Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

  Annie heard giggles from inside the house, and into the doorway emerged a plump Indian woman, short, with a tiny girl clutching her blue sari and two more women about the same age as her standing behind, with three more older ones in the background.

  Heavenly introduced Annie and Pinto, who had recovered from the attack of the scary chicken, explaining that the house belonged to Nishi, the woman in blue, and that the two women of a similar vintage were her sister and sister-in-law, and the three older women their mothers and a neighbour.

  Nishi asked them into the house and Annie stepped through the door.

  It was basic, in every sense of the word. There were no windows and the bare brick walls were exposed, but light poured in through the gaps beneath the tin roof to reveal a spotless concrete floor.

  Two bright-blue plastic outdoor chairs were the only furniture. Sitting in front of the pale brick wall in the filtered light they could have featured on the cover of Architectural Digest.

  In the far corner of the room a sort of lean-to had been made out of brush and bamboo, and in front of that a saucepan was sitting on a small open fire between two bricks on the floor. Next to it sat three empty aluminium dishes and three spoons.

  In the opposite corner, fixed to the brick wall, was a metal shelving unit that held an array of pots, pans, utensils, mugs, cups, bowls, jugs all in the same aluminium. Next to that was a single bench-top held up at one end by what looked like dried straw bales, and at the other end by two pieces of four-by-two timber.

  This bench was empty but for a row of tins in descending order of size.

  On the wall opposite, the artist responsible for the flowers outside had painted Ganesh, the elephant-faced god, sitting on a grassy riverbank, mountains in the background. Next to this was a single table holding up a television. That was it. Four walls with a kitchen on one side and a television on the other.

  It was impeccably tidy.

  ‘I love your house,’ she told Nishi. ‘You must be very proud. Thank you very much for letting me visit.’

  Nishi indicated that she should sit on one of the blue chairs and, as much as Annie refused, in the end she just had to sit down.

  Heavenly was offered the other chair, but demurred, in Hindi, and went and lay on the floor, falling instantly asleep.

  After more argument, the eldest of the old women sat down next to Annie.

  From outside, she heard more giggling and, when she looked up, three girls were peering in through the door. They were wearing dark-blue school pinafores and pristine white shirts, and their shiny black hair was plaited in thick beautiful braids, although they were bare-footed. The littlest one looked about five while the tallest was maybe ten.

  Annie smiled and said hello, but at this they dissolved into gales of laughter and fled.

  ‘These are your daughters?’ she asked Nishi, but Pinto translated that only the baby girl was Nishi’s; these girls belonged to the sister, Divya, and the sister-in-law, Rupali.

  The little girls could speak English, Pinto said, but were shy because they had never before met anyone like her.

  ‘Are they scared of me like you are scared of the chicken?’ she asked Pinto.

  ‘No, ma’am! Chicken is scary, but ma’am is not scary. Just for these small girls, different.’

  The girls went to school in the next village, Pinto explained, although it was more than an hour’s walk away.

  ‘This is very good school, though,’ he translated for Nishi. ‘This makes very clever girls.’

  ‘Will the girls go to university in the city when they finish at school?’

  Nishi laughed when Pinto translated this, as did the grandmothers.

  ‘No, they stay here in the village and make some good marriages.’

  ‘So even if they are very good at school, there is no future for them anywhere else?’

  ‘Their future is at home, ma’am,’ Pinto said, without translating the question. ‘Looking after the husband and the childrens and the old peoples. They will not want to go anywhere else.’

  ‘But what if they want to be doctors or lawyers or astronauts?’

  He did translate this, and the ladies thought it was hilarious, but Annie was serious. Why send the girls to a good school if all that lay in store for them was carrying water from the well to their parents’ house?

  Nishi’s mother then wanted to know if Annie had children, so she told them about Ben and Daisy, how Ben was studying law and Daisy was studying (for want of a better word) marketing. She told them they were far away, doing their studying in other cities.

  The ladies discussed this among themselves for a while, then Nishi asked when they would be coming home.

  ‘To visit?’

  ‘No, to live,’ Pinto said.

  ‘Well, they might not,’ Annie said. ‘They will get jobs wherever they can, and get married and settle down and have children of their own.’

  Saying it out loud did not make it sound as good as she meant it to. Of course it was better for her children to be off doing their own thing than living in her pocket, no matter how much she wanted it that way. It was how her world worked.

  But Nishi seemed to find this hard to believe, judging by the questions she continued to ask Pinto, and by the spirited debate that emerged between the women as a result.

  ‘Do they talk to you on the telephone, the children?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do they write the emails?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Do they cook for you when they invite you to their home?’

  She could hardly outright lie. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Actually they usually come to my home and I have to admit they’re not much good at cooking.’ Or doing laundry, or helping her in the garden, or anywhere else for that matter. They didn’t even make their beds. She did it: she did everything. She’d made some feeble attempts over the years to change this, because she knew she should equip them better for life after her, but she hated the ensuing arguments. And she didn’t want to think about life after her.

  ‘What are they saying?’ she asked, as the women continued to debate among themselves.

  ‘I do not know, ma’am,’ said Pinto.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know? You don’t know what they’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, I do know what they are saying, but I do not know that you will want to hear it.’

  She felt a flicker of irritation. ‘Come on, tell me anyway.’

  ‘Ma’am, they say for you it is very bad that your children want to move away from home and not come near you and do not make the foods for you, because this will make you sad and lonely.’

  His words cut right through her, landing in the hopeful flame in her heart that had recently been fighting so hard for air and space. Of course Pinto knew what she would or wouldn’t want to hear — she really ought to have picked that up by now.

  ‘Oh.’ She nodded, tears welling in her eyes, a tide of emotion building inside her. ‘Well, yes, I suppose when you put it like that it does make me sad and it does make me lonely.’

  Nishi’s mother said something to Nishi, who repeated it to Pinto, who then said to Annie: ‘Are you moved away and not near your mum?’

  Annie’s chin had started to wobble. Why was it that the more you wanted to keep tears at bay, the more they insisted on pushing through? ‘My mother died earlier this year,’ she said, ‘but she did live with us, just like Nishi’s mother does, and she had done for quite a few years, so I had not moved away from her and I loved being near her, and without her …’ She looked around this immaculately kept one-room house and wondered what the hell was the matter with her.

  ‘Well, “lonely” is the word,’ she admitted, feeling a tear slide down her cheek. She tried to suck it back but all that encouraged was a little gasp, the sort that came just before a big torrent. ‘And without the children, without my mother, our house is too big. I’m sorry to even think that when I should feel so lucky, because it’s a beautiful ho
use, but I look around your house, Nishi, and I see you all here together, and you have absolutely everything you need but nothing more, and you have this big raggle-taggle family here so you probably never even have a moment to yourself and for all I know that’s what you dream about, but I have so many moments to myself, my whole life is nothing but a collection of moments to myself. And it’s awful being lonely at my stage in life, because how is that ever going to change? I’m not going to make a whole new bunch of friends; I’m not going to have more children. If Ben and Daisy have children of their own, they probably won’t even come to see me — at this rate they won’t even tell me it’s bloody well happening. And you know what? I had a dog that I loved very much, too, but he disappeared not long after my mother died and so my whole life seems completely totally empty, actually. Not just my house. My whole life. Me.’

  Pinto was looking at the floor, biting his lip, looking on the verge of tears himself. The Indian women, though, were staring at her, fascinated. They hadn’t a clue what she’d said, but they probably knew they were onto it with ‘sad’ and ‘lonely’.

  After an awkward silence, Nishi elbowed her sister-in-law, who blinked, then timidly tested her English.

  ‘Dog dead?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’ Annie wiped the tears from her cheeks as they continued to spill. ‘I’m so sorry. This is such a terrible way to behave.’

  Nishi’s sister-in-law said something to the others, who all nodded, then she repeated it to Pinto.

  ‘They say you can have their dog,’ he said.

  Their dog was a scabby-looking thing collapsed outside on the porch. Its ribs stuck out like garden-fork prongs, one leg was oddly angled, and if she hadn’t seen its scrawny chest rise and fall she would have thought it was dead, too.

  Annie’s polite crying turned into big embarrassing sobs.

  Nishi came over and leaned down to give her a hug, the smell of spices clinging to her like a shroud, a faint oniony flavour emanating from her smooth brown skin. Divya stood and came over, too, wrapping one arm around Annie and the other around Nishi, then Rupali joined in, as did the grandmothers, until Annie was being all but smothered in bare midriffs, swallowing mouthfuls of sari, inhaling body and cooking odours, essential oils, at least three different fragrant perfumes and, from somewhere she couldn’t quite pinpoint, peppermint.

  Despite the fact she could not stop crying, in that moment, in that room, with five dollars’ worth of interior decorating and the sun pouring in through the cracks, she did not feel lonely. She doubted anyone in that room ever would.

  By the time Heavenly woke up, Annie had been calmed with two cups of masala tea and a selection of little fried biscuits whose deliciousness defied description.

  ‘Ay, that was some good sleep,’ Heavenly said, stretching. ‘Now if you will pour me a cup of that tea, I will have it and then we should be on our way back home.’

  It wasn’t until they were nearly back at the hotel that Annie remembered why they had gone to the village in the first place. ‘You were taking something to Nishi,’ she said to Heavenly. ‘Did you forget to give it to her?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Heavenly replied. ‘The something I was taking was you.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Preeti was gone.

  There it was, in the paper when she got back to her room, on page seven; a tiny story with the same photo of her beautiful face smiling in front of the plain red background. But Preeti would never smile again. The internal damage had been worse than doctors feared and overnight she had succumbed to multiple organ failure and cardio-respiratory arrest.

  Her lungs stopped functioning, a plastic surgeon at the hospital was quoted as saying. Her trachea, vocal cord, food pipe and lungs had been reduced to a terrible state. Her kidneys stopped functioning, and then gradually her heart stopped beating.

  Her father and mother were inconsolable, having been at Preeti’s side when she drew her last difficult breath, the paper said.

  The railway police would keep looking for the attacker, but were now concluding that it was a case of mistaken identity and nothing more than a terrible tragedy. Their CCTV, it confessed, had not been working when the acid attack occurred, so there was no evidence.

  Annie threw the newspaper on the floor of the hotel room. That poor woman! That poor family! Nothing more than ‘a terrible tragedy’? Terrible tragedies were as bad as it got.

  She felt sick with rage and sadness — even more so after two glasses of the expensive wine from the minibar.

  Preeti was dead! It was too awful for words. If Daisy died … Well, Annie had considered that possibility before, and no matter how spoiled rotten her daughter was, she could not contemplate it again.

  Quickly calculating the time difference and working out that it was late, but not too late, she picked up the phone and dialled Daisy’s mobile number.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Daisy answered.

  ‘It’s Mum.’ Annie said. ‘In India.’

  ‘Who?’ There was a lot of noise in the background at her end.

  ‘It’s me, it’s Mum,’ Annie said, louder. ‘Where are you? It sounds like a party!’

  ‘Oh, Mum! Hi. No, I’m just at Freya’s with a few friends. How are you doing?’

  ‘I just wanted to hear your voice, darling. To see how you were.’

  ‘I’m good. I’m great. Freya! Turn the music down. It’s my mum.’

  ‘How’s uni?’

  ‘Same old same old. You know. How’s India?’

  ‘Did you not get my email?’

  ‘Oh, I haven’t checked. Did you decide about the dress?’

  ‘Goodness, sweetheart, you should probably read the email first because —’

  ‘Mum, the party is this Saturday so I kind of need to know now.’

  ‘It just seems so much for one dress, darling. When you see how little they live on over here, it just doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘Seriously? OK, Mum. Whatever. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetie, but since I’ve been here —’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. India. I get it.’

  Annie heard a commotion in the background, a champagne bottle being opened, followed by laughing and shrieking. She thought she heard a glass break. Someone called Daisy’s name. Were they drunk?

  ‘Is everything OK there?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Yes, everything’s fine, don’t stress, Mum.’

  More shrieks. More laughter.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, it’s fine, but I’ve got to go,’ her daughter said, laughing. ‘It’s full-on here. Freya’s sister just split up with her boyfriend, so we’re having a wake. Talk to you soon, OK? Bye! Love to Dad.’

  ‘Oh, Daisy,’ Annie said into the phone. ‘Daisy?’

  But Daisy had gone.

  Although she had not hung up the call.

  From the other side of the world Annie heard the phone rustling in her daughter’s pocket. She knew she should put her own phone down. She knew she should stop listening.

  She heard Freya ask if Daisy was getting the money for the dress.

  She listened as her daughter replied that no, her mother had gone all Save the Children and that there were too many poor people in India or whatever.

  ‘She’s in India?’ someone else asked. ‘Wow, that’s pretty awesome.’

  ‘Yeah, but my dad had to, like, drag her there,’ Daisy said. ‘She’d never come up with an idea like that on her own. Borrring!’ Laughter. ‘Hey, Frey, can I borrow your red strapless dress for the party? The one you wore to Troy’s the other night?’

  There was another shriek as more champagne was popped. More laughter. Daisy and another girl started talking about Kim Kardashian.

  Annie put the phone back in the cradle.

  She poured another glass of expensive wine and cried as she drank it; she cried for her own broken heart, for Preeti, for Preeti’s mother, her own mother, her dog, her absent husband — all of them, ghosts to her now.


  SHE WOKE WHEN HUGH CAME HOME and slipped under the sheets, sighing far across the bed from her and falling instantly into the deep, rhythmic pattern of sleep.

  This is what we’ve come to, she thought, her pillow soaking up more tears. Silent, distant, separate, miserable.

  Hugh had become surplus to her requirements, just like her own long-lost father. He was not the real one after all.

  She woke well before the sun, and lay there, turning her aching thoughts over and over, mixing them, sifting them, trying to calm them, get them in an order that didn’t feel like she was running around behind them, panicked.

  Daisy was right. She was boring. She’d noticed it herself. Everything about her was beige.

  And it was true; she herself would never have had the idea to go to India, although that did not excuse Daisy’s cruelty for saying so, for belittling her like that behind her back. Was it even cruelty if Daisy didn’t know Annie had heard the belittling? Annie supposed she must have said awful things about Eleanor when she was younger, although she suspected the world had changed in that regard. She had been brought up to respect her elders. And in those days there were no cellphones that didn’t get hung up, no emails going to the wrong address, no texts or sexts or tweets or posts or other ways to accidentally reveal things that were supposed to be private.

  She hoped that when Daisy grew up and had children of her own, she never had to feel the pain her mother was feeling now. Even if what she said was true.

  Finally, to her relief, it was time to get up and go to laughing yoga.

  She went through the motions, peeling her coconuts and telling off imaginary policemen, and to her surprise with every laugh something deep inside her shifted a little. For the better. On the fine sand of Chowpatty, the laughter was once more working its magic.

  ‘Something changes for you today?’ Heavenly asked as they walked across the sand after the exercises.

  ‘Oh,’ said Annie. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I see it in you. Something that was not there yesterday.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose something has changed.’