by Preethi Nair
I didn’t realise at the time that it wasn’t him that needed to be rescued.
I taught two age groups; four to eight years and twelve to sixteen. The younger children were like my little sister, jumping out of their seats, coming to sit on my lap, distracting me, telling me things like their dad had forgotten to brush their teeth for them that morning or whatever else occurred to them. The elder children had more concentration and I tried to make it much more of a structured class, not like with the little ones, who I allowed to disrupt me. It was different with the older children, they had to sit exams and had parental aspirations firmly propping them up in their chairs. It was amusing watching the relationships evolve between some of the boys and girls, secret and innocent, that first love that is impossible to experience again. Hormones would be flying around with the notes and glances that were exchanged when I turned to write on the blackboard. I hoped that they would guard their feelings safely and look back on them with tenderness when they were older.
When I was fifteen, my mother sent me on an errand to pick up some spices from Wembley which was about half an hour from where we lived. Wembley has a street which is like being in Mumbai: different shops and stalls selling saris, Indian jewellery, exotic fruits, vegetables and spices, wall-to-wall stalls lined up on both sides of the road, heaving with bright colours, pungent smells and noise from the street, a replica of a little India built to help take away some of the homesickness that the inhabitants felt. Amma often sent me there when she ran out of things, realising at the last minute she needed fundamental ingredients. She seemed increasingly absent-minded at that time, as if she had something playing on her mind.
After a while Amma sold the shop so she could spend more time looking after my little sister. Fingers had finally left. I think my mother had had enough of her and my little sister didn’t particularly take to her grandmother, turning back and crawling in the opposite direction when she caught sight of her. Amma and Maggie worked a couple of days a week from the house, nothing like they did before. Amma seemed to let the business slide, not really having any more passion for it. The air of magic that surrounded her, which made everyone stop and look when she walked into a room, had disappeared. Several kilos took up residence around her waist and she made no attempt to hide it with her sari. Ravi loved her anyway and didn’t say anything.
I didn’t really want to go to Wembley that Saturday, a few of the girls from class were going to catch an afternoon matinee and I knew that I wouldn’t make it on time.
‘Maya just do it please, no arguing,’ Amma shouted. Satchin had been taken hostage by exams and so he couldn’t leave the house, so I went. On the way back from picking up the saffron and bay leaves, I stopped at a newsagent’s.
‘Do you have Just Seventeen?’ I asked. The oblongshaped woman at the counter called to her son who was out in the back, she shouted at him to check if they had any left. The son replied back in English with a heavy Indian accent that made me laugh. He was so obviously one of those chameleon types that spoke like that in front of his parents and then as soon as he was let out, he pounded the streets with another accent. He came out, fighting with the hanging tassels that separated the shop from the stockroom and as I looked up, I saw Suri. I was stunned.
‘Hi, Suri,’ I said, unfazed.
He looked distressed and handed me the magazine. So this was the infamous Mrs Rama that we never got to see because she and her husband were always ‘on call’, consultant gynaecologist and obstetrician that they were. At that point, his father came in and asked him to help unload a delivery.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Rama, I’m Satchin’s sister,’ I said, but she looked puzzled and smiled. I paid her and left. I was thinking about Suri as I waited for the bus, had he been taking my brother to see some other parents that he had made up? Had Satchin ever seen them? Did he know? Suddenly, he appeared and put his hand on my shoulder.
‘Maya, I have to talk to you, I really do.’
‘It’s not important, Suri, it doesn’t matter. I won’t say anything to anyone.’
The bus came along. ‘I have to go,’ I said. He jumped on and sat next to me.
‘Maya, I’m not ashamed of them being shopkeepers, it’s easier because … well, you wouldn’t understand because your father is a businessman.’
‘You do know that Ravi is not my father, not my real one?’
He stared at me blankly.
‘You do know, don’t you?’
He shook his head.
How could he not know? How could Satchin not tell him? Erase Achan from his mind like he never existed. All those years Satchin and I had spent looking after each other meant nothing to him, forgotten with a posh house and a good school. So the memory of our real father meant nothing! I started to mumble incoherently, no wonder he never referred to the past. Suri began to laugh and then I stopped, took a deep breath and told him how we had come to England, how my father had died and as I explained, tears welled in my eyes. It was never talked about. He touched my shoulder and then I described the move to Maggie’s house and how Ravi came from nowhere and replaced my father. I talked like time was a sparse commodity. It was an insatiable need to tell someone and to be heard and after I finished, I felt better, much better, as if a weight had been lifted from me. Suri listened, just listened without saying anything. Then he talked.
He told me that he had received a scholarship to go to Satchin’s school, that his parents worked all hours in the shop and their only focus was to make sure he had the best education. So he went on all the ski trips and did all the other stuff with the money they saved for him and the money Amma gave him for coming in on Saturdays. There was no six-bedroomed mansion or au pair; they lived in a semi in Wembley. He made it all up so he didn’t have to feel different from the other boys.
We shared so much on that bus ride and as we got off, he said he would walk me home. No doubt he wanted to play on Satchin’s computer or borrow a book. We got to the drive and he looked at me and said, ‘I’ll see you very soon, Maya.’ Then he turned back, heading for the bus stop. He walked all that way, for me. That evening, before I went to sleep, I began thinking about Suri. His calm smile that I trusted, and the strong hands that gently touched mine as he said goodbye, then I fell asleep and woke up, obsessing about the next time I would see him.
Many times I wanted to go to Maggie, tell her what I felt about Suri and ask her if I should go back to his shop to buy another magazine, but whatever my mother had must have been contagious because Maggie, too, seemed very distant. Something had happened between Tom and her. After he had married without telling any of us, she got very upset and didn’t speak to him, just cut him off like that, which I thought was so unlike her, so harsh, without a second thought. Even those you most trusted were capable of doing that. Lots of times I told her to pickup the phone to say that she forgave him, it was a silly thing to remain upset over but she never did, despite missing him so much. Tom also made no effort, he cut us off too. It was strange, there was a period of time when we saw him every day and then he just disappeared. Some people just didn’t have enough to give.
Suri came around six days later to collect a textbook and stayed to eat with us. Every time I tried to look him in the eye, he avoided my gaze, and I didn’t feel like joking around with him and Satchin like I normally did. It was becoming harder; I couldn’t concentrate on anything and in everything I did, he was on my mind. Upstairs, I started sewing pieces of material together in the hope that this would occupy me and my feelings would pass, that this was what that teenage crush thing was about. A few minutes later, there was a knock at my door. It was him. He quickly handed me a plastic bag and then ran downstairs. I heard him say goodbye to Ravi and Amma and then the front door shut.
My heart beat faster as I opened the bag, finding inside a box, which was awkwardly wrapped in pale orange paper. I ripped it open to find a Dundee cake with a note attached to it. ‘For all the times I have wanted to get you something an
d I never knew quite what. Suri.’ My heart jumped and I wanted to go running after him, but I couldn’t; Amy Willis always said that you should never, ever show a boy that you liked him, you had to ‘make them sweat’. I threw the Dundee cake on the bed and I ran down the stairs, out of the house, chasing after him anyway.
‘Suri,’ I shouted. ‘Suri, stop.’ He turned around and when I had reached him, I didn’t know what to say. I looked up and smiled at him. He kissed me. Our noses collided and he laughed, then he took both my hands, placed them on his face and kissed my forehead and then my eyes, whispering my name, making it sound so very beautiful.
‘Suri,’ I said seriously. ‘You know that there’s only one thing that will ever wreck this?’
‘What?’ He asked
‘Those purple Farahs, they’ve got to go.’
He laughed again as he took my hand and walked me back to the top of my road, promising that despite his exams he would make time to see me and then after that, we would have the whole summer. I wasn’t really listening, this is what it felt like to have all that you have ever really wanted.
It was out of the question to tell Satchin, it would violate the unspoken code of conduct established between us, not to go out with each other’s friends. Amma and Maggie were too busy with other things to notice and I didn’t want to share this with the girls at school who would want to know all the details, turning it into a kind of sordid competition which was so far from the truth. So I kept it to myself and the relationship became even more special.
He became my best friend and was the only person with whom I could openly talk about my father and talking about him resurrected his memory from the many years that Ravi had taken over. Not that Ravi was a bad father; he always treated us like we were his own, not even differentiating between Ammu and us, but it wasn’t the same. Suri also understood where we came from, not sweeping it under the carpet like it was something to be ashamed of.
I loved the ambition that he had, his sense of self and clarity. One day, he said, he would be a doctor and there would come a time when his mother and father would not have to work so hard. He spoke of both of them with such respect, they sounded so lovely (even when he said that his father took pictures of the Queen when she appeared on television!). It made me feel at a loss as to what to say about mine and then he filled in my blanks by depicting my Amma as a determined, caring woman and Ravi as a very generous man.
When it rained, or if I was cold, Suri would give me his coat. Whatever little he had, he shared with me, he went without things so we could go to the cinema or he could take me places. He shared everything; his words, his thoughts, everything. Never afraid to say that he loved me, or write it so it was there on paper in black and white. He handled my insecurities as if they were his own, treading gently and knowing how to calm me when he sensed the onset of a temper, or when he knew that he had touched on something that upset me. When we fought, we fought hard, but it would all be forgotten before the evening was up. ‘Maya, I’m not going home until we sort it out, we can’t leave things like this.’ He would do something or say something stupid: ‘Maya have you ever thought about it? We are like beauty and the beast, it’s true, isn’t it? I bet no one has ever called you the beast before.’
We couldn’t really go to each other’s houses, not as boyfriend and girlfriend, and when he came to mine, there was never any eye contact or exchange between us. It was so difficult and this probably made the whole thing even more passionate. We would see each other every Sunday afternoon without fail and very briefly on some evenings and then when I left him, I counted the hours until I could be with him again. Over the summer holidays, we spent nearly every day together and after that time, it got to the point where we could finish each other’s sentences.
Satchin said that something was going on with Suri and told me that he had found himself a secret woman who was very demanding. ‘Did he say that?’ I probed.
‘No, doesn’t say a thing about her except this one is different, but you know what they are all like.’
The irony was, at the time, Satchin wanted to spend more time with me. One day he came into my room saying ‘Soda, soda and what will you have, Stanley?’
‘Oh, please,’ I thought, ‘get a grip.’ All those years that I had waited for him to talk to me like that again and now I didn’t need him, he decided he was ready. Well, I wasn’t, it was too late, that time had long gone. He lingered in my room.
‘Do you remember, Maya, in the big house when we were sitting on the dining table and laughing hysterically thinking about that fridge game. We couldn’t stop laughing and the tea that I was drinking came spurting out of my nose, we were howling and then Achan came out because we had woken him up and told me to stop. ‘‘Stop Satchin, because for the amount that you have laughed today, I guarantee you’ll be crying for the next three days,’’ he said.’
No, I didn’t remember. Achan wouldn’t say something like that. ‘That was one of the last times we saw him,’ he continued.
‘Do you think about him?’ I asked.
‘Not really, I try not to. I’ve kind of blocked all that off. He’s dead now anyway, what’s the point? I do remember stuff like a few months after that, though, when I broke your thumb and I put it under cold water so it would get better but you wouldn’t stop screaming and then Maggie had to take us to the hospital because your thumb was halfway up your elbow.’
I couldn’t have forgotten about that, I was six years old. Satchin had found a tatty black leather swivel chair in the dump nearby and he came back for me to help him carry it into the bedsit. He thought it would be a good birthday present for Amma. We fought over who was going to sit on it first and he gave in when I threatened to tell our mother that he wasn’t really taking me to school properly in the mornings as he had promised her. He would walk me halfway and then leave me there, stranded. ‘You know your way, Maya,’ he would say. ‘Just follow the other mums,’ as he ran off to find his friends. I followed the other mothers and it was really shameful when they spotted me lurking five paces behind them. They took pity on me and stopped, waited for me to catch up, and held my hand as we crossed the road. Blackmail always worked, so I sat in the chair and asked him to swivel it. He turned it but it was an old thing and the chair fell off its stand and I went flying. My thumb got caught under the iron bed as my body went in completely the opposite direction.
Maggie was irate and started shouting at him, which is why I always thought that he didn’t warm to her as I did. It was probably about a month after we moved into the bedsit and so we probably didn’t create a very good impression. We made up a story for the hospital and for Amma; that I had accidentally fallen on the pavement on my way home from school, landing on my thumb to break the fall. I couldn’t remember that second bit so when the doctor asked me it all came out jumbled and Maggie stepped in and asked the doctor whether it was possible that I could be suffering from concussion.
I laughed thinking about it now. How worried Satchin’s little face was and how I played on it, making him give me his whole precious collection of marbles. I lost them the next day to Jatinder who was the worst at the game and who was nicknamed ‘blind git’ because he never managed to throw them in a straight line. I had to roll the one-ers between my two fingers as my thumb was strapped up and I don’t think that Jatinder ever saw as many marbles as he did that day. ‘They’re all lost,’ I said to Satchin, expecting a fight. ‘It doesn’t matter, Maya,’ he replied.
‘And do you remember when the bloke from the Special Branch came for me, Maya, and I told him where he could get off?’
It wasn’t quite the Special Branch; it was Simon Kingsley’s dad who was a retired policeman. I was about eight, it was before we were going to move into 64a, the house across the road, and Amma was over there getting things ready. Satchin had warned me that Simon Kingsley might send his dad around. Satchin had punched Simon in the eye because of something he had said about Amma and Maggie. He came beating
on the door. Satchin said he would be right there beside me but in the course of me opening the door, he had gone to hide.
‘No, Mr Kingsley, there is no little Indian boy of that name here. If you want to speak to my mother, she is out in the back having a bath.’
He stood in the doorway for a while, looking confused at all the fruit that poured out from the different boxes in the bedsit and then, as I added that she might be some time, he shook his head and left. I heard Maggie tell my mother that someone came around looking for her and Satchin the day after that. Maggie said she thought he was from the Social and so she said she knew of no one of that name and sent him packing.
‘Yes, Satchin, you really told him where to go,’ I said, as I got up to leave.
I think, deep down, I always wanted to be like Satchin. He never thought about things too much, just took things in his stride, not questioning or being suspicious about people. He also had this amazing ability to have friends constantly buzzing around him and to be loved by everyone and to make others happy, something I felt I failed miserably at. When he hit his teens, there were all these different girls who would call, giggle and hang up. ‘Who was it?’ Amma would ask Ravi.
‘Just another one of Satchin’s admirers,’ Ravi responded.
He started to see this one girl, Jasminder, who he met at the tennis courts and was really nice, but then Karla arrived on the scene. I didn’t really think much of her so kept out of the way.
I also envied the closeness Satchin had with Amma and Ravi, somehow I couldn’t get there, not like Satchin could. Before Ammu came along, every sentence was prefixed by Satchin, Satchin sportsman, Satchin brainbox, but now that Suri was in my life, none of this seemed to matter. Suri made me feel important enough just as I was.