Throughout, Tanvir stared into the middle distance. Kamaljit glared at her sister, and Surinder fought to contain her giggles – overt laughter, or ‘showing your teeth’ as her mother put it, not being allowed, along with make-up, unsupervised contact with male strangers and, for some reason, leaving home at a quarter to the hour.
However, there was no trace of a smile an hour later when, upstairs, Kamaljit did the unthinkable and, crossing the invisible line dividing the room, began tidying away some of Surinder’s other belongings. The younger sister watched in disbelief as Kamaljit picked up a pair of her used socks and put them into a laundry basket, started making a pile of used newspapers, stacked her Brontë on to her library editions of Austen and held up a copy of Jackie with the words: ‘Have you taken this from the shop?’
‘I’m going to put it back,’ said Surinder, feeling a hint of embarrassment that the cover featured a topless sunbathing man. ‘I always put everything back.’
Kamaljit ignored her and continued shuffling through the detritus on the floor. Next, she brandished a copy of Woman. ‘And this?’ She put it under her arm. Then, a copy of Vogue. ‘I’m taking them back down.’
Before Surinder could even think of what to say, Kamaljit was storming out of the room. The younger girl had slipped out of bed and was primed for confrontation by the time she returned, but Surinder barely managed a word of protest before Kamaljit pronounced, ‘By the way, you’ll be leaving school in the summer.’ Turning her back to her little sister, Kamaljit began removing her glass bangles in preparation for bed. ‘Straight after your exams. I heard Mum and Dad talking and they are looking for boys. For both of us.’
2 – WOLVERHAMPTON CHRONICLE
THE ODDEST THING was that I was braced for it. I had anticipated the phone call, imagined the late-night drive back, even pictured the scene when I got home: the phone ringing in the hallway and no one picking it up; women I didn’t recognise brewing tea in our kitchen. But it was my mother I was preparing to grieve, not my father. She was the one who had suffered bowel cancer and when strangers began arriving to offer their condolences for my father, it was hard to comprehend.
The delay with the funeral, as my father’s death was briefly deemed officially ‘suspicious’, added to the sense of unreality. The shop was sealed off for the gathering of forensic and non-forensic evidence, door-to-door inquiries conducted. A newspaper report speculated a youth might have been spotted running out of the shop that Friday evening, and we argued with the authorities about when the body might be released.
But no evidence transpired. The post-mortem concluded that my father had died of a heart attack, so-called ‘natural causes’. His body was released for cremation. And a week later my mother was approaching me with her mouth muffled with the damp end of a white chuni, her voice hoarse from going over it all. ‘You need to go to town this afternoon, son,’ she muttered. ‘Get your father some new clothes. It is traditional to clothe the deceased in fresh garments before cremation.’
I’ve noticed that as she gets older, and frailer, my mother becomes increasingly reliant on custom. A fortnight before my father died, and more than half a year before my planned wedding, she had suddenly insisted I have a traditional Sikh engagement ceremony. The closest Freya’s 69-year-old father, a retired quantity surveyor from Sussex, had ever got to India was a visit to his local curry house, but suddenly he was standing in our living room presenting me with eleven baskets (apparently, it has to be an odd number) of fresh and dried fruit (consisting of an odd number of ingredients), and £51 in cash. He looked ridiculous with a garland over his shoulders, the surreality of it all accentuated by the fact that Freya wasn’t even there, the prospective bride not, traditionally, playing a role in the ritual.
I remember feeling frustrated at the level of detail Mum insisted upon, wondering where she got it all from, suspecting that she was making it up as she went along. Our religion, after all, was founded as a reaction to the pedantry of many established Indian faiths. And when it comes to death, we are meant to approach everything with equability. We do not, for instance, obsess about the day someone is cremated, or make sure a body is pointing in a certain direction when buried.
But whatever you say about any culture, you can usually say the opposite too, and another strange thing about my father’s sudden passing was that I found myself clinging on to ritual. It was when there was no guidance, when I wasn’t being told what to do, that I began to feel unnerved. And so, dismissing the suggestion of popping over to Wolverhampton city centre – I wanted, for one afternoon, to avoid going over what had happened – I got into my father’s Escort van, helped myself to one of the extra-strong mints he kept in the ashtray, and drove further afield to the Merry Hill Shopping Centre with a sense of purpose.
Only for this sense of purpose to dissipate on arrival. When did shopping become such a chore? I remember a time when I used to actually walk around department stores in London for fun, fantasising about a time I might be able to afford luxury without worrying about the cost. But when the time came, I found myself unable to look beyond the snooty shop assistants, or the fact that my waist size and age had been interchangeable since 2004. And at Merry Hill, walking around the 210 stores, taking advantage of one of the 10,000 free car-parking spaces, this aversion combined with indecision.
My father always wore a blazer and tie in the shop he ran, sometimes, on cold days, a waistcoat too. But another thing about Sikh funerals is that we do not wear suits, smart clothes being associated with celebration. Did this dress code apply to the deceased? And if I did get a suit, what colour should it be? The Indian colour of mourning is white. But did that extend to the corpse? I wasn’t sure I wanted my father going out looking like a member of Boyz II Men. Also, what would be the right amount to spend? I couldn’t recall the last time I’d spent less than £500 on a suit. But my father objected to expense; every time I looked at something more than a few hundred pounds, I could hear him protesting, feigning a heart attack as he did the time he discovered I’d paid £80 for a T-shirt.
In the end, after two coffee stops, I drifted towards a supermarket ‘designer’ range, and found myself looking at something modern, priced at £300 and sky blue, not too dark, not too light, not cheap, but not expensive either. A compromise. For some reason, I held it up against the light. An attentive shop assistant, an Asian teenager with bright red lipstick and an LA smile, congratulated me on my choice.
‘You’ll find the fitting rooms at the back of the store.’ She gestured behind me, like an air stewardess pointing out the exit doors. Her prettiness made me self-conscious about not having shaved in a week.
‘Actually, it’s not for me.’
‘No problem, sir.’ The smile widened. ‘You have the measurements with you?’
I did. That morning I had visited the room upstairs my father referred to as his ‘study’ and my mother called ‘the office’, which sometimes functioned, like every room in the house, as a stockroom. It was out of bounds to me as a child, and as I stumbled over a stack of nappies and toilet paper, I couldn’t quite banish the feeling I was trespassing. The shelves which lined two of the walls were heaving under the weight of books by Jeffrey Archer and Stephen King and rows of box files marked with labels like ‘gas bills’ and ‘personal tax’.
The sight of the mobile phone on his desk, which had been briefly requisitioned by the police as ‘evidence’, and which he, to my annoyance, rarely switched on, reminded me of the last time we’d talked over it. I had rung him and shouted ‘Happy Father’s Day!!’ down the line, with Freya whooping congratulations in the background. His reply? ‘I’ll just get your mother.’ He wasn’t a great conversationalist. And I didn’t, though it killed me to admit it, put enough effort into our relationship. But the memory made me laugh and, wondering whether his voicemail was still working, I made the mistake of calling his number on my phone. The sound of his voice made me crumble.
It was some time later before I finall
y got to the point of the excursion: his wardrobe, which stood in the corner of the room, a flat-pack contraption from MFI I’d helped him assemble as a ten-year-old, but that was now collapsing in on itself, none of the doors closing or opening properly. It was infused with the nostalgia of his cologne, and as I put my head against one of his corduroy jackets to breathe it in, I wondered if anyone would notice or mind if I crawled in and spent the day asleep inside.
‘Chest 40.’ Smaller than me. ‘Waist 30.’ Thinner than me. ‘Inside l . . .’ Suddenly, a difficult thought: did corpses bloat? ‘Actually, make it chest 42, waist 34.’
‘Inside leg?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘We have a tailoring service. Could have it turned up and ready for collection in an hour.’
‘No need.’ A pause. ‘My mum’s a seamstress.’ Sometimes a lie, or in this case a half-lie, is easier than the truth. Even now I sometimes find myself telling people, when they ask, that my father is on holiday. I picked a shirt and a tie to go with the suit and thought briefly about haggling over the price. It was what my dad would have wanted. There was nothing he wouldn’t barter over – TV sets, utility bills – tutting as he did so, looking offended when declined, launching into speeches about non-existent grasping mother-in-laws. But in the end I couldn’t face the prospect of banter, and as the assistant talked me through her company’s refund policy at the till, informing me that if I wasn’t completely satisfied with my purchase I could simply return the goods within fourteen days of receipt, I thought of where the suit might be in a fortnight. Burnt, rippling in the tiniest fragments, through one of the five rivers that gave the Punjab its name.
I returned home to find that someone had taken the parking space for the van, and succumbed to a bout of sweary rage that was less to do with the hassle of having to park a few hundred yards away, in the car park of Buy Express, the ever-expanding Asian superstore nearby, than it was to do with the guilt I was forced to confront in doing so. My father was seventy years old, had diabetes and heart problems, the bathroom had to be fitted with handles so that he could get into and out of the shower more easily, and yet he was still dragging heavy boxes up and down this stretch of Victoria Road. I should have stopped him. I should have saved some money, paid for his retirement. Yet I had spent my twenties and early thirties gallivanting around London being ‘creative’.
There was little to improve my mood on the short walk to the shop. A youth I vaguely recognised was kicking the top of the zebra crossing light down a pavement. The old working man’s club had been transformed into Singhfellows, an imposing and off-putting desi pub. A new firm of solicitors had been established, seemingly to cater for the increasing number of illegal immigrants and criminals residing in the locality. And then, bleakest of all, next door to Bains Stores, the sight of Ranjit Dhanda, who ran Buy Express with his dad, in his large 4x4, taking advantage of the £3 ‘full valet’ offered by Polish Polish, the hand car wash.
The scene depressed me in a thousand different ways at once. The garage that used to be on the site had once been my playground – when I was a a child, the owners would let me get behind the steering wheel of the cars they were fixing. But it was now home to yet another of the low-cost car washes which scatter the Black Country in the way fried-chicken outlets scatter South London. One of the few growth industries around, they epitomise everything that has gone wrong with this once-mighty conurbation, and the meagre ambitions of its residents. After all, this is all Wulfrunians truly desire nowadays: to earn enough to buy a second-hand Audi Q7, to be left alone to drive it as fast as they want, to get it washed for almost nothing by someone from Eastern Europe and then to reserve the right to rant about parasitical immigrants after they have done so.
As for Ranjit, well, I hated the way he did not turn off his engine, which meant the washers had to work with fumes being blown into their faces. I hated the fact that he didn’t turn off the stereo, which meant the washers had to work while being subjected to the bassline of a succession of Malkit Singh tracks. And I struggled to remember what I had even liked about the guy. We had grown up together, were childhood friends, but nowadays he was insufferable, forever trying to flog me a dodgy Sky box, rebranding himself ‘Jay’ (a nickname I just couldn’t bring myself to use), insisting on calling me ‘professor’ in return because I had gone to university, driving a car that looked like it had been designed by a four-year-old boy, spewing conversational gambits that rarely went beyond ‘Have a smoke’ and ‘Call me Jay, not Ranjit’, his interests not extending beyond bodybuilding and smoking weed, and banging on about movies starring Steven Seagal (any film was either ‘better than Under Siege’ or ‘not as good as Under Siege’). I hated the fact I would, inevitably, find myself having to make polite chit-chat with this man later in the day. A man whose first remark on seeing me, after I had rushed back to Wolverhampton on hearing about the death of my father, grabbing my girlfriend’s car, was ‘Those your wheels, or did you hire it?’
Entering the shop through the private entrance next to the shopfront, into the kitchen that my father had built in an extension, the scene was not much more cheering than the one outside: a gaggle of strangers, arranged around my mother, sitting on the floor, crying. The weeping is another one of those contradictions. Officially, we Sikhs should rival the English when it comes to the stiff upper lip. The scriptures state that relatives should not indulge in wailing during times of mourning. Hymns that inspire detachment are sung on the way to the crematorium to aid the family in hiding their grief. But in reality the tears are endless.
I could even recall my mother telling me as a child that they were compulsory. One could not enter a house in mourning with dry eyes, she said. At the time I was impressed by the theatre of it. I couldn’t switch on the waterworks at will, even when I thought of the saddest thing that had ever happened to me, which at that time was probably the failure to receive a bicycle that Ranjit already owned. And if, years later, you’d asked me if the tears were healthy, I would have replied, ‘Yes.’ I would have said that such is the effect of the ceaseless sobbing that by the end of the two-to-five-week mourning period, you’re totally cried out, aching to return to the banality of the EastEnders omnibus and the commute to work – surely a healthier approach to death than the British stiff upper lip.
The only English funeral I’d attended, for Freya’s grandfather, had, with the endless clinking of wine glasses and chat about the weather, been a surreal experience. I went to offer his widow my condolences, only to be asked in return about how I’d found the drive down the A4040. But three weeks of dealing with weeping strangers remarking that my father had ‘had a good innings’ (he hadn’t, but I didn’t want to go over this again, so I agreed) and ‘He would have been proud of you’ (I doubted it, but whatever), turning up whenever they wanted, being unable to ask them when they might leave, made me appreciate the point of the stiff upper lip.
Certainly I was in no mood to hang out with them on the day before the funeral, so, having placed my father’s last suit in his wardrobe, I busied myself with chores: increasing from two to three the number of coaches taking mourners from the crematorium to the temple; and clearing some of the bouquets placed on the pavement in front of the shop, reading some of the messages as I did so (‘Tanvir, I’ll miss your smile’).
That evening, there was another instruction from my mother, albeit one with a get-out clause. ‘It is traditional for the body of the deceased Sikh to be bathed before it is dressed in clean clothing. But it’s all right if you don’t want to, if you want to remember him as he was. I didn’t with Mataji.’
Mataji. My grandmother. Her funeral was one of my earliest memories. I must have been three or four. I remember being held up by my father to sprinkle almonds and sweets into the open coffin and my mother’s tear-strewn face surveying me as I did so. The coffin must have been standing in the front room of the house in Southall. But I couldn’t exactly recall where it was. Or what the corpse looked
like. Which was perhaps why I agreed to wash my father. That plus the fact that my mother and I had been prevented from getting close to my father’s body during the arduous process of identification, the officer informing us in a monotone that the body was ‘property of the crown’ and could not be touched in case forensic evidence was ‘contaminated’.
I guess if I had imagined anything, I had probably thought of the ceremonial application of a sponge to a head of an otherwise concealed corpse. However, what followed, at six the next morning, when I was ushered with two of my mother’s male relations from Southall, Ranjit and Mr Dhanda, Ranjit’s 78-year-old busybody father, through the back door of a funeral home, was far from ceremonial: an undertaker, not yet shaven, without his tie, informing us that it would be advisable, in the interests of health and safety, to wear plastic gloves as the fluid applied to the corpse could damage our skin; the sight of my father in the morgue, lying on a stainless-steel trolley, his head lolling about at one end; and then, suddenly, the sheets being whipped away, and the undertaker, smelling of fags, asking if we wanted the post-mortem bandages removed.
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