China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘Hello,’ I said, and I can still remember how hard and fearfully my heart was thudding. ‘Spencer’s party?’ The door opened straight into the kitchen and, behind Spencer’s dad, I could see some of my classmates and their parents, chatting, drinking pop, hair newly curled.

  ‘Let him in, love,’ said a woman, Spencer’s mum, with something tremulous in her voice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Spencer’s dad said, to me. ‘No.’

  Everyone inside went silent. Spencer’s mum managed a laugh. ‘You can’t turn him away.’

  ‘I can do what I like, my love. It’s my own house.’ To me: ‘There’ll be no need to come here again.’

  He nodded in a way that made me nod too, as if I were somehow complicit, and then he closed the door. I made it off the drive, embarrassed, stinking with shame, when footsteps came puttering up behind me. The mum. She had a soft, loose face and a tired blonde perm.

  ‘Pay it no mind, will you. He should know better at his age.’ She passed me a small purple bag, glossy and bright with stars. ‘Some cake.’ And I passed her the envelope, the card with ten pounds folded inside it. I don’t know why. The need to complete an exchange, perhaps. But, really, looking back, I think I was simply thanking her, for letting me know that what just happened wasn’t my fault, that it was not deserved, though I felt as if it was and that it must have been.

  One midnight four years later, out of my face on smack, I’d launch half a brick through their front window, but back then, the cake-bag in my hand, I went to Ringwood Park, over the main road. I dangled on the swings for a while, chains grating metal on metal, eating my cake, and then followed the BMX track round to where some steps led up to a field, and then to a large beautiful grotty lake. I took a slow walk round, stopping now and then to smile at the spotty yellow fish, and in those moments forgetting about Spencer and his party, and after completing two circuits of the water I made for home, entering the shop to see my dad at the counter.

  ‘Party over? Did you have fun?’

  There was hope in his voice along with a note of worry, and he looked relieved when I said, ‘Great. I should have saved you some cake.’

  I came through the counter-flap and we low-fived. It was kind of a family rule that whenever I returned home from somewhere, say from school or from delivering the papers, from anywhere really, I first acknowledged my parents with an embrace, unless a customer was present, when a touching of hands would do. I never saw any of my cousins’ families in Derby or Birmingham or Southall act like this and, as I got older, I wondered if the gesture was my parents’ way of saying that I was home now, with them, that I was safe, or at least safer, because it was always impossible to feel at ease in that place, where public displays of violence were only ever a door-chime away.

  ‘First time he’s been invited to a friend’s house,’ I heard Dad explaining, as I went through into the back and up the stairs.

  * * *

  *

  I watched the boy in the distant field climbing the stairs to his room, embracing his mother on the way, who’s also excited to know how the party went, and then I sighed and looked down, surprised to see a small brown wasteland at the back of the farm. It was a walled rectangle, mudded over and desolate. In the far wall, some bricks stuck out, footholds to aid climbing, and in the top right corner grew a single peepal tree, a gangly reedy unhappy thing. A pen for the animals, back in the day? I lifted the charpoy on to my back and carried it down the stairs, cursing as I went. Then I got ready, washing my face at the pump, brushing my teeth in the middle of the yard, filled with a sudden morning sense of freedom, of hope, that I was here, with the run of the farm on a day as bright as parrots, free to do whatever I wanted. I took a piss in the latrine, changed, and then shoved the charpoy into a shady spot near the barn and caught up on some sleep, woken a few hours later by tiny stones showering down on me. Groggily, I realised they were coming from over the wall.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ I shouted, in English, getting up. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘No problem!’ His voice shrilled. ‘I’m Laxman. I’ve got your tiffin and . . . wiping tissues?’

  I climbed up on to the stone bath and peered over the wall. He smiled. He had large eyes and about three teeth. And he wasn’t a boy like Jai had said but a barefoot white-bearded man in wide olive trousers and a black hand-me-down Ghostbusters T-shirt that I imagine he’d politely accepted from some visiting Californian relative. He passed up the food and the bog roll, a torch and some soap, too, and I wondered if I was meant to tip him, whether he’d be offended if I saved my money and didn’t, when he said the job shouldn’t take him long. I must have looked nonplussed because he pointed to his basket of tools, which he’d left at the gate.

  ‘I’ll have to break the chain and put on a new lock. Really, the whole gate needs replacing. You can get good ones now, single, double, side-panel, steel tubing, wrought iron, iron scrolls. Lots of choice at Shankar and Sons in the city.’

  ‘I’ll tell my uncle.’

  ‘Tell, yes. And if you tell them I sent you I get ten per cent.’

  He shuffled off towards his tools and I returned to my charpoy, separated out the tiffin’s steel bowls, left some food aside for later, and ate the lentil daal. There was an elephant sticker on the side of one of the bowls: ‘Eat at Dimple’s Dhaba’. So my uncle had instructed one of the local street joints to sort out my meals: my aunt must have refused. I couldn’t blame her. When the gate opened, the hinges objecting mightily, I left my food and walked over to Laxman.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘I’ve not done anything yet. Only broken the chain.’

  I hadn’t been subtle – I wanted solitude – but he was aggrieved. Roughly he removed the old rusted locks and drilled a fresh hole in the wall, securing a new bolt, and came over only once he’d finished, weighed down by the basket of tools in one oily hand. I was at the guava tree near the barn, snapping off the fruit, slicing it in my palm. I offered him a piece. He looked away.

  ‘Then let me give you something,’ I said, wallet at the ready.

  ‘You are young enough to be my grandson. I’ll speak to your uncle.’

  I nodded, chastened.

  ‘Leave the tiffin outside the gate when you’re finished and someone in my family will collect it each morning. They’ll leave behind the new one. Is that clear?’

  I nodded again and then he grunted and turned to go. He was beyond the gate when I called for him to stop. I’d remembered the little room, the rusted bolts.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, stubbornly remaining where he was.

  I jogged over. ‘Could you open that room there as well? The bolts are stuck.’

  We walked to the door together, past the iron bars of the window and the rectangle of wood that covered it up from the inside.

  ‘Why do you want to be opening up this old room?’

  ‘To sleep in. The mosquitoes love me round here.’

  He seemed reluctant, his mouth pursed.

  ‘It’s not a big job, is it?’ I asked, confused. Maybe it was a special room of some sort, used for prayers and offerings. ‘Is it a baba room?’

  ‘You’re your uncle’s real nephew, yes? Not some side-cousin’s boy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, warily, because he knew that already and so his question must really have been about something else.

  ‘Mehar Kaur’s blood?’

  I was pulled up short by his use of her name. In India, the nature of the relationship always comes first.

  ‘She was my great-grandmother,’ I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully, looking at me the whole time, running his eyes so hard over my face that I felt forced to turn away. ‘Is this her room? Is that what you’re saying?’ When he didn’t respond I touched the bars and noticed that none of the other windows were closed off in this way. �
��You knew her?’

  ‘I think I saw her once or twice, when I was young and cycling past. She was getting old by then.’

  And without another word he sized up the locks, took a couple of hammers from his tool-basket and passed one to me. Being taller, I started on the top bolt.

  8

  Riding his mule, it takes Jeet an age to force his way through the hedge of dawdling city-folk and through the old clay arch. Things aren’t much better inside the city bazaar, where the crabby lanes teem and the blue hoardings shed so much dust that he shades the animal’s eyes with his own hand. Bata Sandals Many Price. Hira Mandi. Best Rate Furniture. Phagwara Number 1 Royal Fabric Palace (this last hoarding always odd, in Jalandhar, a good half-day’s ride from the small town of Phagwara). Rickshaws jangle by, wheels turning, and through their spokes Jeet glimpses a fat old man in a long Kashmiri kurta, lounging about in an open porch and puffing on his long green hookah, letting the world know he’d been to the courtesans above. Decadent fool.

  He really does hate cities, Jeet thinks, and the people who live in them. Or maybe, he wonders, adjusts, it is simply that he appreciates his village more. Simply. Yes, he thinks on, his thoughts not quite staying in lane, that must be how these people look on him and his village: its simple roads and houses; his simple farm and life. His simple wife. She would appear so simple to these rich city women, with their lacy fans and their faces not even half covered. But only he knows of the intelligence in his wife’s eyes, and only he will ever know: a realisation that radiates a pulse of arousal through his body.

  He is always watching her. He’s shifted his charpoy a foot along the wall so that when he wakes he can lie there, one eye to the crack in the wood, and spy her stepping from room to pump, the weak morning light coming off her sleeves as her hands render the animal fat to soap. There was a moment the previous week when, breathing hard, he stopped threshing, threw aside the flail, and told the other men he was going for a shit. Instead, he moved closer to the road because he knew she’d be on her way to the temple and he needed to see her. He was watching her pass by, the tiffin in her hands, when she dropped the tin and bent over. Jeet felt a very precise fear rise in him, a fear of losing her; he could imagine her eyes behind the veil, bulging in their startled hollows. He hurried towards her, jumping through the wheat like some mad hurdler, but one of the others – Harbans – gave three good whacks to her back and they picked up the tin and carried on up the path. He stood there watching them round the bend, a hand to his forehead, relieved and panting and silently imploring the world, God, always to take care of her at times like these, at times when he wasn’t around.

  He strokes the head of the mule, making two furrows in its brown coat, and yanks the left rein. If neither of his brothers has requested the back room, he’ll have a word with Mai as soon as he gets home. Chances are she’ll look at him askance – two nights in a row? – and perhaps even shake her head, like she does when the girl is bleeding, but he’ll insist. She is his. Joy and pride swell his chest and he leans forward over the animal, folds back its ear and kisses the soft inner pink. What a beautiful day. Sunshine spots the bushes sprouting from the red half-timbered façades. New fretwork gleams above the post office. Wonder when they did that? A horse nips at the yellow skirt of an oblivious white girl while her panicking ayah rushes over with an ice cream. Four men, heads dropped low, play chess in the shade of a lonely minaret. Naujhawana Ka Dhaba. Watch Repairs. Shahalmi Gate. Gathering the rein into his fist, he tugs it again, hits the mule with his heel and they veer left at the fork. The lanes are wider here, avenues almost, and he relaxes and breathes the greener air (then coughs out the dust). He tucks in the loose end of his turban and rights his collar just so but when a woman in a pea-green sari gives him a snooty look he petulantly pops his collar back up and kicks his mule on. Left at Nadira Emporium, around the throng baiting a dancing bear and on to Shahbaz Jewellers, its frilled awning following the lazy curve of the street corner. He stays his mule, hitching it to a melon-cart, and enters the shop. The owner spits betel juice into a spittoon and wipes his red lips in an upward motion with the heel of his hand.

  ‘If you want food go steal from the mandi.’ Then, going back to his tobacco pouch: ‘Village fools.’

  Jeet doesn’t blame him. A twenty-two-year-old looking as he does. How is the man to know of the money Mai saved from the three dowries, money she had that dawn brought out from the locked cupboard and placed into his hands? He extracts the wad from his tunic’s top pocket and holds it up, as if taking an oath. He thinks of Mehar’s face.

  ‘Show me some pearls.’

  * * *

  *

  Exiting the bazaar, passing the officers’ cricket ground, the pearls bagged up and tied around his neck, he notices a crowd gathered outside the station. Men in white tunics, their heads covered. A funeral? Here? Jeet mumbles a prayer and, still on his mule, leans down.

  ‘Everything okay, brother?’

  ‘We’re mourning the death of our nation,’ the man says.

  He understands. ‘Yes. We all feel it—’

  ‘No need to tell me. They rob us all. Come join us. Sit.’

  Jeet hesitates a moment then rises back up on to his mule, the sun crashing into his face.

  Banners, green on brown, in both languages: We are the Freedom Movement! and Free India! Was that an order or a hope for the future? Jeet smiles, then winds the smile in, checks no one saw. Flags, too. It all seems at odds with the peaceful way the men are sitting on the ground, packed tight, hands threaded around raised knees like educated types at dinner. He does want to join them, sit alongside them and their fancy ways, maybe even learn a phrase of English to whisper to Mehar. How strange, he thinks, how new the feeling that he should want to impress her, to have her approval and praise. Humble Jeet, who has always tried never to ask anything of anyone. But he has to go. The pearls, in their velvet purple bag. Smiling again, shaking his head, he squeezes his thighs and turns the animal haltingly around.

  * * *

  *

  Two hours later and Jeet is coming back down the red track to the farm, the mule’s hooves muzzled by sand, its tired head lolling low. The sun too is low behind the house, silvering the black crows lined up on the roof and running long shadows along the ground, as though the farm were stretching to meet him. The new tank, he is pleased to note, sits strong on its high wooden perch, piping water on to the steaming buffalo. Should it be closer to the trough, he wonders, when he sees a shape outside the arched entrance, and frowns. It is Suraj, his youngest brother, twenty and hopelessly workshy. He is lying on his charpoy, beard unoiled, shirt untucked, a reed of wheat barely hanging from his mouth. Eyes closed. Jeet dismounts.

  ‘Working hard, I see.’

  ‘Hmm. How was the city?’

  ‘I should ask you. I keep hearing you’re there a lot.’ Going brothel to brothel, he doesn’t add.

  Suraj smiles, lids still closed, and far from anger, or even indignation, it is tenderness that Jeet feels. Unlike their mother, he doesn’t see his younger brother as dissolute, as lacking in application, or if he does, he also acknowledges the neglect behind it, the neglect that comes with being the youngest in a world where the eldest commands all. Can change all. Can even change what had been already promised. A stab of guilt, swift, and Jeet unties the velvet bag from his neck.

  ‘Look what I got.’

  The lashes part and two lids peel back, eyes resisting the light. ‘You got them, then,’ Suraj says.

  ‘Do you want to see?’

  ‘They’re yours.’

  ‘They’re ours.’ And, as if to prove it: ‘Give them to Mai? He’s about to drop dead,’ he adds, meaning the mule.

  Grabbing up a bucket, Jeet drags the animal round to the tank and, left alone, Suraj removes the jewels from their bag. The strung beads slip as easily as silk through his fingers. Ours, you say? In another life, ma
ybe. He throws the pearls in the air, so high that he has enough time to jump off the cot and stand before catching them. He pockets the emptied bag: it should fetch a few rupees, at least. Then he walks through the arch and into the courtyard, the pearls swinging, wondering if either of his brothers has asked to use the room tonight, though can he really even be bothered with her? All bone, she is. The firewood leans tall in the corner. Why hadn’t he chopped it? He’d definitely intended to. He approaches Mai, resting, back to him, on her charpoy in the shade of the wall.

  Get up, he’d usually say, as if she were no more than one of the women working in the tannery, but something of the warmth Jeet cast still sits upon him, and he says, softly, ‘Mai, I’ve something for you. From Jeet.’

  He holds the pearls across his stretched palm and each bead glows. Mai rolls towards him, the weaves groaning underneath her. She reaches up for the pearls and drops them down her front.

  ‘No more?’ she says.

  ‘I haven’t stolen any, if that’s your thought.’

  ‘Not unheard of, though, is it?’

  The sun sinks a little and perhaps that accounts for the chill at his heart.