Staunch

by Eleanor Wood

  Following the beach road takes you around to the hotel’s hidden staff entrance, where there are hundreds of mopeds lined up, the main daily form of transport into work. There are so many of them stacked up, and they all look identical, so I have no idea how anybody identifies their own bike out of the line-up. I occasionally hear music coming from this staff area, or see someone I know and wave on my way past, but I don’t want to stop and interrupt their break. Everyone here is so nice, they would be too polite to tell me to go away. That first day, when I got mildly lost in downtown Benaulim, it took me a moment to recognize Jai, our favourite breakfast waiter, when he came to my rescue, as he had his hair spiked up and a tight shiny T-shirt on, instead of the uniform I saw him in every morning. He came rushing over the road without any prompting from me, and I was touched that he would bother to help me on his day off, when he absolutely didn’t have to. Honestly, if I were him, I would probably have carried on walking and nobody would ever have been any the wiser.

  After about ten minutes, walking around the back of the hotel leads you down to the beach. As you draw closer to the sea, a row of stalls appears. Not many people walk this way, so the ladies running the stalls get extremely excited at the sight of any pedestrian.

  It took me by surprise the first time I walked down there. There were about twelve stalls, similar to the ones outside the hotel gates and selling pretty much identical things: trinkets, jewellery, dresses. This time, when I came into view, I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd of women. They all sat on stools outside their stalls and waited for someone to come into sight. It happened so seldom that it was an exciting occurrence.

  ‘My name is Priya.’

  ‘I’m Pritti. Please come inside and see my shop.’

  They all introduced themselves, and often their children. The stalls each had a table at the front and a covered tarpaulin area at the back. They were all clamouring to get you into their shop, and once you were in, it was hard to escape. It quite quickly got scrappy. There was no love lost between these women.

  Their competitive sales pitches in every direction rendered me paralysed with indecision.

  ‘Small business,’ they eventually said, very pragmatically, on seeing this. ‘We all sell the same things. Make a small business for each of us if you can.’

  I was delighted at this solution. I felt disproportionately guilty about the dichotomy of being a rich Westerner, but also being not at all rich and trying my best to save money. It’s all relative, I guess. I wasn’t sure how earning a writer’s salary and constantly being in my overdraft compared to everyday life around here.

  As I got to know them better, I chatted to some of the women on the stalls about how it worked. They said this had been a very bad year and they were making less money than usual, but I shamefully found myself thinking, well, they wouldn’t tell me they were having the best year ever and making masses of cash, would they? They explained to me a complicated system that I didn’t really understand, whereby they paid for both their rent and their stock upfront and then had to make it back.

  To be fair, I couldn’t really see how they made much profit at all, as there was not much passing trade. When things were very quiet, I’d see a few of the women walking up and down the beach with some of their smaller items. A few people would stop and chat to them, but mostly they would be ignored and swatted away and generally treated on about the same level as the beach dogs, possibly slightly worse. However, I did laugh once when I saw someone express a slight interest in a bracelet, whereupon Priya pulled about a dozen similar options from her bra. If I ever said I liked one thing, they would say they’d give me a good price if I bought two. This would always baffle me: ‘but I only want one, what will I do with two?’

  When we weren’t going on excursions elsewhere, I would try to visit every day and buy something from someone. I worked my way down the stalls and would promise to come to the next one the following day.

  Back home, I once said to my therapist, ‘You know how dogs have no concept of time and every time you leave them, they just assume it’s for ever and you’re not coming back? Well, that’s how I feel in relationships these days.’ We agreed that I’ve been left, with no apparent warning, enough times for this to be unsurprising.

  The reaction from my friends on the stalls seems to be the same – they are convinced this is their last chance to sell me things and I might never come back. They grab my hands and look me soulfully in the eyes.

  ‘Keep your promise. Promise me? You’ll come back. Promise?’

  After a week or so, I’m gratified that they seem to begin to believe me. Each time I tell them how many days I have left before I go home and they take my word for it that they’ll see me again. Every time, I feel a bit sad that the number of days left is depleting. I love my routine here.

  So, each day I might buy a ring or an incense holder to take home for friends. I buy my yoga teacher cousin some bells to use in her class. I buy my sister an anklet to use as her ‘something blue’ at her wedding. Every time I take more money out from the cash machine at the hotel, I keep my fingers crossed that it will let me.

  I try to buy things that will be genuinely useful – also I am on a limited budget and it makes me feel embarrassed to be behaving like some kind of benevolent oligarch over here. I buy tiny things but spend a long time sitting outside stalls chatting. Fortunately, nobody seems to find this annoying. I like to think they’d tell me if it was. These women seem quite forthright.

  Sylvia (some of the women have Anglicised names that I guess must be variations of their real names, but I’m not sure) introduces me to her daughter, who is thirteen, and tells me how proud she is that her daughter goes to school. Sylvia herself can’t read or write. Cheesy to say, but it puts things in perspective.

  This Western guilt plus my total inability to haggle means I am a dream customer. So much so, it is confusing to my new friends. I ask how much something is, they tell me a made-up number, I inwardly panic about this and say ‘um, OK?’. It’s the same sort of voice I used to find myself using with Bad Boyfriend – my automatic reflex when I’m uncomfortable. My good manners have always been a problem for me. In this instance, it seems to cause genuine confusion. Some of the women feel so sorry for me and my naive ways, they start giving me presents. It’s lovely but somewhat adds to my awkward guilt feelings. A lot of the stuff they’re selling goes for much more in overpriced Brighton hippie shops, so I figure I’m getting a good deal anyway.

  One problem is, although it’s all a similar selection, some of the stalls do have nicer things than others. When I go inside Sonia’s shop, about halfway down the parade of stalls and from the outside identical to the others, I pretty much fall in love.

  A lot of the dresses and kaftans I’ve seen look lovely, but I silently lament that they’re in such cheap manmade fabrics. They’d get sweaty and gross in a second, possibly go up in flames, and definitely not survive a spin in the washing machine. If I have learned one thing about myself in thirty-six years – and, let’s face it, I’ve managed to learn very few lessons along the way – it’s that I am far too lazy to hand-wash anything, ever.

  Anyway, Sonia’s stall is different. There are racks of beautiful cotton dresses, the sort I dreamed of bringing home from India. They are perfect, total George Harrison Sixties vibes, which is always a theme I will go for. I want to dance around singing ‘My Sweet Lord’ with joy at the very sight of them.

  ‘You have such beautiful things in here!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Ssh, don’t tell the others,’ she says.

  There is one dress in particular I fall in love with. It’s full-length, blue and white cotton, long bell sleeves with bells and tassels. She tells me the price and it’s roughly the same as something similar would be from a fancy hippie shop in Brighton.

  ‘Um, OK?’ I say.

  I decide there and then that I will wear it to my sister’s wedding in June, then it somehow doesn’t seem like quite such a profligate pu
rchase. I tell Sonia this, thinking she will be pleased.

  ‘This,’ she says sternly, ‘is a very high-class dress. If I sell it to you, you must promise me – promise – you will wear it nicely.’

  ‘OK …’

  She looks at me sceptically. I don’t blame her. As I do pretty much every day here, I am wearing ratty old denim shorts and a vest, my hair in the same plait it has been in for a few days, throughout sleep and sea swimming and yoga classes. I have flip-flops on and my feet are decidedly dusty. I think it’s a look I pull off pretty well, considering I’m not actually a Nineties teenager any more, but Sonia clearly disagrees.

  ‘You must promise me. You wear high heels. Make-up. Do your hair pretty. Not –’ she gestures at my general person, making a most distasteful face – ‘this. Promise me not this.’

  ‘Um, OK.’

  She tries to sell me some more dresses but, even though I want them all desperately, I genuinely can’t afford to buy anything else. I promise her I will come back when I have more money on me.

  She hugs me and whispers to me that I am her best friend. I guess that means I paid far too much for the dress, but I am so happy with both the dress and the positive affirmation that I still consider it a bargain.

  As I go to leave, she steps in front of the doorway and physically stops me.

  ‘Wait, wait!’

  Whenever anything like this happens, I immediately expect to be murdered or at least robbed. It’s shocking how quickly murder always comes into my head as the only logical explanation. Then again, what else can it be? Why won’t she let me leave?

  I’m carrying my beach bag, an ancient Marc Jacobs canvas shopper, which has seen better days and contains all my worldly possessions. Also, the blue plastic carrier bag Sonia has given me containing my new favourite dress.

  She grabs my bag off my shoulder. Oh well, I think – being robbed is definitely better than being murdered. Swings and roundabouts, you know. She then wrestles the carrier bag out of my sweaty hand and takes that, too. Bit rude that she wants her merchandise back as well as all my cash and passport, but ho hum. I guess I’ll just let it slide and not put up a fight. I’m such a coward, when it comes down to it.

  Sonia starts taking all of my belongings out of my tatty old canvas bag. Maybe she’s going to take the good stuff and ditch the rest. I fear she will be sorely disappointed as she sorts through a soggy swimsuit, a notebook containing all my most embarrassing innermost feelings, my beloved iPod Classic and an old Nirvana T-shirt.

  Anyway, Sonia shoves the blue carrier bag down into the bottom of my beach bag and then starts carefully packing my belongings back in over the top of it. She folds my towel and bikini much more neatly than I have ever done in my entire life.

  ‘We can’t let the others see,’ she whispers to me. ‘They will be angry with me if they see you bought a large item here. Small business, small business – remember? When you come back and buy more, it will have to be secret. The others will be angry with me. They will not be nice to Sonia. You are my best friend, remember? Don’t tell them.’

  This would be kind of funny if it didn’t make me want to cry. My buying a dress from one of them and not the others clearly made a bigger difference than I would like to acknowledge.

  I assured Sonia that I would keep it quiet. A secret between best friends, we agreed. Before I went home, I think I managed to buy something from everyone. Nan and Rose definitely helped, buying presents for all their respective grandchildren. Ann thought I was insane.

  I went back and bought three more dresses (that I couldn’t afford) from Sonia before I went home, and hid them way down in the bottom of the bag. She hugged me and gave me some free earrings when I left. Really nice ones as well, that I actually wear. When I took Rose in there to buy gifts before going home, Sonia told Rose that she and I were best friends.

  I may be needy, naive and slightly delusional – but I still like to think she didn’t say that to just everyone.

  December 1947

  The family left India on the Empire Halladale ship, a journey that took over a month.

  Dolly was seven months pregnant (for the eighth time, at the age of forty-two) and spent the entire journey ill and confined to the sick bay. They must all have been traumatised by their last days in India, and with no idea what was waiting for them in the strange country on the other side. Still, Nan remembers they were mostly delighted just to have all made it out together.

  There were a few families like theirs on the boat, but it was mostly shipping home the demobbed soldiers of the Black Watch regiment, who made up the vast majority of the passenger list. The boat set sail from Bombay, made a stop to pick up more passengers in Karachi, then headed for the UK.

  They were on the boat over Christmas and New Year. Rose remembers having Christmas dinner on the ship. She also sneaked out alone to join in the New Year festivities, where her abiding memory is of drunk soldiers racing prams up and down the corridors, and having to hide in a cupboard when they started paying her too much attention. She was a very pretty eighteen-year-old at the time. She never told her mum that one.

  Nan spent her time at sea writing short stories and diaries that she intended to send to her English teacher at school back in now-Pakistan, Miss de Renzi, not realizing then that she couldn’t – that life didn’t exist any more.

  When they left, Nan had started her ‘Senior Cambridge’ course – the equivalent to A-Levels – but had not yet taken her exams. She had been hoping to take up a place at teacher training college in Shimla, which of course was now rendered null and void. She wanted to be an English teacher, and I can imagine she would have been great at it.

  She was, of course at that age, also perturbed to have been parted from her first crush, Willy Simpson. She still vividly remembers having her first formal dress for a dance at the Burt Club – white satin, with puffed sleeves and a sash – and dancing with Willy. He was literally the boy next door. His family owned a shoe-making business and were shoemakers to the Maharaja.

  His family moved to Canada and he ended up marrying Nan’s friend Philomena. She’s still a little bit pissed off about it.

  ‘Ha! Willy and Philly,’ I pointed out, to try and cheer her up about it.

  Even seventy years later, she only laughs grudgingly.

  Willy Simpson aside, it’s so funny the things we remember. Nan vividly recalls having marmalade for the first time on that boat. She remembers going through the Suez Canal, and waving at children from the deck, who were watching the boat from the shore. But she says she didn’t give much thought to where they were going and what it meant for them as a family. I often think how terrifying it must have been, leaving behind everything they had all ever known.

  ‘I do remember feeling sad about not going to college, and I missed my school and my teachers. But I had my parents and my siblings with me; that was the main thing. Still, it was a confusing time for me. I didn’t know what to think, really.’

  Most of their possessions, collected over generations of living in India, had to be left behind in their old house. They really had no idea what was awaiting them on the other side. Although they had never been to the UK before, they thought of themselves as entirely, quintessentially ‘British’. It did not occur to them that the UK would be very different from India.

  Also, they were so used to things going their way, to living a life of privilege, they assumed more of the same was awaiting them on the other side. They were incorrect.

  This journey was referred to as ‘going home’, but when they arrived, it wouldn’t really be home in any way. Nobody was prepared for quite how different it would be.

  Present Day

  In India, I do yoga every day. At home, I wish this were true, but it is not.

  I first did yoga circa 2001, when I became obsessed with the idea that I could achieve both Madonna’s arms and a nicer, calmer personality in one fell swoop. This sort of life-changing efficiency appealed to me. I did the Geri Hal
liwell yoga video religiously for a while when I was a student (Ginger was always the Spice Girl I related to the most, due to our similarly fluctuating weight and shared fondness for home dye jobs), but I soon gave up when it failed to change my life or my biceps as instantaneously as I had assumed. In those days, most of the lifestyle changes I attempted – macrobiotic diet, kickboxing, becoming a goth – had a similarly short lifespan.

  Over the years, I went through intense phases of hot yoga, ashtanga yoga, bellydancing, meditation classes, ballet barre. None of it stuck until thirty was looming and I decided it was finally time to take myself in hand, once and for all. There were bad habits that I didn’t want to take into my thirties with me.

  Miraculously, I really did put my mind to it and it worked. Since then I’ve run three(ish) times a week, been to a dance class once or twice a week (OK, Zumba, but that doesn’t sound as sexy), and done yoga whenever I have the time and inclination in between. Through all the shit that’s happened since, one thing I have clung to is my exercise regimen. Even though I’m now a slightly-more-than-social smoker, and even when I could barely stomach solid food, I hauled myself around the park for a feeble run three times a week. Even when it was barely at walking pace, it always made me feel better. The only times I’ve been a week without running in my thirties were when I had the flu and when I’d just had an enormous tattoo on my ribcage that meant I couldn’t wear a sports bra.

  Much as I would love to be a Zen creature with Madonna arms, yoga is the one that always falls to the bottom of the list and rarely gets done. In the previous year, I probably went to about half a dozen yoga classes at the local Buddhist Centre and one weekend women’s yoga workshop that was just a string of really twee words strung together, sounding like something Jamie Oliver might name a child. I think it was Elemental Woman Inner Cosmic Body Wisdom. Or something a bit like that, anyway.

  So, although somewhere along the line I have become an annoying person who talks about how running has improved her mental health, I certainly did not intend to come to India for a yoga holiday. There’s something about the idea of ‘self-care’ that makes me recoil. Leave that to the Instagram babes doing downward dog while promoting a sweatshirt that proclaims ‘yay kale!’. Back in the day, I was only ever in it for the promise of abs that somehow never materialised, probably because I would turn up at hot yoga hungover and then get chips on the way home, while wondering why it worked for everyone else but not me. I was over that delusion now. However, it begins to dawn on me that while saying the words ‘self-care’ automatically makes me roll my eyes, I am probably in need of it. I have the time here, after all. And I’m in India, for goodness’ sake.