Twinkle Khanna is a columnist and an award-winning Indian writer. Her work has been adapted for stage and film. Khanna is currently completing her MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths.

This is the opening of ‘Welcome to Paradise’, a novella that deals with the complex layering within the microcosm of maternal bonds.

Email: tkhannaindia@gmail.com

 

Welcome to Paradise

When her mother called, Garima didn’t pick up the phone. Then Neil informed her, ‘She says it’s an emergency. They are going to cut off her power supply.’

Garima took a flight to Goa the next morning. Expecting to spend the day talking to municipal officers, she was led to the garden instead.

‘You always keep things to yourself,’ Leela began, her face streaked with mud as she planted a line of marigolds, ‘but luckily Neil had the sense to tell me what happened.’

She wondered if he had told her mother the same things. He had not meant to cheat. He got carried away with his friends.

‘Leave it Ma. What’s the problem with the municipal board?’

Leela held Garima by the arm and led her to a rickety bench, ‘First I want to talk about you. Neil told me you stay awake all night, barely eat. You can’t torture yourself like this. Have you tried speaking to someone, a professional?’

She had found a therapist. Her anxiety increasing as she sat on the faux leather couch in the waiting room. Garima picked at one end, till she could see the orange sponge underneath. One material, pretending to be another, and hiding a third. Pulling off her own layers in front of a stranger seemed beyond her capabilities. She left without informing the receptionist.

Her mother continued, ‘You know, these things happen.’

Garima had overheard similar conversations between her aunts. And she had once seen her mother’s smile making things happen as well. It had been at an art gallery. Leela in a printed sari, her silver earrings swinging with the motion, turned in Garima’s direction. It lit up her face, that two-vodkas-down joyful grin. Garima followed the trajectory, like it was a beam shooting out from her mother’s gleaming teeth. She swivelled, looking behind her, at a bespectacled man, the recipient, flushing in delight.

‘Maybe they do happen Ma, to you. I don’t want to live like that.’

‘I agree, but people slip sometimes.’

‘Slipping hurts other people, like Dad, or have you forgotten?’

‘Garima there are things about him that I can’t discuss, especially not with you. But he wasn’t some perfect hero. For that matter, no one is, including Neil.’

‘That seems clear. And he didn’t even have the guts to tell me himself!’

‘What would that achieve aside from hurting you?’ her mother asked. ‘It’s like scarfing down a carton of ice cream and unable to stomach it, you throw up on someone else. Leaving them to clean the mess.’

Leela stroked Garima’s hair and said, ‘I know you are hurt. But you can’t go through life without some amount of pain. There is a poem, by Jane Hitchfield or some field, I forget her last name, “So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.’’’

Garima wrestled with an urge to bang her head on the bench. Repeatedly. Till her mother’s scraped-together philosophical drone ended. Then the entire family would hear about ‘Poor Garima and her hysterical behaviour’. Stalling was the only sensible move. 

‘Let’s talk later. I am exhausted.’

Leela nodded, ‘These early morning flights are a pain. It was not an emergency though. I just lied to Neil. But now that you are here you can sort out a small matter. These municipal officers want to know why the electricity bill is still in Martin Rebello’s name. How does it matter? He is dead. Who do they think is paying the bill, his ghost?’

 

……….

 

Garima spent the afternoon upending drawers in her mother’s house looking for the misplaced title deeds. Leela, who had disappeared into her studio at the far end of the property, emerged hours later in her paint-splattered kaftan, tooting the horn of a scooter.

‘A car is a cage. All you can smell is recycled bad breath,’ she said, refusing to get into their old Maruti. Garima asked about helmets. Leela shrugged, the scooter wobbling as she hitched up her kaftan and adjusted her bottom on the sticky seat.

They hurtled over speed breakers on a potholed road with hawkers selling sarongs on one side. The smell of fermenting cashew apple from nearby stills filled the air as they reached a narrow lane. When they stopped, Garima swung one leg over, trying to get off and the bike toppled over. The spill made her grumpy. When her mother asked her if she was hurt, she shook her head in a brisk manner and walked ahead.

‘I should have told you, Garu,’ Leela called out as she caught up with her. ‘Don’t get off the scooter till I put the stand down first.’

At the end of the lane, there was a shack with a low thatched roof. Sandcastle, it said in faded letters at the entrance. Unfamiliar music streamed out of boxy speakers, Indian music mixed for western ears. She followed her mother inside.

‘Order a lemongrass tea for me,’ Leela said, before striding towards the bathroom.

Garima was watching a woman dancing in a stupor, when she felt a tug on her foot and let out a startled yelp. A dog had curled around her leg and two more had settled down beside her.

A wiry man, bare chested, like the large number of male patrons at the establishment, ambled towards her. The light streaming in from the window behind him created a halo around his greying curls and caused the reappearance of floaters in her left eye.

‘Are you scared of dogs? They are completely harmless. Anton Pais,’ he said, extending his hand. 

His accent was like a curry made from disparate leftovers. An unfamiliar flavour, half British, half Goan. A blond man tapped him from the back.

‘Welcome to Paradise,’ Pais said, before giving him an exuberant hug. 

On Leela’s return she received the same, spirited greeting before Pais headed to the kitchen. When he passed their table again, Garima asked him for the Wi-Fi password.

‘Who knows,’ said Pais.

‘Is there someone else I can ask?’

He bent towards her, his head in line with hers and said, ‘That’s the password. Who knows. No space, all small letters.’

A frizzy-haired young man joined them. Leela’s newest boyfriend, Garima deduced, from the way her mother immediately nestled her head against his shoulder.

The dark shack and discordant music made her feel displaced. Her life in Bombay, grief, anger, all distant notions. She bent forward, tearing pieces of buttered bread, her eyes still on Pais, and she fed his dogs.

 

……….

The following evening, she returned to Sandcastle. An unplanned diversion from Mapusa market. She made her way to the bar where Pais was pouring drinks.

In the following hour, the conversation shifted from their love for Goan food to her cousin’s death.

‘A pot of beans was boiling on the stove when she collapsed. That’s all she had done in the last few years. Cooked, cleaned, looked after her daughter. She had a law degree you know.’

Pais replied, ‘I cook every day too, perhaps that would be a fitting end, dropping dead, my face floating in a pot of crab masala.’ He seemed amused at the morbid imagery. ‘So, your cousin cooked and what do you do?’

She had trained as a physiotherapist. It was during her six-month internship that she was introduced to Neil at a friend’s party. A year and a half later, Neil and Garima were married, had moved cities, and she had turned into the oddly termed ‘housewife’. 

‘What do I do?’ Garima repeated.

Tally grocery bills. Try to bring some stability to her mother’s finances if not her life. Refrain from pushing Neil down the stairs once she discovered the truth about his Prague trip.

She tried to find something impressive to say. Deep sea diving. Playing the violin. But as he turned back to her with his calm, kind eyes, she told him the truth.

 ‘I do nothing I suppose, nothing at all.’ 

Pais offered her another beer. She leaned back, cradling the cold bottle, as he took out a fine sheet of paper from a red tin box and rolled the leaves inside.

 

……….

 

On her eighth afternoon in Goa, she found herself lying beside Pais, on a rickety bed, in a room attached to the back of the shack. In the light from a bare bulb hanging over the bed she examined her lover. Her mind running over the syllables of that newly reacquainted word. His narrow chest, his nose, chin, all ended in tightly triangulated points. She peered at the gash on his abdomen.

‘A knife fight?’ she asked, coming closer to stare at the keloid scar.

‘Appendicitis,’ he replied before they were interrupted by his dogs. They were howling in unison outside to an old Hindi song playing on Sandcastle’s speakers.

‘It’s like your pets are trying to sing along too,’ Garima said.

‘They are not my pets, but yes, they love music.’

‘They live here, don’t they?’ she asked. 

‘They come of their own free will and leave the same way.’ He scrunched his face, lines running like spreading cracks around his eyes and crooned, ‘Because they don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to them, do you remember this song?’ 

‘Freedom,’ she replied. She knew every George Michael song, had collected his posters as a teenager. These were not the exact lyrics but close enough. And she knew the conversation wasn’t about pets. ‘You are a lot like someone I know,’ she said, cutting short his discourse on dogs and ownership.

‘Garima,’ he answered, a gurgle of laughter tucked away in his throat. ‘Just don’t say I remind you of your father!’

She considered telling him it was Leela, but it sounded almost incestuous.

‘So, who is it? This obviously fantastic person since he seems to be my counterpart?’

‘No one you know,’ she said, accepting the joint he offered as she watched him pull on a pair of crumpled shorts, his customary uniform behind Sandcastle’s bar. 

 

……….

 

Driving back to her mother’s house, the song was stuck in her head, the way it had once played incessantly on her yellow Discman.

‘Freedom, you’ve got to give for what you take,’ she sang, humming the next few lines, unable to recall all the words.

Like Pais, Leela had once described her version of freedom as well. It was the time when Garima had accompanied her mother and grandmother to Rishikesh. 

In a memorable incident, only partly due to the sweater-wearing goat chewing on her grandmother’s slipper, her mother had instigated an argument. This was uncharacteristic as Leela usually avoided confrontations. Garima wondered if it was grief as they were about to submerge her grandfather’s ashes into the Ganga, or had Leela been on something, uppers, downers, whatever she used to take in those days.

‘Like all Sindhi women of a certain class Mama,’ Leela said, ‘you believe in words that begin with a capital M-Morality, Matrimony and Monogamy.’

She then turned on the 23-year-old Garima, ‘And you have made Garima just like you. You are both interested in constructing dams, controlling the natural flow, I,’ she said, gesticulating wildly as she spotted a branch in the polluted river, ‘I am like that twig. I want to drift along. I just want to be free.’

While her mother’s disregard for convention had always agitated her, in Pais, she found it liberating. She could for the first time try drifting herself, without feeling the need to be the one holding an extra life jacket in her hand.

 

……….

 

On the following Saturday, when Garima returned from Sandcastle, Neil was waiting for her on the porch.

‘It took me just 30 minutes from the airport can you believe it? I thought we would have lunch together but Leela said you had gone to the market?’ The intonation placed it between a statement and a question. Neil pressed on with a joviality that she supposed felt false to his own ears because she saw him wince. ‘Doesn’t matter! I anyway wanted to surprise you for your birthday. But even if I hadn’t, it would still end up as a surprise because you haven’t been answering my calls. I thought everything was OK now, so what is this Garu?’

Despite Goa’s humidity, Neil’s polo T-shirt was crisply ironed, his deck shoes an immaculate white. He leaned forward to kiss her and she retreated, tucking her chin in a backward motion while her feet stayed on the uppermost step.

‘You look,’ he hesitated, before adding, ‘…different,’ as he took in her shorts, the thin vest, her braided hair.

In all the lists Garima habitually made, involving annual goals and weekly tasks, she had not accounted for Neil’s betrayal. It had been one of the other wives, Ameeta, who had discovered text messages and informed her about the escorts hired on their husbands’ Prague trip. While Neil called it a mistake and sobbed on her shoulder, Garima’s reaction had been clinical. Could you get Hepatitis B from oral sex, she had wondered. Like she was still working with Dr Kumble, listening to a series of events that led to a torn ligament.

A pair of crows landed on the tray laid out by her mother’s housekeeper. One dipping his beak into the pot of sugar. Neil moved towards them, waving his arms, an animated scarecrow with cheeks turning red in the late afternoon sun.

She had not told Leela about Pais. But her mother must have made her own deductions when she dropped by for a drink and spotted Garima with him at the Sandcastle bar. If Neil’s arrival was meant to be an ambush, it would not surprise her, if he was merely the foot soldier, and her mother the brigadier in charge.

 

………..

 

The bassist hired for her birthday party, paused his rendition of ‘Stand by me’ at Pais’ interruption. Garima could see the two men shaking hands and thumping backs. It was the first time she had seen Pais in trousers. Khaki green, paired with his dusty flip-flops.]

He made his way across her mother’s noisy living room and kissed her on both cheeks. Then he handed Garima a spikey-leafed plant with six closed buds and one fine-spun flower, the color of winter sun.

The previous evening, she had informed Neil she needed a break. Two weeks in Goa and she would return to Bombay. Taking rounds of the garden, Leela had asked if this was her way of throwing a tantrum, ‘with this Pais thing’ as she referred to it.

‘Ma there is nothing going on between us.’

‘Pais must be in a guidebook somewhere, right next to Cape d’Or and Montenegro. On a list of ten things that worthy travellers must tick off their bucket list,’ Leela said with a caustic laugh.

‘Two months ago, he turned his shack partly into a photography studio because of some Daisy Muller. Before that it was some Turkish girl. And someone said there is a wife too, but I am not sure,’ her mother added.

It didn’t matter to her, her expectations were realistic, Garima told herself. A brief relationship without any heartache.

When the bassist began playing ‘Come Together,’ she sensed her husband behind her as she stood talking to Pais. Neil took the heavy planter from her hands. A brief introduction, where she thought her voice sounded strained, though neither man seemed to have noticed.

Pais, without the awkwardness of a man having sex with another man’s wife, enveloped Neil in a bear hug.

‘Welcome to Paradise,’ he said, in the same rolling cadence that he greeted all the travellers who drifted through Goa.

 

……….