Introduction

"This is a captivating, delightful novel. I was totally engaged by Tishani Doshi's people and by their world, and the language often rises—when speaking of the great matters, life, death, and above all love—to powerful metaphorical heights."—Salman Rushdie Meet the Patel-Joneses—Babo, Sian, Mayuri, and Bean—in their little house with orange and black gates next door to the Punjab Women's Association in Madras. Babo grew up here, but he and Sian, his cream-skinned Welsh love, met in London. Babo's parents disapproved. And then they disapproved unless the couple moved back to Madras. So here they are. And as the twentieth century creaks and croaks its way along, Babo, Sian, and the children navigate their way through the uncharted territory of a "hybrid" family: the hustle and bustle of Babo's relatives; the faraway phone-line crackle of Sian's; the eternal wisdom and soft bosom of Great-Grandmother Ba; the perils of first love, lost innocence, and old age; and the big question: What do you do with the space your loved ones leave behind? Tishani Doshi, a prizewinning poet, plunges into fiction for the first time with this tender and uplifting debut. With rich feeling and dazzling language, Doshi evokes both Zadie Smith and Rohinton Mistry as she captures the quirks and calamities of one unusual clan in a story of identity, family, belonging, and all-transcending love.

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

i. Departures and depositories of deceit

In the early hours of 20 August, 1968, the morning of his son’s departure, Prem Kumar Patel succumbed to a luxury he had never, in all his forty-seven years of living, experienced before: he had a dream. It was a long, terrible dream that seemed to take him back to the coils of his mother’s womb and hurl him to the end of his life, to a valley submerged in ice. In this dream Prem Kumar was climbing mountains, trying to find his wife and four children. They were lost to him in a strange kingdom where men carried the ghosts of ancestors on their backs and women hid in trees throwing poison-tipped arrows. Prem Kumar, standing in front of a great wooden doorway, could hear his children screaming. Babo, especially; his eldest, who was cold and wanted extra blankets to sleep, who wasn’t used to this bite in the air that was making him turn from a dark shade of walnut to a pasty pistachio. Babo kept calling out to Prem Kumar, Why did you send me here? Why did you send me away? And the other children – Meenal, Dolly and Chotu, cried in chorus after him, Why did you send him away? Why did you send our brother away?

All morning, while on the other side of the world Soviet tanks invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Prem Kumar Patel lay corpse-still on his back in Madras, South India, watching as his entire life passed before him in a series of silvered, fleeting scenes. He saw his white-haired mother on the front steps of her house in Ganga Bazaar, peeling mangoes for grandchildren that hadn’t been born yet. He saw jackals roaming the rubble-strewn streets of a city laid to waste. He saw burnings and soarings, a celestial aeroplane descending from the sky. He saw things that couldn’t possibly have happened but bore a resemblance to reality that frightened him so much he had to turn to his wife lying beside him and suck on her breasts of wondrous light. He wanted to ask what these portents meant, but Trishala, slapping her husband’s mouth irritably away, wanted nothing to do with it. “Get off, get off,” she said, “What’s the matter with you? Bothering me so early in the morning.” And she pulled the sheets from him, wrapping them around the large mass of her body, preferring to stay cocooned in a dreamland of her own making.

When Prem Kumar finally woke to the event of Babo’s leaving, it was with dark circles under his eyes and the wide expanse of his nose rutted with a rash of mosquito bites. From the distance, he could hear his neighbour Darayus Mazda’s daily morning balcony diatribe: Oh! They are breaking me into pieces. My family is breaking me into pieces. They want to send me to the Towers of Silence before my time. Won’t someone save me from their wickedness….And on and on and on, till Prem Kumar, for the first time in their neighbourly association, wanted to walk over and reassure his Parsi kinsman in suffering. That no one was trying to do away with him; that in fact, it was he, Prem Kumar, who was the target of a far greater suffering.

***

Prem Kumar was not a sentimental man, but he was religious, and he believed in retribution. For him, this event of Babo’s departure was much more than just an investment in the Patel’s family future. It was about his personal dharma, his responsibility. Babo, who had graduated with honours in chemistry from Jain College, was going to be the first member of their community to further his education by studying abroad. Babo, at the breathtaking age of twenty-one, was also going to be the first person in their immediate family to fly on a plane all the way to London.

At the beginning of the year, Prem Kumar had written to the offices of Joseph Friedman & Sons in London, from whom he imported coloured cement and raw materials, asking if his son, who was going to be taking evening classes at the City & Guild Borough Polytechnic, could get some practical training under their auspices during the day. Fred Hallworth, who was the man in charge of exports, had written back saying that they would be delighted to have young Dharmesh Patel working at their offices in Wandsworth, that they could offer him a weekly salary of £10/15, and would furthermore be able to give him Wednesdays off so he could finish his course at the Polytechnic sooner.

These provisions are more than adequate, Prem Kumar replied, And I can only hope that with this new venture, our partnership will grow from strength to strength. A month later, a letter arrived from the Chairman’s office saying that a work permit was being organized for Babo, and that if anything else needed to be arranged, the company would be more than happy to help.

All this was cause for a great swelling in Prem Kumar’s chest. Ever since the Indian government had banned imports on finished products in an effort to encourage home industry, Prem Kumar had been dreaming of opening his own specialized paint factory: Patel & Sons, where Babo, with his foreign-acquired knowledge, and Chotu, under his brother’s guidance, could steer the Patel family towards a stable, lucrative future. Prem Kumar had already raced ahead in time. He could see it now: the labels on the paint cans, the logo, the motto, the workers scurrying in and out noiselessly like ants, filing cabinets filled with account books in his careful, crested handwriting, showing rising profits year after year.

Prem Kumar indulged in this dreaming even as he sat solemnly beneath the sign that he had lovingly tacked above his current desk in his early idealistic years:

PLEASE TALK OF BUSINESS,

FINISH YOUR BUSINESS,

AND LEAVE THE MAN TO ATTEND TO HIS BUSINESS.

Only later, much later, on the day of the dreaded telegram, nine months after Babo left Madras on that nearly-rainy day in August 1968, would Prem Kumar begin to understand the dangerous implications of his idle day-dreaming. He’d realize that he was being punished for his own duplicity: for dreaming of the future when he should have been attending to the present.

On the morning of Babo’s departure, when Prem Kumar hauled his struggling body out onto the veranda to join the rest of his family, he kept quiet about his dream. He didn’t tell Trishala about it – not in the months of silence during her illness, not even when she lay delirious on her deathbed demanding to know the ways in which he’d been unfaithful to her. Because Prem Kumar didn’t believe in superstitions or spiritly visitations. After Trishala died, of course, he found he couldn’t sleep at nights; he was restless, doomed to listen to religious songs blaring into his ears from his Walkman because he missed his wife’s extravagant presence beside him, and because, after his first and only dream, he dreaded the consequences of another.

Prem Kumar had to live with the guilt that if only he’d shared his dream with his wife, she would never have allowed their son to fly away on that fateful day. But as it was, he stood with the rest of the family, watching Babo as he walked out in his new, over-starched Jamal’s suit, smiling at all the world with his jhill mill gleaming teeth, completely innocent of the tumultuous changes his departure was going to bring upon them all.

***

The drive to the Madras Meenambakkam Airport was mostly sullen. Chotu, Prem Kumar’s youngest child, sat squeezed in the front seat between his father and the driver, sulking furiously because he was about to lose one of the things he was most passionate about – his older brother, (the other being the more steadfast game of cricket). In the back, Trishala and Babo occupied places of importance by the windows, while the girls Meenal and Dolly tried to find comfortable positions between them. Once in a while, Prem Kumar would yell, “Watch out! Can’t you see where you’re going?” or “Mind the cow!” to the taxi driver, but otherwise, it was all silence.

Babo, looking out of the window, was watching the patterns the recent puddles had made in the streets. It had been raining in Madras for two weeks, but this morning the sky seemed to be holding its breath, as if in reverence to his momentous occasion.

“Papa,” Babo said, as if the thought had just occurred to him, “In England, when people ask me what caste I am, what shall I tell them?”

“You’ll explain exactly what you are – that you are the son of Prem Kumar Patel, grandson of Shantilal Kumar Patel, great great grandson of Kunthinath Paras Kumar Patel.”

“And if they ask me what religion I follow?”

“Then you’ll tell them that you are a dedicated and practising Jain just like the father of our nation, Mahatma Gandhi; a believer in ahimsa, and in the equality of all souls.”

Yes, Babo thought, that is what I will tell them if they ask.

“Chotu,” he said, reaching over to pat his eleven-year-old brother on the head, “Do you think one day you too will go to England to study?”

“Of course, bhai. I’m going to grow up and become a paint maker just like you and papa.”

With that settled, Babo leaned back in his seat smiling, thinking things were exactly as they should be. As they drove through the tree-lined avenues of Madras, Babo noticed how the flower-sellers were already out, stringing jasmine and marigold for the housewives who would come by after their chores to offer morning prayers at the temple. The coffee and tea makers in the little shanty stands like Balaji Snacks and Hot Point were busy too, as were the newspaper sellers and the early morning walkers. Madras was alive, singing and dancing like the oil on the surface of the low-lying puddles, quivering with delicate rainbows. Babo saw a young girl riding on the back of her father’s bicycle. She wore a bright pink dress with silver anklets around her bare feet, and to Babo, she looked like a princess being guided by a troubadour through the deep forests of morning.

He watched her as he watched everything, knowing it would be a long time before he saw any of it again. But after half an hour of mustering up such an intense look of concentration on his face, Babo felt himself being assailed by a great and sudden need for sleep.

Prem Kumar, still irritated with his sleepless night, noticed with distaste that the dashboard of the Ambassador was cluttered with pictures of gods: Baby Krishna, Jesus Christ, Guru Nanak, Gautham Buddha, even Lord Mahavir – the twenty fourth thirthankara and Great Hero of the Jain religion; they were all lined up, side-to-side, shimmering in gaudy benevolence. The taxi driver, who was obviously trying to cover all bases by appeasing the gods simultaneously, had already infuriated Prem Kumar by smoking bidi after bidi at the gates of Sylvan Lodge, leaving poor Selvam, their half-blind watchman, to pack the luggage in the car. Clearly, he was a fellow who completely lacked any grasp of Right Thought, Right Action, or Right Understanding – the basic tenets of the Jain faith that he’d tried to instil in all his children but particularly in Babo.

Sometimes it seemed to Prem Kumar that Babo came from a different family. He never openly mocked his father or disagreed with him, but Prem Kumar knew for a fact that his son did not pray, did not recite Navkar Mantra thrice a day (which was the minimum number prescribed), did not believe in ideas of penance, and certainly didn’t believe in the idea of denying the self pleasure.

Once, when Babo was twelve, he rounded up all the neighbourhood children and his siblings (including two-year old Chotu whom he carried on his back), and walked them five kilometres to Marina Beach, thinking it would be a grand idea to go out to sea with the fishermen in their catamarans, and to swim with dolphins. When Trishala returned to Sylvan Lodge from her shopping to find her children disappeared, she began a stupendous wailing at the gates with all the other neighbourhood mothers joining in, thinking that demons and asuras had collectively carried their children away. Hours later, when Babo finally returned like Alexander the Great crossing the River Jhelum to conquer King Porus with an army of brown-faced children burned by the midday sun – their clothes wet from sea water, their pockets full of shells, Prem Kumar, who had been summoned back from work, took his son upstairs and gave him the whipping of his life. Trishala went to him later of course, with soft words, saying that as Babo was the eldest, he was the vehicle for all Prem Kumar’s aspirations; it was his responsibility to guide the younger ones, not to tickle their fancies and imaginations. She tried to feed him the samosas she’d prepared for him tenderly with her fingers, but Babo became a wall of stone. He bore his grudges like a turtle – forever. He’d pretend to shrug them off and carry on as if everything were normal, but inside he never forgot things, especially actions that were charged against him unjustly. There were stores of memories just like this one, that he kept locked inside his chest, which remained like fresh wounds on the surface of his body.

Despite all their differences though, Prem Kumar knew his son was a good boy. That at least he believed in ahimsa – non-violence to all living beings; and the idea of truth – because it was the most important idea of all. According to Prem Kumar, everyone had to find their own truth, for without it, life would remain a useless circle of deception and conflict. If one had the wisdom to follow this truth, then one could hope to break the bonds that tied one to the suffering of this world, and attain moksha – the final liberation. But the problem with the young, thought Prem Kumar, was that they were unwavering in the idea of their own invincibility.

Prem Kumar glanced back at Babo who was on his way to finding out all these things, whose head was nodding against the glass of the window – knock knock knock. And in an extraordinarily open gesture of love, he looked at his sleeping son and smiled.

***

At the airport the family disembarked carrying their allotted pieces of luggage. Dolly and Meenal stood in matching green checked maxis and blouses holding the getting-ready-for-camera gear: talcum powder, comb, mirror, hand towel. Chotu stood separately with the basket of snacks and tea flask, staring at the ground so he would not shame himself by crying in public like his sisters. Trishala was pushing through the crowds in her new maroon sari and matching maroon glasses, balancing rose garlands in one hand and puja tray in the other, hollering at the girls to hurry behind her and stay close. Prem Kumar, pulling crisp notes out of his wallet, was lecturing the taxi driver on the ill-consequences of smoking while simultaneously keeping an eye out for another lazy, unreliable man – Lilaj-bhai, who had been hired to take photographs of Babo’s going-away ceremony.

Babo was being preened, made to stand in the light for the photograph session. Meenal was fussing with his hair, trying to get his curls to stay in place. Meenal: second in line, quietest of all four children, given to short bursts of emotion and long periods of introspection, weeping copious tears, as was the tradition of all Patel women when it came to interactions with their men.

“You won’t forget about us will you, bhai?” she said, picking up his hand and stroking the chunky gold ring on his left finger which she’d given him the night before on Trishala’s instruction.

“Don’t be silly,” said Babo, just as he’d said the night before when Meenal had found him on the terrace, sneaking his last fag of the day. “I wish I could forget about you,” he’d said, “but I’ve lived with you for nineteen years now, so it looks like we’re stuck for life doesn’t it?”

When he saw Meenal’s well-powdered face shrink like a deflated balloon, he’d immediately reached out to pull her plaits and said, “Oy, sour puss, why all this drama bazi? Didn’t I promise to write to you?”

“And to Falguni,” Meenal replied, tittering.

Babo had been thinking of Falguni when Meenal had burst in on him. He had fallen in love with her during the festival of Navratri, when for nine consecutive nights, all the people of their community, young and old, gathered in a large hall to celebrate and worship the three supreme aspects of the Goddess Durga. The religious significance was lost on Babo. For him, it was enough to celebrate. It was also one of the few legitimate ways to meet a girl.

Babo had noticed Falguni on the very first night. He’d known her for years of course, because she was the daughter of Prem Kumar and Trishala’s closest friends, Kamal and Meghna Shah. That night though, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time, standing next to Meenal in a bridal-red ghagra with coloured glass bangles all the way from her slim wrists to her elbows. She was a milky-skinned girl with almond eyes, a willowy waist, and a thick river of black hair which she kept demurely plaited. But her biggest attraction was the peculiar structure of her teeth which forced her to lisp her words and confuse her s’s for th’s. For this reason mainly, and for the fact that within the span of a few short months Falguni had developed a sizeable pair of breasts, Babo found himself hanging around her with a clutch of other admirers.

Babo had learned from the movies that the best heroes were the ones who were slick, suave, and oftentimes cruel. So after his initial gaff at gawping, he whisked away one of Meenal’s less attractive friends and spent the whole night dancing with her. By six in the morning, when people started heading towards breakfast places with leaden feet, Babo, continuing in his nonchalance, sat at a separate table with all of Dolly’s sixteen-year-old friends, cracking loud jokes, boasting about being the first one to soon-be-getting-on-a-plane, and pretending to be bashful about his Bon Voyage picture which had appeared in The Hindu newspaper the day before.

Just before taking his sisters home, Falguni had crept up to him with her almond eyes brimming with tears. “Promith me that ssomorrow you will only danth wiss me,” she said determinedly. But Babo, patting her dainty, milky hand, said nothing; gave her a mischievous wink, and left her to worry all day about his intentions.

Since then, they’d been passing secret messages back and forth through the willing and eager conduit of Meenal; the messages getting more and more fervent as the day of Babo’s leaving approached. Along with Trishala’s ring, Meenal had also pressed a long, tear-stained letter from Falguni who promised that she would not path a thingle day in happineth till Babo returned to her from London.

Last night Babo had looked at his sister Meenal like he’d never looked at her before. She wasn’t beautiful. There was nothing very special about her at all. But she had that aura that only a young woman overflowing with innocence could have. Something so heartbreaking, it made him want to reach out and claim it for himself. It was nostalgic, looking at a girl like that – her clear face and untouched body draped in a chiffon sari, the puffy short sleeves, the hair tied back in double braids with ribbons.

All these events – even this moment with Meenal, were entering the annals of Last Times for Babo. Months and years from now he’d think about his sister like this on the terrace, looking at him wistfully with tears running down her cheeks, asking when he would come back to be married, and what if she were married before that? He would remember the magenta bougainvillea cascading out of the terracotta flowerpots, the air mostly still and quiet, telling her briskly that nothing in the world would happen until he returned. He remembered believing it too, while they stood there, sister and brother, their feet on the redbrick terrace – Meenal, whose temporarily waif-like frame would disappear soon after her much-anticipated marriage, and Babo in his crisp white kurta pyjama, his fingernails cut and filed, his hair glistening with the coconut oil that Trishala had lavishly anointed while listing the temptations he must resist while he was away: meat, alcohol, tobacco, and most importantly, women.

***

Lilaj-bhai was trying to get the family organised. As soon as he’d seen the Ambassador roll through the departure gates, he had walked towards it jauntily with a foxy, betel-stained smile. He knew if he played his cards right, he could make a killing with the Patel family: families were at their weakest on occasions of departure and arrival. Deaths, births and marriages figured highest on the emotional range, of course. What were photographs after all, but a desire to capture some of those emotions, trap the feelings so you could pull them out later to marvel at?

Marriage was the greatest occasion of leaving and arriving. The girl departs one house and arrives in the other, and likewise, the family of the boy is, in a way, leaving an old life and entering into another. These moments that occupied the cusp were what Lilaj-bhai lived for, because this was when human beings were willing to forget about hard things like money and expense. And this moment here, with the Patel family on the pavement of the Madras Meenambakkam Airport, was an event Lilaj-bhai could plunder.

While Lilaj-bhai set up his equipment, Prem Kumar pulled Babo aside and slipped him his most prized possession – the locket of his grandfather, Babo’s great grandfather, Kunthinath Paras Kumar Patel, whom Prem Kumar admired for two things: refusing to take up arms against the British because of his belief in ahimsa, and living a life of the highest virtue (eating only two meals a day, taking care of all the stray animals in the village, and dying without any of his neighbours being able to whisper a single word of malice against him).

“Your mother wanted me to give this to you, son. I hope you will wear it with the dignity that your great-grandfather did. And I hope it will give you the strength to make the right choices.”

The locket was a platinum globe the size of a fifty paisa coin with a faded reproduction of Lord Mahavir inside. Ba, Prem Kumar’s mother, and the grand matriarch of the entire village of Ganga Bazaar, had given it to him on the occasion of her husband’s death. She had meant it to be a symbolic passing over of reins. It had been Trishala’s idea to give the locket to Babo for good luck, and as a concrete reminder of home, although Prem Kumar knew that even if the locket possessed any ability to pass on guidance and virtue to its wearer, it would be wasted on Babo, who was more likely to wear a Dev Anand style cravat around his neck, than an old-fashioned, religious pendant.

Prem Kumar, who had a penchant for sayings, had initially thought to tell his son something especially historic at the final moment of farewell: All humans are miserable due to their own faults, and they themselves can be happy by correcting these faults. But now that the moment was here, Prem Kumar, realizing his wife had been right after all, found the words too solemn and artificially constructed, and allowed them to slide back down his throat.

Babo, standing close to his suitcase labelled with his cousin Nat’s address in London – NUMBER 172, FLAT B, BELSIZE PARK ROAD – looked at his family as though he were never coming back. Despite all his youthful inexperience, he knew that after this moment, things were going to change far beyond what he could imagine. He wanted to take each member of his scattered family and press them close to his chest, hold them there and make them realize the moment too.

Perhaps he would come back to Madras one day and everything would appear to be the same: the sky might meet the sea like an old lover; the people pushing past the railings towards their unknowable futures might still smell of dust and tobacco, rosewater and jasmine; the air clinging to his clothes might still be as heavy as tar. His family might even be lined up in a similar fashion: Prem Kumar in his beige safari suit buttoned up to the neck, Trishala in her giant-sized maroon sari flapping about like a tent in a storm, Meenal and Dolly like twin dolls in matching outfits, winking and sticking their tongues out at him. And Chotu, standing apart from them all, concentrating on the giant metal birds on the runway. They might all still be there, waiting for his return to free them. But Babo could feel himself changing already. He knew he was going to forsake all this for something else, something larger, something which for the moment he couldn’t touch.

For the moment he would stand with his family in the morning light with the sun shining through the rain-laden clouds. He would let Lilaj-bhai say, “Okay, E-sherious look now please,” or “E-shmile please,” and take pictures of them together; stiff as dummies in a store window, arms in attention at their sides. And gradually, as they relaxed and lost consciousness of the camera, there would be pictures of Babo’s gleaming teeth and his family smiling along with him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world – to let this boy fly away from them for the first time in his life. Far far away. Zing zing zing in the sky.

ii. Under false skies

It took Babo three months and five days in London to forget about Falguni. There had been a lot to deal with since his arrival, and pining for a large-breasted girl with a lisp from Madras was only working as a deterrent to his ultimate goal, which was, as his father repeatedly reminded him every time he wrote or telephoned, to get the gold medal for the advanced course at the Polytechnic, and to make himself indispensable to Joseph Friedman & Sons.

In any case, Falguni’s letters were getting increasingly and irritatingly sentimental, demanding replies and declarations of love that Babo, with his current schedule, just couldn’t keep up with. How could he begin to describe his new life to her, or to anyone in his family for that matter? It was all so utterly different than what he’d expected; nothing at all like the English movies he used to cut classes for and watch with his college friends in Madras. There were no Alec Guinnesses or Humphrey Bogarts walking around in London. No Gina Lollobrigidas. At least none that he could see in the London City Council in Wandsworth where his cousin Nat had dumped him.

To start with Nat and his wife Lila hadn’t even picked him up at the airport. Babo had waited, holding tight to his suitcase, senses on high alert. Every five minutes he looked down at the face of his new HMT watch to see if it was still working, and finally, after confirming that he had indeed been waiting for three hours and fifteen minutes, he found a sardarji taxi driver who agreed to take him to Nat’s address in Belsize Park for £3 – which was all the money he’d been allowed in foreign exchange by the Indian Government. In the forty-five minutes it took to reach their flat, Babo had worked himself into a teary-eyed rage, because he was already broke, and because to arrive in a new place with no one to greet you, was surely an inauspicious way to begin.

“Where were you?” shrieked Babo, to a surprised Lila who answered the door. “Didn’t you get the telegram from Papa? I don’t understand. You’re my family! You were supposed to pick me up.”

Nat and Lila hadn’t received the telegram. They’d been informed that Babo was due to arrive at some point, but the exact details of that arrival had gone astray. “Doesn’t matter,” said Nat, somewhat too nonchalantly for Babo’s liking. “You’re here now, isn’t it?”

Nat had grown fat during his time in London. Babo had last seen him four years ago at his wedding in Baroda, at which point he’d been a regular, plumpish Gujju boy with a regular head of hair. Now though, he looked to Babo like a cabbage – devoid of any character, his features flattened into oblivion, and his hair, whatever was left of it, swept into a scary comb-over. To compensate for these deficiencies perhaps, Nat talked louder and faster than before, and during the course of tea and snacks, he delivered Babo his second googly of the day. “Well,” he said, reaching for his fifth vegetable cutlet, “We ought to sort out some accommodation for you, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean? Won’t I be staying with you?”

“Look at the size of this place!” said Nat, gesturing to the grubby walls of his bedsit with his chubby arms. “There’s barely enough place for Lila and me as it is. Besides, this is England, Babo. In this country, they don’t live like sardines, not like back home where it’s all family-shamily all the time. Day in and day out, eating, sleeping, shitting in each other’s faces. You know what I mean? No privacy, only lunacy. I tell you, it’s the best thing about this country. Give it a few months and you’ll learn to enjoy your time alone. In fact, you’ll be thanking me.”

Even though Nat eventually proved to be right, Babo never really forgave him for turfing him out of Hampstead – haven of tycoons and film stars – on his very first day, and depositing him in the London City Council in Wandsworth, henceforth the LCC, with only a loan of £5 and an A-Z to keep him company. His room was half the size of his parent’s bathroom in Sylvan Lodge, and it was windowless. If he stretched out his hands he could feel the partition cloth that separated his space from the next fellow’s, and if he stretched further, he could potentially topple the glass of teeth that would surely be sitting on the side table next door because the average age of a LCC occupant was seventy.

On his own side table Babo kept his wristwatch, locket and a limited array of toiletries (toothbrush, tongue cleaner, toothpaste, shaving cream and brush, soap and hair oil which would later be exchanged for Brylcreem). The rest of his possessions – two suits, four shirts, one pair of trousers, four pairs of underwear and socks, two ties, family photos and Falguni’s letters – he fitted into his suitcase and stored under the bed. In his briefcase, he kept his passport, wallet and work papers. The one pair of Bata shoes he owned, black and perfectly polished, he removed and kept by the door as soon as he entered the room. For this room, and for a steady diet of toast, tea, boiled vegetables and custard, Babo would pay £4/15 a week, nearly half his weekly salary.

On his first morning in London Babo was up early, making his way to the common toilets before anyone else so he could do his business in peace. He had with him the plastic mug that Trishala had insisted on packing because she’d heard that English people used scraps of paper to clean their bums instead of washing them, which Nat had later affirmed. After dressing and eating breakfast, Babo walked to the offices of Joseph Friedman & Sons according to the route he’d mapped and memorized from the A-Z the night before. He was so excited, his stomach kept doing jiggly-wrigglies, and halfway there he thought he might have to turn around just to use the toilet again. At 8 am he arrived at the office reception with briefcase in hand and bowels subdued only to be told that no one from Exports had arrived yet. By the time Fred Hallworth finally rolled in to pump his hands up and down and say, “Wonderful, just wonderful to meet you,” Babo had emptied and restored the contents of his briefcase a thousand times, and had started a letter to his father which began: Dear Papa, in England it seems, the first lesson I am to learn, is the art of waiting.

“Let’s take you up to meet Joe, shall we?” said Fred, ushering a bewildered Babo all the way to the eighth floor to the chairman’s office, where old Joseph himself was sitting in a swivel chair, smoking a pipe.

The chairman took one look at Babo and said, “You’ve brought the Indian summer with you, Bob. Is it all right if I call you Bob?”

“Yes, of course,” Babo blinked, not knowing what an Indian Summer could possibly mean, but it was something he’d hear repeatedly over the next few months.

“And when would you like to start working for us?” Old Joseph boomed.

Babo stood in front of him, beginning to feel a bit hot in his blue wool suit. “Today?”

“Don’t you want to take a few days off, son? Get to know London a bit before you settle in for the daily grind?”

And that’s when it all came pouring out: Babo’s money woes, the cabdriver – a fellow countryman who’d gypped him, his own cousin who hadn’t even bothered to pick him up at the airport – all of it in clipped, heavily-accented English sentences, until the chairman, grasping the breadth of Babo’s distress, got up from his chair and planted fifty quid in Babo’s sweaty palms, saying that this was just something to start him off – it was a lot of money, sure, but he could see from Babo’s face that he was hardworking, and that he’d be nothing but an asset to the company. Furthermore, if he needed anything else, he shouldn’t hesitate to bother Fred Hallworth about it.

It was a kindness Babo hadn’t expected. “I’d still like to start today, sir,” he said, before leaving the room, clutching tight to the fifty quid.

***

Fred Hallworth turned out to be Babo’s great protector and champion in London. He was responsible for getting Babo’s photograph printed in the company’s September newsletter, with the headline “WELCOME TO JOSPEH FRIEDMAN & SONS DHARMESH PATEL,” which Babo promptly cut out and sent home to his father, knowing that Prem Kumar would place it lovingly in his file along with his college certificates, The Hindu Bon Voyage photograph and the company’s formal letter of employment.

There was something about Fred that was instantly likeable. He was a big, bearded man with hands like stone-crushers and a voice that matched the pace and turbo of the zippy MG he tore around in, but he was also a surprisingly good listener, and in those early days, Babo found it comforting to be able to pile some of his concerns into Fred’s pliant, available ears. Fred had been to India many times, and he’d been supplying cement and raw materials to Prem Kumar for so long now, Babo felt he was the one person who understood exactly where he was coming from.

Everyday they ate lunch together at The Brewer’s Inn, and everyday Fred joked, “Fancy a pint of bitters, Bob? Or some steak and kidney pie?” knowing that Babo would only laugh good naturedly and say, “Not today Fred, I think I’ll stick to my regular,” which was a cheese sandwich and orange juice.

It took Babo a long time to stop calling Fred Mr Hallworth. It was easier if they were out of the office, but in the domain of Joseph Friedman & Sons, Babo always slipped back to the well-honed show of reverence he was used to reserving for his elders. The lack of rigidity between generations in England took a while to get used to. Back home for instance, Babo couldn’t imagine sharing a cup of tea with one of his professors, or addressing him by his first name. Imagine! Oh! Hello Harindranath. Good morning Subramanium! Unthinkable. More unthinkable for a teacher to light up a smoke in class, and for a student to follow. Yet, this happened regularly at the polytechnic. Babo, despite his rebellious leanings, had at first been uncomfortable with the whole scenario because years and years of being a closet smoker had made it impossible for him to enjoy a fag in public. But, as Fred rightly pointed out , when in Rome, one should do as the Romans do. So, Babo trained himself to adopt the English custom of smoking during class until it began to seem like this was the way things had always been.

Everything was so continually surprising to Babo during those first few months in London that when he sent news home, he didn’t know where to begin. England is an amazing country, he wrote to his grandmother, Ba, in Gujarat. There are parks everywhere – all over the city. Sometimes, while walking to work, I get a strong smell of wet leaves, which in this season are turning colour and falling, and somehow it reminds me of Ganga Bazaar after the rains, and of course, of you, Ba.

To his father he wrote about the preciseness of English life. You would like it here, Papa. Life here is very orderly. Cars go in straight lines, no one uses the horn, they have zebra crossings where all traffic stops automatically so pedestrians can travel safely, and there are absolutely no animals on the road at all – not even dogs! Some adjustments are harder to make of course; the food, even English people will agree, is horrible, and the weather, I’m still finding very cold. Also, life in the LCC is very dull. It’s full of old fogies who do nothing all day but play cards. There are a few young fellows who live here, but they smell unbearably because I think they only shower once a week and live in the same clothes day in and day out. Anyway, the good news is that Mr Hallworth is going to arrange accommodation for me at the YMCA in Croydon, where for only 15 shillings extra, I can get a larger room with a window and a wash basin, and the same weekly meal plan. There’s also a billiards table and regular Scrabble nights, so I’m looking forward to it as I’ll get to make friends my age and it will make me feel less lonely.

Being on his own was one of Babo’s biggest challenges. All his life he’d been surrounded by people – family, friends, neighbours, servants. And while technically the upstairs bedroom in Sylvan Lodge had been assigned to him, he never actually slept in it alone. Chotu invariably dragged his mattress upstairs, or sometimes shared the bed with him, and when cousins came to visit, which was fairly often, a whole gang of children would spread their sheets on the floor and keep each other awake by telling ghost stories all night.

In London, by the time Babo finished his classes at the polytechnic at 8:30 and made his way back from Elephant & Castle to stomach a few boiled vegetables and crawl into bed, the feeling he was left with, more than any sense of moroseness, was a stultifying boredom that he’d never experienced before. The only thing that salvaged those early evenings for him was listening to the Hitachi transistor that Nat had managed to wrangle from work. It was a peace offering, which Babo had grudgingly accepted, and given place of prominence on his side table. Late at night, while the geriatrics snored and rattled around him, Babo tuned into the All-India Radio Station and listened to the news and the occasional Hindustani recital, low and long, because it was the only immediate connection he had to home.

Apart from the loneliness, Babo despaired about the food. He couldn’t understand how something that had been so irrelevant to him in the past, could suddenly become such an obsession. The canteen ladies at the LCC felt sorry for him because he was frequently ill and getting skinnier by the day. To compensate for his meagre main courses, they loaded him up with double helpings of custard and rice pudding, but still, Babo dreamed of food. More than Falguni, more than his family, Babo dreamed of food. Every morning he’d wake up hungry, wishing it was Friday, because Friday was payday, and Friday was when Fred took him to The Star of India for a good feed: vegetarian thali for Babo and mutton vindaloo and butter naan for Fred.

Once in a while, Babo would go all the way to Lewisham, to the house of one of his polytechnic friends, Bhupen Jain, a fellow-Gujju from Kenya, whose wife, Mangala, made the kind of food Trishala used to make at home. And on weekends he’d park himself at Nat and Lila’s where the plan was for them all to cook together, except Babo was so bad at it, they suggested he do the washing up instead.

Babo would report all this mainly for Trishala’s benefit (except the vindaloo bit which would upset her unnecessarily) because he knew that her main concern was food: was he getting enough of it, and was he keeping healthy? It was also Babo’s way of letting his mother know that people were being kind to him, and that he wasn’t experiencing antagonism of any sort.

A week before he’d left for London, one of Prem Kumar’s card-playing friends, Vimal-bhai, had come over and launched into a story of his own son’s experiences in England. “Babo beta,” he’d said, “When you go to England, you mustn’t worry if somebody calls you a darkie okay?”

“Why?” asked Babo innocently, “I am a darkie…. See!” he said, pointing to his nut-brown arms.

“But they mean it in a not-nice way son. Anyway, you don’t take it that way. You don’t let it affect you. You just get on with what you’re going there for. That’s the only way to beat them at their own game.”

Vimal-bhai’s advice had greatly agitated Trishala who wondered whether Babo, with his over-sensitive nature, would be able to cope with any kind of aggression. But Prem Kumar had pooh-poohed her concerns saying that Babo would have to develop a thick skin if he was going to succeed in a foreign country.

In fact, Babo had never once felt threatened in England. Everyone he’d met so far had gone out of their way to make him feel comfortable. If anything had been disappointing, it was Nat and Lila’s lacklustre welcome, which Babo made sure to recount in full to his parents. Later, Babo would sever all connection with his cousin and his wife, but that was for a treachery that was still to come.

To Falguni, Babo’s initial letters were all about how he was aiming to get rich quick by winning the football pools. The place where Nat and Lila lived was the ugliest building in Hampstead, but it was owned by an Indian who used to work in a petrol station, and had won the Treble Chance after fifteen years of playing the pools. Babo calculated that if he set aside a small amount every week for coupons, he too could eventually buy property in London. When Falguni pestered him about possible dates for an engagement, Babo felt his stomach go thud thud very dully – no jiggly-wrigglies or any excitement of any kind. He responded by saying how amazing it was that so much could happen in the little time he’d been away from her.

After a while, twelve weeks and five days to be exact, Babo’s letters to Falguni finally came to a stop. About the time when he moved premises to the YMCA in Croydon, something big happened in his life, and when that thing happened, Falguni, who’d been fading fast, was irreversibly dethroned. Babo’s last letter to Falguni would be blunt and pitiless: For reasons that I can’t explain right now, I suggest that you forget about me and carry on with your life. What you imagine between us will never happen. And with that off his chest, Babo made a solemn fire in the washbasin of his new room, determined to burn all evidence of his past love so he could begin this new phase of his life untainted.

***

What happened to Babo on 25 November 1968, when he saw her standing in the doorway of the tearoom in her white mini-dress, with a twirl of red ribbon in her hair, was a familiar feeling. He’d had it when he’d seen Falguni with her newly-grown breasts at Navratri, and he’d had it recently at the Dominion Theatre when Liz Taylor batted her Cleopatra eyes at him. Babo was used to falling instantly in love. It was what he’d done throughout college – run away to the movies to see Meena Kumari or Sharmila Tagore smouldering in their shimmery clothes with their kiss curls and chori chori looks, singing Akele Akele kahan ja rahe ho? Where are you going to alone? But this was different. This was a real life girl with the tiniest gap between her teeth, smiling at him and saying, “So, I meet the culprit at last.”

Babo would find out that her name was Sian Jones. That she’d been working for the company for a year as one of the chairman’s secretaries. That she was from a small village in North Wales. That her father worked in a limestone quarry and her mother taught at a primary school. Later, Babo discovered that Sian looked most beautiful when she was drunk. That when she thought no one was looking, she had long conversations with herself. That the reason she’d come to London with her best friend Ronda was because she wanted something bigger than what her little village in Wales could offer.

For now though, all he could say was, “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re obviously the reason why we’re having to up our sugar ration around here,” said Sian, pointing to the over-brewed cup of tea on the sideboard, to which Babo was adding his fourth spoon of sugar.

“I’ve been spying on your for a while now,” she said, laughing. There were little crinkles in the corners of her green eyes. To Babo, she looked like a fashion model out of Vogue magazine – her lithe 5 ft 5 inch frame leaning against the doorway like a feather.

“So, where are you from?”

“India.”

“I know, silly. I saw you in last month’s newsletter, but where in India?”

“From Madras. It’s a city in the south, on the coast. I grew up there, but originally my family is from Gujarat.”

“Sounds lovely. You’ll have to tell me all about it sometime.”

Ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom, ba-ba-boom boom boom.

“Hey, I have to take this up for Mr Joe, but my friend Ronnie and I are having a party at our flat this Saturday. You want to come by? It’s 38 Canfield Gardens, right by the Finchley Road tube. See you there.”

And with that, she was gone, the twirl of ribbon in her hair fluttering like a red Monarch butterfly out of the tearoom into some other space that Babo wanted to immediately follow her into.

That Saturday, Babo, who had never been to a proper party before, arrived at Sian and Ronnie’s Finchley Road flat with a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps. “Should I take some flowers?” he’d asked Fred.

“What? To some girl you met for two minutes in the tearoom who casually invited you to a party? Erm, no Bob. You want to take a bottle – any kind of alcohol will do.”

Babo hadn’t planned on tasting alcohol that night, never mind getting drunk; it just happened. He’d been sitting on the couch nursing a tonic-water, wondering when would be a good time to leave so as to catch the last tube home, when Sian plopped down next to him and said, “Let’s try some of this stuff you brought us shall we?”

Babo didn’t have the heart to explain what he’d had to explain to so many people before: that he was a Jain, that a Jain was what Mahatma Gandhi was, that Jains weren’t supposed to eat meat or drink or inflict violence on anyone or anything; that his mother would rather go blind than see him like this – with a girl, smoking a cigarette, about to down half a bottle of Schnapps. But, “Okay,” he said, “Let’s try it together.”

By the third shot, Babo felt like he was on fire. This must be what love feels like, he thought: a burning. A burning that starts in your stomach and spreads to the rest of your body, filling you up with the smell of peppermint and making you light. Sian, laying her soft, auburn head on his shoulder said, “You’re nice you know? Really nice. I could tell from the minute I saw you. I’m glad you came.”

Babo wished she would lean against him for ever. He wanted to reach down and brush away part of her fringe that had fallen into her eyes. “I hope you don’t think this is too forward,” he said, “But would you like to go for a movie with me sometime?”

After a lot of back-and-forthing Babo decided on Dr Zhivago at the Curzon Soho. “Are you sure?” asked Fred, “Isn’t that a bit too heavy? Wouldn’t you be better of with something like The Graduate or Some Girls Do?”

Babo winced. “No no. Omar Shariff, Julie Christie, it will be perfect.” He’d seen it the week before by himself, but he wanted to see it again with Sian just to see if she’d cry in the same places.

That evening, as they sat in the pensive gloaming of the theatre with their hands entwined like serpents, Babo felt something growing inside him. It was the city opening her arms to him at last, saying, Welcome, welcome to London town. And afterwards, when they went back to Sian’s blue-walled bedroom to lie down on the bed and undress each other, Babo would lie there next to her, not knowing what to do, but with a feeling growing inside, filling and filling him.

He had never been this close to a woman before. The most Falguni had allowed was hand-holding, and once, just once before he’d left, she’d allowed him to kiss her on the lips, but even then, she’d kept them clamped shut so his tongue couldn’t explore that lovely, lisping area of her mouth. Now, with Sian lying next to him – her body, naked and white, exposed to him like a wheat field to the wind – Babo could only gape with wonder, too scared to touch in case she should disappear, or suddenly turn into sand.

Later and later though, he’d get the hang of it. There would be fumblings and premature ejaculations. “I’m sorry, so sorry, it’s just that you’re so beautiful, so incredibly beautiful. Can we try again?” And Sian would nod, guiding him into the temple of her body, until Babo learned to hold her long and hard while the trains screeched by beneath them.

***

“I want to try meat,” Babo announced to Fred one afternoon. “I’m serious. Anything. You suggest. If I want to live in this country – and I do! Then I need to learn how to eat meat, isn’t it? You tell me Fred, can I afford to keep falling sick like this? Can I afford to be unhealthy?”

“Slow down Bob. What’s going on? You know I can’t do that. Your father will kill me. Besides, this is your religion, your tradition. Why do you want to change anything now?”

“Because I’m in love with her Fred, that’s it. I want to marry her, and if I’m going to marry her and live here in London, then I’m going to have to live like people here. I can’t keep holding on to these traditions. It’s too difficult.”

Fred wasn’t entirely convinced but he started Babo off with a poached egg anyway. “Better take it slow, mate. No meat as yet, just eggs, and after that we’ll raise the bar with some sausages and bacon.”

Within the month, Babo had eaten his way through the food chain, discovering that there were things that suited him better than others – corned beef in sandwiches he quite liked, and shepherd’s pie with lots of gravy. Sometimes, when Fred ordered something particularly distasteful like liver or ox-tail soup, Babo would raise his head from his plate and say miserably, “I thought eating meat would make the food better here, but it’s just as bad isn’t it? All of it, whether it’s vegetarian or not, it’s just bad.”

“Afraid so, mate, but at least now you know you’re not missing out on anything. Anyway, like I always say, you got to try, try and try again. You never know, things just might get better.”

And he was right. By the end of the year, thing were looking positively peachy. Babo had managed to gain five kilos and defy every one of Trishala’s prohibitions: meat, alcohol and women – just like that. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. Who are the “pleasure seekers” of the novel’s title? Which characters seek pleasure first
and foremost, and which seek other forms of fulfillment—romance, spirituality, duty,
wealth? How do these characters challenge the Jain religion’s prohibitions against
pleasure?
2. The Pleasure Seekers spans more than thirty years and four generations. How does each
section of the novel capture its era? What milestones and trends of British and Indian
history are re-created in the novel? Which period details come to life?
3. What are Babo’s first impressions of London? What hardships does he face as he arrives
in this new city? How does he negotiate new attitudes toward family, work, food, and
women? How does Babo’s journey serve as “the turning point for his entire family”
(259), the milestone by which the Patels measure their family history?
4. Trishala refers to Babo as “this first-born, this child of desire” (34). Why does Trishala
blame herself for Babo’s romantic choices? How does Prem Kumar, in turn, express guilt
for his son’s behavior? How does Babo’s marriage test their spiritual faith?
5. Compare the relationships Babo and Siân have with their parents. How are Babo’s and
Siân’s family disputes similar and how are they different?
6. Siân lives her life “plagued by separations” (113)—leaving her parents, her homeland,
and her customs, again and again. How does Siân cope with her permanent exile? What
helps her adjust to a new life in India, and what will she always miss of her tiny Welsh
hometown?
7. Meeting her great-granddaughters for the first time, Ba predicts, “Mayuri is going to sink
her roots deep. She will know what she is and what she wants, always. But this one, this
Beena, she will change from earth to water to fire, again and again” (117–18). How do
Ba’s predictions eventually turn out? In the end, which sister seems happier in her
element: earthy Mayuri or mercurial Bean?
8. Discuss Babo and Siân’s friendships with the other mixed couples of Madras. What
comforts do these friendships provide? Do these couples and their children seem happy
with their lives in India? Why or why not?
9. Two pieces of tragic news strike Sylvan Lodge at the same time: Indira Gandhi’s
assassination and Trishala’s breast cancer. How does the Patel family handle this dual
challenge? At which other moments in the novel do national history and family history
intersect?
10. The Pleasure Seekers chronicles as many deaths as births, balancing pleasure and grief.
How do the novel’s characters cope with loss? Which characters have the most difficulty
recovering from the deaths of loved ones?
11. Consider Bean’s decision to move to London. What does she seek there, and what does
she leave behind? How does her quest compare to her father’s journey, so many years
before?
12. Discuss the high and low points of the long marriage between Babo and Siân. What
challenges their happiness as a couple, and how do they recover from their marital
difficulties?
13. Trapped in the Republic Day earthquake in Anjar, Bean experiences a “moment of
blinding clarity. Forty-five seconds of it. Bean hadn’t thought of Javier. She had thought
of her baby, of Ba. Of what Babo, Siân and Mayuri would do without her in the world”
(310). Why do thoughts of Javier slip away in this moment of near-death experience for
Bean? What does she learn about the bonds of family and the bonds of love?
14. Consider the sights, sounds, and smells of Ganga Bazaar, Ba’s home in Anjar. What
makes Ba’s home and community so special? Why does the novel close in Ganga Bazaar,
with Ba having the last word?
15. What kind of mother might Bean become? What might the future hold for the unborn
child, who has already survived an earthquake and her mother’s heartbreak?
16. Tishani Doshi is a poet and a dancer as well as a novelist. What elements of poetry and
music can be found in The Pleasure Seekers? Point out some examples of particularly
poetic language in the novel.

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