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Product Details
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Release date: March 13, 2012
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 5.1 inches x 0.7 inches x 7.9 inches; 8 ounces
Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
Number of Pages: 336 pages ...
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Product Description
Review
“[Deborah] Moggach has served us a treat with this novel. Moving, sincere, funny.”—Independent on Sunday
“Underneath the ironies, [The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel] is a book about remembering—too late, or not too late—how to be alive.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“Classic Moggach: funny, touching, and . . . full of colours and visual details.”—The Daily Telegraph
Product Description
Now a major motion picture starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Billy Nighy, and Dev Patel
When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, reaches the breaking point with his difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: “Can’t we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away.” His prayer is seemingly answered when Ravi’s entrepreneurial cousin sets up a retirement home in India, hoping to re-create in Bangalore an elegant lost corner of England. Several retirees are enticed by the promise of indulgent living at a bargain price, but upon arriving, they are dismayed to find that restoration of the once sophisiticated hotel has stalled, and that such amenities as water and electricity are . . . infrequent. But what their new life lacks in luxury, they come to find, it’s plentiful in adventure, stunning beauty, and unexpected love.
About the Author
Deborah Moggach is the author of sixteen successful novels, including the bestselling Tulip Fever, and two collections of stories. Her screenplays include Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ON E
eee
The Truth will set you free.
Swami Pur na
Muriel Donnelly, an old girl in her seventies, was left in a hospi- tal cubicle for forty-eight hours. She had taken a tumble in Peck- ham High Street and was admitted with cuts, bruises and
suspected concussion. Two days she lay in A & E, untended, the blood stiffening on her clothes.
It made the headlines. TWO DAYS! screamed the tabloids. Two days on a trolley, old, neglected, alone. St. Jude’s was be- sieged by reporters, waylaying nurses and shouting into their mo- biles, didn’t they know the things were forbidden? Photos showed her lolling gray head and black eye. Plucky pensioner, she had survived the Blitz for this? Her image was beamed around the country: Muriel Donnelly, the latest victim of the collapsing NHS, the latest shocking statistic showing that the British health system, once the best in the world, was disintegrating in a welter of underfunding, staff shortages and collapsing morale.
A hand-wringing why-oh-why piece appeared in the Daily Mail, an internal investigation was ordered. Dr. Ravi Kapoor was interviewed. He was weary but polite. He said Mrs. Donnelly had received the appropriate care and that she was waiting for a bed. He didn’t mention that he would kill for an hour’s sleep. He didn’t mention that since the closure of the Casualty department at the neighboring hospital, his own, at St. Jude’s, had to cope with twice the number of drunks, drug overdoses and victims of pointless violence; that St. Jude’s would soon be closing because its site, in the center of Lewisham, was deemed too valuable for sick people; that the private consortium that had taken it over had sold the land to Safeway, who were planning to build a super- store.
Exhausted, Ravi drove home to Dulwich. Walking up his path, he paused to breathe deeply. It was seven in the evening; some- where a bird sang. Beside the path, daffodil blooms had shriveled into tissue paper. Spring had come and gone without his noticing.
In the kitchen, Pauline was reading the Evening Standard. The story had gathered momentum; other cases were printed, out- raged relatives told their tales.
Ravi opened a carton of apple juice. “Thing is, I didn’t men- tion the real reason the old bat wasn’t treated.”
Pauline fetched him a glass. “Why?”
“She wouldn’t let any darkies touch her.”
Pauline burst out laughing. At another time—another life- time, it seemed—Ravi would have laughed too. Nowadays that place was unreachable, a golden land where, refreshed and rested, he could have the energy to find things funny.
Upstairs the lavatory flushed.
“Who’s that?” Ravi’s head reared up. There was a silence.
“I was going to tell you,” said Pauline. “Who is it?”
Footsteps creaked overhead.
“He won’t be here for long, honestly, not this time,” she bab- bled. “I’ve told him he’s got to behave himself—”
“Who is it?”
He knew, of course.
Pauline looked at him. “It’s my father.”
Ravi was a man of compassion. He was a doctor; he tended the sick, he mended the broken. Those who were felled by accident, violence or even self-mutilation found in him a grave and reassuring presence. He bandaged up the wounds of those who lay at the wayside, unloved and unlovable; he staunched the bleeding. No- body was turned away, ever. To do the job, of course, required detachment. He had long ago learned a sort of numbed empathy. Bodies were problems to be solved. To heal them he had to vio- late them by invading their privacy, delving into them with his skilled fingers. These people were frightened. They were utterly alone, for sickness is the loneliest place on earth.
Work sealed him from the world that delivered him its casual- ties, the doors sighing open and surrendering them up to him; he was suspended from the life to which he would return at the end of his shift. Once home, however, he showered off the hospital smell and became a normal person. Volatile, fastidious, a lover of choral music and computer games, sympathetic enough but somewhat drained. Of course he was compassionate, but no more or less than anybody else. After all, the Hippocratic Oath need not apply on home territory. And especially not to a disgust- ing old sod like Norman.
Barely a week had passed and already Ravi wanted to murder his father-in-law. Norman was a retired structural engineer, a monumental bore and a man of repulsive habits. He had been thrown out of his latest residential home for putting his hand up a nurse’s skirt. “Inappropriate sexual behavior,” they called it, though Ravi could not imagine what appropriate behavior could possibly be, where Norman was concerned. His amorous anec- dotes, like a loop of Muzak, reappeared with monotonous regu- larity. Already Ravi had heard, twice this week, the one about catching the clap in Bulawayo. Being a doctor, Ravi was treated to Norman’s more risqué reminiscences in a hoarse whisper.
“Get me some Viagra, old pal,” he said, when Pauline was out of the room. “Bet you’ve got some upstairs.”
The man cut his toenails in the lounge! Horrible yellowing shards of rock. Ravi had never liked him, and age had deepened this into loathing of the old goat with his phony regimental tie and stained trousers. Ruthlessly selfish, Norman had neglected his daughter all her life; ten years earlier, however, pancreatic cancer had put his long-suffering wife out of her misery and he had battened on to Pauline. Once, on safari in Kenya, Ravi had watched a warthog muscling its way to a water hole, barging aside any animal that got in its way. He retained, for some rea- son, a vivid image of its mud-caked arse.
“I can’t stand much more of this,” he hissed. Nowadays he and Pauline had to whisper like children. Despite his general di- lapidation, Norman’s hearing was surprisingly sharp.
“I’m doing my best, Ravi, I’m seeing another place tomorrow, but it’s difficult to find anywhere else to take him. Word gets around, you know.”
“Can’t we just send him away somewhere?” “Yes, but where?” she asked.
“Somewhere far, far away?”
“Ravi, that’s not nice. He is my father.”
Ravi looked at his wife. She changed when her father was around. She became more docile, in fact goody-goody, the dutiful daughter anxious that the two men in her life get along. She laughed shrilly at her father’s terrible jokes, willing Ravi to join in. There was a glazed artificiality to her.
Worse still, with her father in the house he noticed the similar- ity between them. Pauline had her father’s square, heavy jaw and small eyes. On him they looked porcine, but one could still see the resemblance.
Norman had stayed with them several times during the past year—whenever he was kicked out of a residential home, in fact. The stays were lengthening as establishments that hadn’t heard of him became harder to find. “The man’s a menace,” said the manager of the last one, “straight out of Benny Hill. We lost a lovely girl from Nova Scotia.”
“Thing is, he’s frightened of women,” said Ravi. “That’s why he has to jump them all the time.”
Pauline looked at him. “At least someone does.”
There was a silence. They were preparing Sunday lunch. Ravi yanked open the oven door and pulled out the roasting tin.
“I’m so tired,” he said.
It was true. He was always exhausted. He needed time to re- vive himself, to restore himself. He needed a good night’s sleep. He needed to lie on the sofa and listen to Mozart’s Requiem. Only then could he become a husband again—a human being, even. The house was so small, with her father in it. Ravi’s body was in a permanent state of tension. Every room he went into, Norman was there. Just at the Lacrimosa he would blunder in, the transistor hanging on a string around his neck burbling the cricket commentary from Sri Lanka.
“He uses my computer.”
“Don’t change the subject,” said Pauline.
The place stank of Norman’s cigarettes. When they banished him outside, the patio became littered with butts like the Out- patients doorway at St. Jude’s.
“He downloads pornographic sites.” When Ravi entered his study the chair was skewed from the desk; the room felt violated. Fag-ends lay drowned in the saucer underneath his maidenhair fern.
Pauline slit open a packet of beans. They both knew what they were talking about.
“I’m sorry.” Ravi stroked her hair. “I want to, really. It’s just, the walls are so thin.”
It was true. At night, when they lay in bed, Ravi could almost feel her father a few inches away, lying in the pigsty that had once been the spare bedroom.
“But he’s asleep,” said Pauline.
“Yes, I can hear that, all too distinctly.”
“He is amazing,” she replied. “I’ve never known anybody who can snore and fart at the same time.”
Ravi laughed. Suddenly they were conspirators. Pauline put the beans on the counter and turned to her husband. Ravi put his arms around her and kissed her—truly kissed her, the first time in weeks. Her mouth opened against his; her tongue, pressing again...
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