Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  The following morning I was up at 4 a.m. to help Mum open the shop, then arranged the installation of a new CCTV system and drove back to London. There was a birthday dinner in Soho that evening for one of my closest and oldest friends, Matt Metcalfe, whom I had met at school in Wolverhampton, but who was now running a technology company in London. I was too tired to attend, and Freya went alone, apologising for my absence. I promised I would have lunch with her the next day, to bash out that list of wedding invitations, but I never made that either. That morning, when my mother didn’t pick up the phone when I rang twice, I panicked, rang the police and immediately hired a car to drive home. It turned out it had been quiet in the shop and she had been tidying the kitchen. That evening, I got an email from my agency’s managing director, asking for a ‘chat’. Which was followed five minutes later by an email from Freya asking if we could ‘chat soon’.

  The breeziness of what the word ‘chat’ implies, in my experience, invariably belies the gravity of the discussion that lies ahead. As it happens, I had had a ‘chat’ at the beginning of it all, amid the shellshock, with my employer’s head of HR, who had called, expressed sympathy and then prattled on about ‘statutory right of employees to unpaid bereavement leave in the event of a parent, spouse or dependant passing away’, how our company went further than most in offering ‘five days’ paid leave for any family bereavement’ as long as the entitlement was not used more than once a year, but how in my extenuating circumstances they were willing to be ‘flexible’. At the time, the idea of official bereavement leave as a perk struck me as odd. But I was nevertheless grateful for their ‘flexibility’, given that it basically seemed to amount to unlimited unpaid leave.

  Sitting in a room opposite my boss, who had hired me a decade earlier, with the words ‘I like Indians, they work hard’, it became clear that things had changed. He was as generous as his laconic demeanour allowed, enquiring after my mother, listening as I outlined my predicament with the shop, but then, in conclusion, he pointed out that my work performance was not up to my ‘usual high standard’, and politely suggested that I either get a grip or take some time off and come back once I had got a grip. ‘We can’t, realistically, hold your position open longer than, say, the New Year, and we wouldn’t be able to pay you while you’re off. But we would hate to lose you.’ From the reflection in his designer glasses, I could see that he was following a football match on his computer monitor. ‘Why don’t you have a chat with your fiancée and get back to me? Within the next week or so? I hope she’s being supportive?’

  Of course she was being supportive. You could say that her response to my father’s death was textbook. Literally. That morning, I was looking for a pair of trainers for a run, when I spotted, under the desk in the spare room, a book entitled How to Help Your Spouse Deal with Grief, and inside it an article from one of her favourite women’s magazines which was headlined ‘Life after Loss’. This was typical of Freya, the trained economist. If there was a problem, she threw a book at it. She’d given me endless reading material about bowel cancer when Mum got sick, and in the build-up to our engagement she had feasted on books about the Sikh faith.

  We’d be at dinner at a friend’s house, or she’d be on the phone to a friend, and I’d hear her reciting bits verbatim, informing the person on the other end of the line that Sikhism was a modern, liberal, open, democratic, monotheistic religion, established in the late fifteenth century by Guru Nanak, that one of the founding principles was opposition to Hinduism’s oppressive caste system, that Sikhs didn’t worship human beings, that the Gurus declared men and women to be equal, that Sikhs didn’t drink, that it was the only major world religion to acknowledge that other religions were a valid way of reaching God. ‘I’m not going to convert,’ I heard her say more than once. ‘But if I had to choose a religion . . .’

  What she didn’t realise was these books were useless. The theory of the religion tells you little about the etiquette of Punjabi life or the actuality of Punjabi culture, which is rarely written about, because one of the defining things about it is that it is defiantly un-self-examining. In practice, Sikh society often runs counter to the principles of the religion, being, for one thing, highly patriarchal. Some believers risk being disowned for marrying outside of the religion – we were struggling to find a temple which would allow us to have a mixed wedding. The world’s fifth-largest organised religion has a caste system of its own, certain Sikh sects believe in living human gurus, some mainstream Sikh families revere spiritual figures and ancestors, and though officially Sikhs don’t drink, and some people like my mother don’t even allow booze to be stored in their houses, the Sikhs of the Punjab have one of the highest alcohol consumption rates in the world.

  At the time I loved Freya for making an effort. It was the thought that counted. But in 2011 these morbid texts had a different effect. I bristled at the idea that there might be some kind of formula to my grief, and they amplified the self-consciousness I had been feeling about our relationship. Freya would suggest a Woody Allen film and I’d think, ‘Page 23, tip four: “Make sure you keep doing fun and pleasurable things together, such as catching a flick.”’ She’d hug me and I’d think, ‘Page 52, tip seven: “It is important not to withdraw from giving one another physical affection.”’ It was odd that none of the books gave the most basic advice: do not at any point let your spouse discover that you are reading these books.

  The ‘chat’ with Freya took place that evening, during the night in I had endlessly postponed in order to go back home. I had picked a science DVD to watch. By this point I could just about cope with TV as long as it remained factual. And the presenter of the documentary in question was standing on the top of a mountain, banging on about how the universe was a ‘billion billion billion billion billion billion’ times larger than anything we could conceive, making my problems feel a little less significant in the process of doing so, when I told her about my day.

  ‘I don’t understand. Are they offering you a sabbatical or are they suspending you?’ Freya asked.

  ‘Fine line, I guess.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘He said they will keep my job open until the New Year. Which gives me, what?’

  As the man on TV pointed out that the Sun would run out of fuel in about five billion years, Freya did the instant mental arithmetic. ‘Five months.’ Behind her brown eyes, which were partly concealed behind a straight brown fringe, I could almost see a sign flashing with the words: ‘We are meant to get married in December. How long will this take?’ But she was too sensitive to say such a thing. ‘So what’s the plan with your mum and the shop?’

  I pressed the mute button on the TV remote. ‘I need Mum to give up the shop. I’ve got to sit her down and have a chat. A proper chat. I will do it this weekend. Promise.’ I kissed her. ‘Look, I know we need to sort out the wedding, send out the invites. You’ve been incredible. Just give me a week.’

  She clasped my hands and I thought, ‘Page 87, tip four: “Express affection. Make eye contact and hold hands as your partner articulates their feelings.”’ ‘I’m not worried about the wedding, I’m worried about you.’ And then she opened her handbag and produced something which wrecked the mood entirely: a brochure for Saffron House, an old people’s home for Asian people in Birmingham.

  I was shocked. Of all the complaints my mother had made about the goras over the years – the bland food; the lack of manners; the chaotic nature of their family life; the absurd obsession with front lawns and tea; the insistence on concealing TV sets in cupboards; the divorces; the selfishness; the irreligiosity; the sexual immorality; the custom of baths, sitting in their own dirt; the refusal to wash their bottoms with water after going to the loo; and so on – the one thing that came up most often was their attitude towards their elderly relatives. ‘No respect,’ she would complain. ‘Do you hear how they speak to their parents? I wouldn’t speak to my dog like that. But the parents are as bad – what do they expect when
they charge their own children rent? When they throw them out as soon as they can?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Freya.

  ‘Just stunned, to be honest.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An old people’s home?’

  ‘It’s not an old people’s home. It’s “culturally specific care”. Sheltered housing.’

  I continued regardless. ‘My mum is a widow. She had cancer last year.’

  ‘Why don’t you actually look at the brochure before you start banging on.’

  ‘Her husband has just died,’ I banged on. ‘I’m her only son, the only family she has. I can’t put her in an old people’s home. She’s not even old, for God’s sake. And we just don’t do that.’

  It was only a two-letter word. ‘We’. But it was the worst thing I could have said to her, harsher than the four-letter word she hurled back in response.

  ‘Oh, do fuck off, Arjan.’ She had moved away from me and was sitting bolt upright, her hands on her lap. ‘Just listen for a second. I wouldn’t put my own parents in a home. But it’s an extra-care scheme – flats, where people can get care if they need it.’

  No. I couldn’t get past the phrase ‘old people’s home’. The evening was ruined. By the time she apologised for swearing I was already up and storming out in disgust. I aimed for the pub, but on the way there I rang Mum and told her not to switch the new alarm on. I would be getting the last train from London to Wolverhampton.

  5 – INDIAN OBSERVER

  IT WAS A Saturday morning in the spring of 1969, Surinder was in the lower sixth and had the weekend to complete a 2,000-word essay on Tess of the d’Urbervilles and revise for a biology exam. But wherever she sat down in the house, she found herself distracted. At the kitchen table, there was the problem of Kamaljit banging away on the saucepans. In the bedroom, she found the griping of her father next door intolerable and could hear Tanvir downstairs making mindless, cringe-inducing chit-chat with customers with a view to improving his English. And she had just settled down at the dining table in the living room, which also served as the shop’s office desk and family ironing board, when she was interrupted by the sound of her mother bellowing from the shopfront, in between serving customers.

  ‘Surinder, are you sure you don’t want to come?!’ This was how Mrs Bains communicated: shouting from wherever she was, knowing that the shop was small enough and she was loud enough to be heard by anyone in any part of the house. ‘Dhanda says he needs as many people to come along as possible! We could call Baljit Kaur over to look after your dad, and close the shop for lunch!’

  Surinder glanced up from trying to memorise a five-part diagram for cell structure. Irritation at being disturbed coalesced with annoyance at the ultimate source of the disturbance: that fatso Dhanda, and his inane obsession with turbans on Wolverhampton buses. There had been a time when it looked like the Sikh activists’ dispute with Wolverhampton Transport Department might fade away. The issue which had arguably helped trigger Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech the previous April, or at least made the response to it so explosive, had faded as Powell’s star rose. It may have inspired the biggest march since World War II in Wolverhampton before Powell spoke, but just a few weeks afterwards a second pro-turban march in London drew just 350 supporters.

  However, the topic had recently returned not only to local but to international prominence, in melodramatic fashion, when Sohan Singh Jolly, a physically unassuming resident of Southall with a penchant for snow-white turbans, who had arrived in Britain four years earlier from Kenya, where he had worked as a police inspector and lost an arm while fighting Kikuyu during the Mau Mau revolt, declared the turban ban ‘a monstrous crime’, denounced Wolverhampton Transport Committee as ‘the worst racialists in the world’, and pronounced that he would burn himself alive on 13 April, the Sikh New Year, if the ban was not overturned.

  The response, you could say, was mixed. The mayor of Wolverhampton accused the 65-year-old of blackmail, and someone high up in the new Supreme Council of Sikhs in the UK worried out loud that Jolly’s actions would lead to ‘the worsening of community harmony’, and dismissed Jolly’s campaign as excessive and hysterical. Meanwhile, Mr Billy Wilson, a 31-year-old Wolverhampton hairdresser and father of three, threatened to burn himself alive if Wolverhampton Transport Committee gave way. ‘I am very serious about this,’ he informed a reporter. ‘Somebody has to stand up against these people.’

  At the same time Jarman Singh Parmar, the editor of the Indian Observer, an obscure London-based Punjabi newspaper, was so inspired that he vowed to burn himself alive fifteen days after Mr Jolly died, unless the ban was lifted, and suggested other men would follow the example at fifteen-day intervals until the ‘racialist policy’ was reversed. And it goes without saying that Dhanda also embraced the cause as if it were the last samosa in the kitchen, insinuating in vague terms that he would join in the chain of suicides, and also organising a pro-Jolly rally at the town hall which Surinder’s mother had declared the family would, at Mr Dhanda’s request, join.

  The whole thing was ridiculous. Though when it came to religion and politics, Surinder had long learnt that it was best to keep your mouth shut.

  ‘No!’ she shouted from her desk. ‘I told you! I’ve got to study for my biology exam!’

  ‘Kee?’

  ‘I’VE GOT MY BIOLOGY EXAM NEXT WEEK!’

  ‘Leh,’ Mrs Bains continued, now addressing Kamaljit and Tanvir, who were restocking shelves in the front of the shop. ‘Did you hear that? Maharani Surinder is too busy to come along with us.’

  Surinder imagined Kamaljit and Tanvir giggling along at the remark, and felt a fresh twinge of irritation. Her sister, embittered about the extension of Surinder’s education, or at least about still having to shoulder the lion’s share of housework, had recruited Tanvir in her campaign to paint her as spoilt and aloof. And while she could forgive Kamaljit and her mother for responding to Dhanda’s invitation, given their functional illiteracy and essentially unexamined approach to life, she couldn’t be so understanding of Tanvir. He had, after all, started wearing a turban only after she had botched his haircut. He continued to wear a turban, she suspected, only because he was balding. And he was now reading two newspapers a day, taking notes and learning new words as he did so.

  But what was the point of Tanvir reading, of understanding English, if he was not going to digest the meaning of anything? He, of all people, must have been aware how the turban dispute was poisoning race relations in their town, how associating themselves with such a campaign at a time when Indians were being beaten up by thugs shouting ‘We want Enoch!’ was suicidal. People like Jolly and Dhanda were painting Sikhs just as their enemies wanted to portray them – namely, as medieval peasants. They were illustrating Powell’s specific complaint in that speech that the Sikhs, in ‘claiming special communal privileges’, were producing a ‘dangerous fragmentation within society’. At a time when the enemies of immigration were talking about repatriation, supporting Jolly was insanity, the political equivalent of buying the community a one-way ticket back to India. Even Dhanda’s once-beloved Indian Workers’ Association thought Jolly’s threat was too much to support.

  It took more self-control than Surinder was capable of to conceal her annoyance when, a few minutes later, Tanvir crept into the living room and, making the march sound like an outing to the park or to the cinema, asked if she would mind manning the shop if he joined her mother and her sister on the rally. ‘So this stupid protest is important enough to close the shop, but my work is not?’ Tanvir looked abashed. ‘I haven’t even got started on my revision.’

  Her mother, proving as capable at hearing as broadcasting, interrupted from two rooms away.

  ‘Surinder!’ she snapped. ‘Your paji will be coming with us!’ The ‘ji’ was her way of letting her daughter know that she had registered her disrespectful tone to Tanvir. ‘If you can’t be bothered to join us because of your test, then at the very least look af
ter the shop! Just move your books to the counter! Make sure you pop in to look at your father! Make sure you do the dishes! They have been sitting there since this morning! And the kitchen floor needs mopping! Do you hear me?’

  ‘Hahnji,’ responded Surinder in return, biting her tongue, bristling at the mocking tone at which her mother had referred to her ‘test’. She had been allowed to stay on at school but she felt no concessions had been made when it came to chores or housework. ‘I’ll get it done.’ She slumped at the table in defeat.

  As the protestors departed, a heavy silence descended upon the shop, a silence which, for Surinder, merely served as a reminder of the racket she normally had to study through. She moved her books and notes to the front of the shop and, settling on the chair behind the counter, spent some time flicking alternately through her Thomas Hardy novel and studying a diagram of the human liver. But eventually, unable to focus, she did what no teenager can resist doing when left home alone: she had a nose around.

  She went up to her bedroom and lay on her elder sister’s bed, concluding with some self-satisfaction that, yes, her side of the room was warmer. She peered into Tanvir’s bedroom: the mountains of excess stock had been pushed to the far end of the room, blocking out the daylight, but the near side was pleasant, with a mattress on the floor, a bedside cabinet improvised from used newspapers, and a neat pile of letters and books. And she was in the kitchen trying but failing to find something resembling pop music on the radio that was normally out of bounds, when she heard the shop bell tinkle.