The salon receptionist led her over to a leather recliner, which faced out, just like the treadmills on the floor above, towards the Arabian Sea.
Her manicurist was a man with the spa-appropriate name of Placid. He barely spoke, but had a very gentle touch. He was just starting to work on her toenails when another customer bustled in and flopped into the recliner next to her.
She was stunningly beautiful, about thirty, Annie thought, with glossy dark hair, a red-and-gold sari and spiky high heels, which her manicurist slipped off as she lay back.
‘Hi, I’m Maya,’ she said. ‘You are a guest at the hotel?’
‘Yes. Annie,’ she answered, stopping just short of calling herself Mrs Hugh Jordan. ‘You’re a guest, too?’
‘I wish,’ Maya said. ‘I work here. Or for the Taj group anyway. In PR. Down at the Taj Palace mostly. But every now and then I feel it essential to come and do some quality control at the Lands End salon with Rajesh here, don’t I, Rajesh?’
Rajesh nodded, hiding a smile as he gently placed both Maya’s feet in warm water.
‘So, what brings you to Mumbai, Annie?’
‘My husband is working here, or somewhere near here, and I just came along for the ride.’
‘And do you like it?’
‘Do you know what? I actually love it.’
Maya threw back her gorgeous head of hair and laughed. ‘You know the best people are always the ones who are so surprised by this crazy city. You are surprised, no?’
‘In just about every way imaginable.’
‘You expected much more excrement and much less Hinglish, right?’
‘Hinglish!’ Annie laughed. ‘I like that.’
‘Hey, what colour are you getting?’ Maya asked, leaning over to grab the bottle she had selected. ‘Ladies On The Town. That sounds about right. See this, Rajesh? I will go Ladies On The Town as well.’
As Rajesh and Placid worked on their toes the two women talked, or rather Maya talked and Annie listened, which was fine by both of them.
‘Do you have kids?’ Maya began by asking, then she put her hand up to stop herself. ‘OK, so you might have noticed by now that Mumbaikars are very nosy. Here is how it works: they will start by asking you if you are married, then proceed to asking whether you have children. Then they will ask if you have boys or girls and if you say only two girls they will suddenly look very happy and say, “Oh, that’s a shame!” Because basically what they want is to keep going until they find something wrong. Quite often I will walk away from a conversation thinking, I was a very content, happy woman until that person started asking me about my life. Now I feel like a disaster area!’
‘I have a boy and a girl,’ Annie said. ‘Both in their twenties. Nothing wrong with either, although I would like to hear from them a bit more often.’
‘Oh, that is a shame,’ Maya said. ‘See what I mean. Thanks for making it so easy!’
She had a lovely laugh and found plenty of excuses to use it. Annie found herself envying this woman. She was so content: she sparkled with it.
‘I live next door to my parents and I talk to them a hundred times a day,’ she said. ‘They probably do not want to hear from me anywhere near as much as they do, but that is their bad luck.’
She was married, she told Annie, to a Bollywood actor but not an A-lister, because you had to come from one of a small handful of Bollywood bloodlines to be an A-lister and her husband came from hoteliers in Rajasthan.
‘Was it an arranged marriage?’ Annie asked, since nosiness was allowed.
‘No, it was a love marriage,’ Maya said. ‘My sister and I — just the two of us, no boys, oh, what a shame! — we both have love marriages. My sister had this big fancy wedding for three thousand people, oh my goodness, you would not believe it. We only had a hundred and fifty, but we did take them all to Goa.’
‘So, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are love marriages for the wealthy and arranged marriages for the less wealthy?’
‘No, I do not think so,’ said Maya. ‘I grew up in Mumbai, which as you can tell is fairly cosmopolitan, and my father is a businessman plus we lived in the US for a while; I went to college there. So I suppose we have lived a less traditional life than many others in India. My parents were happy for me to have a love marriage, but they would have arranged one if I had wanted them to. And also, I wanted to marry someone they approved of, so it was sort of like I arranged it myself. This is becoming more common, I think, and it is not much different from how it is done anywhere else.’
‘Is one better than the other?’
‘I do not know. I think the statistics show that arranged couples do not get divorced that often, but then the divorce rate is low in India anyway. It is all a matter of perspective. Like age. You know, my dad was telling me this morning about his driver who had to go home to his village because some relative or other was sick, and when he got back my dad asked him what happened. “Oh, she died,” the driver said, “but it is OK because she was very, very old.” Then my dad asked how old, and the driver said, “Forty-two. Like I told you. Very, very old.”’
‘I thought my taxi driver was being a bit presumptuous thinking fifty-eight was very, very old, but forty-two is something else!’
Maya laughed, wriggled her toes and checked her watch. ‘Hey, Ladies On The Town is looking good but I should go. Will it dry on the hop, Rajesh? I had a conference call I was supposed to make ten minutes ago.’
‘There’s just one more thing I want to ask you,’ Annie said. ‘Since I have your ear. The beggars on the street: there haven’t been that many of them — that’s been another surprise — but there was a little girl the other day with a baby on her hip, and my driver said not to give them money, that they have plenty already, that it’s a waste.’
Maya laughed again. ‘It is a tear-jerker I know and you will notice that the beggars only cling to the tourists because they do not get much sympathy from the locals. All I know is this, Annie: I got my MBA from Harvard, came back to India for a very good job in PR, was promoted twice over a three-year period and only then was I making as much as a Mumbai beggar.’
She stood and re-arranged her sari. ‘You cannot believe everything you hear about India,’ she said. ‘But you can believe some of it.’ She handed over her business card. ‘If there is anything I can do for you while you are here, or anything the hotel can do — organise cars, planes, boats, trains, you name it — just let me know. My people will be happy to help.’
THRILLED TO HAVE FOUND SOMEONE so engaging to while away an hour or so with, Annie was in good spirits for the early part of the evening, but her mood soured when Hugh was home late again.
She ordered room service for the two of them, but let her dahl and roti sit untouched while he talked on the phone and ate his.
When he finally hung up, she could no longer contain her fury. ‘Why did you bring me here if all you’re going to do is talk on the phone to someone else?’
‘But it’s work,’ he said, surprised.
‘And that’s an excuse?’
‘For working? Of course.’
‘Not an excuse for working, Hugh. An excuse for this: for ignoring me. For spending more time on your phone than talking to me when the work day is actually over. Or should be. For not even asking how I’m doing or what I’m doing or if there’s anything that’s worrying me or if every bloody thing is OK.’
Her voice was getting louder and louder. Hugh looked horrified.
‘I just assumed …’
‘What? You just assumed what?’
‘I just assumed that everything was OK.’
‘And why would you assume that?’
‘Because you never said anything.’
‘When did I never say anything, Hugh? When you asked me? Oh, that’s funny, because I don’t remember you asking me.’
‘Annie, I don’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry, but this bloody machine—’
‘I don’t want to hear about the bloody m
achine!’
‘But it’s basically twenty million dollars of the firm’s money missing in action so—’
‘I said I don’t want to hear about it!’
They were sitting on either side of the room-service table that had been wheeled in bearing their meals; Hugh on the edge of the bed and Annie on a bedroom chair.
He was sitting up, ramrod straight, looking like a deer trapped in the headlights, which for some reason just made Annie feel angrier.
‘So, how are you?’ he said. ‘What is wrong?’
‘I just told you what is wrong!’
‘I’m no good at being put on the spot, Annie. You said something was worrying you? What?’
‘Our children for a start. Aren’t they worrying you? Daisy’s emailed me twice asking for money for a dress, but not even asking a single thing about how I am, or what Mumbai is like; and Ben has yet to come out of the grunting stage. He’s grunting in his emails! Doesn’t that seem odd to you?’
‘Oh, Daisy asked me for the money first and I told her to go to you, but only because I thought you girls would want to chat about it,’ Hugh said, relieved.
‘So you think it is perfectly all right for us to keep forking out money left, right and centre — in this case for a dress for one party that costs the same as it would to feed a family here for a year?’
Hugh’s relief was short-lived. ‘Well, we can’t really expect Daisy to know what it’s like over here.’
‘Can’t we? Why not?’
‘She’s only twenty-two, Annie. You didn’t even know what it was like over here until you came, neither did I. It’s apples and pears. It’s different.’
‘I knew there was poverty here — that we’re lucky to come from where we come from. And maybe I feel that even more now that I’ve seen it firsthand. But when I was twenty-two I’d have stuck needles in my eyes before treating my mother like an ATM, before ignoring enormous changes in her life. Are you saying I should just give Daisy anything she wants, whether or not she shows any interest in or compassion for me or anybody?’
‘I’m not saying anything. Annie — what has changed? I thought it made you happy to give her things.’
‘Well, now I want something back! And I want a son who doesn’t have to be pressured into sending me a one-word response when I try to keep in touch with him. He could be dying of starvation for all I know. Or buried under a mound of filthy laundry.’
‘Ben’s fine; he’s on an abseiling course,’ Hugh said. ‘He passed his last lot of exams with flying colours, so I told him to go for it.’
Annie stared at him. ‘He passed his exams? When did he tell you that?’
‘Yesterday, I think.’
‘He called you?’
‘He emailed.’
Hugh must have known from the look on Annie’s face that this was the wrong thing to say.
‘He emailed you? And you didn’t think to tell me?’
‘He doesn’t email all the time. Twice a week, maybe. No, more like once. I, I’m sorry. I should have told you. I should have been keeping you up-to-date. I just didn’t think it was —’
‘Hugh!’ His name blew out of her like a gust of polar wind, tears springing to her eyes. She stood up, her chair falling backwards onto the floor, and fled to the bathroom, locking the door and catching sight of her lined, anxious, tear-stained face in the mirror.
They never rowed, never, but she was so angry with him, with what her life had turned into, what they had turned into, what she had turned into: this big, beige blob desperate to be understood by someone, anyone. ‘This is not me,’ she wept into the hand towel. ‘This is not me.’
She was pathetic, her problems were first-world, but that didn’t make them not her problems.
Through the closed door she heard Hugh’s phone ring, and him answer it, talking in a low voice, which she tuned out as she tried to calm her breathing, staunch the flow of tears.
She couldn’t keep hiding: it was childish. That was Hugh sitting out there, the man she’d been married to for twenty-five years. Surely they could work it out somehow?
She dabbed at her face with a cold cloth to get rid of the puffy cheeks, and ventured back into the room.
Hugh was still sitting on the side of the bed exactly as he had been before, looking as though he’d been hit by a bus. ‘Annie,’ he said, ‘I can forward you Ben’s emails from now on if that would make a difference.’
She did know him well. That was true. But after all these years, it seemed he did not know her. She was just another missing banana-picker as far as he was concerned. Never mind why she had gone missing — it was all about locating her whereabouts now, getting back on track, moving on.
‘It’s not just that, Hugh.’ She was tired now, her anger softening into a bitter pool of disappointment. ‘It’s that they don’t want to tell me anything. It’s that they don’t seem to want me in their lives, and I don’t know what I have done to deserve that.’
His incomprehension was growing. ‘You’ve done nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing bad. You’re great. They’re just kids.’
‘But can you understand how I feel, Hugh?’
‘I thought perhaps a holiday here might help you …’
‘Might help me what?’
‘Cheer up, perhaps, after …’
‘You want me to cheer up? After my mother dies, my dog disappears, my children abandon me, and you—’
She looked at him, sitting there, utterly bewildered. What had he done? He did not have a single clue what she was talking about. He did not get it. He did not get her.
‘I don’t know why I’m even trying to talk about this with you, Hugh.’
‘Talk about what?’ he pleaded. ‘Annie, I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand.’
‘Exactly,’ she said, as his phone started to ring. ‘Nobody does.’
Chapter Twenty
‘Your laughing was only with the body today,’ Heavenly told Annie when they finished on the beach the next day. ‘Your heart not in it, eh? Come sit with me in the shade.’
Annie let the old woman take her hand and lead her to the stone benches beneath the banyan tree.
‘Pinto is here?’
‘Yes, he’s asleep around the corner.’
‘Would you like to do me a favour?’
‘Of course, Heavenly,’ Annie said. ‘Although I don’t know how much help I can be to you.’
‘I need to bring something to my niece in her village outside of the city. I’m thinking if Pinto is not busy taking you somewhere else, he could take me there and you could come, too.’
‘To the village?’
‘Mrs Hugh Jordan, there are three things you must see to know the best of India, and these are the laughing yoga at Chowpatty Beach, the village life not in the city, and the Taj Mahal in Agra.’
‘She is right,’ said Priyanka, dressed today in daffodil yellow, as she plopped down beside them.
‘And Jaipur,’ said Kirti. ‘That is another third thing.’
‘And Goa,’ added Malika.
‘South Goa,’ corrected Pooja.
‘No, Kerala,’ said the man with the gold teeth, whose name Annie could never remember.
‘And if you are going to go to the Taj Mahal, you must go to the abandoned city on the other side of Agra,’ said Shruti. ‘You know this one that they built before the water ran out?’
‘Fatehpur Sikri,’ said Priyanka. ‘Yes, that is very beautiful.’
‘And if you are going to the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri, you will be going to Delhi on the way,’ said Malika, ‘so you need to see Humayun’s tomb and Qutub Minar, the oldest minaret in the world.’
‘I do not think she will see anything in Delhi apart from the pollution and the traffic jams,’ said Kamalijit, as if those two things were strangers to Mumbai.
‘What about Gandhi’s eternal flame at Raj Ghat?’
‘Or the Jama Masjid mosque in the old city?’
‘Too hot!’
&
nbsp; ‘Too busy!’
‘Too much!’ Heavenly said. ‘Mrs Hugh Jordan is here for a good time, not a long time, eh? I am talking here about the cream of a very fine crop, but cream it is. Laughing yoga, village life and the Taj Mahal. Then you will go home feeling that you know us and also yourself.’
‘How far away is it, the village?’ Annie asked.
‘Maybe an hour. Maybe two. But it is very beautiful when you get there.’
Annie’s heart was not in anything, but more particularly not in another day spent on her own at the hotel. If Pinto was game, she decided, so was she.
Pinto was game. There were only two of them, after all, so he was clearly not breaking his nice-cool-cab protocol.
BY THE TIME THEY HIT the freeway, past the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the traffic started to ease, or at least seemed to all go in the same direction at a similar pace.
Annie was surprised to see so many of the three-wheeled motorised rickshaws competing with the many buses and trucks and much bigger, much faster-moving objects on the eight-lane interstate.
One particular rickshaw kept falling behind them, then catching up again. There were five people crushed in the front of the tiny buggy, and at least that many in the back. The woman sitting at the end closest to Annie had a sleeping child on her lap, and the sleeping child’s fat little feet were sticking out the side of the rickshaw.
Annie couldn’t see more than the beaded bracelets around her ankles, the frill of her dress, and the arm of the woman on whose lap she slumbered, which was holding onto the canopy of the rickshaw as it weaved its way north.
Was the owner of the arm not afraid that the baby’s precious feet would get caught by a passing truck, or bike, or another rickshaw? Didn’t she worry they might get clipped and the chubby little body flung out beneath the wheels of a bus?
From what Annie had seen, Indian parents loved their children as much as, if not more than, any other parents anywhere else in the world, yet they appeared to her so cavalier with their safety. Tiny children riding pillion on motorbikes, playing with petrol cans and matches, sleeping under cars, running at the edges of busy freeways, cuddling diseased dogs, chasing each other through rubbish dumps. These children would surely grow up without fear for their own safety and everyone needed a bit of that. Didn’t they?