Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

  Tania got up from the armchair, heading for the kitchen to grab a glass of water. She stopped mid-way, feeling foolish. She might not know where the glasses were kept any more. She could not bear the thought of opening the wrong cupboard or of having to ask him for a drink.

  ‘So it looks like we both got what we wanted, then,’ Deepak said to her back.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  She could hear the smile in his voice: ‘A wife.’

  He touched her arm, gently, as she made for the door. Not like he had grabbed Chila only hours previously. No yielding soft flesh here, it was all hard-toned ready-for-flight muscle, and somewhere beneath his fingers, a pulse, hammering against a bloody drum.

  ‘She doesn’t want to do this programme, Tania.’

  Tania laughed now, relieved. It sounded joyless; breathe him out, dead air. ‘You’re already telling her what she thinks. God, that was quick, Deepak. It took you months to do that with me.’

  ‘You’re using her. She’s too sweet to see it and you know that.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  Deepak moved in closer, smelled perfume and smoke in her hair. Eau de Slut she’d called it once, wanting to see if he would silently agree. Guessing he would.

  ‘You forget,’ he said softly, ‘I know you, Tania. Every inch. Doing favours isn’t your job.’

  She squared up to him, well-rehearsed speeches on autocue in her head. ‘And granting them isn’t yours. But then, that always was your big problem, Deepak. Getting to know someone and trying to own them is not the same thing. If she says yes because you’ve got bigger muscles than her, what she probably means is no. Why do you think women have to be such good liars? Especially our women? And how are you ever going to know the difference? Scared people never tell the truth. Do they?’

  Deepak flinched from her, pulling his arm away. ‘I don’t need to fight you for her,’ he said slowly, ‘however many pseudo-feminist sayings you want to use to justify your career plan. I love her enough to let her make her own mind up. But I’ll be watching you.’

  And he did, as she flung the front door open and marched to her car, hair flying like some triumphant banner behind her. She always did like dramatic exits. He had rather enjoyed playing along, running after her in his bare feet on the damp pavement, calling her name, begging mock-forgiveness, astonished that enacting such clichés could be such fun. Now, he just felt cold. He shut the door and automatically picked up the telephone. He would check that Chila was OK, remind her that whenever she was ready, he would drive over, pick her up, bring her home, and lock the door behind them.

  Tania

  I NEVER BOUGHT into that truth is beauty and vice versa crap. I’m waiting for proof that telling it like it is makes anyone feel good or better, and my theory was finally confirmed on day two at university when our current affairs tutor banged on about objectivity in reportage. So there’s a war and you’re there with your crew in pretend combats with a Kate Adie streak of dirt artfully smeared on your cheek. Where’s your first location? When you get there, where do you first point the camera? Where the bomb lands or where it dropped from? What do you say to accompany the visuals? Hooray for our lads, the freedom fighters, or boo to the barbarian terrorists? What tone? Grave seen-it-all witness, here we go again, man’s inhumanity, etc.? Or shocked not-since-Belsen horror, a catch in the voice, the soft toy lying/placed pathetically in the ruins? At every stage you make choices. You play God. Cue the Sun. The biggest lie is that we claim to have the real answers. But it is the perfect camouflage, if you want to be an invisible deity.

  My mother believed that those gilt-painted statues on top of the fridge were actual divine beings. She would talk to them like best friends, bow and cry to them, go to cover their ears if any of us said a harsh word in their hearing, ask them for blessings that they repeatedly ignored, like her health, and her children’s future weddings. After she died, I wrapped them up and sent them to her sister in Bombay. I swaddled them in red silk and put FRAGILE – GODS WITHIN on the packaging. The only parcel I’ve sent to India that has ever arrived undamaged and on time.

  The nearest I’ve been to a divine presence was on a beach in Greece with a saxophone player from Surrey. Yeah, he knew he was a walking oxymoron, which is probably why we got on so well. We drank two bottles of wine, and watched the sun sink over the endless, curved horizon as he played some Deep South kinda sultry composition, and life, for those few minutes, was blessed. I don’t remember feeling particularly truthful, but something made bigger sense than me. I could have gone with it, but once I’d worked out that all it took to summon Him/Her/Them up was some retsina and a rather crap version of ‘Summertime’, I gave up on God/s for good.

  Jonathan peppered his speeches with an assortment of divine expletives when I showed him the first rough cut of the documentary. Interesting how you can imbue a holy being with so many different meanings. Maybe that’s what whoever it was meant when He said ‘I have many names,’ knowing future hedonistic generations would need them to use in times of stress, wonder and, of course, when having especially good sex. There were the Christs of glee when Jonathan saw the couple of spousal punch ups that I got in Akash’s sessions, the Jesuses of amazement when I showed him the interview with the two sister-wives of the urbane Muslim businessman, who said they actually loved each other better than the husband they shared. And the oh Gods of envy when I ran through the various beaming, happily matched couples who, after a handful of chaperoned meetings together, took the leap of faith and fortunately landed, feet first, on their perfect match. And then he asked me about Chila.

  ‘I mean, Jesus wept, Tania, she was the reason I wanted you to do this project. I mean, yeah, you’ve got some sexy stuff there, but the journey of it . . . surely she’s the traveller we should be following.’

  Of course, I couldn’t tell him why she wasn’t featured, why it had been so difficult to get her on her own, especially as she had refused to do the interview without Deepak being present. I mumbled something about availability to which he snorted, ‘She’s a housewife, for God’s sake, how busy is she going to be?’

  I thought I’d lost the whole thing then. There were hundreds of reasons I didn’t want to do that interview, most of them featuring Deepak, his reactions, and the knock-on effect on my friend. My soft as butter, snug as a bug friend who is so desperate to be on television.

  She actually rang me up last week (whispering quickly so she could finish before Deepak came out of the shower), and begged me to make her a star. ‘See, I’ve told everyone about it, all Deepak’s friends, and they were dead impressed, and I promised to invite them all to the – what do you call it? – showing, premium, whatever, and they’ve started inviting me to coffee mornings now and tomorrow I’m going to this Tupperware for India Street Kids thing and . . . I really want to do it, Tans. I’ll be really good on it, promise.’

  Like chucking a floppy-eared puppy into the storm. Martin once said, during one of our few nasty rows, that looking after Chila is the nearest thing I have to a conscience. But I couldn’t explain to her that I was trying to protect her by leaving her out. Because then we would have to have That Conversation about why I felt she needed protection from her darling jaan, and how could I tell her that she was married to someone whose darkness had once filled me and frightened me in equal measure?

  Shit. I have been through this so many times. That maybe I should have warned her off. Come clean. But why would her version of him be the same as mine? Truth is especially subjective in relationships. The number of girlfriends who tell me they’ve finally found the one, the witty, handsome, sensitive, yet manly man who will fill the gaping chasm in their otherwise accomplished lives, and I am introduced to ginger dwarves with halitosis, pot-bellied baldies with a nice line in toilet jokes, anorak-wearing Oedipal cases who blush when a bra advert comes on. And the majority of these averagely underwhelming men are stepping out with these incredible, ripe, blooming gals.

  That’s t
he real bastard about the biological clock: ovaries are such terrible judges of character. They get one whiff of a possible sperm donor and they’re off, slipping in their own juices, pulling you after men you wouldn’t have spat on a mere three years earlier. It’s not that I don’t like children per se, I just don’t like what wanting them does to your brain. Apparently a female is born already containing all the eggs she will ever produce and once you hit thirty-five, they start dying off at a rapid rate. How fair is that? Apply the same rule to sperm production and you’d be falling over desperate-to-please men, wearing skimpy vests to reveal their fine child-producing frames, laughing uproariously at your jokes, showing off their cars with inbuilt baby seats, men who don’t go green and twitch when commitment is mentioned, men who swap arrogance for Aran sweaters and nut roasts, because only those with time on their side can afford to be choosy and cruel.

  Personally, I’ve always preferred my eggs unfertilized. Every month I wave bye-bye to them, one down, x number to go, shedding moons, resisting gravity and the tides. It’s what I’m good at, what I’ve got used to.

  In a weird way (and can I just say at this point the nearest gay experience I have had was a half-hearted snog with a drunk TV chat show hostess, only just worth it for the two-page story I flogged to a Sunday newspaper the next day?), Chila being with Deepak is almost like Chila being with me. My gift to her, although he’d say he wasn’t mine to give. My personal leap of faith, the only one I’ve ever taken, believing that all that was good in him would be even better beneath the warmth of her unsullied sun. Goodness breeds goodness, fight fire with fire and all that. Maybe the sharp-fanged creatures we let loose together would become gambolling pussycats with Chila. I hope to God.

  So Jonathan was getting more agitated, not helped by his ridiculously snug leather trousers and a few bottles of Chablis at his BBC lunch, and he comes to the brief section I filmed with Sunita. I’d planned to shoot a day-long interview with her, finally commit to tape the now epic story of how she and Akash met, yadda yadda, but when it came to it, well, she just wasn’t there. Akash joined her for part of it, they told their story in a strange sort of dutiful manner, they even held hands, but it was like watching one of those crap carpet adverts. We love our shag pile and you will too. Maybe it was nerves. She let slip she’d had a couple of panic attacks over the last few months, stress of babies as per, so I didn’t want to scrap the item and make her feel bad. I shot what I could, salvageable in the edit; with a bit of soft focus and some chocolate box music, they will look like anyone else in love.

  I explained all this to Jonathan before he saw the unedited version (always have caveats a-plenty for him after a boozy lunch), and he watched it silently, chin in his hand, making those really bloody irritating grunty noises like some old bloke watching the boxing. And when it’s over, he gets up and leaves the room, leaving me to hyperventilate into a paper cup and start flicking through Guardian Media for another job.

  Then he comes back in, slaps me on the back and says, ‘Brilliant! It’s there, isn’t it? It’s all there. A spot of re-editing and we’ll have a programme.’

  I do a sort of half-nod, half-shake gesture, one of the useful genetic traits I’ve retained, the Indian yes–no head waggle, always lets you off the hook in a sort of mystical enigmatic way.

  And then he says, ‘I’ve had a word with Kirsten, the strand producer, and she agrees, go with the flow.’

  ‘Right.’ I waggled again. ‘You mean, the same flow . . . of the journey . . . we were discussing. That flow.’ Rule number one: always make them spell out what they want, because most of the time they have no sodding idea and they’re hoping you will give them some definition that they can blame you for when it all goes pear-shaped.

  Jonathan leaned forward, his eyes glittering. ‘A therapist . . . married to her. It’s perfect. Ironically funny. It’s what they don’t say that matters, eh? It’s now. It’s very now.’

  Well, that cleared things up perfectly. I got on the phone to Chila in front of him and arranged the interview for the following week. I knew what I had to do. And Chila was so grateful she almost made me feel good about it.

  Of course, just when I need a bit of TLC, Martin decides to behave like a slab of rare sod. Ever since I started this doc, he’s been skulking around, chiselling away at his writer’s block, tutting and harrumphing every time I try and get some feedback off him about my dilemma. (And contrary to popular opinion, it is a dilemma for me, using friends for fodder.) Scratch a new man and a prehistoric snake always slithers out. His testosterone levels are so high, he’s choking on his own basic instincts. He wants to be happy for me, but how can he when I’m doing better than him? I tried to be as sensitive as I could, I tried explaining that me having a job and him not being able to get one did not mean I was standing over his bollocks with a mallet in my hand. I even tried to explain why I can’t play the shucks, this is just a hobby game with him, not only because I respect him and expect more of him than that, but mainly because it made me sick, watching my mother contort herself to bolster my father’s fragile ego.

  God knows, my father had high ambitions: ‘Only the best!’ he would blare at us; ‘You be the best. You will get the best.’ Brave words from a man who never got off the factory floor long enough to see the sky, whose idea of haute couture was Crimplene trousers with the crease already sewn in, whose every effort to better himself just succeeded in making us ashamed of who we were. Smelly Pakis hanging around hotel foyers while he pretended to be checking out prices for the top-floor suite; jungle bunnies dithering in the Mercedes showroom while Dad begged for a test drive; the poor bewildered savages who found themselves, mistakenly of course, in the first-class carriages of trains, with Dad insisting the booking clerk had made a terrible mistake.

  When I get asked about racism, as I always do in any job interview when they’re checking whether I’m the genuine article (oppressed Asian woman who has suffered), as opposed to the pretend coconut (white on the inside, brown on the outside, too well off and well spoken to be considered truly ethnic), I make up stories about skinheads and shit through letterboxes, because that’s the kind of racism they want to hear about. It lets my nice interviewer off the hook, it confirms that the real baddies live far away from him in the SE postcode area, and he can tut at them from a safe distance. I never tell them about the stares and whispers and the anonymous gobs of phlegm at bus stops, the creaking of slowly closing doors and the limited view from the glass counter (we never get as high as the ceiling), which all scar as deeply as a well-aimed Doc Marten. Maybe I would not have learned about them so early on if it hadn’t been for dear Papa. Maybe I should thank him for that.

  But funnily enough, it wasn’t him I blamed. It was Mum. We were kids; duffle-coated, clean-nosed, well-drilled children whose dad had big hands and long strides. Mum was heavier than the rest of the family’s combined weight; I could hear her ten-decibel hacking from the next street. This was not a small woman. But she shrivelled to the size of a wrinkled pea around her husband. Every bad idea he came up with (and there were many), was always hers. She stalked them, pounced on them and claimed them as soon as they went wrong, allowing him to shake his head and bellow, ‘Your mother has bungled matters again!’ Every good idea was usually hers, and given to him on a warm plate with a liberal dash of humble dressing. ‘You see? How your father was right? Listen to him next time, all of you. Such a brilliant move, husband-ji. Thusi acha badh kithe . . .’

  Oh, I knew the drill all right. Training began early in our house, not in the expected areas, cooking, shopping, cleaning, as Mother insisted I would have all my life to run after some man and she would rather I enjoyed my carefree virginal days. (Which I did, by visiting various cafés and sucking the face off some grateful sixth-former.) But what she taught me was more of a spatial exercise: how to take up as little room as possible. How to read the moods of everyone in the room and flow smoothly about them, adapting to their edges and hollows, silver and si
lent as mercury. How to walk in small steps, talk in sweet tones, pour dainty cupfuls, refill plates in the shake of a dupatta, smile and smile at visitors (for it would be them rather than my family who would judge me later on) and, most importantly, save any rages and rumbles for the privacy of my dark bedroom.

  Strange that so many of us become doctors and business people; the women are so much more suited to the service industries. We aim to please. Any complaints, please see the manager. No tipping necessary.

  Martin, moody scumbag that he is sometimes, is always bemoaning my lack of native culture. It must be disappointing for him; there he was, thinking he was getting the genuine article, looking forward to spatting with my family and having forbidden encounters in borrowed places, planning a romantic tour with me around the one-hut, dung-filled villages he visited as a student, and instead he gets someone who can drink him under the table and belch the alphabet as a party piece. I know a lot more than he knows I know.

  Anyone with a bit of sense would guess that a comprehensive-educated kid from a blue-collar family in the East End is force-fed her language and rituals as a matter of survival, our defence against the corruption outside our front door. Anyone Asian, that is. Only anyone not Asian would assume that wearing mini-skirts and liking Italian food meant I was in ethnic denial. The roots go deeper than that, honey. Ask most of my girlfriends, ranging in hue from tinted copper to Dravidian blue-black; between them they run business empires, save lives on operating tables, mould and develop young minds, trade in non-existent commodities with shouting barrow boys, kick ass across courtrooms and computer screens. In the outside world, they fly on home-grown wings. Then they reach their front doors and forget it all. They step over the threshold, the Armani suit shrinks and crumples away, the pencil skirt feels blowsy and tight, the head bows, the shoulders sag, within a minute they are basting and baking and burning fingers over a hot griddle, they are soothing children and saying sorry, bathing in-laws and burning with guilt, packing lunch-boxes and pouring oil over choppy waters, telling everyone who will listen they don’t mind, wondering why they left their minds next to the muddy wellies and pile of junk mail in the front porch.