Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee

by Meera Syal

  ‘Oh, right, yes, of course.’

  Shireen got up to let Chila pass, and then suddenly, inexplicably, screamed quite loudly in Chila’s ear: ‘OHMIGOD! I have to dance to this one.’ She climbed over a couple of chairs and ran, arms waving, right into the centre of the room.

  As if on cue, dozens of other people around the room were also whooping like sirens, throwing down coats and bags and knocking down furniture in their haste to jump into the ever-increasing crowd congregating on the dance floor, mouthing the lyrics as they jostled for a space. ‘But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong, and I grew strong . . .’

  Chila stood dumbfounded; it was like a vision of mass hysteria, as more and more joined the pulsating group. They moved as one, boots and sandals and stilettos and sneakers stamping in unison, a forest of brown arms raised to the ceiling, silver bangles and red nail polish, manicured talons and work-worn fingers, clad in homespun cotton and gaudy silks, bare with ornate mendhi tattoos snaking around the wrists, fists thumping the air, palms open ready to applaud, singing with one voice, triumphantly, ‘I’ll survive! I will survive! Oh as long as I know how to love . . .’

  Chila knew this one. It was really old. She remembered falling off her platforms to this song. She also remembered, if her memory of those youth club discos all those years ago served her correctly, that men never danced to this song. Whenever it came on, anyone male would scurry fearfully from the dance floor, before he was trampled by the stampede of baying women coming the other way. Of course, there were other songs that the men called theirs. Like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (which they always insisted on singing and dancing along to, making Chila laugh), or indeed anything with lots of loud electric guitars. Chila had usually joined in the communal jigging with Tania and Sunita. She thought it was a nice song but she had secretly preferred the Bee Gees. On the one hand, it was quite reassuring that some things had not changed. On the other, she had never really listened to the words before. Or at least, it seemed as if she was hearing them for the first time, at full volume in this belligerent high descant. And only then did it strike her. She swept the room; the bar staff, the DJ, the security at the door, everyone around her was female.

  Chila was not surprised. It was happening more and more lately, this insidious segregation of the sexes. Odd, really, she had imagined that marriage would put an end to this division; no more giggles and whispers with other girls about the availability and motives of these strange remote creatures, no more longing for their forbidden company, no more what ifs. With a ring on your finger, everything would be above board and legitimate. You could move freely with a husband at your side, feel secure even around other men, knowing that they would be, henceforth, merely brothers to you. She liked that part of the wedding ceremony. It was a good theory, anyhow. But she found herself moving from sitting rooms to dinner parties to vast halls where inevitably, eventually, she would end up with the women. The men were always separate, or absent, like tonight. And mostly, no-one seemed to mind.

  Ironically, her mother’s friends seemed to see more of their partners than the so-called modern women with whom Chila socialized. True, her parents spent most of their shared time bickering, something they did unconsciously as they moved around the house, her father shouting crossly from behind the locked toilet door, her mother yelling like a fishwife from the front garden while she scrubbed the path. But Chila found it comforting. It meant they had grudgingly accepted each other and were grumbling about the fact that they were staying put. She could not imagine arguing with Deepak.

  Briefly she recalled a group of young men she had met somewhere, whom she had liked very much. They were youngish, funny-ish, and unsettlingly friendly. More brotherly than her own brother had ever seemed. Where had she seen them? Then she remembered. Tania’s film première.

  The song finally ended to raucous cheers and whistles and, in reply, her baby kicked her swiftly beneath her ribcage. ‘If you’re a boy,’ she told her bump as she started to make her way towards the exit, ‘at least I can talk to you.’

  She manoeuvred her way through the laughing women, her arms forming a protective shield over her stomach. As the last hurrahs finally faded, leaving an unexpected calm in its wake, she heard the laugh, a familiar honking which jerked her head up sharply and pulled her eyes towards a group gathered near the stage. Chila saw a tint of copper, a flash of silver, and began to move slowly towards them, reluctant, underwater steps, resisting the anchor of possible disappointment dragging behind her. Just a little further. Check her shoes, don’t forget. And then the lights burst into flares on stage and everyone in the room rushed towards the front, and the familiar stranger was gone. But Chila did recognize the woman who was now on stage holding a microphone, waiting for the noise to subside. The spiky henna-haired woman with fashionably dowdy glasses from Tania’s screening.

  ‘Sisters,’ she began, and Chila noted with satisfaction the woman was wearing baseball boots, ‘we all know why we are here, to show our support both emotionally and I hope, financially, for a woman who has been through a hell few of us can imagine, but which is closer to us than we all think.’ The audience quietened down immediately, tense, alert. ‘On November the eighteenth of last year, Jasbinder Singh legally separated from her husband after twelve years of marriage, her husband, Gurpreet Singh, leaving Jasbinder with their two sons, Jaspal and Joginder. On December the twelfth, after a weekend visit, Gurpreet Singh refused to hand the children back to Jasbinder, claiming that his sons should live with him and his parents. When Jasbinder refused, and threatened to call the police, her husband took matters into his own hands . . .’ Suki paused for a second, tightly gripping the microphone. Chila became aware of the silence around her, unnerving after so much noise.

  ‘Gurpreet Singh told his wife if he could not have the children, no-one could, and that this was her punishment for destroying their family. He then locked himself in his car with his sons, doused himself and his children with petrol, and in front of Jasbinder, who was watching from a window, waiting for the police to arrive, burnt himself and his own sons to death.’

  Chila closed her eyes and braced herself against the joyous tumbles inside her, her baby gambolling as the room held its breath. She became aware of cheers, thundering applause, and opened her eyes to see a small plain woman gingerly take the microphone from Suki’s outstretched hand. Jasbinder Singh had the body of a young girl, and an unnaturally calm face, carved from stricken wood. The handclaps went on for some time. Jasbinder waited patiently for them to die down.

  ‘Thank you everyone,’ she began.

  Chila had expected a harsh nasal twang, loamy with Punjabi soil, but Jasbinder spoke gently, only a lilt betraying her birthplace.

  ‘Nothing can bring my children back. But I want justice. The courts tell me this was an act of passion, a tragic event. I want this event called what it was, murder. I have been blamed for this. People say it was my karma, my fate for leaving my husband. But no-one will blame him. Even in death, he has escaped. He is the lucky one.’ Jasbinder struggled to keep her voice steady.

  An almost tangible aura of energy, red hot, ready, passed from the watching women to the stage, holding Jasbinder erect, urging her on.

  ‘This court ruling must be overturned, for all the other women out there, like me. For Leila Khan, who was stabbed to death when collecting her children from a custody visit. For Priya Kumar, whose ex-husband kidnapped her son and has been missing for five years. For Jyoti Patel, who let her ex-husband take her children on holiday and when he returned . . .’

  Chila was almost running now, pushing aside bodies randomly as she fixated on the exit light above the double doors at the end of the hall. Mingled sweat and perfume made her gag, a sickbed smell, sweet and decaying. Staying here would curdle her hope, give her acrid breath and a squinted eye, make her look for the catch and expect the worst. Maybe it was already too late. She did not want to dance in big boots to old songs. She wanted to understan
d and to love, otherwise how would they survive, any of them? Who would her baby call Papa? She threw herself through the swing doors and ran straight into someone emerging from the toilets. She felt tinsel against her skin.

  ‘Oh, my God, Chila.’

  Sunita was cradling her like a child, cradling her child in her palms, possessively, short painted nails across Chila’s torso, Sunita with a stranger’s hair and dress.

  ‘Oh, my God.’

  Chila returned the embrace, taking in the tender vulnerability of Sunita’s bare neck, silver prickles everywhere, tiny dancing stars filtered through brimming eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, I—’ they both said, and then snorted snot and relief together, unwilling to let go.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Sunita hiccuped. ‘Oh, my God, just look at you. I should have—’

  ‘Me too, I should have phoned but—’

  ‘It was all so—’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  They laugh and breathe deeply and laugh again and hold hands, sticky playground fingers, and weep without noticing, and Sunita can’t believe, can’t forget that there’s three of them now, just like once before. She kisses Chila through purple silk, a big kiss from baby’s favourite auntie.

  Without looking up, she asks, ‘Have you talked to . . .?’ She can feel Chila shake her head. ‘Nor me.’

  They cannot say Tania’s name. She leaves a chasm. SunitaChilaand . . . The trick is not to look down. Their loss would give them vertigo so they cling to each other, balance each other, hope for a new equilibrium to come, one day very soon. Sunita waits a moment. This time she forces eye contact. Oh it’s so hard, knowing what she knows, not knowing what Chila might know.

  ‘And how’s Deepak?’

  Chila smiles. She sees the lie and loves Sunita for it.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she lies back.

  Tania blinked in the unexpected spotlight as she opened the fridge door, grabbed the carton of cranberry juice and shut the door quickly, waiting for the blue gloom of the room to rearrange itself into shadowy outlines where her sofa squatted like some large beast in a soft pool of neon. She sat in her window seat, bosomy Indian print cushions encircling the window’s bay, and watched the tail lights of miniature cars climb Holloway Hill, watched them disappear at the top, tipped off some invisible lazy conveyor belt. She sipped straight from the carton, a habit that had always infuriated Martin, which was probably why she was doing it, and wondered if she would spend another night watching the first flush of dawn rise over the hill and rinse the darkness away.

  There were still Martin-shaped spaces all around the flat: the wall where his framed black and white film stills used to hang, the Marx Brothers around a piano, Woody Allen dressed as a spermatozoon, a concert shot of Spinal Tap, Jimmy Stewart frozen in ecstasy as he tries to tell the surrounding crowd that it really is A Wonderful Life; the top of the fridge where his cookbooks used to live (now inhabited by Tania’s revealingly pathetic collection, Gourmet Meals in Five Minutes and Cooking For One Can Be Fun!); the acres of space left by the absence of his computer.

  Tania did not subscribe to the theory that every time a relationship ended, the other person walked away with a piece of you, and vice versa, that each failed union took another chunk of your heart. That would mean most of the population would become colanders in a rainstorm, each soul a self-contained sieve. She did not believe it because she had been here before; with the regularity of reincarnation she lived and relived the moving out and moving on and, in the end, the walls always looked better rather than empty after a few weeks. But this time it was taking a little longer than usual, this time the insomnia had slightly outlived its welcome (now that the filming was over it was no longer useful), and she still avoided having Melody FM on in the car (those syrupy ballads were only for people in love or masochists who weren’t). Tania thought all this was odd, considering the Martin-shaped space in the bed had been refilled before his pillow had gone cold.

  She drained the last of the carton and left it on the sill before padding back to the bedroom. She sat gently on the edge of the bed. The candles were burning low in their mosaic-glass tumblers, fluttering like weakened moths against the fractured glass. He lay on his side, scissor-precise, hands clasped as if in prayer or namaste under his cheek, knees drawn up and together, prim as a nun. Even in sleep he kept himself tidy. Tania always made sure she watched her companions in repose. There were no masks in slumber, no rehearsed bonhomie, no practised one-liners, only the face one had as a child, before the world and other lovers chiselled away at unblemished skin. He must have been a beautiful baby, a spoiled boy with those eyes and dimples and anemone mouth.

  Tania’s first proper boyfriend, a history of art student, had told her she looked like a Picasso when awake and a Modigliani when asleep. The relationship lasted until she saw her first Picasso at the Tate. And he, the one next to her, whose neck she simply had to touch, was a six-year-old’s drawing when awake, bold obvious lines, cartoon moods, out of proportion views. Amusing but not worth anything beyond sentimental value. And now, increasingly, she saw the delicate etching, the washes of colour, the fine detail, the bigger picture. It surprised her, it worried her, it kept her awake. It hadn’t happened last time. It wasn’t supposed to happen now.

  Deepak opened his eyes and broke into a lazy smile. ‘Aho bhanji!’ Punjabi in her bed. So incongruous, so thrilling.

  ‘Do me a favour,’, she said, snuggling under his arm. ‘Don’t call me your sister. It’s bad enough as it is.’ That was supposed to have been a joke, but they both kept silent for a minute, shifting limbs to find what they had discovered to be the perfect fit.

  ‘It’s almost two o’clock,’ Tania said, knowing what was on his mind. ‘Do you want a coffee to wake you up before you drive . . . ?’ Home was the end of that sentence which she preferred not to say.

  ‘In theory,’ Deepak began slowly, ‘I could stay now . . .’ Martin’s gone was the end of his.

  They both pondered life in the wonderful world of theories for a moment before Tania said, ‘And your explanation for being out all night would be?’

  ‘Would be that I have found the person I want to spend tonight and several more nights with and therefore it made perfect, absolute sense.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Tania laughed and reached for her cigarette packet. ‘That would do it. Well done.’

  ‘A-plus-good-boy-shabash!’ Deepak added in a mock Indian accent which always sounded more Welsh than authentic but made Tania snort smoke anyhow.

  Between them, they had played all the members of their immediate families and some from the more remote extended branches too. Characters and anecdotes poured out of them, helping each other rearrange potentially depressing and embarrassing experiences into comic nuggets, seen from the same vantage point of love and regret. There is nothing more powerful than feeling mutually misunderstood.

  Tania offered the cigarette to Deepak, who declined. Knowing why he had done so, she carefully blew smoke in his hair.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said, ruffling his fringe in a futile attempt to prevent the smell of smoke clinging to him.

  ‘Say you were in a bar, with your disgusting chain-smoking friends,’ Tania shot back.

  This always happened during the last quarter of an hour, when they made clumsy, resentful small talk against the deafening ticking of a clock. Bickering was the best option, much safer than going into whys and wherefores, because in the end, what right had they to stay?

  ‘And anyway,’ continued Tania, ‘you sleep separately, so what’s the big deal?’

  Deepak swallowed and shrugged slightly. It was back, swift and sharp, twisting his gut into a hard, tight ball. The guilt stayed away long enough for him to believe, for a few hours, that this was the right thing and he would tell Tania/Chila as soon as possible to put things straight. But whom should he tell first? And what, exactly?

  Tania lay back on the pillow, her hair fanned out behind her, framing her face i
n old penny silk. Deepak’s heart contracted, the nearest he would get to labour pain, this agonizing bearing down that left him gasping for breath. He had begun to realize that the heart did actually ache. It was a muscle after all, he rationalized, but unlike cramp, this pain did not pass with a quick rub or a hop around the room. It intensified each time he left her, which baffled him and made him furious. It was inconvenient. It made him say terrible things and then buy big, useless presents. It was the lack of control that made him feel so undignified, so delirious and so afraid of what he might do next.

  He wondered how many others, at this very moment, were lying in tangled sheets preparing for a long cold journey home. Lately, he had found himself scouring scurrilous tabloid reports about serial adulterers or determined individuals who had managed to maintain secret liaisons for several years, and reading these nudge-wink exposés, he felt torn between depression and disbelief. How had he managed to become another grubby statistic? And furthermore, how had they, anyone, managed to live like this for so long without going mad?

  ‘Why did she stop sleeping with you?’ The ‘she’ was almost whispered. Tania never said Chila’s name. That way, she could almost pretend they were discussing someone else, someone they did not know, did not both love.

  Deepak shrugged again. He was too tired, too ashamed to concoct a clever response or diversion.

  ‘She seemed so . . . in love with you,’ Tania continued, almost nostalgically. ‘And then to reject you so quickly.’

  Deepak closed his eyes. It was coming, sooner than he had imagined. She would find out and she would throw him out and then he would possibly die quite soon afterwards.

  ‘It was my film, wasn’t it?’ Deepak was afraid to exhale. ‘I can take it, you know. I take responsibility for what I did. For how I made you look, both of you . . . Just tell me, Deeps.’

  Deepak breathed out and nodded. He opened his eyes to see Tania close to him, above him, inches away from him. Tears glittered on her lashes, transparent beads trembling, ripe and ready to fall.