Free The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi

difficult at first, had changed the minute love entered: it had suddenly become light and fragrant, like rose petals constantly falling around him from the sky. He told her of the conspiracy and lies spun between Nat and his parents to get him to come back home; about how every day spent away from Siân made him feel like he was shrinking into a handful of molecules, smaller and smaller, until he thought he might just vanish.
    Babo laid his head down on his grandmother’s lap – a childhood position he returned to with ease, and talked and talked while Ba, leaning against the walls of her house, murmured ‘Mmm’ and ‘Then?’ intermittently, her moon-white hair shining in the night.
    That night, everything around them was silent. It was as if all the animals and trees that normally sprang to life after the sun went down, were waiting to hear what would unfold next in Babo’s story. Babo and Ba stayed like this for a long time, building a bridge of remembrance between them, until at some point after midnight, Ba smelled the rain coming. ‘We better get inside,’ she said. ‘You’ve brought us thunderstorms for the next three months.’
     
    In Madras Prem Kumar was getting increasingly impatient. He lay awake at night, wondering if he’d done the right thing by allowing Babo to go to Anjar. He wanted his family as it used to be: seamless. And he wanted Babo returned to them, flaws and all, as he was in the past, because this new Babo had torn the space around them, shown his family the door. Prem Kumar, facing the obstinacy of this door, didn’t know if he must stand still and wait, or push it open and make some noise.
    He wrote what he thought was a conciliatory letter to his son, telling him that there was a polish for everything that became rusty, and that the polish for the heart was the remembrance of God. Babo did not respond. If Prem Kumar had had any inkling of the kind of talks that were taking place between grandmother and grandson, he would have quickly summoned Babo back. But as it was, he was unaware, once again, of how a woman continued to bend Babo out of shape.
     
    Babo’s mornings in Ganga Bazaar were spent in Anjar’s only hotel, Zam Zam Lodge. Every day, before walking over to Zam Zam with his writing materials, Babo went to the courtyard in the back, drew a bucket of water from the well, stood in his VIP briefs and used whatever concoction of turmeric and hibiscus flower Ba had left out for him to wash with. Ba was always up at four, bathed and dressed in her staple white widow’s sari. She swept and swabbed the house, clearing away the red, rubbery garoli lizard skins and the blue-green peacock feathers. By the time Babo emerged from his deep, dream-ridden sleep to offer his services, she would have already decorated the entrance to the house with powdered rice flour patterns, tended to her plants and prepared the food for the day. ‘Go, go,’ she said. ‘Go write your love letters. There’s nothing to be done around here.’
    Babo walked quickly through the small lanes of Ganga Bazaar so as to avoid being waylaid by a well-meaning neighbour. At Zam Zam he sat at the table reserved for him, chain-smoking and drinking endless cups of sugary tea, filling at least ten front and back foolscap pages with heartfelt declarations. He pressed frangipani petals between the pages or sprigs of tulsi, and wrote day after day of their enforced separation because it was the only thing that kept him going. Siân in return wrote back, not quite as profusely as Babo, but more poetically, in neat blue aerogrammes that the postman Neeraj-bhai delivered.
    Some days, when Babo was feeling particularly morose, he went wandering the poorer parts of Anjar, trying to convince himself that there was greater suffering in the world than his. He told Siân of all this, too: of the destitute beggar woman who sat outside Zam Zam with no one in the world to look after her, and the toothless men who sat under the trees,