The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Read online

  “Your son?”

  Her grip tightened. More bruises tomorrow, Evelyn thought.

  “Don’t tell the police!” whispered Muriel.

  “What have the police got to do with it?”

  “He’s here, see.”

  “Who is?” asked Evelyn.

  “My Keith,” said Muriel. “That’s why I’ve come here. He’s here, in India.”

  “Your son’s here?”

  “That’s what the neighbors told me, that he’s come to India. It’s a business matter. I been looking at everyone to see if it’s him, looking at the faces. I asked at that hotel; it’s his sort of place, the sort of place he’d stay. But he’ll find me. Keith’s like that. He’ll know his old mum’s here and he’ll find me in the end.”

  It was late. Within their rooms some residents slumbered, dreaming of Dr. Rama, who lifted their nighties with his caring brown hands. Jean Ainslie typed a round-robin email to her friends while her husband tried to sleep. Madge, who had been taught computing skills by her grandson, sat at her screen; the blue light illuminated her face as she logged on to her diminishing stocks and shares. Stella was swallowing her pills—heart pills, joint pills, Prozac—with a glass of soda water. In his room at the back of the hotel, Graham Turner played Dinah Washington, “Mad About the Boy,” at the lowest volume. Somewhere in the garden a bird screeched. The servants slept, wherever it was that they slept.

  Outside, at the crossroads, lorries drove through the night. Brigade Road ran past The Marigold, out beyond the big hotels to the new city of office blocks where nobody had been because it was another world. The second road led to the Old Town and its maze of streets that only the most adventurous had dared to penetrate. The third road led into the city center, with its Victorian buildings that reminded them of home. The fourth road led to the airport. In England an airport was just a place that one made use of from time to time. Here its presence could be palpably felt. It was their place of arrival, which had delivered them into this foreign land. They had stepped out of the plane with a return ticket that in all probability would never be used. And it was a place that might deliver up to them, from a country that now seemed shrunk and unreal, those they loved.

  “Namaste!” wrote Jean:

  Sorry I haven’t written to you folks sooner but Doug and I have been busy busy busy settling into our new home and exploring this bustling Indian metropolis. Though lacking the obvious charms of some of the places we’ve visited on our former trips (see missives number 9 and 24), Bangalore is not lacking in interest and, as Douggy jokes, there are plenty of ancient monuments right here in our hotel!! Seriously though, The Marigold is a pleasant place, delightfully “Old Raj” and boasting the usual erratic plumbing! Our fellow residents are well past retirement age but as you know we believe that age is all in the mind and if one is open to new experiences one will always remain young at heart (enough lecture: ed!). Most of them are female, so Doug is enjoying himself and I have to keep him on a tight leash (just joking). One or two of them grew up in India so for them it’s like coming home. We too feel very “at home” here but then you know what vagabonds we are! We’ve always enjoyed “going native” and have introduced the delights of “dhosas” and “idlis” to our more conventional fellow diners whose idea of local cuisine starts and ends with chicken tikka, a dish unknown to most Indians!

  We are also learning the language of Karnataka (Kannada) and can already carry on a simple conversation with the staff. We can see that they appreciate us taking the trouble to master a few words. As you know, we’ve always believed in respect for other cultures and though McDonalds has popped up its ugly head (sorry, its golden arches!) India is still an ancient and many-layered civilization. Of course there is a great gulf between rich and poor (you should see the bargains!) but we make a practice of giving alms to the beggars—a few rupees can make all the difference to a poor family.

  All in all we have no regrets. Devon seems a distant memory and our only sadness is missing our many friends (do come out!) and of course our children. Amanda has been promoted to Deputy Head and finds time in her busy schedule for her beloved salsa dancing (Stage 4, well done Amanda!) and the annual “Baroque Around the Clock” festival which she seems to organize single-handedly! Adam goes from strength to strength at the BBC (do catch his latest documentary, details enclosed, we think it’s his best yet: thought-provoking and hilarious). Emails are of course a blessing and Douggy has finally overcome his Luddite tendencies and can hardly be parted from his new digital camera. The accompanying photo shows muggins here with the local snake charmer!!

  That’s enough for now. As they say here, “phir milenge” (we’ll meet again), or, for those of a Muslim persuasion, “khoder hafiz, insh’allah”!

  Love, Jean and Doug

  PS: Idli is a steamed rice cake. Dhosa is a type of rice pancake. Lesson over!

  Remember, you are everything or you are nothing. If you are everything, then your heart is so big it can hold all of humanity within itself, you have no jealousy or narrowness. You are in the heart of every creature and every creature is in your heart. There is only bliss.

  SWAMI PURNA

  It was his wife who organized it. Of course Christopher had planned to visit his mother at some point, but it was Marcia who suggested a date and sorted it out.

  “Christmas in India!” Marcia said. “Evelyn’ll be thrilled. And it’ll be great for the kids, an awesome experience.”

  So Marcia took it in hand. She downloaded holiday packages that included Bangalore on their itineraries and settled on an up-market company that specialized in cultural tours. South India Highlights included Mysore, the temples at Halebid and Belur, “with their intricate carvings of dancing figures, animals and friezes,” and a two-night stay at the five-star Taj Balmoral Hotel, Bangalore. “A spacious city with many parks and gardens,” she read, “… now a thriving business center, known as the Silicon Valley of India.” Within a few days it was all set up, including an optional extra: a week at the Colva Beach complex, Goa, where they could unwind before returning to the States.

  Christopher felt his usual mixture of powerlessness and gratitude. The woman was so damned efficient. Not only did she hold down a demanding job in a top-flight brokerage firm, keep herself fit with a punishing regime at the gym, and organize the children’s own packed schedules, she had also masterminded yet another makeover of the apartment and was negotiating to buy some real estate up in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, as a retirement home for her father and stepmother. Marcia was an exemplary daughter in this respect. Christopher attributed it to her Jewish and Italian blood. She came from a large achieving family where it was taken for granted that children cared for their parents.

  This made Christopher feel guilty, of course. So did the fact that she was paying for this holiday; Marcia was a generous woman in this respect. Of course, she earned more than he did; when they met, in fact, she had been his superior, though upon moving to New York she had transferred to another firm. His sister, Theresa, who had never liked Marcia, assumed that she was bleeding him dry with her high-maintenance lifestyle. Christopher had only half-heartedly disabused her of this; after all, a man had his pride.

  It was a Saturday in November and he was taking Clementine to Central Park. His daughter was eleven, going on sixteen. She had wanted to go to the beauty place to have her eyebrows done, but he had insisted she try out her new Rollerblades. Marcia had stayed behind to help Joseph with his math.

  “Kirsty’s had her eyebrows shaped,” said Clementine.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to,” he said. “Stay a child for a bit longer.”

  “Duh?” Her face said Don’t be a dork, Dad. It was a new expression—curled lip, pitying smile.

  They walked down Madison, past the fashion shops. Christopher wished she would slip her hand in his, but she had recently ceased doing this.

  “Are you looking forward to India?” he asked.

  “Yuk. India’s gross.”
They were passing Ralph Lauren. Clementine caught her reflection in the glass and held in her tummy.

  “You’ll see some marvelous sights,” he said.

  “India’s full of poor people. They’ll smell like Constancia.”

  “That’s not nice. Anyway, Constancia’s from Haiti.” Constancia was their maid. “And you’ll see Granny Greenslade.”

  “You said she was doolally,” said Clementine.

  “I didn’t! I don’t even use that word.”

  “I heard you talking to Mom.”

  “I just said she was a little vague. She is seventy-three.”

  “Gross.”

  “Stop saying that, sweetie.” He thought of the fortune they spent on her education.

  “She can’t even email.”

  “Just because you spend half your time glued to the screen.” He was sure Clementine was spending it in some unsuitable chat room, probably run by a pedophile. He remembered his mother’s face as she gazed at the laptop he had given her. “Christopher dear, it’s too late for me to learn.”

  Clementine stopped outside a Starbucks. “I want a Frappuccino.”

  “Not now. Afterwards.”

  She groaned. They trudged on. Wasn’t this supposed to be fun? Clementine’s state-of-the-art Rollerblades weighed a ton. Nowadays, Christopher felt like a pack mule, carting his children’s consumer durables from one activity to another. Maybe his daughter should be carrying the Rollerblades herself—earned pleasure, all that English stuff. The trouble was, he wouldn’t dare suggest it. She wouldn’t have a clue what he was talking about and would gaze at him with that Elvis sneer that was becoming so familiar.

  Christopher’s daughter unnerved him. Nowadays she seemed to regard him with contempt. In fact he felt this about the rest of his household, too. It was a struggle to retain any dignity at all in a place where even the maid seemed to treat him with condescension. In Haiti, no doubt, men were still men. Over the years the suspicion had been growing that he was surplus to requirements. Having inseminated his wife—it had been a late marriage for both of them and time was running short—he felt he had little to offer a woman who was so very capable of doing everything else herself.

  Once he had found this stimulating. When they met he was thirty-nine, working in the City and living in bachelor squalor in Clapham. He had his routine—squash on Tuesdays, the pub on Fridays. In fact, with his Golf GTI convertible he considered himself quite a man-about-town. One by one, however, his friends had deserted him; the pub crowd had dwindled, picked off by the sniper fire of the opposite sex.

  That he himself hadn’t found the right girl was due to inertia. He realized this when Marcia blazed into his life with her power suits and organizational skills. She had been transferred to the London office for six months and for some reason made a beeline for him. Maybe the old biological clock was ticking, for—not to put too fine a point on it—she was no spring chicken. She had been too busy working her way up the corporate ladder to think about starting a family. Nor, he had to admit, had he found Marcia that attractive on first meeting—sallow skin, heavy features and the thick eyebrows her daughter was to inherit. He, however, was powerless, drawn by the force-field of her personality. What a bracing contrast she was to his conventional English upbringing!

  Within a week he’d surrendered himself up to her flashing eyes and vigorous lovemaking. Within a month she had moved in and sorted things out. “You take your WASHING home to your MOTHER?” He remembered so well that slack-jawed, pitying look. He had become familiar with it over the years, particularly when the various investments he had made, on his family’s and his mother’s behalf, had gone so very wrong. Of course the market had been depressed since 9/11, but he had to admit that he had made some unwise decisions. Still, they were all right, weren’t they? A comfortable lifestyle on the Upper East Side, and his mother settled in a home that didn’t drain her finances and that had many advantages compared to its equivalent in England. And her letters sounded cheerful enough, all the little comings and goings. She had been twittering on about some new sandals. For the old, the world shrank to their immediate surroundings; it scarcely mattered where they were. It was as if they were babies again; apparently her hotel even served jelly and custard.

  They walked past the Met. An elderly woman sat on its steps. She was surrounded by plastic bags and held an empty Styrofoam cup. A well-dressed woman, she bore a faint resemblance to his ma.

  Christopher felt a lurch of guilt. How easy it was to persuade himself that everything was all right! He had always been good at self-justification. In fact—to be really, truly honest—he had reduced his mother to penury. She deserved a contented old age in the bosom of her family and what had he done? Fuck all. Off he’d buggered to New York and weeks went by when, absorbed by his own distracting life, he didn’t think about her at all.

  The woman’s gaze met his. What have you done? Christopher fumbled for his wallet. I gave you life itself, and you dumped me like a bag of rubbish. A police car sped past, its siren wailing.

  It was then that he realized his mistake. The cup contained dregs of coffee. The bag lady was simply an exhausted shopper.

  Christopher had barely paused, thank God. Nobody had noticed.

  In Central Park, Christopher strapped his daughter’s skinny legs into the boots. She tottered along the tarmac. She managed to do even this as if humoring her old dad, as if this hour with him was just an interval before she got back to her real life.

  “That’s the girl, Clem! Great!” He heard his own voice, over-boisterous. She wobbled. He held out his hand, but she was determined to do it alone.

  Three black dudes sped past. One carried a ghetto blaster; music thumped out. People were biking, jogging, practicing obscure Eastern postures. Marcia was a New Yorker. He loved this energy in the city, the utter lack of self-consciousness. The trouble was, he couldn’t let himself go. He felt as if he were an onlooker at his own life, watching his actions from a distance. At this moment he was a father having quality time with his daughter—overreacting, overenthusiastic, his voice booming with false bonhomie. He could see that it was a beautiful autumn day—foliage on fire, the twin spires of the San Remo building rearing into the sky—but all he was thinking was how to describe it later to show Marcia he had noticed.

  One of the black guys swerved and turned with consummate grace. He was simply himself; he wasn’t split in this awful English way. Christopher thought: If only I could fuse myself together. His sister Theresa, who was into all that Indian stuff, went on about wholeness, about shedding the something to reach a higher state of awareness. She had even sent him a book, printed on what looked like lavatory paper, written by a Bhagwan thingy and with the passages on stress underlined. Theresa meditated; she did yoga. How come, then, that she was the unhappiest person he knew?

  “Can we go now?” asked Clementine.

  “What, already?”

  “We’ve been here for ages.”

  She steadied herself on a bench and bent to undo her boots. At that moment one of the black guys drew up, with a hiss, and came to a standstill beside her.

  “Hey, you stopping so soon?”

  He held out his hand. Clementine blushed pink. She hesitated, glancing at her father. Then she slipped her hand into the large black one and they were off.

  Christopher watched them Rollerblading side by side—Clementine tiny, the man huge. She was laughing—really laughing, childish shrieks of excitement. The man slowed down for her. His red T-shirt matched her jacket.

  Sitting on a bench, Christopher watched them. Or, to be accurate, he watched himself—a middle-aged man, paunchy now, wearing gray tracksuit bottoms with a vinaigrette stain on the knee—he watched himself watching his daughter spirited away by a black god and laughing for joy.

  What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of the mind.

  DHAMMAPADA

 
Dr. Rama had a powerful effect on the female residents of The Marigold. During November several of them became ill. Their complaints were not life-threatening but were apparently beyond the scope of Mrs. Cowasjee, whose area of expertise, indeed, was somewhat limited. Dr. Rama would be summoned to attend to the patients in the privacy of their rooms. Later, when they compared notes, they discovered that he had put them all on antibiotics, but that didn’t lessen him in their esteem. After all, antibiotics were meant to cure practically everything, weren’t they?

  “Dr. Rama, what a charmer,” crooned Stella, gulping down the pills with a glass of boiled water. She was quite alone in the world. “To be frank, it’s him who’s the best tonic.”

  “Is anything more handsome than a handsome Indian?” said Madge, who had been frequenting the hotel bars in search of her rich maharaja. So far she had found only one: he was eighty-six, however, and looked like Yasser Arafat. “One does have some standards,” she had sighed.

  “Norman’s nose is out of joint,” said Evelyn.

  “Serves him right,” said Madge. “The old coot.”

  For Norman was no longer cock of the roost. Some of the women had been immune to his charms but a surprising number had responded blushingly to his gallantries and laughed, sometimes uncomprehendingly, at his blue jokes. Madge had been right; in some sense, when one reached a certain age, any man would do. They had all witnessed this back in England where any recently widowed male, however unappetizing and dilapidated, found himself inundated with females eager to take care of him. The reverse, of course, was not the case. Such was the brutal fact of life.

  Muriel was not a member of the Dr. Rama Fan Club. She said there was something funny about him.

  “He’s not like a real doctor,” she said. “When I had my palpitations he put the stethoscope the wrong way round.”

  Evelyn put this down to racism. She knew, from what Muriel had said, that the woman didn’t trust foreigners. Early on she had heard Muriel muttering about darkies and wondered why on earth she had come to India if she had that sort of attitude. Now, of course, she knew the reason: Muriel’s son was in the country. It all made sense—well, a sort of sense. What blind faith could lead Muriel to believe that just because she was in the same subcontinent as her son she would find him? Muriel hadn’t told her much: just that Keith was wanted by the police for some fraud he hadn’t committed—according to Muriel, he hadn’t—and had fled to India to track down the business associate who had betrayed him. It all seemed highly improbable. Muriel had sworn her to secrecy and not spoken of it since. In fact, she seemed to be avoiding her. Evelyn tried not to take this personally; she knew, from experience, that those who receive confidences can be subsequently resented.