Free The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach Page B

Donnelly.”
    “Wouldn’t let darkies touch her.” He coughed his smoker’s cough. “Ha! Catch her going to India.”
    Pauline laughed. “I think we can safely say that she won’t be joining you.”
    Ravi came into the room. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
    Pauline told him.
    “Nothing funny about racism,” he said.
    “Oh, don’t be such a prig,” she replied. “You have to admit it would be funny if an old bat like her, who can’t stand darkies, suddenly found herself surrounded by a thousand million of them.”

 
When Ignorance is shattered, Light overflows, Wisdom arises, the Meditator becomes fully delivered and freed from the bondages of cycles of Birth, Rebirth, Decay and Death … Herein lies the sole object and the very purpose of Meditation.
V EN . D R . R ASTRAPAL M AHATHERA
     
     
    W hen the Queen Mum died, Muriel put up the flags—three of them, stuck in a vase in her window. She had removed them from her Diana shrine in her lounge. Diana was a storybook princess, of course—beautiful, doomed, a deer fleeing the hounds according to that Earl Spencer. The Queen Mum, however, was the real thing—royal to her bones rather than a beguiling traitor. She was special, the most special mum in the world. Muriel’s son Keith made her feel like that. He made her feel like royalty.
    The last time Keith visited he had admired the Union Jacks. “It’s to set an example,” Muriel had said, indicating the flats opposite. “To that lot.”
    Muriel had lived in Peckham all her life, except for a short and traumatic period during the war. While she stayed put, however, the area had changed around her. The Blitz had been followed by equally savage destruction in the 1960s, when streets had been bulldozed to make way for high-rise blocks. As the years passed many of the families she knew had moved out, to be replaced by blacks. Nowadays crack dealers drove past in convertibles, music blaring, the thuds making her ornaments tremble. Huge girls barged into the Only Two Schoolchildren at a Time newsagent’s. They shoved past her, shouting on their mobiles, while she tried to buy a tin of Whiskas. More recently, illegal immigrants had moved in, gray-faced men from God knew where. They stood outside the tube station waiting to be picked up by cowboy builders. Crime statistics were soaring; her nights were punctuated by the sound of smashing glass.
    Keith had urged her to move out. “It’s a dump, Mum. Come to Chigwell.” He lived there in some style; he had done well for himself. Muriel, however, was stubborn. She let him buy her a flat on the ground floor of a nice new block, around the corner from where she grew up. She let him fit it out, washing machine, satellite TV. She even took the money Keith pulled out from his wallet, so fat it didn’t close properly, when he visited her. But she stayed where she was. She was an independent woman; she didn’t want to be beholden. And she didn’t want to live anywhere near that snarky wife of his.
    The loathing was mutual. When Muriel had been stuck in Casualty, back in May, Sandra hadn’t even been bothered to phone. It was only when Keith got back from Spain that all hell was let loose—newspapers, TV; Muriel did enjoy it. The neighbors made a fuss over her, the ones who could speak English; all of a sudden she was a celebrity.
    Muriel loved her son. She had always been there for him. Wives and girlfriends came and went —“Here we are, gathered together again,” said the best man at Keith’s last wedding—but they were like driftwood, washed back to sea while Muriel remained, the rock. That was mothers for you. Keith was all she had, Keith and her cat, Leonard. In fact they had a certain amount in common. Both were sleek, handsome and predators of the opposite sex; both disappeared for days at a time on mysterious business of their own—in the case of her cat, returning with a torn ear.
    Where did Keith’s money come from? Muriel didn’t ask. He