Read Online The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach - Free Book Online Page A

up with that sort of tape they used, in films, to gag prisoners. She scrabbled at it with her fingernails. On the PM program there was an item about woodlands. Apparently they were too thick and dark. The government had decided that the countryside was now a leisure facility and that woods were too alarming for its citizens—sorry, customers —particularly ethnic minorities who weren’t used to them, and after consultation with the community was putting in place a scheme to make them more user-friendly. Trees would be cleared to create more open, glade-type environments with seating, disabled access and leisure facilities.
    “I’m seventy-four years old, Laszlo,” Dorothy said. “I can no longer be surprised by anything. Maybe those who have suffered stress disorders caused by overpowering vegetation have been claiming for counseling. Maybe, once those messy trees have been cleared away, those too big to wipe will sue the relevant agency for making the seating too discriminatingly small for their enormous bottoms.”
    She often spoke aloud to her dead sweetheart. It was one of the consolations of living alone. The relationship had been doomed but in her imagination Laszlo was forever hers, leaping to help her in his polite Hungarian way.
    “Help me to wrench off this blasted tape,” Dorothy said. “Help me to survive.”
    Life was full of incomprehensible instructions. The manual for her video recorder was twenty pages long, in tiny print that only an ant could read. It no doubt catered for possibilities undreamed of by those who, until then, had been content with their existence. The funny thing was that the more choice there was, the more powerless one felt.
    “Am I just a batty old woman, Laszlo? Given the choice, would you have tired of me by now?”
    Dorothy finally extracted the video from its Jiffy Bag. She slotted it into the machine, poured herself a whisky, and sat down in front of the TV. Adam, her surrogate son, was a charming young man. She owed him an honest opinion.
    A picture bloomed on the screen. It was the Taj Mahal.
    Dorothy gazed at the TV. She couldn’t see the connection with chat shows, but then many connections escaped her nowadays. She could watch ads in the cinema and have no idea what they were going on about, not a clue.
    The sun was sinking—no, it was rising. That dewy, pearly light … it was the dawn. The marble mausoleum glowed, radiant. The camera panned around to the Yamuna River; submerged in it, up to their necks, stood water buffalo. Sitar music played.
    “Welcome to India,” said a voice. “A land of timeless beauty.”
    “W as that a joke?” said Dorothy on the phone. “If so, it was in very poor taste.”
    “Sorry,” said Adam. “I sent the wrong tape. It was meant for my parents.”
    Dorothy seemed extraordinarily upset. He could see it could be construed as tactless, to send an old lady an ad for a retirement home, but where was her sense of humor? Dorothy had never been easy, but age was clearly worsening her temper.
    Adam was standing at the window, poised for action. In his street there was severe parking congestion. His own car, like several others, was double-parked. At any moment one of his neighbors might emerge from a house and drive off, in which case Adam had to be ready to leap out and grab the space before anybody else got it. Some people, to avoid losing a space, never moved their cars at all and had resorted to public transport.
    “Send the tape back,” he said, “and I’ll send you the other one.”
    “Why don’t you come round for supper?” asked Dorothy. “Haven’t seen you for a while. Then we can do it in person.”
    “I’d love to sometime—oh, blast, must rush.” Outside, a car was pulling out. Adam slammed down the receiver and ran out of the house.
    He meant to phone Dorothy back, he really did. But then Sergio came home with some squid he had bought for their dinner party and they had started hunting for the recipe they had