by Annie Murray
And now, at home, all she got was this endless wall of silence, almost as if Meena believed the charge of adultery to be true.
Handing Priya her bottle of milk, Sooky looked down at her. My daughter . . .
She remembered Mom as she was growing up, rough and ready with her Punjabi village ways, but fond. Meena had proudly borne her sons, as a dutiful wife, but she had shown as great a joy in her daughters. They were company and comfort, she said. Daughters-in-law could not be guaranteed to be the same – an unknown quantity. Tears running down her cheeks now, Sooky remembered the hurried touch of her mother’s hands when she was little, the way she barked out commands. But that was just Mom. She’d not had much education or gentleness herself. But she had been like a rock, always there: the clink of her bangles as she moved round the house; her soft silky suits that you could snuggle up to while watching the television that she barely understood a word of (she had loved Tom and Jerry: anyone could understand that); and her food, the spicy smells wafting from the kitchen, the way she sang little snatches of Punjabi songs while she was cooking.
Stroking Priya’s soft hair, Sooky whispered, ‘I’ll never do this to you. I want you to choose your life – be free as a bird . . .’ But with a pang of misgiving she wondered: what if Priya chose to be different, to veer off the narrow track that women were permitted – would she face a lonely life, full of disapproval?
The best thing about home was her other two siblings. Pavan, her brother, who was eighteen, was a studious boy, in the run-up to his A-levels. He was doing science, and unlike Raj who had left school at eighteen, wanted to study to be an engineer. He never said anything about what had happened, about Sooky’s marriage, except sometimes he’d just look at her and say sweetly, ‘You all right, Sis?’ And she’d always say, ‘Yes thanks, Pav.’ That was enough: to know he was not against her. And her sister Harpreet, fifteen and doing her GCSEs, was obviously delighted to have her home, even though she was worried for her.
‘There was such a fuss,’ she said when they were chatting soon after Sooky came home. They were sitting on the bed in the room they would now share again. Harpreet’s school jumper was flung across the pillow, her old stuffed rabbit and teddy still on the bed, posters of Wham and Spandau Ballet on the wall. ‘I thought something terrible was going to happen to you.’
‘Oh, there was a fuss all right,’ Sooky said, patting Harpreet’s hand fondly. Her little sister was a sweet, stolid and rather fearful girl. ‘But I’m okay – still alive and just as ugly, you see?’
Harpreet giggled. ‘You’re not ugly; you’re pretty.’
‘Why, thank you, my dear!’
‘What will you do?’ Harpreet was serious once more. ‘Will you have to get married again?’
Sooky tried not to think about this. Attempting to be cheerful, she said. ‘Oh, maybe they’ll find me a rich sugar-daddy. But I could study some more, maybe do a degree.’
Harpreet’s eyes widened. ‘You think they’ll let you?’
‘Maybe, part-time. You can do that at the Poly now. Mum used to like me studying.’
‘Yes, but that was before you got married. Oh God, Sooky.’ Harpreet looked haunted. ‘I just hope they find me someone nice.’
‘We’ll try and make sure they do,’ Sooky said.
She didn’t share her misgivings about how difficult this was. She knew her parents hadn’t chosen Jagdesh with any bad intent. He had seemed polite and competent, looked good on paper, even had his own business cards. How could they know what a ridiculous, feeble bully he really was, his true colours coming out almost the instant they were married?
Priya banged her bottle on the table, interrupting Sooky’s thoughts. She made some toast, then took Priya upstairs.
‘It’s the toddler group today,’ she told her as they had a shower together. ‘You can see your little friend – Amy, isn’t it?’
Priya squirmed with happiness. ‘Amy,’ she said, stamping her feet excitedly in the water.
Sooky liked the toddler group. She had announced to her mother that she was going to start going a few weeks ago and received a puzzled-looking frown – but no words of course. She wanted it: for Priya to meet a mixture of children, not just Asians and Punjabi-speakers; and for herself. Brought up in England, in an English school, however many Punjabis were there too, Sooky had an English side to her. Punjabi in the house, English out of it, she thought, though of course it was never as simple as that. Most white people seemed to think that ‘English’ could only mean ‘white’. But she’d never be like Mom, mixing only with Punjabi women, with no need to learn English for her everyday usage. Her life was very different. And she liked to get out and about, not be stuck in the house all the time.
At school and at work she’d always been drawn to the naughty ones: not the really screwed up and harmful, but the ones with a subversive sense of humour, the ones she kept being told to keep away from. Like Gemma, who’d done fantastic imitations of the teachers and got mostly As in her O-levels. And Suze, who worked in Dad’s factory making leather goods – jackets and bags. Sooky had worked there sometimes in the holidays.
‘Why d’you mix with the gorees?’ Mom had asked her, puzzled.
Of course she had Asian friends, but she liked some of the white girls too. Suze was in her thirties, divorced with three sons, and smoked like a stack. Her situation was chaotic, but she was kind and funny and had a force of life in her, and that was what Sooky liked. She felt that vitality in herself, burning through her veins in a mad kind of energy. It was good to talk to someone else who had that sort of energy in them.
She liked Joanne too. They could laugh together and she was kind, and somewhere in her there was a liveliness that seemed to be trying to get out, and Sooky was drawn to her because of it.
Once she and Priya were ready and went downstairs, the TV was on again. Pavan and Harpreet had left for school, and Dad and Raj were long gone. She could hear Roopinder getting Amardeep and Jasmeet dressed upstairs, nagging at them as usual.
Mom, dressed in a suit the colour of milky coffee, the scarf loose on her neck, was sitting bolt upright on the sofa. Sooky noticed suddenly how much grey there was in her plait now. Both her parents seemed older than their years.
There were adverts on the TV and Meena was obviously waiting for the news. She watched TV a lot, often the videos of the most recent wedding they’d attended, going over and over events, relishing it all. Sooky wondered what had happened to the videos of her own and Jaz’s wedding.
‘Mata-ji?’ She spoke in Punjabi. ‘I’m just going out, taking Priya to the toddler group.’
All she expected from her mother was a vague nod out of her stony silence. For a moment Meena didn’t react at all. Then she turned and Sooky saw there were tears on her cheeks. As she did so, the news came on. Meena nodded towards it. ‘Look!’
‘Events at the Golden Temple in the Indian city of Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion . . .’
The gold of the Akal Takhat, the Seat of the Timeless One, glittered onto the screen, its reflection shimmering in the green pool around it. Sooky felt upset, sick in her stomach at the thought of harm coming to it. Her eyes met her mother’s.
‘Don’t go,’ Meena said in a low, humble voice. ‘Not today. Stay here with me.’
Sooky could hear the deep distress in her voice. In all the six months since she had re-entered the house, it was the most her mother had said to her.
She went and unstrapped Priya from the buggy and together they sank down on the sofa in front of the news. After a time Meena let out a trembling sigh and, in a distraught voice, said, ‘Oh my God – such terrible things. It’s going to happen all over again.’
Twelve
Sooky waited until the end of the TV news. Priya, to her relief, after a few squeals of protest, forgot all about where they had been going and started playing with some plastic hoops.
Sooky sat at the other end of the sofa, half-taking in the news, half-watching h
er mother’s thin, careworn features. Meena stared at the screen, straining to understand the English. Pictures passed in front of their eyes: Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in his blue turban, arm raised, rallying a crowd. Mom could understand him at least. She tutted at his words.
An ache rose in Sooky’s chest. She felt tender towards her mother, so vulnerable in her big house, in this country that was still so foreign to her. She felt a sense of honour for the journey her parents had made, from the wide farmlands of western Punjab to this city full of factories, chimneys and strangers. They never talked about any of that much, but she knew how important the community here was to them. It was their place, their people, a bit of home preserved in a foreign land. To feel disgraced was to be outcast: a nobody.
Sooky’s marriage had been a disaster. They all knew it, but it had upset everything. Mom was clinging to the ways she knew, where anything in marriage was endured. Your husband was as God: it was your duty as a wife to care for him, however he treated you. And yet what Jaz was doing went beyond this, and this seemed to lie at the root of the conflict. She also knew her parents blamed themselves for what had happened. Everything seemed to be about blame. Can’t we just stop it? she thought. All this blame?
How long was Mom going to keep this up, she wondered despairingly? She sat waiting for the news to end. Maybe then her mother would switch off the TV and turn to her: they would talk, the way they used to. They sat through the weather forecast – warm days ahead. Roopinder brought the children down, taking them into the kitchen.
Meena got up with a grunt. Her body was stiff, prematurely aged. Barefoot, she went and searched for a video and fed it into the player. Images appeared from a wedding the previous week – Sunny’s and Jaswinder’s. Sunny was the son of a family friend; the wedding had been in Smethwick. Even Sooky had gone: the mehndi patterns were still fading on their hands, the henna turning rusty after a few days.
‘Mata-ji?’ She couldn’t bear it any longer.
‘Make me a cup of tea, Sukhdeep.’
This was a hopeful sign. Maybe if they both sat down for a drink together . . .
Roopinder was putting Weetabix into bowls in the kitchen. She was wearing a cerise salwar kameez suit and lipstick, and the pink material seemed to glow against the white kitchen cupboards. As usual her handsome face wore an expression of snooty disdain.
‘I thought you’d gone out somewhere,’ she said, turning away, as if Sooky was a bad smell. The way she said somewhere made it sound dirty and bad.
Not looking at her, Sooky smiled at her nephew Amardeep, a beautiful three-year-old boy, and niece Jasmeet, his one-year-old sister, who was in the high chair. Sooky was very fond of Raj’s children; they couldn’t help what their mother was like, she thought.
‘Mom asked me to stay,’ Sooky said, pouring milk into a saucepan. ‘I’m just making her some tea.’
Roopinder’s head turned. ‘She asked you to stay?’
Sooky ignored her and ruffled Amardeep’s hair. He squirmed and giggled.
‘Stop, Auntie . . .’
‘What are you doing today?’ Sooky asked in a mild voice, determined not to sink to Roopinder’s level.
‘Oh, I’m going to see my mother.’ Her tone suggested that her mother was nothing short of royalty. Roopinder was also from Birmingham and her parents lived only a short distance away.
‘That’s good,’ Sooky said sincerely. Great: Roopinder was going out. The stupid bitch would be out of the way.
She poured two cups of sweet, milky tea and carried them to the front room.
‘Here you are, Mata-ji.’
Meena took the tea without meeting Sooky’s eye. She nodded her thanks. Sooky could see she was very tense, was not sitting back comfortably.
Sooky sank down beside her.
‘Look, Ma-ji – it’s a nice day. Why don’t you come outside with Priya and me? We can go to the park, walk round the lake. We could talk . . .’
There was no reply. Meena turned her head away with a slight gesture of recoil from her and fixed her eyes on the dancing wedding guests. Her silence went on.
Sooky went to the park anyway. I might just as well have gone to the toddler group, she thought, as she strapped Priya into the buggy, hurt and let down after those moments of hope that Mom might be softening towards her.
Why did she ask me to stay, when all she wants to do is ignore me again? She’d even dressed in her yellow suit again, not jeans and a T-shirt. She was trying to be a dutiful Punjabi.
It was sunny and warm outside. She turned out of their street of tall, gabled Edwardian houses, past her old school and then down towards the park. The streets were quiet and it was a pleasant walk. But Sooky could not feel peaceful, even when the green space of the park opened out in front of her. All the old doubts came back.
The first time she had seen Jagdesh, her prospective husband, she had thought he looked all right. Well, all right-ish. He and his parents had come over from Derby and they had gone through the rituals of tea and snacks and introductions. She had waited on them and been stared at and commented on. Jagdesh had been polite, though Sooky had been sure she could detect a smirk on his face, as if he thought himself superior to everyone there. He was clean-shaven, quite trendy in a smart suit. He worked with computers, or something like that. She hadn’t taken too much notice because she wasn’t really interested in that sort of thing. She was keener on people, dreamed of training as a social worker.
The parents had talked amicably enough.
‘Sukhdeep is a good student,’ her father had told Jaz’s parents. ‘She’s a good girl.’
Her mother, of course, laid it on about how she could cook, which was the truth. Mom had taught her well.
She and Jaz had a few minutes to talk alone.
‘What d’you like to do in your spare time?’ she’d asked him.
‘Oh, you know. Films, music, that sort of thing.’ Obviously neither the drinking and being insulting nor the inclination to be sexual with small children was laid out in his CV.
‘You’d like Derby,’ he’d told her assuredly. ‘It’s better than Birmingham – smaller and not so ugly.’
She hadn’t liked or disliked him. She had been seventeen: Mom and Dad had started looking for someone for her. Now she wondered why she hadn’t expected more, demanded more. They wouldn’t have forced her. Jaz was only the second man who came; there could have been more. It was almost as if she’d known it was inevitable and just wanted to get it over. She realized later that Jaz, who was then twenty-two, had felt the same.
‘You marry as strangers,’ Mom had counselled her. She seemed in her element, the wise older woman who had been through it all, passing on her knowledge to her daughter. ‘But you are not strangers for long. You live together, work together, have children. You look after him properly, do cooking, cleaning, bedroom things – he will respect you.’
After she’d met Jaz she’d crept upstairs to where Harpreet was waiting. Harpreet had been twelve then, and so shy that she’d begged to be let off the family meeting, but she was fit to burst with curiosity. She grabbed Sooky’s hand and yanked her into the room.
‘So, what was he like? What did you say?’
‘He’s all right. I said yes.’
She hadn’t felt anything much. It had been a bit like going to the dentist for a filling. It just had to be done. And at that time the wedding itself seemed quite far off.
She’d missed Harpreet terribly once she had moved in with Jagdesh’s parents. He had no sisters, just two brothers, one already married and living elsewhere, the other a year older than Sooky, but silent and unsociable. Jaz’s mom was glad to have a girl in the house, and Sooky quite liked his parents. Everything had felt strange and lonely, but that was to be expected. It was bearable. With other people around, the fact that she and Jaz already disliked each other could be disguised. But once they moved out into their own little terrace in Derby, two months before Priya was born, things had gone quickly downhill a
nd there was no one else to hide behind.
Sooky pushed the buggy along the path by the boating lake, relieved to see that Priya had fallen into a doze. She stopped, staring out over the water. There was a thin sheen of oil on the surface close to her. No one was out with a boat at the moment, and the only other person she could see was a man sitting up at the other end on a bench.
They’d never had much to say to each other, she and Jaz. There was nothing in common. She found him arrogant, insecure and limited, driven solely by the desire to make money. What intimate life they had was cold. Their rare lovemaking – and that was no name for it – happening mechanically in the dark, with no words or kindness. Maybe it would get better, she’d thought. He didn’t hit her, he earned his money. She knew she could not say anything to anyone. No one would take her complaints seriously.
Once Priya was born, it all changed. After the initial excitement of the birth, his attitude to her hardened. He became colder and insulting.
‘Where’s my food, you skinny bitch,’ he’d say, arriving home at night. When she gave it to him, sometimes he would hurl it back at her, the spices seeping into the carpet, staining it. He turned his back on her at night as if she was invisible, treating her as if everything about her disgusted him. All he wanted was Priya, in a cloying, overblown way, as if she was a new toy brought on Earth especially for him.
At first Sooky had been pleased when he wanted to help, to change Priya and spend time with her. But her suspicions grew. One day, when Priya was about six months old, she had come into the room to find Jaz holding her, kissing her on the mouth, and not as anyone kisses an infant – his eyes closed, and she could tell by the movement of his mouth that he was pushing his tongue between Priya’s lips. The baby was squirming, starting to cry, struggling to breathe. Jaz didn’t realize she had been standing watching as long as she had. He laughed it off.