by Meera Syal
‘I never wanted that,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘I wanted her to see you clearly and love you still, not be in your power any more. I didn’t want this.’ She kissed him and it rained.
As he was leaving, she stopped him in the doorway. She looked bruised in the dusk, and tiny, dwarfed by a large T-shirt.
‘She always wanted kids, you know. And I never have.’
‘I know,’ Deepak said, stopping with one arm in his overcoat, feeling ridiculous and exposed in her hallway.
‘I mean,’ Tania continued, helping him into his sleeve, ‘if you want a family, with her, a future, let’s stop this now, while we still can.’
‘Can we?’ Deepak asked.
Tania ignored him. She was in practical mode. He half-expected her to spit on a finger and remove a mud speck from his cheek. She buttoned him up instead, her voice calm.
‘If she wants to try again, maybe try for a baby, if there’s a chance—’
Deepak put his finger to her lips. ‘She doesn’t. There isn’t.’
There. No thunderbolts, no big fist coming down from the sky. Not yet. In the meantime, Tania could go on pretending she was merely offering comfort and he could pretend his wife wasn’t weeks away from having their first child. It did not make much sense, there was an inescapable point when all would be revealed, but for once, for maybe the first time in his life, Deepak was living each moment with no thought of the future. He drove home and fell into a deep sleep next to a sleeping Chila, his back warmed by her growing, inevitable belly.
Akash only woke up when Sunita fell over him, yelping in annoyance. He sat upright on the bottom stair (how had he got here?) and fixed her with a rheumy red eye.
‘Whatimeisit?’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Sunita, trying to climb over him on her way upstairs.
He saw a flash of underwear as she lifted a leg. At least, he consoled himself, she still had some on. And what’s more, they seemed to be her at home pants, large, comfortable ones with roomy legholes. This made him feel, momentarily, very confident.
‘And you,’ he said to her back, ‘are such a bloody cliché.’
Sunita stopped and slowly turned round. She looked like some festive Amazonian, legs astride, hands on shimmery hips, gazing down at him from what seemed to be a great height. Had she grown taller? Or maybe, Akash mused, he was shrinking.
‘What did you say?’ Sunita said, through pursed lips, their edges blurred by faded lipstick.
‘Cliché,’ said Akash again. ‘Dumpy, depressed housewife loses weight, gets hair cut, indulges in retail therapy, goes out on piss without husband. Left your job yet?’
Sunita physically jumped, her body actually rising a few inches though she managed to keep her feet on the stairs. A few hours earlier she had decided, with Chila egging her on, to give a month’s notice at the CAB and enrol on a legal secretarial course. She had intended to discuss this first with Akash, but looking at him sprawled beneath her, oozing smarm, she suddenly changed her mind about consulting him on anything.
‘I’m going to bed,’ she announced. ‘You can sleep down there if you want.’ She did not know why she had said that. She tasted ashes in her mouth. The effects of the non-stop dancing had caught up with her joints, which groaned in protest as she ascended the last few stairs. She glanced down, and saw Akash sitting perfectly still, staring at the front door.
‘Are you going to stay there all night, then?’ she said, too loudly.
‘I’d better keep my shoes on,’ Akash replied woodenly.
‘Why?’
‘If you’re going to leave me, I’ll have to get up and walk around outside for a few hours and it might rain.’
Sunita’s hand gripped the banister tightly. She felt inexplicably winded and confused. This was supposed to end like all the other recent spats, with a whispered sniping row in bed, and frosty muesli in the morning. But somehow, they had wandered into one of Akash’s case files and were spouting the banalities that always signalled the beginning of the end.
Akash took her silence as assent. He knew he had guessed everything, curse his extraordinary instincts! Curse the unfortunate blend of red wine and his bloody big mouth.
Sunita knew she could reassure him now, laugh it off and hold out her hand, saying Come to bed and be my husband. But somehow, that would negate her extraordinary evening in which she had rediscovered her passions, her backbone, her legs, her equals, her beloved blooming friend, the world beyond with its cruelty and the compassion it engendered in return. She wanted to share all of this with Akash. And instead, he got drunk and talked about leaving. He had mentioned it first. It was his idea and he was kindly passing it onto her. So Sunita said nothing.
She went into the bathroom. As she locked the door, Akash laced up his shoes. As she wiped away her make-up, he plucked his coat from the hallway pegs. As she brushed her teeth, he found his keys. By the time she came out of the bathroom, he was gone.
Sunita
HE IS TWENTY-FIVE, for god’s sake. He was in nappies when I started senior school. He thinks the Bay City Rollers were an American football team. He can’t remember Michael Jackson ever being black. He reckoned The Female Eunuch was a porn film or a German expressionist painting. He can’t remember not equating sex with AIDS. He counts his parents as quite good mates. He believes that not belonging anywhere is a good and creative place to be. He says I make him laugh.
I suppose meeting him was proof that good deeds are repaid in some mysterious and unforeseen ways. When I promised Chila that I would hold her hand during her daily hospital visits (her blood pressure is going crazy at the moment and they’re monitoring her blood sugar levels as well), I was thinking purely about her, my waddling friend, and my soon-to-be-born niece. We both reckon it’s a girl, me because she’s round all over, front and back, the way I was with Nikki. When I was carrying Sunil, I didn’t look pregnant from the back, but from the front I looked like I’d swallowed a football. Chila keeps saying she will be having a daughter, repeating it like some mantra, although I’ve tried to explain that no amount of wishing at this stage is going to change what’s already done.
Anyway, at the first scan I went to with her, Chila asked the radiographer if she would tell her what sex the baby was. I didn’t think this was a good idea, and told Chila so when the woman left the room to consult her senior about this request.
‘Let it be a lovely surprise!’ I jollied her along. ‘I mean, it’s your first, so what does it matter?’
But Chila was adamant. She wanted to be prepared, she said.
‘Oh, right,’ I joked, knowing how anal she is about accessories and the like. ‘Want to colour co-ordinate your towels and sheets, I suppose.’
She shook her head. ‘I just want to know so I can . . . be ready. If it’s a girl, she’ll be all mine. If it’s a boy . . .’ and she wouldn’t say much after that. She just looked, not disappointed but more perplexed.
So I was thinking about how to handle this, when the battleaxe in the green overalls came back in and said, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t tell you what sex the baby is. It’s hospital policy.’
Well, I knew this was crap because just two weeks earlier, a woman on my course, Sally, had come in for a scan in this same hospital and had been told she was having a boy straight away. I sniffed the air. I knew something was fishy and it wasn’t old guppy face who was shuffling some papers around and hoping we would leave without making a fuss.
‘What do you mean, policy?’ I asked her, and told her about Sally, using as many pseudo-legal terms and long words as possible. She had that Gosh, you speak good English look on her face that I can spot from fifteen paces after years behind that stained desk (which I am so happy that I will never see again). I could tell she was a mite confused, poor love, as Chila and I both happened to be wearing shalwar kameez that day and therefore messed up her rules, that the brown ladies wearing curtains are the ones you can patronize and baffle with policy.
‘Well, um,�
� she stuttered, and by now I was enjoying this, ‘in certain cases we do make exceptions—’
‘So why not in ours, then?’ I butted in.
‘Well, you see’ – she blushed – ‘with our . . . Asian ladies, we tend not to reveal the sex. It’s just, we had a number of the ladies afterwards requesting . . . terminations, when they found out they were carrying girls.’
Chila burst into tears and I felt a few blood vessels bursting somewhere behind my eyes. I can’t remember what exactly I said, but it was loud enough to bring a few other people in gowns and uniforms rushing into the room. I recall the words ‘blatant discrimination’ and ‘tarred with the same brush’, which was probably not an appropriate phrase to use, given the circumstances. Also possibly ‘my MP’ and ‘the highest level’. I ended, and I do remember this, with ‘It’s the bloody fathers you need to be re-educating, not harassing pregnant women who come in here expecting support!’
At this point, I was really enjoying myself. It was like the good old days at university on the marches and picket lines, and I was in my leggings and Doc Martens again and shaking fists at the sky, absolutely sure that I was powerful and beautiful enough to change the world.
And then he cleared his throat and said, ‘Is there a problem here, Mrs Evans?’
And I shot back, ‘Yeah, it’s just too bad she doesn’t know what it is!’ which I have to confess is a line from some B-film I caught on Channel 5 one night and had always hoped I would have an opportunity to use. Here it was, and there he was.
Maybe it’s something to do with the way doctors are so revered by my parents’ generation, the magic profession which excused all other flaws (‘Yes, Anil is four foot ten and bandy legged, but he’s a doctor!’ ‘Yes, they have ten secret bank accounts in Jersey and sell out-of-date drugs to poor countries, but hey, they’re doctors!’), but there is something special about someone who knows how to mend a broken body.
I mean, I didn’t register anything special about him at first, this young Asian bloke in white coat, sort of nice face, sort of friendly eyes, in that awkward age bracket where they’re too old for you to pat on the head and ask about their studies and too young to take seriously as an ally – in what was becoming a rather nasty situation. I expected him to shuffle his feet and scuttle round looking for an older white man in a white coat who would escort us from the premises. But the first thing he did was go over to Chila and comfort her. He told her getting upset was not good for the baby or her and asked if he could organize her a cup of tea.
Good move, I remember thinking, good doctor’s instinct, good human being’s instinct actually: seek the one most distressed. Then he turned to me for an explanation, even though Mrs Green Drawers was dying to get a word in. He asked me first, and by now I was getting slightly impressed. And when I told him what had happened, that’s when he sprung into action.
Chila and I ended up in a nice plush office eating free NHS garibaldis while mysterious calls were being made elsewhere. The radiographer had by then flounced off, rustling her rubber gloves, and we had a quick visit from someone who looked like an accountant but whom we were assured was someone high up in Community Relations who muttered a few inanities about cultural sensitivity and responsibility to the patient, while Doctor Hero stood behind him looking faintly embarrassed.
We let him finish and Chila cleared her throat and said, ‘It’s OK. I’ve changed my mind, anyway,’ which was a typical Chila way to end the whole affair, taking the path of least resistance, and then she asked if she could now empty her bladder of the five pints she’d imbibed for the scan.
That’s when Krishan introduced himself properly and apologized for the whole mess. We somehow got into a long discussion about stereotyping and the damage done by well-meaning liberals which took in dowries, The Simpsons and the double-edged role of Third World charities, and suddenly half an hour had gone by, Chila was waiting to go home and he was being paged to go to Casualty. I left feeling I had clouds in my shoes and wondering why I hadn’t noticed how bright the pansies were in those pots next to the sliding doors into which I had thrown up almost two years ago.
Of course I took it further. The whole scan incident thing, I mean. I started off mentioning it to one of my lecturers, who, funnily enough, made quite a name for herself in medical negligence cases in the Eighties. She put me onto some chambers contacts for advice. This no tell policy is quite prevalent in urban hospitals where they serve a large Asian population, but I had to find out through talking to other women, as the hospitals are strangely cagey about this whole area. And of course, I kept in touch with Krishan about my progress, not that he could help much as he was trying to finish his own internship and I’m not so naïve that I expected him to infiltrate the hospital computer files at the cost of his own job. But his support made all the difference. And just when I was at the point of going to the newspapers, imagining follow up exposés on Panorama and me sitting with Jeremy Paxman thumping the Newsnight desk as I told the whole awful tale, Chila brought me back to earth.
‘You know,’ she said one day as we were eating our usual post-blood test snack of tea and Walnut Whips, ‘there’s clinics you can go to where they guarantee you can have a boy.’ She produced this cutting from one of the Asian papers. This place was three miles from my own front door. Some paunchy, bespectacled doctor guaranteed through his ‘Special Methods’ that any ladies out there could choose the sex of their child.
‘It’s done with test tubes, I think,’ Chila said, sadly. ‘And this place has a waiting list. He’s got four other clinics round the country—’
I finished the sentence, ‘And they’re all full. Full of our women.’
Chila nodded. ‘I don’t expect many ladies go there asking to have a girl, do they?’
And there I was, back in the grey area again, caught out by the enemy within. There wasn’t any point pursuing it after that.
‘There’s too many people’s minds to change,’ Chila told me. I argued that we have to start somewhere, and she said, ‘With ourselves,’ which startled me – impressed me, I’m ashamed to say. It just was not the kind of remark I ever expected from her.
‘That’s a really Buddhist approach,’ I said. ‘Been reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, have we?’ Probably a bit flippant, I know, but I was genuinely intrigued.
‘Sunita,’ she said, ‘you don’t learn the important stuff from books. It happens to you and someone gives it a long name afterwards. You should know that by now.’
I don’t know what the official title is for what’s happening to me but I know it started the night Akash walked out of the house. He came back of course, about half an hour later, tried to defrost his feet on my back and nuzzle apologies into my neck, but something had changed while he was gone, because he had gone. Made flesh the words, the threats.
My mum has always had this weird habit, she has never called my father by his real name (in fact, for years I thought his full name was Darling Sharma), preferring endearments such as jaan and ji and sometimes, when she was feeling fruity, husband-sahib. During my rebellious phase, when I was monitoring how many times my dad and brothers left my mother alone in the kitchen while they stared at the TV, I challenged her about this.
‘Are you so in awe of him that you can’t even use his name?’ I asked her.
She laughed at me from behind a pile of unwashed pans. ‘It is protection,’ she said.
‘What, scared that he’ll get violent if you call him . . . What is it? D—’ She put her soapy finger on my lips.
‘We remind each other who we are, married to each other. Husband/wife. If I use his proper name, I am like anyone else he meets on the street. If I name him, I make him a stranger.’
It made sense in a quaint, superstitious sort of way. Every relationship has its own invisible boundaries, its own internal rules. For some people, it’s never raising their voices in public; for others, it’s not using the sharp knives when the cutlery starts flying. For us, it was promi
sing not to walk out on an argument, to face each other and let the blood flow, and perhaps mop each other up afterwards. But he went. Maybe that means there are no boundaries any more.
A couple of years ago, the sound of that front door slamming would have brought on a panic attack. The last time I thought I was having one was that night, the night of the film, when I had to sit in a room full of people patronizing me with their vicarious tears, when I stood in the darkness afterwards and watched a twenty-year friendship kissed to death. I had all the usual symptoms, the shallow breathing, the racing heart, the dizziness, and this time, I wasn’t trampled by them, I reigned them up, drew them in and rode them like a madwoman, all the way down the stairs, all the way home. I do that a lot now. Akash said he was glad I was better, relieved my funny turns had abated. Maybe that’s why he thought it was OK to walk out and slam doors, now I wasn’t going to collapse in a heap and choke on my own breath. Maybe now I need him less, he loves me less. I asked Deepak something like that, that night, before the film out on the balcony. Did he need Chila or love her? He said both, I think. Not that it matters much now.
I know Chila enough to have guessed there is something haunting her, something that is nothing to do with the baby, the baby that was always part of her big life plan. You don’t need to be psychic to guess the reason she is unhappy and that she’s married to it. Before ‘the incident’, I would have just asked her point blank, however prying, however close to the bone. But now I’m frightened to mention Deepak, not knowing what else will come tumbling out. This is the time when we should have been closest, all of us. Instead, there’s some invisible glass screen separating us, just the thinnest layer of transparent cold which glides smoothly into place whenever we approach anything intimate. I can see Chila, hear her, even touch her, but when we kiss, it’s like brushing lips through a frosted window. When we try and talk about anything happening in our homes, the chill descends and we mouth polite chit-chat instead. Cocooned in secrets, both of us.