Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  I hadn’t quite pulled off the racial epithet. My tone was timid compared to Ranjit’s. I screwed up the pronunciation. Still, it was a racist remark. The first racist remark I ever recall making. Which had, perhaps even more than the street fight, left me feeling shaken. After all, my whole adult life had been built upon the belief that races could get along. I was engaged to a white woman. My experience of ‘racism’ in the workplace amounted to little more than being mistaken for the IT person. When I thought of the West Midlands, I thought of pop bands like UB40, the army of turbanned supporters of Wolverhampton Wanderers.

  Of course, in recent weeks I had found myself having rather basic conversations with school kids explaining why the BNP was wrong and how as a Sikh I was not expected to marry my cousin or join al-Qaeda. And I’d seen a kid running into the shop just to shout ‘Paki’ at my mum before running out again, a depressing urban version of Knock Down Ginger. But the former was just a consequence of bad education, a question of class rather than race; the latter was unusual. Yet that evening I’d said the words ‘bhenchod gora’ out loud, meant them in the moment. What the hell had happened?

  The only comfort, I suppose, was that I now had a real scare story for my mother, something she would have to acknowledge. Guarding the shop with a mop handle wasn’t a realistic way forward for the business. I would have it out with her the following morning. The battle was over. She would have to give up the shop. I could get on with my life.

  However, the next day, after I’d woken late, gone for a run to get my head straight, washed and dressed and had lunch, it became apparent that this might not be the case. It turned out that while I was out that morning, planning my speech, a reporter from the local rag had turned up in the shop. The same reporter who had appeared in the aftermath of my father’s death – not old enough seemingly even to have developed facial hair, wielding his notebook, mispronouncing our names, asking a load of questions and extrapolating massively from Mum’s monosyllabic answers delivered in broken English.

  If you’ve ever had to deal with the press, you won’t be surprised to learn that the resulting report of my father’s death was full of mistakes. The ages were off. My cited profession was incorrect. The headline was, at best, reductive and sensationalist, the claim of ‘exclusivity’ ridiculous. But the report that appeared in the middle of the paper’s riots coverage that afternoon, amid the news about how an electrical repair shop had been destroyed, how the entire frontage of a shoe shop had crashed to the pavement in the city centre during the disturbances, was even more annoying.

  Tragic Death Shop Defies Rioters

  The widow of a tragic shopkeeper who recently died of a heart attack in his Wolverhampton store has vowed that rioters will not stop her trading.

  Speaking exclusively to this newspaper, Mr Singh’s widow, Kamaljit Banga, 61, revealed that the shop had been inundated with offers of support after last night’s disturbances.

  ‘People have been very kind,’ she said. ‘The owner of the shop down the road helped keep guard last night. The community has really come together.’

  Just hours after rioters left cars and buildings burning and streets strewn with shop-window glass, thousands of volunteers from across the Black Country arrived with brooms to reclaim their streets. Around 50 volunteers who formed a group called RiotCleanUp turned up at Queen Square to assist the council.

  Tanvir Singh Banga, 70, died at Bains Stores in Blakenfields in July. His death was initially deemed suspicious, but a post-mortem cited ‘natural causes’ and no arrests or charges have been made.

  This morning the prime minister praised members of the Sikh community for volunteering to stand guard at various temples and businesses across the country. ‘My husband would have been very proud,’ added Mrs Banga. ‘It will take more than a few idiots to close us down.’

  7 – THE TIMES

  THE WEEK THAT followed was one of high tension for the town as the deadline approached for Mr Sohan Singh Jolly’s threat to burn himself. Thousands of Sikhs marched on the British High Commission in New Delhi in protest at Wolverhampton Transport Committee’s ban on Sikh busmen wearing turbans and beards. Mr Arthur Bottomley, the chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration, which was taking evidence in Wolverhampton, told The Times that he thought Mr Jolly was serious about suicide, ‘and it would not be an isolated case’, while a member of the Transport Committee added, ‘I have heard nothing yet to make me change my mind. Mr Jolly has his way of life and we have ours, and that is all there is to it.’

  Meanwhile, grief tore through Bains Stores, as it succumbed to mourning. Mr Bains had suffered a stroke after falling to his bedroom floor. In hospital he had experienced a second, fatal one. Within an hour of Mrs Bains returning home from the hospital with Kamaljit, the living-room furniture was being moved upstairs to make space for the grief-stricken, and Surinder, shellshocked, was putting together mourning clothes from white cotton bought from Dhanda’s drapery store.

  The shop continued to open at dawn to sell newspapers, but it closed for general trade at nine, to accommodate the mourners arriving in tens and twenties through the house door, their expressions of grief and sympathy being dictated by their sex. The women, for their part, sat on the floor on one side of the living room, under the window, around Mrs Bains and her daughters, the most traditional and most devastated wailing and beating their breasts, the less traditional dabbing tears with the hems of their Punjabi suits, each new visitor taking a turn to envelop Mrs Bains in a tearful embrace.

  Stationed in the opposite corner across the room, the men were led in grief by Mrs Bains’ brother-in-law from Southall, a thin man in his fifties whose naturally doleful expression made him perfectly suited to the task. In contrast to the women, the men wept quietly, interspersing tears with religious reflection and rational asides. They dwelled soberly upon the deceased’s qualities and achievements, remarking that the only real tragedy of the noble man’s life was that he had not lived to see his daughters married off, pointing out that the body was just a shell, and Mr Bains’ soul was now blending with the divine, like a river rippling into the sea.

  At least, this was the idea. In reality, there being no separate room for the men to sit, both sexes found themselves grieving and reminiscing together, and Dhanda, who more or less moved into Bains Stores during the mourning period, appearing suddenly in a snow-white turban which just happened to resemble the one sported by Mr Jolly, at times gave the women a run for their money. So as Mrs Bains used her white chuni to wipe away a stream of tears and opined ‘Why couldn’t it have been me first?’ for hours on end when it was plain to everyone that, being seventeen years younger, she was never going to be first, Mr Dhanda transformed every belch and fart into a howl of grief, pawing at anyone who would let him, his overbearing hugs and flatulence driving visitors to the furthest recesses of the ground floor.

  Though his preferred mode of grieving took the form of hysterical nostalgia. Sitting cross-legged against the wall with a bag of crisps he had taken, without asking, from the shop, stroking a beard which, despite the white turban, he hadn’t actually grown, he would hold forth on how sad it was that his dearest friend Mr Bains would never again see the golden fields of the Punjab, on the agony of their common experience of leaving the homeland and, among other things, on how they had met in Britain.

  The way he told the tale, Mr Bains was on his knees when he turned up one day in the shop, canvassing support for the Indian Workers’ Association, or the local Socialist Party, or whichever activist organisation he was obsessed with at the time. The old man, abandoned by fickle white customers, betrayed by his gora assistant and the police, had lost all the money he had saved in three years of foundry work, and, on top of potential financial ruin, was facing a devastating medical diagnosis. The story went that Mr Dhanda, feeling sorry for Bains, gave the old man some advice. He reminded him that he was a Jat, a caste renowned for producing good ploughmen and never fee
ling downtrodden, and that he was from a part of India know as the ‘Sword Arm of India’. He also reminded the old man that they had both been through much worse in 1947. And then, he offered to quit his job to help him resurrect the shop. The way he told the tale, things had improved the instant he moved in and they converted the shop into a newsagent. And obviously it was all his idea.

  ‘That man is too much,’ complained Mrs Bains’ sister to a fellow mourner. ‘Too, too much. You would think that he was the one who saved paji, and not the other way round. He was nothing but a pendu factory worker before he got given that job.’

  ‘He makes it sound like he was doing it for charity,’ muttered Tanvir to Kamaljit in the kitchen. ‘I heard he asked to be paid double what your father was paying that thieving gora. Double. But at least when he is wailing like a bullock he is not eating. He will have wiped out all the shop’s stock before the end of the week.’

  One person who didn’t mind Mr Dhanda’s shop stories so much was Surinder. For when he was reminiscing about Mr Bains, dominating the conversation, it at least brought relief from the endless group speculation upon Mr Bains’ final moments. Everyone seemed to have a theory on why and how he had ended up on the bedroom floor that afternoon and seemed to want to share it. Mrs Bains was keen on the romantic notion that Mr Bains heard the rallying call from the turban protest down the road, decided he wanted to join the protestors, and fell, symbolically at least, in defence of his faith. Mrs Bains’ sister, the girls’ massi, meanwhile, considered it nothing less than a miracle: she had always thought there was something saintly about her brother-in-law, had heard stories about the crippled suddenly being able to walk when overcome by the holy spirit, and pronounced him something bordering on a saint.

  As for Dhanda, his contribution to the topic normally took the form of firing questions across the room at Surinder like a police inspector. ‘Which way was he sleeping when you checked? How many customers had you served?’ But, fortunately for Surinder, Dhanda was often asked to restrain himself during these inquisitions; his fellow mourners reminding him that death and life were merely stages in the progress of the soul on its journey to God, so why dwell on the details of one’s passing? It was also useful that it was acceptable at such times for Surinder to be overcome by emotion, to cry and pray for her father’s soul. Which is not to suggest that her prayers were in any way insincere. For while she did fret about being found out, about Tanvir noticing that the chocolate tins had been collected that afternoon, her bereavement was as deep as her mother’s and sister’s. Indeed, another reason she didn’t mind Dhanda’s stories was that the gap between his recollections and others echoed her own dislocation about her father. If it was shocking that someone could be remembered so differently by different people, it was even more so that one person could change her mind so completely about someone upon their passing.

  Before her father had died, she had considered his biography the most tedious topic in the world, right up there with Tanvir’s interest in the variable price of sprouts. To her, Mr Bains was a stern man without any sense of fun, interested only in money and appearances. She saw his opposition to ‘ostentation’, to the point of even refusing to put up a sign on the shop, as symptomatic of his meanness and joylessness. If she ever thought about the essential facts of his biography, not that she ever really did, they merely confirmed her view of him as passive. The way she saw it, almost all of his major life decisions had been forced upon him. He left the West Punjab during Partition because his family, who all perished, had decided to send a member of the family to India, just in case. He left Delhi for London because his extended family there had made life so difficult, and, she suspected, because he found being a husband and father tedious.

  But spending day and night in the living room listening to all sorts of people reminisce about him – the girls had given up their room to the visitors – she realised that not only had she never known her father, but she had also never given him the benefit of the doubt. She had judged him through the prism of one fact: the fact that he used to hit her mother. But she had never witnessed this herself. Maybe she had exaggerated the importance of it. Perhaps there was a kind of nobility to his lack of ostentation after all. She was certainly moved when Baljit Kaur recalled something her father had said when trade finally started to pick up and Mr Dhanda was encouraging him to expand quickly. ‘Some men open a shop and in the first fortnight make profit of £60. They tell themselves that if they had two shops it would be £120 and expand. But I would rather work harder with one and aim for £70.’

  Then there were all the stories of how hard he toiled to revive the shop. The way she had seen it, he started a shop because factory shifts were too much like hard work. And she had dismissed the stories about this time as attempts to emotionally blackmail her into obedience. But now she had to tally this view with the moving image of him working through the night on the books, tying his long hair to the wall so that he could not physically nod off. Delivering groceries as far afield as Dudley, carrying the produce on buses and trams when the van broke down, serving people even in the middle of the night when they knocked on the door asking for ham or cheese or emergency loans.

  Even more affecting were the stories of her father’s escape from the West Punjab during Partition. This was part of her father’s life that she had never really heard acknowledged before, a topic, like her mother’s first marriage, which was largely taboo. But that week, some of the strangers who visited came with haunting stories and images from this prehistoric era. The Bains family sitting holed up in their family home in a village in a Muslim-majority district, not unlike how they were sitting now, hearing stories of how nearby villages were being wiped out, corpses of young Sikh children being found hanging from trees. A debate among the men about whether they should slaughter their own daughters so that they would at least be protected from defilement at the hands of rapacious males. The agonising decision to send the eldest son to Delhi, so that the family had someone in India, in case they needed to flee later. After this, her father’s long journey, his hair cut short, Muslim style, on the back of a truck with some other families from the village, all the family gold stolen from him within twenty miles, the young girls picked out within thirty miles. Surinder would have nightmares for months, disturbed by descriptions of murdered refugees, earlobes and noses cut away to get at jewellery more easily. Her father dipping his hands into the wounds of his dying neighbours, smearing blood over his face so attackers might leave him for dead.

  Of course, it was impossible, as Tanvir pointed out, to tell how much of this was fact. Dhanda was egging on those recollecting, taking any opportunity to emphasise his own grisly experience, though rumour had it that his family, who lived only a few miles from the border, had bribed themselves into India in an army truck and had quickly arrived unscathed in Jallandar. But the fact was that her father had fled Partition, he had been the only member of his family to survive, and he had nevertheless built a successful life for his new family. And how had Surinder repaid him? She had forgotten to look in on him, while flirting with a white boy. Her shame was intense. So intense that she sometimes hoped Jim O’Connor would reappear and she would get the punishment she deserved.

  As Surinder tortured herself, the turban dispute ground to a resolution four days before Mr Jolly’s deadline. Ernest Fernyhough, the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Employment and Productivity, suggested to the Wolverhampton Transport Committee that it would be unfortunate if Mr Jolly were to carry out his threat; that his martyrdom would be seen throughout the coloured world as the result of British racialism. And eventually, the eight members of the Transport Committee met for two and a half hours and announced they had eventually agreed to change the rule on turbans.

  Reaction was, once again, mixed. The Times said that ‘the decision by the transport committee in the face of government and other pressures’ had saved Wolverhampton ‘from a macabre experience’, but the committee chairman expressed li
ttle joy in arriving at the conclusion, remarking that ‘the ordinary man in the street feels that this is an encroachment on his way of life’. Meanwhile, an editorial in the Express & Star complained that the conclusion was ‘hardly a victory for anyone’ given the dispute had ‘made Wolverhampton a sad byword for racial injustice and intolerance in many parts of the world’, and the secretary of a Wolverhampton temple, speaking of how the episode had seen the Sikhs of the town portrayed, remarked sadly that ‘a small piece of bread with the respect of one’s fellows is better than a whole loaf without it.’

  Nevertheless, Jolly and his supporters were jubilant, Mr Dhanda finding it in himself to overcome his grief for a few hours to join hundreds gathered at a local gurdwara to thank Sohan Singh Jolly for his campaign and to present him with a congratulatory ceremonial snow-white turban. A day later, he was back as part of a smaller congregation gathered at the same temple following Mr Bains’ cremation, the older women lining up to wash their hands and faces in the sinks at the end of it all, a tradition brought from India, where the ashes of the deceased sometimes rained upon the bereaved. Kamaljit and Surinder copied their elders, finding solace in the ritual.

  The visitors began to peel away quietly that afternoon, and Bains Stores started to return to normality. Kamaljit, still in her white suit, started cleaning the house. Tanvir began making a tally of the stock that had to be reordered from the cash and carry. However, one visitor remained: Mr Dhanda. He hung around the house, walking around listlessly, staring mournfully at random items on shelves and on walls, shaking his head, talking distractedly about how sad it was that there was no turban ceremony for Mr Bains, when it was customary for relatives to bring turban lengths to the eldest son of the deceased. Then, in the living room, failing to help Mrs Bains fold away the white sheets that had been spread across the living-room floor, shuffling weight from one leg to the other, he made a suggestion: that he cook a meal for the family.