sah!’ He put his hand out, and his tiny sister mimicked the gesture. Suzy patted them on the head kindly, already thinking of a way to slip them a few rupees without causing an urchin storm. She took out a piece of Kleenex, wiped the girl’s nose, and threw the tissue into the dirt with the other detritus. I shuddered. I know nothing of caste systems, but these children were verily untouchable.
‘For pity’s sake,’ I said, ‘just buy the damn thing! How much can it cost? You can always give it to Lucy if it doesn’t suit you. Let’s go!’
‘I give you best price!’
‘Yes! Yes! She’ll have it. How much?’ I offered half the amount.
‘Hungry, sah!’
‘Are you sure?’ Suzy held the garment uncertainly. I had confused her by switching categories. Was it for Lucy? Would it suit her?
Back at the hotel, after a revolting walk of some fifteen minutes, beseeched by beggars of the heat and dust, the children paid off by the front gate, I made straight for our room, convinced that the stench of the market followed me across the marbled foyer, carried subtly on the jasmine-conditioned air. I spent the next ten minutes in the shower, soaping and gelling and scrubbing. I sniffed my hands, and they carried still the odour of dung and spice. I washed them again.
The ritual of changing into freshly laundered clothes was soothing, and with each layer – freshly ironed socks and underwear, a crisp cotton shirt with a touch of starch, and finally the careful donning of my mushroom linen suit – I felt as if I were being reincarnated. I put my filthy clothes in the hamper, ready for the hotel butler to pick up and return – pristine – tomorrow. Draped over the chair were Suzy’s nightgown and bathrobe, and on the floor lay discarded underthings, for she had changed, God knows why, before we went to the market. Getting clean to get dirty.
The unshowered Suzy was standing on the veranda, her rumpled carrier bag with the silk shirt in it on the recliner beside her, looking over the gardens and the water below. The late afternoon air was freshening. I opened a bottle of wine from the fridge, and poured a glass for each of us.
My box of cigars was in the safe in the wardrobe. I opened it ceremoniously, spirits already lifted by the anticipation of my evening treat. The hotel had a humidor in the bar, next to which a stagey turbaned gentleman with silk robes and silkier moustaches stood at attention, whose sole employ was pompously to facilitate the choice of a cigar for anyone willing to fork out the hefty price for importation from Havana to a five-star palace in Rajasthan. That didn’t bother me. Good for them. But the cigars – I was informed before coming – might not withstand the travel, and would deteriorate further languishing in an inadequately moisturised humidor. They would be brittle to the touch, crack and crumble in the mouth, and shed outer leaves in the hand. I saw a florid gentleman, the evening before, expostulating furiously as he peeled the dried outer leaves off the Bolivar Churchill for which he had paid the equivalent of £65.
Forewarned, I’d brought a box of twenty-five Montecristo No. 2s, opened it in London and smoked three cigars – just enough to create room for two peeled halves of a new potato – and resealed it firmly, tapping the nails back into place. The cigars would stay moist for our full three weeks, allowing my usual one a day. Twirling it between my fingers, I snipped the torpedo end, and gradually heated the tip, turning it slowly and regularly, until a red glow showed across the entire area, blew on it gently, then slightly more firmly. I took the first, the most highly anticipated, the perfect first draw, held it in my mouth, exhaled slowly, allowed the smoke to surround my face – indeed, stepped right into it – and took a deep breath. Richer than a glass of great claret: earth, cinnamon, cream, perhaps a hint of vanilla, also some chocolate, perhaps a homeopathic trace of manure. Even in the morning, when the smoke would have settled and infused the curtains – and as Suzy would remark (again) her clothes (I like it when it infuses mine) – it would still, in its lingering staleness, be one of the great smells of the world. And quite enough, just then, to get the filth out of my nostrils as effectively as the water had expunged it from my pores.
Joining Suzy on the veranda, I offered a glass of wine to her unresponsive hand. She looked out over the lake, unmoved, sucking at a cigarette. Why the smoke did not penetrate her clothing, while mine did, was one of the unexplained mysteries of our marriage. Her claim, which had no merit that I could detect, was that her Sullivan & Powell tipped cigarettes emitted only the mildest and least penetrative of odours. Unlike my Montecristos.
‘Never again,’ I said. I may actually have shuddered. I remember some involuntary movement, a full body tremor. ‘I’m happy to see the sights. I like our driver. But keep me off the streets. They utterly disgust me.’
She half turned, and took a long drink of the wine, lips pursed as if against excessive acidity, some crass grapefruity sauvignon perhaps. It wasn’t. Along with my box of cigars, I had imported an adequate supply of Meursault, which had travelled better than I had.
‘Tell me about disgusting,’ she murmured, not meeting my eye.
I came up behind her and put my arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘this is all my fault.’
‘I know,’ she murmured, ‘you’re doing your best. It was asking too much of you . . .’
I kissed her neck, which smelled of the market and humid air.
‘There’s still time before dinner,’ she said. ‘Let me have a quick shower.’
She ‘felt at home’ in India, she said, though this was our first trip together. She’d been determined to save me the discomforts of such a visit, but eventually I had insisted: if she felt that India was (in some idiotic way) ‘her spiritual home’, then the least I could do, before we both dropped off the perch like dead parrots, was to accompany her there.
She would happily have abjured the palaces and luxury hotels with which India is now so amply provided, and stayed instead in simple hostelries, or – more desirable yet – with ‘real Indian families’, as she had on previous visits with various friends. (I don’t know what ‘unreal’ Indian families would have been. Except, of course, for her own.)
Her parents Henry and Sophia – latterly Sir and Lady – lived in a Georgian rectory in Dorset, which they purchased in their late-thirties with money gouged out of the City. They proceeded to reinvent themselves as stereotypes, took up country pursuits with the idiotic enthusiasm only urban refugees can generate. They hunted (fox), fished, went on bracing walks in wellies, planted a kitchen garden, were active in the local church, and provided occasional jobs for a number of locals, whom they, not entirely discreetly, called yokels. Their only deviation from the county norms was in their choice of governesses for the children, Suzy and her older brother Rupert. Not for them the sulky and hormonally hyperactive au pair – ‘trouble on wheels, my dear’ – nor indeed, did they look for the sort of nanny self-advertised in The Lady. No, they wanted only Indian women, of mature age, to look after their children. They wanted an ayah, and indeed a succession of them were called just, and only, that. The local gentry sneered, but Sir Henry was triumphantly unrepentant: ‘It’s what they would have done, if they’d thought of it first. Too late now.’
And so Suzy grew up, in their Dorset idyll, a foster child of Empire. Sir Henry encouraged Ayah to read Indian stories, sing Indian songs, draw pictures of tigers, elephants, and parrots, make Indian sweets, and otherwise indicate to the children that there was something other – if not something more – than the long tedious days of West Country life. He could hardly wait to catch the 6.50 train from Dorchester to London every Monday morning and spending the week at his set in Albany. He had some grand times there, and Sophia left him to it. It
