‘So where are you spending your honeymoon, dare I ask?’ said Noel Kumar.
‘We’re flying to Goa, to spend a few days at the Raj,’ said Jamwal.
‘I can’t think of a more beautiful place to spend your first few days as man and wife,’ said Noel.
‘A wedding gift from your uncle,’ said Nisha. ‘So generous of him.’
‘Just be sure you have him back in time for the board meeting on Monday week, young lady, because one of the items under discussion is a new project that I know the chairman wants Jamwal to mastermind.’
‘Any clues?’ asked Jamwal.
‘Certainly not,’ said Noel. ‘You just go away and enjoy your honeymoon. Nothing’s so important that it can’t wait until you’re back.’
‘And if we hang around here any longer,’ said Nisha, taking her husband by the hand, ‘we might miss our plane.’
A large crowd gathered by the entrance to the house and threw marigold petals in their path and waved as the couple were driven away.
When Mr and Mrs Rameshwar Singh drove on to the airport’s private runway forty minutes later, the company’s Gulfstream jet awaited them, door open, steps down.
‘I do wish someone from your family had attended the wedding,’ said Nisha as she fastened her seat belt. ‘I was hoping that perhaps your brother or sister might have turned up unannounced.’
‘If either of them had,’ said Jamwal, ‘they would have suffered the same fate as me.’ Nisha felt the first moment of sadness that day.
Two and a half hours later the plane touched down at Goa’s Dabolim airport, where another car was waiting to whisk them off to their hotel. They had planned to have a quiet supper in the hotel dining room, but that was before they were shown around the bridal suite, where they immediately started undressing each other. The bellboy left hurriedly and placed a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door. In fact, they missed dinner, and breakfast, only surfacing in time for lunch the following day.
‘Let’s have a swim before breakfast,’ said Jamwal as he placed his feet on the thick carpet.
‘I think you mean lunch, my darling,’ said Nisha as she slipped out of bed and disappeared into the bathroom.
Jamwal pulled on a pair of swimming trunks and sat on the end of the bed waiting for Nisha to return. She emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later wearing a turquoise swimsuit that made Jamwal think about skipping lunch.
‘Come on, Jamwal, it’s a perfect day,’ Nisha said as she drew the curtains and opened the French windows that led on to a freshly cut lawn surrounded by a luxuriant tropical garden of deep red frangipani, orange dahlias and fragrant hibiscus.
They were walking hand in hand towards the beach when Jamwal spotted the large swimming pool at the far end of the lawn. ‘Did I ever tell you, my darling, that when I was at school I won a gold medal for diving?’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Nisha replied. ‘It must have been some other woman you were showing off to,’ she added with a grin.
‘You’ll live to regret those words,’ he said, releasing her hand and beginning to run towards the pool. When he reached the edge of the pool he took off and leapt high into the air before executing a perfect dive, entering the water so smoothly he hardly left a ripple on the surface.
Nisha ran towards the pool laughing. ‘Not bad,’ she called out. ‘I bet the other girl was impressed.’
She stood at the edge of the pool for a moment before falling to her knees and peering down into the shallow water. When she saw the blood slowly rising to the surface, she screamed.
* * *
I have a passion, almost an obsession, about not being late, and it’s always severely tested whenever I visit India. And however much I cajoled, remonstrated with and simply shouted at my poor driver, I was still several minutes late that night for a dinner being held in my honour.
I ran into the dining room of the Raj and apologized profusely to my host, who wasn’t at all put out, although the rest of the party were already seated. He introduced me to some old friends, some recent acquaintances and a couple I’d never met before.
What followed was one of those evenings you just don’t want to end: that rare combination of good food, vintage wine and sparkling conversation which was emphasized by the fact that we were the last people to leave the dining room, long after midnight.
One of the guests I hadn’t met before was seated opposite me. He was a handsome man, with the type of build that left you in no doubt he must have been a fine athlete in his youth. His conversation was witty and well informed, and he had an opinion on most things, from Sachin Tendulkar (who was certain to be the first cricketer to reach fifty test centuries) to Rahul Gandhi (undoubtedly a future prime minister, if that’s the road he chooses to travel down). His wife, who was sitting on my right, possessed that rare middle-aged beauty that the callow young can only look forward to, and rarely achieve.
I decided to flirt with her outrageously in the hope of getting a rise out of her self-possessed husband, but he simply flicked me away as if I were some irritating fly that had interrupted his afternoon snooze. I gave up the losing battle and began a serious conversation with his wife instead.
I discovered that Mrs Rameshwar Singh worked for one of India’s leading fashion houses. She told me how much she always enjoyed visiting England whenever she could get away. It was not always easy to drag her husband from his work, she explained, adding, ‘He’s still quite a handful.’
‘Do you have any children?’ I asked.
‘Sadly not,’ she replied wistfully.
‘And what does your husband do?’ I asked, quickly changing the subject.
‘Jamwal is on the board of the Raj Group. He’s headed up their hotel operation for the past fifteen years.’
‘I’ve stayed at six Raj hotels in the last nine days,’ I told her, ‘and I’ve rarely come across their equal.’
‘Oh, do tell him that,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll be so touched, especially as the two of you have spent most of the evening trying to prove how macho you are.’ Both of us put nicely in our place, I felt.
When the evening finally came to an end, everyone stood except the man seated opposite me. Nisha moved swiftly round to the other side of the table to join her husband, and it was not until that moment that I realized Jamwal was in a wheelchair.
I watched sympathetically as she wheeled him slowly out of the room. No one who saw the way she touched his shoulder and gave him a smile the rest of us had not been graced with, could have had any doubt of their affection for each other.
He teased her unmercifully. ‘You never stopped flirting with the damn author all evening, you hussy,’ he said, loud enough to be sure that I could hear.
‘So he did get a rise out of you after all, my darling,’ she responded.
I laughed, and whispered to my host, ‘Such an interesting couple. How did they ever get together?’
He smiled. ‘She claims that he tied her to a lamp post and then left her.’
‘And what’s his version?’ I asked.
‘That they first met at a traffic light in Delhi … and she left him.’
And thereby hangs a tale.
A Wasted Hour
KELLEY ALWAYS thumbed a ride back to college, but never told her parents. She knew they wouldn’t approve.
Her father would drive her to the station on the first day of term, when she would hang around on the platform until she was certain he was on his way back home. She would then walk the couple of miles to the freeway.
There were two good reasons why Kelley preferred to thumb a ride back to Stanford rather than take a bus or train. Twelve round trips a year meant she could save over a hundred dollars, which her father could ill afford after being laid off by the water company. In any case he and Ma had already made quite enough sacrifices to ensure she could attend college, without causing them any further expense.
But Kelley’s second reason for preferring to thumb rides was that when she grad
uated she wanted to be a writer, and during the past three years she’d met some fascinating people on the short journey from Salinas to Palo Alto, who were often willing to share their experiences with a stranger they were unlikely to meet again.
One fellow had worked as a messenger on Wall Street during the Depression, while another had won the Silver Star at Monte Cassino, but her favourite was the man who’d spent a day fishing with President Roosevelt.
Kelley also had golden rules about who she wouldn’t accept a ride from. Truck drivers were top of the list as they only ever had one thing on their mind. The next were vehicles with two or three young men on board. In fact she avoided most drivers under the age of sixty, especially those behind the wheel of a sports car.
The first car to slow down had two young fellows in it, and if that wasn’t warning enough, the empty beer cans on the back seat certainly were. They looked disappointed when she firmly shook her head, and after a few raucous catcalls continued on their way.
The next vehicle to pull over was a truck, but she didn’t even look up at the driver, just continued walking. He eventually drove off, honking his horn in disgust.
The third was a pick-up truck, with a couple in the front who looked promising, until she saw a German shepherd lounging across the back seat that looked as if he hadn’t been fed in a while. Kelley politely told them she was allergic to dogs – well, except for Daisy, her cocker spaniel back home, whom she adored.
And then she spotted a pre-war Studebaker slowly ambling along towards her. Kelley faced the oncoming car, smiled, and raised her thumb. The car slowed, and pulled off the road. She walked quickly up to the passenger door to see an elderly gentleman leaning across and winding down the window.
‘Where are you headed, young lady?’ he asked.
‘Stanford, sir,’ she replied.
‘I’ll be driving past the front gates, so jump in.’
Kelley didn’t hesitate, because he met all of her most stringent requirements: over sixty, wearing a wedding ring, well-spoken and polite. When she got in, Kelley sank back into the leather seat, her only worry being whether either the car or the old man would make it.
While he looked to his left and concentrated on getting back onto the road, she took a closer look at him. He had mousy grey hair, a sallow, lined complexion, like well-worn leather, and the only thing she didn’t like was the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He wore an open-neck checked shirt, and a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows.
Her supervisor had told her on numerous occasions that if she wanted to be a writer she would have to get some experience of life, especially other people’s lives, and although her driver didn’t look an obvious candidate to expand her horizons, there was only one way she was going to find out.
‘Thanks for stopping,’ she said. ‘My name’s Kelley.’
‘John,’ he replied, taking one hand off the wheel to shake hands with her. The rough hands of a farm labourer, was her first thought. ‘What are you majoring in, Kelley?’ he asked.
‘Modern American literature.’
‘There hasn’t been much of that lately,’ he suggested. ‘But then times are a changin’. When I was at Stanford, there were no women on the campus, even at night.’
Kelley was surprised that John had been to Stanford. ‘What degree did you take, sir?’
‘John,’ he insisted. ‘It’s bad enough being old, without being reminded of the fact by a young woman.’ She laughed. ‘I studied English literature, like you. Mark Twain, Herman Melville, James Thurber, Longfellow, but I’m afraid I flunked out. Never took my degree, which I still bitterly regret.’
Kelley gave him another look and wondered if the car would ever move out of third gear. She was just about to ask why he flunked out, when he said, ‘And who are now considered to be the modern giants of American literature, dare I ask?’
‘Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow and Faulkner,’ she replied.
‘Do you have a favourite?’ he asked, his eyes never leaving the road ahead.
‘Yes I do. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was twelve years old, and I consider it to be one of the great novels of the twentieth century. “And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history, repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.’”
‘I’m impressed,’ he said. ‘Although my favourite will always be Of Mice and Men.‘
‘“Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella,”‘ said Kelley. ‘“Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.’”
‘I don’t think you’ll be flunking your exams,’ said John with a chuckle, which gave Kelley the opportunity to begin her interrogation.
‘So what did you do after you left Stanford?’
‘My father wanted me to work on his farm back in Monterey, which I managed for a couple of years, but it just wasn’t me, so I rebelled and got a job as a tour guide at Lake Tahoe.’
‘That must have been fun.’
‘Sure was. Lots of dames, but the pay was lousy. So my friend Ed and I decided to travel up and down the California coast collecting biological specimens, but that didn’t turn out to be very lucrative either.’
‘Did you try and look for something more permanent after that?’ asked Kelley.
‘No, can’t pretend I did. Well, at least not until war broke out, when I got a job as a war correspondent on the Herald Tribune.‘
‘Wow, that must have been exciting,’ said Kelley. ‘Right there among the action, and then reporting everything you’d seen to the folks back home.’
‘That was the problem. I got too close to the action and ended up with a whole barrel of shotgun up my backside, and had to be shipped back to the States. So I lost my job at the Trib, along with my first wife.’
‘Your first wife?’
‘Did I forget to mention Carol?’ he said. ‘She lasted thirteen years before she was replaced by Gwyn, who only managed five. But to do her justice, which is quite difficult, she gave me two great sons.’
‘So what happened once you’d fully recovered from your wounds?’
‘I began working with some of the immigrants who were flooding into California after the war. I’m from German stock myself, so I knew what they were going through, and felt a lot of sympathy for them.’
‘Is that what you’ve been doing ever since?’
‘No, no. When Johnson decided to invade Vietnam, the Trib offered me my old job back. Seems they couldn’t find too many people who considered being shipped off to ‘Nam a good career move.’
Kelley laughed. ‘But at least this time you survived.’
‘Well, I would have done if the CIA hadn’t asked me to work for them at the same time.’
‘Am I allowed to ask what you did for them?’ she said, looking more closely at the old man.
‘Wrote one version of what was going on in ‘Nam for the Trib, while letting the CIA know what was really happening. But then I had an advantage over my colleagues that only the CIA knew about.’
Kelley would have asked how come, but John answered her question before she could speak.
‘Both my sons, John Jr and Thomas, were serving in the front line, so I was getting information my fellow hacks weren’t.’
‘The Trib must have loved that.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said John. ‘The editor sacked me the minute he found out I was workin’ for the CIA. Said I’d forfeited my journalistic integrity and gone native, not to mention the fact I was being paid by two masters.’
Kelley was spell-bound.
‘And to be fair,’ he continued, ‘I couldn’t disagree with them. And in any case, I was gettin’ more and more disillusioned by what was happening in ‘Nam, and even began to question whether we still occupied the moral high ground.’
‘So what did you do when you got back home this time?’ asked Kelley, who was beginning to consider the trip was every bit as excit
ing as the journey she’d experienced with the fellow who’d spent a day fishing with President Roosevelt.
‘When I got home,’ John continued, ‘I discovered my second wife had shacked up with some other fella. Can’t say I blame her. Not that I was single for too long, because soon after I married Elaine. I can only tell you one thing I know for sure, Kelley, three wives is more than enough for any man.’
‘So what did you do next?’ asked Kelley, aware it wouldn’t be too long before they reached the university campus.
‘Elaine and I went down South, where I wrote about the Civil Rights movement for any rag that was willing to print my views. But unfortunately I got myself into trouble again when I locked horns with J. Edgar Hoover and refused to cooperate with the FBI, and tell them what I’d found out following my meetings with Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph Abernathy. In fact Hoover got so angry, he tried to label me a communist. But this time he couldn’t make it stick, so he amused himself by having the IRS audit me every year.’
‘You met Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph Abernathy?’
‘Sure did. And John Kennedy come to that, God rest his soul.’
On hearing that he’d actually met JFK, Kelley suddenly had so many more questions she wanted to ask, but she could now see the university’s Hoover Tower becoming larger by the minute.
‘What an amazing life you’ve led,’ said Kelley, who was disappointed the journey was coming to an end.
‘I fear I may have made it sound more exciting than it really was,’ said John. ‘But then an old man’s reminiscences cannot always be relied on. So, Kelley, what are you going to do with your life?’
‘I want to be a writer,’ she told him. ‘My dream is that in fifty years’ time, students studying modern American literature at Stanford will include the name of Kelley Ragland.’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said John. ‘But if you’ll allow an old man to give you a piece of advice, don’t be in too much of a hurry to write the Great American Novel. Get as much experience of the world and people as you can before you sit down and put pen to paper,’ he added as he brought the car to a stuttering halt outside the college gates. ‘I can promise you, Kelley, you won’t regret it.’
The Short, the Long and the Tall Page 16