One Hundred Shades of White

by Preethi Nair

  Later that afternoon when I was cleaning, I remembered the suit. I went into the walk-in closet and began looking for it, the pinstriped blue one. Finding it amongst the hundreds he had, I took the suit out and placed it on the bed. I went to fetch a bag to put it in and as I folded it, I thought I had better check the pockets to make sure there were no tissues or loose change. From the breast pocket of the blue suit, I pulled out a picture. It was of Raul with his arms around a blonde woman and, placed between them, a young child. Confused, I stared at the photograph. On the back were some words that I could not read. I felt numb. Thoughts went around in circles. Who was this woman? Who was the child? Was there some mistake?

  I rooted through his closet and found pictures and letters in a shoebox. None of it made sense; who was she? I needed Raul home. I had to speak to him. He would sort it all out and tell me there was some big mistake. It was four o’clock and the children would be home soon. I put the things back in their place and when they arrived, I made them something to eat, sat and played with them and tried to go to sleep.

  Days passed waiting for a phone call, a letter, anything; a week went by and my anguish mounted as the children asked for their father. I made up stories that he would be back within the week and then another week went by. No news. And then I got a call from the office but I didn’t want to understand and asked them to call back on Thursday lunchtime. Tom came then. They rang and I watched him as his face turned white and he hung up. ‘Mrs K, there is no easy way to say this, but he’s gone. They can’t find him. Embezzled money from the company and left.’ I shook my head, not comprehending. ‘He’s disappeared. They want to know when you will be leaving the house. They have someone coming next week.’

  ‘No, no, no, no.’ I shook my head. Tom came to touch me. ‘Go,’ I screamed. ‘Go.’

  ‘Mrs K, can I do something? Can I call someone? What shall I do?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ I cried in disbelief. ‘Go away.’

  ‘I can’t leave you, not like this.’

  ‘Go,’ I screamed again.

  He left, saying he would call on the way back home.

  As the door closed behind him, my hands began to tremble, tears streamed down my face and then I screamed and screamed until there was no breath left in me. ‘Ma … where are you? Help me.’ I lay on the ground like some animal, pulling at my hair, choking on the tears. I looked up and saw his pictures on his table. I crawled onto my knees and threw them to the floor, smashing them with my fists and cutting my hand on the pieces. Why? Why did he bring us to this place only to leave us? Why? Didn’t he know what it would do? If he were planning to leave, why didn’t he prepare us? Did he? Had I missed the signs? Did he mean to leave us money and air tickets to get back home? Maybe he did? I got myself off the floor and searched the house desperately, overturning every piece of furniture. I went into every room. Nothing. He left us nothing.

  ‘Ma, help me, talk to me, what shall I do?’ I screamed. ‘Tell me.’

  There was silence.

  My children, what would I tell the children? In two hours they would be home. I made my way to the kitchen and began to cook frantically.

  The blood from my hand covered the marrow as I picked it up and began to chop. Blood and tears dripped into the pan and made the oil splatter. Blood seeped into the wooden spoon as I held the spoon tighter and tighter. I began to stir. Who was this man who called himself a husband and a father? What kind of a person could be that cruel? Why? Security, stability, certainty, kindness; he pretended to have all those things, to give all those things but he took them away so ruthlessly. I didn’t know where he was, even who he was, or if he was ever coming back. As the spoon went round and round in circles, I made myself a promise. I swore that this would be the last time he would ever disrupt our lives. No matter what reasons he had, he could never come back, and I would do whatever it took to keep him away from my children. Nobody could come back from this with the pitiful excuse of being a father, he didn’t deserve them. And so that was the day he died.

  Having everything taken away, brick by brick, puts you in a position where you don’t care what else leaves you, there is nothing more to lose. My only concern was for my children, to protect, provide for them and to make sure they evolved into good people. I went to collect them and to tell them that their father had lost his life by jumping in the middle of the road to save a little boy who was about to be killed by a bus.

  Maya did not cry or scream. She looked at me. Tears rolled down Satchin’s face as his sister watched. ‘He’s not coming back,’ I whispered, unable to get the words out, but there was incomprehension. ‘Do you understand, Mol?’ I said as I held her. She nodded, Satchin began to cry. My heart felt heavy at the enormity of what I was doing to them but it was the right thing to do, I knew it was. I kissed them both, promising them that it would be all right, that I would always be there for them, no matter what. When we got home, we said a prayer together and lit a candle so that they were able to say goodbye to him.

  My children slept close to me as I lay there thinking what would happen to us. Was it better to scrape together the fare to go back to India? Where could we go? How would we manage there? Two children and a woman on her own, it wasn’t possible. I didn’t know where my mother was, maybe she was still at the village, but I couldn’t take them back there, that would be the first place he would look for us, if he ever decided to return. The doorbell interrupted my thoughts. It was Tom. He tried to smile, but all he could say was that he was so sorry and offered to help us in any way he could. He sat down with me and I asked him to read out the letters that were in the shoebox. I needed to know. Tom shook his head. ‘Do you really want to do this to yourself, Mrs K?’

  ‘Yes, I need to know all of it,’ I replied.

  Every one of them was from a lady called Marisa, who asked when he would return and if the minor problems he was having that required him to stay in England had been solved. They were all signed, ‘Come back soon because we love you and miss you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs K, I’ll try and help you in any way I can, you just say,’ Tom said again as he folded the letters away.

  ‘Do you have a match?’ I asked, as I took back the box.

  He looked at me and then rooted through his pockets and found a matchbox. I lit a match and set fire to the letters, watching them burn into ashes. ‘He’s dead now, buried. We need somewhere to live.’

  I asked him if he could find people to buy our furniture and anything else of value and help us find somewhere to go. He said he would take it all to a second-hand dealer he knew on the Bow Road and ask his sister if we could stay with her.

  By the following Friday, the house was almost empty. All that was left in the dining room were the suitcases we came with, cardboard boxes packed with necessities and a few of the children’s toys. Tom came at five o’ clock as promised and loaded up the van with our possessions. The children sat between us in the front of the van and Tom was talking to them about his sister, her cats, whilst I sat thinking, worrying. Suddenly, Maya shouted, ‘Jemina, where’s my Jemina?’ Jemina was the doll she carried with her, the doll he’d bought her. ‘She’s probably in the back, Mol, with the boxes,’ I said.

  ‘No, no, I need to see her, I need to see her now,’ Maya insisted.

  ‘It’s no problem, Nalini, I can stop here so we can check Jemina is all right,’ said Tom, pulling over. Maya went with him to check the boxes in the back of the van and then she began crying. ‘She’s not here, she’s gone. Jemina’s gone. Gone. She won’t come back, will she?’

  ‘Maya, don’t cry, sweetheart, I’ll go back to the house when the new owners come, when it’s daytime, and check for you. She might be there,’ Tom reassured her.

  ‘No,’ she wailed even louder, ‘I know she’s not coming back, she’s gone.’

  I got out of the van to get her. My little girl was lying on the roadside, Tom unable to console her. I picked her up. ‘Amma is here, Mol.’

  �
�No,’ she sobbed, burying her head in my hair, her face soaked with tears. ‘Achan, I want my Achan.’

  We had to move to a place in the East End of London, an area heavily populated by immigrants. It looked poor: filthy children were playing on the streets, fighting over whatever little toys they had. As we drove into the place, people looked weary, shabbily-dressed, carrying black bin liners or plastic bags or pushing them in rusty prams. There were many ethnic faces but, believe me, when I say that there was no sanctuary or familiarity in this. It was a feeling of complete mistrust. That was the climate, a heavy insecure feeling, with looting, rioting and petrol bombs through letterboxes all going on in the background. We parked in front of a Victorian terraced house. Tom’s sister Maggie came out to meet us and welcomed us to our new home.

  Maggie became one of my closest friends but when I first saw her, I just wanted to take my children and run but there was nowhere else to go. Tom had told her about our predicament and I wary of her kindness, thinking that it was a way of slowly luring me into her profession. So even in those first days, when she spoke and I understood most words, I looked at her blankly because ignorance was the only thing that felt safe. I looked at the shabby home she was offering us and I despaired. Smelly carpets, damp, peeling ceilings with a constant drip, drip, drip from the leaking roof. What kind of place was it to bring up children?

  Having abundance brings many choices and when I am faced with decisions today, I relish them, revelling and indulging in possibilities and consequences. Back then, there was none of this. Even contemplating momentarily how the children were feeling was an extravagance. It was a fight for survival and this eliminates the luxury of emotion: if you stop and contemplate you lose the battle and so I was grateful for the fact that there was no time. We arrived on Friday evening, I spent two sleepless nights learning how to sew and on Monday, I was taken to the factory.

  The factory was situated on a run-down industrial estate a twenty-minute bus ride away. These twenty minutes were filled preparing myself mentally for the day ahead and then observing the actions of the workers who clambered on at the various stops. Some of them were Irish or Polish, most were Pakistani women dressed in salvar kamise and shawls. A scattering were Indian women in saris, socks and sandals who glared at me in my western clothes. All managed to find their respective countrywomen and huddled together chatting. The Irish made the most noise and livened up the dead journey with their laughter.

  Maggie had taken me to see the boss, Mr Humphries, a fat, bald man who seemed happy to see her. He was about forty-five, chewed on a pencil which he kept behind his ear, and cleared his throat every five minutes. Maggie and this Humphries man had a conversation. I don’t know exactly what they said but he showed me to a table with a machine.

  Maggie took a piece of red material from the basket and placed it on the sewing machine. Manoeuvring it carefully, she produced the template of a skirt that I was to copy. After I had done a few, she smiled. The Humphries man came to inspect. He nodded and Maggie left.

  It was 1978 and I was alone in a strange country at the age of twenty-six. This first place of employment, Humphries & Co, Bow, was a badly-lit factory, where I sat making shabby dreams for two small children. I would catch the bus, punch my card in at eight o’clock in the morning and sit at my machine, just sewing. The monotony of the noise would take me far away, with my children and mother, back to India, to a beautiful home with a veranda surrounded by mango trees. Then the supervisor, a rake-shaped woman called Veronica, would stab me in the shoulder with her pen. Spitting some words at me that I did not understand, her face said it all and so I would speed up. The noise would bore through the memories, but I would stitch them together with a fabric of sunshine and laughter. At ten o’clock the noise would stop for five minutes as the women drank from their flasks, and then it continued, the women fuelled by the tea or coffee inside them until lunchtime. There was half an hour for lunch and the women congregated in their respective groups, squeezing every second out of the minute with gossip and cackling. The machines then continued their cacophony until six in the evening. I would be the first person on the bus and the first person off it, running home in the dark to see my children, but by the time I arrived, they would be almost asleep and then whilst they slept, I cooked. Cooked whatever they needed for the next day, cooked just to forget. Forget that somewhere I was losing them, that Satchin was becoming very responsible. At eight, he had responsibilities beyond his years, and Maya; Maya was very distant, almost in a world of her own. I had to continue. There was no choice. At night, their warm bodies would cling to me as I stroked their hair and touched their sleeping faces, tears rolling down my cheeks, whispering over and over again, ‘I know I am not enough for you, not at all enough.’

  When I was at the factory I could not allow myself to think of my children’s safety. I prayed that God would be taking care of them until I got home and that they would not fall sick. My frame of reference for everything was Friday. The brown envelope arrived every Friday at the end of our shift. I managed to save a little amount from it every week and would work any available overtime on Saturday. The money from Saturday would be used to buy Co-op stamps so no matter what else, we could always eat well.

  I didn’t affiliate myself to any of the groups at the factory, pretending not to understand the broken English, avoiding the politics this way. Every group had its leader and issues. Instead of uniting against the same cause, they all fought non-stop. The other Indian ladies pretended to be proud and snubbed me or made comments when I passed, perhaps this was because I was from the South or because I was new or wore western clothes. I feigned ignorance at every opportunity, doing my piecework, stepping out for air at lunchtime, slowly accumulating the groceries for the week from the local Co-op and picking up some small toys or whatever I could for Satchin and Maya.

  Sundays offered the only opportunity to spend time with my children. They were growing so fast and it was only on these days that I stopped to notice. At times, I didn’t want to see because guilt crept into my soul. Guilt that I had nothing to offer them and the only way I could compensate was to cook. Sometimes you see things and there is absolutely nothing you can do so you pretend you don’t see them because it hurts a lot less.

  We had no money to go anywhere, no money for luxuries, I couldn’t even take them to window shop because I thought it was cruel to show them goods that we could not possibly afford. Sunday morning was a visit to the launderette and the children helped me carry the wet bags of washing home which we hung around whatever space we could find. We then sat with the dampness of the clothes. If the weather was nice, we went to the park, but if it was cold we just sat huddled together in bed and I would try to tell them stories. I was desperate to recount stories of their grandmother; I even wrote letters from her pretending that she had sent them, but when I tried to think of other ways to remind them of home, my imagination usually failed me and Maya would continue the stories. Then I would cook, and she would ask if she could go up and invite Maggie.

  At first I didn’t like this; what kind of an influence was a woman like Maggie on my children? And I barely had enough time with them as it was. But I saw how much Maya loved her and how Maggie was around them and so I eventually gave in. Maggie ate with us on Sundays and occasionally Tom would join us. Sometimes, she insisted that she cook a roast for us all, saying that Satchin and Maya really liked it. Before I had a chance to say no, they would be leaping up and down with excitement. So I would go upstairs on a pretext and just before she put the chicken or the meat that she was cooking into the oven, I stabbed cloves and cinnamon through it so that they would not forget the taste of home.

  When I did the cooking it was normally on my hotplate and I went upstairs to Maggie’s to serve because it was much bigger and she also had a dining-table. A year had passed and I trusted her a little more, seeing how she took care of Satchin and Maya in my absence, so everything I cooked was from a deep sense of gratitude. Tom,
as always, devoured the food. Maggie found it a little too hot, which was understandable as the spices conflicted with her temperament, leaving her feeling vanquished. I hoped that one day the spices would do their job by diffusing the anger that was raging inside and that she could give up her profession.

  Tom continued to deliver groceries to the wealthy and his clients now extended out of London, so he was away during the week, driving and delivering. One particular week, a client had asked for a certain bottle of pickle, not too spicy like the Asian stores in the area made them, but something that had a combination of zest and sweetness. Tom was telling us that he had looked but was unable to find a supplier. ‘Maybe Nalini could make some up,’ Maggie eagerly volunteered. ‘Go down to the market, get what you need, I’ll take care of the kids.’

  There was a ripple of excitement as I chose the fruit and spices from the market stalls: soft Alfonso mangoes imported from India; deep red chillies; root of ginger; mustard seeds and coarse cinnamon sticks. I got back to the house and washed and peeled the fruit, cooking them, experimenting with the proportions of lemons, mangoes and spices, until I came up with the combination that I felt was right. I gave the pickles to Tom and forgot all about it.

  A few weeks later, Tom came back saying that the family had absolutely loved the pickles and asked if they could order a dozen bottles. I spent that Sunday making and bottling them in decorated jam jars, giving them exotic names. Tom offered the surplus to his other customers and more orders came in. It got so busy that I stopped working Saturday overtime at the factory and concentrated on making and bottling hand-made pickles. Satchin and Maya helped. The mixture needed to be stirred continuously so Satchin stood on a chair and did that. Maya wanted to spoon the contents into the jars but made a huge mess, so I said putting the fabric on lids and placing an elastic band to secure them was much more interesting, adding that I really wished I could do that job. So she swiftly moved departments. In just two days, we made a week’s wages. Soon, the bedsit was full of brightly-coloured mangoes and lemons, spices and bottles. We had a whole system going and Maggie would squeeze into the room and help with the labelling and packaging.