Free The Cambridge Curry Club by Saumya Balsari Page A

waited. He knocked and rang again before gingerly calling out her name. He found her crying on a sofa in the living room, wearing only a dressing-gown, an empty bottle of vodka by her side.Between sobs she told him that her ex-husband had moved the courts to prevent her visits to her child on the grounds that they were disruptive.
    Absorbing the impact of her words, Mr Chatterjee found the sight of her gown open to the waist even more disturbing, as she leaned across and rested her head on his shoulder. He patted her reassuringly, but suddenly felt warm, naked skin instead, as the gown fell away. She began to kiss him with urgent, desperate passion. Then a furry living snowball scratched his arm and landed with lightning speed on Rachel’s bosom. The sight of her ballooning breasts swinging under the weight of a clinging cat clawing them in jealousy was one that Mr Chatterjee never managed to erase. He fled, remembering to shut the front door firmly behind him, and on reaching home rang the local police station about the twisted bicycle. He was a good Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator.
    Rachel Chesterton had moved home shortly after the incident, carrying no recollection of her last encounter with Mr Chatterjee, a detail sadly unknown to him. For years thereafter, Mr Chatterjee had suppressed a thought couched in rhyme that gnawed at his insides: what would he have done, with the dress undone, had the cat not won? Searching for the answer, he drove solitary in the silent winter dusk down Lime Kiln Road to gaze at the city of spires below. The branches of the bare trees were wagging, censorious fingers in the sky and the frost on his neat patio garden was the ice in his heart.
    Over the years, Mr Chatterjee slowly convinced himself that he was not to blame, that her breasts were, in fact, thorny, wrinkled pineapples that should havestayed on the stem, and that encounters of this nature were as much an occupational hazard for a Neighbourhood Watch Co-ordinator as for the engineer called out to inspect a gas leak.
    Mr Chatterjee had recorded a private image of English life in the neighbourhood with his customary powers of observation; the women who gave their husbands a peck on the cheek before the car backed out of the driveway; those who never came out; the men who regularly cut the lawn and washed the cars and trimmed the hedges; the women who put out winter pansies in garden centre terracotta containers and planted aconite, snowdrops, anemones, grape hyacinth, tulips and daffodils along the path to the front door; the children who greeted the neighbours and those who stayed up late; those who had cats and those who had dogs; those who left Dairy Crest milk bottles outside their door and those who were disabled; those who left the black bins out too long and those who took them in early; those who recycled and those who did not; those who swept up the autumn leaves and weeded the flowerbeds; those who read the broadsheets and those who read the tabloids; those who bought DIY furniture and those who entertained; those who had attic conversions and those who had conservatories – and those who led happy lives.
    Mr Chatterjee believed that the years devoted to the study of law and human nature had sharpened his faculties , and it was thus evident to him that Mary and David were a cultured elderly couple and ideal neighbours for the adjoining side of his semi-detached house. Even the dull, muffled sound on the stairs stopped after some years; David moved downstairs once he contracted Parkinson’s disease. Mary was devoted and uncomplaining; she wheeled him out into the sun, a blanket over his knees, to cheerfully water the petunias. She began to suffer from migraine, a condition that made it difficult to tend to an ailing husband. Their two sons, who lived locally, made infrequent visits. Mr Chatterjee pursed his lips at their lack of filial devotion, while Swarnakumari wordlessly added Mary’s Tesco and Sainsbury’s shopping