‘An old friend.’
‘Oh? Does Atul know about this? What is the need to ring this friend from here?’
Durga had remained silent, unsurprised by the hostility, unwilling to talk about her loneliness, and Archana was satisfied she had found proof of Durga’s guilt.
A week before her wedding in Pune, Durga had perched on Moody Baby near the quiet, leafy Afghan Church in Colaba.
‘You will stay in touch, won’t you?’ asked Durga.
‘What do you think? Who else is going to make you laugh out there in cold Cambridge?’
‘I’m serious.’
‘Arre, I laid down my life on the road for you once, and I would do it again, but don’t tell anyone, it’s bad for my reputation,’ said Vivek with a tremor in his voice.
She looked at him, choked by a new realisation. ‘Why didn’t you say …’
‘Not good enough. Not for you. Do great things with your life, Durga, as you were always meant to. Now enough! Moody Baby will cry in a minute, and you know how she hates ruining her mascara and leaving those black streaks on the road.’
Prior to her departure for Cambridge, Durga visited her parents’ retirement flat for the last time. Standing in the hallway as the sun filtered through the rooms, her eyes lingered over the contents carefully transported from Mumbai. Her mother’s books were piled high on a table, the reading spectacles neatly folded, the chair at a beckoning angle. Her father’s liquor cabinet caught the afternoon light swirling in the wine, sherry, cognac and whisky glasses shipped with pride from England, the pub souvenirs, a model of a London bus, Durga’s pop cassettes and teenage fiction spilling over the shelves, the broken tanpura and the Time-Life book so eagerly perused by Joshiji. She walked to the wardrobes, opening them in turn, burying her face in the soft folds of her mother’s saris, as neat and fragrant as when last worn, running her fingers over her father’s shirts from Marks & Spencer, labelled with lingering cologne. Durga wept.
Atul’s mother wept until her son was no longer a speck in the private Pune luxury taxi bound for the airport. She leaned heavily on her husband for support, a cracked stalk in the wind. Rivulets snaked down her face, as her husband bravely blinked back his own tears. ‘What do I have to look forward to, except my Atul’s next visit?’ she cried plaintively, prompting several female relatives to pull out tiny handkerchief squares in haste. Dab, dab, dab. Their sons and daughters, too, had left Pune for the winking lights of the West, never to return. The green-eyed cousin Shreya wept pitifully in glandular gasps, but Archana remained dry-eyed. ‘That is enough, Aai – you will make yourself ill. Do you want Atul to drop everything he is doing there and come back just for you?’ she rebuked her mother, planting a seed for slow germination.
The rotund man sitting next to Atul in the aisle seat on the flight to Heathrow confided his diabetic condition within minutes of being airborne. ‘So which fruit is the highest in sugar content, Doctor? Which vegetables do you recommend I should avoid? Doctor, any suggestion on exercise?’ he asked humbly, whipping out a large notepad and pen. A gynaecologist was still a doctor, and the advice was free.
Durga looked at her husband’s profile. The days in Pune had passed in crumbling suffocation, and black, hate-filled mosquitoes had bitten through her limbs despite the window mesh. She wondered at Atul’s desire to have an arranged marriage; his cousin and sister clearly felt he and Durga were ill-matched, and slyly influenced his mother to concur. Atul’s father was a mild-mannered man who spoke little. Surrounded by female nurses and patients all day, over the past twenty years his vocabulary had dwindled to the injunction ‘Push harder!’ at the Maternity Clinic. He was an unlikely ally, despite the apparent feminist sentiment behind the two words.
Faced with baseless suspicion from strangers, Durga was initially optimistic; she would turn the other cheek, douse fire with love. A smuggled surfeit of Mills & Boon romances had led to her muddled view of love and marriage, and she was horrified to find a rewritten script; she was playing the role of Cinderella after she had married the prince. Was he a prince who had turned into a frog, or a princely frog? Durga had taken a bite of the apple, but instead of a gentle awakening from slumber in a glass casket, she was learning to iron the creaseless shirt.
She glanced frequently at Atul during the flight. He was a handsome man, and perhaps it was too soon for disillusionment; they had left India and his family behind, the future awaited. It would be different once they were on their own and in Cambridge, city of spires.
Durga waited at the luggage carousel at Heathrow as Atul struggled to heave a second heavy suitcase onto the trolley. He looked down in dismay at the spreading oil stains on his beige chinos, leaned forward and sniffed. ‘It must be mango pickle – oh God, it has leaked!’ he exclaimed. He looked crushed, as a red stain formed a symmetrically large triangle on his crotch, coupled with two vertical red streaks on his thighs; his mother’s blessings had safely accompanied him to England. Had Durga laughed, the echo would have sneaked into the terminal, into the waiting coffee cups and steaming ears of the passengers and out onto the tarmac with the planes, steering upward into the open skies.
‘Do something!’ he ordered sharply, aware of the smirks and stares of the other passengers.
‘You mean do something about the suitcase first, or you?’
Before he could respond, a man approached. ‘Atul Patwardhan? I thought it was you! We met at the New Hall dinner two months ago. Richard Cartwright, obstetrics.’
The two men shook hands and Richard Cartwright’s gaze travelled downward.
‘He’s in a bit of pickle, can you help?’ asked Durga. ‘These suitcases are rather heavy, and I need to open one to get some wet tissues.’
Richard Cartwright obliged and as Durga dabbed Atul’s trousers a passing passenger quipped, ‘Mind the Crown Jewels there, luv!’ Richard began to chuckle, but Atul looked thunderous. ‘I’d say your best bet is to find another pair of trousers,’ commiserated Richard as he left, but they discovered that the mango pickle had spread in spurts over the entire contents of the suitcase zealously fingerprinted on the outside by Atul’s father with two large, handwritten, heavily gummed labels PROPERTY OF DR PATWARDHAN. The Cambridge address was prominently displayed. It was as legible as an optician’s sight-testing chart.
Durga rummaged through the clothing and beheld the stained portrait. The eyes of the Patwardhan family were red blobs of sorrow. The packet of his mother’s home-made sweets was coated in oil. Durga suggested disposal, but Atul was reluctant. ‘We can’t throw anything away. My mother has made everything herself. But I don’t understand, how could you pack edible things with my clothes? You should have had some sense at least.’
‘Who said I packed them?’
‘Then who?’
‘Mommy dearest? Sister dearest?’
He was about to protest when she waved a pile of baby clothes in indignation under his nose. They were all postmarked in mango red.
‘Yours, I presume?’ she asked coldly.
He stared sheepishly at the accompanying envelope addressed to Mrs Aparna Achrekar of Milton Keynes. ‘That’s my cousin Shreya’s sister-in-law. She’s expecting a baby. Maybe she asked Aai to send the baby clothes through us,’ he mumbled, as she continued to display several packages at random.
‘And who is Kishori Chavate in London? Lucky, lucky girl! A kilo of laadu for her sweet tooth. And who is Mr Mystery-Man Madhav Mhatre? Life will be one long party for him once he receives your mother’s eight-cassette pack of Marathi devotional songs mailed direct by us to the American address attached here,’ declared Durga with increasing flourish.
Durga would have been surprised to hear that she had begun to sound like her mother.
‘All right, stop it now. I get your point. We are late for the coach. If we miss it, we have a long wait, so just put it all back and we’ll have to sort this out later,’ he said irritably.
It was a morose journey on the airport coach to Cambridge’s D
rummer Street. The driver had asked, ‘What happened, mate?’ in horror, for the trousers now appeared to be covered with dried blood, pointing untruthfully to the dismemberment of a vital organ. The other passengers politely averted their eyes, but a man walking quickly past had sniggered, ‘Lost your lunchbox, did yer?’ Atul scowled. His gaze returned repeatedly and hypnotically to the stains during the journey. ‘They were my best chinos,’ he complained. ‘I bought them in New York when I went there for a conference. Dry cleaning costs such a bomb here, I’ll have to wait and see if I can send them back with someone. Actually, Nikhil is going to Delhi soon.’ He brightened.
‘You mean send them all the way to India?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘Why not? What did I tell you, every damn thing is so expensive in this country. Why do you think my mother was so keen for you to learn to cook? Who can afford to eat out at these prices? Listen, I really hope you brought everything you need, because we won’t be running around in the shops as soon as we arrive.’ He softened. ‘See, it’s not that there is no money, but it is not to be wasted on frivolous things. It is important to count every penny while we are here, and then we will have something to take back when we return.’
He had omitted to tell her that anything saved would be invested in Patwardhan’s Maternity Clinic. Despite the future purchase of gleaming new machines, women would still have to push as they had through the ages.
Durga looked at the rain-streaked landscape and grey skies of her London childhood with increasing excitement. She was back in England, going to Cambridge and that was all that mattered. She would roam the colleges, see the fan-vaulted ceiling of King’s College Chapel, the Fellows’ Garden of Clare and Christ’s, the Grecian buildings of Downing, the Wren Library, Trinity’s Great Court. She was living a student’s dream after years of crammed after-school coaching classes in rat-infested dank buildings, and nights of endless study leading to a single magical word: Oxbridge.
Atul shared none of the excitement she felt. He had not spoken to her on the flight or introduced her to Richard Cartwright, nor had he commented on her return to England after the long absence. He did not ask if this was home because it was the country of her birth and childhood, if home was what she had left behind in India, or was home wherever she was with him? On her first day back in England, Durga’s suspicions were being speedily confirmed. It was about a boy, not a man.
As the taxi sped towards Hills Road from the coach station, Atul leaned over and asked the driver about the woody smell inside. ‘I thought it was you, mate,’ replied the driver sanguinely. ‘Smells like an old lady with a cold in the back.’
Atul sniffed his way to the source of the odour and scrabbled frantically in his rucksack until his fingers made startled contact with a cracked bottle of Olesan eucalyptus oil and a hastily wrapped packet of incense sticks. As he searched further afield, he found a hot water bottle, herbal back-rub ointment and three pairs of thick hand-knitted men’s socks.
‘What have you been putting in here?’ he asked in anger.
‘Not mea culpa.’
‘Then who?’
Durga thought it prudent not to point a finger in the same direction more than once, and did not reply.
As they entered the tiny flat, he snapped peevishly, ‘What a bloody mess!’
It was not the welcome to Cambridge she had fondly imagined, but Durga could only concur.
CHAPTER TEN
All good things come to those who wait
SWARNAKUMARI HAD DISCOVERED something far more important missing in her life than a mere dozen roses. ‘Any of you have seen my Guru Ma’s prayer book lying anywhere?’ she asked anxiously. ‘I had it with me when I came in this morning. I must find my prayer book, must find it. It has her photo on it. She has long black hair, and she is sitting in a white robe in lotus pose, with one hand up.’
‘What’s she doing with the other, I’d like to know?’ said Durga.
‘Durga!’ warned Heera.
‘Where did I leave it, where could it be? Girls, help me! What if it has gone?’ Swarnakumari wandered distractedly into the Staff Area.
‘Did you hear about the book by that woman who hadn’t had you-know-what for thirty-five years, and suddenly she was having lots of it, so she wrote about it?’ asked Heera, standing by the shop window. ‘She was American, I think. Anyway, she was sixty-five or something and she put an advert in the papers, saying all she wanted was you-know-what, and can you believe it, a lot of people answered.’
Eileen gave a disbelieving snort.
Durga turned to Swarnakumari as she returned through the curtains. ‘Did you hear that, Swarna? This woman could be a role model for all those who think life’s over at fifty.’
‘Keep looking for the book,’ urged Swarnakumari absently.
‘Imagine, the youngest bloke to do you-know-what with her was thirty-two,’ marvelled Heera.
‘What?’ mumbled Swarnakumari, barely listening.
‘Why beat around the bush? Swarna, what would you say if a woman of sixty-five wanted sex? What would your Guru Ma say?’ asked Durga.
‘Baba, now you are teasing me again. What is there to say? At that age a woman should be thinking of nothing but spirituality, na. She should lead a simple, pure life. She must lose her attachment to all worldly things – all possessions, wealth, family, children. That is all,’ concluded Swarnakumari firmly.
‘Why not have fun in the years there are left?’ suggested Durga.
‘Is this the time to ask me such things?’ barked Swarnakumari. ‘Where could my prayer book be?’
‘People do strange things at that age,’ mused Heera. ‘I know a woman called Sudha Barjotia. A little older than me, of course, she has a daughter-in-law now – they don’t get along at all, in fact, they hardly talk to each other – but do you know what she puts on her face? That cream you get in India called Fair and Fine. As if it is going to make any difference to her now, after the age of forty-five. Both she and her daughter-in-law use it, so at least they have something in common.’
Swarnakumari looked up with interest. ‘What is this cream?’
‘A cream called Fair and Fine to make the skin fair and fine. Honestly, Swarna, what else could it be?’
‘If you are fair, you are fine,’ observed Durga. ‘Unless you mean the groom.’
‘Does it work?’ asked Swarnakumari, thinking of Mallika.
‘Why don’t you ask the men who use it?’ countered Durga.
‘You shouldn’t make so much fun of her,’ whispered Heera. ‘Just help her find the book. She really believes in this Guru Ma, you know. These gurus are powerful people, and they can be quite inspiring.’
‘That reminds me – when I was visiting Pune, I heard an amazing story,’ Durga told her. ‘There is a holy man, a baba, somewhere, who meditated in a pond for years. When he decided to emerge, his followers apparently discovered the fish in the pond had devoured his legs, so they carried him off on their shoulders. According to some reports, he’s gung-ho about going back in again. I would fear for his arms this time, but then that’s the power of faith for you.’ She continued, ‘And there’s another baba who changes anything his followers offer him into something that tastes sweet. So let’s say I give him a bitter veggie, it turns as sweet as honey.’
‘What else does he do?’ asked Eileen.
Durga looked puzzled.
‘I mean, what’s the point in trying to make other people’s lives taste good?’ Eileen persevered. ‘The world needs other miracles.’
‘Do you know, I heard a TV presenter the other day, who described Indian skin as mahogany,’ interrupted Heera indignantly, still reflecting on creams and complexions.
‘Are you sure he wasn’t talking about furniture?’ asked Durga.
Heera rushed to answer her mobile phone. ‘Yes, Bob, it’s me … I’m fine. Really … No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m going out tonight. Can’t we talk another time?’ She silently returned to the coun
ter, unnerved by the call. There was an unhappy edge to Bob’s voice. He had been so insistent; was it about Adam?
No one spoke. Such moments were rare at IndiaNeed, and did not last long. The shop bell soon tinkled, and a strapping young man entered, carrying a bulky shoulder bag.
‘Hiya, Assistant Photographer, Cambridge Evening News,’ he trumpeted. ‘Which one of you is Diana Wallington-er-Smith?’
Durga mocked, ‘Do you think any of us could be Diana Wellington-Smythe? Such a deliberate transposing of the postcolonial subject would not only be aesthetically unappealing but necessitate an inapposite dismantling of notions of self, ethnicity, race and class, thus bringing it into hybrid discontinuity.’
A faint smile hovered over Eileen’s lips.
‘Er …’ responded the photographer.
‘The director of the charity is out riding and won’t be disturbed. And she won’t like you messing with her name, by the way. It’s Wellington-Smythe. Why do you want to know where she is?’ asked Heera sharply.
The photographer turned to Heera, relieved at her intervention. ‘Well, she wanted to pose for the shop photo tomorrow afternoon with a toff, Lady something or other. It’s some sort of Charities Special, but I’ve got to rush and do it now, or it won’t get into the Saturday paper. Can’t you ring her?’
Heera was emphatic in her refusal.
‘Oh, all right then, why don’t you lovely ladies line up there under the shop sign? Right there, yeah. Brilliant. Tell you what, display something from this shop, will yer?’
Swarnakumari and Heera both jostled for a central position, looking on in dismay as Durga mischievously slipped between the two. Swarnakumari held a teapot aloft, Heera a scarf and Durga a clock, and Eileen hovered uncertainly, displaying a child’s mathematical set.
The Cambridge Curry Club Page 15