‘You can’t be strong all the time, Hugh. No one can.’
‘I should have paid you more attention. You were right. It was a terrible way to treat you and I’m sorry.’
This is so not how I thought this day would turn out, Annie thought, as they walked hand in hand towards the trees. ‘And I am sorry for saying what I had to say in a letter, instead of to your face, but I meant it when I said we seemed to have lost the art of actually speaking to each other.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘Yes. I was never much good at it, and I just got worse and worse.’
‘But you’re here, Hugh! You’re here talking to me now. How did you even know where I was?’ she asked, as they sat in the shade of a large cyprus in the middle of one of the symmetrical gardens, away from the reflective lake, from the growing crowd of other tourists.
Hugh got a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face and neck. ‘Heavenly Hirani,’ he said.
‘You spoke to Heavenly Hirani?’
‘After I Googled her, yes.’
‘She’s Google-able?’
‘Laughing Yoga is the number three thing to do in Mumbai on TripAdvisor.’
‘Oh my god, you’re kidding me!’
‘No, she has a website and a mobile number.’
‘And she told you where I was?’
‘No, she told me what she tells everybody, apparently: that I shouldn’t leave India without going to the Taj Mahal.’
‘But what made you think I would do that, on my own, without telling anyone?’
‘After reading your letter, I figured you could probably do anything.’
‘It was that easy?’
‘Yes, it was that easy.’ He shook his head. ‘And also I knew that if this Heavenly told you to go to the Taj Mahal, you would. You do that sort of thing. You went to stitch ’n’ bitch because of Rhona. You went to zamba or whatever it’s called because of Daisy. You tried rock-climbing because of Ben. And you came to Mumbai because of me, although I hadn’t really thought that through. It’s always busy when I’m here, but on this trip the problems just got bigger and bigger and …’
He looked down at his hands.
‘I should have tried to be more understanding,’ Annie said. ‘I was carrying too much baggage.’
‘Annie, I do see you, I do, it’s just … It didn’t fall by the wayside, what we had. I just get … stuck. I have always been stuck, but in the past few years it’s been worse. I can’t explain it. I closed down and I didn’t know how to open up again.’
‘Hugh …’
‘I thought you were having an affair,’ he said. ‘I thought I had lost you, here in India, to someone else.’
‘What?’
‘When you were leaving early in the morning, sliding off, I thought you were going to meet someone.’
‘But, Hugh, I would never do anything like that!’
‘And I couldn’t blame you,’ he said, blundering on, ‘but I couldn’t think what to do either: it was like grabbing sand and watching it slide through my fingers, like a nightmare.’
‘Why would you even think that?’
‘I found Bertie!’ he said, the words exploding out of him like cannon shot. ‘The day after he went missing. He’d been run over and I found him, but I couldn’t tell you because I knew what he meant, that he was your favourite thing and I just didn’t want to be the one to …’ He was weeping again.
‘Oh, Hugh!’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Annie wept then, too, but they were, strangely, tears of relief more than anything. Bertie’s little dog soul might indeed be in an Indian chicken now, or a Princeton undergraduate, or just another wily terrier. She need not worry about where he was or what had become of him. His time had passed. It was all right. ‘I understand,’ she said, wiping her eyes. And she did. She would not have wanted to tell her either. She had not really wanted to know until now.
‘What did you do with him?’
‘I took him to that park behind the dunes at the beach where we used to go with the children and I buried him. I couldn’t think what else to do. And then it got worse when you kept coming up with ways he might still be alive and the longer it went on the worse it was that I hadn’t told you.’
‘Oh, Hugh, I’m so sorry.’
‘No. I’m sorry. It’s me who—’
‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.’
‘I wanted that little church, too,’ he said. ‘To get married there. I wanted the picnic and the crayfish.’
But now Annie could not believe she had even dredged up that little nugget of disappointment from the past. Most of what she and Hugh had was a good thing: and it was those that mattered.
He took her in his arms then, arms that she had missed for so long, and she felt safe, and loved, and hopeful for the future, even though she was still grieving the loss of that silly old dog.
Chapter Twenty-seven
They talked all the way back to Delhi. It was almost like meeting Hugh all over again, except that he’d been the strong silent type right from the beginning. But in two hours in the car driving along the beautiful freeway from Agra, it was as though a cork had been popped and he could not stop the flow of everything he wanted to say.
He said he’d known when Ben was still a toddler that he was starting to clam up more than usual, but he’d felt unable to do anything about it.
‘You know you said in your email that it felt pathetic to be grown-up and lonely? The thing is, I know that feeling. I had that feeling when the children were little, and that just seemed so … weak. I wouldn’t have wanted to tell you that even if I could have, but I still felt that way. Then I got used to feeling that way, but I stopped remembering why, so that it was just there, all the time. You three together and me slightly distant. And after we lost the baby …’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘I didn’t know what to say, Annie, so I didn’t say anything. I just wanted you to feel better.’
Annie wiped away her own tears. ‘We survived it, Hugh.’
‘You were so brave. I wanted to tell you, to talk about it but … but I wanted to be strong. I’d do it so differently now, I’m sure I would.’
‘Well, you’ve been doing something right, because our son doesn’t even answer my emails and our daughter only wants me for my money.’
‘I was wrong not to tell you about Ben, it was thoughtless of me; and I’m so sorry you felt ignored, because he asks about you in every email, wants to know how you’re doing, if you’re still so sad about Eleanor and Bertie. I should have told him to ask you. I don’t know why I didn’t. That’s my fault. And there’s no excuse.’
‘And Daisy?’
‘She asked me about the dress and I did tell her to ask you. But what’s all this about saying you were boring? What happened? Did you two argue?’
‘No, I called her and she didn’t hang up her phone. She told her friends I was too boring to ever have gone to India on my own.’
‘Oh god, really? I always think of you two as being thick as thieves. I’m sure she didn’t mean it; she was probably just acting up in front of her friends. But it must have hurt.’
‘It’s true, though, Hugh. One thing I’ve realised after going to laughing yoga is that I don’t have enough fun. I am boring.’
‘You are not!’
‘I am. I was. But I don’t want to be anymore. I want to take Bollywood dancing lessons and learn to paint and speak French.’
‘Good for you. I’ll come to the French lessons if you want me to, but I think I’ll sit out the dancing.’
‘Do you worry about Daisy, Hugh?’
‘Honestly? I suppose I do. I wasn’t sure if you felt that way or not, but sometimes I think she seems to lack … well, not maturity, exactly. But something like it.’
‘I think perhaps I have mollycoddled her too much and it’s not going to do her any favours in the long run.’
‘You’ve had your reasons,’ Hugh said softly. ‘We both have.
They are good reasons.’
‘But how long should that last? I think it’s more a habit now than anything else. She’s doing well enough at university and she seems healthy and happy and all but grown-up, yet we’re still paying for everything.’
‘We would probably help her more by slowly weaning her off the dripfeed.’
‘Yes, I think you’re right. We can’t expect her to sort herself out overnight. But she has to make a start or she’ll never be independent.’
Annie looked out the window as her heart skipped a jump; the happy kind.
‘How long is it, Hugh, since we talked about the children? Since we talked about anything?’
‘A long time,’ he said. He reached for her hand. ‘You did the right thing, with the letter, with the Taj,’ he said. ‘The thought of my life without you in it … it was so shocking to me, Annie. And I mean shocking, as in — electric. It fired me up somehow in a way I didn’t know … Well, anyway, that’s terror for you, I suppose. I will never let you feel that way about me again, I promise.’
‘I’m not perfect,’ Annie said. ‘I know that. Your life got busy with work and you got used to pulling away, and I filled my life up with the children and got used to biting my tongue. That’s how we derailed.’
‘Never again,’ Hugh said, squeezing her hand. ‘I promise, never again.’
He barely let her hand drop all the way back to Mumbai, and when they fell back into their bed at the Taj, exhausted, he held her so tight she truly felt he would never let her go.
WHEN SHE WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING, she was half convinced the whole escapade had been a dream, except that when Hugh’s eyes opened they stayed on hers, and he smiled, then pulled her close.
The love was still there, and so was the desire, the desperate need for her to lose herself in his familiar scent, against his bare skin, as they moved together, as close as any two people can be, once more on the same track.
Hugh had more or less finished his work in Mumbai, he said, and wanted to spend the day with her. He now knew where the machine-that-shall-not-be-mentioned was, and he was delegating responsibility for its safe return to someone else.
He marvelled at his wife as she wolfed down a stuffed dhosa and three cups of masala tea for breakfast, as Adesh fussed over her.
‘They all but dust and polish me,’ she told her husband. ‘I love it.’
‘OK, I’m all yours,’ he said, after they had finished, as they sat looking out at the Arabian Sea, which was able to scrape up a sparkle this morning despite its natural murk. ‘What would you like to do?’
Annie knew exactly, and had already organised it.
She was going to show her husband some of the jewels of the city she had discovered while he had been otherwise occupied.
PINTO WAS WAITING FOR THEM outside the hotel at ten, grinning from ear to ear.
‘Sir, please, sir,’ he said. ‘A very warm pleasure to greet you.’
Their first stop was the Mahalaxmi railway bridge to watch the dhobi wallahs beating, rinsing and drying the city’s laundry and themselves.
‘This is where your work shirts have been coming,’ Annie said, as she pointed out a never-ending coil of brilliant blue fabric twisting around the crooked posts on one of the laundry rooftops.
‘It’s a miracle they ever came back white,’ Hugh said. ‘How do they do it?’
‘Good old-fashioned elbow grease,’ Annie said. ‘And here’s me complaining about my washing machine needing updating. I won’t do that again in a hurry.’
Hugh loved the dabbawallahs even more, stopping one of the more elderly of the tiffin co-ordinators — the proud owner of the splendid white walrus moustache — to ask him how long he had been working outside Churchgate station.
‘Since before I am remembering, sir,’ he said. ‘Some long time.’ His job was taking tiffins from the younger men, he explained, through Pinto, who carried them from the train on their heads so he could disperse them to the other younger men who delivered them by foot or bicycle.
At the Gandhi house Annie showed Hugh the puppet room and the letter to Hitler.
She paused in front of her favourite framed relic of wisdom: Be truthful, gentle and fearless, and Hugh stopped behind her and read it over her shoulder, but she didn’t tell him what it meant to her. It meant so many things after all. She’d left him on that premise, and run back into his arms on it, too.
Next Pinto took them to the Sassoon Docks to watch the fishermen who worked on the brightly coloured boats that she had admired bobbing in the harbour, tied loosely now to the battered jetties.
‘No photos here,’ Pinto said. ‘No tourist peoples.’
They didn’t have to ask why. The catch of the day was more often than not poured from bins onto the bare ground and then picked over by dozens of bare hands as dogs and children wandered between the piles of slapping butterfish and pomfret.
The health authorities at home would have a conniption, thought Annie, but the docks bristled with the rainbow of people going about their jobs unsullied by hygiene regulations.
As they walked back to the taxi, stepping delicately over rivulets of water and fish innards, they passed two elderly men sitting on the deck of a shabby-looking boat threading little sea creatures onto long strings that criss-crossed the vessel from bow to stern like Christmas tinsel.
‘For the dried fishes paste,’ Pinto said. ‘Some other peoples like this.’ From the look on his face he was not one of them.
After leaving the docks, he took them through the streets of the colonial East Indian tea buildings — ‘I call it Little London,’ he said. ‘Although I never go to Big London.’
Then they drove slowly down a single, cluttered, impoverished strip where ‘the Bangladeshis’ lived.
‘These are the poor peoples in Mumbai,’ he said. ‘No papers. No investments. No nothing.’
Their homes were made out of bits of wood and cardboard and coloured plastic, roped or stuck together, clinging haphazardly to the fencing behind. It was obvious that Pinto was right — these people had nothing. A toddler was going to the toilet on the side of the street as his father lay asleep next to a pile of rags beside him and his mother scratched at some rice from a pot lid.
There were animals, there was rubbish, there was a brokendown handcart, a half-burned mattress, and yet the constant movement, the clash of vibrant colours — it was brilliant and busy and bizarre.
‘It feels like we should be seeing this in black and white, don’t you think?’ Annie asked Hugh.
‘I’m not sure what it is,’ said Hugh. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘I wonder if you would ever see everything there is to see in this place,’ Annie wondered. ‘Pinto, what can we do about this? How can we help?’
He shrugged. ‘These peoples belong in Bangladesh,’ he said. ‘You help by coming to Mumbai and being in my taxi. Or coming to Jammu and staying on my cousin’s boat.’
He then gave Hugh the run-down on just how superior his village in Jammu was to Mumbai and everywhere else in India — in every way imaginable. It certainly sounded like paradise the way he described it: lakes, mountains, rivers, greenery, and the best ghee in all of the universe.
At her behest Pinto stopped on a busy corner, and she and Hugh queued up at a street cart to buy two of Mumbai’s famous masala grilled cheese sandwiches, stuffed with spiced potato, chilli sauce, tomato, pepper and layers of grated mozzarella.
‘Look at you,’ Hugh said, wiping a bit of sauce from the corner of her mouth as she finished her last mouthful. ‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Believe it,’ she said, giving him a chilli-fuelled kiss.
Before they headed back up towards the Sea Link and their hotel, Pinto took them to the Gateway of India, parking in the shade of a tree half a block away and waving them off without him.
Annie and her husband went through their separate security checks and met on the other side.
‘I can’t believe I’ve nev
er been down here,’ he said.
Annie watched as he moved through the crowd, a head taller than anyone around him, framed in the basalt curve of the Gateway, the colours of portside Mumbai swirling around him.
A turquoise scarf floated past her in the welcome breeze, fluttering from the neck of a teenager dressed in cerise. A gaggle of children ran helter-skelter behind her, shrieking with laughter.
An elderly man swathed in white walked by with two huge balloon-like collections of bright-pink fairy floss in cellophane bags as Annie smiled but waved away a plump woman thrusting a fistful of peacock feather fans at her.
She looked through the elegant arch of the Gateway to the silvery mother-of-pearl waters beyond, alive with the bright ferries and faded fishing boats that criss-crossed perilously from one side of the harbour to the other, and to Elephanta Island in the distance.
Hugh stopped, turned, saw she hadn’t followed in his footsteps and reached out his hand for her.
What Daisy said was true. India was a country she’d never hankered to see: indeed, quite the opposite, she had particularly not wanted to see it. But come here she had and in less than two weeks she’d fallen head over heels.
Of all the things Annie had expected to find in the air here, love — in all its hot, messy splendour — had come as the biggest surprise of all.
Chapter Twenty-eight
That evening, Hugh said it was his turn to show Annie something. He wanted to take her to the Mexican restaurant in Bandra, he said, not too far away from the hotel. He knew it was odd to eat Mexican in India, but still he’d heard it had great food and good margaritas and he wanted to try it.
Annie agreed without a moment’s hesitation and, to his astonishment, eschewed the forecourt taxi and instead took his hand and led him down to the sea face where the auto rickshaws were lined up like mosquitoes, honking and jiggling on the spot.
‘Are you serious?’ Hugh asked. Despite his repeated trips to the city he had not yet been in one himself.