The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel

  “What, even Norman’s?” asked Evelyn.

  They spilled into the garden. The sun was sinking; it was time for the young people to go to work. Sonny paced up and down the lawn, talking on his mobile phone.

  Norman stumbled over to Surinda and took her arm. “You’re a fine-looking girl,” he said. “Let me escort you to the Hideaway Pub tomorrow for a glass of their finest rum.”

  Surinda removed his hand. “No thank you,” she replied.

  Norman pointed to the young men making their way down the drive. “They’re no bloody use. Shirt-lifters, the lot of them.”

  “Pardon?” asked Surinda.

  “I’ve seen them in the street, holding hands.” He leaned toward her, breathing heavily. “My dear girl, they bat for the other team.”

  “Piss off!” Surinda said.

  “Come on, don’t be coy—”

  “Jao, karaab aadmi!” said Surinda.

  Sonny hurried over. “That’s enough, old chap—”

  “Bugger off, you twerp!”

  “Don’t make a complete fool of yourself—”

  “Leave me alone!” roared Norman. “You Paki nitwit!”

  Sonny grabbed Norman’s arm and yanked him away. Norman stumbled against him. Sonny set him upright and pushed him toward the veranda steps.

  There was a silence. Eithne Pomeroy, the cat lover, suddenly laughed. It was an eerie, high-pitched sound, like the bird nobody had seen, the bird that called from the flame tree at night.

  When Evelyn turned, the young telephonists had melted into the gloaming.

  It wasn’t just Norman who drank too much that evening. Some of the others became decidedly squiffy too. Eithne started singing “Rose in the Bud” in her high, cracked voice.

  “Rose in the bud, the June air’s warm and tender,

  Wait not too long and dally not too late—”

  “No, pet,” said Madge. “It’s trifle not with fate.”

  Dinner was late, that was why. In fact, it was eight-thirty and there was no sign of dinner at all. Minoo was glimpsed hurrying through the lounge; raised voices could be heard, but no delicious curry smells drifted from the kitchen (it was chicken bhuna that night). The residents sat on the veranda, drinking. They had long ago cleaned out the bowls of small, dry crackers, always in short supply at the best of times.

  Norman was nowhere to be seen. The incident with the Indian girl had bonded the others together; even Dorothy, the BBC lady, had joined in.

  “He really is a menace,” she said.

  “Poor girl!” said Evelyn. “What can she think of us?”

  “Not much of an ambassador, is he?”

  The Ainslies had missed the excitement, having been to a lecture on Tagore. By now they had heard all the details.

  “So embarrassing.”

  “So terribly un-British, just lunging like that—”

  “Pretty typical, I would say.” Dorothy put down her whisky glass. “English men are useless at foreplay.”

  A frisson went around the table. Eithne tittered.

  “Hang on,” said Douglas.

  “It’s our ghastly public schools,” drawled Madge. “Why do you think I married a Jew?”

  “I had a Hungarian friend once,” said Dorothy. Her voice was slurred. “He blamed home ownership. On the Continent people rent their places, but in England men are dying to get back to their DIY.”

  “What did she say?” Stella fiddled with her hearing aid.

  “No, it’s public schools,” said Madge. “They all bugger each other at fifteen—”

  “Madge!” squeaked Eithne.

  “—they enjoy it so much, they spend the rest of their lives terrified they’re gay.”

  “That’s not true about public schools,” said Jean. “Take our son, Adam—”

  “Exactly,” said Dorothy.

  “What?” asked Jean.

  Dorothy drained her glass. “At least he’s honest about it.”

  There was a silence. A roar of laughter came from one of the other tables.

  Jean whispered, “What did you say?”

  “What did she say?” A whistling sound came from Stella’s ear.

  Douglas pushed back his chair and got up. “Darling.” He touched his wife’s shoulder. “Let’s pop along to our room. I’ve forgotten my specs.”

  Jean didn’t move. She sat there, her face frozen. Douglas took her hand.

  “Come along, old girl,” he said. “You might know where to find them.”

  Gently, he helped his wife to her feet. He steered her across the veranda to the door. Jean moved stiffly, as if sleepwalking.

  When they had gone, Madge turned to Dorothy. “What was that all about?”

  Dorothy didn’t reply. She sat there, her mouth open. Madge thought: The poor thing. Maybe it was true, what they said about her—the wanderings, the mutterings. She did, indeed, look quite dotty.

  There was a strange atmosphere during dinner. It wasn’t served until after nine, by which time people were dizzy from hunger and the effects of alcohol. Nor was it chicken bhuna, a general favorite. It seemed to be a hastily assembled dish of fried chicken with tinned tomatoes ladled on top.

  Both Norman and the Ainslies were absent. So was Graham Turner, always such a nebulous presence that it took them a while to realize he wasn’t actually there. Perhaps he had been overcome by his own revelations.

  “Fancy having a fiancée who died,” said Olive Cooke, scraping the sauce off her chicken leg.

  “No wonder he looks so, well, unused,” said Madge.

  They had nearly finished working their way through the chicken before the rice appeared. Jimmy put down the bowl on the table. Evelyn whispered to the old bearer: “Is anything the matter out there?”

  “Trouble in the kitchen, memsahib,” he said and glided away.

  Madge looked around. “Dorothy’s not here either. It’s just like the Ten Little Niggers.”

  “Indians, dear,” said Evelyn.

  “Who’s going to be next?”

  Dorothy and Douglas sat in the garden, hidden from the hotel by a clump of bushes. They could hear the far clatter of dinner. Beside them the aviary was silent, its budgies long since gone to sleep.

  “I’m so terribly sorry,” said Dorothy. “I presumed she knew.”

  “It nearly happened once before,” said Douglas. “He’d broken up with a Spaniard called Marco. This was years ago. Marco phoned up but we weren’t at home. When I got back, I heard this message on the answering machine.” Douglas paused. Something rustled in the dead leaves. Maybe it was the snake that nobody had actually seen but that had distinctly been heard. “It told us that our son was gay. Not just that, it itemized in some detail all the things he’d been up to. You can imagine, I daresay. It went on for ten minutes.”

  “Good Lord,” said Dorothy.

  “Jean was away for the night. I knew she mustn’t hear it, I knew it would destroy her, but I didn’t know how to erase messages. Our daughter had given us the machine and I hadn’t got the hang of it yet. So I pressed Rewind and phoned up everybody we knew, saying how Jean would love to hear from them. She’s been feeling a bit low, I said, and could they give her a tinkle.” Douglas paused. Various cats were meowing in the darkness. By now Eithne and the others were too inebriated to feed them.

  “She came back the next day to find eight calls on the machine. ‘How are you, Jean, haven’t seen you for ages.’ Things like that. ‘We’ve been thinking about you, do pop over.’ She was so pleased. And the calls lasted more than ten minutes, so the original message was swallowed up. All that love taped over all that hatred. And she never knew, till now.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Dorothy again. Beyond the wall, somewhere in the waste ground, a dog howled.

  “She would have found out sooner or later.” Douglas got to his feet. “Better see how she is.”

  Douglas patted Dorothy’s shoulder and left, his footsteps crunching on the gravel. Dorothy sat there in the darkn
ess. What an evening. It reminded her of her youth in rep—the drunken confessions, the elderly roué making a fool of himself, the thrum of homosexuality. The little group marooned in the middle of nowhere.

  Except it wasn’t nowhere. She knew every inch of this garden. It had altered, of course, as places alter in dreams, but it was still the same earth under her feet. It was terrifying. All those years—school, the BBC studios, the flats in Lancaster Gate and the Marylebone Road, all the people she had met and the places she had been, all the meals she had eaten, all the seventy-four years of her life—it had drained away, as if she had hardly lived it, and here she was, back where she began.

  Dorothy thought: What must it feel like, for somebody to love you enough to rewind that tape?

  Douglas stopped outside the bedroom door. He pictured his wife’s face, puffy from weeping. He stood there in the corridor, gazing at the bamboo-printed wallpaper. To be honest, he was glad that Jean knew about their son. It disburdened him of the secret he had kept for so many years. He himself hadn’t minded at all. At the time, his own equanimity had surprised him. Other people would probably have been shocked. Disappointed. He had thought: Oh well, that explains things then. I just hope Adam’s happy.

  It was at that moment, standing in the corridor, that Douglas realized he didn’t care that Jean was upset. He didn’t mind how she felt, the woman with whom he had shared his life for forty-eight years. I don’t mind. I don’t care. In fact, I don’t even like her.

  Strangely enough, this didn’t disturb him. It was as if the words had been waiting, patiently, for him to notice them. The mist had cleared, revealing them like standing stones. And they didn’t even surprise him.

  How strange, and yet not strange at all. Perhaps nothing could reach him. Perhaps there was nothing to reach. Something in this country answered a certain lassitude in his soul. It was the enervating weight of the place, the mass of its humanity who couldn’t do anything about anything either.

  Douglas gazed at the picture hanging on the wall. It was a photograph of a waterfall. The glass was cracked. Somewhere in Kashmir or wherever, that water was still falling. So his wife was upset. That too would pass. He was too old to leave her; he hadn’t the energy to go, nor the energy to cope with her distress. Life would continue, the water would pour over the rocks and he was as resigned as the beggars who sat outside the hotel, their hands outstretched.

  Douglas moved toward the door. Maybe none of this was important, this thing they called life; maybe he had realized a great truth. Or maybe he was just incapable of feeling anything at all and had long ago given up.

  All this should have been shocking, but what the hell. Douglas turned the doorknob and went into the bedroom.

  It was eleven o’clock, way beyond her bedtime, but Evelyn was awake. Carrying the plastic bags of newspapers, she crossed the road.

  “Memsahib!”

  She heard the rattle of trolley wheels. The legless beggar propelled himself toward her but Evelyn shook her head. Her hands were full. She squeezed her way between the stalls. The little bazaar was still busy. Did nobody in this country ever sleep?

  She couldn’t get “Rose in the Bud” out of her head.

  Life is too short and love is all, I’m thinking,

  Love comes but once, and then, perhaps, too late.

  When she was young she had thought this song the height of romance, but now she realized the words were footling. In fact, she could have fallen in love with any number of people. There were men, perhaps dead now, who could have made her as happy as Hugh had done. Maybe happier, who knew? If she hadn’t been so well behaved, she could have fallen in love during her marriage. Hugh’s sailing partner, Tim, had made a pass at her, and her widowed friend Angus had once murmured “Barkiss is willing” during a flute recital at Arundel Castle. If she had allowed herself, she could have found both men desirable. Exciting, even. And, as this seemed a night for confessions, she could even admit to a mildly unsettling fantasy about the man at the post office.

  Evelyn entered Karishma Plaza and walked up the stairs. One of the carrier bags was splitting—Indian plastic was so flimsy, it was no use at all. She hoisted the bag under her arm. Up in the office, she looked at the rows of dark heads clamped with headsets. Michael Parker, Mary Johnson. They sat there selling things nobody needed. Pity flooded through her. What must it feel like, to pretend to be somebody else because you were Indian and therefore not to be trusted? And yet they hadn’t complained; in fact they seemed to think it was quite natural to pretend to be British. They certainly had better accents than some of the young people she knew, even friends of the family.

  Evelyn paused outside Rahul’s booth. It was papered with Bollywood posters.

  “… if you commit now,” he said, “we can offer you a substantial discount …” Today his hair was oiled into spikes. “No, sir, I’m calling from England … Yes, Enfield, do you know it? A very pleasant town. I live there with my floozie.”

  Oh Lord. Evelyn moved away and eavesdropped on the next booth. She could swear she heard the words “Army & Navy Stores.”

  The supervisor was nowhere to be seen. Evelyn stepped into Surinda’s booth.

  “… never mind, madam, thank you for giving me your time.” Surinda, heaving a sigh, pulled off her headset. “Stupid old bag,” she said.

  “I came to apologize,” said Evelyn.

  “What for, auntie?”

  For everything, really, thought Evelyn. For you, having to pretend. For not thinking that’s terrible. She said: “For the behavior of Mr. Purse.”

  “That’s okay. He’s just a dirty old man.”

  “And I’ve brought you some English newspapers. I feel we gave you rather a misleading impression of Britain.” Evelyn put the bags on the floor. “They’ll help you to keep up to date. Except, of course, some of them are rather old. Oh well, never mind. It’s always the same news, somehow, isn’t it? You’ll find the crossword’s been done already.”

  Surinda unwrapped a stick of gum and offered it to her. Evelyn declined. “Not with my teeth, dear.”

  Surinda chewed for a moment. “Your hotel’s pretty crummy, isn’t it?” she said cheerfully.

  “Is it? I rather like it.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose it feels like England.”

  “I want to work at the Oberoi,” said Surinda. “They have a great disco.”

  “I think I’m a bit beyond discos.”

  “You’re as old as you feel.”

  “Then I feel old,” said Evelyn.

  Surinda got up and indicated her chair. “Sit down, auntie.”

  How polite they all were! Evelyn thought of the lager louts in England stampeding through the train, how she clutched her handbag to her chest.

  “I have a friend like you in England,” Evelyn said. “A young woman who painted my nails. I was very fond of her. To most people one is quite invisible.”

  A voice floated over the partition. “… you’ll find we’re a more competitive supplier than British Gas, Mr. Potter, and can reduce your quarterly bills by thirty percent.”

  Evelyn said: “The thing is, I was married for a very long time. It’s quite a shock to come out into the real world. Until then you don’t think you’re old. You’ve been together for so many years, you’re somehow the same people as when you first met. You don’t notice the gray hairs.” She paused. “And having someone with you is so—well, distracting. In a comforting way. Them being with you, going on. It stops you thinking about dying.”

  “Never mind, Mr. Potter,” said the voice in the next booth. “Have a good day and toodle-pip.”

  Evelyn said: “You have so many choices when you’re young. Or at least you think you do.” She gazed down at Surinda, who was sitting on the floor. “Will you have a choice, dear? Will you be able to marry the person you love, or will somebody arrange it for you?”

  “You think that’s really bad, don’t you?” said Surinda. “Like, weird.”

>   Evelyn shook her head. “It’s probably as good a way as any.” If only Christopher had listened to her, he would have married that nice Penny Armstrong-James who had adored him but finally, disheartened by his inertia, had gone off and married somebody else.

  Oh heavens! She still hadn’t rung her son. That was the reason she had come to this office in the first place. A great deal seemed to have happened since then.

  “Good night,” she said to the chowkidar who sat, wrapped in his blanket, beside the gate. He waggled his head. Somebody had told Evelyn how to say “good night” in the local dialect, but it had slipped out of her mind.

  It was nearly midnight. Nights were beautifully clear here; the stars were so bright you could touch them.

  Raise thine eyes to heaven

  When thy spirits quail,

  When, by tempests driven,

  Heart and courage fail.

  Evelyn thought: One day I shall die. I must learn the Indian words so I can say good night to my new friends.

  She listened to the crickets trilling. Ahead loomed the black bulk of the hotel, most of its lights extinguished. She thought of the dramas that had taken place within it during the past few days, the dramas it must have seen since it was built in the middle of the last century—no, the century before the last one. Good Lord! It wasn’t just the days that were whizzing by. It was the years. The centuries.

  A shape was approaching down the drive. She saw the glimmer of a white shirt.

  “Mrs. Evelyn! You are out so late?”

  It was Minoo. The gravel crunched as he walked up to her. They stood peering at each other in the darkness.

  “Have you come to look for me?” she asked.

  He was highly agitated. “Mrs. Evelyn, please accompany me.” He took her arm and turned her around, back toward the gates. “You, of all people—you will understand.”

  “What’s happened?”

  He held up something in front of her. It was a pair of shoes. “You recognize these items?”

  She peered closer. They were the shoes he kept in his office.