Jubilee

by Shelley Harris

  Retriever Pups. Cast Iron Cookware.

  ‘Can we?’

  ‘We’ve got enough cookware at home,’ says Maya. Satish knows she is delighted with herself, biting down on her smile.

  ‘No, really!’ says Asha. She bangs the back of Satish’s seat for emphasis.

  ‘What are you looking for? Casserole? Frying pan?’

  ‘Mummy, you know that is actually annoying,’ puts in Mehul.

  ‘We are buying neither pots nor puppies,’ says Maya.

  There’s a brief silence. Asha mutters something. Then Mehul pipes up: ‘Asha said bloody hell.’

  ‘You said what?’ asks Maya, twisting round in her seat.

  ‘God!’ says Asha.

  ‘And we don’t want any of that either, young lady,’ Maya tells her.

  ‘Why is Mehul allowed to tell on me and no one tells him off?’ asks Asha.

  ‘Mehul, don’t tell on people. Asha, don’t swear.’

  In the back of the car, Mehul yelps.

  Maya turns to Satish. ‘So what’s up? Spit it out.’

  Satish wonders how quickly he could unclip his belt and exit the car. He imagines himself rolling to safety like they do in films, landing in the hedge and watching the car travel on without him. But I’m driving, he thinks. They’d crash.

  ‘Look, kids!’ he says. ‘Look at the dog in the back of that car! Look at his ears!’

  ‘Aww!’ they say, in unison, and Asha starts up again. ‘Mum please! I’ll do all the walks and make sure he’s, like, fed and everything.’

  ‘No,’ says Maya.

  Asha heaves a theatrical sigh. ‘Can we not do just one interesting thing?’ she asks.

  ‘Nearly there,’ says Satish. For a short while there’s silence, Maya watching the road, Asha and Mehul quiet. Satish relaxes his shoulders and realises he can drop them a good inch. Two inches.

  ‘I heard you and Mum talking about that photograph,’ Asha pipes up. ‘She said publicity and fame. Is it true? Are you going to do it?’

  His shoulders rise again. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, go on, Papa. It would be fun. You’d be, like, a celebrity!’

  He says nothing. They’ve nearly reached the motorway. Maya looks steadily at Satish. He can see her out of the corner of his eye, unflinching.

  They arrive at Sima’s place in a tumble of noise, Satish getting the kids out of the car, Mehul reticent, Asha scrambling to be first. Maya stops in the driveway and frowns, reciting her list of things forgotten, things to be remembered. ‘Got the dish, Sima’s book, kids’ pyjamas. Satish, did you bring the toothbrushes? No, hang on, they’re here …’ He knows she’s not addressing him, not really, and he walks to the front door.

  Asha rings the bell and they’re still waiting for an answer when the second vehicle in their little convoy draws up behind them. Satish’s mum and dad get out, bickering gently.

  ‘Ask about their mechanic, Ram. Get the number. I’m fed up with this constant squeaking. You’ve left it long enough …’

  ‘Do you know how much he charges? I can do it myself. Waste of money …’

  Then the door opens and Gita is there, his little sister’s littlest girl, already a lofty twelve to Asha’s eleven and carrying the weight of her advanced age with dignity. Her greeting is schooled and formal: ‘Hello, Satish Mama! Welcome! Come in!’ Satish wants to laugh at her but suppresses it, bending to kiss the top of her head instead. He’s not fooled for a moment; Gita, the spit of her mother as a kid, will be upstairs in no time, continuing his daughter’s social education with the blend of authority and inaccuracy that marks all such discussions between children. It was ever thus, he thinks. And, indeed, as his sister emerges to greet them, Asha is hauled upstairs by her cousin, and he can already see the doors closing on their private world.

  ‘Come on in! It’s chaos of course!’ Sima hugs him, her skin sheened with sweat from the kitchen. Around him, there’s the noise of reunion. They are ushered into the lounge, taking their fragmented conversations with them. Mehul is encouraged to play upstairs, and he does so grudgingly, still muttering about the absent DS; younger than all three of his cousins, he’s a misfit boy in a house of girls. Satish’s mother has brought a gift, two jars of the chutney she made this week, and the women disappear into the kitchen.

  As their voices fade, Satish’s father makes for the chair he always sits in. He’s lowering himself into it when Sima’s husband Manik enters; Satish feels his hand squeezed in a hearty, brother-in-law grip.

  ‘The drinks are coming. Sit!’ Manik tells them.

  ‘So, my latest find. Listen to this!’ Satish’s father leans forward in his chair. ‘Electric mower, Qualcast, ex-display. Guess how much?’

  ‘Forty?’ offers Manik.

  Ram frowns in disapproval.

  ‘As new! Higher than that.’

  ‘Fifty?’

  ‘Lower. A little.’ He gestures with thumb and forefinger, a pinch less.

  Manik leans back. ‘Forty-seven?’

  ‘Forty-six. And based in Bassetsbury, so buyer to collect. Thank you.’ This to Maya, who’s come in with his drink. ‘A bargain. Just in time for spring. Bidding ended at midnight. Got in with thirty seconds to spare!’ He takes a satisfied draw on his nimbu pani, the sweet lime and water concoction which really belongs to the heat of Uganda or Gujarat, but which he has never quite lost his taste for, even in the chill of England. Is this eccentricity, wonders Satish. Is this old age? He looks across at his father, his sweater fraying, his trousers and shirt mismatched, the shoes he’s had since 1982, and he wonders whether Manik might just be humouring him. Silly old man, wise old man. For a second Satish balances between the two, and the thought of the former pulls up a great wall of defence in him. Manik shakes his head and Satish gives him the benefit of the doubt; you’re a bit fuzzy today, he tells himself. You’re not thinking straight, so just go with it for the moment. We’re next, anyway.

  ‘You have more patience than I do,’ says Manik. ‘Going through those lists of stuff, checking the bidding … The girls love it, though. On it all the time.’

  Satish looks across at the mantelpiece, where his nieces smile out from silver frames: they are toddlers, they are at a party, they are forced into brief, uniformed solidarity for the school photographer.

  ‘Didn’t Gita get something on eBay?’ asks his father.

  ‘Yes, she did. Her iPod. Now, of course, she’s plugged into it night and day. I’m not sure it was such a bargain any more.’

  ‘Oh! Kids will always do that. You should have heard the rubbish Sima played when she was a teenager. And no headphones, unfortunately …’

  Satish, hearing them commiserate together, feels himself rocked to a familiar rhythm. He’s caught up in the old patterns of behaviour he watched as a child, only now he’s the dad, inhabiting the bass rumble of men’s talk that reaches up through the floor to his kids, round the corner to his wife in the kitchen. She’s there now, politely asking for Sima’s chai recipe, while his sister refuses with equal courtesy. He hears his mother reprise her complaints about the malfunctioning car. A couple of seconds later, Maya is in the lounge again, bringing him his chai, remonstrating with him about the barfi sweets he’s been snacking on. He lets the words patter about him, welcomes the hazy distance bestowed by last night’s dose. He feels middle age settle upon him comfortably and takes another bite. The milky sweetness of the barfi is reassuring. He licks the floury residue off his bottom lip and smiles. His sister has turned out to be a decent cook.

  It didn’t always look that way. During the painful early years of her apprenticeship in the kitchen he’d wondered who would crack first: Sima, whose resistance seemed a denial of her very gender, or his mother, in denial herself, her cuisine a refusal to admit they’d ever left Uganda.

  His mum had evinced a constant dissatisfaction with the ingredients she could find in England, and in Cherry Gardens her demeanour was that of an army field-cook, working under intolerable conditions, for
ced to make the best of what was available. Notwithstanding her complaints, she displayed an admirable inventiveness. Satish could still remember their home in Kampala, the strings of green chillis hanging from the kitchen ceiling. His mum would buy them at the market, hang them for a few days in the dry equatorial heat, then pound them to a powder. Installed in the dampness of Bourne Heath she continued to disdain shop-bought spices, and instead commandeered the airing cupboard for her precious chillis. She’d take a bus ride into Bassetsbury to buy them fresh, then hang them from the water pipes amidst towels and sheets. Even so it wasn’t uncommon, as the family tucked into a meal, to hear her softly tutting at what she’d been reduced to.

  In those early days in Cherry Gardens, when he was still young enough to want to stick around, Satish would spend time with his mum in the kitchen. As she prepared the meal, she’d murmur her mantra over the food. ‘We thank the food, and we ask forgiveness for killing it, even the plants,’ she told him. As she chopped herbs or sliced chicken, she taught him about the hierarchy of living things, with the cow at the top, the one animal they could never, ever eat.

  ‘Cows are like our mothers, because they give us their milk,’ she’d say. ‘You wouldn’t kill your mummy, would you, Sati?’ Some things changed, as they adapted to their new lives in Bourne Heath, but this never did. Later, when Sima was old enough to learn, he’d heard his mum instructing her in the order of things, in the hierarchy of nature and the maternal benevolence of the cow.

  But Sima had proved to be less than biddable. Wilful even at five when she was just rinsing rice and rolling chapatis, she was a sullen malcontent at the age of nine, by which time she was chief vegetable chopper and washer-up. She’d pull a kitchen stool over to the counter, raising herself to roughly their mum’s height, and the two would snipe at each other over the spinach and lentils. By then Satish was just an occasional visitor, passing through. He’d grab any stray bits of food he could, then leave, heading outside to a game with Cai or upstairs to his room. Sima would watch him soulfully as he went. Careless of her suffering, he nevertheless tuned his senses to what was happening in the kitchen, keen not to miss any treats, and on a special day he’d not go far. That smell when the barfi was being made, sweet-sweet as the ghee started boiling, a promise of what was to come. Then when his mum added flour to the pan it changed: the smell you get at the start of rain. He’d time his entry into the kitchen, letting the fragrance of just-cooked barfi guide him, and then make off with a portion while it was still warm, the top sprinkled with almonds. Sometimes there would be a pan for them both to pick clean, the strings of melted sugar welded to the stainless steel, yielding to their nails and teeth.

  Now, Sima’s calling the children for their tea, and Maya is busy retrieving them from their various nooks around the house. Satish knows what’s happening in there right now; his sister in perpetual motion, kitchen-to-table-to-kitchen, ferrying hot bowls of rice, dhal and chana nu shaak for the kids. They will clatter down the stairs soon enough, hungry and restive, elbowing for room, chorusing their thanks to his sister. It was just the same when he was a child, in Auntie Manju’s time; unlike Satish’s parents, Ranjeet’s family were strict vegetarians, and Manju’s virtuoso cooking was more than just hospitality. It was a counter-argument.

  But even Auntie Manju didn’t make puri, the showy flat-bread Sima always lays on for Satish’s visits. It will keep her working over a crackling pot for a good while yet, but they all adore her for it. Come to think of it, maybe now would be a good time to pop into the kitchen. Just a brief visit, cast an eye over the family … In the lounge, his father and Manik have entered into a vigorous debate about car servicing, and he’ll not be missed for a while. A little tower of puri is building on the plate next to Sima’s stove, but it won’t be there long. If he’s quick, he’ll get in before she transfers it to the table.

  Easing up from the sofa, Satish reflects that his search for gastronomic pleasure has been a life’s work of sorts, a proudly international enterprise which, even in childhood, reached beyond the boundaries of his mother’s kitchen and into other, more alien territories. In Cherry Gardens, ‘going round for tea’ was common practice, and if he wasn’t doing it himself, he was on hand to catch the preparations for other people’s. Mandy’s mum made a great macaroni cheese: creamy sauce loaded with cheddar, then even more piled on top and browned under the grill. He loved the elastic crispness of the topping against the squish of the sauce. Mandy’s mum would pop a tiny portion on a side plate for him if he were around when she was cooking it.

  At a Boxing Day drinks party in Sarah’s house, he had grazed the tray of nibbles, one of everything, just to see what it was like: little sausages impaled on wooden sticks, a totem pole of cheese and pineapple, the fruit still dripping with the syrup it had been canned in. He couldn’t stand the cavernous pork pies – the jelly made him retch – but the vol-au-vents made up for that, and he ate as many as he could, until Mrs Miller discovered what he was doing and, sibilant with vexation, confiscated the tray.

  As time went by Satish added to his repertoire of exotic foods: the bizarre, the scrumptious, the nauseating. He drew up lists in his head, a catalogue of his discoveries. Toad-in-the-hole, the name of which made him shiver in delight; mushy peas; scampi; egg-and-bacon sandwiches; chips and mash and roasties – every iteration of the glorious potato; faggots; fry-ups; fish and chips; jelly and rice pudding; apple pie and Arctic Roll. Everything, bar beef, had to be tried. He wondered what might happen to him if these were the only things he ate. Would it build up a Britishness in him, all this English food? Might it drain his colour, sharpen his football skills, send him rushing into church? The thought was a wicked one; he was playing with fire. Safer by far, and more familiar, were the meals at home, or the dinners they had with Auntie Manju and Uncle Ranjeet.

  Ranjeet’s place was great, their first refuge after they’d left Uganda. There was tension in those early days; the rest of the family had quit Kampala some time before, but Satish’s dad had refused. In the end he’d had no choice. Idi Amin scoured the country of Asians and the four of them had fled. They arrived on Ranjeet’s doorstep with nothing, then filled up his Bassetsbury semi, waiting to move on again. And when they did – a worse crime this, far worse than their inconvenient destitution – Ram chose Bourne Heath and placed an unacceptable four miles between himself and the rest of the family. Satish can’t remember any of the rows which later became legend, but fragments of them lived on, in throwaway comments designed to remind Ram of his role as the errant younger brother.

  All the more comforting, then, that throughout Satish’s childhood Ranjeet had offered a welcome, no questions asked. At Ranjeet’s, Satish and Sima could lose themselves in the hurly-burly of the extended family, and there wasn’t all this endless explaining of things. Cousin Dinesh was there, Ranjeet’s son, four years older than Satish and ripe with wisdom. They’d smirk at each other knowingly as their parents traded news about the prodigious achievements of their boys.

  ‘Dinesh has been getting excellent marks in science,’ Uncle Ranjeet would confide, grabbing a handful of dhal biji, the crunchy spiced lentils he adored. ‘Biology, chemistry … he’s taking after his old man!’

  ‘Very good, very good,’ Satish’s dad would agree. ‘Satish’s teacher, too, is very pleased with him. He’s a real all-rounder, she says. You know, good at all sorts of things. You listen to him now, on the tabla. Are these children going to play for us?’

  The kids would be rounded up and made to play songs for the adults, and Satish would try to look casual for Dinesh’s sake whilst trying really hard for his dad’s and be exhausted and relieved when they were finally allowed to escape outside.

  While they threw a ball in Ranjeet’s garden, or lounged around on the grass, his cousin would tell tales of life at the boys’ grammar school. There wasn’t much Satish could do to compete with this; all the things he might say would be old hat, so mostly he just listened. Dinesh was going to be a
doctor, he told Satish. A really good one, better than his dad. He’d work in London, not some rubbish local hospital. And he’d be a surgeon, too, or an anaesthetist. He lingered over the word, though whether from pleasure or the struggle to pronounce it correctly, Satish couldn’t tell.

  Satish’s family went to Ranjeet’s for the fun stuff, too, the things that didn’t fit properly in Cherry Gardens. Best of all was the spring festival, Holi. They left Bourne Heath, dressed in their oldest clothes, the ones they could ruin with impunity, waving politely to their neighbours as they climbed in the car and headed for Bassetsbury.

  When they arrived, they were made to eat lunch first and they did it in a hurry for once, distracted from their food, peeking out into the garden. There were buckets by the side of the shed, filled right to the top with coloured liquids – pink and green, orange and blue. A pile of water pistols waited next to them. Sima caught Satish’s eye, sniggering, and pointed at Uncle Ranjeet. From where they sat they could see boxes of bright powder on the patio and the domes of balloons, multi-coloured, jostling in a washing-up bowl outside the back door.

  When Auntie Manju said the children could get down – release! They tried coaxing their uncle onto the lawn, and when he feigned resistance they grabbed him instead, hauling him by the arms, Dinesh pushing him from behind. In the garden, the world was turned upside down: kids against adults, the grown-ups losing. They scrambled to attack Ranjeet – a water balloon full in the face, an exploding splash of red. He held up his arms in useless defence, giggling, while the children did their worst. Splashes of yellow across Ranjeet’s clothes, purple soaking his hair, orange squirting at him from hastily filled water pistols.

  Then the kids collided during the chase, or maybe it was Ranjeet dodging them too effectively, and suddenly nobody was safe. Dinesh rushed up to Satish, hands full of green powder, and smacked it onto his cheeks, then smeared it down his neck and T-shirt. Satish made a grab for one of the balloons but Sima got there first, raising it unsteadily and launching herself at her cousin.