Heavenly Hirani's School of Laughing Yoga, Page 3

  And there’d been a third baby, miscarried at twelve weeks, just as they were about to announce the impending arrival of their ‘little autumn leaf’.

  Hugh had initially not wanted a third child, saying they had two perfectly healthy ones already, but because Annie wanted it, he had approved, and eventually it all but came to be. She resented him, for a while, after the baby was lost, even though the fault had not been his, had not been anybody’s, as every man and his dog kept telling her, moony eyes glowing with sympathy.

  And Huugh had been as heartbroken as she was, white-faced and pinched with grief and worry, so she could not hold onto her bitterness. She was too tired, and too busy with the older two.

  Ben had seemed relatively unaffected, as one would perhaps expect in a six-year-old, but Daisy had been seven and going through a strange period, perhaps brought on by her mother’s pregnancy. They had stupidly told the children about the baby just days before the miscarriage, so she was understandably confused, then tearful, and at times so anxious that Annie thought they might need to seek professional help for her.

  It was Rhona who, aghast at the very idea of ‘paying a shrink to counsel a Muppet’, suggested that instead they get a puppy.

  And so Annie had found Bertie (number one), who had tumbled into their family and made them all laugh with his adorable face, his wicked sense of humour, his trick of bouncing up and down on the spot when he saw them.

  Had it been a stupid idea, to cheer up a slightly dented family with a dog? Was the family really only slightly dented? Perhaps Annie had swept too much under the rug. Perhaps it was she who should have been in therapy.

  The only thing she knew for sure was that Bertie was loved so much by all the Jordans, that he brought so much joy to their lives no matter what the reason for getting him in the first place, that when he went to doggie heaven at ten years of age, she went straight out the very next day and got Bertie (number two).

  Her mother had been horrified at the lack of name change, saying it was bad luck, and disrespectful to number one, but Annie would not budge.

  She just could not bear the thought of a world without a Bertie in it.

  She still couldn’t.

  But if she went out and got another Bertie now, it was accepting that the missing one was gone forever and she just could not do that. Without proof, she couldn’t do it.

  Annie rolled over and looked at the photo on the nightstand of Ben and Daisy, taken the Christmas before as they clutched each other and kidded around, Daisy with her long blonde hair perfectly coiffed as usual, and Ben with Hugh’s good looks and seriousness but that rampant streak of mischief no one could miss.

  She imagined their lost child — she had always felt she was a girl — in that photo; at fifteen she would have been the annoying teenage sister. Would she have fair hair like Daisy or be dark like Ben? Be a flibbertigibbet obsessed with nails and necklaces or a buttoned-down scholar with a mind-boggling work ethic? Or a combination, or something entirely different?

  Hugh groaned quietly in his sleep and she tried to pinpoint the last time they’d been anywhere together, done something special, just the two of them, but couldn’t. They had visited the kids a few months back, quite a few when she thought about it, then she had gone away for the weekend with Rhona before her mother had gone so horribly downhill … and Hugh had continued to travel each month for work, but together? It didn’t happen.

  When he woke up, Annie was still watching him, pondering this.

  His sharp blue eyes sprang open, and although his body didn’t move he was instantly alert, as though waiting for something terrible to happen. His mouth was immediately pulled back into its straight line, his eyebrows slightly raised to reduce the frown lines that gave away his worries as he slept.

  He is worried, Annie thought, with a jolt. He was worried about her. He thought the something terrible was going to happen to her, or be her.

  She knew that, just by looking at him, just by watching the way he gathered himself up in wakefulness to be prepared.

  She was low, she knew that, beyond low. But she would never do anything terrible, anything stupid. She hadn’t even begun to contemplate such a thing. She just couldn’t, because of Daisy, because of Ben, because she was Mrs Goody Two-Shoes. And she could never put her children through the pain she felt now at the loss of her own mother.

  Besides, couldn’t Hugh remember the hell they went through when Daisy was pronounced by the school counsellor to be suicidal when she had just turned seventeen? She’d been dumped by her boyfriend not long after another girl in her year died in a horrific car crash. At the time, Annie had put her daughter’s moodiness and distance down to another ‘phase’. She was definitely a phase sort of girl. So she was devastated to learn that she’d failed to recognise the far more chilling truth. After that, she was afraid to leave Daisy alone for even a moment. Her heart jumped out of her chest every time the phone rang. For a brief period she had to take anti-anxiety medication herself, she was so terrified for Daisy’s safety.

  Hugh knew the awful toll that had taken on them all. Did he really think she would do anything, now, other than carry on? Carrying on was her only option. She was good when it came to carrying on. She always had been. Two small babies and a too-big mortgage: she carried on. Two school-age kids and a lost child: she carried on. A dearly departed mother and a much-beloved lost dog …

  What Annie was currently doing was falling slightly short of carrying on. She saw that now, clear as crystal.

  Bloody Bertie! It was his loss that was the nail in the coffin of her old life. She could still hear the echo of the hammer that drove it in ringing inside her, bouncing off the walls into all that empty nothingness.

  Yes, she had the big house, the lovely — if slightly absent — family, the clothes, the shopping, the friends … but she wanted that stupid dog. And knowing that a scrawny terrier was at the bottom of her hollow pit of despair just threw a layer of shame over the nothingness. Other people in other places would think that Annie Jordan was the luckiest woman alive.

  So perhaps she needed to find other people in other places.

  Perhaps, she thought, staring deep into the dark blue oceans of Hugh’s anxious eyes, other people in other places might help her find a point between this bland plateau she was balancing on right now and — if not happiness, then something like it. And perhaps it would be good for her and Hugh, too. Perhaps it would reignite their old spark to spend time together somewhere new and unfamiliar, where it might reek, but not of change or loss.

  ‘About Mumbai,’ she said.

  ‘About Mumbai,’ he repeated.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  He took this in, blinked, then a smile spread slowly across his face. His lovely mouth turned itself up to match his happy eyelashes.

  But what she couldn’t miss was that even when he smiled, he looked sad. It wasn’t an expression, it was an atmosphere; it clung to him.

  There was so much she wanted to say to him then, in the half-light of the morning, with all their history so fresh in her mind, with the sort of fleeting clarity that lying awake in the dark sometimes brought.

  But was it clarity? Or was it insomniac madness? It was hard to tell.

  And her grief was still too close to the surface while beneath it bubbled many complications. She couldn’t decipher them herself, let alone explain them to anyone else, and anyway, over the years she had lost the art of speaking from the heart.

  Actually, she’d never been much good at it — that’s probably why she and Hugh had got on so well from the beginning — but maybe that was because there had been no need. And now when there was, when it would have felt like a release to articulate what she was having trouble even feeling, her heart felt like a stranger, any meaningful words too hard to come by.

  Instead, she reached under the covers until she found her husband’s hand and held it for a moment, sliding her fingers between his and squeezing.

  ‘I’ll go pu
t the coffee on,’ she said.

  Chapter Four

  Annie stepped out of the cool air-conditioned interior of the baggage claim area in Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport and into the furnace-like heat of the Mumbai arrivals hall.

  Hugh was two steps ahead of her, which she tried not to find annoying. Once upon a time they walked everywhere side by side, holding hands, or holding children’s hands. She couldn’t remember when Hugh had moved ahead, but thought in India, of all places, they should be keeping in step.

  India! What an assault on the ears and eyes!

  Brown-skinned people dressed in a shock of different colours were five deep against the arrival-hall barriers, holding signs, flowers, balloons, each other. Someone, somewhere, was wailing, children were shrieking, a loud booming laugh floated over the crowd like a blimp.

  ‘Sera, sera, sera, sera!’ an old woman was shrieking, tears streaming down her face; another elderly woman clutched her from behind, also crying.

  So much colour and not a single white face anywhere, not in the crowd, behind it, in front of it. Even on the plane they’d been hard to spot. If Hugh had waited for her she would have asked him if that was always the case; if foreigners were always so few and far between, but instead, he was even further ahead and now greeting a short, rotund man with large, dark eyes, a slightly dusty toupee and a bright, white smile.

  ‘Ali, my man, lovely to see you again,’ Hugh said, turning to introduce Annie when she caught up. ‘Annie, this is Ali, my faithful driver, isn’t that right, Ali?’

  Annie smiled although she didn’t want to shake Ali’s hand — she’d become more and more worried about germs the closer the trip got — but she could hardly ignore the one he proffered.

  She grasped it and shook, imagining the amoebas jumping from him to her the way they did in disinfectant commercials, hoping that he — or anyone else who might have been looking — could not tell from her face how horrified she was.

  When they found their white 4WD, jammed in the sweltering car park amid what seemed like thousands of other identical ones, Annie eschewed the front passenger seat that Hugh offered her and slid into the back, surreptitiously scrabbling in her handbag for a bottle of antiseptic, splurting it on her palms, rubbing them together. Hillary Clinton used it in far more developed countries than this, so it couldn’t be that rude.

  Still, when Ali looked at her in the rear-vision mirror, she lowered her hands and kept rubbing, distracting him with a smile.

  ‘You OK?’ Hugh asked, as they pulled away from the airport terminal.

  She nodded, then looked out of the window, squinting and reaching for her sunglasses.

  The flight had been made bearable by an empty seat next to her and a sleeping pill. She didn’t know what day it was, or what time, but the world outside the SUV was dazzlingly bright.

  And the scene that was now unfolding on the roads in front of, behind, and beside her was making her dizzy. She’d felt sick ever since reading in the airline magazine that Mumbai was one of the world’s biggest cities with a population of nearly twenty-four million people.

  Twenty-four million? Just knowing that was bad enough, but what was worse was the fact that every single one of them seemed to be attempting to merge with the car she was in right at that very moment as they joined the freeway heading towards the central city.

  Annie was a confident enough driver at home, but had been in a car accident with her father when she was very young so had always been a nervous passenger. In Mumbai, she realised, she was never going to be anything but a passenger. She was going to spend two weeks feeling on the brink of disaster. It was going to be a nightmare.

  Shambolic didn’t even begin to describe the battle that raged around her.

  Uniform high-rise buildings lined the surprisingly modern wide road they were on, just as in any hectic metropolis, but every lane, not that they were recognised as such, was choked with cars, vans, trucks, buses, motorised rickshaws and everything in between.

  The squealing of brakes and honking of horns was deafening. Every vehicle was trying to move at the same time, in the same direction, at the same pace. It was bedlam.

  Two buses — one bright yellow and one wildly decorated orange — converged in front of their car, cutting them off. Annie jumped as Ali honked with such ferocity that she was surprised the steering wheel didn’t disintegrate beneath his fist.

  She gripped the seatbelt crossing her chest with both hands.

  Somehow, a motorcycle bearing two portly men in purple turbans squeezed between their car and the buses. Behind them, someone else — everyone else — was honking. On their other side, another motorcycle, carrying a young couple — the woman riding pillion wearing a primrose sari — inched through an impossibly small gap.

  Annie inhaled, as if she could make the whole car suck its stomach in, pull itself tighter, take up less room, just as the buses started to move. Ali took this fleeting opportunity to shoot forwards, right through the centre, honking for his life, parting the traffic like the Red Sea without — miraculously — touching another vehicle.

  Annie closed her eyes. How would she ever cope with such chaos?

  She could feel beads of sweat pooling on her skin beneath her shirt even though the air-conditioning was icy cold.

  Her heart was beating too fast.

  She should have stayed at home. She didn’t want to be here.

  She had teetered on the brink of pulling out so many times since telling Hugh she would come to India with him. But every time she opened her mouth to tell him she needed to stay home, she had imagined him asking, ‘What for?’

  ‘Don’t look out the front,’ Hugh said. ‘Look out your window. Look out the side.’

  She opened her eyes and directed her gaze across the top of the torrid ocean of vehicles. The high-rise buildings further away from the airport looked like grimy apartments, not shiny new offices. Washing hung from nearly every dusty terrace like bright necklaces on weathered old necks.

  In front of these buildings, which were only spitting distance from the many-laned freeway, crouched rows of temporary-looking shanty shops; they were nothing more than poles and old tarps, really, held together by grubby signs and rusty sheets of corrugated iron, but each selling something specific: garlands of flowers next to clay pipes, car tyres next to baby shoes, broken chairs, sewing machines, fruit, coconuts, carpets.

  It was as if a giant hand had opened in the sky and just dropped everything it was holding down onto this one dusty strip.

  In front of the shanty shops, a constantly moving sea of pedestrians flowed back and forth in a kaleidoscope of colours. They were close enough to touch and be touched by the traffic, yet no one seemed ruffled in the slightest.

  Some tiny children were playing with an empty tin and a stick practically beneath the wheels of a gaudily painted bus that had stopped on the side of the road despite the bumpy snake of honking vehicles behind it.

  One was a little girl with a short haircut, about three, Annie thought. When Daisy was three she had refused to wear anything but white, and would not so much as step outside even wearing gumboots if she thought she was going to get dirty. She still did not like the dirt.

  Annie turned to look at Hugh.

  ‘Not what you were expecting?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know what I was expecting,’ she said. ‘Beggars, I suppose. But they wouldn’t last a minute in this traffic. I hadn’t thought about the traffic. It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘You’ll see them,’ said Hugh. ‘The beggars. But there are not great armies of them. Not that I’ve seen anyway.’

  ‘And are they missing limbs, and eyes, and all of that?’

  ‘Occasionally, down in South Mumbai, the tourist part of town. But otherwise I think you’ll find that Mumbaikars regard Slumdog Millionaire as somewhat misrepresenting the case. It’s not like home, but it’s not Hell on earth either.’

  ‘But the poverty, Hugh.’

  ‘Yes, there’s a l
ot of it. And maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. But Mumbai’s probably not that typical anyway, because there are also more billionaires here than in any other city in the world.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense!’

  ‘Not to us.’

  ‘Not to anyone.’

  ‘India’s possibly not the best place to come to if you’re looking for sense.’

  Out the window, on the other side of the road, there was a hole in the never-ending stretch of high-rises, the ground level suddenly eaten up by a sprawl of small shabby mud-coloured low-slung roofs undulating over the land like an enormous dirty carpet with an uneven pile.

  ‘Speaking of poverty,’ said Hugh. ‘That’s a real slum.’

  ‘Oh, I saw one of these right by the runway as we landed,’ Annie said. She still had the indents in her palms from clenching her fists so tightly. ‘But they all have satellite dishes.’

  ‘Welcome to Bombay, ma’am,’ interjected Ali. ‘Even the poor peoples have TV!’

  ‘Bombay or Mumbai?’

  ‘Both, madam. Bombay for the old ones such as me, and Mumbai for the young ones, such as everyone else.’

  Annie sank back into the cool air-conditioning of the car, soured only slightly by the smell of Ali’s armpits.

  It occurred to her that she had not even seen Slumdog Millionaire. Hugh must have watched it on his own. On a plane, most likely. She certainly couldn’t remember the last time they’d been to a movie together, or even watched one at home.

  They jerked to a stop, the traffic snarled in front of them, the honking reaching a frightening crescendo. She looked up to see a half-finished empty high-rise building. She could see right through its unfinished door-and-window-shaped holes to the sky on the other side. A group of boys was playing cricket on one of the upper floors.

  She turned to point this out to Hugh, but he was busy texting. Annie still resisted texting. It wasn’t that she was against it in principle, it was more that her forty-nine-year-old fingers and matching eyes did not have the required co-ordination to spell things the way she meant to or send them to whom she intended.