The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Read online

  The irony was that despite her prejudices, Muriel had sopped up more Indian ways than any of them. The Ainslies presumed themselves superior in this respect, but Muriel seemed to have absorbed subcontinental beliefs straight into her bloodstream; it seemed to answer something in her nature. She regularly read her horoscope with Mrs. Cowasjee, with whom she had become pally; she had had her fortune told by the man with the parrot in the bazaar opposite. The scent of joss sticks drifted from her room and Stella swore that she had heard her chanting some incantation, though Stella’s hearing was not to be trusted.

  One day in late November an outing was planned to the Nrityagram Dance Village, twenty miles away. A minibus was booked, but Muriel refused to go.

  “It’s an inauspicious day,” she said. “Mrs. Gee-Gee told me.”

  She meant Mrs. Cowasjee, of course. “Why do you call her Mrs. Gee-Gee?” asked Evelyn.

  “Well I can’t call her Mrs. Cow, can I?”

  Stella lowered her voice. “She can be a bit of a cow sometimes.”

  “It doesn’t mean the same thing here, Stella,” said Jean Ainslie. “Cows are holy in India; it would probably be taken as a compliment.” She turned to Muriel. “Why is it inauspicious?”

  “Search me. She just said it was.” Muriel chuckled. “Watch out or you’ll get bitten by another monkey.”

  As it turned out, the minibus broke down on the journey home. It had taken a while to repair, apparently with a length of twine donated by a roadside coconut-seller, and they were late for dinner. Plus, Madge had lost her sunglasses.

  “See what I meant?” said Muriel triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”

  Evelyn alone knew the reason for Muriel’s belief in supernatural forces. Prayers, spells, who cared? She was prepared to enlist any help in her quest to be reunited with her son. A bit of a long shot, but then this was India, land of miracles.

  Dinner was cream of something soup, nobody could quite work it out, followed by a choice of fried fish or mutton pilau. People talked about the day’s expedition: the charming dancers, the potholed roads, the lack of air-conditioning on the bus, for that, too, seemed to have given up the struggle for life. Evelyn had stayed behind; her hip was playing up and besides, she relished a day when she had the hotel practically to herself. She had written letters and ventured out to the bazaar, where she had given a rupee to the legless beggar and bought some oranges. She even knew the word for oranges now: santara.

  She was sitting with the Ainslies and Olive Cooke, a chatty woman whose husband had worked for BP and who had lived all over the world. They were discussing Hong Kong.

  “Our son Adam made a documentary there,” said Jean. “About Norman Foster’s buildings. It was nominated for a BAFTA.”

  As always, the Ainslies made Evelyn feel inadequate—their happy marriage, their achieving son at the BBC, their worldwide travel experiences. Evelyn thought of her own village, its high spot the yearly Cross-stitch Extravaganza in the community hall.

  “His old boss is arriving here next week,” Jean said. “A woman called Dorothy Miller, quite a legend apparently. We’re dying to meet her, aren’t we, Douggy?”

  “Sounds a bit formidable,” said Douglas. “What is this soup? Any ideas?”

  Evelyn was thinking about her own son. She was looking forward to his visit with mixed feelings. Of course she wanted to see him, and the grandchildren whom she had not seen for so long, but she simply couldn’t imagine Christopher in India. How would he react to this place? And what about that daunting American wife of his? What would she think of the stained tablecloths and fly-bespattered strip light? Americans were so hygienic. Seeing the hotel through Marcia’s eyes made Evelyn realize how shabby it was.

  Jimmy, with trembling hands, lifted her soup plate and took it away.

  “To be honest,” whispered Douglas, “it should be us looking after him.”

  What would Christopher think of the palsied servants, of the taps that coughed out brown water? Maybe he would sweep up Evelyn and take her back to New York. If he were Indian he would do that, but then if he were Indian he would never have let his mother come here in the first place.

  Actually, thought Evelyn, I wouldn’t want to go. Sitting there at dinner, she realized she had grown fond of her fellow residents. They were all in the same boat, all deserted in one way or another by those they had loved, and now they had to stick together. After two months they had become a sort of family; even those she didn’t particularly like had grown so familiar that concepts of liking or disliking had become irrelevant. England was distant now, it was another life; it was these people now who concerned her. Some might get ill and go into the hospital. Some might succumb to homesickness and return to Britain. The slightly odd ones would no doubt become odder, herself included. Some might—they would—die. They would all die.

  “You on for Inspector Morse?” asked Douglas.

  Evelyn nodded. Graham’s great-nephew had sent a video of Inspector Morse from England. Graham didn’t look like the sort of man who had relatives, but he obviously had. Maybe nobody had asked him. Those not exhausted by the trip were planning to watch that nice John Thaw after dinner.

  Evelyn ate a mouthful of trifle. It was startlingly colored, with sprinkles on top. It reminded her of her children’s birthday parties and there was a comfort in that. Whatever happened, there was always comfort to be found in the small things of life.

  Pauline passed the fax to Ravi. “Dad says this new woman is completely bonkers.”

  “What?”

  “This Dorothy Miller. He says she wanders around singing nursery rhymes.”

  “Your father thinks everybody’s bonkers except himself,” said Ravi. “He’s so bloody competitive.”

  “Surely she can’t be senile? I thought everyone had to have a doctor’s report before they went there.”

  This sounded like an accusation. Pauline hadn’t meant this, but whatever she said nowadays came out like a complaint. It was Ravi’s fault. He was so prickly.

  “Don’t you want to read it?” she asked. “It’s quite funny.”

  Ravi glanced at the fax but she could see he was only skimming. She tried to change the tone.

  “One of my clients, her mother has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “The old dear turned up at the airport carrying three handbags. It took them ages to get through the security checks.”

  Ravi paused, lost in thought, and went on loading the dishwasher. He rinsed the plates so thoroughly that it seemed a pointless exercise to put them into the dishwasher at all.

  “And she was wearing a body belt,” said Pauline.

  Still no response.

  Pauline indicated the fax. “Did you read that bit about the birthday cake? The cook spelling birthday with a U?”

  Ravi closed the door of the machine and turned the dial. Suddenly, Pauline broke out in a sweat—menopause, anger, one or the other. “You don’t seem to care what happens there, as long as you’re making a profit.”

  “That’s not true—”

  “You used to be such an idealist.”

  “But what’s wrong with the place?” said Ravi. “You tell me. You said it was charming, you said it was as if time had stood still. You said you’d live there yourself if you were old enough.”

  “The whole thing was extraordinary. I wish you’d been there.” Actually, Pauline thought, I don’t.

  “You’ve been quite different since you’ve come home,” Ravi said.

  “The country had a strong effect on me.”

  “Everyone says that about India.”

  “I’m not everyone—”

  “You British go there—‘oh the poverty, oh the sunsets!’ ”

  “Stop lumping us together—”

  “You romanticize the place, you always have, but you’re all the same: you take what you want from it, the British always have, then you get the hell out and it carries on just like before—”

  “You got the hell out.”

  �
�That’s because I couldn’t stand it,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Ravi folded a tea towel. “You haven’t the remotest idea what it’s really like. You all come back with your bazaar bargains, mouthing a lot of mystic tosh—”

  “Why couldn’t you stand it?” she asked.

  “Because I was suffocating.”

  Ravi left the kitchen. From the lounge, she heard the sound of the ten o’clock TV news. She knew from experience that there was no point in continuing this conversation.

  Pauline went upstairs. Nowadays she and Ravi no longer built up to quarrels; their life was one long rumbling argument interrupted by work or sleep. It was a chronic argument with a life of its own; it was an intestinal parasite sucking their nourishment, sucking them dry.

  She had thought it was the Ravison business that had changed her husband, but India had made her realize something: Ravi hadn’t changed at all, he had just become more himself—chilly, focused elsewhere, not really a husband at all. He was a single man who happened to have a wife. Maybe this was how most married Indians behaved and she hadn’t realized it until she had gone to a country full of Ravi look-alikes. Marriage was something you got settled before you carried on with your life. He simply didn’t connect with her at all. Oh, she knew he had to put up a self-protective shield, simply to do his job at the hospital. No doubt caring for strangers was easier than caring for those one loved. The trouble was, the more neglected she felt, the less lovable she became. She watched herself becoming whiny and resentful; she was becoming hateful to herself.

  Pauline sat down on the bed. The springs creaked. How she had desired him once! It was Ravi’s foreignness that had aroused her; the jolt of the unknown. She remembered their first date, a meal in a French restaurant long since gone, his brown hand laid on the white tablecloth, the glimpse of his throat in the open-necked shirt, the thick black hairs there. She had pictured his brown cock, as yet safely zipped in his trousers. Maybe tonight we shall kiss. Will his saliva taste different? Will he smell different? Tonight, maybe, I will wrap my legs around the naked body of an Indian man. Weak with desire, she could hardly eat.

  Love is perverse, she thought. The very element that inflames can carry, within itself, its own destruction. What had seemed mysterious now seemed simply opaque. Impenetrable. Dull.

  India had explained her husband. Like a kaleidoscope, India had shaken Ravi and settled his pieces into a different arrangement. She saw him more clearly now; she could even understand why he had left. I was suffocating. Being in India was like being in the tube in rush hour—all those people, the press of them, the clamor of them; you had to shut down. If not, the sheer volume of that teeming, inert desperation would destroy you. And then there was his family, some of whom she had met over the years when they visited London. You romanticize the place. At the beginning she had envied him his parents and siblings and cousins. Coming from a small family herself, she had indeed romanticized them. She could see now, however, that there was something oppressive about their demands. No wonder he had simply bailed out.

  The awful thing was that now that she finally understood her husband, she was no longer interested.

  Outside, a gale was blowing. It had been a wild autumn. Pauline opened the wardrobe and took out a plastic bag. It was filled with photos. She took them out and spread them on the bed.

  Some of the photos were of The Marigold: the peeling bungalow smothered with creepers. They called it a bungalow, but in fact it was two stories high. In one photo she saw a face in an upstairs window. Who was gazing out? She hadn’t noticed at the time. Another photo showed her father sitting on the veranda outside his room; she could tell, by the tilt of his head, that he was listening to the cricket on the radio. During her stay she had grown fonder of him; it was easier without Ravi being around to wince at her dad’s daily bulletins on his bowel movements. Her father seemed to be tolerated at The Marigold more easily than at his other residential homes, perhaps because there were no pretty females on the staff. Or maybe Indians were just more accepting of odd behavior, especially by the British. They had had to put up with it long enough.

  Pauline shuffled through the photos. One showed a lady, whose name she had forgotten, painting at an easel. Another showed four of the residents, all women, sitting in the garden. The photo was overexposed and somewhat blurred. She couldn’t work out what they were doing, if in fact they were doing anything at all. Nor could she recognize them; the women were as insubstantial as ghosts in their pale summer dresses. There were only a few of them then, the first arrivals, but already they had faded from her memory, outdazzled by the life outside the garden walls.

  For during the afternoons, when her father was dozing, Pauline had explored the neighborhood. Most of the photos were of the children she had met in the streets. They had clamored around, jostling to get in the picture. In the photos their smiles were stilled, their hands outstretched for boiled sweets. They melted her heart. It was a feeling that made her legs weak, a feeling more profound than the desire she had felt for Ravi all those years ago in the Antoinette restaurant. Most of the children were boys; in one photo they danced in the water from a burst pipe. They were desperately poor, but how different from the shaven-headed thugs from the estate behind Plender Street, kids with men’s faces who smashed car mirrors as they swaggered down the street. Theirs was a different kind of poverty. You take what you want from us. The British always have. If only she could give them back their photos; these were probably the only photos that would ever be taken of them, proof of their existence. But how could she send them? She didn’t know these children’s names and addresses. She could hardly write to: Two boys, c/o the Rubbish Heap behind the Paradise Cinema, Bangalore.

  She knew that she was going back. It wasn’t just her father’s presence that was pulling her there. Pauline replaced the photos in their bag and went downstairs.

  Ravi was watching some cop drama. This mildly surprised her; he never watched that sort of thing. She could tell, by the back of his head, that he knew she had come into the room. She thought: He’s as miserable as I am.

  She said: “Let’s go there for Christmas. Please, Ravi.”

  Please say yes or I might go there and never come back.

  “Have you heard from your charming daughter?”

  “She’s fine,” said Norman. “Absolutely fine.” He was having a drink with Sonny in the Gymkhana Club. “Got a phone call yesterday. She’s coming out for Christmas.”

  “Excuse me!” Sonny jumped up and ran after a man who was crossing the bar. Norman watched him gesticulating. The fellow couldn’t sit still. Their conversation had been interrupted twice already by Sonny’s mobile phone.

  Sonny returned to the table. “Please—carry on.”

  “You should calm down, old chap,” said Norman. “We’re the ones who’re supposed to be having the heart attacks.”

  “What can I do? There’s nobody I can trust; everything I’m having to do myself. These people I do business with, they cheat me, they do another deal behind my back …”

  Sonny rattled on. Norman wondered when he could bring up the subject he had come to discuss. It was a matter of some delicacy. A tiger’s head was mounted on the wall nearby; it stared glassily ahead, avoiding Norman’s eye.

  “Any problems at the hotel? You must tell me, Norman old boy.” Sonny twinkled. “You are my spy.”

  “They’re all obsessed by that bloody doctor. Got them in a twitter. You’d think the sun shines out of his arse.”

  “Women!” Sonny shrugged.

  Norman took a breath. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about—”

  “Please! A moment.”

  Sonny jumped up and waylaid a group of men who were just leaving the bar. Norman subsided into his chair. The Gymkhana Club was a vast old building filled with potted palms and slaughtered animals. It was built for the British, of course, but now it was full of brown faces. Norman had been there a couple of times before,
as Sonny’s guest—the only way a chap like him could get in nowadays. Relics of the Raj remained—photos of past presidents hanging in the lobby and a list of team members, inscribed in gold, fixed to the wall of the cavernous billiards room. Cockaded bearers, carrying trays of drinks, glided from table to table. From his sojourns in the tropics, Norman was familiar with clubs like this one. In the past he had found them reassuring. Now that he was older, however, a place like this made him feel as if he were already extinct.

  Sonny returned to his seat. Norman lit a cigarette. “You’re a man of the world, old fruit,” he said. Almost family, in fact. The realization always gave him a jolt. “Must have knocked around a bit.” He knew Sonny had a wife, but the man never seemed to mention her. “Thing is, a chap can get lonely for a bit of female company. I’ve heard that the women in Bangalore can be very, well, accommodating. If you get my drift.”

  Sonny was fidgeting. His eyes flickered around the room. Norman soldiered on.

  “I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction. You know, make some sort of an introduction. Something of that kind. In the most discreet sense.”

  “What?” asked Sonny.

  “I’m looking for a friendly, experienced woman—”