by Annie Murray
He started taking Priya off into the bedroom, enraged if Sooky came in. Sooky felt like a servant, not a wife.
‘What are you doing in there with her?’ she asked.
‘Just having a lie down with my daughter! What d’you ****ing think I’m doing, you nagging bitch?’
She couldn’t say – not then. Thinking about it now, she searched her soul to see if there was anything else she could have done. She knew girls in marriages where they were cruelly beaten, shrunk into silent shadows of the bright girls they had once been, who felt they had no choice but to keep quiet. They were married: this was how it was. If they left they would be turned out of the community in disgrace – outcast, penniless and treated as nobody. In comparison, she knew she was lucky.
One Sunday afternoon when Jaz had taken Priya upstairs, telling her she’d better not disturb him, she crept up and listened at the door. There was no sound for a time, though she thought she could hear little movements inside. Then she heard a cry from Priya. Her stomach tightened with dread. Very quietly she opened the door.
Priya was lying on a towel, completely naked, kicking her legs in the air at the freedom of it. Jaz was on all fours on the bed over her, his flies undone, a hand working at himself.
Sooky closed the door very carefully, then opened it again, rattling the handle.
Jaz jumped away from Priya, too shocked to be angry.
‘Sorry,’ she had whispered. ‘I just came up to get my cardigan. Oh,’ she pretended to be surprised, ‘she’s not asleep yet then?’
‘I was just changing her,’ he said.
That Monday, once Jaz was at work, she packed a bag and took Priya back to Birmingham on the train. She told her mother everything. Meena stared at her as she spoke, sobbing as the words poured out. Meena’s face was very grave and every so often she rolled her eyes up to the ceiling as if silently imploring God. Then she turned her face away. Sooky waited for her to say, ‘You must go back. It is your duty. He is your husband.’
Instead – and even now Sooky found this the most puzzling aspect of everything that had happened – Meena seemed to be in shock. It took an age before she said anything. At last, in a very quiet voice, she said, ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I think I’d better stay here for a bit.’
Sooky knew she meant forever, but it seemed too big a thing to say.
‘What if he comes?’ Meena said.
‘He won’t.’ Jaz must know that she knew about him. He didn’t want her any more than she wanted him.
She wrote to him, telling him that if he came anywhere near Priya she would personally tell his parents what she had seen, and would contact both the police and Social Services in Derby. She had no idea what he had told his family, but it all went quiet and stayed quiet. Two months later he wrote back saying he wanted to divorce her on grounds of her adultery, which he expected her to admit. She decided to agree, knowing that it would bring shame upon her own head, but she wanted to be rid of him. And who would believe her if she said anything else?
Now she was tormented by doubt again. Why had she agreed to something so unjust? And should she have told someone? What if Jaz started his behaviour with some other child?
A pair of mallards drifted past on the water below. Sooky tried to think sympathetically about Jaz. Should she have been able to help him, to do something to make things better? But she knew it would have been impossible. Jaz hadn’t liked or trusted her. They had married as strangers and become enemies. And if she ever heard that he had married again, she ought to warn his new wife. That was something she promised herself to do.
She moved further along, away from the patch of oil, and knelt down on the bank. Leaning over, she looked down at her reflection in the water, her yellow chunni pulled over her head. Her eyes stared sadly back at her. She knew she was glad to be away from Jaz, though she was sorry about his parents, about not being able to explain. And living back here, even in disgrace with Raj and Roopinder on at her, was better than the desolation of her marriage.
But what broke her heart was her mother. This stony, complicated silence, which made her feel so hurt and desolate. Would she ever see her mother smile at her or hear her talking to her properly ever again?
Thirteen
Meena drew up her legs, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, and stared at the television: the dancing after a wedding on the back patio of a house, a swirl of women’s clothing, purple, orange, turquoise, and everyone chatting and eating sweets. Usually she found watching the wedding videos soothing. They showed her things as they ought to be, everything fitting into the right place, the old traditions handed down over centuries, tying them to home.
She gazed for a long time at the flickering images, soon ceasing to see them. Her mind was elsewhere completely. Eventually she picked up the remote control, and the red button folded the pictures away into darkness.
Silence. Roopinder had gone out with the children. It was very seldom the house was this quiet.
Meena looked down into her lap, fingering the hem of her kameez with its edging of coffee-coloured sequins, which felt rough, like tiny pieces of shell. Emotions boiled inside her. Her limbs were aching and heavy and a swelling sensation rose in her, as if she might vomit.
The past was all mingled with the present. Having her daughter Sukhdeep anywhere near kept her in a state of permanent turmoil. Her outrage with Sukhdeep could barely be contained: that she had dared to challenge her husband, to leave him and overturn everything that was expected of her, to disgrace her family. She was a woman – her duty was to accept her fate, her kismet, to bear everything, forgive everything.
And yet, there was the reason she had left . . . There were some things that could not be forgiven – at this thought the feeling of sickness became doubly oppressive – some things a young child should never have to experience. Then her rage turned like a white flare on Jagdesh, her serpent of a son-in-law, so smooth and deceitful in his smart suit with his Western ways and his computers and business talk. The feelings came so strongly that her body began to tremble and she had to breathe hard to calm herself.
And now, with the upset in Punjab, what the Indian army had done . . . She began to rock back and forth in distress. ‘And my own son, my foolish Raj,’ she muttered. He had become so savagely angry, so uncompromising. She was afraid for him – of him. And that Bhindranwale whom he worshipped. He was supposed to be a holy man, but why had he filled the holiest of all places with bullets and grenades? It was all so horrific, so confusing. And all of it began to revive those memories of the deep past, of the Punjab of her birth, which she had tried to bury forever, never to look at or speak of, even in the very darkest places of her own heart.
Western Punjab, April 1947
She remembered the rhythmic creak of the bullock cart, the brightness of the stars in the vast canopy of sky and the merest shred of a moon.
Lying in the cart, she had felt the itch of straw against her bony back, smelled the dung fires as they stole through the lanes at the edge of the town and heard the barking of dogs, which at last faded to a silence broken only by crickets and that rhythmic creak, creak . . .
Every so often there would be a whimper from her little sister Parveen and their mother urgently silencing her, ‘No crying! You must be quiet.’
Before this there had been the thick darkness, the smell of fear, sitting all together in the gurdwara, showing no light, everyone deadly quiet. Then they were all squashed onto the cart, women, children and her Uncle Gurbir, because of his crippled foot. It was a cool night. Gurbir had been wearing a brown knitted hat instead of a turban.
Meena’s mother Jasleen, with Parveen in her lap, had shivered beside her with cold and fear. Jasleen had been heavily pregnant, as had her sister-in-law Amarpreet, Meena’s auntie. Meena’s father had walked alongside the cart, as had Nirmal. Her beloved Mama-ji Nirmal, her mother’s youngest brother, had been only fifteen then and he was always kind and looked out for others.
The journey had lasted a very long time. Meena slept, her cheek pressed to the back of her hand, breathing in the smell of the night.
They were heading for the border – or at least the border that would be officially drawn in four months’ time, in August 1947, between Muslim Pakistan to the west and Hindu India to the east. Just then no one was completely certain where this slicing line across Punjab would fall. Would Lahore be part of Pakistan? Would Amritsar?
What they did know, the Sikhs whose homes fell to the west of the line (as the Hindus knew), was that they were no longer welcome. Those who were about to find themselves in Muslim Pakistan when the border fell would have to fight for survival or leave. The Muslims on the east side faced the same dire choice.
Only much later did Meena hear the stories that had made them flee. All over this western area Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, who had shared the streets of towns and villages for generations, took violently against each other. More and more blood was being shed. Sikhs were now terrified of their Muslim neighbours.
But it was the news that came from the north, from villages in the Rawalpindi district, that chilled their blood. Villages where the Sikhs, often themselves gathering their forces for violence, were vastly outnumbered and had gone into hiding from the gangs of Muslims who came raiding their villages, taking away their women and making them convert to Islam, slaughtering anyone who was not one of them.
There were villages where fathers, to defend the honour of their women and stop them falling into Muslim hands, took up their kirpans, their long knives, and beheaded daughters, wives and sisters. Another where the women of the village had committed acts of communal suicide by throwing themselves and their small children into the village well. This would be their future if they did not get away.
Meena sat, still rocking herself, remembering, fiddling with the hem of her kameez. She found herself agitating at questions which could now never be answered, which didn’t matter, except that they kept her thoughts away from confronting what actually happened that night as they fled their district of Gujranwala, a place that neither she nor any member of her family had ever seen again.
Whose was the bullock cart? There had only been a dozen or so Sikh families in their small community, all Jat farmers, living on the western edge of the town. What had happened to the cart? Because the next thing had been boarding the train: where? Gujranwala? Lahore? A bullock cart was a valuable thing. And not everyone who had been in the cart with them was on the train – certainly not everyone, because . . . Because . . .
Her thoughts were sucked towards the events of that night – or rather to the shame of not being able to remember, because as a little child she had been asleep, and that sleep had betrayed her.
Somewhere on the journey, while it was still dark, her mother, Jasleen, had asked them to stop so that she could relieve herself. A number of the other women got down also (not Meena who was asleep), among them their aunt Amarpreet and Meena’s sister Parveen, clinging sleepily to their mother. They took themselves a modest distance away, to the rocks and scrub at the side of the road. Had her mother strayed further than the others? She had been an excessively shy, modest woman, and was eight months into a pregnancy.
Meena was woken by her father’s cries. ‘Jasleen? Jasleen? Wife, where are you? Come back now – don’t move so far away from us! JASLEEN!’
His cries, becoming more hoarse and frantic, would echo forever in her head. Some tried to silence him, but Nirmal joined in the shouting for his sister. There was confusion, then utter panic. The other women were weeping hysterically, crying out that they had seen nothing, only darkness around them. Meena began to cry as well, terrified, not understanding what had happened.
The men searched every possible spot. Then they found her pink chunni a little distance away, as if she had thrown it down as a marker. But of mother or child there was no other sign.
Meena’s father was distraught, twisting the pink scarf round and round in his hands, crying out, running this way and that.
‘We must move on,’ the others said fearfully. ‘If they come back here they will kill us all.’
Meena remembered the sound of muffled weeping, of being forced to lie back down against the thighs of her Bhabi-ji Amarpreet, her aunt’s hand unusually firm on her head as if holding her down, as they continued the journey without her mother and Parveen.
And then they were on the train, crammed in in the oppressive heat, squatting on the floor, pressed against the wall, faces of strangers all around them. For hours there was no water. Amarpreet, who was a timid, passive person, her legs spread wide to accommodate her belly, let out little moans of terror that her baby would start coming here in this crush. Meena sat clenched up, her chin on her knees, eyes staring blankly in shock. No mother, no sister. Only Nirmal beside her, his arm around her as they tried silently to comfort each other.
Meena rocked herself harder now, her head bending right down to her lap, hands over her face, the tears running out between her fingers.
Fourteen
Two weeks passed.
Joanne faced each day as if it were a mountain, glad only if she could get up and over it and safely down the other side before tackling the next one. Gradually, everything had come to depend on Dave’s moods, so that she had to think hard to remember anything different. What had happened to the man she used to know and love?
When she opened her eyes in the morning, she was immediately tense. She usually woke first, roused by a cry from Amy. Sometimes it was difficult to ease herself out of bed without waking Dave, as his arm would be lying heavily across her. She would inch up into a sitting position and slide out, to find Amy standing in her cot, warm and adorable.
‘Don’t wake Daddy,’ she’d whisper, lifting Amy out, smelling her sweet, yeasty smell. As long as Dave was asleep, peace could reign. ‘Let’s go and get you some milk, shall we?’
Most mornings she warmed a bottle for Amy and made cups of tea, carrying one up to him, hoping desperately to begin the day on a good footing. Quite often he was all right first thing, as if sleep had washed him clean of whatever had made him snarl at her the day before. Now and then, though, he woke in an ugly mood, his face clouded and aggressive even before his eyes were open, and she was tiptoeing around from the very start. Nothing she could do was right. If it was raining, it was her fault; if he couldn’t find the shirt he wanted, she was the one to blame.
‘Why can’t you put anything away in the right place?’ he’d growl. ‘I’m out at work all day – just a shirt, that’s all I ask.’
She had learned that it was not worth arguing.
The times when he hit her were almost always in the evening, as if all his rage and suspicion had built up through the day like gas under pressure. Afterwards she would try not to think about that, either – about anything. Just get up, face the next day, the next climb. See if you can get down the other side without disaster. Keep Amy safe. To start thinking would be too frightening.
As soon as he had gone to work, she could breathe. Her day revolved around Amy, her meals and naps and taking her to the park. Instead of dwelling on Dave, on what he had done or not done, she banished him from her mind, almost as if he didn’t exist.
‘This is our day now – our lives,’ she sometimes whispered to Amy. ‘And he can’t do anything about it.’
Sometimes, when he was there in the evening, watching TV and caught up in the football and wouldn’t notice, she looked carefully at him. She saw a strong, good-looking man with a head of thick, cropped hair, which had darkened slightly, but was still blond. In those moments she might see something else that twisted her inside: his tension and bitterness. She could sense it in the way he sat, in the way his eyes looked out at the world.
The boy she had first known, when they were teenagers, had been bright-eyed, full of it, keen and bouncy as a spring. He was going to be a footballer, had been selected for training with the Juniors at the Villa; he was good, he was going so
mewhere. He’d gone through life with a force that had carried her with him, away from her A-levels – ‘What d’you need them for?’ – into work and a life with him. He’d been the leader then, the lad taking life by storm. She’d adored him. And now, at times, she felt heartbroken for him.
Still, mostly she had to look at him with detached, wary eyes. Anger was like a demon in him. He was starting to drink more now as well, and to bring home a rack of cans on a Friday night and get stuck into them and end up asleep, snoring on the sofa so that she had to go up to bed without him. All these things increased the distance between them. Trying to talk to him about it was impossible. He had shut down.
In the daytime when he was not there, though, she didn’t want to think about it, about what might happen or what she should do. She just kept climbing, one foot in front of the other, looking out for pitfalls and trying to avoid them.
Sooky had come to the toddler group both of the next two times. The first time Joanne felt a big smile spreading across her face when she arrived, and Amy ran to Priya, squealing with excitement.
‘That’s nice!’ Tess remarked. ‘She really remembers her, doesn’t she?’
‘Hello,’ Joanne said shyly. ‘Amy, give Priya a chance!’ Amy was trying to throw her arms round her little friend.
Sooky laughed. ‘Let me just get her out, darling.’
The two little girls ran off together, holding hands.
‘She really missed her last week,’ Joanne said. And I missed you, she thought, but didn’t say it.
Sooky looked pleased. Pushing the buggy tighter in against the wall she said, ‘I know – I wanted to come. It’s just, there’s all the trouble in India and my mom was a bit upset.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Joanne said as they wandered across to join their daughters. She racked her brains. She watched the news every day. It was full of the miners, pickets and police – and, yes, India. ‘The . . . is it . . . the Golden Temple?’