Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘Your mother tells me. You want. Be nurse.’ He spoke good English but pronounced ‘nurse’ in an Indian accent, perhaps to emphasise the ridiculousness of the idea. And then laughed raspily. After a long pause: ‘What kind of job is that?’

  Surinder could have pointed out that it was the kind of job that kept him alive. That he would be nowhere if it wasn’t for the army of people who nursed him. She could have also pointed out that he was once a believer in his children’s education, agreeing with his wife that they attend school in Delhi (when most girls didn’t), or at least not caring enough to object. But all that seemed to have gone with his health. Suddenly there appeared to be limits to what women could learn, and she maintained the obligatory respectful silence as Mr Bains, his bloodshot eyes dry and itchy, his forehead glistening with sweat that ran down his face despite the unseasonable chill in the air, emitted a series of short statements which, when added up, amounted to: ‘How on earth can you be thinking about working in a British hospital with white people when things are so bad out there?’

  Once more, there was a gap between Surinder’s dutiful silence and what she actually thought. She suspected she knew rather more about what was going on ‘out there’ than her bedridden father. No doubt Dhanda had told him about the speech that local Tory MP Enoch Powell had made, attacking the government’s immigration policy, saying it was like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre, calling for repatriation and warning that as he looked to the future he was filled with a sense of foreboding and ‘like the Roman’ could ‘see the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

  No doubt he had heard on his radio that Conservative leader Edward Heath had sacked Powell as shadow defence spokesman and that subsequently thousands of dockers, factory workers, brewery workers and meat porters across the country had walked out in protest at what they termed Powell’s victimisation, carrying placards demanding ‘Back Britain, not Black Britain’; that Powell had got tens of thousands of letters of support. And Mrs Bains had doubtless informed him that several windows and door panels of a nearby Sikh temple had been broken, that Indian workers leaving a foundry had been stoned by white youths, that Indians were having their cars wrecked and daubed with graffiti declaring ‘Enoch’.

  But he didn’t know from his bed what it was like to be spat upon by children in the street. To hear her schoolmates talk unembarrassedly about how coloured people were pigs, that they wanted burning. To endure, as she had that day, a white teacher at her school refer to a West Indian girl as a little monkey.

  Mr Bains grabbed her arm so hard that she could feel it bruise. ‘No college, no nursing,’ he spat. ‘OK?’ He relaxed his grip and continued. ‘We are looking for boys for you and Kamaljit. Dhanda has ideas. One family with two brothers. Shop family. Nice to be married into the same family as your sister?’ She thought it sounded sick. ‘You will have good life, my dear. Good life. We will get you settled.’ Surinder waited for the inevitable sign-off – ‘Baapu di izzhat samalni, beti da sabh to badda dharam ne’, one of her father’s favourite sayings, which translated as ‘A daughter’s main religion should be to uphold her father’s and family’s honour.’ But, instead, he made an attempt at empathy: ‘I too did not want to get married. Waited too long. You know how old I was?’

  She knew all too well; he was forty-three, her mother was twenty-six. It was 1950. Her mother had been widowed young, after just a few years of marriage, and was facing a life of poverty and childlessness. He had fled the West Punjab for India during Partition, his family had remained and been wiped out, and also facing a life of loneliness, poverty and childlessness, he worked where he could, living with an extended family who treated him like a servant. And so on.

  ‘Marrying your mother, best thing I did,’ he remarked. ‘You will feel the same.’

  Surinder wept, but lowered her head while doing so, making it look like she was meekly presenting herself for parental blessing. Mr Bains obliged, patting her with his palm and declaring, ‘Shabbassh.’

  Surinder recovered enough to suggest some exercise. It was the doctor’s recommendation that Mr Bains have his limbs moved as much as possible, to stretch the muscles and maintain joint function. She must have done it hundreds of times, but this evening, as she lifted his arms and then his legs up and down, she omitted to put a hand against his joints for support, and pushed so hard at one stage that Mr Bains yelped out in pain.

  The conventional modes of protest were not open to Surinder when it came to expressing upset. Argument and sulking were not tolerated in the Bains household. But she nevertheless made her feelings felt. If her parents wanted her to be a good little village girl, then that, she decided, was exactly what she would be. She started addressing Tanvir as ‘paji’ at every opportunity, to his not inconsiderable distress, and called Kamaljit ‘pehnji’ whenever their mother was in earshot, to her not inconsiderable confusion. She refused the weekly treat of fish and chips for the vegetable sabzi she insisted on making even though it was not her turn to do so, and declined invitations to the cinema. In short, the most frivolous person in the household suddenly became the most sombre. Her misery spread through the house like damp. And then, one evening, Surinder came home from school bearing a green envelope.

  Mrs Bains recognised it as one of several discipline strategies employed at North Park High. Minor offences resulted in detention or lines. More serious offences got instant punishment in the form of slaps or swishes of a ruler against hands and legs. But in cases of severe transgression, girls got the ‘green ’un’ – a note to take home to their parents for signature, the idea being that punishment at home would be more severe than anything that the school could dream up. Mrs Bains had previously been sent one when Tanvir had fallen sick and she had been forced to keep Surinder at home for a week to work in the shop. Her daughter handed it over as she walked into the back of the shop, with the kind of nonchalance she would reserve for passing on a leaflet or bill. Her mother handed it straight back for translation. She could get by with English customers with a vocabulary of ‘morning’, ‘hello’, ‘evening’ and ‘shilling’, and an ability to tell the difference between the Express and The Times, but struggled at anything more expansive.

  Surinder read it to herself, although she was already aware of its contents.

  Dear Mr Bains,

  I am writing in relation to an important matter concerning your daughter Surinder. I was hoping you could pop in for a brief conversation with me at school one day soon. Please contact my secretary Susan on the number below to make an appointment at your convenience.

  Yours sincerely, Mrs Flanagan.

  Surinder telescoped the note in translation to: ‘My headteacher wants to talk to you about something.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged.

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Have you been going to school?’

  Surinder gestured at her uniform and began biting her thumbnail. ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me.’ Mrs Bains pushed her daughter’s hand from her mouth. ‘Have you been doing your work?’

  ‘What’s the point if I’m leaving?’ Surinder responded bitterly.

  If Mrs Bains had spoken to her own mother like that at fifteen, she would have been dragged by her hair out of the house. It took considerable self-control to resist hitting the girl. But she realised Surinder had her in a bind. ‘I didn’t mean you should give up entirely.’ Mrs Bains sighed. ‘We will have to go to see this dadni teacher of yours. I thought, as you girls got older, you would help me, provide me with support, but you just seem determined to make life even more difficult.’

  With Surinder sitting an O-level exam, translating duties that Friday afternoon fell to Kamaljit. And while time spent alone with her mother was normally something Kamaljit treasured, the prospect of accompanying her to North Park High filled her with dread. Her little
sister was a mystery in many ways. She didn’t understand how she could be taller and yet younger, fairer and yet have spent her entire childhood playing out in the sun. But the thing she found most bewildering, even more than her obsession with magazines and her ability to identify any brand of clothing at a glance, was Surinder’s fondness for school.

  The sisters had never attended the same educational establishment in England, owing to the local council’s policy of randomly transporting immigrant children from school to school to achieve an arbitrary balancing figure of ‘the black problem’. But for her, school had been a daily torment of being teased about the smelliness of Indian food, sarcastic teachers asking, ‘Don’t you understand English? Or are you just stupid’?, dismal academic failure and being addressed as ‘Camel-shit’.

  Not that her attendance had really been daily. She had been fourteen when they moved to England, sixteen when she left school, and had found the whole thing so bewildering that she had skived whenever possible. She had left school with no friends – the white pupils in her class would look away if they saw her on the street – no qualifications, able to vaguely follow basic English, but unable to speak it very well. Which rather added to the stress of translating this afternoon.

  They arrived to find the school full of students, but eerily silent, everyone huddled away in classrooms or exam halls. The central building smelt strongly of coffee and freshly mown grass, aromas Kamaljit would always, along with fags, associate with white people, and on arriving she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was the one about to be castigated. There was no solace to be found in glancing at her mother. In the shop, Mrs Bains was a tower of strength. But out of context, in her purple salwar kameez, surreptitiously snuffling boiled sweets from one of the shop’s paper bags, the paper bag stowed away in undergarments, she looked vulnerable and incongruous, decked out like a Christmas tree in the middle of June.

  Eventually Mrs Flanagan, the headmistress, appeared, the authority of her smart suit undermined by her girlish blonde curls and high-pitched squeaky voice. She greeted Mrs Bains with a smile and a welcoming handshake. ‘Ah, thank you for coming, I was expecting Mr Bains, but this, in some ways, is better.’ Mrs Bains smiled back, blankly. ‘I find that things are easier, not only when you cut out the middle man, but men in general.’ She laughed at her own joke and noticed Kamaljit. ‘Were you one of ours? No? Course not. Never forget a face. Follow me, please!’

  They plunged down a sequence of corridors at a pace that betrayed the fact that Mrs Flanagan still taught Games three times a week, ending up in a study which felt larger than the entirety of Bains Stores. It was furnished with a green leather sofa the size of a double bed, and three leather armchairs, each the size of a settee. Despite this, it still somehow felt empty, and Mrs Flanagan’s squeal echoed around the chamber as she noticed Mrs Bains glancing at a children’s magazine on her enormous oak desk.

  ‘Good edition, that!’ She picked it up and held it out for her visitors’ benefit. The cover featured a picture of a Viking warrior under the headline ‘Who are the British?’ ‘Makes the point that immigrants have been entering the country for hundreds of years. Did you know there are nearly two million people living in Britain who were born outside the country?’

  Kamaljit froze in her seat. Suddenly, she was fifteen again and being shouted at in a classroom. She could tell from the inflexion in the headteacher’s voice that she was asking a question, and gambled on a response. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Quite!’ squeaked Mrs Flanagan, pacing around and sitting on the edge of her desk. ‘Exactly!’ Kamaljit breathed out in relief: it was the right answer. ‘A sister of Surinder’s was always going to know that! But did you also know that in the mid nineteenth century Wolverhampton had 6,000 Irish people in a population of nearly 50,000? That’s over 10 per cent! They worked in the factories and coalfields and lived in a slum known as Caribee Island! Seems funny now, doesn’t it?’

  Kamaljit stared absently at a pen on the desk and then risked another gamble, less tentatively this time. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes!’ Mrs Flanagan scratched the back of her hand. ‘My point simply being that in the nineteenth century Wolverhampton saw much immigration following the Irish Potato Famine. And that I was once an immigrant too – at least my grandfather was among them. There have always been foreigners in this town. The problem with Enoch Powell, of course, is that, unlike us, he has no historical awareness. No historical awareness! Eh?’

  A long pause ensued. Mrs Bains nudged her daughter to say something. Blushing, avoiding eye contact, she coughed. ‘Sorry, miss,’ she whispered eventually, uttering one of the phrases she recalled from school. Even these words felt unnatural to utter. ‘My mother. No English.’

  Mrs Flanagan, who by this stage had marched across the room and was standing at the grand marble mantelpiece which dominated one side of the room, turned on her heels. ‘Oh!’ she yelped, lamenting inwardly that she was succumbing to the vice that seemed to claim all headteachers eventually: pomposity. She walked back to the leather chair behind her desk, sat down and began addressing Mrs Bains in a loud but slow squeal, as if her visitor were deaf and stupid. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to discuss your daughter Surinder. SURINDER. Talk about her plans. The question of her future. FUTURE.’

  She waited for Kamaljit to translate. ‘I think she wants to talk to us about Surinder.’

  ‘I consider your daughter a highly accomplished student. SHE IS VERY GOOD.’

  Translation: ‘She’s good at school.’

  ‘She has GREAT POT-ENTIAL.’

  Translation: ‘She’s particularly good at cookery.’

  ‘She is the most diligent girl I have known – here 8 a.m. every day.’

  Translation: ‘She is also good at maths.’

  ‘She is probably the brightest girl I have come across in twenty years of teaching. You get girls who are good at languages or cookery or maths or English, but very rarely do you get a girl who is accomplished across the board. I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets top grades in nine or ten of her O levels. Nice girl too, gets on with everyone, knows her mind, doesn’t assume politics is the domain of the adult and the male. And her English, well, it shames her classmates, in truth.’

  Translation: ‘She will do well in her exams.’

  ‘Given this, it would be a great shame if she didn’t stay on for A levels.’

  And so on. This exchange went on for some time. The more Mrs Flanagan raved about Surinder, the shorter were her sister’s translations. It was, the teacher thought, the conversational equivalent of mining for gold – excavating tonnes of earth for very little in return. Exhausting. And typical of so many of her encounters with immigrant families.

  Though Mrs Flanagan would have conceded she was having a rather good war in this respect. At the age of forty-eight, having never worked outside Wolverhampton, or lived outside it, she had found herself at the centre of things, teaching in a town that was enjoying five minutes of fame as Britain’s equivalent of Harlem. Pinpointed as the county borough with the highest proportion of coloured immigrants in the country, barely a week passed without education in Wolverhampton making the national papers, whether it was Powell claiming that there was a class in Wolverhampton in which there was only one white child, or white parents claiming that their children, besieged, were ‘becoming fluent in Punjabi’. Running a school where one in three pupils were black, she had become sought after for her expertise. There had been an op-ed piece in the Times Educational Supplement, appearances on the TV news.

  But there were also downsides to the whole thing: emotional outbursts from the National Front and the Indian Workers’ Association, both as unreasonable as each other. Children arriving at the age of eleven, or even fifteen, who couldn’t speak English and didn’t even seem to want to – children not unlike the girl before her. And parents like this Mrs Bains, who did not value education and whose plans for their daughters extended only to trotting them off to India or Pakistan at the age
of seventeen to sell to the highest bidder.

  Nevertheless, she believed in being proactive, making a difference one child at a time, and when Surinder had alluded to her parents’ medieval intentions, Mrs Flanagan knew she had to try to do what she could. Just the other day she had read in the Guardian about a Sikh Punjabi family who had imprisoned their eldest daughter, chained her to a bed for four days because she refused to marry the man of their choice.

  But ten minutes into it, it was obvious from the faraway look in the mother’s eyes, from the terseness and physical rigidity of the elder sister, that she was getting nowhere. The meeting was going the way of her attempt to incorporate Indian food in the home economics syllabus, which had almost resulted in a riot; or the even more misjudged interview she had given to the local paper when she had inadvertently implied that her experience teaching retarded children was relevant when it came to teaching English to Punjabi students.

  But as she half-heartedly handed Mrs Bains a leaflet entitled ‘Careers in Nursing and Other Hospital Professions’, which featured a sketch of a busy hospital ward on the cover, and outlined the educational options for girls like Surinder who wanted to nurse, she heard Mrs Bains emit a sound which sounded suspiciously like the word ‘yes’.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Jes. Surinder . . . stay.’

  She sat forward. ‘Mrs Bains. Are you saying that you are fine with Surinder staying on at school for her A levels?’

  Kamaljit intervened, alarmed. ‘Mum, I don’t think she wants an answer now, she just wants you to think about it.’

  Mrs Bains repeated herself, addressing Mrs Flanagan directly. ‘Jes, Surinder stay. Good girls, good girls.’ She patted Kamaljit on the lap to emphasise the point. ‘She good cooking.’ She mimed Surinder reading a book. ‘Surinder always read. Always newspapers. This girl, always cook. My girls, good girls.’