Staying On

  “What is wrong, Franky, my love?”

  Actually, he realized, there were two things wrong: the thought that Lila had bought her way into the consortium with black money (a deal to which he may unwittingly have been a party, down in Ranpur particularly, signing this and signing that and thinking of nothing so much as Hot Chichanya) and the thought that if Lila hadn’t used black money she must have sold her only apparent asset: the hotel. Apart from St John’s his managership of the hotel was the only thing he had in the world. Well, no. He had Lila. But what was Lila? A cross or a blessing?

  “There is nothing wrong, Lila, my love.”

  “You look so sad. Let us have another drink. Then we will eat a lovely Tandoori, and chicken curry, and perhaps some mutton-do-piaza and some lovely saffron rice. After that we will make love.”

  He poured more drinks, and tried to ignore the twinge of anticipation in his traitor-loins. He did not want to make love but knew he was going to. He went heavy on the gin and light on the tonic. The first swig of this richer mixture gave him the courage to say:

  “Lila, have you sold the hotel?”

  “Sell, buy? You cannot make this distinction. I buy my way into the consortium. The hotel therefore becomes part of the consortium’s assets. But the consortium’s assets are also my assets, so how can you say I have sold the hotel when it remains among my assets? All one can say is that when I bought it I made a sound investment after all, which they tried to do me out of by building the Shiraz. Now they know the value of this place. They cannot do without me. Achchha. So now we make something out of it and of it. In this you will help me, my Franky. We shall become rich together. But what is rich? What is rich if alone?”

  She was crying again, or about to be.

  “We make something of Smith’s?” he asked, trying to concentrate.

  “Why not? Why else would I buy into the consortium?”

  “We redecorate? Refurnish? Advertise? I have heard about Nansera, Lila. It could be a great opportunity for us.”

  “This is what I am saying just now. I am very hungry, Franky. Ring the bell.”

  He did so. Having done so he began to pace the room. His imagination was on fire. The future looked promising after all. The hotel would flourish, side by side with the Shiraz. St John’s would flourish too. And if they were going to make real money he could perhaps persuade Lila to employ an under-manager. That would give him more time to devote to St John’s.

  “Lila,” he said, pouring more gin. “What a clever Lila it is. What a lovely Lila.” He kissed her. Her tears flowed over his nose.

  “Franky, Franky. Later, later.”

  Old Prabhu came in with the tandoori. While they ate Mr Bhoolabhoy began to describe the various things that ought to be done to bring Smith’s back up to scratch. Lila, occupied with her chicken leg which she ate with her fingers, as he did his, nodded, nodded, said nothing, burped, drank, attacked the chicken curry and rice and occasionally murmured, “All such things will have to be gone into,” an apposite phrase that registered in Mr Bhoolabhoy’s mind in a somewhat different context as he anticipated a reconnaissance of that vast territory of her flesh.

  . . .

  At what hour precisely the reconnaissance had begun he could not recall when he woke in the morning and returned on penitential knees to his own room, there to curl up in the embryonic position. He could not remember the end of the meal, the beginning of conjugal rites, or how many times they had been celebrated.

  But he slept for only a few minutes in his own bed before being woken by the recollection of Lila whispering at some stage of their gigantic couplings, “Bombay, Calcutta, New Delhi, London, Rome, Paris, Cairo, New York, Warsaw, Prague, Washington – oh in those places to be like this Franky, my tireless lover. Ah! What happiness you will give me world-wide. What is Pankot but a beginning? What do we know of Pankot if we only know Pankot? Ah! Ah!”

  He sat up, stabbed by spears of revelation, blunt last night, razor sharp now. He groaned and, driven by a demon, got out of bed, half-fell to his knees as if these were the only supports he had left, then got to his feet and, naked, opened his door in to Lila’s room and surprised Minnie in the act of stealthily clearing up the ruins of last night’s feast. She placed a hand over her mouth to stifle a shriek of laughter and fled, foolishly forgetting to close the door quietly so that Lila shrieked and sat up and stared at Mr Bhoolabhoy, then shrank back because he was coming at her. He grabbed her shoulders.

  He wanted to shout, the occasion called for it, but his voice came out cracked and hoarse. “What did you say, Lila? Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Cairo? What are you up to, Lila? What are you hiding from me? I will know. I must know. You must tell me. You will tell me. You have sold the hotel. You did not consult me. Am I not your husband? Am I not entitled to give an opinion? Are my wishes of no account? You will make what you call this real money. You intend to go to all these places. You imagine I will go to them with you. But only I want to stay in Pankot. Only I want an improvement here, an improvement there, decorators, new furnishings, new table cloths, new cutlery, pukka fittings in all bathrooms, telephones in all bedrooms, new typewriter, new letter-heading. Aren’t these modest wants, Lila?”

  “Modest?” she shrieked. “Who is talking of modesty? Look at you! Stark-bollock, isn’t it? Frightening me out of my wits!” She broke free, grabbed a pillow and smote him with it smack in the genitals.

  He groaned but grabbed the pillow – an instrument of punishment translated in a moment into a comforter – and held it to his numbed parts.

  “Lila,” he pleaded, eyes closed. “Lila, my love. All I want is to stay on here and manage the hotel for you, for you, my Lila.”

  “Liar!” she shouted. “You do not love me! All you want me for is one thing.”

  In the passage between dining-room and kitchen, Minnie covered her mouth again and then said to her fellow listener, Prabhu, “Management wanting it. Ownership not giving it.” They went to spread the news among the other servants that there had been an intended rape in Room 1.

  “All you want,” Mrs Bhoolabhoy said, but now instinctively lowering her voice to a hiss, “is hotel and church, church, hotel, what difference? There is nothing to be had from either. The hotel is fit for nothing. Only the site is worth anything. So stay on by all means why not? Like in the old days, perhaps we could brick you up alive when the new building starts, to give place an auspicious start. Not that that would work. Only fine strong handsome Punjabi boys were worth bricking up. If we bricked you up the whole building would collapse even if we aren’t cheated by the man supplying the concrete. Now go to your room. I do not want to see you again until you have come back to your senses, then I will deal with you. What have I married? A fool? What was I when I married you? Also a fool? Dear God, what a beginning to the day!”

  She groaned and turned over and kept on groaning.

  “What new building, my love?”

  The iron had entered his soul. Only temporarily he supposed but it had entered. Be my guest, he said to it, stay as long as you like.

  “I am talking to you, Lila my love. I ask, what new building?”

  She lay doggo. But he knew she was listening. He was also listening – to the still quiet voice not of his conscience but of his commonsense which his passionate nature and wish for an easy life had kept under restraint ever since his marriage.

  “If you will not tell me what building, Lila, then I will tell you. It is the building you hoped to put up when you bought the hotel from old Mr Pillai’s executors, but which you found you could not put up because the people who would give planning and development permission and permission to pull down the old place and people who would have lent you the money were already in the pockets of the consortium, is that not it? And the members of the consortium did not like you Lila because you had stepped in and bought the site before they had quite made up their minds. You knew what was in their minds and hoped to profit by it, instead of which they buggered you u
p by ignoring this site and building the Shiraz opposite. But now they find they wish to expand because of the Nansera Development project and heaven knows what else, so in the end you have been very clever, Lila my love, because you have what they now want and they will give you what you want to get their hands on it. The site is worth several times at least what you paid for it and hanging on to it has cost you little. To you, Lila my love, it has always been a site, not an hotel. It has always been the rupees you were thinking of, never the guests. The guests have been left to me, and what am I?

  “I will tell you what I am. I am the man who has maintained, what is it you call it, the goodwill of the business, what is left of it. Single-handed I have maintained it Lila with no help from you but more with hindrance. In Ranpur people say, So you are going to Pankot. Shiraz is most modern, ring Shiraz, if you can’t get in there ring old Frank Bhoolabhoy at Smith’s, he will see you are all right. It is true, Lila, my love. I grant you it does not amount to much but that is not my fault. All the time I have been thinking I am maintaining goodwill of the business to carry us through a bad time by being a good manager I have only been caretaker of a development site. Now bulldozers come in. New monstrosity goes up. But the good name of Frank Bhoolabhoy of Smith’s Hotel, Pankot, my Lila, will take a little longer to ruin. I do not know whether goodwill has been considered in all your figurings and workings and manipulations because all that sort of thing is beyond me. I am not an intelligent man, and proof of this is that I do not want to go to Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, London, Paris, Cairo, New York, Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. What would a man like me do in places like that?”

  He waited.

  “What indeed?” she murmured. “You are a fool.”

  “I know, Lila, my love.”

  She heaved herself up and round and looked at him.

  “And fools are sometimes wise without knowing it which doesn’t make them less of fools. The crooks! Perhaps they get away with too much! Tell Mr Pandey to be here in ten minutes. Tell Minnie to come at once. Go and get dressed. I shall want you later.”

  “I shall not be here, Lila. I shall bathe. I shall get dressed. I shall have a modest breakfast. Then I have things to do. I shall not be available for the rest of the morning.”

  “It is Monday!” she cried. “You will be here!”

  “Sunday, Monday, what is the difference when all one has to manage is a site? I really cannot stand here any longer with my sex in your pillow.”

  He placed the pillow gently on the bed, turned, then turned back again to face her amazed glance.

  “What of the Lodge?” he asked.

  “What of it?”

  “People are living there.”

  “Here also at least one person is living,” she said. “And she asks herself why? She asks herself for how long? She asks what is the point? She asks why she has to live at all if she is always to be surrounded by fools and crooks! Call Minnie.”

  “Call her yourself, Lila my love. You are in better voice than I am.”

  “You will pay for this, Frank Bhoolabhoy,” she shouted at his bare bottom.

  “I know,” he murmured, “oh yes, I know.”

  By the time he closed the door between them he was already beginning to because the iron had melted and the prospects ahead were almost too atrocious to contemplate.

  Chapter Nine

  WHEN HE SLIPPED out of the hotel half-an-hour later it was in a spirit more of desperation than of lingering rebellion. Used though he was to bad Monday mornings there was usually the pleasure to look forward to of Lila’s midday departure for bridge at the club and a convivial evening with Tusker. But today, even if Lila managed to despatch her business with Mr Pandey in time for him to catch the midday train and for her to recover sufficiently to welcome the idea of expending the rest of her temper over cards, he did not think he could face an evening chatting amiably to a man whose days themselves might be numbered and whose days at The Lodge certainly looked like being. He would not dare tell him. And, who knew, perhaps what he had said to Lila that caused her to refer to her prospective partners as crooks would spur her to actions that would delay completion of the contract or even lead to its cancellation.

  Wishful thinking, no doubt; but any thought that gave a glimmer of hope had to be cherished. He cycled to the bazaar and spoke to his old friend, Mr Mohan Lal the photographer (Weddings, Home Portrait Specialists, Passport Photographs) and did a deal with him to take a couple of time exposures of the interior of the church and a series of exteriors. The deal was for a cut rate if Mr Mohan Lal was credited in Father Sebastian’s magazine article, and for the shots to be taken today when the Sunday flowers on the altar would still be fresh.

  “I will send young Ashok right away,” Mr Lal promised, which Mr Bhoolabhoy knew meant in about an hour. As for ‘young’ Ashok, he must be well over thirty years old. Ashok was an untouchable, although you were supposed nowadays to call him a member of the Scheduled Castes. He had been an orphan and a ragamuffin who as a kid ran wild in Pankot picking up jobs here and there including jobs running errands for Mr Allah Din the previous owner of the Paramount Photo Studio (motto: Time passes, a photograph Remains) who had packed up in 1947 and gone to Pakistan. Mr Lal (coming the other way and leaving his studio behind) had been accosted by young Ashok on the first day he opened for business, had let the boy make himself useful and, as he grew, begun to teach him the trade and the art, until now, as Mr Lal’s Outside Man, he was a familiar face behind his camera at weddings, christenings, coming of age parties and at grander occasions accompanying Mr Lal to regimental sports days, receptions at the Shiraz and speech days at the Chakravarti College. As an untouchable he was potentially a convert and Mr Bhoolabhoy wondered whether he ought not to do more to urge him into the fold. Perhaps today a seed could be sown because Ashok had never been inside the church.

  Reaching Church road, Mr Bhoolabhoy dismounted and pushed his bicycle up the incline. Once inside he inspected the vases of flowers. They were still in good fettle. It was a lovely sunny morning. The church was full of light. It looked beautiful. The personal pride he took in keeping it so was a sin Jesus would surely forgive him. He sat in the front pew and gazed with love at the altar. As a youth he had wanted to take Holy Orders, but his father, although a devout Christian himself, insisted on him following in his footsteps and learning the hotel business.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy Sr said that short of eternal life in Jesus’s arms he could want nothing better for Francis than the managership, even ownership, of a seemly and decent hotel such as he himself worked at as assistant manager. That was at the old Swiss Hotel in Muttipore. Mr Bhoolabhoy Sr’s career had suffered from ill-health and lack of ambition perhaps. Francis hadn’t inherited the ill-health but often felt he’d inherited the lack of ambition to the extent that it seemed to have been fulfilled the moment old Mr Pillai appointed him manager at Smith’s, just in time for his father to know and write him a letter of congratulation from what turned out to be his death bed.

  Mr Bhoolabhoy knelt to pray for the repose of his father’s and mother’s souls and for peace to ease his own troubled mind.

  But the harder he prayed the more troubled his mind became. Ah, so many sins! Not least adultery in Ranpur, and occasions of fornication before marriage. Also the deadly sin of lewd and lustful thought – once committed even here in St John’s when observing Susy Williams’s neat little bottom as she raised her arms and stood on tiptoe to arrange some flowers better. Then there were the sins of suspicion, of jealousy, greed and envy, and also of cowardice which perhaps was the worst of the lot. Oh Lord, he muttered, when it comes to sin you name it I’ve done it.

  You can say that again, a Voice said in his head.

  He looked up wildly and stared round the church. But for the first time in his recollection the place seemed devoid of a Presence. He felt abandoned so completely that another sinful desire sparked in him. He wanted to confess aloud, unburden himself not to God directly but through the comfo
rt of an intermediary, another human being. He wanted to kneel before Father Sebastian or someone looking in his imagination remarkably like Father Sebastian.

  Father I have sinned (he would say). I have spent the night in debauchery and enjoying sexual congress for the hell of it procreation being out of the question what with the coil which probably isn’t necessary because it’s unlikely a woman could have so many husbands and all of them turn out sterile so it must be her and she’s probably long past it anyway and all the business of the coil and complaining about periods is just to kid me she’s as young as she said she was. And after spending the night in debauchery I have used angry words and laid hands on her with violent intent. Moreover I have appeared naked in front of her handmaiden. Where I could have offered wise and sober counsel I have offered only provocation and have parted from her in anger and dare not show my face. I am guilty of the sin of adultery with a lady in Ranpur and of the sin of lascivious expectation, item, the purchase of an unseemly garment for Koshak Dance, not having been content to call it a day with double-lotus, but then chickening out and so committing the sin of failing to keep a promise and disappointing a fellow human being and causing her bosom to swell if that is further possible with anger or contempt or both which means I have been the instrument by which she added yet another sin to her sum of sins which I should have tried to talk her out of and not let her talk me into. But mostly, Father –

  (pp) Snick-snick

  – I have committed the sin of turning a blind eye and not speaking up like a Christian and a man and where does my salary come from, pocket money you could call it, but still where does it come from except Ownership? So wasn’t it my duty to start speaking long ago in a calm Christian manner and ask, What are we doing, Lila my wife, what are we up to? What is the future? So that I could fulfil my obligations as a husband and as a manager and as a Christian to see all those things in which I am concerned directed to good ends and not to bad? But oh no, for me anything for a quiet life, until the moment comes and the quiet life looks about to end –