Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Neither Kamaljit nor Mrs Flanagan could quite believe what they were hearing, and both wondered if Mrs Bains had followed what had been said and if she knew what she was doing. The fact was that she hadn’t entirely got the gist, gathering only that Surinder was being complimented, and feeling vaguely flattered that she was. But what Mrs Bains did see in Mrs Flanagan’s argument was a neat way out of her husband’s plan to marry off her two daughters at the same time. A plan which had been troubling her since its inception.

  She understood and sympathised with her husband’s thinking, of course. She, like all Punjabi mothers, had taught her daughters from the youngest age that parting was inevitable, regarded marrying them off as a near-religious duty. But even more intense than this feeling was her memory of the poverty she had endured, first as a young widow, when neither her husband’s parents nor her own had wanted her, and then when Mr Bains had parted for Britain and left her in Delhi with his insufferable extended family. For thirteen long years, when she drank water instead of milk, used mustard oil instead of ghee, she had looked forward to the day when she would be mistress of her own courtyard, and now that she had the shop, and it was trading well, she had no intention of giving it up.

  And this was the essential problem with the idea of marrying both girls off at once. It would devastate the shop. Tanvir’s English was improving, but Surinder still did most of the paperwork and translation, while Kamaljit more or less ran the household. With both girls suddenly gone, they would have to take on new staff, or even close, and as tired as she felt sometimes, she wasn’t ready to retire. It was all right for her husband, it was not like he had long to live but she was not checking out anytime soon and had no intention of returning to the days when she had to wash dishes in an outside gully, when the few animals she owned went hungry and kept the household awake with their groaning. Doubtless her husband would be annoyed that she had overruled him. But given everything she had done for him, holding on to her daughters for a year or two longer was not much to ask for. Besides, what could he, ultimately, do about it? The days when he could make his point with the back of his hands were long gone.

  ‘That is excellent news, Mrs Bains,’ said Mrs Flanagan, coming over to her visitors and shaking them vigorously by their hands. ‘EXCELLENT. News.’

  Conscious of the uneasiness many immigrants felt at the moral values of white people, and sensing wariness in their uncertain handshake, she found herself adding, ‘Now then, you need not worry about Surinder here, Mrs Bains. There are no boys at this school.’ For some reason she mimed an action representing ‘boy’, which involved flexing her biceps. ‘I will keep my eye on her.’ At that moment Mrs Flanagan could have performed celebratory bhangra around her office. And Kamaljit would have looked no more astonished had she done so.

  4 – PSYCHOLOGIES

  I CAN’T SAY my parents and Freya’s parents ever had much in common. Except maybe the fact that my father and her mother, a retired civil servant, were both, inexplicably, fans of Midsomer Murders. And then, of course, the fact that my mother and her father both struggled to conceal their disapproval at our match.

  In Freya’s father’s case this disapproval mainly took the form of mispronunciations of my name (‘So, Tarzan . . .’), and endless fussing about my dietary requirements. ‘You allowed to eat this?’ he once asked while handing over some asparagus during dinner at their Sussex home, making me explain yet again that I ate pretty much everything, except beef, and that for cultural rather than religious reasons.

  Bill Tunstall was prejudiced, and out of touch, but I put up with it, in part because my Indian upbringing had, ironically, made me instinctively respectful of the elderly, and he was nearly seventy. But mainly because Freya had, in turn, quite a lot to put up with from my mother. Though Mum’s disapproval was rarely so direct. Take, for instance, the only visit my parents had paid us in London, on a Sunday a year before my father died. Mum went into the bathroom as soon as she arrived and didn’t come out for half an hour. It turned out she was cleaning. When she finally reappeared, she went straight into the kitchen and started washing and mopping up. The criticism was implicit: your white girlfriend is filthy and does not know how to look after you.

  There followed an excruciating meal in an Indian restaurant in East London where my father nearly passed out at the sight of the prices, even though he wasn’t paying, and my mother almost passed out at the idea that the chefs handling her food might also be handling meat, and refused to eat anything but a naan bread with yoghurt. And then a strained visit to Madame Tussauds, where Mum failed to recognise any of the waxworks except for Tony Blair and Indira Gandhi and took umbrage at Freya’s suggestion that she have a photo taken with the latter. ‘Does your girlfriend know what that woman did to us? How she wanted to exterminate the Sikhs?’ She probably didn’t. But then what did my mother know of World War I, World War II, the ongoing situation in Iraq, or any other geopolitical dispute that didn’t involve Punjabis? She lived in a bubble.

  Talking of which, in Wolverhampton, Mum’s passive-aggressive disapproval of Freya mainly took the form of regaling me endlessly with stories which reflected the most excessive aspects of the lives of white customers. She did this with Asians too – sometimes it seemed she continued shopkeeping only for the gossip-mongering auntie conferences which convened several times a week. But there was a definite uptick in the intensity of the former sort of stories after my engagement. And when, the morning after my father’s funeral, I went downstairs in my dressing gown, found she had opened the shop and was serving Amy Wilson, then returned, dressed, and asked, ‘Mum, when did you decide to reopen the shop?’, she ignored the question entirely and instead continued updating me on Amy Wilson, whose life she followed like other people followed EastEnders.

  ‘You know she has five children? And they say it is we Asians who have big families. By three men as well. Her latest bloke is a tattoo artist, apparently. Practises on the kids. No shortage of space there of course.’

  I stood, swaying on the spot, wielding two cups of tea, stunned momentarily by my mother’s ability to absorb such gossip and information, despite her refusal to speak English (a quality that caused me endless confusion and distress as an adolescent), and Amy Wilson’s desire to share such information despite the lack of meaningful feedback. Then again, maybe this was the appeal.

  ‘Mum, I didn’t know you were going to reopen the shop.’

  ‘She calls him her boyfriend. A boyfriend at her age,’ she continued. ‘Can you believe it? But then again, she is old enough to be his mother.’ A pause. ‘What did you say?’ There was a short hiatus as I noticed that a picture of my father had been put up behind the counter. I repeated myself. Her eventual response: ‘You never asked.’

  This, admittedly, was true. I hadn’t got my head around ‘What happened?’ yet, let alone ‘What next?’

  ‘And this is what you want to do? To run the shop?’

  ‘Why not?’

  A million reasons flashed through my mind: trade was anaemic; she was in remission but not exactly in peak health; running a shop on Victoria Road was not the safest thing for a widow of sixty-one to be doing alone; I didn’t want to give up my life in London to help my mother run a shop in Wolverhampton. But all I managed was: ‘Mum, you’re not well enough.’

  ‘Leh. I’m doing all right this morning, aren’t I? If I need help, there’s Ranjit.’

  I tensed up. Ranjit. Who with his arranged marriage to a girl from India and two kids and decision to stay in Wolverhampton to run the family business was another weapon my mother used to provoke guilt.

  ‘Ranjit has his own shop to run. I know he’s being helpful at the moment, but he can’t be here all the time. And even he had trouble last year. Remember?’

  The attack was currently one of Ranjit’s favourite stories, and I had heard several versions of it over the preceding fortnight. He had apparently refused to serve an underage Polish/Romanian/West Indian boy some booze, and the sa
id boy returned with five illegal immigrants/gangsters with metal bars/machetes, who left him with a cut on his neck which needed seven/twelve/eighteen stitches, the account of what happened varying according to how much weed he had had, and which Steven Seagal movie he had watched the night before.

  My mother added, ‘You mustn’t worry. What will be will be.’

  The antagonism deepened. There comes a point in an argument with any Indian parent when they try to kill the conversation with: ‘Don’t worry, what will be, will be’ or the karmic variant, ‘Chaloo koi gaal nahi’. Sometimes, I envied my mother for this approach to life: it helped her cope with her illness and Dad’s death. But sometimes, like now, it enraged me. I was torn between emitting a despairing ‘Naaaaaaheee!’ in the style of a Bollywood hero, and explaining calmly that we have choices, free will. But in the end, in spite of myself, I blurted, ‘Mum, it’s not safe.’

  ‘I can look after myself. And you mustn’t worry about what the police said.’

  I wasn’t worried! No one had been more sceptical than me when the police briefly classed Dad’s death as unexplained, and I was not at all surprised when the post-mortem provided a straight answer. But even though I was now thirty-five, Mum still felt the need to coddle and reassure me as if I were a child. I found myself adding, in an adolescent whine, ‘Mum, I can’t leave my job to help you run the shop.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to give up your job,’ she snapped back. ‘Have I asked you to? Tell me, what would I do if I didn’t work in the shop? Why don’t you go back to London . . .’ She didn’t say it, would never have done, but in my head, I finished the sentence for her. ‘. . . to your white girlfriend.’

  I recoiled. The tension between us, her bitterness that I had left Wolverhampton and got engaged to a girl who wasn’t Sikh, my father’s annoyance that I hadn’t become a doctor or a lawyer, and in turn, my annoyance at being compared unfavourably to Ranjit, at how my parents valued making money over professional or educational development, convenience over romantic fulfilment, their refusal to be impressed by Freya’s charm, all the tensions we had put aside since Dad’s death, and, for that matter, since her diagnosis, threatened, momentarily, to reappear. I did the sensible thing, and retreated.

  The morning after that argument with Mum, I was up at four to open the shop, spent six hours standing at the counter as she rested and caught up with housework, and visited the cash and carry to restock. I did a version of the same over two days at the weekend. But on Sunday evening I had no choice but to go back, to return to East London and the life I’d abandoned weeks earlier.

  Freya was delighted to have me back, had laid on dinner and, judging from the prominence of the pile of ‘save the date’ cards on the living-room table, which we had been intending to fill out when the news about my father came through, was hoping to carry on where we had left off. But the conversation was stilted, I had little appetite, got up to call Mum during the meal, felt too tired for wedding admin and couldn’t face TV. I thought an early night might help with re-acclimatising, but then I couldn’t sleep. And at 3 a.m. I was padding around the flat I co-owned, trying to relearn the basics of my former life like a stroke victim learning to talk again.

  The framed Bollywood poster in the hallway, a souvenir from Goa, though I disliked Goa and have never liked Bollywood. The square blackboard we had painted in the kitchen, bickering as we did so – Freya anal about getting the lines perfect; me, less so. It was covered in slightly self-conscious messages and a picture of a dog she wanted but we had no space for. Meanwhile, in the living room, above the reclaimed period fireplace, a bright abstract picture. A bright abstract picture painted by me and which had, in effect, brought Freya and I together.

  She was working for a private equity firm at the time, had specialised in finding promising new technology companies to invest in, but as part of her accelerated promotion she had been tasked with revamping the company logo and marketing material, a task which she made clear from the moment she walked into my agency’s offices she considered an exercise in banality. It was far from a case of love at first sight. Not least because we were both dating other people: her, an earnest Canadian academic; me, a cheerful Asian corporate lawyer, who was just my type – pretty, out of my league. I remember complaining to her about Freya. Specifically, the way Freya made out that she didn’t care about the project, was happy for me to take the lead, but then, when presented with the designs, had a thousand and one comments to make about everything from the font to the way white space was used.

  However, after the assignment, she turned up, with her boyfriend, at an exhibition I was having for a bunch of pictures I had painted during a trip to India. I couldn’t recall telling her about it, though she claims that I did. I remember feeling embarrassed that she was there: the set-up, a disused shop with barely whitewashed walls, was unprofessional, to say the least. The pictures weren’t even framed. I also remember she looked very different that night, in a Whistles dress and ankle boots, instead of the suit I had got used to seeing her in. She apologised for being difficult at work. She had a nightmare boss, was just passing on the grief. Then she told me I was talented, that I should give up graphic design for painting, and she bought this picture entitled, if memory serves, something painfully pretentious like Jodhpur Luminescence #9.

  The story goes that the Canadian academic never liked it. He said it was like ‘something you might see in a mid-priced Indian restaurant’. But she got the Nietzschean subtext, said it reminded her of Rothko and of the heat and colour of India, and in return, I sent her web links to my work in case she had friends who might like my stuff too. There followed an intense email and text exchange. Though it wasn’t the intimacy which was intense – most of the time the content was banal – links to new music, pictures, and so on. It was just the sheer amount of it. Twenty to thirty messages a day. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it, even when I found myself going online and checking out her boyfriend’s books, ‘liking’ all the one-star reviews he had received, and deleting our message exchange on my phone in case my girlfriend discovered it.

  But then we met, purportedly for coffee. The afternoon began in the tone of our messages: we agreed that Barry Lyndon was Stanley Kubrick’s finest moment; argued about the merits of Phil Collins’ back catalogue. As we moved on to food, deciding on an early supper, I discovered she had a grandparent who was Jewish, and we bonded over the parallels with Punjabi culture, listing all the similarities together: the workaholism, the large overbearing families, the value placed on education, the tendency for migration, the emphasis on integration, the pressure to get married within the community, the massive inter-community variance in religious interpretation, the guilt, the emotional blackmail, the belief in property as an investment, the emotional hysteria, the inability to be laid-back, the noisiness, the studiousness, the self-sufficiency, the obsession with the healing properties of chicken soup/lentil dal, the propensity for beards, the incompetence in the field of sport, the talkativeness, the degrees in law, accountancy, medicine and finance, and the mothers who with their meddling, intrusiveness, inability to recognise boundaries, nagging, protection, nourishment and self-sacrifice kept everything going.

  I’m not sure if it was the thought of my mother or our second bottle of wine that made things turn maudlin, but soon Freya was confessing to regretting giving up a promising career in academia for cash, and I was admitting to occasionally regretting giving up medicine for art, and giving up art for graphic design. Inevitably, I found myself saying my girlfriend didn’t really approve of my career choice, painting her in a worse light than she deserved, confessing in the process that I was stuck in a sequence of three-month-long relationships, which seemed to be the amount of time it took to get excited by someone and bored by them again. It had the response I must have hoped for: Freya said my girlfriend didn’t deserve me, that my problem was that I hadn’t met the right person yet. And when she complained about her boyfriend’s narciss
ism, that she thought her relationship was on the rocks, I inevitably returned the compliment, saying that he was lucky to have her.

  There was an uncomfortable moment when we finally kissed, when something like dread passed across her face and she said, ‘You don’t kiss like my boyfriend.’ But actually that was the beginning and the end of awkwardness. Lying on a hotel bed that night, our limbs entwined, I imagined our whole relationship unfolding in the form of a storyboard. And that was pretty much how things unfurled. The shared flat in Dalston. Saturday mornings at a farmer’s market, Freya in an oversized cashmere jumper and leggings, me in jeans and jacket and a scarf tied in one of those neat knots. Lunch with friends in artfully dishevelled pubs. Yoga holidays to India. We had got everything we wanted, except perhaps the dog in Freya’s case, and, for now, the beautiful interracial children I’d imagined, with self-conscious ethnic names like India and Kashmir (‘And maybe, if we have a third child we could call it Bangladesh,’ Freya had added archly, when I confessed to the fantasy).

  They say people don’t fall in love with people, they fall in love with a quality they want to possess. I hope this isn’t true because I think the thing I loved most about Freya was the intensity with which she adored me. I could do no wrong, in her eyes. And the picture above our fireplace epitomised this adoration. When I’d painted it, I’d imagined I was scorching the canvas with a radical evocation of the deserts of Rajasthan. But the ex-boyfriend had a point – it was derivative. Where Mark Rothko feathered his brushstrokes across the picture field, blending tones with a whispery subtlety, my marks were crude. But it was touching that Freya loved it so much, that she believed so much in an artistic ambition I had abandoned. I went back to bed, and, my cold hands against Freya’s warm skin, we made love.

  However, the unsettled feeling was back the next day at work. Everyone was sweet. There were cards and hugs from my sensitive colleagues. But I found concentrating difficult for more than a minute or two. It took physical effort to stop myself from saying ‘Shut up’ when clients called and said things like, ‘I will know what I want when I see it’ and ‘Could you jazz it up a little?’ Meanwhile, I fretted endlessly about my mother, working alone in the shop. I must have called home three times by lunchtime. Mum insisted she was fine, but that evening I did something no one had ever done in the history of my agency and left work at 5 p.m., cancelling my evening with Freya.