Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

  ‘My insurance,’ she said, unfurling heavy yellow bangles, triple-stranded necklaces, filigree earrings. ‘We don’t have bank accounts so we have these. Just in case.’

  Sitting next to Modern Auntie, I suddenly realized what the just in case meant.

  ‘I hope he comes back as a slug,’ I eventually said.

  She laughed. She had a wonderful laugh, earthy, smoky with sadness somewhere. ‘The slug, dear child, is living in a big house in Ealing with his new wife and two kids. Men can always start again, can’t they?’

  I am so ashamed to admit this but I didn’t talk to her much after that. I mean, that’s one of my last memories of her and perhaps she just moved on. Or was moved on. She fascinated me but also scared me more than anything else, even the impending TB jab at school. In fact, after I got up from the settee and went upstairs to the toilet, I had my first ever panic attack. One moment I was staring at a spot on my chin in the bathroom mirror, the next I was gasping for breath, feeling the whole world was about to crack and fall around me. Everything looked different: the familiar wallpaper with its blue and yellow squares, the toothbrushes in the cracked mug on the sink, my own face. I hated her for making me see stuff I hadn’t noticed before. And later on, much later, I thanked her for it. I reckon that was my first baby step along the road that led me to read law at university. It was also the reason I warmed to Chila straight away when Tania pointed her out to me, the little fat girl carefully balancing along the white lines of the netball court in the playground. Someone else whose story hadn’t been heard, who needed someone like me to shout it. I need to remember stuff like this. Especially lately. I need to remind myself that I started out with the best intentions.

  I got called Auntie for the first time recently, by one of Nikita’s little friends from nursery, a Pakistani girl. ‘Say bye-bye to Auntie,’ her mum scolded her, after we’d had a brief chat on the front step. I actually looked round, expecting to see some old lady in the usual uniform of winter coat over sari, man’s socks and sandals, and a shopping trolley. And then I realized she meant me. I told Akash when I got home that night. He thought it was really funny and I laughed along with him, although I felt strangely depressed by my new title.

  ‘So what sort of auntie would you be?’ He grinned, knowing how I’d classified my relatives in my youth. ‘I know, Messy Auntie!’

  I suppose it could have been worse. He could have said Cellulite Auntie, or Crap at Job Auntie. Or even Gagging for it Auntie, given the number of times I’ve snuffled into his back hopefully in bed and he’s pretended to be asleep. (Like I don’t know!)

  I gave him his name, though.

  ‘Preoccupied Uncle,’ I said, and shut the study door on my way out.

  Oh, I know these are supposed to be the Dark Days of Marriage, this period when you’re bringing up young children and trying to establish your careers. It says so in all of Akash’s psychotherapy books that I fall over regularly in the hallway or by the bed. (Yes, I have flicked through some of them, at least the pages that fall open when I’m tidying up his crap.) And I’ve talked to enough friends in the same position to know that what we’re going through, whatever it is, is normal. But this is what I don’t get, I suppose. When we first met, when we were so desperate for each other that we would happily skip days of lectures to lie on his bed and drink wine and argue the relative merits of Plato versus Homer, or Muttley versus Scooby Doo, that was considered entirely normal too. Every self-respecting young couple in love was doing what we were doing. It was expected, walking bow-legged and bleary-eyed into the canteen, smelling of each other’s most intimate juices; and how we pitied the ones who had time to iron or write essays. They were the abnormal ones, obviously.

  I could get used to this normal, if I could forget the one we had at university. It’s funny, but I never had panic attacks during those years. I had suffered a few at school, which Tania had talked me through, before exams, after fights, but within a few weeks of meeting Akash, they stopped. Of course, I took this as another sign that We were Meant to Be. How could you not marry the man who gave you back your breath?

  God, I was besotted. Even now when I get a memory blast back to those days, a record comes on like Joni Mitchell’s ‘Case of You’, or I smell that refectory odour of ancient pasties and roll-ups, I’m back there, nineteen again, stupid, skinny and in love. My spine straightens, I feel layers of dimpled flesh peel off my thighs, my cheekbones come back, I’m running down the road towards the union in my Doc Martens and black leggings (the FemiNazi Max Wall look, he called it), probably carrying a placard saying ‘Reclaim the Night!’ or ‘Hands Off Our Bodies!’, and I fling it down to fall into his, waiting on the steps with a lazy smile playing on those soon-to-be-mine lips.

  A big part of the attraction was that it was so unexpected. I’d already given up on men, especially Asian men, who only came in two flavours as far as I could see, according to the selection available at our university. First, the Mummy’s Boys, in their ironed trousers and neat hair, stalwarts of the Computer Soc and Asia Society, usually reading medicine or pharmacy. Their idea of a good night out was organizing a showing of some ancient Hindi movie in a broom cupboard, and then getting tipsy on cider while the girls handed out microwaved samosas and tittered at their obscure bilingual jokes. I’d joined Asia Soc out of a sense of duty. I mean, politically, I felt I ought to seek out my brethren and express my solidarity. I had imagined long evenings in front of a roaring fire, discussing the implications of the recent Southall uprisings, snacking on home-cooked sabzis and planning sit-ins for peace in one of the labs, or marches against the bride burning scandals in India. I did not expect to be cornered in dark corridors by dribbling teenagers who thought, because I wore men’s shoes and smoked, I might be the ideal person to lose their virginity with. I made my mind up then. Just because we shared the same skin tone, I didn’t have to like them.

  And then there were the Rebels, a small select group of brothers who were dotted about in various unexpected departments, the rangy Sikh guy doing fashion and design, the scary-looking Bengali punk reading politics, a couple of cuteys doing languages, and the shy, plump South Indian doing research in phonetics. They were easy to spot, as theirs was often the only non-white face in their particular departments. And besides, I had a built-in antenna for kindred spirits. I could spot it in the way they walked, the books they carried, what they drank and smoked, what made them laugh. Always the same stuff about family and duty and the double lives we were leading. Always proud to be who they were, but not scared to push back the boundaries, to redefine what being Asian meant. We were making history. We knew it as we were living it. It made us feel special and lonely. Maybe that’s why I sought them out.

  I’d had one boyfriend before, a brief fling in my first term with a guy from Southampton reading French, but I got bored with having to explain stuff all the time. How come my parents came over here? What did korma actually mean in my language? What was that dot on the forehead? Why was my skin so beautiful? I felt like his social worker, not his girlfriend. I knew then this wasn’t what I wanted or needed. I needed someone I could have cultural shorthand with, someone who would get my jokes. So I found the Rebels, and there was loads we had in common except for one thing, which they all had in common. White girlfriends.

  I’m laughing now but bloody hell, the tears I wept over that. I mean, I got all the usual crappy arguments back from them: love has no colour (yeah, right, try telling that to Nelson Mandela), it was impossible to meet Asian women because of their family restrictions (well I was there, right in front of them, available), Asian women expected too much commitment too early (which, translated, meant they might not shag on a first date), and finally, amazingly, Asian women were just too heavy! Puh-leeze. And they weren’t talking about weight here, because as I recall, Bengali punk’s bit of fluff, who happened to be sitting next to him, bore a passing resemblance to a blonde Hattie Jacques.

  The next thing I remember, I was thro
wing cruet sets around and shouting in what I thought was a female and empowering way, and I gave it to them straight: ‘Angela Davis has got you lot sussed. It says in her latest book that the reason men of colour want white women is revenge. It makes you feel powerful, shagging the women of your oppressors. But how do you think that makes us feel, eh? Your women? Not good enough for you, eh?’

  There was a long silence, broken only by someone putting on David Bowie’s ‘Changes’ on the jukebox. Then rangy Sikh guy cleared his throat and said, ‘See what I mean?’

  They avoided me after that, probably because I’d hit a nerve and they couldn’t deal with the truth, which suited me fine. And luckily, that happened to coincide with the period I got heavily involved with the Uni Women’s Group, so I was far too busy picketing rugby players’ socials or attending meetings like Examine your own Cervix. Speculum Provided! to worry about being single. It is still something that Tania teases me about. She’s always asking for anecdotes about my life as a womb-an, and nowadays I laugh along with her, amazed at how good I was at the theory of being a strong female. So yeah, hands up, I admit it, I did it all, maybe because it was the only group around in which I could be a star. You see, when I joined the sisters, there were only two women of colour members, me and Yaba, a statuesque Nigerian, far below the acceptable multiracial quota the group felt was decent. And I had, if you’ll excuse the pun, loads of brownie points over all the others. I was, well, Black, back then (anyone not white was given the honorary title) so I had plenty of skinhead-centred anecdotes with which to impress the group. I was working class, which gave me the edge over Yaba, who was unfortunate enough to come from African royal blood. I was pissed off (my rant in the refectory had made me something of an underground heroine), and I came, as I was often reminded, from a repressive culture in which women were treated like cattle. (I kept quiet about cows being holy, it would only have confused things.) If I ever wanted to win a point, all I had to do was start the sentence with ‘As an Asian woman’ and end it with ‘You don’t understand.’ So I marched and put up posters and organized pickets and spent drunken evenings dancing along to ‘I Will Survive’ and even considered taking up lesbianism as it would have been a logical and convenient choice, given how I lived. Life was good, simple and mine. And then I met Akash.

  To be fair, it wasn’t just him. Yaba’s dramatic exit from the group had unnerved me. She walked out after a fevered discussion about female circumcision, in which Angela, our protest co-ordinator, had argued, ‘Well, we can’t condemn it totally. After all, it might be a very ancient and precious custom which we’re just too white to understand. Like nose piercing.’

  Yaba threw some furniture and likened Angela to a portion of the female anatomy, which in other circumstances might have been an attempt to reclaim a rude word, and in this instance, was just rude, then turned to me, trembling, and said, ‘You remember this, Sunita. Our ancestors were living in cities with drainage systems while they were still shitting in caves. They ain’t got no culture, which is why they’re trying to own ours. What makes you think they know the answers, huh?’

  That’s when I began thinking about the men, our men, a little more sympathetically. Sat in here, everyone with a pair of nuts was an enemy. Out there, all we had was each other. Maybe I felt I didn’t want to subdivide any more. Maybe I was just, finally, growing up. Weird really, but now I look back, not one of those marches or demos or discussions came close to the kinship I felt with my sex when I gave birth. Strangely enough, it is also the one thing, the only thing that separates me, Tania and Chila. Chila, I reckon, will be dropping sprogs as soon as she’s found the right wallpaper for the nursery. But Tania, not ever wanting kids . . . I can’t get past that one.

  Akash always wanted children, loads of them, he said. That was number five that I ticked off my perfect man list within a week of meeting him. (To justify being a feminist and wanting a man, I had a very long and complicated list.) He passed the first three requirements within five minutes of me handing him a flyer for an Anti-Nazi League benefit.

  ‘Oh, I’m already going to that,’ he said, ruffling his fingers through his mad hair. ‘In fact, there’s a bunch of us from the Law Soc who have hired a coach to go down for the concert in Finsbury Park. Wanna come?’

  I almost fell off my wedged boots. ‘You read law? I haven’t seen you around . . . but I’ve been really busy, actually,’ I rescued myself, wanting to slash my wrists with my CND badge for missing this one.

  ‘Oh, I just swapped courses from PPE. Too much theory, I want to be on the front line, you know?’

  He was the right colour, politically aware, and doing a funky subject. So what about vital number four on the list?

  ‘Actually,’ he said shyly (number eight; I’m a sucker for blushing blokes), ‘I wasn’t around campus much last year. Got into a bit of a heavy scene with a girl.’ I held my breath. ‘Messy stuff. Was really doing my head in, did no work, you know the score.’ I was still holding my breath and hoped my turning puce wouldn’t put him off. ‘So I finished it and . . . here I am.’

  And there he was. The best of East and West in one perfectly formed package and I knew how lucky I was to have found him before anyone else.

  Soon after that I left the women’s group, and two years later failed all my exams while Akash sailed through his. I wasn’t going to be a barrister, but knowing I was going to be his wife made up for it then. He proposed when I was in my digs recovering after . . . an operation. I wonder now if it was guilt that made him produce a ring pull off a beer can from his pocket and slip it onto my thumb. (My other fingers were digging into my palm. It was the bleeding, it didn’t stop for days.) I mean, don’t get me wrong, he didn’t force me to . . . It was a mutual decision, the wrong time for a baby, what were we going to tell our parents, etc.

  We could have timed it better. Four weeks before my finals was not the ideal time to blow both our grants on a quiet visit to a suburban clinic. Yellow wallpaper. Isn’t that the title of a book? It’s what I remember most about that place. That and the gas mask coming down like a slap. Akash says I was crying, shouting stuff – forgivememybaby. He still pretends I was referring to him, even now. Like he’s the one who can’t live with it. I don’t think about it too much. My chest hurts and I have to be careful. If you can’t be good, be careful. My old village neighbour trilled that at us as we trooped off to school. I didn’t manage either, did I?

  I was really worried that Akash would bring this up when we had our pre-interview interview with Tania for her documentary. I wasn’t too keen on the whole idea, to be honest. For a start, she knows most of the dirt on me and Chila, like you do with old girlfriends. And I wasn’t about to repeat any of it just so she had some good hard copy to show her boss. So we sat there, answering these really intimate questions with polite smiles. I thought it was totally pointless, but Tania seemed really pleased afterwards.

  And then she explained, ‘Look, Sunny, I’m not after shock horror scandal scoops, OK? This is going to be a really wide-ranging look at relationship alternatives, no narrator, letting people tell their stories the way they want to, and with as much or as little detail as they feel comfortable about.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t watch it, then,’ I quipped back. ‘Who wants to watch loads of boring couples banging on about how happy they are?’

  She didn’t take it badly. She had her preachy face on, so I made sure I was sitting comfortably.

  ‘But that’s exactly why people will watch, Sunny! No more Jerry Springer fisticuffs, no more digging in the trash so we can all feel a bit better about our own sorry lives. Right now, what we all want to know is, how do you get it right? And as it happens, my two best friends have most of the answers between them. Course, I’ll be interviewing loads of other couples, so no pressure. OK?’

  I should have told her then. I almost did, honestly. I wanted to congratulate her at having perfect ironic timing. I wanted to tell her that she couldn’t have picked a worse
time to ask us how we maintained such a happy marriage. But I felt I was partly to blame. As close as we all are, I’ve never been able to admit things were anything less than perfect, at least with Tans.

  Chila, I reckon, would sympathize, but God knows what advice she’d give back. ‘Oh, just cook him his favourite dinner and snuggle on his lap. Works for me, Sunny!’ Hoosodding-ray for her, then.

  I also knew that Tans was really worried about this film. She’d gone on and on about how it was her first time producing and that’s why she wanted to work with people she trusted, and Chila had actually taken me aside and told me that if this documentary didn’t work out, Tania would possibly lose her job. At least, that’s what Tania told her. Chila, bless her, couldn’t wait to be a film star. She’d even had the house carpet-shampooed when Tans arrived, on her own, with a notebook, and then had to eat a banquet cooked for a whole crew that Chila had been expecting. She ate it of course, and took doggy bags home with her, because you do that sort of thing for your mates. Which is why, in the end, I said yes.

  As it happens, Tans has become very interested in Akash, or at least his therapy work with Asian couples. He resisted her at first, muttered a lot about client confidentiality and how Anthony Clare had lost all respect when he became public property, but I could have told him that no-one resists Tania for long. It makes sense, of course. He’s got the overview, the access to cases, the hundreds of files, the thousands of books, the joints they both enjoy smoking in his office when I’m trying to put the kids to bed. Actually, in a weird sort of way, I’m glad he’s become involved. It’s become a bit of a cosy routine over the last few weeks. Tans comes over with a vanload of papers and questions. Sometimes Chila will join us (only when her hubbie is working late, and she always hurries back before he gets home). And we girls have a good long chat over the meal we’ve cobbled together (I get something from the freezer, Chila produces an amazing home-cooked dish, Tans always brings a take-away), and off we go.