Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  ‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘Absolutely beautiful.’

  ‘Maybe the crazy Janians get married in here,’ Pinto said. ‘I think this. Come on, we go higher.’

  They kept climbing, sometimes taking hand-carved steps, sometimes just clambering over rocks. As Pinto had predicted, the other tourists fell away. It was the heat more than the height that made it difficult. Annie was dripping. Pinto took her bag and slung it over his shoulder.

  ‘You will be happy to come to the top,’ he said.

  And when they got there, she was.

  ‘Look, ma’am,’ Pinto said, turning around and pointing back in the direction from which they had come. ‘Mumbai.’

  They were on top of a large rock face, with smaller rocks scattered around it, one of which formed a perfect throne. Annie sat on it.

  Below the rock face, the national park spread like a lush green blanket, falling away into the distance, where Annie could just make out the faraway outline of the city. Otherwise she could have been on the moon, she felt so far away from the traffic of Colaba.

  ‘I can’t believe this is only an hour away from Mumbai,’ she said.

  ‘It’s good,’ agreed Pinto. ‘I like coming here.’

  He walked to the edge of the rock face and held up both arms. ‘I’m king of the world!’ he shouted. ‘I’m king of the world.’

  He turned to Annie. ‘Ma’am, can you take photo of me? To send to my village.’

  He handed over his phone and she took one and showed it to him. ‘Maybe one more where I look better for my wife,’ he said.

  ‘Has your wife ever been to Mumbai?’ Annie asked as they made their way back down from the highest point.

  ‘No, ma’am. She has never been away from the village.’

  ‘Does she want to come?’

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am. I am not asking her.’

  Husbands everywhere seemed not in the habit of asking their wives much, it would seem, Annie thought, as they clambered back down the hill.

  ‘Who was Sanjay Gandhi?’ she asked as they started the drive towards the city.

  ‘He was son of Indira Gandhi, our very famous prime minister,’ Pinto answered.

  ‘And she was the daughter of the other Gandhi? The really famous one?’

  ‘No, ma’am. You know about this other Gandhi? This really famous one?’ He eyed her in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Would you hate me if I said no?’

  ‘Ma’am, I would never hate you because you are always making me happy by coming in my taxi. But if you would like to know more about this other Gandhi I can take you to my favourite place. I like this one better than the dabbawallahs and VT.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Gandhi house, ma’am. Is a small museum. Very good. I think you will like it.’

  Annie was not usually much of a museum person. The world’s larger collections tended to leave her overwhelmed. But she was indeed hazy about the significance of this other Gandhi, and Pinto had not steered her in the wrong direction yet. ‘Lead on,’ she said. ‘Gandhi house it is.’

  The museum was in a charming three-storey house in a lovely, leafy street not that far inland from Chowpatty Beach.

  ‘This is where Gandhi lives while he is in Mumbai in the olden times,’ Pinto said, pulling up outside. ‘Although he spends much of his time walking through India, talking with the peoples, teaching them not to fight and telling Britain to go home.’

  He escorted her to the door of the house, then said he had already been there so many times there was nothing he did not know already about the father of the nation, so she should explore the place herself. He would be waiting under the tree across the road having a smoke.

  ‘Start on the top floor,’ he said, ‘where Gandhi sleeps, then go to puppets.’

  ‘Puppets?’

  But desperate for his smoke, Pinto was already heading for the shady tree.

  The ground floor of the museum was a research centre and library, but not the glossy and pristine sort. It was still just a house, to all intents and purposes, with the rooms turned into offices.

  Annie loved the place just for the worn wooden stairs, for the peeling paint on the walls, adorned with photos of Gandhi as a boy, a teenager, a young man. The interior designers where she came from would be in hysterics at the very sight of the original mosaic tiles on the floor of the rooms she peered into. They would have been just as at home in a grand palazzo in Rome as beneath Gandhi’s bare feet.

  The house, she read, when she arrived on the top floor, was where Gandhi had stayed whenever he was in Bombay, as it was then, between 1917 and 1934. His room had been preserved as he had lived in it. The crisp white walls and dark wooden shutters gave it a tropical feel, but it was sparsely furnished, with just a mattress on the floor, a writing desk, a bookshelf, and a small traditional cotton loom.

  There was hardly anyone else in the museum, and it was so quiet Annie could hear the rustle of the leaves on the trees on the terrace outside the door of Gandhi’s room.

  In the space across from this she started to piece together more of Gandhi’s life, looking at photos, mementoes and copies of various documents. He was born into a relatively well-to-do family, she read, travelled to London to study law, then went to South Africa, where he was thrown off a train for being coloured. This inspired a lifelong battle for equality, not just for himself, but for everyone.

  All she really knew of Gandhi was that Ben Kingsley had played him in a movie she had never bothered to see. Now she at least knew why he deserved a movie. Gandhi had been an advocate for all the downtrodden — the peasants, the persecuted, women, even vegetarians, although she wasn’t quite sure how downtrodden vegetarians were.

  He was ahead of his time in some ways, she thought, or maybe he was part of the reason why the times ended up where they were.

  Ghandi was a fan of civil disobedience but only if it was nonviolent, and he was a poet: or at least he wrote soul-scorching prose in beautiful handwriting which as far as Annie was concerned was as good as poetry ever got. Framed on one wall in lovely open, cursive script was the simple motto: Be truthful, gentle and fearless.

  The simplicity of this gave her goose bumps. Did she try hard enough, she wondered, to be truthful, gentle and fearless? It seemed so straightforward written down like that: a blunt little instruction on how to live a worthwhile life.

  It was easy enough to be gentle — for her anyway — but being truthful was hard. It required work. And it came with risk. She supposed that was where the fearlessness came in.

  I lack that sort of bravery, she thought, moving into the next room, so it was one out of three for her as far as Gandhi’s recipe for living was concerned.

  He, however, was truly a man of his wise words, and nowhere was there a clearer example of this than in a neatly typed single-page letter on a different wall, dated 23 July 1939, and addressed to Herr Hitler.

  Dear friend, Gandhi began, before very politely asking the Führer to please not start a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Tears welled in Annie’s eyes. The pluck of a man halfway across the world, asking the leader of the Third Reich to take his foot off the gas.

  Gentle and fearless, indeed.

  A lot of the weightier political issues for which Gandhi fought long and hard proved somewhat beyond her, but the basics were spelled out in an adjoining room devoted to a series of miniature tableaux.

  These, she figured, were the puppets to which Pinto had referred.

  Doll-like creatures formed dramatic scenes behind glass-fronted boxes about the size of an old-fashioned colour TV set such as the Philips K9 of Annie’s youth.

  The first scene depicted Gandhi leaving India after gaining the approval of his doll-sized mother and her sari-wearing friends only by vowing not to touch wine, women or meat, in that order, according to the plaque on the front of the glass box containing the tableau.

  The Gandhi doll then went on to South Africa, where
he was turfed from the train, started advocating for the downtrodden, and eventually travelled to London to meet the king in Buckingham Palace. This doll house made Annie laugh out loud — not because Gandhi was wearing his traditional garb, which by then was just a loin cloth, so he must have been freezing cold in London — but because the queen doll looked so much like the real thing.

  The scene showing Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, dying in his arms in prison sobered her somewhat.

  And the gruesome scene of Gandhi’s assassination proved equally heart-wrenching, even as played out by puppets. In this tableau, the dolls were crowded around their hero, the closest ones holding him up, the bullet wound in his chest marked by splotches of red paint.

  Even though the characters were only eight inches tall, each one had a different look on its face — shock, bewilderment, sadness. Some arms stretched towards the heavens, some towards the man himself, some comforted the dolls standing next to them.

  So that’s where being truthful, gentle and fearless got him, Annie thought. What a terrible tragedy, but then again, there she was, a white woman from the suburbs on the other side of the world, standing nearly seventy years later where he too had stood, with goose bumps.

  The museum was free, but Annie made a donation and bought a handmade book of Gandhi’s wisdom and ‘glimpses of life’.

  She needed all the wisdom and glimpses of life she could get her hands on.

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE HOTEL, she realised that she was able to drift off for minutes at a time without imagining being mangled in a car wreck. Then a honk, or a swerve, or the bashing of human hand or motorcyclist’s leg against the taxi would bring her back to earth with a thump. Her best moments remained when they were stopped at the traffic lights.

  ‘Oh, ma’am!’ Pinto said, during one such lull, pointing to a massive billboard for an upmarket watch company. ‘This man, with this watch! Who is this man? Lino? Lilo?’

  ‘Leo,’ Annie offered. ‘Leonardo di Caprio.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, Leo di Caprio.’ Pinto was dancing in his seat with excitement. ‘This man with this watch is in my favourite movie of all times.’

  ‘Let me guess — Titanic?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, Titanic. I watch this movie three times. Jack, come back. Jack, come back! And I cry and cry and cry, ma’am. Jack, come back!’

  He did as good a Kate Winslet impersonation as any Indian taxi driver could pull off, Annie was sure, and with such enthusiasm she couldn’t help but join in.

  ‘Jack, come back! Jack, come back!’ the two of them pleaded together.

  ‘She had the whistle, remember, Pinto? She had the whistle, but she could barely blow it.’

  ‘And it is too late for Jack anyway. He is all frozen on the thing. Oh, ma’am, I love this film so much. Jack, come back!’

  ‘You’re a romantic, Pinto.’

  ‘I do not think so, ma’am.’

  ‘But you love the story of Jack and Rose.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, but this is in the movies. For me it is not like Jack and Rose, because for me my parents have chosen my wife.’

  ‘Oh, and this isn’t good?’

  ‘It is not good or bad, ma’am, it is just the way it happens. I go back to Jammu one time and my parents have choosed my wife and so we get married, and sometimes I can visit and then we have my big son, my small son, and now the tiny little baby.’

  It obviously wasn’t going too badly.

  ‘So it was an arranged marriage?’

  ‘This is not a choice in my village to have a love marriage.’

  ‘But you would have wanted one?’

  ‘There is no sense to want one when this is not a choice.’

  This struck Annie as being equal parts stunningly pragmatic and hopelessly sad.

  ‘But you love your wife, Pinto.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. She is nice. But she is a very simple woman. She does not read or write or speak English or go to the ATM. She has never been out of our very small village.’

  ‘But you talk to her on the phone?’

  ‘Sometimes, ma’am, but usually I talk to my father and he says all the things.’

  Annie wondered if perhaps she had been wrong, if rather than missing his family Pinto preferred his job driving taxis in Mumbai to the simple life in a distant village with a wife he hadn’t chosen and his three children.

  ‘Do you think love marriages are better than arranged marriages?’

  ‘Is different,’ he said. ‘Even for Jack and Rose, this would have been love marriage when her mother wants for her arranged marriage.’

  ‘So do you think she was wrong to fall in love with Jack?’

  ‘I think that this will make her mother very sad, ma’am, and for me I would not want to make my mother very sad, so I will say arranged marriages are better because you can make your parents happy and then also your parents can help you in your marriage to be happy in your whole family.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘Ma’am, sometimes a while ago I think love marriage would be better, but then my mother and my dad help my wife with all the things when I am not there and this is good for everyone.’

  Pinto was not a man to waste too much time questioning what he didn’t have, concentrating instead on what he did have, no matter how inferior a situation it seemed to Annie.

  She could learn something from him.

  ‘Jack, come back,’ he was saying up front, with a chuckle. ‘Jack, come back.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Preeti’s alleged attacker had been released, Annie read when she got back to the Taj Lands End. The police had no evidence against him and were now back at square one, the culprit still un-nabbed.

  Nearly a week after the acid attack, the space being devoted to the story was shrinking, the emphasis now on who would pay for what and when. The injured woman’s condition was noted as critical but stable and her father disappointed that the only arrest made was of someone the family knew well and whom they never thought for a moment was involved. Preeti had not written any more messages and needed much rest to make a recovery, the doctors had said. At least they were talking about a recovery, Annie thought, as she made her daily trek to the business centre.

  There was another message from Daisy: Did you think about the dress?

  Annie cried when she read it.

  Was it just the contrast with Preeti that was making her see her beautiful daughter in this new ugly light? Or had Daisy been like this all along and Annie blind to her faults, blind to everyone’s faults, including her own? What would Gandhi do if his daughter only talked to him when she wanted something?

  She wiped away her tears.

  Gandhi would be too busy defending the vegetarians to bother with such a trifling affair.

  ‘Talk about a first-world problem,’ Daisy herself would no doubt say, with a languid eye-roll.

  Hi darling, Annie wrote back.

  I hope everything’s all right back at home. How are the studies going? About the dress, to be honest I feel a bit disappointed that you would ask about that again, but not about what I’ve been up to, or how I’m feeling after such a big couple of months. I’m in Mumbai, after all — in India! It’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined — hot, dirty, busy, yes — those things I was expecting, but there is so much to see here, so much to do, and exploring it has been a real joy. I wish you were here with me. You’d get through the wet wipes, but I think you would love it, too. Talk soon, love, Mum.

  Truthful, tick. Gentle, tick. Fearless? Well, she’d never told her daughter she’d disappointed her before, so tick, tick, tick.

  Next she opened a message from Rhona.

  Her friend sounded much more like her usual self, saying that she was getting her shizz together and that Annie was right, if she didn’t have to have sex with Aidan but could still get to smell the head of a newborn baby she could perhaps start to look at the bright side. Although having sex with someone would be good, she added, if she could fin
d someone who didn’t mind her private parts having been quite such a popular delivery route for large humans.

  But how are YOU? Rhona asked, You know, REALLY — as in a not-disappearing way.

  Annie thought about that on her way out to the pool. Since she’d been in India some things had become more muddled in her mind than ever. Her feelings for Hugh and for her children, which she’d never really doubted before, for example: she was doubting now, that was for sure.

  And in doing that, she doubted herself. What sort of a woman didn’t know whether she loved her husband, and wondered if her daughter was a spoiled brat and her son—? Well, she didn’t wonder so much about Ben. He was like Hugh, just not a talker. But if she was going to be truthful, thank you Gandhi, he had been in the grunt-only phase for about seven years now and she was tired of it.

  She was tired of cleaning up after everyone even though she wanted to because that would mean they had a better time. But what about the time she was having? Basically, it boiled down to having the people she loved most in the world disregarding her, for want of a better expression. And it was pathetic to feel that way, but that didn’t make it hurt less.

  However, in terms of disappearing, she thought, as she swam lazy laps across the middle of the circular swimming pool, in some ways she felt more definite than she had in years.

  It seemed that a lot of what she was thinking about now wasn’t exactly new: it had just settled at the bottom of her life like sediment while she got on with things. Now the sediment had been stirred by grief and change.

  She was still in a muddle — unsure what the final mix was going to be — but surely it was progress to be even this much clearer about what lurked beneath her own skin?

  Congratulating herself on this small revelation, she decided on a pedicure.