The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: A Novel Page 3

  “They’re not customers, Sonny, they’re people.”

  “Ah, Ravi man, you’re such a prig.”

  Back home, Pauline seemed doubtful about the whole business. “It’s a huge risk. Where will you get the money?”

  “Sonny’s raising the finance.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Of course,” said Ravi. “He’s a bigwig in Bangalore, got a finger in a lot of pies.”

  “What sort of pies?” she asked.

  His wife irritated him with her misgivings. It wasn’t like Pauline, to be so unsupportive.

  “You’ll never get people to go,” she said. “I mean, a nice warm country’s one thing—but India. Think of the disease.”

  “It’s not all mud huts, you know.” Ravi felt a rare stirring of patriotism. “If you’d been, you’d realize that.”

  “You’ve only been back a couple of times yourself.”

  “That’s because I don’t like it,” he said.

  “Well, they might not either.”

  “Then they can come home,” Ravi replied. “It’s not a life sentence. They can go out for the winter and see if it suits them.”

  “Old people like the familiar.”

  “What’s familiar about the world they live in now? Britain’s a foreign country to most of them these days, it’s frightening, it’s confusing—”

  “And full of darkies,” said Pauline.

  He looked at her sharply. Was she teasing him? “Well, they’ll feel at home in India then.”

  Touché. They were lying in bed, whispering. Norman’s snores were audible through the wall.

  “I know the real reason you want to do this,” hissed Pauline.

  “Why?”

  “So you can get rid of my father.” She turned away, pulling the duvet with her. “You want to send him there, don’t you?”

  Like Brahma, you do not become attached. You are not sorrowful at the passing of the past.

  SWAMI PURNA

  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was a roomy bungalow built in 1865 by a boxwallah named Henry Fowler. He had done well for himself in the cotton trade, produced a large family and found in India a congenial home away from home. The Marigold was indeed a pleasant place, with verandas on three sides and a compound shaded by flame trees. One could imagine the tea parties and parasols. In those days Bangalore was a garrison town favored by the British for its mild climate, wide streets and parks. The old city, with its maze of bazaars, was seldom penetrated by them; they lived in the tree-lined thoroughfares of the Cantonment, of Cunningham Street and Defense Lines. They called it the Garden City; their heavy Victorian buildings gave it an air of permanence and authority though they themselves, being made of frailer stuff, passed away and were buried in the graveyard of St. Patrick’s Anglican church.

  After Fowler and his successors died, the bungalow was occupied for a time by the Inspector of Waterways and then used as a primary school run by nuns. With Independence and the departure of the British, it was converted into a guest house and had remained so ever since. In the 1960s an annex was added; over the years air-conditioning was installed in some of the upper-rate rooms, and bathrooms, with temperamental plumbing, were added en suite. But it had remained largely unchanged: twenty rooms with flowered bedspreads and mismatched, cream-painted furniture. There was a lounge filled with chintz armchairs and a heavy teak bookcase filled with paperbacks left by former guests; there was a large, dark dining room. As in many such places, the furniture seemed either too heavy or too flimsy for the rooms—it looked as if the items had been shoved there on a temporary basis until somewhere better could be found. There was an air of somnolence about the place: ticking clocks, creaking ceiling fans and, from the kitchen, the distant clatter of pans. Outside in the garden, budgerigars chirruped in the aviary and the flower beds were planted with marigolds and roses; really you could be in Tunbridge Wells.

  “A little corner of Britain,” wrote Sonny. “An oasis of old-world charm in the midst of the hustle and bustle of modern Bangalore.” He was drafting the script for the promo video:

  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel combines the tranquility of yesteryear with exciting shopping and sightseeing opportunities. Enjoy the ambience of a bygone age with the advantages of modern living: all rooms, both deluxe and standard, are equipped with direct-dial telephones and STAR TV. First-class cuisine includes both English and South Indian specialities. Come and pamper yourself! You deserve it.

  The Marigold was indeed an oasis. Around it a new city had grown up. Property prices had rocketed. One by one, the neighboring bungalows had been demolished and replaced with office blocks. Over the past twenty years, with the arrival of the high-tech revolution, business had boomed. The Garden City was transformed into the Corporate City and The Marigold lost its customers to the big new hotels springing up along Brigade Road: the Oberoi, the Taj Balmoral, the Ramanashree Comfort Inn. They offered convention centers and conference suites; they offered twenty-four-hour room service and health clubs where executives sweated out their curries. There was no way that The Marigold had been able to compete with that. Though it had a small clientele of budget travelers none of them stayed long, for despite Sonny’s words, Bangalore had little to offer the sightseer and was mostly visited as a stopover en route to somewhere else—Mysore or, for the adventurous, the ruined city of Hampi. Even then, most tourists were on some package deal tied in with one of the five-star hotels.

  So The Marigold had gently declined. Its owner was an easygoing Parsee named Minoo. Through a combination of inertia and sentimentality he had resisted the offers of developers to buy him out, for he had inherited the hotel from his parents and was loath to see his childhood home demolished and made into an office block. Sonny Rahim’s offer, however, was more attractive.

  “Just think of it, my friend,” said Sonny. “One hundred percent occupancy guaranteed, no vacant rooms, no canceled bookings—it’s the hotel wallah’s dream!”

  They were sitting in the deserted dining room. Minoo knew Sonny because he owned the building opposite—Karishma Plaza, a concrete edifice hideous even by Bangalorean standards, with shops below and office space above. Sonny had get-up-and-go, that was for sure.

  “A little updating is needed,” said Sonny, “some minor alterations, but we’re not talking old crocks here; these people won’t be on their last legs, incontinent and senile—”

  “What happens when they become so?” asked Minoo. “It will happen to us all.”

  “Then I will make arrangements for them to be transferred to the Victoria Hospital or to be sent home—these are the conditions that operate in British establishments of this kind. Of course we’ll have a qualified doctor on call; I have already approached Dr. Sajit Rama, he is a good chum of mine, he runs the Meerhar Clinic in Elphinstone Chambers, and of course on the premises we would have a trained nurse in residence—your good wife.”

  This was true. Minoo’s wife had been a nurse before their marriage. Well, a nurse of sorts. Everything slotted into place.

  “My cousin, Dr. Ravi Kapoor, lives in London,” said Sonny. “He’ll run the British side of the operation; we have set up a company together, Ravison Residential Homes. His own lady wife will be our co-partner as she’ll be involved with the travel arrangements. We’re talking big, my good fellow.” Sonny stretched out his arms, jolting a bottle of soda. “Join us now, my friend, and you’ll reap the rewards! I see an empire growing, retirement homes in sunny climes—South Africa! Cyprus!—away from the rain and the crime, where the living is cheap and the service excellent; I see a chain of homes so our customers will be able to travel freely between them if they wish, a time-share for the active elderly, this is the way the world is going. From little acorns, great oak trees grow, acha?”

  The man was a human dynamo. Every few minutes they were interrupted by the squawk of Sonny’s mobile. He paced up and down, shouting into it. A damp patch spread across the back of his shirt.

  Minoo
gazed across the dining room. The curtains were closed. Shafts of sunlight blazed through the cracks, so bright they hurt his eyes. What happens when we die? he wondered. How can we truly know? Suddenly the room was filled with residents, their white heads nodding as they talked together. They were older than he; they had been shunted nearer that blaze of whiteness.

  “What happens when they die?” he asked.

  “The same as in England,” replied Sonny. “Cremation, burial … I will make the arrangements, leave it to me.”

  What happens to us all? Minoo wondered. Vultures will pluck out my eyes, for I will be dispatched in our Parsee manner, and then what?

  The chair creaked as Sonny sat down again. The man was waiting for an answer, but Minoo was lost in a kind of luxuriant dread. Surely there would be nothing to fear … just a sweet surrender.

  “You wish to talk it over with your wife?” asked Sonny.

  “She is at the beauty parlor.” The thought of Razia jolted Minoo to his senses. “I must be frank with you, my friend. My wife’s nursing experience is somewhat limited. She worked at a foot clinic.”

  “A small matter.”

  “She was an assistant chiropodist.”

  Sonny shrugged and added vaguely: “Once a nurse, always a nurse.”

  Suddenly, Minoo flushed with rebellion. For once, he would make a decision. He pictured Razia arriving home, her nails blood-red and her mouth dropping open. He pictured his mother staring at him, the teacup halfway to her lips.

  “Let’s talk figures,” he said, surprising himself. He had never used the phrase in his life. From the kitchen came the crash of crockery. Fernandez, the cook, had been at the bottle again.

  Sonny opened his case and pulled out a sheaf of papers. And so the deal was struck. It was June. Just a month had passed since Sonny’s moment of revelation in the Royal Thistle Hotel, Bayswater.

  Once he had secured the premises, marketing was the next step. Sonny planned to set up a website. Also to produce a full-color brochure and promo video, to be distributed to the appropriate agencies in England. With this in mind, he arranged a meeting with his cousin’s brother-in-law Vinod.

  In his youth, Vinod had dreamed of being a film director. He had pictured himself surrounded by Bollywood starlets like Sonny was, whose playboy antics he read about in Calling Bangalore magazine. Fate, however, had written him a different script and after various financial disasters, Vinod had found himself, in his middle age, running a photographic studio on the Airport Road. Weddings were his specialty, and it was while he was shooting a video of Sonny’s nephew’s nuptials that Sonny pulled him behind a clump of bougainvillea and told him his plan.

  The following week, Sonny clattered up the stairs to Vinod’s studio and thrust a folder into his hand. He had already storyboarded the video.

  “We open with the timeless beauty of our country.” Sonny pointed to a poster on the wall. “A shot of the Taj Mahal at sunset.”

  “Maybe sunset is not a good idea,” said Vinod.

  “What? So we have to die?” Sonny shrugged. “Okey-dokey, sunrise. Some raga playing on the sound track—”

  “Too foreign,” said Vinod.

  “—and then a tour of the tourist sights of Bangalore.”

  “What tourist sights?”

  “Tipu’s Palace, my friend! Cubbon Park and our splendid Botanical Gardens! There is plenty to see here, for the discerning visitor. If you please, focus on the Raj aspect—the clock tower, the statue of Queen Victoria. My theme will be: there’s a little corner that will forever remain England.”

  Outside, traffic thundered past on the way to the airport. Due to a power cut the air conditioner wasn’t working, so Vinod had unwisely opened the window. The studio stank of exhaust fumes and they had to shout above the noise.

  Vinod had to admit it: his life was a failure. The realization had been creeping up on him but only now, in his fiftieth year, had he put it into words. His creativity had been destroyed by a thousand weddings and their numbing demands. Any attempt at artistic license—cutaways to a stray cat, a montage sequence of dancing feet—was met with bewilderment and, on one occasion, a refusal to pay the fee. Vinod was also saddled with an irritable wife and heedless, disappointing sons. It was chastening to be a recorder of other people’s triumphs when he himself had so little to celebrate. So his pulse quickened at the prospect of this job, despite Sonny’s bossiness and his insistence that the section devoted to the bustle of downtown Bangalore should include shots of emporiums owned by his business associates.

  “Kiddy Korner?” said Vinod. “These people, surely they are past their childbearing years?”

  “Don’t they have grandchildren?”

  “Drapes Galore?” asked Vinod. “What will they be doing buying curtains? Surely their hotel rooms will be furnished?”

  Sonny pooh-poohed this. Fired with entrepreneurial zeal, he saw that anything was possible. He himself owned a half-share in the Surinama Silk House. “A sari imparts an air of timeless elegance, particularly to those of mature years.”

  “But these are Englishwomen,” said Vinod. “They’re not going to start wearing saris.”

  “Don’t be bloody negative.” Sonny paused. “Ah, that has given me an idea. Fashion shows! I shall lay on entertainments. Once they are living in our country our customers will have money to burn! The gray pound, it’s called. Or the white pound.”

  Suddenly, Vinod started to enjoy himself. Most jobs were a simple matter of getting all the relatives in the picture and making sure the jewelry was in focus. It was a long time since he had had a creative argument.

  Filming at The Marigold would include an establishing shot accompanied by Sonny’s sales patter. “And British music,” said Vinod. “The Enigma Variations would be just the ticket. I have the CD at my residence.”

  “A panning shot around the garden,” said Sonny. “The trees, the flowers, the tranquility. A hummingbird sipping nectar.”

  “Who’s making this film?” said Vinod. “Leave the shots to me.”

  Sonny was unabashed. “And a buffet in the dining room, my friend. Birianis and cream cakes!”

  Fighting, Fucking and Feeding, thought Vinod. In his youth he had wanted to make wildlife documentaries. You had to have the three Fs; otherwise viewers switched off. In this particular case two of the Fs were inappropriate, but the Food aspect was vital. After all, when you were old, that was all you had to live for.

  Sonny paced to and fro, across the backing sheet. Vinod willed him not to trip over the folds. Once, years ago, Vinod had sat his sons there, in their school uniforms, and taken their photographs. Perched on their chairs, they had radiated hope for the future. Twenty years later here he still was; nothing had changed except he was older, his sons had left him and the traffic had grown to a roar.

  “And don’t forget the doctor,” said Sonny. Vinod snapped to attention. “He’s first-rate; I’ve been there for treatment myself. Take a shot of him in his workplace.”

  Dr. Sajit Rama ran a clinic for sexually transmitted diseases. The next day, Vinod loaded his equipment onto a rickshaw and directed the driver to Elphinstone Chambers.

  The waiting room was thick with bidi smoke. Rows of men sat there, gazing at their feet. I’m not really here, their bodies said. Vinod recognized the man who sold CDs in the street outside the Air India office. What brief pleasure has brought them here? wondered Vinod. Was it worth the price to be paid?

  He was ushered into the doctor’s surgery. Dr. Rama stepped out from behind his desk and shook Vinod’s hand. “Any friend of Sonny is a friend of mine.” He was a handsome man with a fine head of hair. “To be perfectly frank, I’m not a geriatrician.”

  “And I’m not Alfred Hitchcock,” said Vinod. “But we all have to make a living, acha?”

  He set up his camera. The idea was to film a consultation. As it was a clap clinic, the dialogue would be mute. Vinod planned to shoot sixty seconds of the doctor listening to a patient, and play music ov
er it.

  He positioned the doctor in front of the framed diploma on the wall. The man was unfairly handsome; film star looks, in fact. Vinod pictured the English ladies imagining all sorts of aches and pains just to get him to visit. This fellow would always be doted upon.

  Who will look after me when I’m old? Vinod wondered. Not his sons, that was for sure. Their treatment of him was shameful; had they no sense of family responsibility? Of respect?

  The nurse ushered in a patient. He was a thin, hunted-looking man. He sat down on the edge of his chair and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” asked Dr. Rama.

  “I have a discharge from my part,” said the man. He looked at the camera.

  “I assure you, this is confidential,” said the doctor. “My friend is filming for another purpose entirely.”

  “It only happened the one time, Doctor-sahib,” said the patient. The doctor nodded in sympathy. They all said this. “And now I’m punished for it.” The man lit a bidi. His hand shook. “Please don’t let my wife find out about this! She will kick me out of the house.”

  “Step behind the screen, sir,” said Dr. Rama, “and lower your trousers.”

  Once, Vinod had enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. For years he had visited Chula, a charming young lady who worked at an establishment near the Gandhi Market. Even his own wife had shown some enthusiasm in the early years before she started ganging up with their sons and dismissing him as a failure.

  A yelp came from behind the screen. As Vinod packed up his camera he thought: Already I feel past it and I’m fifty years old. What must it feel like to be seventy? Eighty? The only answer was to endure this existence, try to perform good deeds—look, he was helping his friend, and for a very small fee—and pray for better things in his next life. He would go to the temple that very afternoon and perform puja; it never failed to restore his spirits.