by Meera Syal
Akash ignored the implicit request and read the opening sentence of the report again, wondering when she was going to tell him why she had been in the West End when she should have been at work. It was not up to him to ask. He would use the analysis approach on her and wait until she felt she had to speak. That way he could not be blamed for asking leading questions. And not lose his temper, of course.
‘Throw them in the bath for me, would you, Akash?’
Akash could not believe the complete lack of awareness she was displaying. Did she not realize she owed him an explanation? He lowered his newspaper slowly and wondered why there was a strange woman holding his son towards him like an unexploded parcel bomb.
‘Sunita?’ he stuttered.
Sunita stroked her boyish hair which barely skimmed the fur-trim collar of her very expensive velvet box jacket, which went remarkably well with her new slightly flared Lycra trousers and her soft leather cowboy boots. She smiled slightly, the tilt of her head revealing red and copper highlights shimmering in her crown. A tiny diamanté butterfly slide winked cheekily at him from above her left ear.
‘Vidal Sassoon,’ she said finally. ‘They told me that the Gwyneth Paltrow was out, so they did me the Natalie Imbruglia instead. Everything else I bought was on sale.’
It was then Akash noticed the bulging carrier bags hanging precariously from the buggy’s handles. His newspaper drooped mockingly in his hands. He knew he ought to speak, but at this moment he could not think of one sensible syllable to say.
Sunita began pulling clothes off Sunil, who gurgled fatly in her deft hands, his face a contented mask of encrusted chocolate.
‘I worked out that I haven’t actually bought myself anything since’ – she was going to say Chila’s wedding but she skated round it smoothly – ‘for about eighteen months. A student did my hair at the salon. It’s a bit shorter than I thought but I’m getting used to it. So pound for pound, I am a really cheap date.’
She plonked a naked Sunil on top of the newspaper on Akash’s lap and began stripping Nikita, who still managed to keep licking her sticky fingers throughout the operation.
‘They’ll need feeding after bath, and best put some emollient in it – Sunny’s skin’s a bit dry. I’m going out in about twenty minutes so I’ll just run up and change.’
It was only when Sunita was halfway up the stairs that Akash managed to shout, ‘Where?’
‘That benefit I told you about? With Beroze? You remember, sweetheart.’
He heard the bedroom door slam as Sunil gave a satisfied sigh and emptied his bladder over his confused papa’s lap.
Akash soaped the children down on autopilot as they screamed and splashed in the foot-high bubbles of their bath. Next door he could hear Sunita singing along to the radio as she pottered around the bedroom. ‘I’m so randy . . . randy randy randy,’ she chirruped, off key he noted miserably. He seemed to have gone into delayed shock. Was there something he had missed lately? Something she had told him or he had done which had turned her into a designer-clad, over-sexed Natalie in the space of twenty-four hours? True, they had exchanged a few weeks of sharp, splintered words after the screening of that dreadful, exploitative film, which subsided until the bloody thing was shown on television and they argued all over again about exactly the same subjects.
He knew they were in danger of being trapped in some destructive co-dependent cycle and told her so, to which she had replied, ‘Bollocks!’ and then, ‘It’s really simple. I hurt, I wanted to talk about it, you didn’t listen so I ended up talking about it to someone else.’
‘But to her? On camera?’ Akash had yelled back.
‘I didn’t know she was filming me,’ Sunita had replied calmly, and that had more or less ended any detailed discussions about the whole incident.
Akash knew deep, deep down that most of his anger was fuelled by his own sense of failure. The shame he felt watching his wife cry helplessly into camera had been superseded by an overwhelming urge to shake Tania by her pretty little shoulders until her teeth rattled. But as neither of them had had any contact with Tania since, the wave of his bruter instincts had retreated, leaving him washed up on the shore, a nugget of emotional flotsam, rinsed clean but uncomfortably naked. He had tried to engage Sunita in a dialogue about Tania, hoping their joint sense of betrayal would bind them together, make them a team again, but she inexplicably refused to discuss her. Akash guessed the betrayal had been much worse for Sunita and he tried to respect that. His instincts told him that once Sunita had come to terms with what Tania had done, that would open the floodgates and together they could work something out.
That was yesterday. Today, he was not sure about anything except what he could see, and feel and hold: the fish-slippery perfect bodies of his children, the chocolate ring of scum accumulating on the sides of the bathtub, the slowly drying patch of urine on his favourite brown cords, and the sight of Sunita standing in the doorway, ready to leave.
‘You didn’t tell me you were going out tonight,’ Akash said carefully, trying not to stare too hard at the short silver dress that clung to Sunita’s not inconsiderable curves.
‘I did actually,’ Sunita said brightly. ‘You probably weren’t listening. It’s written on the magnetic calendar on the fridge.’
Akash did not mention that he had not noticed there was a magnetic calendar on the fridge. ‘I might have been doing something,’ he said, reasonably he hoped.
‘I usually am doing something when you have to work late or go to evening sessions,’ Sunita said, checking her hair in the mirror above the sink, ‘which is why the calendar is a good idea. At least we can liaise about things, keep the channels of communication open.’
Akash’s ears pricked up, his Pavlovian response to any phrase that he might have used himself when trying to win an argument. ‘Pardon?’ he asked, trying to keep the squeak of indignation out of his voice.
‘If a couple can’t co-ordinate the mundane tasks of daily life, there’s little hope of them managing the bigger, more nebulous issues, wouldn’t you say?’ purred Sunita.
Akash dropped the soap then. He felt around in the suds for a while longer than he needed, hoping she would leave now. When he looked up again, she was still there, framed by steam and backlit by the yellow landing light.
Venus rising from that big shell, thought Akash, and then said, ‘You’ve lost weight.’
Sunita shrugged. ‘A bit. Haven’t been trying. Don’t care really, but I feel healthier.’
‘The dress . . .’ murmured Akash, fighting an urge to slide a soapy hand from her knee to thigh.
‘Mama looks like a beautiful princess,’ yelled Nikita happily, ‘with spangles!’
‘Don’t forget the sparkles.’ Sunita laughed and blew them a kiss before she skipped downstairs.
Later on, when the children had finally settled, which took an hour of cajoling, warnings and serious threats, a familiar soundtrack Akash usually heard in snatches from the safety of his study, he flopped down into an armchair, too tired to even think of picking up any of his papers. The children had drained him; he felt as if he had endured a session of dialysis and a hot enema to boot. He noticed he was sitting the way Sunita often sat in the evenings, slouched, legs apart, staring at a distant point somewhere near that large cobweb above the television. Maybe this was what being in touch with your feminine side meant, sitting shagged out and listless on a cushion, wanting desperately to be looked after, for just a few minutes. He leaned back and tried to relax his limbs. His hand brushed against something hard next to the armchair. He looked down and saw the pile of books, still with Sunita’s ‘MY MESS’ Post-it note stuck to the cover of the top volume. He picked it up, and recognized it as one of his course study journals. Psycho-Sexual Counselling: A Journey.
‘God,’ he muttered, ‘the Noddy version with big pictures. I don’t know how she could—’
He stopped when he saw little scribblings in Sunita’s familiar spidery scrawl in the margins.
He squinted and held the book to the light, too exhausted to get up and find his reading glasses. ‘Facile’ read one of them, ‘Over-stated’ another. The remark on the inside back cover was bigger and underlined. ‘Even three-year-olds know this stuff!’ Then her initials and a date. Three months ago.
He flicked through the rest of the books quickly now. Some of them were his, some he had not heard of, with garish shiny covers and ridiculous shouty titles: If You’re Not Listening, Why Am I Still Talking?, Women and Fear: Dare You Read the Truth? Mind Sex! The Big O Revealed! Sunita’s running commentary in the margins looked more interesting than what was on the pages. If only he could read it.
Akash made the effort to find his bifocals and pour himself a glass of red wine before settling down again. He refocused, and Sunita’s voice seemed to jump out at him from the well-thumbed pages. ‘If I had known this twenty years ago . . .’ was one, next to a passage about low self-esteem and how it influenced your choice of partner. Akash felt strangely unsettled, wounded even. A chapter on eating disorders was criss-crossed with red pen. ‘ME AT SIXTEEN’, Sunita had written in capitals next to a description of a teenage binger. Why hadn’t he known about that? ‘I knew my mirror lied to me!’ was her comment on a passage about distorted self-image. ‘Good evening, madam, and what would you like to throw up tonight?’ she wrote on the back cover, making Akash snort with laughter, despite himself.
They had laughed a lot together. Flashes of indolent evenings marked with pillow fights and fevered kisses came back to him, warm and full-blooded, with an aftertaste of cinnamon and maybe vanilla, decidedly vintage.
Sunita stormed through chapters, dismissing earnest Americanisms with pithy one-liners: ‘Nothing wrong with guilt. Kept my mother busy for years’; ‘This is a good theory unless you grew up in Ilford and only met men who wore tank tops’; ‘I would love to shout I deserve good sex, but we have very thin walls and the man next door might take it the wrong way.’
Akash chortled and drank his way through the diminishing pile and was amazed to find, when he checked his watch, that two hours and two bottles had passed. He sat back, one book remaining on his lap. He felt, well, pissed, he had to admit, but satisfied, happy even. He felt as if he had spent two hours with Sunita on a student mattress, candles stuck in empty bottles of Liebfraumilch sputtering around them, while she pulled secrets out of him with gentle fingers, trapped in the web of her moon-luminous eyes.
How easy it was to remember what made you fall in love. How tragically easier it was to forget. They had never feared silences before. They would read companionably together for hours back then, secretly impressed with their grown-up restraint. Somewhere between then and now, the pauses between the talking had got longer and the silences had become deafening. Before, Sunita would catch his eye and ask, ‘What you thinking?’ Now they were both afraid to ask. Appropriate really, that they now spoke to each other via graffiti in a book.
Akash felt extremely grateful that he was reading her observations alone, with no chance to demand further explanation. Indeed, how much was needed? – when he saw his name in bold letters next to paragraphs such as ‘Sexual withdrawal, far from being a passive act, is in fact a deliberate and aggressive act, conscious or not’, or ‘Beware the eternally reasonable partner who seeks to make you into the unreasonable neurotic reactor’, or, more worryingly, ‘Listen, sister, if he ain’t hot to trot, and he ain’t got the cojones to even talk about it, you ain’t doing him or yourself no favours by staying and staying schtum!!’
The final thin volume aroused Akash’s curiosity: Dark Lotus: The Mythology of Indian Sexuality. He wanted to read this one. He checked the flyleaf: Hathi Publishers, Calcutta. She had purchased an imported book. He was impressed. The chapter headings were reassuringly predictable: ‘Mother India – and her Son’, ‘The Role of the Hermaphrodite’, ‘Patriarchy Made Divine’, and the final chapter, ‘The Sita Complex’, which Sunita had obviously read several times. There were plenty of YES! SO TRUEs dotting the margins, and heavily drawn arrows to certain sections with accompanying bubbles: ‘My mother!’, ‘My mother again!’ and ‘OK, did my mother write this?’ A few pages into the chapter, a whole section had been boxed off by a thick red line. Akash was somewhat irritated; this looked like wilful damage now. She could have used a pencil. He read:
. . . and due to this, the deeply embedded image of Sita’s sacrifice through fire to prove her worth, many Indian women subconsciously equate marriage and partnership with trial and suffering. Indeed, they expect it, welcome it as proof of a virtuous liaison, blessed by tradition. Stoicism in the face of extreme pain is expected of the good wife (a belief possibly reinforced by the resignation and fatalism displayed by the mother or other close female relatives). Surrounded by forceful female role models, or loving harmonious parental examples, the myth will be challenged and replaced perhaps with other powerful Kali-centred female models (particularly prevalent in the South of India where matriarchal familial structures still persist). Left unchallenged, and indeed encouraged by dominant male partners, Sita will encourage masochism, martyrdom and the subjugation of self . . .
Akash read and reread this section, puzzling over its significance. Was this how she saw herself, the woman who just hours ago had shimmied out of the door in a silver handkerchief singing to the world she was randy?
‘There ought to be a bloody chapter on the Krishna myth somewhere,’ he muttered, reaching for a wine bottle and finding it was empty. ‘We can’t all be flute-playing charmers with the universe in our mouths.’ He threw the bottle across the room. ‘The Superman myth? What about that, eh?’ he told a cobweb. ‘Mild-mannered wimp, good with small animals and kids, jumps into phone booth and comes out with big muscles and his pants over his tights, ready to save the world . . . I think not!’
He got to his feet unsteadily. ‘And wharrabout the biggie, eh? The new man myth. Oh, yeah. They really got us with that one, didn’t they! You can cook quiche till you’re shitting oven gloves and they’ll still roll their eyes at some point and say Bloody Men . . . ow.’ He closed his eyes. ‘But we are . . . not the same.’ He opened one eye. ‘I see them every day, like Joe Jackson said, pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street . . . out of my office. Good women, taken all sorts of shit, take the gorilla’s hand and forgive him. I’m a nice guy. And I still don’t get the girl. I don’t get it.’
He stared out of the window, curtains still open to the cloudy night sky. ‘Sparkles, my arse.’
Chila sat in a dark corner, watching multi-coloured lights spin and strobe across the dance floor. She could see her escort, Shireen, at the bar, fishing in her embroidered shoulder bag for change. Shireen was one of Chila’s most recent diary entries, the sister of one of her lunching friends, who was introduced to Chila as ‘The woman to know in East London. If there’s something happening that is “happening”, Shireen knows about it!’ Shireen had that effect on people; they began talking in quaint Sixties hippy terms whenever her name came up, using phrases like ‘right on’ and ‘cool babe’. Chila did not mind this (at least they weren’t saying ‘boring old fart’ which summed up some of Deepak’s business circles), and besides, after escaping from her mother’s house, she longed to be somewhere anonymous and busy.
She watched Shireen pushing her way through the throng of enthusiastic dancers, holding aloft a long glass of white frothy liquid which she placed in front of Chila, and then rearranged her long thick plait which she quickly spiralled and pinned to the top of her head. Chila thought it looked as if a black cottage loaf had decided to perch on her crown. It seemed incongruous with Shireen’s traditional loose-fitting suit. And then Chila remembered: the footwear. Always check the shoes to assess what sort of conversation you might have with another Asian woman, whether she was the type who wanted to discuss the price of gold and baby clothes, or talk about travelling round India and how crap men were. It was one of Chila’s secret tactics in social situations, and it never failed. She knew wh
at she would see even before she looked down. A pair of steel-capped Doc Martens peeked from beneath Shireen’s baggy shalwar trousers. Chila sighed. She would have to keep alert then, and even though she had just arrived, she was trying desperately to repress a series of very large yawns.
‘The barwoman was pleased with me, ordering a diet Coke and a pint of milk. You OK?’
Chila nodded before downing the glass in a few grateful gulps.
Shireen grinned at her and handed her a serviette. ‘Milk moustache,’ she whispered.
Chila giggled and wiped carefully around her mouth.
‘That’s better,’ said Shireen, easing herself next to her. ‘You’ve been really quiet tonight. I felt a bit bad, dragging you out.’
‘Oh, no, I wanted to come, I really did,’ Chila tried to enthuse. ‘I mean, it’s a really good cause and everything. What is it again?’ She cursed herself for not doing her homework, for not admitting the real reason she was here was to avoid yet another night sitting on her own in front of the television, feeling her baby turn somersaults to the theme tunes of various soap operas.
‘It’s to raise funds for Jasbinder Singh’s legal fees,’ Shireen replied, before waving madly to someone across the room.
‘Oh, right,’ said Chila, no wiser, but wise enough not to let on. ‘Jasbinder Singh, of course.’
‘Awful case, wasn’t it?’ Shireen continued. ‘But really symbolic of what’s going on out there.’
‘Oh, yes. Symbolic. I thought that as well,’ Chila muttered, trying to check out where the nearest fire exit might be.
‘I mean, did you read the papers?’
Chila nodded. ‘Oh, yes, it was everywhere wasn’t it?’
‘Well no, actually, no-one bothered to report it, except the Guardian. At least, that’s what I thought . . .’
Chila got up hurriedly. ‘Baby on bladder, have to . . . you know.’