by Meera Syal
And in that one sentence she summed up all the women who had gone before her in Deepak’s life. Snappy witty women with low-fat bodies and high-maintenance demands, who sneered when he offered to open doors and snivelled if he didn’t smile patiently while they wittered on about their problems. But as they fitted his criteria for a suitable mate, he had learned what to do to keep hassle at a minimum: go Dutch on dates unless it was a special occasion or he intended to make some unusual demand in bed later on, encourage time out with their girlfriends so he could spend an evening farting in front of the TV in his boxers, enjoying making a mess, and always use his family as an excuse if they ever put pressure on him to commit. It always worked with the white women and sorted out the stayers from the players. (With Tania, of course, the reasons for breaking up had been much more complex.) But in any case, at that moment, when he saw his Chila snuggled up in mink, he realized all the compromises he had made in previous relationships had been much more of a childish game than changing gears together on a dual carriageway.
He was glad he had hung around to check on Chila that evening. True, he had felt a bit stupid, parked with his lights off outside a neighbour’s drive, pretending to read an old copy of the Financial Times. But that sudden rush of warmth that flooded his whole body, when he saw Tania shouting to Chila through the window of her jeep, well, that told him he had done the right thing. Checking up on Chila, that is. What else could that belly-churning feeling have been?
Chila squeezed his hand on the gear stick. ‘What you thinking, jaan?’
‘Kuch nahin.’ He smiled and squeezed back, hard.
The car pulled up to Tania’s flat and Martin was already opening the door, a mug of tea in his hand. Tania threw some notes at the driver and walked slowly towards the rectangle of light, feeling more exhausted with each step. She stepped into Martin’s open arms and leaned her head on his chest, sniffing his familiar scent of toast, fags and soap, simple pleasures, Martin’s smell.
‘Hey,’ he said gently, juggling tea and a free arm. ‘Plum tuckered out, are you?’
Tania nodded.
‘Hot bath and a stiff vodka?’
Tania shook her head, not knowing why she felt tearful.
‘How about a good seeing to from a blond Adonis who’s been slaving over a hot computer for hours and only produced some jokes that Jim Davidson would call unsubtle?’
Tania didn’t move her head at all.
‘Hey,’ Martin said again, ‘What’s up?’
Tania did not know how to tell him. What was up was that she wished he would call her jaan.
Sunita
PAIN IS A relative concept. I used to be the biggest whinger in the world when it came to doctors, dentists, cuts and scrapes as a kid. My mother would have to physically restrain me to apply water and Savlon, while the neighbours wondered if those Arabs at number thirty-two would ever stop beating their children. Later on, after we had moved from the village near Bolton where we were, literally, the local colour, to the East End suburb where, God, I still am, we acquired lots of new neighbours who, joy of joys, looked just like us. (That’s when my dad stopped ordering a daily newspaper. He said if we wanted to know who was doing what in the world, all we had to do was pop next door.)
It was a shock, the lack of privacy, having been the oddballs whom people left alone. Luckily I met Tania on my first day in the new school. As it happens, I was screaming my oiled and plaited head off, having squashed my finger in a door hinge, freaking out as I always did at the sight of my own blood. She shrugged, told me off for being a pathetic kid and warned me that showing any weakness pretty much guaranteed I would soon be fishing my satchel out of a toilet. And then she put my finger in her mouth and sucked the blood away. Always had a sense of drama, that girl. I didn’t mind being boring fat friend though. You got hit less, which was fine by me.
Still, it was a good lesson, and even though I felt the pain as much as I ever did, I learned how to disguise it. I grimaced my way through inoculations, period cramps, occasional netball accidents, and that awful, terrifying day when I underwent my first bikini-line wax. (It’s funny, but now it’s politically OK to remove unwanted hair, I don’t bother. Call it my contribution to reclaiming the rainforest.) Tania insisted that this skin-ripping torture was nothing compared to a broken heart, but as I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet and she had already shimmied her way through most of the local youths, I had to take her word for it.
I got my own back when I had Nikita though. When Tans wafted in with flowers and pink teddy bears and asked how it was, I threw up my nightie and showed her my episiotomy scar.
‘This was the bit my wimmin’s group told me to call my womanly flower. Venus fly trap is more like it, eh?’
Tania went slightly green so I carried on. I described in exquisite detail the twenty-hour labour, the progression from planned water birth with Vivaldi playing to lying in stirrups, fanny to the wind, all hope and dignity gone as I pleaded for anyone with a steady hand to give me an epidural and/or kill me quickly. I left nothing out, not even that moment when my Irish midwife told me to be a good girl and push, with Akash crouching next to her, tears forming at the thought of his first beloved child about to enter the world, and how their faces changed from birthday card beams to silent film screams when I strained for Britain and produced nothing but a fat warm turd. (There’s all these theories now that you shouldn’t allow your partner to see you give birth as it destroys the mystery that is an essential part of eroticism. You don’t say!)
I told her how the barn door forceps they eventually used had left ravines that would never close up and muscles so slack that wearing tampons would now be a pointless exercise. ‘Cocktail sausage in the Blackwall Tunnel,’ I tittered through the drugs. I mentioned in passing the cracked nipples that yielded watery blood mixed with my body’s milk, the amusing ritual I had to undergo at every toilet visit, wrapping tissue paper around my hand and holding my stitches as I sat, in case they burst with the strain. And the really funny bit, the smiling visitor I got my first morning in hospital, having been too terrified to sleep in case this precious scrap of human being forgot she was no longer inside me and stopped breathing.
‘Mrs Bhandari,’ the kindly woman said, sitting next to me, avoiding my drip. ‘What contraception will you be using when, um, relationships resume?’
I pointed to Nikita, swaddled in her cot.
‘Her,’ I said.
Tania reassures me that she had already decided she didn’t want children before I told her all this, but tell her I had to. She knew I had been a physical coward all my life, hiding my eyes in her duffle coat while she had her weekly scraps, and I wanted her to know that I had stared pain in its fanged grinning face and survived. Now I knew what real agony was, I reckoned nothing would be as frightening again.
That’s what I thought, until that night when Sunil was rushed to hospital and for the whole of the ninety-minute cab ride, I thought he was dead. Labour pain has a point. Otherwise why would any woman ever have more than one child? No-one would volunteer to pass their insides out of a small hole without knowing there was life at the end of it. That’s what sustained me through Sunil’s birth, which was, thank Vishnu, much quicker as I ended up having an emergency Caesarean. (My son wanted to hit the ground running and decided to try and emerge feet first. Akash cracked some joke about his lad showing early signs of playing for England but quickly apologized for his un-PC comment. Like it fooled anybody . . .)
But in that taxi I felt I was hurtling through the night along an endless tunnel towards a bottomless pit, and that the falling would be slow, dark and for ever. That is what you see on the faces of those parents on the news, whose children never came home. That is something I see in passing, just the shadow of the thing’s huge black wing, on some of the faces who turn up at my desk, wanting me to paper over the Grand Canyon with a few legal placebos, when we all know my sad corner is often the last stop before depair. It is the hell of limbo.
/> I tried to explain to Akash that I was not being a neurotic woman, it was just that he knew what was going on and I didn’t. It was just me and my imagination in that taxi, and we’ve never got on too well when left alone in dark places. All he kept saying was, ‘You swore at me, Sunita,’ and that was something I had never done before. Apparently. So Sita has an off day sometimes! I told him, although he didn’t get the joke. Not that it was, really.
Any road up, as we used to say up North when we were trying to fit in, in the three months since Sunny’s tumble off the kitchen counter (don’t even ask me what he was doing up there holding a potentially lethal Batman car), something’s happened. Or is happening. Maybe my thoughtless piss off has triggered some childhood trauma in my husband’s teeming psyche, maybe when I tumbled into casualty with a dripping nose and bits of barf down my front, he decided to go off me (the final straw after seeing me give birth twice, put on three stone and regularly hunt for underwear in the dirty washing basket), but it seems he’s finally decided to chuck me without actually saying it, or indeed doing anything much different. He still comes home at approximately the same time, still helps wash and feed the kids occasionally, still disappears into his study the minute they are in bed and sits at his computer with a glass of wine and his one evening joint (window wide open and towel stuffed under the door, in case illegal fumes give away the one bit of youthful rebellion we still possess). True, he doesn’t offer to cook any more, but that began when he started this training course. We don’t go out much as a couple, but as we don’t have a regular babysitter, having fun separately and in shifts seems the only sensible option. (Not that I’ve gone out since the Accident. Not that I’ve been asked to actually, apart from Tans and Chila ringing me up about movies and occasional meals. And whenever I say I can’t make it, they cancel the whole thing, as if it’s my fault that I’ve ruined their evening. Why they don’t just go out together is beyond me.)
So it is not as if Akash is behaving oddly. He still goes through the motions, but it is as if he has checked out for a holiday, leaving his body behind. As a good Hindu girl, I should understand this. I still have the calendar that Mum brought home from one of her religious knees-ups, which was entitled the Migration of the Soul. This colourful wall-hanging features a man tending his cattle in a lush green meadow, while a woman washes clothes at a nearby stream and a beatific looking priest with a shaved head lurks pointlessly behind a tree. On each of their breasts is a swirling fiery sun, on every tree and bush, on the foreheads of the cows and birds and insects and in the centre of the sun is the symbol for God, Om.
‘You see?’ Uncle with Patterned Jumpers blared in my ear. ‘This shows us that God is in every living thing. Our bodies are just vehicles to carry round the soul.’
‘Like your Datsun Sunny, Uncle?’ I asked.
‘Er, well, something like that, yes. So if the body is a car, the soul is the driver, you see? And if the car crashes and is broken beyond repair, the soul merely moves into another car, er, body. Like so.’ He pointed to a caterpillar in the picture, reclining gracefully on a leaf. ‘These are the lower souls, you see? Bad people become the lowly animals. And if you are a good caterpillar you might become—’
‘A tree?’ I asked hopefully.
‘No, plants come under creeping things. Maybe a cow. And after a cow? If you are a good cow, what do you think you would come back as, Sunita?’
I scanned the various options laid out before me, and pointed confidently to the turbaned man holding a staff. ‘The man next.’
‘No no no, silly girl,’ tutted Uncle, adjusting his psychedelic tank top. ‘First a cow, then’ – his finger moved over to the stream – ‘a woman. Then if you behave yourself, you come back as a man, and then of course, top position, number one car is the priest. The Rolls-Royce of the karmic cycle, yes?’ He chuckled to himself and glanced round, extremely disappointed that there were no other adults in the vicinity to applaud his wit.
I hesitated for a moment. ‘But women can’t become priests, can they, Uncle?’
Uncle stared at me for a second, then got up, said, ‘Finish your dinner,’ and walked out.
I suppose that was some sort of turning point for me, young as I was. I grew up with three older brothers, so was quite used to being alternately spoiled and lectured by my parents. But this was different. This was a blatant example of unfairness, and someone had to explain it to me. (It’s always got to me, which is why I ended up doing this job. Except now I understand why Justice wears a blindfold. And on some days, I’d kill for her sword in my bottom drawer.) Anyway, asking my parents was not a good idea. It would only get back to Patterned Jumper Uncle and he would in turn blame them for raising a mouthy curie who questioned the word of an elder. (By then I knew how the mafia worked: they always defend their own.) So I ran through the grown ups I could possibly approach without it becoming a minor scandal.
There were too many aunties and uncles to remember their names, so I gave them my own titles, based on their most memorable characteristic. There were the obvious ones like Ginger Auntie (over fond of the henna bottle), Car Keys Uncle (hands for ever in his pockets jingling things, at least I hoped they were his keys), Halitosis Uncle (no explanation needed), My Bobby Auntie (never stopped boasting about her fat son who, incidentally, ended up serving time for fraud) and my personal favourite, Existential Uncle, a tall thin man who never spoke when spoken to, but would occasionally interrupt others’ conversation without warning, with loud comments such as ‘Why it is, huh?’ or ‘They spoil everything, bastards!’
I finally settled on Modern Auntie as my confidante. It almost felt wrong to bestow the auntie label on her as she was nothing like the overweight fussy women who seemed to live at my house at weekends.
Modern Auntie was beautiful, really beautiful, with sharp aquiline features and sleek black hair like a Mughal miniature, except her hair was cut short in a fashionable bob. And she wore make-up. But not the usual auntie warpaint of bright orange lipstick (much of it on the front teeth) and alarming smears of eyeshadow. She used it to give her face shadows and contours. On close inspection, I realized she employed three different kinds of powder on her eyes, a gold wash on her lid, a dark matt on her socket, and a shiny glittery shade on her browbone. She showed me her palette once. It looked as complicated as the controls of a tank and I asked her if it was hard to remember what went where.
‘Beti, when it comes to looking good, you have to understand it is a war, which you will lose as you gradually get older.’
God, how I understand what she means now! And while the other women favoured bright sequinned clothes for formal do’s, and haldi-stained Punjabi suits for informal at-home meetings, I never saw her in anything except sleek, subtle saris, no pattern except on the pullau and hem, and the simplest gold jewellery.
I noticed the way the room would often fall quiet when she entered, women coagulating into whispering groups and men smoothing stray hair over their bald patches and hitching up their trousers expectantly, and I always thought it was her beauty and poise that unnerved them, the way she held her head high, her armour on, ready for battle. It was only when I told her that I secretly called her Modern Auntie that I discovered the source of her strange effect on others.
‘Is that how you see me, beti!’ She hugged me warmly and whispered, ‘Well, that’s much nicer than the name everyone else has given me.’
‘What name?’ I asked, happy to be inhaling her expensive perfume and feeling her bangles sing against my body.
‘Divorced Auntie, of course.’
It took a few minutes for this to sink in. I had never ever met anyone divorced before, anyone Indian I mean. There were two single mothers back in the village, but no-one in my family was the least bit interested in them. In fact, we were surprised there weren’t more of them. Divorce was one of the English diseases my mum was afraid we would catch if we hung around Willis’ Fish Bar too much, along with short skirts, bad skin and bland food.
/>
I had only seen Asian divorcees in the Hindi films we would watch around Gadget Uncle’s house, the one person we knew who owned a video recorder. They were fairly easy to spot; they would have names like Kitten or Junglee, and enter scenes on a motorbike in black leather catsuits, chain smoking. They would puff out smoke clumsily and say sentences in gruff Hindi with the odd Bastard! and OK cool cat? thrown in somewhere. Usually, they would try and steal the hero away from the heroine, who was always a pudgy-faced doll given to fainting fits and saying prayers at every opportunity. And naturally, Divorced Woman never got her man. Who would want shop-soiled goods? That was a phrase she actually used, Modern Auntie, when we had our girly chat.
‘You see, Sunny, how the women hate me because I walk in looking good, instead of crawling in on my knees, begging for them to like me? Pity me. And you watch how many of your uncles come and sweet talk me when their wives aren’t looking. They think because I have no man, I will be grateful for their scraps. It is OK to wipe your hands on shop-soiled goods, hena?’
She told me about her ex-husband. Or rather, she listed her visits to hospital: ‘Five broken ribs, nose broken twice, broken arm, burns to chest . . . No low-cut tops for me, sweetie. And I am the whore for leaving him, apparently.’
I sat next to her, sweating, not wanting to listen to this, afraid of what I would hear next, all thoughts of a chat about reincarnation long gone.
I swear I remember hearing actual cogs whirring in my head, the clanking of machinery as I began to reconstruct my small friendly world. I began to notice things I had never noticed before. The way the men would enter the house and sit, playing cards, waiting to be served while the women ran in clucking circles around them. The way my brothers would waltz in and out of the house with their mates, rolling back whenever they wanted, not even seeing my mother waiting up for them at the kitchen table, their dinners reheated and ready. The stash of gold my mother showed me one wintry evening when all the men were out, hidden in a rolled up sari at the back of the wardrobe.