Anita and Me

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I once tried explaining to our next door neighbour, Mrs Worrall, why my parents seemed to have so many siblings. ‘It’s just being polite, see,’ I said. ‘Like saying sir or madam, to call them Auntie and Uncle. ‘Cos we have different words for proper relatives, like my dad’s younger brother is called a Chacha, his elder brother is called a Thaya. But me mom’s sister is called a Masee, and my dad’s sister a Buaji…So you know the difference between pretend ones and real ones.’

It was a litany I knew well, from being sat down in front of photos from India and forced to memorise my parents’ many brothers and sisters by name, occupation, and personality quirks. ‘This is your Thaya,’ papa would say. ‘Clerk, sweet tooth, married, prone to crying over nothing in particular as if committing them to memory would make up for not being with them.

Mrs Worrall listened carefully to my monologue and then said, ‘Yow must be mad. What do yow want more relatives for? Yow want extra, tek a few of mine. Selfish sods, all of em,’ and lumbered back into her kitchen.

But I could not imagine existing without them, although I hated the way they continually interfered in my upbringing, inevitably backing up my parents’ complaints. ‘Look at you, like a “jamardani!”’ mama would exclaim when I tumbled into the lounge smelling of pig dung after a good rambling session. ‘Hah, a sweeper!’ the Aunties would mutter in stereophonic sound. ‘Spoiled your lovely smock and all …’ But it would never end there. This was a moral marathon, and they took up the baton with pride, passing it amongst themselves long after mama and papa had run out of breath and were having a cold drink on the sidelines.

‘Why behave like a boy all the time?…Stand with your legs together…Are those nose drippings on your sleeve?…Why don’t you grow your hair, do you want to be a boy, Meena?’ And so in a few short phrases I had progressed from a slightly messy girl into a potential sex change candidate, all done in this jocular caring way, as they showed how much they loved my parents by having a go at me on their behalf. And then suddenly the session would be over and I would be enveloped in crackling silk bosoms and rough clumsy hands, fed morsels off over-loaded plates and shunted away to sit in the Kids’ Room, which was wherever the television was, all recriminations forgotten.

I rarely rebelled openly against this communal policing, firstly because it somehow made me feel safe and wanted, and secondly, because I knew how intensely my parents valued these people they so readily renamed as family, faced with the loss of their own blood relations. I understood this because of the snippets of stories I would hear when the grown-ups would sit around on the floor, replete and sleepy, exchanging anecdotes that reinforced their shared histories, confirming that they were not the only ones who were living out this unfolding adventure. ‘I got off the train at Paddington,’ papa would begin, stifling a satisfied burp, ‘sick as a dog from that damn boat, twenty-five pounds in my pocket, and I looked up across the platform and I saw …’ ‘Me!’ my Uncle Amman would say proudly. ‘Va, you looked like a film star, Kumarsaab, that Jimmy Cagney suit and all.’ ‘So, naturally, I go up and introduce myself, and …’ ‘And we found out our cousins had gone to the same college! So we went back to my home and that was that!’ Uncle Amman would finish with a flourish, as if it were perfectly natural to meet a total stranger and within ten minutes, find him a meal, a home and a list of Situations Vacant.

During this particular story, mama would always listen with a patient, fond look, absorbing the history she had not been around to witness. Papa had left her in Delhi whilst he tried his luck in England, promising to send for her as soon as he had discovered the promised gold beneath the dog shit on the streets. We have the photograph taken on the day of his departure, it looks like a still from one of the old black and white movies I used to watch on Saturday afternoons (after the football and before the wrestling). Papa is leaning out of a steam train window in a brilliant white shirt, an overcoat slung over his waving arm. The smoke rises like cold-morning breath around his face and he is backlit by a rising sun. He is smiling his gap-toothed smile, though his eyes are intense. Mama stands on the platform, the fingers of one hand slightly raised, as if she is afraid to wave him goodbye. She is impossibly young and utterly bereft, her long chiffon dupatta is frozen in mid-curl, lifted by the wind. Even in such a small photograph her longing is palpable, the way her fingers say what her mouth cannot.

This was always one of my favourites, this image of my parents as epic, glamorous figures, touched by romantic tragedy. I knew there was plenty more where that came from too; I have heard the excited whispers between the Aunties whenever my parents’ marriage was mentioned, odd words from which I concocted a whole scenario – ‘…Saw her riding her bike round college…At first sight it was…Her parents, of course…Long negotiations…Such a love story!’ I was in a fever of excitement the first time I eavesdropped on these juicy morsels. My parents in a love story! I kept myself awake imagining them chasing each other around old Indian streets (which were basically English streets with a few cows lounging around on the corners), mama on a bicycle laughing loudly as papa tried to grab onto her saddle and haul himself beside her whilst various old people looked out of half-shuttered windows and tutted under their breath.

But when I confronted mama about her courtship adventures, her face closed up like a fan. ‘Don’t be so silly!’ she sniffed. ‘We were introduced by an uncle. It all was done through the proper channels. Listening to your elders’ conversation again …’ And that was that. I did not have the courage to ask her why there was only one single photograph of their wedding, when all the other Aunties each had a van load of nuptial albums, which they would whip out at the slightest excuse, and sigh over their eighteen-inch waists and demure demeanours, neither of which would ever return. In my parents’ album, this single photograph is given a page all on its own. Mama and papa are seated in the back of a car. Papa wears a turban with strings of pearls attached to the front which obscure his face, except for one guarded eye. Mama is in the foreground, her delicate neck seemingly bent under the weight of a heavily encrusted dupatta. She looks up into the camera lens with the expected posture of all new brides, a victim’s pose showing passivity and bewilderment, stressing the girl would much rather stay with her family than drive off to a bed with her new husband. But mama is not crying, although her head is bowed, her gaze is direct and calm, and there is a light in her pupils which papa said was the camera flash, but which I recognise as joy.

Individually, the Aunties were a powerful force, my mother was an Auntie to several kids in her own right too, but together they were a formidable mafia whose collective approval was a blessing, and whose communal contempt was a curse wrapped up in sweet sari-shaped packages. I found myself continually surprised at how these smiling women who would serve up their husband’s food first with such wifely devotion, could also be capable of such gentle malice.

For example, when I once confronted my mother about the Front Garden dilemma, I unwisely did this in front of the Aunties. Under their benevolent gaze, I tried to explain to her what a social embarrassment it was to have such a bare, ugly display in front of our house and could she not possibly consider buying an ornamental well, make some effort to fit in with the neighbourhood? Mama shot her posse a knowing look and explained that all this garden frippery, gnomes, wells and the like, was an English thing. ‘They have to mark out their territory …’ It was on the tip of her tongue to add ‘…like dogs’, but the Aunties recognised their cue and launched into their own collected proverbs on English behaviour. ‘They treat their dogs like children, no, better than their children …’ ‘They expect their kids to leave home at sixteen, and if they don’t, they ask for rent! Rent from your kids!’ ‘They don’t like bathing, and when they do, they sit in their own dirty water instead of showering …’ ‘The way they wash up, they never rinse the soap off the dishes …’ ‘You know that barmaid-type woman from up the hill has run away again, this time with the driving instructor. He is called Kenneth and wears tank tops…It’s the children I pity …’

At this point I would be sent on a non-existent errand so my mother could finish the latest piece of yard gossip whilst the Aunties would listen wide-eyed, ears flapping, moustaches quivering, glad they had made the perilous journey from the civilised side of Wolverhampton to catch up on the peculiar goings on of the ‘gores’. There was much affectionate laughter, but laughter all the same, tinged with something like revenge.

But mama was not laughing today. The sun was hot now and I felt sick with all the sugar I had consumed; every sweet had tasted only of one thing, Guilt. Through the open front door, I could hear my parents having what they called one of their ‘discussions’, which began as a stilted, almost embarrassed conversation as if two neighbours who barely knew each other had met on the steps of a VD clinic, progressed to a strangely musical monologue by my father, accompanied on percussion by mother banging down various pots and pans, and always ended with a male vocal explosion and a tangible female silence which invaded the house like a sad damp smell. I wondered vaguely if they were arguing about the house.

Whenever my father got sick of our three-up-three-down with its high uneven walls and narrow winding stairs, sick of the damp in the pantry, the outside toilet, the three buses it took to get to work, taking a bath in our bike shed and having to whisper when he wanted to shout, he’d turn to my mother and say, ‘You wanted this house, remember that.’

My mother grew up in a small Punjabi village not far from Chandigarh. As she chopped onions for the evening meal or scrubbed the shine back onto a steel pan or watched the clouds of curds form in a bowl of slowly setting homemade yoghurt, any action with a rhythm, she would begin a mantra about her ancestral home. She would chant of a three-storeyed flat-roofed house, blinkered with carved wooden shutters around a dust yard where an old-fashioned pump stood under a mango tree.

She would talk of running with her tin mug to the she-goat tethered to the tree and, holding the mug under its nipples, pulling down a foaming jet of milk straight into her father’s morning tea. She spoke of the cobra who lived in the damp grasses beneath the fallen apples in the vast walled orchard, of the peacocks whose keening kept her awake on rainy monsoon nights, of her Muslim neighbours whom they always made a point of visiting on festivals, bringing sweetmeats to emphasise how the land they shared was more important than the religious differences that would soon tear the Punjab in two.

Yet, in England, when all my mother’s friends made the transition from relatives’ spare rooms and furnished lodgings to homes of their own, they all looked for something ‘modern’. ‘It’s really up-to-date, Daljit,’ one of the Aunties would preen as she gave us the grand tour of her first proper home in England. ‘Look, extra strong flush system…Can opener on the wall…Two minutes walk to all local amenities …’ But my mother knew what she wanted. When she stepped off the bus in Tollington, she did not see the outside lavvy or the apology for a garden or the medieval kitchen, she saw fields and trees, light and space, and a horizon that welcomed the sky which, on a warm night and through squinted eyes, could almost look something like home.

At first I would listen entranced to this litany of love, imagining my mother as I had seen her in those crumpled black and white photographs hoarded in a shiny suitcase on top of her wardrobe. She was skinny and dark then, all eyes and stick insect limbs protruding from a white pyjama suit with paper-sharp creases in the legs. She retained this image, of a country girl lost in the big city, throughout her teens and early twenties, only the costume changed. Here was mama in a school play, a coat hanger for a home-sewn robe, mama winning a race as All Delhi College Champion, running in full length salwar kameez, mama as a lecturer, standing in front of a class of bored Delhi teenage girls, looking younger than all of them. On paper her achievements were remarkably impressive—actress, athlete, teacher—incarnations from other lives, trumpeting talents I would never see fully realised. But I still found it comforting that in every face she wore, I still saw the incredulity and bewilderment she so often turned on me. I liked knowing I could still surprise my mother.

But gradually I got bored, and then jealous of this past that excluded me; she had milked goats, stroked peacocks, pulled sugar cane from the earth as a mid-morning snack. She had even seen someone stabbed to death, much later on when the family had moved to Delhi and partition riots stalked the streets like a ravenous animal. A man in a rickshaw, she said. The driver gave him a bidi, took one himself and indicated he needed a light. As the customer fumbled in the pockets of his ill-fitting suit (and this memory seemed to upset her greatly, remembering how his shirt sleeves protruded from worn linen elbows), the driver reached into his dhoti and brought out a knife which he plunged into his fellow smoker’s head, a lit match still in his victim’s twitching hand.

That was my favourite, but she would not repeat it more than twice. The last time I had asked her to tell me the Rickshaw Story, she looked at me much as I imagine Damien’s mother looked when she gave her smiling baby his first shampoo and found three sixes curled up like commas behind his tiny pink ear. But the story did not fascinate me because of the violence, what obsessed me was this meeting of two worlds, the collision of the epic with the banal. A shared cigarette and a hidden knife, a too-small suit, probably borrowed from a brother who was expecting it back that evening, and a bloody betrayal. I listened to this tale and heard huge boulders moving somewhere, my centre of gravity shifted and I saw the breath of monsters gathering on the horizon. Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned.

I recognised this feeling; it was the same feeling I had when I had almost asphyxiated in the back of our car, that a birthday treat could end with a screaming headline in the Express and Star, TOT CHOKES ON UNCOOKED SAUSAGE! BIRTHDAY RUINED, SAY WEEPING PARENTS! Death itself did not frighten me; I had grown up examining the crushed slippery bodies of baby sparrows who had fallen prematurely from their nests to land under our gables, filmy eyes and bloody beaks open with surprise, maybe with their last thought that mama had made flying look so easy. We local kids regularly gathered round the mangled corpses of cats, foxes and badgers left at the side of the road, their fur patterned with tyre marks, their bluey-white entrails trailing the murdering vehicles’ exit like accusing fingers. What frightened me was the excitement I felt when death became possible, visible, bared its teeth and raised a knife in Indian moonlight. There was so much more I wanted that I could not name, and brushing mortality, all those hot dog moments, helped me name it. Was this all there was? When would anything dangerous and cruel ever happen to me?