagle pub, where wartime American pilots waiting for sorties had etched their names with cigarette lighters and their girlfriends’ lipsticks on the ceiling. Then they would go out for dinner. Another time they would visit the Samuel Pepys library at Magdalene College, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, the Scott Polar Research Institute and the Fitzwilliam Museum. In the spring, they would visit the Botanic Gardens and walk in the Backs to admire the crocuses, daffodils, tulips and bluebells.
There was an important detail she had omitted to mention, did not see the need to mention: she was married.
CHAPTER NINE
Home is where the heart is
DURGA STOOD RUEFUL after Roman had left, a quiet tempest brewing. It had been stardust and shooting stars, she had met the stranger whose locked glance she had coveted in her dreams like a romantic fool, but he had been a pleasant interlude, nothing more. She would retreat.
It had been a spring day in South Kensington; the magnolia blossoms in the communal gardens were bursting into velvety bloom, and Durga was thirteen. Her parents informed her over lunch: her father, the manager of a leading Indian bank, was being transferred back to Bombay. The move had been premeditated; Durga was being whisked away from the temptations of drugs, cigarettes, sex and rock ’n’ roll in time for a dose of roadtested middle-class Indian values.
At the age of twelve Durga had sung and pirouetted in her room in their South Kensington flat overlooking the French café, reed-thin arms and legs, gawky in a short skirt. Pop would ruin Durga’s voice, argued Durga’s mother; Indian classical singing came from the pit of the stomach. Soon after their arrival in Bombay, Joshiji had been summoned for Hindustani classical music lessons. He waddled in every week, his dhoti revealing smooth, hairless calves. Fondness for paan led him to clear his throat often as he transferred the sodden red wad to another cheek in order to teach Durga a simple taan. Reaching for her father’s old Time-Life books on the coffee table, he would dictate notation and hum the unfolding of a raag. Durga observed his fascination with the page displaying Sophia Loren in the famous black and flesh-striped transparent garment. She would deliberately pause and ask a question as his little eyes feasted and fastened on forbidden flesh, returning with reluctance to the musical composition.
A few months later, Joshiji was knocked down by a taxi during an act of worship at a roadside temple, and, shocked by the inexplicable interruption of his prayers, he became a recluse within the four walls of his Borivli home. Durga was merely relieved at the cessation of lessons, and the tanpura’s strings broke over time.
Mishraji was recruited to teach Hindi, and he arrived every Wednesday wearing a worn but spotless white shirt and trousers, travelling from his home in Kurla, high on a hill near a buffalo milk dairy, to leafy Malabar Hill for the tuition. Durga hated the lessons, demonstrating her contempt for her circumstances, the language and the country to which she had been unceremoniously transplanted by blotting the seat of his pristine trousers with ink. He merely smiled and proceeded with the lessons. Over time, his son and daughter-in-law commandeered his rooms in the humble tenement building, feeding him meagre leftovers; it was a cruel fate for such a mild-mannered man.
Miss Noronha, Year Nine teacher, was the school’s unofficial guide to puberty and adolescence; between lessons there had been homilies on the evils of sitting on the floor and eating bananas during menstruation as both affected the flow, as well as the optimum angle of hygienic suspension over a public seat. Good things came to girls who waited before marriage, but Miss Noronha omitted to mention to her class that she had waited far too long. Durga’s marriage invitation to Miss Noronha was returned as Addressee Unknown. She heard two conflicting stories: Miss Noronha had left for Australia, and Miss Noronha was dead.
Miss Sathe was hired for Marathi lessons. She wore starched Finlay saris and lived in a tiny flat behind a temple ruin at Walkeshwar. A mousy, diminutive woman, she puckered her lips and emitted kissing sounds to denote assent and consent. It was one of life’s little ironies that she herself remained unkissed, although it was rumoured there had once been a middle-aged suitor in her life, a Hindi teacher called Mr Doot. On his first visit to her home he had found her ministering with clicking, puckered sounds to a cantankerous mother. His ardour cooled rapidly, but he tenderly left her his copy of a story by Munshi Premchand.
Durga’s new friend Anita was dismissive about the extra tuition, urging her to focus on the development of the body instead. She enjoined flat-chested Durga to follow a daily regimen of throwing her arms wide to the front and back to the accompaniment of the rhyme I must and I must and I must and I must, I must and I must increase my bust.
At thirteen, Anita was already buxom in her too-tight PE shirt, drawing sly glances from the school caretakers. She loved erasers of every kind. The Indian ones were boring, had no smell, so she bought imported Japanese ones by the dozen; her favourites were square and white with a green border carrying a letter of the alphabet and a picture. She perched them between her nose and lips to sniff their scent during lessons as she rocked on her chair. Anita had merely laughed when Durga asked if increased bust size was linked to the sniffing of erasers, making no denial. Anita did not attend Durga’s wedding either; she was erasing a messy divorce.
Durga remained unresponsive and sullen; on her aunt’s advice, an astrologer was summoned to her father’s executive flat near the Hanging Gardens. Poring over her horoscope, he had turned silent. Whatever the stars were planning for her future, champagne corks weren’t going to be popped.
‘But what about marriage?’ asked her mother, an academic, who had bestirred herself reluctantly from a scholarly essay on Vinoba Bhave to await the verdict on her daughter’s destiny. Displaying a deep scepticism towards astrologers, she demanded from their findings a scientific approach far more rigorous than they were willing to display.
‘Difficult. Beti, your life is a struggle. You will encounter bad luck after bad luck all the way through,’ he had announced to Durga between greedy slurps from the saucer of ginger tea. ‘You will also suffer from women’s problems,’ he pointed vaguely in the direction of Durga’s abdomen, ‘but later, much later, maybe at thirty, thirty-five.’ His baleful owl eyes gleamed as her mother slipped him an extra hundred rupees toward the dilution of planetary harm to the refined Maharashtrian family.
A stern, scholarly woman, she was happiest among her books. Durga remembered her seated at a little desk, head bowed nightly in a lamp’s glow, an avid expression on her face as she turned the pages, her tongue darting between her lips in fierce concentration. She ceaselessly fed her daughter the texts of the Vedas, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Sant Tukaram and Sant Gnyaneshwar, demanding nothing short of excellence from Durga, who dutifully collected the form’s silver badge every year. The school badges soon began to be made of a dull tin-like metal, evidence of the school’s declining moral standards.
Durga witnessed violent arguments between her parents as her ambitious father rebelled. Entertaining at home was an essential part of climbing the corporate ladder, he protested, but Durga’s mother stayed firmly on the ground. The only exceptions, she sai
d, were relatives, whose frequent interruptions had to be borne with equanimity.
Under her mother’s influence, the family embraced asceticism; it was the poor and downtrodden who would receive its compassion. The modest approach of ‘simple living and high thinking’ was at odds with the new residences on Malabar Hill, where sprawling old bungalows and tree-lined grounds were being rapidly replaced by luxury high-rise duplex apartments overlooking the sea, and whose nouveau riche inhabitants roamed fearlessly in tooting cars.
Eighteen-year-old Durga took the single-decker bus from Hanging Gardens, rumbling slowly down from Malabar Hill past the dense trees of the Governor’s mansion, the flame of the forest trees and their incandescent rain-drenched blossoms pierced by the rare shriek of a roaming peacock in the dense undergrowth. Reaching Chowpatty Beach, she would look across the bay and Marine Drive with its Art Deco buildings, and the Manhattan-like skyline beyond. Staring into the murky water, she wondered if she would ever return to England.
Durga had soon realised that her parents were loosely bound by convention in a relationship vitiating both as they struggled for independence. She came to the conclusion that they should never have married. In the meanwhile, her father watched the promotion of his colleagues with bitter dismay, convinced that his hermit wife was the cause of his own stagnation.
‘You know what your colleague Verma does, don’t you?’ her mother erupted in self-defence. ‘He is always putting an arm around the ladies, and there is also something going on between his wife and your boss, as if you didn’t know. Did you think they were patiently counting bundles of five hundred rupee banknotes together every night?’ As Durga’s father remonstrated, she raged, ‘Why should we adopt their pretence and loose morals? For a career? Money? Will you be able to live with yourself if we do the same? Aho, do you remember where you have come from?’
Durga’s father was from a poor coastal Brahmin family. As a schoolboy, he had studied under the light of oil lamps; following a charitable system practised for centuries in the community, he was sent to a different household on a nominated day of the week for a free meal. A car once passed through the small dusty village with its magnificent mango groves, and an industrialist stopped to ask his way to a religious shrine. The boy had been concise and clear in his directions, his eyes snapping with intelligence without fear. The industrialist had him transferred to a city school and paid for the family to move to Bombay.
Verma was undoubtedly popular with the ladies at the parties. His compliments on their saris and jewellery led to coy giggles over the risqué jokes as he moved closer to drop an arm around a waist, lightly tap a neck, or lean over to inhale a favourite perfume.
‘Well, well, what do we have here?’ he asked interestedly, roaming Durga’s small breasts and narrow waist with his gaze. ‘You have grown into a real beauty.’ When she failed to respond, he laughed, ‘Don’t you recognise your Uncle Verma? Come, give me a hug, bete!’ He enveloped her in a tight embrace and guffawed as she fled.
The director, a balding man from Jullunder, asked Verma’s wife to carry one of her husband’s ties to every assignation. She chose a different one each time, but either Verma’s collection was too modest or the trysts with the director too many, for Verma was obliged to hurriedly purchase a fresh stock of striped, checked and polka-dotted ties from the Akbarally’s at Flora Fountain. So strong were the ties of the Verma union that he was subsequently promoted to manager at the Delhi office while she remained in a Colaba flat, but a year later he was found hanging from the ceiling – by a tie his wife had never seen.
Durga could not have been more ripe for rebellion, a tomato ready to spew angry seeded pulp, but while her female friends flirted with male classmates in the college library and in the chapel and smoked cigarettes in the canteen or perched on the benches under the college hostel trees, she remained protected by her mother’s idealism and the fiery reformist texts of the thinkers and educationists who had been her spiritual guides. She had also inherited her mother’s naiveté and trust.
At the age of twenty, Durga caught a chest infection. She visited a laboratory to collect an X-ray report. The grey-haired pathologist beckoned. Had she been examined recently? he asked. She should have a second opinion. The diagnosis was often wrong, he added jocularly. She should lie down, relax and let him reassure her. He asked her to undo her blouse, and stared at her small pert breasts, breathing noisily, his stethoscope dangling from his neck. He had straightened suddenly, and ordered her off the table. It was the equivalent of intoxication without the drink. It never occurred to Durga to complain; years later she heard the pathologist was under review for indecent conduct with a number of women.
Durga attracted the attention of several amiable young men; it was her classmate Vibhuti, striking a provocative pose in tight jeans and blouse, who told her about the ‘Durga Virginity Challenge’. The rich son of a Bollywood music producer had even offered free canteen batata wadas and chutney sandwiches for all if declared the winner. Who would have thought a swot would be such a draw? spat Vibhuti grudgingly, leaving Durga bewildered and angry. Difference was a terrible burden. So was conformity.
She met a young British backpacker roaming the back streets of Colaba behind the Taj Hotel. Her nostalgia for London and untried rebellion led her to agree to accompany him to the Elephanta Caves on the island across the harbour. As she waited at the Reception of the Presto Hotel while he changed for the trip, two large cockroaches scurried up the peeling, damp walls latticed with the stench of stale onions. He returned from his room clad in denim shorts. The sight of his wobbly pale pink thighs unleashed a rising, bilious wave as she imagined she saw the two cockroaches climbing his flesh instead. She fled, leaving a bus ticket fluttering to the ground, one that he collected and carried home to Nottingham as a souvenir to show his mates. She was a dark-eyed beauty, he had said with the air of a conquest over the Balti meal; she had sobbed when he left for England, begging him to stay and be hers.
The day she developed the mandatory infatuation for her French teacher at the Alliance Française, Durga met Vivek Thadani. An overcrowded bus had failed to stop; at the sight of another overflowing bus approaching, a young man suddenly detached himself from the impatient queue to lie supine on the road. The bus stopped. The young man winked at Durga as the passengers swarmed of single mind up the steps of the bus. He arose, nimbly joining the last eager passengers as they boarded.
‘What’s happening? Why have we stopped suddenly?’ asked a woman anxiously, looking out of the window.
‘Accident,’ replied another succinctly.
‘Who?’ quavered a fearful elderly man, trembling as he held his newspaper and his breath.
‘A young man,’ contributed a passenger in the front seat near the exit.
‘But I can’t see anything,’ sulked a plaintive voice from the rear. ‘Can’t you move your head?’
‘Do you think this is the cinema?’ another said reproachfully. ‘Next you’ll want popcorn.’
‘Arre, she can’t see anything because he’s dead,’ announced a peering passenger. ‘He’s under the wheels.’
‘Hai!’ screamed a few voices in panic, and a large, perspiring woman burst into tears that fell on her basket of spinach, giving it a fresh, dewy appearance.
‘Calm yourself. These things happen,’ murmured a stranger gently.
‘It is in the hands of God. Time and place decide everyone’s fate,’ agreed a hard-faced woman in a snug salwar kameez.
‘But what a place to choose to read!’ exclaimed another woman.
‘What? He was reading? In the middle of the road? These students of today …’ The hard-faced woman clicked her tongue disapprovingly. Several passengers followed suit until the bus reverberated with a click, click, click.
‘What was he reading?’ inquired an eager voice.
‘Arre, does it matter whether it was a book or a bus ticket? He has gone to heaven now.’
‘I think he was lying down,’
confided an elderly passenger.
‘Hai! Suicide?’ shrieked a woman attempting to peer over the oily heads of her companions.
‘The driver is looking under the bus,’ reported a man in a vantage position.
As several passengers rushed for a better view, the young man slipped into a vacant seat and winked cheekily at Durga. As she subsided beside him, he buried his face in the pages of a newspaper.
‘He must be a jilted lover,’ concluded the hard-faced woman. ‘He must have decided to end his life in a dramatic way to show her how much he loves her.’
‘But then she should have been there to see it, otherwise what’s the use? His life will have been wasted for nothing. Where is she? Could she be on the bus?’ asked an agitated voice at the rear of the bus.
Several sharp eyes roamed the bus, pausing momentarily over Durga’s wooden face.
‘Maybe his girl is under the bus, too?’ suggested a new, unseen voice.
The women looked as if they would burst into fresh tears, until a calm voice in the front said that was unlikely. That only happened in television soaps.
‘Arre, chalo, chalo, come on, we are getting late,’ shouted a man impatiently to the bus driver.
The large woman had a renewed bout of tears.
‘A young man has died, and you are bothered about being late?’ yelled the hard-faced woman. ‘He is someone’s son, someone’s brother, and now he will never have a wife, or bear children. Shame on you!’
The man subsided, embarrassed. The driver climbed back into the bus. He glanced at the tiny picture of Ganesha pasted to the corner of the windscreen and bowed his head in thankful prayer. He had been convinced there was a man lying on the road; now he could no longer be certain. ‘It was only a goat, and it ran away,’ he announced to the passenger in the first row.
The Cambridge Curry Club Page 13