There was nothing for it but to go down to the high street. It took him a good ten minutes; his back was playing up. Finally, however, he reached its welcome anonymity, cars thundering past, and went into a newsagent’s.
“Morning,” he said to the man behind the counter. He scanned the top shelf of magazines. Lifting his walking stick, he dislodged a copy of Asian Babes. It fell to the floor.
Norman bent to pick it up. A spasm shot up his spine. He froze. Bent double, he waited for the pain to pass.
“Here, Granddad.” The man came over and picked it up for him.
“It’s for my son-in-law,” Norman muttered at the floor. “He’s Indian.”
“I’m sure he is.” The man grinned. “I expect he’ll be wanting it in a bag, too.”
Clutching the carrier, Norman hobbled back along the road. A siren screamed. He jumped. A fire engine rushed past. Suddenly he wanted to be home, safely ensconced on the sofa. Today the world seemed more than usually hostile—the traffic, the heedless passersby, the newsagent with his insolence. Somebody unloaded a crate of bottles. Norman jumped again. He wanted his daughter to be home, instead of miles away in some office or other. She would bring him a cup of tea. She would rub Ibuleve into his back and tell him he wasn’t that old, it was all right, he wasn’t going to die. Everything was going to be all right.
Norman paused, leaning on his stick. Suddenly he saw himself as others must see him. Just for a moment, like the clouds parting. Then they closed again.
He thought: I miss my wife. Rosemary would understand.
This surprised him so much that he didn’t notice what was happening at the end of the street. Something was up. What looked like a fire engine seemed to be parked outside his daughter’s house. A crowd of people stood watching.
Norman hobbled closer. He stopped and stared. At 18 Plender Street, black smoke was billowing out of the side window.
Let us meditate on the Divine Light that is inherent in us, May it dissolve all Ignorance and Darkness.
GAYATRI MANTRA
Ravi hadn’t seen his cousin Sonny for years. The man lived in Bangalore, for one thing; they had grown up four thousand miles apart. Besides, they had nothing in common. When they met, they regarded each other with mutual incomprehension. But Sonny was in London for a couple of days, en route to somewhere or other, and none of the other family members was around to pick up some stuff he had brought over.
They had arranged to meet in the lobby of the Royal Thistle Hotel, Bayswater. Ravi spotted his cousin straightaway—a portly man in shirtsleeves, pacing up and down and shouting into a mobile. The fellow had put on weight. Hard to imagine that he was once a playboy, bopping the night away in the Lotus Room at the Oberoi Hotel, Bangalore, in the company of Bollywood starlets. Still talking, Sonny snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Bacardi and Coke, plenty of ice!”
Ravi’s heart sank. Sonny was a wheeler-dealer, a businessman of boundless energy. Ravi had forgotten how sapping that could be for someone in a fragile state. He longed to go home.
Sonny turned. “Ravi old chap!” He barked something into his phone and clicked it off. “Come over here! You look terrible, you poor fellow. Overworking as usual?”
“No—”
“Don’t know how you stand it, your hair’s gone gray. You should try the stuff I use, Tru-Tone—I’ll get you a bottle, you’ll feel a new man.” Sonny snapped his fingers again and ordered Ravi a drink.
“And you should lose some weight,” said Ravi. “You’re storing up trouble for later.”
“Aye, aye, doc.” His cousin’s face was shiny with perspiration; he had always been a sweaty man.
“Think of your heart.”
Sonny patted his chest. “Sound as a drum.” He heaved over a carrier bag and dumped it at Ravi’s feet. It said Surinama Silk House. “Mangoes for you and your lady wife. Brought them from Lalit’s farm—remember Lalit, your uncle’s cousin? The best mangoes in Karnataka.”
Ravi watched two men cross the lobby. They fetched their keys from Reception. Suddenly, the thought of checking into a clean, empty hotel room was so seductive he nearly swooned.
“Flying to Frankfurt tomorrow,” said Sonny. “You know Meyer Systems? They’re relocating to Bangalore, to our very own Silicon Valley—these techies, they have their heads screwed on, they all want a piece of the action. You wouldn’t recognize the place, yaar, you know how much software we’re exporting? We have the satellite links, we have the know-how …” He counted on his fingers. “Motorola, Texas Instruments … The world’s shrunk, my friend …”
Ravi’s temples throbbed. Outside an ambulance sped by, its siren wailing. Today he had failed to revive a cardiac arrest. Asthma attack, a young man with newborn twins.
The drinks arrived. Sonny was still blathering on. Ravi took a sip of orange juice and put down his glass.
“Sonny,” he said. “I’m having a terrible time.”
That he confided in his cousin of all people, a man not overly interested in others, took him by surprise. Once he started, however, the words gushed forth.
“Pauline’s father’s come to live with us; we can’t get rid of him and I’m going out of my mind. Last week he set fire to the kitchen. He was boiling up his revolting old hankies in my Le Creuset saucepan, nearly burned the house down. I can’t tell you how disgusting he is. The toilet stinks of pee, prostate problem, scatters it everywhere; he babbles on when I’m trying to concentrate, he makes horrible slurping noises on purpose, he tells the most offensive jokes, he farts, he belches …” Ravi’s voice rose. “He strains his tea through the fly-swat, he never lifts a finger to help, he drops biscuit crumbs everywhere, I can’t stand him, I can’t get any sleep, Pauline and I are quarreling all the time, sooner or later I’m going to have to move out, I can’t stand it anymore, I think I’m cracking up.”
Ravi paused for breath. He thought: What a sign of my desperation, that I’m telling all this to a coarse, Bacardi-swigging little man I hardly know. Who I don’t even like much.
“Jesus.” Sonny let out his breath.
Driving home, Ravi felt violated. He only had himself to blame. This, of course, only made it worse.
Ravi was a private man. “Knock knock, anybody there?” Pauline would ask. After the miscarriage he had never spoken of his grief. Twenty years ago, that was; their child would be an adult now. During the Flower Power years he had never let it all hang out, he was busy studying. Confidences made him uneasy; it was like handing over your luggage for somebody else to unpack, picking through your underwear.
Now he had blurted it out and soon it would be all around the family. His Auntie Preethi in Chowdri Road, Delhi, would be phoning her sister, his mother, who was at present visiting his brother in Toronto (The world’s shrunk, my friend). They would be discussing his problems, shaking their heads sorrowfully, hissing at their grandchildren to turn down the TV …
Ravi parked outside his house and sat there in the darkness. He had betrayed his wife and, much as he loathed him, he had betrayed the old boy. In the main, he considered himself a man of integrity. If Norman were lying on a hospital bed, he would be all compassion. But then, work was easy. It was appallingly, drainingly difficult, but it was easy.
Ravi looked up at the house. It was dismal, this reluctance to enter one’s own home. The upstairs window was steamed up. Pauline must be having a bath. Downstairs, needless to say, Norman had not closed the curtains. The room was exposed to the street. None of the lamps was lit, just the ceiling bulb, which cast a pitiless glare like that of an operating theater. Norman, the cuckoo in the nest, sat in a haze of cigarette smoke, watching TV.
Ravi let himself in. He had made up his mind: he would phone Sonny and tell him to keep mum about tonight’s conversation. The living-room door was ajar; he glimpsed a pair of veined ankles in bedroom slippers. Tiptoeing past, he dumped the bag of mangoes in the kitchen. A burnt smell still lingered.
As furtive as a teenager, Ravi crept up the stair
s. Even his study felt polluted now; he was certain that Norman masturbated in it. The bedroom was his only refuge.
Ravi sat down on the bed. Royal Thistle Hotel. He didn’t know the number. The phone book was downstairs in the living room.
I hate him, thought Ravi. Why can’t he just go gentle into that good night? Why can’t we just throw him into the care of the community like we do schizophrenics and psychopaths? Why can’t we leave him to stagger round the streets of London, stealing ladies’ knickers off washing-lines? He could get arrested for lewd behavior. Why don’t the old know when to give up the whole damn business and call it a day? “Hope I die before I get old.” Who sang that, the Kinks? Why didn’t I have a misspent youth?
Ravi reached for the receiver, to dial directory inquiries. As he did so, the phone rang.
It was Sonny’s voice, shaking with excitement. “Listen, man,” he said. “I’ve got a hell of an idea.”
Pauline’s job as a travel agent had shaped her theory about love. Sexual attraction is triggered by the unknown. A foreign destination quickens the pulse. Even the anticipation of this made her customers fidgety, watching her with bright eyes as she downloaded hotel availabilities on her computer. She imagined them stepping into an unknown city, as alert as foxes sniffing the air.
Within a week, however, the senses became blunted and routines established (Why isn’t there any grapefruit? We had some yesterday); what was thrilling became mundane (Not another ruin). She had experienced this herself, often enough. It was a speeded-up version of love’s exhilaration, so soon dulled by domesticity.
In fact, Ravi was the domesticated one. It was he who dug the garden and did most of the cooking; it was his way of unwinding from work. He liked things just so—soft lights, real napkins—a sense of style that had been sorely tested in recent weeks. Any taste, she had learned from him. Left to herself, she would be as slovenly as her father.
The trouble was, Ravi had ceased to surprise her. No doubt this was mutual, though he was too well-mannered to say. The beach onto which she had once run, whooping for joy, had reverted to a strip of sand. She wasn’t exactly bored; Ravi was an intelligent man and his beauty still had the power to startle her—fastidious profile, graying wings of hair. It was simply that, during a long marriage, a holiday mentality was hard to sustain.
Ravi wasn’t an adventurous man. She put this down to his job. At work he coped with the victims of chance, its random brutality. Many years ago she had tried to get close to him by reading books about Hinduism. “Surely it’s all about predestination?” she said. “If somebody’s going to be knocked down by a lorry, that’s their karma.” Ravi had looked at her, puzzled, as if she were talking a foreign language. He wasn’t an Indian Indian at all. He was a doctor.
Hence her astonishment the next evening. She went straight from work to the restaurant. It made her uneasy, not to check in at home first; her father, like a dog, should not be left alone all day. But Ravi was insistent—seven-thirty prompt—and things were strained between them; she felt obliged to obey.
Sonny sat beside a bubbling aquarium. He was talking on his mobile phone. His shirt was strained across his chest. “Every button doing its duty,” her mother would have said. Black hairs sprouted from the gaps. “Sit down, sit down!” he said to her, patting a chair.
Ravi was reading a fax. He looked up briefly and smiled at her as if she were a waitress. What was up? Both men had loosened their ties; there was a conspiratorial air to them. More papers, anchored by a salt pot, lay on the table. Their edges stirred in the breeze from the ceiling fan.
Sonny switched off his phone. “That was my accountant,” he said. “Tip-top man.”
“You remember Sonny, my cousin?” said Ravi. “You met at Samina’s wedding.”
Pauline nodded. “Lovely mangoes. Thank you.”
Sonny waved this away. “This evening, Pauline, is an evening to remember. Your husband and I are cooking up a plan.” He looked at Ravi. “Who shall begin?”
Ravi opened his mouth, but Sonny leaned across the table. “I have a business proposition.” He gripped Pauline’s hand. “Big bucks all round, and a benefit to humanity. Sounds good so far, eh? Ravi’s a good fellow; he and me, we’re going to be business partners.”
Pauline looked at her husband. “But you don’t know anything about business.”
“Listen to Sonny, sweetheart. It’s an ace idea.”
Ace? Ravi never said ace.
“I’m talking about the old-people business,” said Sonny. “In my country we care for our olders and betters—know what our pension scheme is called? It’s called the family! Here in Britain what happens to them? There is nobody to look after the poor old buggers; their families are scattered hither and thither. People like yourself, what do you care for your old apas and ammas?”
“I care for mine,” said Pauline.
“Where’s the money to pay for them?” asked Sonny. “Your National Health Service is cracking up under the strain—”
“Don’t I know it—” said Ravi.
“—this Muriel lady, I see her on BBC Worldwide out of her trolley, discarded like rubbish—”
“That’s because she wouldn’t let—” Pauline began.
“That’s not the point,” said Ravi. “I know she was a racist old bigot. The point is that we’re facing a huge increase in the number of old people—”
“And what will be facing them?” Sonny interrupted. “Poverty! People are living longer, my dear lady, and there isn’t the money to care for them—”
“You and I will have to face that soon,” said Ravi.
“Not that soon!” snapped Pauline. She disliked being harangued. And she wasn’t that old.
“The pensions time bomb!” Sonny spread out his hands. “It’s a disaster of epic proportions, my dear; already it’s happening and it’s going to get worse. First your Equitable Life, then the others; company after company is pulling the plug on final-salary schemes—”
“—low interest rates and the fall of the stock market—” said Ravi.
“—all that hard-earned money is vanishing into the air!” Sonny snapped his fingers. “Year after year it’s getting worse.”
Beside them, a waiter cleared his throat. “Are you ready to order, sir?”
“No!” barked Sonny.
“Something has to be done!” Ravi’s eyes were glazed; there was a hectic look to him that Pauline had never seen before. She felt a surprising throb of desire. Behind her husband the fish darted to and fro, bright with their secrets.
“All day I have been on the telephone,” said Sonny. “I should be in Frankfurt now but I have postponed my trip. This brain wave, it is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, the great eureka!”
“We’re going to set up a retirement home,” said Ravi.
“A chain of retirement homes!”
“First things first,” said Ravi.
“Okay, okay.” Sonny swung back to Pauline. “Your good husband and I, we’re going to set up a retirement home.”
“In India,” said Ravi.
She noticed, then, that one of the fish had died; it floated on the surface, buffeted by the bubbles from the pump.
Ravi was indeed a changed man. He surprised not just his wife, but also himself. The plan was so bold it felt like a shot of adrenaline. His normal caution had disappeared, for the scheme made sense; there was a large and beautiful logic to it. Only someone with vision could see this. Sonny had recognized this capacity in Ravi and had singled him out.
Ravi stepped out the side door for a breath of air. Cigarette butts littered the concrete. Rubbish had collected in the gutters—a dusty baby’s pacifier, a crumpled examination glove. The maintenance contractors had gone bust and St. Jude’s had no funds to hire anyone else.
Third-world conditions, thought Ravi. I’ll give them third-world conditions. As Sonny said: “If we can’t take Muhammad to the mountain, we’ll bring the mountain to Muhammad.”
It all made s
ense, such staggeringly obvious sense he was amazed that nobody else had thought of it. Perhaps they had. Perhaps, at this very moment, retirement homes were being built in developing countries. Sunshine, cheap and plentiful labor, low costs. The elderly could be looked after at a fraction of the price, thus unburdening the social services. He and Sonny would form a company and set up a deal with local authorities. Sonny already had his eye on some premises, a run-down guest house near his office in Bangalore.
“It’s not so far,” he said. “Look at me: Stuttgart one day, Houston the next; fellows hop on a plane like they hop on a tonga, easy-peasy!” He clicked his fingers. “We’re all global travelers now, old boy, cheap packages to God knows where, Maldives, Seychelles, our own beauteous state of Kerala, cheaper than the bloody train to Worthing and probably faster too, went there myself on Monday and it took all bloody day. Who wants to be stuck there in some nasty little room smelling of cabbage? Why should they be moldering away in rainy, dirty old Britain when they could be sitting under a palm tree, tanning their wrinkles and getting their false teeth stuck into a nice juicy mango? What would you do, eh?”
“Actually, I’d stay here,” said Ravi, who hated India.
But he didn’t have to go; he would be the London end of the operation, using his medical contacts, liaising with the residential sector. Sonny was right; even older people were sophisticated travelers nowadays, visiting children in Johannesburg, playing golf in Florida. This was where Pauline came in; Blenheim Travel Agency, where she worked, could fix a deal for low-cost fares to Bangalore. Sonny, who was now back in the subcontinent, was working on it that side.
“The head honcho at Air India, he’s a pal of mine. Once we’re up and running we’ll put on special flights, discounts for relatives, sightseeing packages … mark my words, cousin, they’ll be a lot keener to come to Bangalore than bloody Worthing on a wet Thursday afternoon.” Down the phone line, his voice crackled with excitement. “This time next year, we’re going to have some very satisfied customers.”