China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

  ‘Too easy? Eager for the good stuff,’ and he changed things up, adding some functions I didn’t recognise, and pushed the paper back my way. ‘Should be more up your street.’

  I kept my body very still and turned only my head towards the paper. It made no sense. I said nothing, and he was looking at me much more closely now. I looked down at my hands and heard him slide the paper away.

  ‘You say in your statement that you often visit India. Do you know Calcutta? Wondrous place,’ and for the rest of our time together he told me the story of how he met his wife there, a fellow professor, when they were both in their fifties and getting on, and their plans to now spend half of every year in a bungalow just outside Ballygunge.

  He was very matter-of-fact, abrupt, even, as he showed me out and called in the next candidate, and I felt despondent during the entire coach ride home. But then one Monday a few weeks later I got a letter saying that the university were delighted to make me an unconditional offer. I don’t know why he did that, and I never saw or heard from him again, but it was such compassion, and from such an unexpected direction, that it lives with me to this day.

  I lay the results slip on top of the kindling and sat by the oven with my chin on my knees, wondering how I’d cope with moving to London after the summer.

  * * *

  *

  Very soon after her first visit, Radhika turned up again, cycling through the half-open gate and right into the courtyard. I was squatted over the latrine but could see her via the big cracks in the wooden door. She dismounted and leaned her bicycle by the porch, against one of the pillars. There were some things in the basket, too far away for me to identify. She ducked inside, briefly, then backtracked and looked through the iron bars of my room. Not finding me there, she headed over to the barn, clicking her fingers as she went, half-singing a song in a language unknown to me: are rama krishna bane manihari/ odh li saree/ re hari. It was a lovely, absent-minded sound, as if she wasn’t even aware that she was singing, which made me feel that I’d witnessed something precious.

  I started launching jugfuls of water down the latrine and she turned towards the cubicle and said, ‘Sorry! I’ll just wait here.’ I came out determined not to look as sheepish as a man emerging from emptying his bowels only to be met with an amused woman pulling on a Marlboro.

  ‘This is becoming a habit,’ I said.

  Her eyes flicked down to her cigarette. ‘Oh, you mean my coming here! But, look, I come with colour.’ She pulled something out from between the tins of paint in her basket. ‘And a mirror. Now you can shave, no?’

  ‘What’s the paint for?’

  ‘Your uncle, he said that if you’re living here for free the least you can do is smarten the place up a bit.’

  My uncle would never have said that, suggested that. Had she paid for all this? ‘I’m not painting it.’

  ‘Run off your feet, are you? I’ve brought brushes, too. And there are dustpans and brooms in there’ – she was pointing at the barn – ‘beside the old newspapers.’

  I knew, of course, what she was doing: forcing me to focus, to give my mind a purpose and my days a shape. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Glad we’re on the same page. We’ll need water.’

  That first afternoon was all about preparation: removing flaking paint and debris from the walls and the pillars, sanding off gobbets of stone, washing down the yellow stonework with warm water. When I emptied the final bucket into the field and came back into the yard, she was wiping her face with the hem of her blouse, revealing one whole breast held in its cotton cup. Her skin was perfect and flushed and I put the bucket down at the pump and concentrated on refilling it.

  * * *

  *

  Most mornings, once Prince had deposited the tiffin and before it was light enough to paint, I’d head up to the roof to see how far the workmen had got with the blue statue overnight. Sometimes I’d catch them still at it, their headlamps roving like fireflies. After a while, I’d move to the opposite wall, the one looking over the brown pen and away from the village, and through the green air I’d watch that boy in the far English school-field, avoiding the other schoolboys who kept tripping him up. There they were again, in the canteen, throwing white flour into his face. One morning, perhaps triggered by the distant building site, or even by Radhika’s use of the word balm, which had lodged in my head, I saw him, nine years old. He was standing on the staircase, high on his tiptoes and peering through the spindles of the landing, and in again through his parents’ open bedroom door. Dad had lifted his shirt to his neck and Mum was applying some kind of cream to his back. The recession had hit the little shop hard, and walking home from school I’d see Mum standing in the doorway, a long broom in her hand, wondering where the next customer might come from. To avoid selling up cheap, Dad had accepted work on a building site in Ealing, 150 miles away, living in someone’s spare room during the week and coming home at the weekend to give Mum a break. The job required him to lift tall plastic tubs of bricks on to his back and carry them from one end of the site to the other, like some packhorse, for god knows how many hours a day and alongside mostly illegal immigrants. When he arrived home late on Fridays he had a difficult stiff gait as he handed me and my brother a present, usually a cassette of Top of the Pops hits. His back was scraped raw and covered with bleeding sores that had him flinching whenever Mum pressed in the ointment. She was trying hard not to cry, and Dad was staring straight ahead, trying equally hard not to think about his wife crying.

  ‘How was this week?’ Dad asked.

  ‘A little better. I think we’re turning a corner.’

  Dad nodded. ‘Customers okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘No more broken windows, I see. Must be good.’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘Honestly, no problems?’

  ‘None, believe me.’

  She was lying. I’d been on the settee earlier that evening when I’d heard the noise. I took my headphones off. It was a woman, screaming at Mum, shouting that she had no right to refuse her son alcohol. I moved towards the wooden panel that opened into the shop, careful not to be seen, and I listened to the woman loudly, so loudly, itemise all the ways in which she was offended by my mother’s presence, all the ways in which she couldn’t stand the way my mother dressed and spoke and smelled. When she left, slamming the door, I went back into the living room, lay back on the settee, put back on my foamy earphones and turned up the volume. I was staring at the white ceiling. Why had they come here, to this broken, white town? Had things really been so bad? There’d been thirteen of us – uncles, aunts, cousins and all – in a two-bed terrace near the centre of Derby, but at least the neighbourhood was full of our own. And now those same relatives, and more besides, were laughing, because my parents had struck out together and were clearly not coping. I was raging at them, my parents. Mum walked in and stood at the window, facing away from me and on to the concrete yard. The back of her head was vibrating a little. I turned towards her, but not enough to see her reflection in the glass.

  23

  Suraj lies awake worrying about her. Desperate for news, he even risks asking Mai if her daughter-in-law is any better.

  ‘Anything to avoid work,’ she replies, which only sharpens his hatred. When he sees Mehar restarting her chores around the house, he hopes it’s a sign that she’s recovered from her illness, has perhaps even started to forgive him. He tries to catch her alone, but it’s impossible, and so he reverts to life away from the farm, passing his days with friends in the shade of the masjid, pea-shooting stones into a spittoon, juggling rocks. Often, he’ll ambush a cart on its way into the city (mollifying the protesting driver) and call at Kashyap’s Vaishnu Dhaba, where every day you can get two chapattis from the tandoor and a bowl of fried lentils for not more than ten rupees a month. On his way home, he’ll stop at the village crossroads, by a marble white Sikh
temple being built, and join the circle of males gathered there. It is the only place you might get a decent signal, though even here the All India Radio announcer has to fight through the static. Young men! Listen up, join the Youth Bharat Sabha! Fight for real freedom, not dominion status . . .

  A small plant sits on top of the radio, and the volume pin is pitched so high the copper pot fits about.

  ‘They don’t know their shit from their piss,’ Suraj says, to get the men going.

  ‘Telling me. Weren’t they asking us to join the farmers’ collective? Is this youth one different?’

  ‘Let the rich have their games.’

  ‘Panditji’s pushed his cock so far up the British arse he’s got it stuck.’

  ‘Quiet! Listen, won’t you! Did he just say the Mussulmans are getting in on it, too?’

  ‘Are you, Parveiz Miah?’

  ‘Ask my wife, friend. I was the last to even know about my son’s wedding.’

  ‘And, pray tell, to which of your many wives should we pose the question?’

  ‘Looking very tired lately, Parveiz Miah!’

  Suraj breaks off from the laughter and continues along the asphalt, which is nothing more than a rugged avenue of leafless trees. Ahead, a soda-seller pushes his grubby three-wheeler, his vest stained with an arrow of sweat. Turning down an alley, Suraj spots a pink-bellied dog collapsed in the shade, resigned to the flies that hover above like a small raincloud. Her pregnant stomach rises and presses against the ground, radiating a kind of unseen heat, and Suraj imagines the warmth of the fur against his skin, and then all at once he is full of both dismay and gratitude because trailing that warmth – part of it, in fact – comes the memory of Mehar’s hair in his hands. All the way down the alley he thinks of her, her hands on his back, her hot encouraging voice in his ear, her satisfied face when they’d finished. A voice. He turns round. It is Old Aunt Besant and she is waddling towards him as he stands there with the unmistakable tenting below his navel. He adjusts, cursing these bottoms and their stupid thin cotton.

  ‘I’ve been calling and calling you,’ Aunt Besant says, breathless. ‘Should I be running, at my age?’

  ‘Not with the volume you eat, mausi.’

  ‘Scoundrel. Here’ – she passes him a note, a yogi’s prescription – ‘read it for me. What’s that thieving Brahmin saying now?’

  He scans the blue scrawl. ‘You need an injection of puréed cow-shit. Into your bum. Urgently.’

  ‘By the lights of Nanak and all that is holy, tell me you’re joking! It’s a little ache in my bones, is all.’

  ‘I wish I was, mausi. It sounds serious. Take this to the medicine-man now.’

  She snatches it back, tucks it inside her sari blouse. She has a strange relationship with the village, this low-caste aunt. No one seems to either mind her or take her seriously. ‘If I find out you’re lying, I’m going straight to your mother, do you understand?’

  ‘It says only the shit of pregnant cows. Don’t let them get away with any sub-standard shit, will you?’

  She frowns. ‘Illness after illness. It spares no one. How is the daughter-in-law? Any better? Is it . . . ?’ She mimes holding a baby. ‘My daughter-in-law’s the same. With child, I mean.’

  Ridiculous village. Can’t even be ill in peace. ‘I wouldn’t know. It’s not my concern.’

  ‘She looked awful taking the rotis out just now. I would have offered to help, in case your mother asks, but with my knees . . .’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  Turning to go, she gestures to where his erection had been. ‘I never knew your heart carried such feelings for me,’ she laughs, and Suraj, blushing, begs his leave.

  * * *

  *

  On the way back to the farm he climbs into one of the trees and finds a seat, straddling a rooty limb that has split thickly from the trunk, like a rival. There is nothing but fields all the way to the horizon, where the slate of blue sky takes over. Nothing at all but land and toil, and there she is, he is sure of it, piling the empty tiffins back into her basket, lifting the basket to her head. Arms elegantly holding on to her load, back straight, veil pulled down below her mouth, enough to allow her to catch her steps. He watches her wend through the bowing crops and all the time he is hoping for something to sprout up – a deserted little bunker, an unused watchtower – a place he could pull her to and where they would be undiscovered. So when he remembers the old parrot farm it feels like the blessing he is waiting for, and he is all but climbing down and running towards her when his face hardens, for she is already stepping out of the wheat and on to the dirt track, where Gurleen waits to accompany her home.

  24

  Later, he lies on the farmhouse roof, the ribbed mat rough against his back. There is camphor in the warm air and several hours until dawn. Everything is still. The china room is closed, the window slatted shut. He tips his head back. These stars. Precise and grand and so many it feels inscribed that he will be with her.

  25

  It has been so long since Suraj helped bring in the wheat that he rapidly falls behind the others and by the time the sun is in its high spot he is at least forty bundles from the nearest farmhand. Alone, he hacks away, a chop either side of the root, then a twisting out of the crop, the workers’ far chatter like strings of silver on the hot breeze. His thighs ache, and there’s a constant drip of sweat from his forehead, his nose, his chin. He pauses, mid-chop, on seeing her walk up the dirt track, the wide basket on her head. She pivots into the field and he watches her closing in, growing more real with every step, the sky so massive at her back it is as if she is descending from on high. The others receive their food first and then someone gestures towards him (‘Don’t forget the dragger’) and he sees her look over from under her veil – she can’t have made out his face from that distance – and follow the soil-path round, describing a full semicircle until she is but a few feet away. She lifts the basket from her head and holds it out to him, so he might pick his two rotis and whatever daal he fancies with his own hands, without any risk of touching her flesh.

  ‘Take some water, too, brother. It’s a hot day.’

  It is the first time Mehar has spoken to him since she discovered the lie, and it transpires he’s been so desperate to meet her again there has been no space to feel embarrassed; until now, when the shame of his deception washes over him and robs him of speech. He lifts the small bowl of water and tentatively places his hand on top of hers. There’s an audible catch in her throat.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ He cannot see past her veil.

  A long silence. She takes her hand back. ‘Spare my life, I beg you, please.’

  ‘You’re not sparing mine.’

  ‘Don’t try to speak to me.’

  ‘That’s a very severe punishment.’

  ‘If I could string you up from the barn, I certainly would.’

  ‘For loving you?’

  ‘You’ve ruined me.’

  ‘No one’s ruined anyone,’ he says, giving in to impatience. ‘No one knows a thing. Not Mai. Not anyone.’

  ‘This isn’t a game. You don’t get to play with my honour.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. Ruin. Honour. People need to stop thinking in such small ways. The world is changing.’ Irritably, as if she were being needlessly unreasonable, he takes out his food and drops the empty tiffin back into the basket – ‘I’m done’ – and she bends her knees to lift the thing on to her head. ‘You were betrothed to me, you know. We were meant to be married. But when he saw you, he changed it all round.’

  ‘It’s decided. You can’t change the past.’

  ‘But that’s just it! You can. We can. We can have whatever we want. And I want you.’

  Later, she’ll wonder if that is the essence of being a man in the world, not simply desiring a thing, but being able to voice that desire out
loud.

  ‘I’ve put a paper in the tiffin.’ About to leave, she hears amusement in his voice that infuriates and halts her. ‘A timetable for meeting by that abandoned parrot farm towards Sunra. I’ll see you there.’

  She twists round, torso only, and the hot breeze grips her veil, sucking it to her lips so she must spit it out before she can speak. ‘I think if it had been Gurleen you had been betrothed to, but me you’d ended up marrying, then it would be her standing here, not me.’

  ‘That’s not true. You can’t think that.’

  ‘No, no. Of course I can’t. Only you can tell me what to think.’

  * * *

  *

  She fishes out the timetable and folds it into her underwear before stepping out of the field and on to the dirt road.

  ‘You were a while with the last worker,’ Gurleen says, as they continue down to the farm.

  ‘He took a long time emptying the tiffin.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘It seemed you did,’ Gurleen presses.

  ‘Then I hope Mai didn’t catch you with your veil up,’ says Mehar.

  26

  Mehar is illiterate, so the paper contains nothing but images: a row of boxes drawn in a hand unused to holding a pen, and within the boxes are suns, some in ascendance, some at the peak of their arc, a few near-set. There are also many boxes that he’s kept empty, which, she figures, must represent those days on which he’s calculated they won’t be able to meet. It staggers her to imagine how closely he has been watching her, the attention paid to the rhythm of her days. She refolds the paper many times, secures it inside the thin panel of her underwear, and continues with the evening’s chores: shelling peas, sweeping the roof, scrubbing the stone bath from the inside.