Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga

‘And what did you do when you arrived?’

  ‘I looked for Bollywood, ma’am, but I could not find it. I thought it would be here to meet me and I had no money, not a single rupee. I did not think that Bollywood would be so hard to find and that so many other boys were also looking for it.’

  ‘At least you weren’t alone,’ Annie said, although without much conviction.

  ‘I was alone,’ said Pinto. ‘I do not have any friends and any money, so after not very long I get a job on a banana truck.’

  ‘A banana truck?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, a truck full of bananas. But that boss was mean, ma’am, and he beat me because I was too small to lift the big heavy cover over the bananas. I try, but I have not got the muscles.’

  Annie thought of Ben at twelve — a child no more capable of jumping on a train to Mumbai and getting a job on a banana truck than growing wings and flying to the sun. A baby never beaten by anyone, let alone his boss, not that he’d ever had one.

  ‘Now I have barbells in the back of the taxi,’ Pinto said. ‘And if I have no customer, I go to the park and I do my exercises.’ He took one hand off the steering wheel and flexed his bicep.

  ‘Truck!’ Annie cried, pointing to a large unwieldy lorry tearing towards them on the wrong side of the road.

  Pinto just laughed and slowed to let it go past.

  ‘What did you do next, after the bad banana boss?’ Annie asked, her heart thumping.

  ‘I take some of the bananas, ma’am; please do not be angry. I take some bananas from the bad boss and I try to sell them on the street, but because I had not put the cover on them, they were too ripe and no one would buy them, not even for one rupee, so I eat them myself even though I do not like bananas. But we have a saying in India: hunger does not have eyes.’

  When Ben and Daisy were twelve, Annie was making them three meals a day, taking them to and from school, doing most of their homework and tucking them up in bed at night. She could not imagine a world in which they would have to eat rotten bananas or starve. ‘Where did you sleep?’

  ‘On the street, ma’am. Then after some days of no food, not even bananas, I get a job in a restaurant, washing up the dishes and I am doing this for eight years. I am doing this till my nails go away.’

  He held both hands off the steering wheel and wiggled his fingers. ‘But they have come back.’

  ‘Please! Pinto! Both hands on the wheel! I need you to drive carefully.’

  ‘Always I am careful, ma’am. Always.’

  ‘Yes, but I prefer it when you are using those lovely fingernails to steer the car. Thank you. So, you washed dishes for eight years, then what happened?’

  ‘Then I have saved up the money to get the licence for a taxi, ma’am, but I give it to a bad man and he runs away with it, so I go to work at a restaurant with more better money and in two more years I have the money again.’

  ‘Oh, Pinto, you’re breaking my heart.’

  ‘Please, ma’am, do not make that happen. I have nine lives. Still three more to go.’

  Pinto had graduated from sleeping on the street to in the back of his taxi, he told her. It was only for the past five that he’d been living in a guesthouse.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, seriously. But for us, this is OK. For the tourist madams they see the mans asleep in his rickshaw and his bus and his car and they think he is taking a forty winks but this is his house! I was liking my taxi to be my house, but then there is a serial murderer in Mumbai killing the taxi drivers. They call him Beer Man because he leaves a can of beer behind after he kills the peoples. Bollywood is making a film, I think. You will see.’

  ‘You must have been scared, Pinto.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, and once I am woken up by a crazy person on drugs with a knife in my face. He is not Beer Man but I need three stitches. And after that I go to a guesthouse, even though it means less money to send home and bed bugs, but I am happy there.’

  ‘You’re happy living thousands of miles from your parents, driving a taxi and sleeping in a guesthouse that has bed bugs?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. My small brother is an engineer because of me, and my next small brother is in the army because of me, and I can bring for my mother some beautiful dresses when I go home. This also makes me happy.’

  Pinto turned around to smile at her, proving just how happy he was, not that she doubted him for a moment. He pointed cheerfully to a mark below his left eye. ‘This is where I have the stitches.’

  ‘Please, Pinto! Eyes on the road,’ she said, tensing in her seat. ‘Honestly. I’m not as lucky as you — I only have one life and I’m not quite ready for it to end.’

  Pinto slowed to drive around a group of pre-teen boys playing what looked like marbles, with small rocks, in the middle of a busy intersection. Rickshaws careened around them, taxis honked, buses skidded, motorcyclists yelled, but the boys only had eyes for their game.

  ‘Please excuse me, ma’am, for saying so,’ Pinto said, ‘but no one only has one life.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Outside the hotel, Annie handed over a thousand rupees, which Pinto took, shyly, thanking her, and asking if he should pick her up again the following day.

  She said he should.

  ‘If you have a local SIM card, ma’am, you can call me to take you somewhere anytime. We could go sightseeing. To Gateway of India, maybe, or Kanheri Caves.’

  He carefully wrote his name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

  Annie thanked him, and said that was a good idea, although she didn’t like to say she didn’t know what a local SIM card was. Maybe she could email Rhona or, a slightly more practical idea in the circumstances, ask the concierge.

  She skipped breakfast but went on her own to the restaurant for lunch, and after scanning the menu decided to try dahl, which was the cheapest offering and which she had at least heard of.

  Valren was not working, but another handsome young man — was there an agency that provided them? — Adesh, who had a silky beard and was wearing a dark turban, took her order.

  ‘Would you like some naan with that?’ he asked. ‘Or perhaps paratha?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Paratha is bread, ma’am, like naan, but made with ghee and tastes very much better, although my wife is telling me it is not on her diet.’

  ‘Please excuse my ignorance, but what’s ghee?’

  ‘This is Indian butter, ma’am. For many of us it is like medicine more than food.’

  ‘So your wife doesn’t have this medicine on her diet?’

  ‘Ma’am, my wife says paratha is not on her diet, but this does not mean she does not eat paratha. My wife very much likes paratha because of the ghee.’

  ‘I guess I’ll try the paratha then,’ Annie said. She liked the sound of Adesh’s wife.

  The dahl was like the yellow soup she’d had the day before with the dhosa, but thick with lentils and so full of flavour that before she knew what had happened she had emptied the entire bowl. As for the paratha, it was a cross between a croissant and a pita bread, and she could see why Adesh’s wife was such a fan.

  As she waited for her masala tea, she picked up the Hindustan Times and looked for news of Preeti.

  The poor girl remained in a critical condition in the same Bandra hospital where she had been admitted, according to a small story well into the newspaper. The railway police were now looking at CCTV footage from the terminus at the time of the attack, and following a lead from police in Delhi, but the culprit was yet to be nabbed.

  Preeti’s parents had arrived at her bedside from Delhi, but she was still under sedation, the story read. Her lungs were damaged by the acid and doctors were not sure how long it would be until she could breathe on her own. Today there was a photo of Preeti before the attack — she was indeed a beautiful girl, with big eyes and full lips, wearing a green sari in front of a red background. She could have been one of the Bollywood stars featured in the paper’s many c
elebrity pages.

  Annie imagined her, full of excitement, travelling from Delhi to start her new life. She was not from a wealthy family — they could not pay the hospital bills, the story said, although the rail company had agreed to foot them. What promise Preeti must have felt, graduating from nursing school and being chosen to work at the naval hospital. What a different sort of life she must have imagined she was going to lead. This opportunity was going to completely change her world. And now it was changed again, without a moment’s notice, for the worse.

  Annie hoped they kept her under sedation for a while longer.

  She couldn’t read about Preeti without thinking of Daisy. She loved Daisy with all her heart, but never had it been more obvious what an easy life she had provided for her daughter. Not that this was a bad thing — it was what every parent dreamed of being able to do — but she wondered what would ever give Daisy that same sense of promise that Preeti must have had, setting off for Mumbai.

  Daisy expected everything — from vacations to iPhones to university fees to eyelash tints — to fall in her lap, and why wouldn’t she? It always had. Since the terrifying suicidal phase, all Annie had wanted to do was make her daughter happy. If she indulged her, tiptoed around her more than she should have — more than Eleanor ever would have — it was only because she remembered so clearly the fear of losing her.

  Annie didn’t know if Daisy ever stopped to wonder why she got everything she wanted, or if that might one day change.

  At a pinch, she thought Ben could probably sleep in the back of a taxi for a night or two. But Daisy would likely not step foot inside one, let alone sit on the seat, or touch the door handles. Her headstrong daughter was quick to label others pathetic, but could effortlessly apply different standards to herself.

  Still, thinking about her beautiful girl made Annie homesick, so she went back to the business centre after lunch to check her emails. Neither of the children had responded to her messages of the days before, but she sent them another anyway, this time telling them she had joined a yoga class and was starting to eat the local food.

  Rhona, bless her, had emailed to say Caleb had learned how to spray his sisters with orange juice through the gap in his teeth and was so good at it that she was tempted to sell him to a passing circus, if only she could find one.

  Aidan was acting weird, she wrote, which was not like him. The guy was a schmuck, but he’d at least had the decency to be wracked with guilt about leaving his family for the proverbial hot totty from the dental surgery.

  He’d texted her to say that he couldn’t take the kids for the weekend, she said, even though that had always been the deal. No explanation, just a terse sentence saying she’d have to deal with it.

  There goes my lovely relaxing day of reading self-help books in the bath with only a bottle of pinot for company! Rhona wrote.

  Annie typed into a return email that she wished she was back there to help out, but when she saw the words written down, she realised that she didn’t. She was actually enjoying herself in Mumbai.

  She deleted her original message and instead offered her condolences, then told Rhona about the laughing yoga group, the disdain at Pasta Ponder Hanky Panky, and the Indian women’s scepticism about meditation. This would cheer her friend up, she knew.

  Rhona had tried transcendental meditation on several occasions but failed spectacularly. Mothers of four just didn’t have enough space left in their heads for quiet, was what she had figured. Also, she was gassy.

  Mahendra at the front desk told Annie she would have to go into Bandra to buy a SIM card for her phone, which would then mean she could make local calls and send SMS messages. A lot of tourists did this, he said. She could get a taxi or she could walk out the front gates of the hotel and get one of the motorised rickshaws. It should cost no more than thirty rupees.

  He said this as though it would be the easiest thing in the world to do, but the thought of climbing into one of those death traps held no appeal for Annie whatsoever. Still, when she got back to the room she was restless. She didn’t want to stay there nor did she feel like going back out to the pool, so after glancing briefly at the book she’d been planning to return to, she scooped up her bag, checked her lipstick in the mirror and went back to ask Mahendra for a map. She wanted to walk to the mobile phone shop, she told him. He seemed doubtful about this, but Annie assured him she had a relatively good sense of direction and figured that the store was no more than twenty minutes away.

  Once outside the safety of the hotel gates, however, she started to lose her nerve. The rickshaws buzzed around her like flies, the drivers desperate to catch her attention, until they worked out she was striding on without them. It was just a matter of finding how to walk along the side of the road without there being a dog in the way, or a bus or a truck or five people walking abreast towards her.

  She crossed the wide, busy street to walk along the boulevard next to the sea face, which was partly protected from the road by an ankle-high concrete lip. Families and couples gathered in occasional groups out on the jagged rocks, screaming as the coffee-coloured water crashed around their feet and sprayed them. One old man was crouched in a loincloth doing his washing, although how he expected the dirty, salty water to clean anything Annie wasn’t sure.

  There was a pleasant breeze blowing down by the water, but within five minutes she was dripping in sweat. Her linen trousers and fitted shirt, perfect in the hotel air-conditioning, were no match for the near-forty-degree temperature and high humidity outside.

  She could almost feel her hair crinkling as the moisture was sucked out of it. She should have brought bottled water from the hotel, as she was parched already. She passed a street wagon where two sulky-looking young men were selling samosas and something else that looked similar but was a different shape. They had water, too, but it was sitting directly in the sunlight and covered in a thick layer of dust.

  By the time she turned away from the sea and started to walk in towards the shopping area, her hair felt frizzed and her shirt was stuck to her body, her shoulder bag leaving an even darker sodden stripe across her chest. She could feel the makeup sliding off her face, and her strappy white sandals were orange now with dust, creating little pouffy clouds of grime with every step she took.

  In the absence of a footpath, she found herself jumping left and right to avoid the traffic, the pedestrians, the animals, the piles of debris, broken bricks or discarded pieces of plumbing that dotted the side of the road.

  Behind her, in front of her, towards her, away from her, people streamed in every direction, walking, walking, walking, like a freshly painted mural smearing on a pavement in the rain.

  Everywhere she looked screamed of thirst: paint peeled from walls, bark hung off trees, leaves sagged on branches, dogs panted in whatever meagre shade they could find.

  Was this why everyone dressed in such brilliant colours, she wondered? So they didn’t feel as boiled dry and brown as the earth all around them? Her own neutral tones were decidedly bland, as well as dripping wet and unbearably hot.

  She was entering the shopping district now, just a few boiling blocks away from the main street, but the dusty apartment buildings and private residences were giving way to the occasional storefront.

  Across the road, an untended fruit stall provided an extra explosion of colour on the side of the grimy street. Annie stopped in the shade of an abandoned building just to feast her eyes on it.

  Luminous persimmons were displayed in boxes lined with bright-pink tissue paper next to oranges stacked in cartons of brilliant blue. Pears were neatly layered beneath piles of plump green grapes, dangling over the sides above the bananas. Fat green watermelons glistened in rows at the bottom of the display, with some other dark-red fruit — tamarillo? — climbing up the shelves behind them, lemons and limes filling in all the dull gaps.

  Behind the stall, the corrugated-iron fencing had been painted in thick blue and white stripes. The whole scene looked like a wor
k of art. And where the fencing ran out someone had made an attempt to brighten up an otherwise uninspired shopfront with a collection of plastic containers — red, orange, green and white — tied together with string like balloons and clacking uninterestingly in the breeze.

  The shop, Annie saw, was a clothing store called Nice Thread. Two Indian women swathed in different shades of mauve were standing in front of the window pointing up at something in one corner.

  She could see that the door into the little shop was shut, which led her to believe it might be air-conditioned. The very thought started to lower her temperature, so when she felt brave enough to attempt a road crossing, she scuttled to the other side, pushed open the door and stepped into the small but blissfully cool space.

  A thin boy in his early teens was sitting listlessly on a stool but jumped to attention. The store was tiny, with two racks on either side completely stuffed with coloured cotton and muslin tops roughly organised in colour.

  ‘Can I try that on?’ Annie said pointing to a pale-green tunic top. ‘And that and that?’

  Half an hour later she owned one in every colour. Her own oatmeal threads were shoved in a plastic bag and she was wearing a pair of white cotton pants and a pale pink top. The young boy had not spoken a single word to her during the whole process but had known exactly what she was looking for and kept delivering it to the tiny changing room, his thin brown arm poking through the curtains with anything he thought she might like.

  Probably every Pasta Ponder Hanky Panky tourist who passed by did the exact same thing, she thought, but who could blame them? Over-dressed white women could only get so close to expiration before they were moved to outfit themselves the way the locals did.

  Still, by the time she emerged from the phone shop, another ten minutes’ walk away, with her new SIM card, she was once more overcome by the heat.

  When a rickshaw stopped in front of her, she fought the urge to turn the hopeful-looking driver away, and instead climbed into the back seat, the heat on the black plastic burning through her new cotton trousers.