What Else is there for a Boy Like Me?

Patrick Moon

Description

A successful City solicitor, in his mid-forties, Patrick Moon finds himself disenchanted with the law but enchanted with India. A decision to abandon the one gives him the freedom to return to the other, as he tries to come to terms with the opportunity he has created for himself, the chance to reinvent his life.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 03 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783067886
• Langue: English

Extrait

What else is there for a boy like me?

PATRICK MOON

Copyright © 2014 Patrick Moon
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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For Mohamd, of course
Contents

Cover


BEFORE


One


Two


Three


Four


Five


Six


Seven


Eight


Nine


AFTER


Ten


Eleven


Twelve


Thirteen


NOW


Fourteen


ADDITIONAL MATERIAL


Author’s Note


Acknowledgements


Also by Patrick Moon
BEFORE
One

I wonder, am I the only passenger in this first class cabin who has abandoned his means of paying for such extravagances?
Until three weeks ago, I was a solicitor. I had been a solicitor for twenty years. And then I stopped. People keep telling me I’m ‘brave’ but, as Air India’s senior hostess serves me caviar, I know that ‘brave’ is simply code for ‘crazy’. The week when you’ve said goodbye to your income is hardly the moment for acquiring a taste for Sevruga. Glancing round the half-empty cabin, I count just seven fellow passengers: two indulging these gastronomic treats, the rest sleeping through them. I used to be part of all this, affording significant sums for trivial comforts. I was a well-rewarded partner in a large London law firm. Then I stopped. And now I feel guiltily out of place, a fraud, an imposter awake on a long journey.
‘I knew you’d do this soon,’ said my secretary, when I told her I was resigning. ‘You’ve been a different person since you first went to India.’ It wasn’t that I hated my life as a lawyer. It would have been easier to do this if I’d seen it all as a mistake; but I didn’t. I was good at it. I found it stimulating. Yet I didn’t want to wake up one day, aged sixty, having done only one thing. So – I have to keep saying it to get used to the idea – I stopped.
That makes resigning sound like a snap decision – an impulsive, even whimsical severing from my past – but it wasn’t. I hadn’t stepped that far out of character. I’d been flirting with the idea for a few years but I needed more time to plan, more savings to cushion me. Then events made me act sooner than I intended.
‘First time coming to India, sir?’ asks a second sareed hostess, topping up my champagne.
‘Third,’ I boast, thinking how incredible that my first, just two years ago, was the only time I had ventured outside Europe. I came all this way for a week. With everyone saying I’d either love it or loathe it, I didn’t want to waste too much treasured holiday finding out which. Yet I returned a lost cause.

‘The wrench of leaving India is no ordinary end-of-holiday sadness,’ I wrote to my father at the end of that first visit. ‘The rest of the world will no longer be the same, London miserably monochrome after the colours of Rajasthan… Yesterday we rose before dawn for an early flight, only to find the check-ins dark and deserted, thanks to a schedule change, which everyone except Mr Sharma, our guide, seemed to know about. “I am being very surprised,” was all he could say. And how well that continuous present tense sums up these eight precious days. A state of constant amazement and wonder...’
‘You are coming for maybe three, four weeks?’ asks the final member of the trio pampering the eight of us.
‘Three or four months,’ I correct her, wondering whether, if circumstances had been different, I’d have acted at all. I was too timid, too reluctant to let go, too afraid of casting aside my well-defined place in the world, too frightened of failure.
‘So we are not seeing you again until… March, April?’ she calculates, as if genuinely saddened by the wait.
‘You won’t see me at all,’ I laugh ruefully. ‘I’ll be back there in economy.’ I should be in economy now, but I persuaded myself I deserved a last luxury. That was part of my problem – working hard to pay for the treats that consoled me for working hard – a vicious spiral that I’ll be glad to break. And yet I wonder how much economic simplification I shall really welcome. Or be able to live with.
‘You are coming to Delhi for holidays?’ my inquisitor persists, apparently determined to locate me in her scheme of things.
I smile as if to say ‘yes’ because how can I explain why I’m coming? I’m not even sure myself. Yet as soon as I knew that I could escape by the end of the year, there was never any doubt where I’d be spending my winter. I’ve never felt more compelled about anything in my life.
*
Even the business class passengers are held back behind a cordon of cabin staff while we, the select eight, make an unruffled exit. The others strain impatiently for release, tensing themselves for a hectic dash down the long, half-lit corridors. I myself am about to break into a sprint, remembering how the smallest delay could cost hours in the immigration queue. Yet tonight the passages are eerily empty, as if all human life has been banished to ease our unhurried progress.
Turning the corner, we find the hall of the passport control desks equally deserted – except, that is, for a single figure holding a signboard on a pole, as if he were stationed there to protest at our arrival. His handwritten text is a short list of names and I notice that one of them is mine. My seven companions show similar signs of recognition. Immediately, the demonstrator gives a blast on a whistle, confirming his opposition to our entry, while running footsteps suggest guards about to bar our way. However, the others know better. It is only the sound of eight breathless clerks, scurrying out from their tea break to open a dedicated counter for each of the favoured few and, in little more than a minute, I am standing beside eight sets of suitcases, set neatly apart from the chaos of the baggage carousels.
*
Of course, it’s not just my relationship with India that I need to examine. There’s also what my friend, Elektra, calls my relationship with myself. Elektra thinks this is the only issue, but then she’s a psychotherapist. She thinks I did hate my life as a lawyer, when I wasn’t busy hating myself. She says I need every minute of my time away, just to get twenty years of ‘denial’ out of my system.
I certainly need time to consider what comes next – a question that I’m trying to keep as open as possible. I need to put some distance between the past and the future. Too many old patterns of thought need purging before new ones can safely be let in. For the moment, there are just two things I’m sure about: one, I had to stop being a solicitor; the other, I had to return to India.
*
The airport is just as I remember: grey, grim and utterly unromantic but that doesn’t stop an odd surge of emotion as I savour what, for me, will always be India’s special smell. More evocative than the aromas of cumin and coriander from pavement kitchens or the stench of squalor in the gutter, it will be the smell of bed-linen through the coming weeks, the perfume of Indian laundries on shirts taken home to England. It is simply the comfortable, lived-in smell of warm dust. And it tells me: I’m back.
*
Most of my friends think I’ll soon see sense – that, as soon as I’ve had my little spree, I’ll simply tiptoe quietly back to the sane world of law; but I don’t think I shall. There was a time when a few months’ break might have done the trick, given other interests some temporary expression; but not now. I’ve changed. I’ve glimpsed freedom, caught sight of the possibility of doing something that matters to me. I want to spend the rest of my life thinking it’s important, not just necessary, to get up in the mornings.
*
A bare-foot nine-year-old is tugging at my heaviest case, determined to heave it onto a trolley, propelled by an even younger boy. ‘Taxi, taxi,’ he jabbers, pointing to the waiting rank.
‘No taxi.’ I yank the trolley back and scan the waiting crowd behind the barrier for a face that looks as if it might be scanning the arrivals for me.
‘This way, this way,’ the boy insists, as my bags set off in the opposite direction.
‘Wait!’ I protest, still searching for my name in the bobbing sea of cardboard placards at the fence. ‘Private driver this side…’
‘Private driver?’ queries the boy, as well he might. I’ve hired a car, you see, and with it a driver. Elektra calls me ‘the chauffeur-driven drop-out’ but how else would I get the freedom and flexibility that I take for granted in Europe? I’m not sure whether I’d be allowed to hire a car and drive it myself; but I’ve seen enough of Indian roads to know it would be madness. In theory, you drive on the left; in reality, you drive on whichever side is emptiest, or over an adjoining field, if need be, so long as you fight a route through the avalanche of oncoming traffic and animals. It’s not just quaintly chaotic, it’s dangerous.
My first thought was to travel more ‘authentically’, with a rucksack and a railway timetable – until I read a book that warned me that I’d need to chain my bag to my ankle, if I ever thought of sleeping on a train. Anyway, there was too much I wanted to bring, to make th