‘I think so,’ agreed Heavenly. ‘I think the village visit was good for you?’
‘Yes, it was good, but now …’
‘Exactly,’ interrupted Heavenly. ‘Now this just leaves the Taj Mahal. Wonderful!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Annie said as they sat down in the shade.
‘Of course you do not,’ said Heavenly. ‘You have not been there yet. But after you have been there, then you will know about it.’
‘About the Taj Mahal?’
‘Yes, Mrs Hugh. The Taj Mahal. Remember I told you that to know India and to know yourself that you need to come to laughing yoga, visit a small village, and go to the Taj Mahal?’
‘I remember you saying it —’
‘Then what else is there but for you to go?’
‘What else is there? Well, I’m not sure …’
She wasn’t sure. Despite her earlier self-congratulation on stirring up the sediment of her deep unhappiness, in some ways she was still less sure than she had ever been.
But what was she going to do now? Go back to the hotel where she felt as far away from Hugh as she was from home? Go home, where she felt as far away from everyone else as she was in India? Where her own daughter delighted in telling everyone how boring she was?
Both options were, indeed, boring.
‘What are you not sure about?’ Heavenly asked. ‘It’s just one flight and a short drive.’
‘I’m not sure about anything,’ Annie said.
Heavenly took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Most people are not sure about much,’ she said. ‘But you only really need to be sure about one thing. This is why for you the Taj Mahal is a good idea.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Annie said again.
‘I do. Trust me.’
‘I do,’ Annie said, and it was true. She trusted her.
‘Then go to the Taj Mahal!’
She sat there in silence, holding the old woman’s hand, and a strange tiny nugget of something like anticipation wriggled in her stomach like a mustard seed frying in hot ghee, jumping and popping.
Everything nice and safe was boring. Everything dangerous and risky was exciting.
Maybe she should try some excitement.
Whatever she was going to do, she knew she could not spend another night feeling lonely and sad on the desert of the king-size Taj Lands End bed.
Somewhere along the line in the past few hours, maybe the past few years, something had ended. She saw that now. So something else was about to begin.
‘Maybe I will,’ she said.
‘There is no maybe about it,’ Heavenly said.
‘But it means I won’t be coming back to laughing yoga.’
‘Oh, we hear that a lot,’ the old woman said, ‘and it is very rarely the case, but if it is, we just have a good laugh.’
At that, Shruti, who had been demonstrating what looked like a complicated gymnastic manoeuvre to Priyanka, farted so loudly that two crows flew out of the banyan tree in fright.
Heavenly Hirani’s School of Laughing Yoga erupted into raw, wonderful, real peals of infectious joy, and Annie erupted with them.
‘Thank you for everything,’ she said to Heavenly when it was time to go. ‘You are a wise and wonderful woman.’
‘No more wise and wonderful than anyone else,’ Heavenly said. ‘You should not forget this.’
‘I won’t forget anything,’ Annie said, standing to leave. ‘Ever.’
The two embraced, and, although Heavenly was so small, it felt as though her arms were wings, and inside them Annie felt warm and safe and loved.
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘And thank you, thank you, thank you.’
‘This Heavenly is very good woman,’ Pinto said as he drove Annie back to the hotel. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes, Pinto, I do.’
They had stopped at a set of traffic lights near a many-pronged roundabout that was beautifully planted with lush shrubs and blooming flowerbeds.
‘Oh, I stay here once,’ Pinto said, looking idly out the window.
‘Where?’
‘In this garden, ma’am. See these bushes? Inside this is an empty space. Very nice. No mosquitoes.’
‘You mean you lived in the bushes?’
‘At night for some weeks before I get my new taxi job. There is a very good gardener who works there, for the city, and he is never mean to me. I see him now, sometimes, in the street but he is very old. He doesn’t work there now, I think.’
‘Does he remember you?’
‘No, ma’am, just I remember him because he is nice.’
His tendency to casually drop into the conversation, without expecting even a smidgen of sympathy, the likes of sleeping in the middle of a roundabout staggered her.
‘Your life makes mine look like a tired old hall rug,’ Annie said as they pulled away with the green light.
‘But, ma’am, you are only on your first life and I have had six.’
In the back of his cool cab, Annie smiled.
WHEN THEY REACHED THE HOTEL, she pulled out the usual fare and handed it to him, his shy smile her extra reward.
‘Pinto, I think I’m going to start my second life today,’ she said. ‘So if I were to need a ride to the airport later on, would you be able to take me?’
‘You are going home, ma’am?’
‘Yes, I think so. But I’m going the long way round.’
‘Oh, this makes me sad because you have helped me and been so kind for me, but yes, I will take you any way you would like. Just SMS me the time. Thank you, ma’am. See you, ma’am.’
And so the decision was made.
She was leaving.
IT WAS SURPRISINGLY EASY to put the wheels in motion; in fact it was energising.
As soon as she got up to her room she rang Maya, and asked her to arrange the earliest flight she could find to Delhi and a driver from there to Agra.
Annie Jordan was going to see the Taj Mahal.
‘Sure, there is a flight at midday we can get you on, and we have a tour company we use there all the time,’ said Maya. ‘They will send a guide as well. You are in for a real treat. Trust me — you will love it. But make sure you do not go to the Taj tonight — go first thing in the morning so it is not too hot. You cannot soak up the atmosphere if you are soaking already. Oh, and make sure you take a handkerchief — everyone cries. Or every woman, anyway!’
Annie quickly packed her bag, texted Pinto a time to pick her up, then sat down with a thick pad of the Taj’s beautiful stationery to write a letter to Hugh.
Be truthful, gentle and fearless, she told herself. That was the best anyone could be.
Chapter Twenty-two
Dear Hugh, Annie began, before crumpling up the sheet of paper and starting on a new one with Darling Hugh.
But ‘Darling’ wasn’t right either. She was running away, after all. This was her, being fearless.
She tried just Hugh on its own, but that looked too bold, too cold.
‘How can I finish this if I can’t even start it?’ she asked out loud.
Then she thought of the way her mother had always called her ‘my dear’ and how she’d always loved that, how honest and kind it seemed; how it did make her feel dear to her mother. And she wanted to be dear to Hugh. She just wasn’t sure if she wanted to be married to him anymore.
Talking wasn’t working. Maybe this would.
My dear Hugh, she wrote.
I can’t quite believe I am writing to you like this but I seem incapable, well, we both seem incapable, of talking to each other in any meaningful way at the moment, yet there is so much to be said — hence this letter.
And sorry about the ‘hence’. I hate that word and it makes it seem more formal than it is, and it’s not formal, but I don’t want to write and re-write, I want to just get it out. This is me speaking from the heart, Hugh, because I don’t think you know what’s in my heart anymore.
This is not your fault. I think I am only just
starting to find out what’s in it myself. I think we long ago stopped talking to each other about what matters deep down inside, but I know now that I should have been saying more, sharing more, asking for more all the way along. It seems preposterous to me that I didn’t, but somewhere back in the dips of those endless valleys of sleepless nights and countless nappies and school meetings and weeks, months, years spent ferrying children hither and yon, I lost my voice.
Or was it before then?
It seems pointless to backtrack quite this far, but, you know, I never actually wanted that big church wedding with the fancy reception and all the guests and the five-layered cake and the string quartet. I’m not sure I even like string quartets. And the cake wasn’t even chocolate! But I honestly can’t remember having much of a say. Isn’t that terrible? I’m going back twenty-five years here, I know, but I guess I’m just trying to figure out for myself where the heck I went wrong.
I wanted to get married at that little church down the coast near where we went that very first weekend we spent together. Do you remember it — sitting in the middle of all that beautiful rolling green farmland with the little picket fence around it and the buckets of geraniums?
I wanted it to be just the two of us, Hugh, with a couple of bystanders plucked from the local town for witnesses. Then I imagined sipping champagne and having a crayfish picnic on the beach in front of the cottage we stayed at: the one hidden in the dunes that was decorated like a shipwreck.
I loved that place. It was so ‘us’. Whereas our wedding was so ‘everyone else’. Not that I didn’t want to marry you, Hugh, please don’t get me wrong about that. Oh, how I wanted to marry you! But even way back then I seemed to struggle to find my voice.
And now, all these years later, I have turned into this strange, silent, unhappy person.
I phoned Daisy last night and she called me boring. She didn’t know I was listening, but still, the awful thing is that she’s right. I feel boring. I feel like I don’t even recognise myself in the mirror. I don’t know who this dull, ordinary middle-aged woman is. Worse, I didn’t even notice I was her until I got to India.
Being here has made me look at the world, particularly — strangely, since I am so far away from it — my world, with such fresh eyes. In many ways it has been extraordinary.
Utterly extraordinary.
I’ve been embraced here, Hugh, by strangers for the most part, in a way that has been nothing short of magical. But it’s also revealed how un-embraced I am at home. Not by strangers, but by everyone: by you, by the children — by life in general.
When Mum was with us I didn’t notice it so much, because I was busy taking care of her — something I loved doing and which I have to thank you for allowing, as I’m sure it took its toll on you, too, and you were so generous to let her encroach on our lives the way you did for so long without ever complaining.
Did it get on your nerves? I don’t know, Hugh. You never said anything. You never say anything. Am I complaining that you never complain? I don’t know; it just seems wrong to me that I currently know more about what my Kashmiri taxi driver thinks than I do about what you think. His name is Pinto and he’s lived a hell of a life, but he seems happy — happier than you and happier than me, although you were right the other day when you said that I seemed happier here. In some ways I have been.
This happiness has come from a slightly mad group called Heavenly Hirani’s School of Laughing Yoga. I’ve been joining them every morning for their laughing yoga sessions on Chowpatty Beach. Turns out they’re seniors, so I have had the added benefit of being a youngster in their presence. I didn’t tell you about it because, oh, I don’t know, you were tired and busy and never asked, and then I realised we were so out of the habit of sharing what goes on in our lives that I started thinking what was the point of starting again now?
I mean, what is the point, Hugh?
I feel invisible to you half the time. I feel invisible to the children all the time. I’m so hurt that you wouldn’t think to tell me about what Ben is up to, but I’m also hurt that he wouldn’t tell me himself. As for Daisy, well, she’s broken my heart, but that’s a temporary state of affairs. Besides, it’s probably my fault she is the way she is — I don’t think I’ll ever get over the fear of losing her. But you’re right, it’s unfair to compare her with other girls in the world, because Daisy is not aware of how the rest of the world lives. But that needs to change — she needs to be. We all need to be.
And Preeti died! Oh, that just kills me, Hugh, even if things like that do happen here all the time. That beautiful young life full of promise snuffed out. What a tragedy! What a waste! And no one seems to care!
Poor Preeti has undone me, Hugh. I don’t know why. One loss too many, perhaps, and not even my loss, but a loss nonetheless.
She worked so hard, and her biggest worry was how her parents would pay for her medical care, and here we have Daisy wanting more and more, and I don’t think she knows what hard work even is. It makes me want to shake our girl until her teeth rattle, but it rattles me, too. It rattles me more.
She’s my daughter and I love her more than anything, as I do you and Ben: we’re a family and we always will be. But now that I’m not needed to take care of any of you, now that no one seems to notice if I do or I don’t, I can’t work out what to do with myself.
The truth is that in recent times it felt like Bertie was the only person in my life who was ever truly happy to see me. And he’s not even a person. Plus, he’s gone.
I’m only forty-nine, Hugh, I have so much of my life ahead of me, so it’s just too tragic for words that, without a slightly deranged terrier and a young Indian woman I don’t even know, I am quite so lost.
Or, should I say, I was quite so lost.
I’m not sure why you brought me to Mumbai. You said you wanted to cheer me up, but then your work got in the way. Something always seems to get in the way. But I do have to thank you so, so, so much, because, despite the odds against it, I think I’ve found myself here. Yes, it’s Eat Pray Love but with a different ending (I assume — I really must read the whole book).
I’ve tried to be a good wife. I’ve cooked and cleaned and hosted and supported and done my best to raise our children and, don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret that, I don’t regret anything. I’ve done precisely what I thought I was supposed to, and it was a pleasure to try and do it well.
But now here I am at the next stage of my life, and it turns out I’m lonely, Hugh. I’m so lonely — oh God, I’m crying like a baby! It’s wretched to be a grown woman and to feel hurt and lonely, but I do and I am.
The people I’ve met over the past two weeks have been the best thing to happen to me in I-don’t know-how-long and I’ve looked at what they have and how happy they are and what I have and how happy I am and it would be criminal for me to continue my life in the same way as I have been living it up until now.
I don’t need a five-star hotel. I don’t need a five-bedroom house. I don’t need a new car every three years or a kitchen island or to have my highlights done every month.
I need laughter. I need joy. I need to be happy. And I need to be loved, Hugh — deliriously, openly, continuously loved. And I need to be UNDERSTOOD. I think — no, I KNOW — that this is what I deserve.
And I hate it when the kids SHOUT at me in texts, but I really DO know this.
I also know you really loved me once, Hugh, perhaps not wildly or openly, but in your own way, though whatever we had in those early giddy years before our children, your career, sick parents and whatever else, well, that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
I think the love is still there but, Hugh, I just don’t know if that’s enough.
When I ask you if you can understand how I feel, I need you to at least try, because otherwise I’m just another lost banana-picker. You’ll methodically do everything you can to find me, then tick that off your list: a job well done.
But will you ever even want to know why
I went missing?
Heavenly Hirani says that in India you don’t need to die to be reincarnated, and I think that’s what has happened to me. I’m a new person now and I’m done with the old one.
I don’t know if we can go back. I don’t even know if I want to.
My dear Hugh, I am going missing.
Sorry to do it like this, and I do hope you find the other banana-picker, the real one. I also hope you can try to understand why this one does not want to be looked for. I’m not on your list now. You don’t need to tick me off.
I’m not sure when I will come home, but when I do I think it best if I move into Mum’s apartment. The tenant left, and I was going to find a new one when I got back, so the timing is right for that.
The timing is right for leaving, Hugh.
I’ve tried to explain myself as best I can here, and I hope you can see it, I hope you can see ME, and I hope you can understand. Please don’t hate me. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.
Maybe you’ll be pleased, or relieved, or — how dreadful that I don’t know what you’ll be. That’s the problem, right there in a nutshell.
I’ll email the children and tell them I’m off on an adventure while you’re busy at work.
Then let’s regroup, you and I, at home, and work out what and how to tell them.
I’m so sorry, Hugh.
I’m not sure what else to say.
Love
Annie
She read through it twice, folded it carefully into a Taj Lands End envelope and placed it on Hugh’s pillowcase.
She had been truthful, gentle and fearless, and now she was going to get on a plane on her own and fly into the middle of India to see one of the world’s most famous and beautiful buildings.
Chapter Twenty-three
The lobby flowers had been changed again to a buttery shade of yellow. She loved those flowers. Annie had always imagined it would be stifling staying more than a day or two in a grand hotel, but she had absolutely adored it.