The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Read online

  Hand in hand they strode out of the hotel. Minoo watched them walking down to the front gate. They stopped to greet the mali, their heads cocked cordially as he gestured at the flowers. Minoo felt a wave of misery. How contented they looked! The Ainslies were the only married couple among the guests, who were predominantly widows or spinsters; over dinner, Mrs. Ainslie had told him that they had been married for forty-eight years. Their happiness drained those around them of energy. Next to them, the old ladies looked bloodless.

  Minoo stood behind his desk, lost in dreams of what-might-have-been. Bapsi’s face appeared before him. She was as he remembered her a quarter of a century earlier: smiling, placid, fixed forever at twenty years old. How different his life would have been had he married her, as his parents had intended—a demure Parsee girl who would have been a comfort and support to him, who might have given him sons. Love would have blossomed between them, he was sure of that now—a love created by mutual respect. Minoo was aware of the irony: that this yearning was not for a lost romance but for an arranged partner, hardly the stuff of passion. But where had passion got him?

  It was all the fault of those bloody shoes. Minoo had always been particular about his appearance. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity … If he had not bought those shoes—Bata, beautiful shiny brown leather, antique finish, narrow fitting and just a half-size too small—if he had not bought those shoes he would never have developed corns and gone to the chiropody clinic on Chundrigar Road where a luscious nurse had bewitched him, turned his life upside down and brought humiliation to his own family and that of his blameless bride-to-be.

  Through the wall, Razia’s voice rose and fell. Minoo’s stomach churned. She had snapped at the cook that morning; judging by the lack of smells emanating from the kitchen, Fernandez was also sulking. Minoo would have to investigate.

  He sighed. How well-behaved the British were, compared to his turbulent wife! A new arrival was expected that evening: a Mrs. Muriel Donnelly from London. She, no doubt, would also possess impeccable manners. Manners maketh the man was a proverb he much admired. Look at that Mrs. Greenslade, a vision in beige, so well-mannered she hardly existed anymore. Don’t mind me, said the British, I’m not really here.

  Minoo opened the register and rubbed out Mrs. Evelyn Greenslade’s name. There! Gone, just like that. How fleeting is our stay in the Hotel of Life! (And how his wife would sneer if she heard him say that.)

  He penciled in Mrs. Donnelly’s name instead; he would put her in Room 15, next to Mr. Purse.

  “Any advice, I’m your man,” said Norman. “Knocked around in the tropics, you see—Africa, Malaysia.”

  “It’s bloody hot,” said Muriel. “And the taps don’t work.”

  “Water supply’s a bit erratic, but you get used to it. In India you just go with the flow.” He chuckled. “So to speak.”

  Muriel Donnelly was unpacking a Coronation mug. She had arrived only that evening and was moving into the next-door room unexpectedly vacated by Evelyn Greenslade. The mugs were wrapped in an old newspaper but it was the South London Echo, so even Norman wasn’t interested. She was a stout woman. Legs planted apart, she delved in her suitcase.

  “I must say, you’re the last person I expected to see here,” he said.

  “Why’s that?” She unwrapped a photograph of a cat and put it on the chest of drawers.

  “My son-in-law, he was the doctor.” Norman explained the connection—the hospital, the fuss. Her being on the TV.

  Muriel nodded. “It was him who gave me the brochure.”

  Norman stared at her. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  She turned around. “You believe in fate?”

  “These chaps here do. Indians.”

  “Something happened, see.” She didn’t explain further.

  “Got some whisky in my room,” said Norman. “Fancy a chota peg?”

  Muriel shook her head. Norman felt rebuffed. Most of the old biddies here were eating out of his hand. Desperate for a man, of course—a healthy, red-blooded male like himself. Not that there was much competition. There were only a couple of other chaps here: Doug Ainslie, hale and hearty enough but out of bounds, being married, and Graham Turner, a decrepit old bachelor who was long past it, even if he had been up for it in the first place. The staff, though male, looked even more ancient than their customers, if that were possible. In general the Indians were a handsome race but somewhat effeminate; you had only to see them in the street, holding hands like nancy boys. No, Norman was having a fine old time, bees around a honeypot.

  He wondered how this Muriel woman was going to fit in. How could she afford this place? It was cheap, of course, by comparison with England, but she came from a different class. A bit of a culture shock, in more ways than one.

  “They’re a friendly lot here, by and large,” he said. “Nobody completely bonkers. You’ll feel at home in no time. The grub’s good, too. Wait till you try Fernandez’s treacle pud. Just like the old days. And lots going on—cards, quizzes, outings.” He looked at her scalp. The old boiler was thinning on top. “And a hairdresser comes round, charming lass.”

  “Always looked after myself,” she said.

  “So have we all, my dear. But there comes a point when we have to put ourselves into the hands of strangers, and this place is a sight better than some of the dumps I’ve been in. Stuck in the middle of nowhere looking at a bloody ploughed field. Wait until morning. Street outside absolutely teeming. Never a dull moment.”

  It was true, of course. In these poor countries, people lived their lives in full view of everybody else. No privacy at all. Some of them had no homes to go to and slept in the concrete passageways of the office block opposite.

  Later, Norman lit a cigarette and strolled down to the gate. It was ten o’clock at night, but the row of stalls beside the crossroads was still busy. Smoke rose from a brazier where a man was roasting nuts. Spirit lamps lit a cigarette stall, a cold-drink stand and a place that sold plastic novelties, the sort of things Norman could never imagine anybody buying. This little bazaar was so familiar to him now that he felt he had been here for years. Behind it stood a crumbling concrete office block, three stories high. It was named, somewhat pompously, Karishma Plaza. At street level was a row of shops the size of cells. Most were still open: Khan’s Video Rental; Gulshan Crafts; a tailor’s shop where an old man sat in the strip light, bent over a sewing machine. He seemed to be there day and night. When cars slowed down at the crossroads, beggars clustered around them, tapping at their windows.

  Norman gazed at the scruffy little bazaar. He was used to this from his sojourns in the tropics—the destitute scraping a living amid the traffic, the slums clustered around the five-star hotels. It made a chap pleased for his own good fortune. Besides, being British he was treated with a deference that had long since vanished in his own country. Here, he was still somebody, and that was good for a fellow’s ego. All his most intoxicating experiences had happened abroad, in places that smelled of dung and cheap perfume. It was the smell of adventure.

  Norman nodded a cheerful good evening to the chowkidar who, perched on his stool, dozed at the gate. A pariah dog stood listlessly, its dugs heavy with milk. “The women in Bangalore are the most voluptuous in India.” Not here they weren’t. Where he stood they were either beggars, baby on hip, or else sweepers. Comely enough, of course, but sexual shenanigans were definitely out of the question. Maybe some of the shrouded bodies lying on the pavement were female, but he could hardly prod them awake and ask them in for a tot of Johnnie Walker. They lay there, as still as the dead.

  It was up Brigade Road, in the big hotels and shopping arcades, that he saw women with some flesh on their bones—flashing-eyed temptresses haggling over jewelry or sipping lattes in the coffee shops. He saw them on his trips to the Oberoi Hotel to buy yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Those wearing saris revealed, at their midriffs, seductive bulges of skin. These were sometimes bedewed with perspiration. Norman imagined grabbing
the hem and spinning the women like tops until they unraveled. He imagined dark nipples, puckered like currants, and thighs kama sutra’d around his neck. He imagined nuzzling enormous breasts that smelled of gardenias. Norman closed his eyes and pictured pussies that tasted of mangoes and prawns, the surprisingly luxurious starter at last night’s dinner. His carnal knowledge of Indian women was limited—to be frank, nonexistent—but he knew they were tutored in sexual wiles from an early age and the prostate doctor’s words had inflamed him. Surely here, in India, he could arouse his flagging libido?

  There were, however, certain problems. To the younger, jeans-clad generation he was invisible. In recent years Norman had grown accustomed to this, of course; it was one of the penalties of growing older. The females of more mature appearance, however, presented another difficulty, for they were never alone. In India, as in Africa, there was no such thing as solitude. This made the lothario’s task a challenging one; like a lion, one had to single out one’s prey and separate her from the herd. So far he had not managed to accomplish this.

  Norman flicked his cigarette into a bush. Behind him the aviary was silent; the budgies had settled down for the night. So had the old dears in their bedrooms. He too felt weary. His back ached; his varicose veins throbbed. He knew he was getting too old for this sort of caper, but one had to show willing. He would make discreet inquiries. Sonny would be the fellow; no doubt he was acquainted with the hot spots of his home city. Or Norman could have a man-to-man chat with Minoo Cowasjee, who ran the hotel. With a wife like that—what a harridan!—he was bound to have found solace in other arms.

  Ah, the joys of coitus! After all, it was the only way a chap could tell that he was still alive.

  The residents were eating breakfast.

  “Listen to this, girls.” Madge Rheinhart adjusted her spectacles and read aloud from the Daily Mail: “In a bid to control the London drugs epidemic, armed police are being recruited to patrol school playgrounds.”

  “I read that yesterday,” said somebody.

  “It’s yesterday’s paper.”

  “Actually it’s three days old,” said another woman, whose name Evelyn hadn’t caught.

  “Aren’t you glad we’ve got away from all that?”

  “Good grief, Cooper’s Marmalade!”

  The bearer put it on the table: a pot of Cooper’s Coarse Cut Marmalade, complete with saucer and teaspoon. There was a silence.

  “Where did you buy it, dear?”

  “A shop in Lady Curzon Street; it had Marmite, too. Cost an arm and a leg.”

  “Still, one’s pension goes a long way here.”

  “What did you say about the schools?”

  “Oh do pay attention, Stella!”

  Madge Rheinhart rolled her eyes. She was a bossy, good-humored woman. Her husband, apparently, had owned half Kensington. Today she wore tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt saying Starlight Express. Her spectacles hung around her neck on a diamanté chain. Evelyn wished she had thought of this; her own glasses hung on a sort of bootlace. Evelyn wasn’t a vain woman—her nails were her only weakness—but she admired pizazz in others.

  Jean Ainslie leaned across from the next table. “Doug and I’ve been reading the Indian papers, haven’t we, darling?”

  “Dull as ditch water,” said Douglas. “Full of cement tenders.”

  Evelyn smiled. She liked Douglas because he had been kind to her on the plane.

  “Anyway, they don’t have the crossword,” he said.

  This was a source of some grievance. Norman Purse was the only person who managed to buy the Daily Telegraph on a regular basis. This was because he knew where to go—a source he kept secret—and set off smartly after breakfast. Evelyn had seen him striding down Brigade Road, waving away the beggars with his walking stick. Not only did he hog the papers all day—sometimes he managed to buy The Times, too—but he always filled in the crossword, triumphantly scrawling in Biro so nobody could rub it out. Worse still, it was often incomplete; this made it doubly annoying, especially when the clues he missed were easy ones. Even Evelyn could have solved “Kentish town famous for its oysters (10).”

  He was out now, buying the paper. Breakfast was being served by Jimmy the bearer, an elderly man in turban and stained white jacket. He was very slow, and brought out only one item at a time. Evelyn watched him cross the room carrying a bottle of ketchup on a tray; he carried it with care, as if it might explode. Still, they were in no hurry. Cereal was available, plus omelettes or hard-boiled eggs. Evelyn had once tried the sausages, but it was not an experience she cared to repeat. The dining room was gloomy, Indian buildings being constructed to keep out the sun, and some rebellious souls took their tea out onto the veranda.

  Fifteen residents were already installed, and some more were expected in the next few weeks. Evelyn couldn’t remember all their names and was inclined to cling to those with whom she had made acquaintance in the first few days: the Ainslies; Madge Rheinhart, whom everyone knew because she organized things; and Stella Englefield, who had buried two husbands and was somewhat deaf. Who was going to sit with whom at meals? Friendships had been forged; territories staked out. It reminded Evelyn of boarding school, a period in her life that she remembered with painful clarity. Madge’s efforts to move people around at dinner had been firmly resisted by those who had found congenial companions and were determined to stick with them.

  This morning Evelyn had taken pity on Muriel Donnelly, the latest arrival, and had joined her at a table for two next to the toilets.

  “They try to do an English breakfast,” said Evelyn. “But it’s not the same, of course.”

  “Milk’s funny,” said Muriel Donnelly.

  “It’s boiled. I think it’s from buffaloes. The Ainslies are very adventurous—look, they’re eating little puffy things filled with curry. When in Rome and all that.”

  “I go to Spain for my holidays,” said Muriel. “My son’s got a villa.”

  “How nice,” replied Evelyn.

  “It’s not hot like this.”

  “It’s the humidity, you see.” Evelyn enjoyed being the expert. “Before the monsoon, apparently, it’s insufferable. Now it’s getting better and it should be very pleasant all winter.”

  The ceiling fan creaked. At the next table, Madge anchored an airmail letter with the teapot.

  “There are plans, apparently, to open another retirement hotel in Ooty,” said Evelyn. “That’s up in the hills where it’s cooler. The British used to move there in the summer months. Apparently it’s just like East Grinstead.”

  The Marigold was, too. Sealed into their compound, the residents lived in a world that was, in many ways, more familiar than the England they had left behind. It was an England of Catherine Cookson paperbacks and clicking knitting needles, of Kraft Dairylea portions and a certain Proustian recall. Now that the summer was over, the mali was out planting English annuals—marigolds and cosmoses—widely spaced in damp depressions of earth. Evelyn itched to get her hands on the flower beds; gardeners here knew nothing about color and mass.

  Outside the walls, India clamored. So many people, such need and desperation. Evelyn had ventured out only a few times; she found the experience disorienting. The moment she stepped through the gate, beggars stirred and clambered to their feet. Skeletal dogs nosed through heaps of rubbish. Even the holy cows, wandering between the cars, were cruelly thin. And then there was the legless young man, sitting on his trolley in the midst of the exhaust smoke.

  “We can go for a walk later, if you’d like that,” said Evelyn. “It’s all very different, I must say. I mean, in England people have got so much, yet they’re becoming rather rude, don’t you find? Here they’ve got nothing at all yet they’re very polite. ‘How are you?’ they ask. ‘Where do you come from?’ Oh they pester you, but in the nicest way.”

  Muriel didn’t appear to be listening. She was probably suffering from jet lag; after all, for her it must still be the middle of the night. Somebody had mention
ed that she had been left on a hospital trolley for two days. Oh well, thought Evelyn, at least she’s got her legs. India, she was discovering, made one thankful for small mercies.

  “I met some charming schoolchildren,” Evelyn said. “White socks, so neat and clean, and they called me ‘auntie.’ ”

  Muriel pushed away her plate. Her face was the color of putty.

  “Are you all right, dear?” asked Evelyn.

  “Got a pain in my guts.”

  “You poor thing.” Jean Ainslie leaned over from her table. “Probably Delhi belly. We’ve all had it.”

  Evelyn scraped back her chair and stood up. “Come along. I’ll take you to the nurse.” She reached for Muriel’s arm.

  “I can manage.”

  Muriel was a stubborn old thing. A cockney, of course. They were an independent bunch.

  “When I went to the nurse with tummy trouble,” said Jean Ainslie, “she insisted on looking at my feet.”

  Evelyn left Muriel with the nurse—aka Mrs. Cowasjee, the manager’s wife—and walked into the garden. It was already hot. The mali, holding a dribbling hose, squatted in the flower bed. Around his waist was tucked a checkered dhoti. She had once owned a summer frock made out of the same material—D. H. Evans, if she remembered correctly. Up in the tree, rooks cawed. A man stood at the gate. “Memsahib!” he called out, hoarse with his secret. His bicycle was laden with bundles. “Memsahib! You want T-shirts? Slacks? Good price, madam!”

  Evelyn feebly raised her hand in a gesture of both greeting and dismissal. Maybe she should buy a T-shirt and look like Madge; she already felt sapped of energy, however, and it was only ten o’clock in the morning. The heat exhausted her. The need out there, the vastness of it, drained her. In a moment of rebellion, staggering in its boldness, she had decided to embark on a new life. Was it a sign of despair, a recognition of how little she was needed? Brick by brick she had created a family. Like the walls of this garden, they should have shielded her from the terrors of the world outside. One by one, however, the bricks had been removed and she was left alone in a foreign country.