The Cambridge Curry Club Read Online Free Page A

woman shook her hips suggestively, hiding her face behind her shiny dupatta. The women tittered as Bob ducked like a diver in a scuba suit wandering into a May Ball by accident.
    ‘Come, Heera, I will read your hand before you have your mehndi put,’ offered a large woman in a purple sari, who fanned herself vigorously. Bob watched as Heera was led to a couch.
    ‘Heera, you give only happiness wherever you go. It is in your bhagya, in your destiny,’ declared the woman. ‘Your husband is a very lucky man.’
    Heera smiled.
    ‘But what is this?’ queried the woman in deliberate tones. ‘
Hai
, what is this? You are blessed by the Goddess Lakshmi herself, but you were not meant to haveany children?’ Deliberately ascending an octave, she repeated, ‘There is no line at all in your palm. How can that be?’
    Heera glanced at Bob in the silence. She had looked stricken, he thought later, as he stood in front of the mirror, removing his tie. Unfathomably stricken, for he recalled his question to her in Hyderabad: could she contemplate a life with him and without children? She had appeared not to hesitate in accepting his proposal.
    Their announcement to Heera’s flabbergasted family led to the appointment of a lynx-eyed chaperone waiting for gora Bob to make an unlicensed move. Cinema visits were conducted without peanuts and in the company of curious relatives eager to behold Heera’s white fiancé in the dark.
    Tonight, on the evening of his seventeenth anniversary party, Bob felt constricted by the tight collar of the white sherwani he wore, although a frail little man in a black sherwani holding a whisky glass appeared to suffer no such discomfort.
    ‘Brahma-ji, you are such an expert in English Literature , and we haven’t heard your recitations for a long time. Why don’t you give us all a demonstration?’ prompted Heera gaily.
    ‘Su-er,’ assented the little man in a pronounced Sindhi accent. He handed his whisky glass to Heera and moved to the centre of the room to sit cross-legged on the carpet. There was a hush as, arm raised to render a qawali, he announced, ‘Hamlet’. It sounded like ‘omelette’. His voice boomed:
    To beeeee
(he paused overlong, looking meaningfully around the gathering)
    Orrrr
(long pause)
    Not to beeeeee
(he shook his grey locks),
that is the qu-ushtion:
    Whether ’tish nobler in the Mind to suffer
    The s-lings and arrows of outrageous fartune,
    Orrrr
(meaningful look)
to take up arams against A sea of troubles,
    And by opposing end them?
    There was a thin ripple of applause. Brahma Mansukhani was a retired doctor from Bradford, who had once been travelling in a minicab that was blocked by a red Ford Fiesta. Three young men wearing balaclavas sprang from the darkness, brandishing knives at the driver, wrenched the car door open, punched his face, took his money and vanished. They failed to notice the tiny terrified doctor slumped low, cowering in the back. The next day his son, a locum at a pharmacy, appeared before the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, charged with the unlawful sale of prescription painkillers. The combined shock could have rollercoasted the little doctor to drink, but he had turned to the Bard instead.
    His mentor’s birthday on 23 April filled him with a religious fervour of such potency that he undertook an annual pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon. Then he read of the controversy over the Bard’s precise date of birth in April. A cautious man, he now celebrated at home for an entire month.
    The chance discovery of an anagram website that had rearranged the letters ‘William Shakespeare’s birthday’ into ‘April’s skies: we may hail the Bard’ filled his days with activity as he created his own anagrams fromvarious Shakespearean plays to post on the Internet. His attempt to rearrange his own name ‘Brahma Mansukhani ’ concluded abruptly after the emergence of the embarrassing configuration ‘Bra Man Khan’.
    While ‘Shakespeare’ trilled in the