Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Which brings me to the other thing you need to revise when socialising with Ranjit: your notion of what constitutes ‘fun’. If you have a conventional social life, like I once did, socialising probably involves a combination of eating, drinking and animated debates about Simon Cowell’s sexuality in critically acclaimed establishments. But ‘bare jokes’, as Ranjit would put it, will almost always also involve: (a) driving around in his German 4x4, hollering at girls; (b) driving around in his German 4x4 to find alleyways and playing fields in which to smoke weed; (c) driving around in his German 4x4 and listening to bhangra and hip hop, nodding along in time; and (d) hanging out at Singhfellows.

  Each of these pastimes takes some adjusting to. I’ve never really understood the logistics of trying to seduce the opposite sex in cars, given that when you’re driving you are usually moving at speed, whereas the mythical girlies you are supposedly attracting are stationary, usually nothing more than a blur in your window or wing mirror, which surely limits the possibility of seduction. The idea of driving around circuitously to Singhfellows, when it is just a short walk from our respective homes, is also a struggle: I didn’t enjoy standing around getting high in alleyways and on school playing fields the first time round, when I was an adolescent. As for bhangra music with its repetitive beats, occasional cries of ‘Balle Shera’ and ‘Chak de Phate’, and lyrics fetishising fair-skinned women raised on milk and butter who look like peacocks and walk like deer – it has always left me cold. Then, the challenge of Singhfellows itself.

  My God, Singhfellows. Carved out of the remnants of a once-proud working man’s club, with a banqueting suite around the back providing catering facilities for weddings, it defines itself by a religion that, officially, rejects drinking. This is odd – only a range of pork pies named after the Prophet would be more strange. But even weirder is how we can as a community continue to have one of the highest rates of alcohol-related disease in Britain when so much of the drinking is done in desi pubs like these. You’d think it would put you off booze for life. The lighting is fluorescent and of the unremitting kind you might see in a hospital operating theatre. The tables resemble the kind you might see in an abattoir or butchery, the menu offers nothing more than chicken and samosas, the wine list extends to two varieties (red or white), and the staff and clientele are indistinguishable – overweight Asian men displaying absolutely no pleasure in what they’re doing.

  Taking a seat with Ranjit, I was momentarily impressed when someone brought over a pint of lager and a basket of tandoori chicken without him even placing an order. But I have since realised that this is often what you get, whatever you try to order. He began motoring his way through the food, even though he had demolished half a dozen drumsticks only an hour earlier, and before Ranjit had even asked, I began to offload my troubles. I complained about my customers, who had turned out to be much ruder than I remembered. About the abuse and graffiti and falling fag orders. About my mother’s need to endlessly feed me and her tendency to start hoovering the living room just as a TV drama approached a dramatic conclusion. About how newspaper deliveries were more hassle than they were worth.

  ‘If they’re not complaining that their papers are late, or that the sections haven’t been separated, they are moaning that you didn’t pop into their kitchen, make them a cup of tea and read out the headlines over breakfast.’

  I assumed, as I talked, that Ranjit was nodding in acknowledgement of my woes, but it turned out he was actually nodding in time to the Bollywood soundtrack playing on a flat-screen TV above us. The screens were, like the Monet prints and the framed football programmes, hung absurdly high up on the walls – almost as if they didn’t trust customers not to try to pull them down.

  The lack of empathy shouldn’t, I suppose, have come as a surprise. This, after all, was a man whose condolences on the day of my father’s death amounted to a text saying: ‘Il have a fat smoke now in the honour of your pops. RIP innit.’ More generally, sympathy just is not a Punjabi trait. I remember reading an account of a visit to a Punjabi village by an English woman called Sarah Lloyd, in which she complained that her hosts didn’t even seem to understand the word ‘sympathy’. ‘I had certainly never heard anyone use it. If I was ill I would be diligently looked after as far as food was concerned, but . . . the stock phrase, whether one was suffering from a slight headache or a burst appendix was, “Never mind, you’ll soon be all right.” Spoken in a standard indifferent matter.’

  Having said that, Ranjit did manage something resembling sympathy when I got on to the topic of the graffiti. He sucked in his cheeks, narrowed his eyes and, while it is hard to do his speech justice, spat out something along the lines of: ‘Swear down, I bet it was one of those fucking bhenchod Wilson boys. These breddas don’t know the difference between Muslims and Sikhs. That these fucking Musselmen have been trying to nail Sikh girls for centuries? One brown-faced person is another brown-faced person innit to them, like all Chinese people look the same to us. Racist sala kuttas. Don’t bother with the Feds, man. They just par you. We know where they live. We should pay them a fucking visit. Ya get me? Time you stopped being a pussy man. There’s a reason we never get anyone messin’ in our shop. They know to leaaaave it, yeah?’

  This continued for some time, with Ranjit expounding at length what he would do to the culprits – ‘I’d chop their fuckin’ heads off and then fuck ’em in the neck’ – speculation about how Wilson and his mates might have been involved with my dad’s death, and what he did the last time he caught a kid graffitiing his store (‘I made the dickless brainless khota clean it up. And then the next time his dad came in for bread I switched the packet for one I jizzed into. Innit’). I dismissed Ranjit’s speculation about my father without even thinking about it – years of drug abuse had made him paranoid, and he was forever seeing threats and conspiracies where none existed. But I wouldn’t have put masturbating into packets of Hovis past him. As a youth, I remember seeing him wipe fresh snot onto vegetable produce just for amusement. It was gross behaviour, but tonight, a spot of anger and solidarity, in whatever form, was just what I needed. It made me laugh, and I was struck again by another thing that Ranjit had turned out to be right about.

  For years I had dismissed the man as a bigot. It was one of the main reasons we had drifted apart. I hated the way he hated the goras (prefaced usually with an apology to my fiancée), the Muslims (he called the mosque down the road, the ‘mushque’, a Punjabi word translating as ‘smell’, and referred to a local taxi firm as ‘Al-Qaeda Cabs’), the Eastern Europeans (though several worked for him, and they formed an increasing proportion of our customers) and the blacks (though he listened and identified with rap and hip hop). But maybe he had a point after all. At least, it is one thing to be colour blind in liberal, middle-class East London, but quite another when you regularly get called ’Sama (Osama Bin Laden) or curry muncher by youths running in and out of your shop.

  After the riots, when a historian went on TV to feverishly blame the riots on ‘a violent, destructive and nihilistic’ black culture and, after citing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, complained that the problem was that ‘whites have become black’, I had gone through the intellectual motions of rage. If you reread that speech, I told Freya, one of Powell’s targets was the policy of ‘integration’, which he described as a dangerous delusion, unacceptable even to immigrants such as the Sikhs, who were campaigning at the time for the right to wear turbans and beards while working on the town’s buses. But these Sikhs were the same Sikhs who in 2011 were praised for reacting so visibly and forcefully to protect several British communities from rioters. The same Sikhs behind Sangat Television, a community TV station based in Birmingham, which was praised after one of its presenters helped the police to chase and arrest suspected rioters. Even the Tory MP representing what had been Enoch Powell’s constituency, who greeted the prime minister on his tour of riot-battered Wolverhampton, was now a Sikh.

  Intellectually, I
appreciated that my community and my home town, not least my own life, stood as a testament to the fact that Enoch Powell was not right. But the longer I spent in the shop, the harder it became to hold on to this thesis. In my heart of hearts, I couldn’t forget that the only Asians on the streets of Wolverhampton that night were shop owners, or people trying to protect the shop owners. All the looters I’d seen that night were black and white. And once I had accepted this, started seeing the world in monochrome, embraced casual racism, I felt liberated. Political correctness, thinking about what you say, is the hard thing.

  Ranjit drained his pint and, physically deflated after his rant, continued, ‘Anyway, how’s bhua-ji? With the shop and everyfink.’

  A flash of déjà vu. I had, as it happened, sat in exactly the same seat a few weeks earlier and been asked the same question by Freya, albeit in better English.

  ‘So, got anywhere with your mum?’ she’d asked, not even pretending to drink her pint, taking up about a quarter of the space Ranjit would occupy. ‘Got to say, she’s looking better than she has in ages.’

  It had been both the first time I had brought Freya to Singhfellows, and the first time I had been there myself, and though I felt uneasy with all the Indian men staring at us, I still felt more relaxed than I had in the country pubs we had visited over the preceding weekends. We would drive miles and miles to find the kind of gastropub we might consider passable in London, and I would feel self-conscious about being the only brown person in the room, and Freya would say I was being oversensitive, that in the countryside people stared at anyone who wasn’t from the village (‘You’ve got racial Tourette’s – not everything comes down to skin colour, you know’), and she would tiptoe around the subject of my possible return to London in the way that I tiptoed around my mother and the awkward matter that I had stopped contributing towards our joint mortgage. It was strange how in London I never thought of how we looked together. Just took it for granted that we were part of the furniture. But in the Midlands, it was always on my mind, whether it was in country pubs assuming that people were thinking ‘What is she doing with him?’, or, in Singhfellows, assuming everyone was thinking the opposite.

  Freya played with her ear lobe, something she always did when she was anxious. ‘Have you managed to talk to her about her plans?’ she asked.

  My reply to both Freya and Ranjit was the same: that my plan to persuade my mother to give up the shop, to find some way for her to move on, wasn’t working out. In my first few weeks of running the shop I had only come close to discussing the issue twice. The first time, I had tentatively suggested my mother join a local community group, the basic thinking being that a small change of scene might be a small step towards a more fundamental change of scene and lifestyle. She dismissed the idea with the words: ‘I won’t be comfortable. Even when I go to the temple, I feel as though they are all saying, “There’s that woman whose husband has died.”’ Meanwhile, the suggestion of a trip to India, to scatter my father’s ashes, produced the response: ‘Your father saw England as his home. And someone needs to look after the shop.’ The question ‘What next?’ quickly became taboo, yet another thing that we didn’t discuss as a family, along with my relationship with Freya; what happened to Dad; Mum’s illness; sex; politics. At the same time, the problems we were having with sporadic abuse and violence made leaving Mum alone in the shop even more unthinkable.

  Needless to say, Ranjit’s and Freya’s reactions to my admission of paralysis did differ somewhat. Ranjit, distracted now by the fact that someone had put twenty pence into the jukebox, had emitted a triumphant ‘brauhhaa’ and began singing along and performing sedantry bhangra to Malkit Singh’s ‘Aj Bhangra Paun Nu Ji Karda’. Meanwhile, Freya said, ‘Why don’t you ask your mum to move in with us?’

  It was an insane suggestion. There was barely room in our flat for two of us, let alone three. My mother would never have agreed. But it was also a sign of how desperate Freya was becoming. It was September and we still hadn’t sent out our wedding invitations. I realised I had to do something.

  ‘It’s really kind of you to suggest it, Freya. Really kind. But I don’t think my mum is a London person.’ I cleared my throat. ‘Look, she can’t carry on with the shop, it’s ridiculous. I can’t carry on. But it’s just going to take some time to sort out. And I have been thinking about the wedding. Christmas isn’t that far off. Do you think that maybe it would be best if we postponed it?’ A long silence ensued. Freya stared into the distance, stunned. When she still hadn’t said anything after half a minute, I added, ‘I think it was always going to be ambitious, what with Dad dying and everything.’

  Freya looked pale. Even paler than she had coming off the train from London, which, with its tilting, and her insistence on reading all the way, made her nauseous. Eventually she spoke. ‘Look, Arjan, if you’re having second thoughts, I would rather know now, rather than prolong the pain.’

  I reassured her earnestly that I wasn’t having doubts, that I needed her, which I did, that the whole thing was just a question of timing and that I would pay back the mortgage payments I had missed; and though she was upset and sad, she seemed to accept the argument. Ranjit was, however, less than understanding when, in the same spot some weeks later, I told him about Freya’s tearfulness.

  ‘Oh, man, she can fuck right off.’ I bristled at his aggression but then it made sense that Ranjit, who still lived with his elderly father, would be horrified. ‘Does she not get that family comes first? I ain’t disrespecting you, blud, but are you sure you want to be with this girl? I mean, English girls are good for a bit of fun. But you need to marry a desi girl.’

  ‘Like you, you mean, and keep shagging on the side?’

  ‘Who says I shag around?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Swear down, it don’t count if it’s in the mouth.’

  I winced.

  ‘Point is. Best to stick to your own.’ He finished his pint and waved at the barman for another, pulled out some hand cream from a trouser pocket, squirted some into a palm and rubbed it over his meaty fists. ‘Anyway, you looked into selling the shop?’

  I had. This had been another of the lowering events that month. I had taken it for granted that a sale would provide enough proceeds to give Mum options. But when I did something constructive and, at Freya’s gentle suggestion, invited a business broker over to value the place, our financial predicament turned out to be complicated. The agent had arrived in his BMW 3 series, his jacket hanging from a hook in the back, a Bluetooth earpiece fixed to his ear, a tattoo just visible behind the collar of his shirt. He had barely registered the physical aspects of the shop. Instead, he asked for some ID (‘Due to money laundering regulations, and the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, we are obliged to check’) and then asked if he could see the accounts. I had pointed him up to my father’s study, explaining shamefacedly that I hadn’t got my head around them yet. He raised an eyebrow. Ran a hand through his hair. Did everything short of rolling his eyes. I guess I probably wasn’t the most professional business person he’d met that week. And then I told him he had to be gone by three.

  ‘My mum will be back from the doctor’s by then and she doesn’t know I’m thinking about selling the shop.’

  Just half an hour later he was striding down the stairs, seemingly determined to escape while I was busy serving a customer. But I managed to get to his car before he drove off. And after he had emitted a series of phrases ranging from ‘streamlining processes’, ‘market conditions’, ‘performance benchmark signals’ and ‘CTN market value is usually 1.25 to 1.35 times the adjusted net profit’, he hit me with the news that our family business, after fifty-three years of ownership and development, was worth £25,000. £472 for every year of work. £9.08 a week.

  ‘The accommodation has been done up nice,’ he said, speaking through a gap in a window. ‘But this is a leasehold property. Even if it were freehold, doing up the back would be a waste of money. The Indian and Turkish families wh
o take over these kinds of shops nowadays are not very interested in living accommodation. They are interested in making money. And you can’t really let out the living quarters separately.’ He shrugged and touched a spot on his satellite navigation screen. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Looking back, none of this should have come as a shock. Finance wasn’t a strength of mine, but I knew Bains Stores was a leasehold. I had heard my father complain about the rent often enough, and it puzzled me that he had spent so much time improving property he didn’t own. I also knew the shop was doing badly. When you wake up at 4 a.m. every day, you cannot help but keep a mental tab of how little you are selling. By eight that morning the takings had amounted to £41, which given the average profit margin of 20 per cent meant I was working for a wage below the minimum wage. I had joked to a customer that day that we should rename the shop ‘Ten items or less’ given how few things people bought. Ranjit was not surprised either, when I told him.