Chapter 12: The Spinster Society

EELA — 1955–1968

They called themselves the Spinster Society and they were magnificent.

Padma was the instigator — Padma, who had survived the war and a broken engagement and the particular scandal of a woman in 1950s India who chose to live alone, and who had emerged from all of it with an appetite for life that was so voracious it bordered on the indecent. She was tall, angular, with a laugh that came out in short explosive bursts and a talent for saying the precise thing that everyone was thinking and no one had the nerve to articulate.

Hetal was the anchor — quiet, steady, blessed with a common sense so robust that it could withstand any amount of Padma's enthusiasm. She wore spectacles that she was constantly losing and cardigans that she knitted herself and she read novels the way other people breathed — constantly, automatically, as though fiction were a biological requirement. She had been engaged twice and married neither time, and when asked why, she said: 'I keep choosing men who are less interesting than my books. It's becoming a pattern.'

And Eela was — what was she? She was the one who drew the maps. The one who planned the routes and booked the tickets and made the lists and worried about visas and vaccinations and whether they had packed enough clean underwear. She was the organiser, the worrier, the one who lay awake at night in hotel rooms and pensions and hostels and guest houses across three continents, listening to Padma snore and Hetal turn pages, and wondered whether this — this restless, beautiful, unmoored life — was enough.

Their first trip was Goa, in 1955. Three days on the beach at Calangute, which was, in those days, an empty stretch of white sand backed by coconut palms and frequented by precisely no one except fishermen and the occasional Portuguese priest. They swam in their petticoats because they had not thought to bring swimming costumes. They ate fish curry and rice at a shack on the beach where the owner's wife cooked over an open fire and the food was so good that Padma cried — actually cried — and demanded the recipe, which was given freely and which Padma promptly lost on the train home.

'It doesn't matter,' said Hetal. 'We'll go back. The woman will still be there. The fish will still be there. The beach will still be there.'

'You can't be sure of that.'

'I can be sure of the fish. Fish are reliable. It's people who disappear.'

The Goa trip established the pattern. Every year — sometimes twice — they went somewhere. Mahabaleshwar, where Lata lived and where the strawberries were so sweet that eating them felt like a moral failing. Darjeeling, where the tea plantations rolled down the hillsides in orderly green waves and the Himalayas appeared at dawn like a hallucination. Rajasthan, where the desert heat made the air shimmer and the forts rose out of the sand like the dreams of a civilisation that had decided that beauty was more important than practicality.

They went to Sri Lanka. They went to Nepal. They went to Burma, which was beautiful and troubled and where Eela found herself standing on a hillside outside Mandalay, looking at the landscape that had killed Rajesh's comrades and that might have killed Vijay if fortune had been less kind, and feeling — not grief, exactly, but a deep, solemn acknowledgement of the debt that the living owed to the dead.

And in 1968, they went to San Francisco.

*

The idea had been Padma's, naturally.

'America,' she announced, over chai and Shrewsbury biscuits at Eela's parents' house, with the air of a woman unveiling a plan that had already been decided and was now merely being communicated. 'San Francisco, specifically. I've been reading about it. There's a movement — people living freely, thinking freely, loving freely. It's called the counterculture. I want to see it.'

'You want to see hippies,' said Hetal, not looking up from her book.

'I want to see people who have decided that the way things are is not the way things have to be. Yes, some of them are hippies. Some of them are also poets and musicians and philosophers and — look, the point is, it sounds extraordinary. And we're the Spinster Society. Extraordinary is what we do.'

Eela had hesitated. San Francisco was far — farther than anywhere they had been, farther than she had ever imagined going. But Padma's enthusiasm was infectious, and Hetal's quiet acceptance was reassuring, and the truth was that Eela needed to go far. She needed distance — from Pune, from the house, from the journals she had been writing in every night, from the memories that surfaced every time she passed a child of Rajan's age on the street and felt the familiar lurch of recognition followed by the familiar stab of loss.

They flew to London first — three days of museums and grey skies and a restaurant in Soho where they ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and agreed, unanimously, that English food was an acquired taste they had no intention of acquiring. Then New York — overwhelming, loud, the smell of hot dogs and exhaust and the particular metallic tang of a city that ran on ambition and coffee. And finally, San Francisco.

The city was unlike anything she had experienced. The light was different — golden, warm, the Pacific light that painters had been trying to capture for centuries. The buildings climbed the hills in pastel rows. The bay glittered. And everywhere — on the streets, in the parks, on the steps of the houses — there were people. Young people, mostly, with long hair and bare feet and clothes that looked like they had been assembled from the contents of a dressing-up box. They wore flowers. They played music. They greeted strangers with the word peace and meant it, or at least performed meaning it with such conviction that the distinction hardly mattered.

'I know what I am now,' Eela said, standing on a hilltop in Golden Gate Park, the wind off the Pacific pulling at her hair. 'I'm a free spirit.'

Padma and Hetal exchanged glances. 'You've always been a free spirit, Eela,' said Padma. 'You've just been pretending not to be.'

They were in Haight-Ashbury when they met Janaki. She was sitting on a park bench, rolling a cigarette with the practised ease of a woman who had been rolling cigarettes since long before it became fashionable, and she was watching the three Indian women in their cotton saris with the particular interest of a person who recognised fellow travellers.

'You ladies look like you could use a guide,' she said.

'We could use a great many things,' said Padma. 'A guide would be an excellent start.'

Janaki was in her mid-forties — older than most of the Haight-Ashbury residents, which gave her a certain authority. She had grey-streaked hair that she wore loose and a smile that was both warm and knowing, the smile of a woman who had seen the best and worst of the counterculture and had decided, on balance, that the best outweighed the worst. She took them to a park that was full of people sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed and their hands on their knees.

'We're meditating,' said a woman next to Eela, opening one eye.

'I'm afraid I don't know how,' said Eela.

'Close your eyes. Close down your thoughts. Just listen.'

Eela closed her eyes. She tried to close down her thoughts, which was like trying to close down a marketplace — the noise simply relocated. But slowly, gradually, something shifted. The sounds around her began to separate and clarify — a low droning hum, many voices together, and beneath it, a musical instrument she could not identify, something between a guitar and a sitar, something that vibrated not in her ears but in her chest. Her breathing slowed. The marketplace quieted. And then — she was not sure how to describe it — she was outside herself. Looking down at a woman sitting on the grass with an expression of complete peace, and the woman was her.

'Hey,' said the woman beside her, when Eela's eyes finally opened. 'You're a natural. You sure this is your first time?'

'Absolutely,' said Eela. 'Goodness, I feel quite marvellous.'

*

Janaki's partner was called Lalitha.

She was tall, slender, with grey-black hair tied in a loose bun and skin tanned to a deep brown by years of California sun. She grew vegetables in the garden behind the house she shared with Janaki, and when Eela first saw her emerge from behind a row of tall plants with mint leaves in her hand and a friendly smile on her face, something shifted — a recognition, a resonance, as though a string inside her had been plucked by a hand she could not see.

Lalitha reminded her of Billu. Not in appearance — they looked nothing alike — but in presence. The same quiet authority. The same assumption that the world would arrange itself around her. The same way of looking at you that made you feel simultaneously seen and assessed.

'We're in an open relationship,' Janaki explained, over mint tea in a room decorated with Eastern imagery — a statue of the Buddha, silk hangings, cushions scattered across the floor.

'What does that mean?' asked Padma.

'It means we can love whoever the hell we want, including each other,' said Lalitha. 'We're not exclusively anything. We're just — open.'

'Good for you,' said Padma, in a tone so perfectly English-Indian that everyone laughed.

They moved in the next day. The house had spare rooms and Janaki and Lalitha were generous hosts — generous with their space, their food, their time, and their philosophy, which boiled down to a single principle: live authentically. Not as the world expects. Not as your family demands. Not as convention dictates. Authentically. As yourself.

For Eela, this was both a revelation and a homecoming. She had spent her life — all forty-four years of it — navigating between who she was and who she was expected to be. The gap between the two had grown wider with each passing year, until the effort of maintaining the performance had become exhausting. Here, in this house, with these women, the gap closed. Not because San Francisco was utopia — it was not; Janaki was honest about the darker side of the counterculture, the drugs, the exploitation, the naivety that sometimes tipped into stupidity — but because it was a place where the question who are you? was asked without judgement and answered without apology.

She told Lalitha about Billu on the third night. They were sitting in the garden, sharing a joint — Eela's first, and she coughed so hard that Lalitha had to pat her back — and the marijuana loosened something that sobriety kept tightly wound.

'I loved a woman,' she said. 'During the war. She was my best friend and I loved her and she loved me and we had a child — not together, obviously, but I had a child and she raised him and then she took him from me and I have not seen either of them in nineteen years.'

Lalitha listened. She did not interrupt. She did not express shock or sympathy or any of the responses that Eela had been dreading. She simply listened, her dark eyes steady, the mint-scented smoke drifting between them.

'Did you love her the way you loved the father?' Lalitha asked.

'No. I loved the father simply. I loved her — I loved Billu — the way you love a hurricane. With terror and awe and the absolute certainty that you will be destroyed.'

'And were you?'

'Yes. And then I was rebuilt. By other people. By myself. By time.'

Lalitha ran her fingers through Eela's hair. The gesture was so tender, so unhurried, so completely devoid of agenda that Eela felt tears forming and did not stop them. 'You're a free spirit, Eela,' Lalitha said. 'You've survived a hurricane and you're still standing. That makes you extraordinary.'

'I don't feel extraordinary.'

'The extraordinary ones never do.'

They kissed. It was not planned — or perhaps it was, in the way that certain things are planned by the body long before the mind catches up. Lalitha's lips were warm and tasted of mint and marijuana and the particular sweetness of a woman who lived without pretence. The kiss was gentle. Exploratory. The kiss of two people who understood that what was happening between them was temporary and were determined to make it matter anyway.

They spent the rest of the summer together. Not exclusively — Lalitha was true to her word about openness, and Janaki seemed genuinely unbothered, perhaps because she had developed her own quiet attachment to Padma, who was flattered and amused and ultimately uninterested, though she handled the situation with a grace that surprised everyone, including herself.

In those weeks, Eela learned things she had not known she needed to learn. She learned to meditate — properly, deeply, accessing that place outside herself where the noise stopped and the pain dulled and something that might have been peace took its place. She learned to say I am bisexual — not in those words, which did not yet exist in her vocabulary, but in the simpler, more direct formulation that Lalitha used: I love who I love. She learned that the years she had spent aching for Billu were not a weakness or a perversion but a fact — a fact as solid and unremarkable as the colour of her eyes.

On the last night, they stood on a hilltop — Eela, Padma, Hetal, Lalitha, Janaki — with their arms outstretched and their tongues stuck out, tasting the sky.

'Can you taste it?' said Hetal, giggling.

'It could be the pot,' said Padma.

They collapsed in a heap, laughing. Lalitha rolled a joint. Eela took a long breath and passed it along the line. Then she turned to Lalitha and kissed her one last time.

'Will you miss me?' Eela asked.

'Terribly, darling.' Lalitha adopted an English accent that made Eela think, painfully, of Billu. 'But do me a favour, Eela — don't miss me for too long. It's a waste of your life.'

'I'm going to miss you.'

'Good. That means I mattered. But Eela — live well. That's the only thing I ask. Live well.'

At the airport, Lalitha ran her fingers through Eela's hair one final time and touched her cheek. 'You're a real free spirit, Eela. Live well.'

Eela carried those words home. She carried them back across the Pacific and through customs and onto the bus from Bombay to Pune and into the house where her parents were waiting and Hema had made chai and the garden was in full monsoon bloom and the neem tree stood in the rain like a benediction.

She was forty-four. She had loved a man who died in the sky. She had loved a woman who took her son. She had loved a woman in San Francisco who taught her to meditate and taste the sky and say I love who I love without flinching.

She was, at last, free.

Not happy — she would not have called it happy, because happiness required the absence of loss and her loss was permanent. But free. The particular freedom of a woman who had stopped pretending, who had stopped apologising, who had looked at the life the world expected of her and said: no. This is mine. I will live it my way.

And she did.