The Temple-goers Read Online Free Page B

didn’t know your grandfather was a poet. The turbaned gentleman who was in the army?’
    ‘No, not him. My father’s father. He died when my father was six.’
    ‘Oh.’
    Sanyogita didn’t like hearing about my father. She felt that his absence from my life was an unspoken source of pain whose emotional consequences she had inherited. To speak of it casually was almost to belittle the wrong she felt he had done my mother and me. She could be unforgiving in these matters.
    I had thought I would return to my mother’s flat that evening, but Sanyogita dissuaded me.
    ‘Yes, stay here, baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing staying in my aunt’s sex pad anyway.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘OK, this is totally confidential, and comes from my mother, who you know hates my aunt, but she told me that Chamunda uses your mother’s flat to meet lovers.’
    ‘What lovers?’
    ‘She has tons. There’s one in particular whom everyone calls the “French lieutenant”.’
    ‘Does my mother know about this?’
    ‘Of course, baby. Your mother’s the fixer.’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    Sanyogita laughed out loud, then smiled thoughtfully as if she’d said something with more truth in it than she’d intended. ‘I think it’s great. If I was a high-profile politician, I’d like my close girlfriends to make sure I had some fun in later life, especially in this hypocritical society.’
    ‘Well, it’s settled, then.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m never going back.’
    ‘Don’t! I’ll tell Vatsala to send for your bags.’

3
    ‘Junglee?’
    ‘Yes, yaar,’ the voice boomed down the telephone. ‘It’s a very sweet place. Not too expensive and the trainers are damn hot. I used to go myself in the promiscuous days.’
    ‘And now?’
    ‘Not so much now. Hubby doesn’t like it. What to do?’ She laughed uproariously. ‘I was a big slut, but just a one-man woman now. So sad! No?’
    Mandira was a Bombay friend of Sanyogita’s now married in Delhi. Her father had died when she was a teenager and she’d had a difficult transition into adult life, namely a string of bad relationships through which Sanyogita had been a constant support. She was one of the people whom Chamunda had in mind when she sometimes said of Sanyogita, ‘She likes birds with broken wings.’ And it was Mandira who recommended Junglee when I was looking for gyms in the area.
    In the days after I moved in with Sanyogita, I became anxious about routine. I had never worked as a writer before. I was back in the place where I grew up, supposedly writing about another place. I was worried that my ideas would slip away from me. I sometimes woke up with nightmares about having to call the agent in New York with the news that I had gone blank.
    My imagined routine consisted of waking up at seven; being at my desk by eight; working till one, then having lunch. After that, I would sleep for half an hour, read in English till three, then from three to five read my grandfather’s poetry in Urdu. (I still hadn’t found a teacher but had spoken to someone at the Ghalib Academy, a crumbling, art-deco building with pink walls and smelly carpets, who promised me a teacher would call in the next few days.) At six, I would either do yoga with Sanyogita in the flat or go for a walk in Lodhi Gardens. I wanted to be in bed by ten or eleven. I refused to go out at night until I had made a start with the revisions.
    But a few days into the routine, I realized there was a flaw. The exercise was too late and too little. By lunchtime I was longing for release. Sanyogita was doing errands and Vatsala buying vegetables when I stepped out from the study into the noon emptiness of the flat and decided to call Mandira about a gym.
    Junglee was in Sundar Nagar, and like Jorbagh, an early post-independence colony. I had known it as a child for its antique shops where I had also come with my mother. I called Uttam, my mother’s driver of many years, a gap-toothed Inspector Clouseau