by Meera Syal
The only regret I had afterwards is that I had almost become another bloody statistic. Yeah, I’ve read all those reports about our propensity towards cracking up and self-harm, how we are more likely than any other group to do what all good girls do, dispose of our mess without bothering or blaming anyone but ourselves. But this did not feel like an apology. In fact, I’ve never felt so powerful as I did for those lost hours, sobbing my secrets to the pigeons. All that time and energy I’ve wasted trying to keep control, when giving it up, giving into the chaos I’ve always feared, was so . . . Deepak was just an excuse really, the bogyman who I could claim led me astray. I can get lost on my own perfectly well actually, carry my madness on my back, owning it, whistling a perky tune. All the winds of the world in a knotted knapsack, ten miles to London and still no sign of Dick. Best way really, for now.
If I could, if it was possible, I’d track down every blip on that graph of misery, every woman who has used her creativity and cunning to try and dispose of her own beautiful body: the ones who loop festive saris over wooden beams for their nooses; the ones who concoct witchy cocktails from their bathroom cabinets and lie down in convenient places to avoid startling the neighbours; those who fill soapy baths and clutch their cheap disposable razors in clean brown hands; the ones who write out loving farewell notes in big three-year-old frightened writing; and especially those who decide on a whim that they will punish the world by punishing themselves and make their exits furiously, messily, but still alone. I’d let them in on the big secret, show them the hair-thin line that separates anger from despair, giving out from giving up, black-faced, demon-killing Kali from demure-eyed, long-suffering Sita.
No, I haven’t suddenly found religion although, strictly speaking, by now I should have undergone some kind of guilt-blasted conversion, if only for appearances’ sake. Oh, Lordy, the local mafia have bought ringside seats for that one. I’ve met covens of moustachioed masis around my dad’s hospital bed, where they gather to eat his futile, freshly bought grapes and contribute what they feel is an important part of the healing process, hours of tuneless wailing and breast beating, pausing only to spit occasionally in my general direction. To them it is perfectly obvious why my father lies in unconscious limbo, it may as well be written on the chart at the end of his bed. ‘Broken heart and loss of faculties due to bloody ungrateful daughter who has not even the decency to say sorry. PS We were right then, huh?’ I am convinced the main reason they turn up with such frequency is that they do not want to miss the moment when I finally crack and fling myself upon his body, tearing out my hair and begging Bhagwan to take me instead!
What they do not know is that we have an understanding, me and Dad, we’ve made a pact. We stick to what we’ve always done, because to behave otherwise would be gross hypocrisy and worry us both unnecessarily. So that’s what we promised each other, when I whispered in his ear and saw, I know I did, the tiniest tremor of an eyelid in response. I won’t cry and he won’t die. We can sort out the sub-clauses when he finally decides to wake up.
The day or so after my wild woman of wonga impression remains slightly blurred. I vaguely remember driving home, singing some old Hindi song in a no doubt atrocious accent. I remember ringing up my agent Mark and telling him to cancel all my work projects until further notice. And then I was waking up, fully clothed, on the kitchen floor, with birds madly carousing outside and sunlight warming my bones like a spotlight. Then I went shopping. I parked up outside Riz’s music shack on my old stomping ground and just got out and walked. I’ve done the ethnic ramble loads of times on camera, but only lingered long enough to angle my profile perfectly or raise an ironic eyebrow at a piece of kitsch. This time we were all there, mum, Sunita, Chila, holding imaginary hands, fighting over Big Mac-sized bindis, sharing headphones to listen in on a tune, running fingertips over fabrics cascading from their bolts like waterfalls. There was no sense avoiding it any more. So it hurt, having them all there, but they always had been, gossiping and wheezing amongst the daals and industrial-sized tins of tomatoes.
I was expecting to be recognized. Mostly I was ignored. Obviously none of them read any of the magazines or newspapers that claim I am now officially the voice of Brit-Asian Yoof. Actually, no, there was one woman, an old lady in a voluminous billowing suit who stalked me around Asha’s Tip Top Mini Mart, staring in that unapologetic way that old ladies do. She finally grabbed my wrist at the check-out and demanded ‘Are you Tendon-sahib’s lost daughter?’ I told her yes. I didn’t know how else to answer her.
Anyhow, Dad seemed to approve of most of my purchases. I scan the beeping screens around his bed to assess his responses to me, to my questions. Each one shows the same programme, the intensive care test card of black shot through with a continuous green line, the story of his body unfolding as he breathes. I edit out the rhythmic everyday pulses and watch for the unexpected leap, the irregular contraction that tells me he has heard me. There were definite jumps of appreciation when I held up the armfuls of silver bangles I’d chosen and jingled them near his ear, making them choon-choon softly, Mum’s theme tune as she waddled around the house. He enjoyed the alarm clock I’d found, encased in white plastic domes, whose alarm is a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. He held very still as I waved packets of spices under his nose – not the red chilli powder or the coarse black pepper, obviously, but he seemed to recognize the ground cinnamon, the garam masala, the special chana masala mixture that he likes sprinkling on fresh fruit. And when I broke off some leaves of fresh coriander and crushed them beneath his nostrils, I saw them wrinkle, I’m positive.
It was day four, I think, when I decided that Dad needed a shave. Long ago, when he wasn’t embarrassed to have physical contact with me, I used to sit on his lap, counting the white hairs in his stubble.
‘You gave me that one,’ he’d say as I pointed. ‘Your mother did all of those. Your brother made the hair come out of my ears.’ I was fascinated by how quickly these bristles would reappear after his morning shave. If I stared hard enough, I felt I could almost see them emerging, pushing their way through his soft brown skin.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing hurts me,’ he would boom proudly, and I believed him then.
I’d watched him shaving so many times that it was easy to remember how he liked it. The old-fashioned way, of course, a soft brush, warm water, a hot flannel, a curving cut-throat razor. I wanted to do it. It is a good sign, that his hair is still growing. It means that despite his silence, his body continues to thrive. I’d just lathered him up when my brother swept in laden with gifts, dropped whatever he was carrying and knocked me and the razor across the room. If I’d managed to hold on to it I’d have carved an explanation onto his nuts, but in any case, he was off on one, spluttering and foaming as he paced around the room, slipping on the carpet of squashed soft fruit beneath his feet.
‘I can’t believe . . . I know you’ve sunk pretty low but . . . Do you think anything you do will make any difference now? He can’t change his will, he’s not capable and I will personally drag you through the courts if you dare—’
‘I don’t know what’s in Dad’s will,’ I told him, ‘and I don’t give a shit.’
I got up then, picked up the razor and sat down again next to Dad. His monitors were steady, laconic beeps. Why would he be surprised that me and Prem were fighting again?
‘Then what were you . . . ?’ Prem finally shut up when I began scraping the blade over Dad’s cheek, watching the salt and pepper filings collect in the white foam.
‘I presume he’s not left me anything,’ I said, not looking at him, hearing him exhale noisily.
‘You can’t change anything,’ Prem said finally, and then, ‘Why are you doing all this now, Tans? You don’t have to.’
‘I know. Maybe that’s why I want to. Not that you’d understand that, bro.’
By the end of the first week I had become used to the routine. I no longer experienced that swoop of di
sbelief in my gut when I walked into Dad’s room and found him comatose. I think the TV screens helped; another long edit, I told myself at first, Dad on freeze frame until I cut this altogether to make sense. Now I’m just bored with reverting to convenient cinematic tags to justify the whole sodding mess. Before I would have comforted myself with the certainty that, some day in the future, this would inspire a wonderful film, a seminal scene, a dramatic anecdote. Not now. Now I crave anonymity, privacy. I guard my grief jealously, like a pearl. I flinch at the news, I avoid tragic headlines, I follow babies and small dogs in the street with moist, protective eyes. I now yearn for goodness, for resolution. My mum once told me that was what karma truly meant, to experience at some point all you have inflicted. So saying sorry doesn’t make much difference, I suppose. And actually, when it came to it, I didn’t have time, none of us did.
I hadn’t imagined for a second that I would bump into Chila or Sunita at the hospital. I assumed that Chila would have been discharged after two days at the most and that it was pointless trying to contact her, either of them, because there was no explanation I could offer that wouldn’t insult their intelligence or make me look less of a twat.
That’s not to say I didn’t hope for a brief unplanned encounter in a corridor for the first couple of days, that I would round a corner and they would both be there, cooing over a bundle, too suffused with joy not to welcome me back into the fold. That was the Hollywood version. Then I woke up, thought about how long, how many lies, how could I? The Hackney version begins with an expletive-littered screaming match and ends in a fist fight, with all of us holding handfuls of someone else’s hair.
They did that for me, you know. Both of them. I’d limp back to them after another playground rumble and they would groom me like two maternal monkeys, checking my teeth and hair, producing tissues to dab away any blood and spit, putting me back together neatly before returning to our families, because we all knew what hell there would be to pay if our parents sniffed any scandal clinging to our uniforms. It was simple really, only having to choose between two worlds, home and everywhere else. And in between was the long walk home, and the three of us, rebuilding the crossing on each journey. That’s what I missed most; it’s not some mysterious mother-country ancient bond, it’s nothing to do with being oppressed, menstrually synchronized womb-en or any of that crap. It’s just that there aren’t that many of us who built that bridge, walked it together. Our parents ignored it, our children won’t even see it. Some of us will never get off it. I missed them, my fellow travellers.
So when it happened, about ten days after Dad had been admitted, I had stopped hoping that I would ever see any of them again. Actually, I was feeling heavy and hopeless myself. We had just had a meeting with the consultant, Prem and I, who’d informed us in hushed but strangely impersonal tones, that our father was never going to improve, and what course of action did we want to pursue? We had been told when he was admitted that there was little point in operating. There had been such massive brain damage that even if he survived the operation to remove the clot, which was unlikely, his ‘quality of life’ afterwards would be minimal. Prem had become belligerent and shouty, his normal reaction when faced with anything that doesn’t run according to plan, and insisted that ‘You will operate and you will save him! However he ends up, he is still our father!’ I had waited a few minutes until the alternative options were established. ‘You could choose to keep him as he is,’ the consultant had continued smoothly, almost like a sales patter, laying out the choices like carpet samples, what you lose in shade you gain in shag pile, madam, ‘but it is merely a matter of time, maybe weeks, before he dies. Or you stop his suffering now.’ And now he was advising us to make a decision.
All three of us instinctively looked towards Dad then, or rather at the bank of machines. Which was the actual switch that one had to merely flick, to end it? Ironic, really, I thought, all those times in my childhood when I had prayed that my embarrassing, bellowing, fabricating father might be fitted with a volume button, and finally, I am given the chance. I briefly remembered some bizarre news item, where a spate of sudden deaths in the intensive care department of a hospital was finally solved when detectives watched the ward cleaner doing her rounds. She would unplug the life-support machines to plug in her Hoover. That was more the sort of exit that suited Dad. Darkly comic, preventable, dramatic. Not his smart-ass daughter, she who once claimed there was no such thing as absolute truth, faced with the finality of On and Off.
So that day, as I made my way to the main exit, intending to snatch a hurried cigarette, my head was full of fuzzy feedback and funerals. I wouldn’t have recognized them, anyway, standing together just beyond the automatic doors, their heads almost touching. I had been looking for two girls, one dark and dumpy, hovering hesitantly in her space, never quite owning it, waiting for permission to proceed, and the other taller, long hair in need of a good brush, a plump, sturdy arm around her companion, ready for fight or flight. So I pushed right between them, muttering an apology, barely registering the confident, curvy woman with her gleaming bob and her softly smiling, lotus-open friend, standing proudly, glowing with pleasure as she rearranged the blankets around her new son.
‘Tania,’ they said together, an involuntary gasp tinged with what I choose to remember as pleasure.
I turned. My limbs turned to liquid, the world looked molten and yellow. I heard what sounded like a war cry somewhere far away. Triumphant and fearful, I stretched out a hand slowly. And then he was there, only for an instant amongst us, scattering us like seed, and when we came together, Chila, Sunita and I, Deepak and the baby were gone.
We actually stood staring at Chila’s empty arms before we registered what had happened, before we saw Deepak’s car reversing crazily out of the car park and screeching onto the main road, leaving an echo of angry blaring horns. Chila opened her mouth agonizingly slowly, cavernous grief, a grotesque silent yawn, and before her guttural wailing began, I was running towards the car park exit, dialling on my mobile phone as I sprinted, gasping instructions to the police. I did not need to wait for their questions. At this moment I knew him better than anyone else. I knew his car number-plate, his likely haunts, his credit-card details, his favoured hotels. I knew the routes he preferred, the friends he might choose to visit in an emergency and who would lie for him, no questions asked. I knew where all his distinguishing marks were hidden. I knew I shouldn’t have known any of this, but it was done.
A crowd had gathered by the time I returned, panting and cursing my inefficient lungs. Nurses, security guards, appalled visitors and frightened patients were milling around uselessly, uncomfortably silent, transfixed by the sight of Chila and Sunita, sitting together on the floor where they had fallen, Sunita whispering continuously to Chila, holding her as if she feared she might float away. And Chila, shivering and mute, glacial with shock, staring at the empty baby blanket fluttering gently in her hands. I marched the voyeurs away, instructed the necessary officials on what had happened. Yes, we knew him, yes, he must have been hiding behind the soft drinks machine, yes the police had been alerted and were no doubt on their way, and no, there was no need to hover with banalities because all we could do now was wait. Then I sat next to them both on the floor, took each of their hands and completed the circle.
We didn’t say much, at least not to each other. Sunita and I tried to deal with the police. Fuelled by anger and despair we talked at them simultaneously for the first fifteen minutes, only halted by one young PC’s nervous enquiry, ‘Are you her lawyer and press agent or something?’
Chila only spoke once, to insist we did not inform her family yet, and then asked if she could go home.
We sat together in the back of the police car, listening to the robotic instructions coming over the radio. I expected urgent barking news flashes: press statement imminent! Roadblocks in place! Airports covered! But outside, it seemed the world turned laconically; burglar alarms sounded for no reason, drunks sl
apped each other in gutters. Maybe kidnappings were routine around here, I thought bitterly.
The WPC on the front seat turned round and said, almost apologetically, ‘Don’t worry, love, it’s all under control. He won’t get far . . .’ and tailed off, embarrassed by her own well-meaning platitudes.
I snaked an arm around Chila’s waist and pulled it away quickly, feeling dampness. The front of her shirt was transparent with moisture.
‘He hasn’t been fed,’ she said dully, sticky with her leaking milk.
I searched in my bag for tissues while the WPC tried again. ‘Your little one, love, what’s his name? We need to inform—’
Sunita butted in, her voice harsh, accusatory. ‘She didn’t have time to give him one.’
We sent the WPC away. She had a whole support team standing by, she argued with us, counsellors and doctors and men in uniform with batons. She reassured us they would all be ready if we needed them, outside in the squad car, our protection. As Sunita muttered as she shut the door, ‘More like the bloody morning-after pill.’
I quickly gathered up any baby accessories I spotted downstairs and shut them inside a kitchen cupboard. We turned on all the lights and put the heating on full blast. Sunita insisted Chila take a shower and led her, meek as a lamb and doped up on some druggy cocktail the hospital had made her take, to the bathroom.