Free The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi Page A

watching the world spin by from the tops of their rolling eyes. It terrified him to see people this way: old and alone, without the slightest trace of happiness on their face. How do human beings lose themselves so entirely? he wrote to Siân, and then proceeded to try and answer his own question.
    For Babo it was simple. He needed to be with Siân and wake up with her every morning. He wanted to be light and free like they’d been in London, skipping down to the cinema if they felt like it or spending all afternoon in a sha-bing sha-bang haze. Mostly, he didn’t want his life to slip by him. He didn’t want someone telling him how he should live. He wanted a life that would be like lightning, striking the surface of water – joyous and ethereal. He wrote pages and pages like this. And Siân, from her Finchley Road flat, responded in simple, inky words: Dreamed of you last night. You came to me and we washed together before eating in the light .
    When Babo walked back to Ba’s house in the afternoons, he let the rain soak through his skin, holding his writing materials and Siân’s letter for the day secured in a plastic bag against his chest. If it was a good day, Neeraj-bhai would hand over one of Siân’s aerogrammes with his 100-watt smile, and Babo would take this to the back of the house, where a bamboo grove had sprung up in the recent showers, and stay there, turning the sheet of paper over and over in his hands until he had memorized every word.
    Some days Siân’s letters went missing in the entrails of the Indian postal system, and then, Neeraj-bhai appeared at the door with a hangdog look on his face and each of his triple chins juddering, to say, ‘Sorry, boss, no luck today, maybe tomorrow?’
    In the evenings the ladies came in all shapes and sizes to sit around his grandmother like a fanfare of trumpeter swans. Every day they had a different project: Mondays they cooked in giant steel containers to feed the poor at the Amba Mata temple; Tuesdays they powdered red garoli lizard skins so they could make tie-dye scarves for themselves; Wednesdays they made pappads for Poppat-bhai’s shop; and so it went. Through the week there was talking, singing, wailing, complaining – a real hullabulla of voices and competing emotions. But rising above them all was always Ba, with that girlish voice of hers, her laughter tinkling over them like bells.
    When the women of Ganga Bazaar saw Babo spying on them through the window grills, they shouted, ‘Ey, Babo, come and sit with us! What’s the matter? Are you frightened of us? Or is your heart breaking too much?’ And Babo, without so much as a hello–goodbye excuse–me–please turned from them and disappeared into the back room to revise the chemical formulas and equations he’d learned at the Polytechnic.
    Only after the women left, and the jute mats had been rolled away, did Babo venture out to Ba. They sat together with their dinner under the early stars, talking above the sound of the crickets in the undergrowth. Ba told him stories of the ancestors Babo knew so little about. She related all the love-marriage scandals she knew of, including her own sister’s story – how she ran off with a Muslim boy from the neighbouring village never to be seen again, and the story of Kanta-behn’s son, who fell in love with his dark, pockmarked cousin, Damyanti. Babo listened intently, secretly believing that his love-story scandal was going to be the most beautiful of them all.
    ‘Did you love Bapa?’ Babo asked one night, during the week of the British postal strike, when there had been no news from Siân for ten days. ‘When he died, did you ever feel like you would die too because he was gone? Did you miss him in that way?’
    ‘It wasn’t like that for us, Babo. There are so many ways of loving a person. With us, it was a gentle thing, nothing like what you’re feeling now. What you have, it’s something rare. We call it Ekam. They say that you may