However, the panel had overlooked one very important thing: an outsider was trying to infiltrate the system. A man of whom they had no knowledge had just asked me to marry him. The judges were going to have a problem. At best there would be an uproar: my dad would pretend to go into heart failure and my mum would do her wailing and beating on the chest routine. At worst I would suffer the same fate as my sister, who had run off with her boyfriend and who they had not spoken to since.
I didn’t know what to say to Jean Michel when he asked me to marry him. It wasn’t a question of not loving him enough; it was a question of making a decision and then facing all of the consequences, and I was too tired for all of that. So for a while I hadn’t been making any decisions; not even daring to venture slightly outside my routine. There was a certain sense of safety in catching the tube to work, dealing with clients, going back home to Mum and Dad and seeing the CVs on the table.
I hadn’t been thinking about anything too deeply except on days like that when I had been forced to. I mean, I knew Ki was dead, I had watched her disintegrate before me and then be scattered into the wind, but for me she was still there in some kind of shape or form. She had to be. Pretending that she was still there, looking out for me, was the only thing that had helped me hold it together, because otherwise … otherwise, everything was pointless.
Her death was senseless. Good people weren’t supposed to die young. I had bargained hard with God and promised to do all sorts of things if He let her live, and although He didn’t listen I held steadfast in my belief. It was the only thing that I could really cling to. I don’t know how best to describe what this belief was, but it’s the feeling that someone out there is listening and responding; that there’s a universal conversation going on where forces of nature conspire to look after you and give you strength. Occasionally you’d get a glimpse of the workings behind the scenes and these were termed by others as coincidences or luck. And then there were signs. Signs were things like accidentally finding a twenty-pound note when you most needed it; a song on the radio that comes from nowhere and that speaks to you directly; words or people that find their way to you at just the right time. Ki promised she would send me a sign. A year had passed and she hadn’t. Or maybe she had and I’d missed it. I had become far too busy to see any signs.
I got off the underground and waited for the train that would take me home.
The High Street looked tired and depressed, like it too had had enough of being battered by the rain. Among all the greyness, the windswept umbrellas and the shoppers scurrying home, I suddenly spotted colour, a vibrant bright orange. I walked in its direction to take a closer look. It was a Guru, standing calmly in the rain amid a flurry of activity. I stopped momentarily, thinking that the scene would have made a good painting, and stared at the strangeness of his presence. He was wearing a long, orange robe over some blue flarey trousers and over his robe he had a blue body-warmer. As they walked past, school children were pointing and laughing at the enormous red stain across his forehead. The red stain did not strike me as much as the open-toed sandals on his feet. It was freezing, and as I was thinking that he must be in desperate need of some socks, someone called out to me.
‘Nina, Nina,’ shouted the man as he came out of Pound Savers, clutching his bag. He knew my dad, I had met him a couple of times but I couldn’t remember his name.
‘Hello Uncle,’ I said, thankful that calling obscure friends of your parents ‘Uncle’ is an Indian thing. Any random person that you’ve only met once in your life has to be bestowed with this title. ‘How are you?’ I asked politely.
‘Just buying the socks for his Holiness,’ he said, looking at the Guru, ‘he’s finding the weather here a little colder than Mumbai. Guru Anuraj, this is Nina Savani. Nina, this is his Holiness, Guru Anuraj.’
The Guru put his hands together in a prayer pose. If I was a well-mannered Indian girl, such an introduction and the use of the word ‘Holiness’ would be my cue to bow down in the middle of Croydon High Street and touch his ‘Holiness’s’ icy feet, but instead I just smiled and nodded.
The Guru held out his hand. I thought he was angling for a handshake so I gave him mine. He took it, turned it palm up and muttered, ‘Been through much heartache. Don’t worry, it’s nearly over.’
‘He’s very good, you know. For years Auntie was becoming unable to have baby and now we are expecting our child,’ acquaintance man interrupted eagerly. ‘Guru Anuraj was responsible for sending child,’ he beamed.
The Guru’s warm smile spun out like a safety net as he told me my life would improve greatly in two weeks. Although his smile was warm I chose to ignore the fact that it was full of chipped and blackened teeth. If I had paid attention to his dental hygiene it could have given me some indication towards his character and all that was to follow without having to take his palm – ‘cleanliness being next to godliness’ and all that – but as he made promises of being able to remove the stagnant energy which was the cause of much maligned obstacles, I chose not to see the warning signs. I wanted him to tell me more but the Guru had his socks to put on. He’d also spotted the grocer roasting chestnuts, and indicated to acquaintance man that he might like some.
Before he left, he delved inside his robe and handed me a leaflet. ‘Call me,’ he said, staring intently into my eyes.
‘You must call him, his Holiness only gives out his number to the very special people,’ added acquaintance man. I took the leaflet and said goodbye to them both.
When I got home, Hindi music was blasting from the television set and both my parents were doing their normal activities. My mum was in the kitchen making rotis and my dad was in the sitting room, with a glass of whisky in one hand, newspaper in the other, looking like an Indian version of Father Christmas with his red shirt, white beard and big belly. He was the only person who was not engulfed by the enormous Land of Leather sofa.
‘Good day, Nina?’ he asked, turning back to his newspaper.
‘It was really crap. Crap day, crap client, just awful.’
‘Good, good,’ he replied. My dad had very selective hearing and only chose to hear the words he liked or words that were of some threat to him. ‘Home early, no?’
‘We were all made redundant.’
He put his glass down, threw his newspaper to the floor and looked at me. Redundancy was his worst nightmare. I had to be a lawyer; years of both time and money were invested in this and it was pivotal to the list system (the spin on candidates worked both ways so I too was lying on someone’s dining-room table). That was what he sold me on, the fact that I was a lawyer working for a reputable firm, and also that I was tall and quite fair-skinned, but he omitted the fact that I had one humungous scar down my left arm and that I couldn’t really cook.
By my parents’ standards, twenty-seven was far too late to be getting married, and my mum was truly baffled by it, saying to my father that I was one of the prettiest girls on the circuit and there was a queue of men waiting to marry me. But I had managed to fend them off so far by telling them that things were changing and men were looking for women who were settled in their careers; it wasn’t like the olden days when they just wanted to know your height, complexion, and if you had long hair down to your back. It was, however, getting to a stage where this argument was wearing thin. As my dad said, at this rate I would be heading towards retirement: hence more and more weekly CVs.
‘What?’ he shouted.
‘I said I had a headache.’
‘I thought you said redundant.’
‘No, just a headache.’
‘Thank Bhagavan,’ he sighed, glancing up to one of the many incarnated god statues.
My mum