by Frank Kusy
But I didn’t have any books. On this occasion, fearing Madge’s disapproval, I had given the dirty mag racks at Heathrow Airport a wide berth.
Babu was disbelieving. He was sure I had a book secreted on me somewhere. ‘No book?’ he kept repeating, and each time I said no he looked more cross. When I asked what had happened to the last one, I learned he had cut it up and sold it to his mates one girl at a time.
As his anxiety deepened, Babu became more tactile. First he rooted around in my bag, then he dug his hands into my pockets, and finally he began running his hands furtively up and down my trouser legs. In the end, I was forced to call for assistance. Another few minutes and Babu would have gone for a full body strip search.
Having left Bobby with strict instructions to have my goods ready in a week, I hailed a taxi back to the Oberoi. We were just setting off when a small boy ran up to me and said, ‘Hello, smiling sir! Which country is belonging to you?’
I said, ‘What?’
‘Which country is currently missing your presence?’
Madge sneered when I gave the boy a tip. ‘You’re always tipping people!’ she said. ‘What for?’
‘It’s common courtesy,’ I replied. ‘And anyway, how can these people live without tips?’
‘So the answer is to throw hundred rupee notes all over the place? I’ve seen you at the Oberoi: this is for the man on the door, this is for the guy who polishes the wine pedestal, this is for the assistant manager’s understudy, and this is for the man who cleans the swimming pool. You’re just making it harder for travellers who come after you, don’t you realise that?’
I shrugged dismissively, but I soon learnt my lesson. A few hours earlier I had been so pleased at getting my Oberoi breakfast on time that I’d handsomely tipped the room-boy fifty rupees, then promised him another fifty rupees if he brought our evening meal with similar speed. But this didn’t happen. Our dinner arrived, cold and burnt, a whole hour after I had ordered it, so I tipped the room-boy only ten rupees. In London, this would have had the effect of restoring normal service, but not here. What I got the following morning was no breakfast at all. Several calls to room service elicited the same bored response: ‘Yes sir, coming, coming.’ It didn’t matter how polite or desperate I sounded, I was obviously being punished for not sustaining the flow of fifty rupee tips.
At 11am, nearly two hours after ordering my food, it finally arrived. ‘Happy breakfast!’ said the room-boy sarcastically and set before me an inedible Indian thali.
‘I did not order this!’ I complained. ‘Where is my bacon, egg, and chips? And why does our coffee pot have no coffee in it?’
‘Breakfast time now finish!’ declared the boy triumphantly. ‘Now is only thali possible. So sorry!’
I waved him away and stabbed miserably at an onion. It was the last time, I made a mental note, I would ever give anyone in a hotel a big tip again.
Moments later a loud banging rattled my door. Who could it be, I wondered? An apologetic room-boy come to give me my long-awaited English breakfast? An impatient taxi-driver wanting to take me to Pushkar an hour early? No, it was Satish Agarwal and he was grinning from ear to ear.
‘I have found TV!’ he announced happily and handed me a bill.
I had quite forgotten that I had promised Satish this present last time. I had also forgotten that Satish had offered us another lift to Pushkar. I excused myself on the pretext of changing out of my pyjamas, then dug in my room for some cash. While I was gone, Satish and Sanjay invaded the room and polished off the remains of our thali breakfasts.
Just as it was time to leave, Sanjay sprang to his feet and said he had to ‘go for half an hour.’
‘Go where?’ I asked. ‘It’s noon and I have to check out!’
But Sanjay was adamant. He had to drive into the centre of town to buy some spare parts for his Maruti van, and he didn’t return until 1.30pm. When he did, we all went downstairs and studied the tinfoil Maruti with incredulity. It was hardly big enough to accommodate us, let alone Satish, Sanjay, the driver, all our luggage, and Satish’s gigantic new TV, which occupied most of the boot. Satish listened patiently to my complaints and then – just a few hundred yards up the road – shoved Sanjay out of the van and stuck him on a bus to Pushkar. Things were a lot easier after that, and I sank back on Madge’s lap and went to sleep.
‘Ha, ha!’ declared Satish when I awoke. ‘Good sleeping?’ And then, to Madge: ‘You can come to me if you have any marriage problems, because I know this man for six years and I know what make him tick!’
‘Really?’ I asked curiously, raising myself up. ‘What’s that, then?’
‘You are a good man, no problem,’ replied Satish. ‘Except that sometimes you have an upset mind. When you give me order, I ask you only one thing: please listen why is delay, why is mistake, why is people no working. Then you no upset your mind. If you consider everything slowly, looking at both sides, then you never feeling upset!’
I was not used to Satish having such strong opinions. It was quite a revelation, and the only reason I could see for it was that Satish had been in prolonged contact with Madge, who had strong opinions on just about everything. Satish was so enraptured with Madge that he could—and did—listen to her for hours. It was not what she said that fascinated him so, rather the fact that she was so interested in him. The only other friend of mine he had time for, it turned out, was Gordhan, who was also an Agarwal, and who had some education. Gordhan, I was surprised to learn, was previously a ‘government servant’—a teacher just like Madge.
It was fortunate that Satish liked Gordhan, because his Maruti blew a gasket just outside Jaipur, and we had to stay there overnight. That meant a courtesy call to Gordhan, whom we arranged to meet the next day, and a short stop at my old haunt, the Megh Niwas hotel in Bani Park. The Colonel wasn’t there, unfortunately, but Indu, his smiley wife, was. She had no rooms, she apologised, but she laid on an ‘English tea’ on the lawn and let Madge use the heated swimming pool.
Also present was her younger son Ajay, who was now a tall, strapping lad of seventeen with a lazy grin. In temperament, he was very much Indu’s boy, sanguine in the extreme and very polite. In physique, however, he bore a striking resemblance to Fateh, or at least to the young Fateh I had seen in a wedding photograph, sitting regally on a horse and wearing a turban. He had the same confident smile, the same shock of wavy black hair, even the same lofty ambitions.
Ajay, we learnt, wanted to be an astronaut. At the very least, he wanted to go to America and study economics. I kept my doubts to myself, but I didn’t think sending him to the States was a very good idea. Ajay was altogether too keen, too impressionable, not to be affected by western materialism. God knew what he would come back as—a gum-chewing, glib-tongued yuppie, most like. Whatever happened, his parents weren’t going to keep him here much longer. He was bored senseless in Jaipur.
Later on, after putting up at the Arya Niwas hotel, I took Madge to my favourite Indian cinema, the Raj Mandir off M.I. Road. The film we had come to see was Hum Aapke Hain Koun, which roughly translated as ‘Who Am I To You?’ It was apparently the biggest hit in Bollywood history and had not only been running for over a year but had been seen by most Indian families at least five times. Madge and I couldn’t make head nor tail of it ourselves, but it was still fun. The film opened at a cricket match, umpired by a perky little dog with a whistle. The hero wore a hat with ‘Boy’ embroidered on it and was singing joyously into the top of his cricket bat. The heroine wore a T-shirt with the logo ‘Bum Chums’ and entered stage left on a pair of roller skates, eating two bars of Milky Way chocolate simultaneously. In the next scene she had seamlessly swapped her T-shirt for a new one which said, ‘Some Do, Some Don’t, and I Might.’ The hero, meanwhile, had relocated to an alpine meadow and was singing to a tree. Later on, his loved one burst out of a haystack with a bottle of brandy and embraced a lonely goat.
The film had us both in stitches. We only left halfway throu
gh because a rat ran over Madge’s foot.
Chapter 29
A “Poor Man’s” Castle
The following day, as arranged, we paid a visit to Gordhan’s new house.
‘My God!’ exclaimed Madge. ‘It’s the size of an airplane hangar!’
I nodded, arms crossed. ‘It looks like a pink spaceship, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ decided Madge authoritatively. ‘What we have here is a post-modernist structure along European lines, but with all sorts of other architectural features thrown in. There are traditional Jaipuri elements, of course—the pink brick stonework, the pair of giant bullhorns adorning the entrance—but that giant keyhole in the middle of the façade is pure Dali in its surrealism. And the ogee arch windows are in the late Gothic style. A lot of money has gone into this.’ Her eyes were wide with wonder. ‘An awful lot of money. I mean, look at the interior: a solid marble floor lounge as big as a football pitch and a ceiling as high as a shopping mall!’
‘Not bad,’ I said with a snort, ‘for a so-called “poor man” who makes no profit!’
A short while later, Gordhan appeared, as fat and welcoming as usual. He was most pleased to meet Madge at last and instantly began force feeding her platefuls of vegetarian food, all the while holding her hand and jabbering away at her in broken English. At one point, unable to contain his jubilation, he turned to me and said, ‘She is much nice, just like Mummy!’
Girish was far more reserved. He now had to get up at 6.30 every morning to go to the gym, a routine he evidently found distasteful. ‘It is good for his body,’ explained Gordhan. ‘He has too much body.’ Girish’s eyes rolled heavenwards then roamed sceptically across his father’s own rotund physique.
Back at our hotel, I asked Madge her verdict on the Jaipur Agarwals.
‘Gordhan is a lovely man,’ she said. ‘A chubby little gnome with grotesque features and an urgent, plaintive voice that’s impossible to understand. He really wanted to communicate with me, bless him, but the only words I could make out were “dress quota,” something he was obviously upset about. I tried to look sympathetic and nodded my head at what I hoped were the right times, but I can see why he’s such a good friend of yours. He’s open and honest, with a heart of gold.
‘As for Girish,’ she continued, frowning slightly as she considered him, ‘he looks like a benign young Buddha with a hairpiece.’
‘Their relationship is interesting,’ I said. ‘A year or so ago, I told Gordhan he was lucky to have a son like Girish, a son who spent one hundred per cent of his time building up the business. Gordhan had beamed back at me and said, “Yes! It is better to have one lion than a thousand cubs!” But I don’t think he feels that way anymore.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘I don’t know, but since we last met father and son have gone into some kind of competitive meltdown. They’re constantly giving credit to people who never pay them back. First Gordhan lent Spud £25,000 worth of goods, just as Spud was going bankrupt, then Girish stole the show by advancing some Italian $100,000 worth of silver without even asking for a receipt. Both of them are constantly having their house robbed, too, and any profit they do make has to be shared with loads of indolent relatives who don’t work at all.’
‘The thing that gets me,’ added Madge, ‘is that they’re both so fat. I’ve always had this idea of strict vegetarians being lean and healthy, but you look at these two and you’d think they’ve been eating sausages non-stop, with lashings of whipped cream as afters!’
‘Vegetarian food in India isn’t the same as in England,’ I explained. ‘It’s all cooked in greasy ghee—clarified butter—which has more calories than a block of lard. On top of that, Girish smuggles home a pint of ice cream every night, which he gobbles up all by himself.’
Sobered by this conversation, we ordered the healthiest breakfast option possible the next morning: scrambled eggs and fresh mango lassis. Just as we were finishing it, we were summoned by Satish, who finally had his Maruti up and running again. He was keen on getting to Pushkar as soon as possible since he wanted to install his enormous new TV.
*
Three hours later we were settling back into my favourite room, number 111, at the Pushkar Palace Hotel.
‘It’s all you could wish for when you reach a tropical destination,’ said Madge happily. ‘Lovely sunny terrace, bright palm trees, and ultra-friendly waiters who make you feel at home. Even the shower works now, so they have made an effort!’
Downstairs we were welcomed by a jaunty Jagat Singh, kitted out in pressed khaki trousers, a stylish windcheater, and a pair of reflecting RayBans. What he felt pressed to impart, amongst other things, was his low opinion of beggars.
‘When a beggar dies in Bombay,’ he said, ‘the cops come running, because they know he has lots of money. I have come to know, for instance, that one Indian man who went to Nepal to do business lost all his funds on the bus. He went to the police and they said, “No problem, you just have to go into the street and beg.” And that is what he did. And he made enough money to buy his land back, to send his boys to college, and to marry both of his daughters off. He said, “This is my karma—to beg—and it is a lot easier than doing business!”’
Jagat also had a low opinion of Pushkar people, especially puja boys and so-called holy men. ‘The other day,’ he related, ‘a friend of mine said to me, “Jagat, if I had to stay in Pushkar, I would be selling Brahmin barbeques and Sadhu steaks!” And he is correct. These bloody fellows, they are good only for burning! I will never keep a Brahmin in my establishment, and I will never keep his relative!’
The one person of whom Jagat had the lowest opinion was Babloo, proprietor of the adjacent Sunset Cafe. This cafe had originally been the parking space of the Maharajah’s elephants, and when Babloo had taken it on he had just—according to Jagat—got out of jail for stealing the starter motor of a Mercedes Benz. Jagat reserved a supernatural amount of vitriol for Babu each day. In his view, Babloo was responsible for every murder, every drug related death, and every arrest of foreign tourists in Pushkar’s recent history. If Jagat had his way, Babloo would not just have been hung, drawn, and quartered, but barbecued and tandooried as well.
‘Babloo must have a low opinion of me,’ I told Jagat, ‘for mentioning the rats in his water tank in my guidebook. But he never refers to it. He just leaps to his feet whenever I drop by and grins from ear to ear. I don’t know why, but I can’t help liking him.’
‘You can also like a dog!’ sniffed Jagat and stormed off.
Speaking of low opinions, everybody in Pushkar, I soon learnt, had a low opinion of me for being over forty and having no children. ‘You should take some penicillin!’ scolded one shopkeeper, thinking I must have some rare disease since I was so old and still childless. ‘You must do your duty!’
‘That’s nothing!’ snorted Madge. ‘I didn’t tell you earlier, but Satish had a word with me back in the van. He asked whether I had any children, and when I said no, he laughed and said, “Ha, ha! You must be grandmother! Because in India, at the age of forty, you must be a grandmother!” I explained to him that children were out of the question, that I had a medical problem, but he was not to be deterred. He went on and on about these healers I could try, a magic bracelet I could wear, and how I should go down to the lake and do some special puja to the gods. The idea that we could never have kids was totally unthinkable to him, because he wanted us to be the “same same” as him, and this was not possible when he had children and we didn’t.’
Speaking of Satish’s children, we met them when we made the obligatory trip to his house. He had two boys and a girl, and all three were beautiful. They were dressed to the nines—the boys in little sailor suits, the girl in a fetching little smock—and they all had big brown eyes, painted around with black kohl. Shy and well-mannered, they only broke ranks and rushed forward when I produced a pack of western chewing gum.
As for the house, it was a complete contrast to Gordhan’s.
The building was a crumbling, ramshackle affair secreted in the bowels of Pushkar’s back streets. The only approach was via a narrow, potholed lane down which Sanjay, on his motorbike, drove us at high speed.
When we arrived, we stepped into a small courtyard smeared with animal dung and dotted with wads of dead chewing gum. To the right of the courtyard was an underground concrete bunker, where Satish’s twenty or so subterranean tailors were secretly stitching up clothing. ‘Here is safe, no problem with duplicators!’ he told me.
On the other side was Satish’s house, dark and dim at street level but painted a wild pink upstairs, the ceiling adorned by long lines of laundry. Behind these was the ‘business lounge’ which offered a small table and two cheesy-green sofas. Looming over the back sofa was the new 42-inch screen TV, playing loud Hindi movies. Next to the TV stood a high, velvet-covered shelf, occupied by a gently snoring relative who was ‘just visiting’. The only other room we saw upstairs was the kitchen, where the ladies of the house were constantly cooking. Satish and his brothers darted in and out at regular intervals, both to sample the results and to force feed us foreign guests because we were ‘too thin.’ Satish was particularly keen that we partook of anything cooked by his mother, whom he regarded with a level of respect bordering on awe.
The two Agarwals Madge liked best, she confided later, were Satish and Gordhan. They both had the same childlike simplicity, the same eagerness to please, and the same willingness to laugh at anything, even if it was at their own expense. At first she had been shocked at my rudeness to them, making comments like ‘What’s this rubbish? Take it away!’ but then she’d realised it was all part of a game – that when I got very upset, they just gave me a big smile and asked, ‘Take some chai?’ And that when I cracked up at this absurdity, they were so relieved they ran over to embrace me, saying, ‘Oh, funny man, funny man!’