Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

  He was so sweet to me, Bichaara. As soon as we were on the North Circular, after we’d driven off from the hall, he got out his hanky and wiped away the panda rings from under my eyes. We both took our shoes off, he undid himself from the hanging gardens on his turban and we got Riz, his mate who was driving, to pick up a Kentucky bargain bucket, as neither of us had eaten in all the excitement. By the time we got to the honeymoon suite at the Garden Palace in Theydon Bois, all we fancied was a nap. Course, I got teased rotten by Sunita and Tania when they rang up the next day, wanting details, positions, number of times and what language he got excited in. I told them, It wasn’t our first time anyway, so what’s the big deal?

  Except, and this is the weird thing, when we did eventually get round to it, it was like the first time somehow, because when we were going out together, it was impossible to relax; where, how, will anybody notice the windows are steamed up, will a vanload of people I know decide to have a midnight picnic in Epping Forest and park next to our car? Believe me, for single Asian girls, there is no such thing as safe sex. When you ask a guy if he’s got protection, what you mean is, has he got tinted windows, safety locks and a baseball bat in the boot, in case of passing brothers? Of course, you learn to be imaginative, because of space, cramp and because you’re scared of coming back in the next life as something with fur because you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.

  The first time, if the truth be known, was sweaty, painful and messy. Deeps had arranged for us to spend an afternoon at a mate’s house whose parents had gone to Kamla Warehouse for the day to stock up on tinned tomatoes. (He did have his own place, this gorgeous detached house, but he said his cousin was over from India staying with him and the lazy sod hardly ever went out, so no joy there.) So this mate’s promised him they’d be away at least four hours, what with the rusty lock on their van and the roadworks on the M11 link. Anyway, we get down to our undies and of course, the van pulls up in the driveway, so we leap through windows and climb over fences until we end up in an alleyway running behind the houses, and eventually, after deciding we had been planning this for weeks and we should stick to it, on a mattress in Deep’s lock-up garage. So it was over pretty quickly, with both of us being nervous, feeling disappointed and foolish, and he asked me if I’d liked it and I said yes because he’d gone to so much trouble.

  I never told him it had been my first time. For a start, he wouldn’t have believed me. I mean, how many thirty-two-year-old virgins are there in East London? And then he would have wanted to know why, and I couldn’t have explained that without it sounding like there was something wrong with me. Which is just one of the rumours I’ve had to put up with round this manor.

  It started at school, the rumours, the relatives and neighbours whispering about soft-in-the-head Chila. I suppose it didn’t help that my education was spent in the prefab hut at school cutting out stuff from old Argos catalogues. I always did the same picture: My Perfect House. I’d cut round beds and dining tables and pine kitchen units and pink chaises-longues and I’d arrange them all into rooms and I’d always leave a space in the hallway for me to stand. Just me. And a cat if I could find one, though I was never very good with cutting round the ears, really fiddly. I liked it in that hut. The United Nations for dumbos Sunita had called it, and said it was a conspiracy to keep anyone foreign down, but I felt safe in there. It was when they took me out that all the trouble started. I was always going to be a cut and paste girl. I would have been just as good at it in Africa. That’s what I told Mum and Dad when they threw fits about me failing yet another exam and how they had given up paradise to get us girls an education.

  Then the visits started from the aunties and their witchy friends. They’d come round with cooking pots full of brain food which looked like scrambled rats and smelled like old pants, and home-made spells, or lockets with something hairy inside I would have to wear in my sleep, or mantras I’d have to learn and then be sent out into the garden to chant to the moon while throwing chicken bones over my shoulder. God knows what the neighbours thought. ‘Seen that slow fat girl standing in the bushes talking to a chicken leg?’ I had mustard oil massages from an old man in bottle glasses who spent a lot of time looking for my missing brain down my bra, for some reason. I had scalp examinations from a blind Bengali woman who charged my mum fifty quid to poke in my hair and then gave me a bottle of dandruff shampoo. I even got dragged off to a visiting guru from India who had taken over one of my aunties’ houses in Harrow for a month. He had come over here to spread the divine message to the rootless Indians in the West and save them from spiritual exile, at least that’s what it said in his leaflet. He said some really nice poetry to me, something about the wisdom of the heart being more important than the knowledge in your brain, asked Mum for a donation to his ashram and went upstairs to play on my nephew’s Sony Playstation. The only thing that made Mum give up was visiting a few astrologers. After the fifth one had done my chart yet again and told Mum what they all said, that I would marry soon and marry well, she stopped and left it to Fate.

  I know that was her way of saying she had given up, but I was OK about it. The teasing wasn’t too bad because I always had Sunita to argue for me and Tania to beat people up for me, but I never minded if someone called me slow. By then I knew that it was just the rest of the world was too fast and one day we’d catch up with each other. So I cut and pasted and dreamed and hoped and waited for Deepak to come and find me. I mean, I didn’t know exactly it was going to be Deepak, and most people had paired me off with Uncle Madhan’s son who works on the petrol pumps in his dad’s garage and has a withered arm. (They always try and match you up with someone who they think has got similar deformities to you. ‘Boy with club foot seeks similar’; ‘Girl with acne will consider short, balding man with no prospects’, according to the matrimonial column in our local Hindi paper.) But I knew it was just a matter of time before Someone would want me and all I needed was that one chance, to make that Someone never regret it. That’s what I wanted to tell Deeps, there on that mattress in the garage. Anyhow, I let it pass, flow away, with my blood. Some things you never get back.

  So when it came to honeymoon night, we were lying on a different mattress of crushed flowers, squashed tinsel and finger-lickin’ crumbs. We both knew this should have been our first time, if we’d done things the proper way. Maybe blokes don’t feel guilty about stuff like that, but I did. I wanted it to be special, to be proper. It’s how I was brought up. I mean, of course I’d done loads of things I shouldn’t have, like wearing blusher to school, and later on, skipping lessons to go to those midday raves in town with Tans and Sunny. They thought this was the height of excitement, but I always ended up feeling a bit stupid, squashed in a dark corner with some strange bloke’s tongue in my ear. It’s not like you can have a conversation. His mouth is full and you can’t hear anything, and then there’s that awful moment when you get home from school, back in your uniform, and have to pretend you got those marks on your neck from a falling dictionary in the library. But I always worried about what I was throwing away, all the rules my parents had given me I seemed to be chucking out the window. Because a lot of the time, you don’t know what you might need until it’s too late. It’s all gone into the skip and then you think, Oh, I could have done with that crochet top, now it’s back in fashion. That old lamp only needed a polish and who knows, there might be a genie inside. Some of the old rules hold you up; trouble is, you only find that out when they’re being carted off in the rubbish van and you’re left on the pavement in an embarrassing nightie wondering who’s going to tell you what’s right now. At least, that’s how I felt then.

  He unwrapped me like a present on our wedding night, our proper first time together as man and wife. That’s how I felt; a longed for, favourite present he’d been asking for every Christmas since he was a kid, and finally, there I was under the tree with his name on my forehead. There was so much to take off; a billowing suit with fiddly hooks, nose
rings, heavy bangles, not to mention the coconuts on each wrist. He looked straight into my eyes as he opened me up slowly, layer by layer, until it was just me and him and nothing between us any more. I’ve never been so frightened and so excited all at once.

  He talked all the time, soft words, some in Hindi, not really to me but about me, my eyes, my hair, my fingers, my bwoti, my Chila. He discovered moles I didn’t know I had, found bumps and crevices I’d never counted as part of my body. I’d never realized how dark I was until I saw his fingers on my skin. And when he . . . it wasn’t the Dirty Dreadful Thing I’d been warned about, it wasn’t the Fumbling Messy Thing we’d shared before, it wasn’t even the Boring Back-Aching Thing I’d heard my mum’s friends discussing in hushed whispers when they’d had a Babycham too many at some party: ‘It’s quick and he’s nice to me after so, bas, I let him in sometimes.’

  For me, it was a letting go. I fell into him and he caught me. I think he got a bit teary afterwards. His voice was all furry in the dark. And he thanked me again. All I could think of was how much I’d been lied to, all the years and horror stories spent on scaring us off what we’d just done. But at least I understood now why everyone spent so much energy stopping women doing it. It’s bloody brilliant. It’s the best kept secret in the whole bloody world.

  It’s a good job that I’m thick, I reckon, because my world is small, tidy and hoovered and I like that. Once I’d flunked school and Tans and Sunny had gone off to college or whatever, I knew it was time to pick myself up and make something of my life. I had relied on them for so long, I felt like a baby bird pushed out from the nest. So I got myself the job at Leos on the check-out, after considering some other offers (Sainsburys was too far and Safeway overalls are downright unflattering), and I was good at it. I’m good with people, always there with the chat, smiling at the kids who have eaten half the trolley before they reach the till, the old people with bent fingers who pay in loose change and the Care in the Community lot who know the price of everything and sing Beep! along with the computerized swipe. And especially the old Indian ladies who know I’ll let them prod the aubergines for freshness without glaring at them and chat to them in Punjabi or Swahili about their good-for-nothing kids who leave them all day in unheated houses with piles of vegetables to cut for dinner. All life is in that supermarket and, watching it go by with the tins and packets, I knew I’d found my place.

  In fact, I was up for promotion just before I got engaged to Deeps but he said no wife of his was going to work if she didn’t want to. (I did want to as it happens but he forgot to ask me that bit.) I reckon it was more that he was a teensy bit embarrassed that his fiancée swiped cans of beans for a living, especially since I’ve met some of his friends’ wives who wear sequinned tracksuits and spend one morning a week helping with their husbands’ businesses and the rest of the time doing interesting charity events like Bhangra Nights for Bengali Flood Victims and posh dinners for Famine Relief.

  I met some of them about a week after we’d got married. Laila, I think her name was, threw me a party to welcome me into their club. Her house was gorgeous, some mansion out in Chigwell, leather suites in cream silk, chandeliers and a little foreign waitress serving snacks. Actually, she was called Lenka, she was over from Prague because her husband had run off with their two kids and she was trying to get enough cash together so she could hire a lawyer to find her children. We got on really well, which was fortunate as I didn’t talk to the business wives much. I mean, I tried but we didn’t seem to have a lot in common and they’d go off in corners giggling and jingling their jewellery. Deeps said I just needed to get to know them better. I have invited them all over but it is the charity ball season apparently. I’m sure they’ll visit soon.

  So anyway, six months as a married woman and it’s all going as expected, which is how I like it. We’ve settled into a nice routine, now I’ve got the house the way I wanted. You know, organized all my cupboards and drawers, found homes for my glass animal collection and his badminton trophies. Deeps is home regular as clockwork, except on the few days a month he has to entertain clients. He always offers to take me along but I’m happy catching up on the chat shows I video off cable and doing the little bits that make a house into a home, you know, lining all the drawers with scented paper, scraping the limescale off the bathroom tiles, with Sunrise Asian radio on full blast. I still listen to the Sunday matrimonial phone in (even though I don’t have to now! It seems to have got so much more . . . complicated). All those confident parents who ring up wanting a match for their kids, swearing their Bunty wants a religious graduate while you can hear their kid in the background shouting, ‘No, I don’t! I want someone in the media with a nice arse!’ And all those divorced men with angry voices who say their wives didn’t understand them and could they start again with someone who’s about twenty-two . . . (Funny though, you never get any divorced women ringing in . . .) And the ones who really break my heart, the thirty-something single women, who start off all brassy and bright, they’ve all got degrees and they all know exactly what they want in a bloke: he’s got to respect their parents but also know his own mind, be modern enough to load the dishwasher and traditional enough to swear in Punjabi, earn at least fifty k a year and also know the value of a walk in the moonlight, Western enough to be trendy, Indian enough to be pukka. By the time they’ve reached the end of the list, their voices are small and hopeless, like they’ve realized as they’re saying it all how silly they sound. I mean, it’s good to have standards, but how choosy can you be at thirty-four? You can’t arrange a marriage and then expect to find perfection.

  We have only had one argument during all this time. It wasn’t even a row, just a silly tiff, when Deeps asked me why I had removed the plastic covers off the settee and the hall carpet that his mum insisted we should keep on, ‘So it will last for ever, beti.’ So I told him, Carpet isn’t supposed to last for ever. Important things are, like good mates, and love. And I’ve waited so long for all of this that I don’t want to save anything for Later On. I want it now, out of its wrapping, fresh.

  So I get up with him at half past six, even though he says I don’t have to. It’s so nice, just making him some tea and toast in the morning and watching the sleep flake away from his eyes. Me in my kitchen with my man. Tania would kill me if she heard me say that. She always said I was too grateful. Beautiful women like her always say that, because they’ve never had a moment’s worry that there isn’t someone ready to open their doors or kiss them till their teeth hurt. But I am grateful, I admit it, especially for the little things. Like morning tea and seeing him off with a kiss and his briefcase, and planning what we’ll eat when he comes home. And my favourite bit, when he wipes his plate round with that last bit of roti, stifles a burp and pats his knee. He doesn’t have to say anything, I’m there, in his lap, and he just holds me, not so tight now, and I’ve managed to stop him saying thank you all the time because it was making me feel funny. I asked him, during the first week it was, why he kept thanking me and he said, ‘You saved me.’ But he won’t tell me from what. Maybe he doesn’t know.

  The best advice my mum ever gave me was not to expect too much (the only thing she could say to me when I was growing up and messing up everything I touched). And it really works, you know. I’ve never been disappointed because everything good about Deeps is a big fat bonus. Every little lovely thing he does is a wonderful surprise. And I know that at some point in the future he’s going to severely piss me off, but I’m ready for it. I look forward to it, funnily enough, because it’s all part of the plan. You find someone, they love you, they hurt you, you forgive them, you carry on, because there’s no question you’d give up on someone just because they’ve turned out to be human, is there?

  I once tried to explain to Tania about how I felt when I was in that hut, with my catalogue and scissors and dizzy with happiness because I knew what I had to do and how to do it and that every day was the same and she looked at me like I was mad.
<
br />   ‘Well, what about spontaneity?’ she said. ‘And adventure and fun and . . . you know, the thrill of things that you don’t expect, that just happen? Why are we lot so hung up on having everything predictable and . . . decided?’

  I just smiled at her, so full of love for her at that moment, so glad I wasn’t in her head.

  And then she shook all that hair, black cloud around a puzzled sun, I remember thinking, and she said, ‘God, you’re so bloody lucky, Chila.’

  And it’s sort of true actually. Compared to her and Sunita, I think I really am.

  2

  TANIA CURSED QUIETLY to herself as the lights changed from green to amber and drew her jeep smoothly to a halt. A waddle of ancient Indian women in white widow’s weeds creaked slowly across the zebra crossing, oblivious of the impatient honks of the traffic building up behind Tania. One of them, intriguingly, was carrying a large carrot which she proudly displayed to her friends, who paused to examine this fine specimen of root vegetable and congratulate their compatriot on her cunning at obtaining it. Tania jumped as the car behind her emitted a ten-decibel version of ‘Colonel Bogie’. Early twenties Punjabi lad with goatee beard, gold earring, over-gelled hair and I Heart Khalistan stickers on his souped up Cortina, Tania bet herself, confirming her guess with a quick glance in her rearview mirror. The predictability of it all depressed her suddenly and she revved up impatiently, feeling, as she always did on this stretch of road, that she should have brought her passport.

  There was border control, the Victorian police station on the corner which separated the Eastenders from the Eastern-Enders; on one side, auto-part shops and a McDonald’s, on the other, Kamla’s Chiffons and the beginning of two miles of sweet emporiums, café-dhabas, opulent jewellers and surprisingly expensive Asian fashion boutiques. It was possible, literally, to stand with a foot in each world on this corner. In fact, she’d used this location several times in the many gritty documentaries she’d worked on, persuading some self-conscious presenter to stand legs akimbo, while they gravely intoned on the Scandal of Britain’s Lost Urban Youth, the Secret Trauma of the Schoolgirl Brides, the Tomato which Contained a Message from God.