by Meera Syal
‘Well, I think it’s absolutely thrilling, sweetie,’ said Leila, planting a delicate kiss on Chila’s cheek. ‘We’re all terribly excited you invited us. The rest of the lunching ladies were most jealous when we told them we were coming to a proper film première. Such a refreshing change from all those Gandhi Centre do’s where you end up flattering some sad old soak who was famous twenty years ago. And their canapés are disgusting.’
‘You haven’t even seen it yourself?’ Chandni asked, wincing as she made for a suddenly vacant bar stool.
Chila shook her head. Her cheeks were beginning to ache with inane grinning. She was one of the club now and she had to keep up.
‘Er, that’s what happens usually, Tania told me,’ she began. ‘I mean, the film isn’t ready until it’s been stuck together and . . . and they get music on it.’
The women nodded sagely; the men had already grouped around the bar and were making loud calculations on the cost of the conversion.
‘So Chila-bahen,’ drawled Manju, ‘does this mean you’ll be leaving us for Hollywood? Or Bollywood even?’
Chila swallowed. They all adored her. They were grateful for being there. She reminded herself to send out her carefully selected thank you for attending notelets first thing in the morning. ‘I can’t see me dancing around trees, can you?’ They laughed. Of course they would. ‘Anyway, Deeps and I were thinking about starting a family. That big house needs some little feet running around. And we’ve had enough dry runs, if you know what I mean!’
Everyone laughed again, except Chandni, for whom the term dry run now had new and sinister connotations.
Chila caught sight of Sunita below one of the screens and waved madly. Sunita mouthed something and waved back. Chila relaxed in a second; she could feel the adrenalin slow its galloping through her veins, for the first time that evening feel the smile actually reach her eyes. Sunita motioned Chila to join her. She was in conversation with two other women, one, in a severe shalwar kameez, with short-cropped hair and thick NHS specs, dragging heavily on a bidi, the other in embroidered trousers with a Kashmiri shawl thrown over her shoulders. She batted the air animatedly, running long square fingers through spiky hennaed hair.
‘Do you know them?’ asked Manju hesitantly.
‘Nice to see the lesbian contingent out tonight,’ added Leila. ‘I suppose we need someone to start the dancing.’
‘You are too much!’ tittered Chandni, attempting a few furtive pelvic floor exercises where she sat.
‘Well, look at them, really,’ said Leila crossly. ‘Why is it so many of these young girls set out to make themselves look as unattractive as possible? No man in his right mind would want to go near them.’
‘Maybe that’s the idea,’ said Chila unexpectedly. ‘Or maybe they’re both married with five kids each. Maybe that’s why they didn’t have time to put make-up on.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ soothed Leila, ‘I’m not shocked at all. In Pakistan I met so many women who were in love with their sisters-in-law or whatever. Hardly surprising when they have so little contact with the men. But they still got married, had children, kept everything going. One has to. It’s perfectly OK to have a girlfriend as long as you realize it’s just a hobby, really.’
Chila watched Sunita’s companions and wondered what it would be like, to plan a future without including a husband. As long as she could remember, her tomorrows were filled with, built around a Deepak. To imagine otherwise would be like jumping out of a plane without a parachute, free-falling towards God-knows-where.
Manju nudged her. ‘That one in the middle needs an emergency make-over.’
‘Who?’
‘The lardy lady with the growing out perm and her thinner sister’s suit on.’
‘That’s my friend Sunita,’ said Chila, a little too loudly.
‘Is she gay?’ enquired Leila.
‘Cheerful enough,’ Chila replied, and began pushing through the crowd.
Sunita did not register Chila at her shoulder for some time. She had been too caught up in Beroze and Suki’s conversation, a shy spectator at an intellectual tennis match, feeling balls whizz past her ears – balls which, until recently, she would have been able to lob back with wit and confidence. Beroze was describing a recent case she had defended. A sweet old Pakistani granny had been caught smuggling pounds of pure heroin stashed in the inner tubes of her wheelchair. Her defence had been that her sons had forced her into it, that she had been too weak and frail to resist.
‘I mean, this woman was terrified of her own children, had spent a life of dependency on the various men around her. All she had ever been was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother. What free will did she have in this crime?’
‘Sorry, I don’t buy that bullshit any more,’ responded Suki tartly. ‘I meet women every day who on paper have no choices, but against every odd, they up and leave their homes, challenge their families, question their communities . . .’
‘That’s not the same—’ Beroze began, but Suki ploughed on.
‘Nahin, it is! We spend all our energy making excuses for not doing anything. Do you know how much effort it takes to stand still and do nothing, blame everyone else for your misery? Much more than it takes to actually change things, change yourself.’
‘Shit!’ Beroze said with a laugh. ‘Remind me not to send any of my more desperate cases to your project. What do you do, slap them as they come in the door and say, What took you so long?’
‘Um, well, I think everyone has a right time to do stuff, don’t you?’ Chila piped up perkily.
Beroze and Suki fixed her, then Sunita, with bemused stares.
‘This is one of my oldest friends, Chila,’ Sunita responded, moving a little to let Chila into their tight circle. ‘Beroze and Suki were at university with me, even though they look like my daughters.’
Chila wasn’t sure whether to laugh, as Sunita’s observation was entirely accurate, but Beroze and Suki both pooh-poohed affectionately, which made Chila a little jealous.
Suki adjusted her specs to focus on Chila. ‘Do you live round Ilford way?’
‘Yeah, as it happens. Do you?’
‘No I work round there. Thought I’d seen you about.’
‘Oh, right. You don’t work in Argos, do you?’ Chila asked. ‘I seem to spend my life there at the moment, just doing up the kitchen, you know how you just keep finding little bits you need and . . .’ Chila trailed off gradually. Telling this to Suki was like talking into an unflattering loud speaker. Everything she said sounded too loud and horribly trivial.
Suki’s cool brown eyes seemed to have acquired a slight glaze, although her mouth kept up its pleasant smile. ‘No. Actually, I work at a project just outside the town centre. But Argos is pretty good value, now you mention it.’
‘What project is that?’ Chila asked. ‘I don’t know one round there.’
Suki swapped quick glances with Sunita who butted in, ‘Um, the address is kept secret, Chila, for, you know, security reasons.’
‘Well, how would anyone know where to find it, then?’ Chila demanded, feeling rebuffed.
‘Well,’ began Suki, ‘they would turn up somewhere like Sunita’s desk and she would tell them. We tell the people who need to know, or they phone and we vet the calls.’
‘It’s a refuge,’ Sunita said finally, gently, ‘so it’s not surprising you don’t know where it is.’
‘A refuge?’ squeaked Chila. She had heard about them in the agony hour on the local Asian station. It seemed to be the answer to most of the questions from the desperate women who rang up, whispering in trembly voices from public telephone booths. ‘You need to contact your local refuge,’ Auntie Salma would tell them in soothing tones before switching to an ad for basmati rice. Chila imagined them to be dank, dripping places with mouldy blankets and bars on the windows. Auntie Salma always managed to make them sound like the last shameful resort for those people too weak to cope. But then she was only a boutique owner who happened t
o be a friend of the radio station manager’s wife, and Suki, Chila decided, looked a little more sussed than her.
A waiter filled the ensuing pause by offering his tray of drinks around. Both Chila and Sunita grabbed the nearest glass available, Sunita downing hers rapidly while Chila wasted a few seconds trying to put her paper umbrella up.
Beroze turned to Chila. ‘What you said, about everyone having their right time. That’s so true, you know.’
‘Is it? I mean, it is, yeah,’ Chila responded gratefully.
Beroze continued, ‘Suki here spends most of hers raging that things don’t change quickly enough. I, on the other hand, know everyone eventually gets their day in court, metaphorically and literally speaking. We battle enough guilt, without beating ourselves up about not being braver and stronger.’
‘In fact, why beat yourself up when you can ask a man?’ Suki quipped.
Beroze ploughed on. ‘When someone’s had enough, they move bloody quickly, in my experience.’
Sunita cleared the creamy liquid from the back of her throat. ‘Beroze is a barrister,’ she said, surprised at how much the words hurt her throat, ‘specializing in family law.’
‘Oh, right!’ enthused Chila. ‘That’s sort of what you do, isn’t it, Sunny?’
Sunita hesitated, prickles of shame pushing through the skin of her neck.
Beroze sipped on her drink and added quickly, ‘Sunita is on the front line. I’m the one who gets the glory with half the work load, but I suppose that’s a fair swap, for all the essays I used to write for you when you were too shagged to pick up a pen, heh, Suns?’
‘Oh shit, please don’t remind me,’ begged Sunita, really meaning it.
Suki adjusted her specs mock sternly. ‘The department troublemaker,’ she explained. ‘We always said she’d end up keeping people out of prison or ending up in one. Was she a motormouth when you met her, or is that something she just did to annoy all of us?’
Chila caught Sunita’s eye, saw something in her face halfway between pride and fear, conveying all that she was, all that she could have been, all that she carried with her now. For a moment she felt disoriented. It was always Sunita or Tania who had run to her rescue; when had things changed? ‘Sunny’s the brains in our group all right,’ she said. ‘But she’s had to fight me for motormouth title. And of course, she was the first to bag a really nice bloke, so we were all dead jealous of her.’
‘Ah, Mr Dreamboat Freud himself!’ laughed Beroze.
‘We just talked to him, Sunita. He’s just the same!’ added Suki.
Sunita looked over at Akash who was, typically, deep in conversation with a group of young men, listening with his head down, forefinger on his chin: her Thinker, cast in clay rather than bronze, every shadow and hollow familiar to her even with closed-tight eyes, like reading Braille. From afar she could see all he had to offer: wit, warmth, good profile, strong backbone, an angel compared to some of the brutes Suki encountered in her work, sifting through the shipwrecks of stormy relationships. Yes, he was the same Akash, and she wondered why, at this precise moment, she looked at him and felt nothing, when she ought to feel blessed. It was as if she watched herself watching the world going on around her. She listened in to Suki and Beroze’s sparky banter, remembering how many hours she used to spend arguing ideals to the death, intoxicated by her commitment, astonished by her own undying faith.
‘You see? There are good men out there, you just have to look a bit harder, that’s all!’ Suki finished.
‘What?’ Sunita jumped at Suki’s voice.
‘You found one, so did I, so—’
‘Really?’ Chila interrupted. ‘Are you married, Suki?’
Suki’s lips curled into a ironic bow. ‘Put me down as a dyke, eh?’
‘No no,’ Chila spluttered, cursing Leila silently, ‘I just thought . . . doing the job you do and all, you know, you’d get—’
‘Bitter?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Far too clichéd for me, yaar. It makes me appreciate what I got. I leave the testicle crunching to Beroze here. My job gives me faith in everyone’s ability to change. Beroze’s, on the other hand, forces her to see everyone she defends as a helpless victim of circumstance . . .’
‘Piss off!’ Beroze said. ‘And anyway, Miss smug I-get-it-five-times-a-night woman, I do have someone around as it happens.’
‘The dating agency came up trumps, did it?’ Suki enquired, relighting her bidi.
‘No, met him in a bar. He’s a graphic designer, trilingual, sorts out the whites from the colours when he does his own laundry, cooks blinding biriani.’
‘And?’ Suki held her breath.
‘Oh, yes,’ Beroze said, nodding, ‘he gets down and stays down there for hours, without being asked, and doesn’t even ask for the Listerine afterwards!’
Suki spluttered smoke and began hacking as she held onto Beroze.
Chila dug Sunita in the ribs.
‘Did she mean . . .?’ and Sunita nodded, tight-lipped.
‘Well, you know our guys.’ Beroze sighed. ‘They expect us to worship at the shrine of their mighty weapon, but anything we have in our pants is dirty, smelly, chi-chi stuff which must be handled with fingers only, from a safe distance. And once a month, light the blue string and stand well back!’
Chila tittered uncomfortably, feeling her cheeks begin to glow. Of course she, Tania and Sunita had spent hours giggling about sex, until they all actually started having some themselves. Maybe it was something to do with growing up together, knowing each other’s families. Yes, that was it, she decided, trying to tune out Suki’s background anecdote which seemed to involve something plastic and a tub of tutti-frutti ice cream. How could you hear about your friend’s sex life and then sit down with her dad and talk about the weather? But these women seemed to revel in it, what they did, how, how long, what they wanted and what they got. The idea that you could ask, that you could actually speak during sex, was at once alarming and thrilling to Chila. It made her feel naughty and powerful. She vowed to bring up the subject with Deepak at an appropriate moment.
Sunita was trying to conjure up a suitable fond memory of her tumbles with Akash, but found the images kept rearranging themselves into the jagged outline of her episiotomy scar.
‘So where is this man with the magic tongue then?’ Suki asked, catching her breath.
‘Over there, talking to Akash,’ Beroze replied.
They all turned as one to gawp. He was good-looking, spiky haired, nice smile.
‘He’s about twelve, isn’t he? Knew there had to be a catch,’ Suki said, and sighed.
Beroze drew herself up. ‘He’s twenty-three, and believe me, girlfriend, you move to the next generation down and you will not be sorry. They’ve all grown up with sisters like me – notice I did not say mothers – and some of them actually like women, prefer women, because they’ve seen their mums go through such bullshit with their dads.’
‘So it’s a guilt shag, then,’ Suki said.
‘Not mine this time,’ Beroze said, smiling. ‘Anyway, I expect all this will be covered in your film, Sunita, which I can’t wait to see.’
‘I’m in it too,’ said Chila defiantly, ‘And it’s not Sunny’s film or mine. It’s Tania’s.’
‘Right. Tania,’ Suki said, looking meaningfully at Beroze. ‘Her stuff’s always, um, interesting.’
‘I think,’ Sunita said, slightly surprised at the sound of her own voice, ‘sex is only part of a good relationship. People totally overrate how important it is.’
Suki chuckled. ‘Yeah, and only people having bad sex or no sex say that.’
Sunita stood for a moment, listening to her own steady breathing, checking it was normal, and then turned on her heels and walked away.
Deepak was bored. He had discarded his business associates and their braying, harpy wives as soon as was polite, drifting around the room in search of whatever it was that would make the evening bearable. Despite the crush, he noticed that
people had divided themselves into distinct groups, seeking out their familiars.
He gave the boiler-suited brigade a wide berth, earnest huddles of confident, chattering women – some of whom were surprisingly good-looking – who seemed to laugh longer and louder than anyone else in the room.
He hovered around the fringes of some media people who had requisitioned a corner plot, where the same words and phrases seemed to crop up: ‘seminal’, ‘demographic’, ‘TX date’ and, most often, ‘wankerneverlikedhim/her’. He managed a half-interesting conversation with a young director who urged him to persuade the business community to support the arts, which he agreed with until he discovered her intended project was touring a play called Sunil and the Big Spider around infants schools in the suburbs.
For a while he chatted amiably enough to Akash, whom he liked but found irritatingly intense sometimes. However it was the presence of the other young men in the group that discomfited him. He couldn’t work them out. They looked ordinary enough, normal beer-drinking lads, apart from the odd earring and tatty OM T-shirt, but they didn’t know how to conduct a normal conversation. There was no mention of what jobs they did, how much they earned, current affairs, recent purchases, girlfriends/wives and possible kids. They mentioned football, but in a self-conscious, mocking sort of way. Instead they wanted to get personal. Within a minute of Deepak’s arrival, they were asking him a million questions and actually waiting for his answers. They wanted to listen and let him do the talking, a habit which Deepak only associated with Chila. They laughed a lot, they had soft edges, and yet they cracked jokes which Deepak found clever and biting. Standing there stiffly clutching his wine, he felt as if he should slip them ten pence and tell them to go down the shops, treat yourself, don’t run. Ridiculous, Deepak scolded himself, excusing himself, they’re not much younger than me. But as he walked away he felt an unexpected tug of regret, remembering how he was ten years ago, buckling under the weight of his father’s demands that he take over the family property business, deciding that if he was going to do his duty in his job, he would be as undutiful as he could in his private life. There had to be some part of him that didn’t wear a suit. The schizophrenia didn’t bother him; it seemed to be a requirement for survival among all his Punjabi friends. And then someone came along and danced mockingly along the fine line that divided his life so neatly, and forced him to choose.