Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Mrs Bains: ‘Huh?’

  He repeated himself, making half-lidded eye contact, and in between pouring the tea from cup to saucer to cool it down, and slurping noisily from the rim, he added casually, ‘What I mean, of course, Mataji, is that if you are looking for a Jat with a shop, someone with a British passport, of good character, and someone who Mr Bains would have approved of, maybe you do not need to look so far.’

  Mrs Bains was so distracted by the appellation – it was the first time he had ever called her ‘mataji’, mother; he normally called her ‘pehnji’, sister – and so perturbed by what he seemed to be saying, that she asked him for clarification. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the age gap between dear Mr Bains, God bless his soul, and your good self was not all that different to the age gap between, say . . . Surinder and I.’

  In that moment, the floor seemed to tilt. Feeling sick, Mrs Bains put both hands on the worktop to steady herself, and then felt a wave of grief for her dead husband. This would never have happened if he were still around. Then, a pang of anger towards him: this would never have happened if he hadn’t been so indulgent of this narcissistic, impudent man.

  There was, academically, nothing wrong in what Dhanda was suggesting. The rules, when arranging a marriage, were that you must not marry within four gotras of your family, or within your village. And Dhanda was right about the age gap between Mr and Mrs Bains. But she had been a widow, had not been in a position to resist the overtures of any man, whereas her daughters were far from desperate. Moreover, Dhanda’s proposition exposed as a fiction the idea he had long propounded that he was Mr Bains’ brother and an uncle to her daughters. The girls called him ‘chacha’, for God’s sake – the appellation for one’s father’s younger brother. Mrs Bains was shocked, and registering her expression, Mr Dhanda glanced at his watch, which he kept fastened upside down on his left wrist, mumbled something about an urgent appointment and slipped away.

  On his departure, Mrs Bains did what she always did in an emergency: she shut the living-room door, picked up the telephone and called her sister in Southall for advice. The voice on the other end of the phone was scandalised. She gasped at the right moments, and despite having been vocal in her complaints about Mr Dhanda in the past, resisted saying ‘I told you so.’ But having digested all the details, she surprised her sister by launching into a tirade that made Mrs Bains’ own monologues seem like playful asides.

  This, ultimately, was all Mrs Bains’ fault, she pronounced. She had petted her daughters too long, allowed Surinder in particular to be spoiled by education; God knew what ideas were swishing about in that unnaturally pretty head of hers. She had never known a girl to read so many books. Had never known a girl to read newspapers in the way Surinder did. It was not normal. She had been influenced too much by the West. Mrs Bains had been too lax, had lost focus since Mr Bains had died, the girls were running rings around her. She herself had married off two daughters and a son within the space of a year, and yet in the many months that had passed since Mr Bains had died, Mrs Bains had not even set up one girl. All mothers were proud, of course, considered their daughters too good for most men, but people were beginning to talk. Maybe watching too many Bollywood films had given her strange ideas about ‘liking’ and ‘happiness’ when all that mattered was ‘suitability’ and ‘duty’. Frankly, it was time that Mrs Bains stopped faffing about.

  The lecture was painful to endure but she accepted the criticism that came her way, conceding every point. She had been lax and proud. Running a shop and finding two husbands was probably too much for one woman, and maybe fear of loneliness was making her delay the painful moment she lost her daughters. It was so hard, she sobbed. So hard. This was the reason it was better to have boys than girls, she lamented. They weren’t better. But you didn’t lose boys to another family through marriage.

  The phone call ended with a series of instructions. First, Mrs Bains should not reveal to anyone what Dhanda had suggested. It was important not to alienate or humiliate the man: he was respected in the community, you needed friends in this godforsaken country, and Lord knows what damage he could cause the izzat of the girls if provoked. Second, it was essential the girls be married off quickly. To aid this, Surinder should be sent to her aunt in Southall as soon as her exams were over. Her aunt would not only knock some sense into the girl, with the back of her hand if necessary, she would also find her a husband, freeing Mrs Bains to concentrate on Kamaljit. Finally, Mrs Bains must not ever mention any of this to anyone – not to any relatives, any customers. No one. Especially her daughters.

  Mrs Bains followed her sister’s advice to the letter, clinging on to the plan as if her life depended on it. She knew Surinder would resist being sent to Southall, even without her realising the full nature of the plan. She had spent one summer there a few years earlier and had complained of being treated like a slave by her aunt, who had made her work fourteen-hour days in their shop. But it all went smoothly. Like clockwork. Except for one thing. When discussing Dhanda’s request on the phone that Sunday afternoon, Mrs Bains had failed, not for the first time, to keep her voice down, and Surinder, reading upstairs, had overheard some of what had been said.

  In the event, Mrs Bains didn’t inform her daughter about her confinement to Southall for months. But she needn’t have been so careful: seemingly distracted by the task of studying for her exams, Surinder accepted the news without fuss. And when the time came for her to depart one hot morning in June, the day after her final A-level paper, the surprise was that no one was more upset than Mrs Bains. She couldn’t even glance at her daughter’s packed suitcases without tears filling her eyes. Life, it seemed to her, was just one long painful lesson in learning to let go. When Surinder had finished packing, she would have endured the pain of childbirth ten times over to be spared the torture of sending her daughter away.

  The van, which had been driven to near destruction some years earlier by the General Post Office, and had suffered further years of abuse and vandalism under the ownership of the Bains, seemed to find the mile-long journey to the station with Surinder in the back as much of a strain as Mrs Bains. It emitted an explosion on being started by Tanvir, and once it droned into life, the floor rattled and the transmission whined. Throughout, Mrs Bains, in tumult, complained about the roadworks that seemed to perpetually afflict Wolverhampton.

  ‘Leh, what they doing now? New ring road, schming road. How many family shops and churches have been destroyed to build this? What godforsaken country is this that bulldozes the dead, for roads? And what kind of people leave bodies to rot in the soil? It’s disgusting.’

  There was little solace to be found at the new high-level train station, given that it, like the roads, and the town centre, which had been torn up to make space for new shopping centres, had been rebuilt in the name of progress, and in the process had been robbed of anything resembling comfort. The ticket hall was a featureless concrete box, and passengers on platforms were exposed to the elements, the idea of a ‘roof’ having been dismissed as a design remnant of the past. The three of them stood perspiring in the sun with the two suitcases Mr Bains had used when he emigrated to England, Mrs Bains attempting to conceal her emotional turmoil with incessant advice.

  ‘Your massi will be waiting for you at the station. If you don’t see her, wait at the end of the platform and she will find you. Make sure you call us as soon as you leave for Southall. Make sure you offer to pay for the petrol – if she doesn’t take the money, leave some on their mantelpiece. Always cover your head when your masur is in the room. Remember, they are more traditional than us. You will not be able to flounce about like you do at home, OK? Make sure you always use ‘ji’ with your cousins when they visit. If there are any visitors, make sure to give up your bed and offer to sleep on the floor. Don’t sit around reading books in your room. Do not address your uncle unless he speaks first. Keep your head covered in his presence, do not laugh loudly, nor run anywhere, and don’t
start eating until your masur has finished. And for god’s sake stay out of the sun or you will turn into a blackie like your sister.’

  Surinder, who had barely spoken that morning, rolled her eyes and said, evenly, ‘I know, Mum.’

  Mrs Bains broke down.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mum.’ The more hysterical her mother grew, the calmer Surinder appeared.

  ‘You will always be a child to me, putt.’

  She kissed and hugged her daughter, even as Surinder stiffened. ‘I know you are a good girl. I just want you to be happy. You know that, don’t you?’

  Her daughter looked so beautiful. No wonder men lost their senses around her. And just when it felt like things could not get any more emotional, Tanvir sneezed. A big, snotty, no-hands sneeze. Mrs Bains would have been no less horrified if he had just thrown himself on to the newly electrified track. Of all the superstitions she lived by, the one she held on to most fervently, even more intensely than physicists held on to Newton’s laws of motion, was the belief that it was bad luck to sneeze on embarking on a journey or new initiative. For a moment, all three of them froze in shock on the station platform.

  Neither Tanvir or Surinder seemed to know how Mrs Bains would react. In the event, she made a unilateral decision to reach for her daughter’s suitcases and announced they would have to go back to the shop, come back another time. There were plenty of trains, she would pay whatever was necessary to send Surinder later, the risk simply wasn’t worth taking. Tanvir and Surinder had to chase her down the platform and spend a considerable amount of time persuading her to change her mind, to remind her that the effects of a sneeze could be counteracted if the person waited a few minutes – the train was still fifteen minutes away – and if all the parties in question ate something sugary. Thank God they ran a sweet shop. Thank God Tanvir always carried mints.

  Fearing another scene, Tanvir managed to get Mrs Bains to leave the platform with five minutes to go, and he helped Surinder on to the train alone, while Mrs Bains sat in the van crying. She was still crying when, on the way back home, after they had descended a hill and the van had misfired two or three times, Tanvir came to a standstill at a set of traffic lights, cleared his throat and made an announcement. ‘There’s something I’d like to discuss with you, bibiji.’

  Mrs Bains was too shattered by the morning’s events to digest what Tanvir had said.

  The van set off again and soon they were speeding down a new smooth section of the ring road – though speeding was a relative thing in this vehicle: it could, in theory, reach 77mph, and the speedometer wound round to indicate 90mph whenever Tanvir ventured near the accelerator, but it was difficult to imagine it hitting such numbers even if driven off a cliff. Eventually they slowed down again, the van emitted a farting noise, and he continued, staring intensely at another red light, ‘In short.’ Yellow. ‘With all due respect, bibiji.’ Green. ‘I would like to marry Kamaljit.’

  It was too close a day to sit in the van for more than a few moments when stationary, but having parked up outside the shop, Mrs Bains was still sitting in it alone fifteen minutes later. No matter how hard she thought, she couldn’t make sense of what had just happened.

  Whereas Dhanda’s request had resulted in shock and dismay, Tanvir’s had just produced incomprehension. She had grabbed the sides of her seat and stared at the petrol gauge, almost expecting it to provide some sort of direction or guidance, when the fact was that it didn’t even provide a clue about the contents of the petrol tank, having been stuck on ‘empty’ for years. Her response, when she finally did manage one, amounted to nothing more than: ‘You want to marry my daughter?’

  ‘Hahnji.’

  A silence ballooned between them. After a while, Tanvir broke it, inserting, tersely, in a tone she had never heard him speak before, ‘Perhaps you think we are not well suited?’

  Of course they weren’t well suited! Tanvir was indispensable in the shop, loyal, as reliable as gravity, and Mr Bains’ death had meant that he was more or less running the place, but he was also a Chamar, whereas the Bains were Jats, and Jats could no more marry Chamars than one of the road cones that were whizzing past. The fact was that in India someone from a scheduled caste like Tanvir would not be allowed to draw water from the same well as Jat Sikhs like the Bains; at school, Jat children would have to give away or throw away their food if he had touched it; some Jats would feel the need to clean their clothes with soap if he so much as touched them; in England, on the factory floor, some Jats would not take water from the same tap from where someone of Tanvir’s caste had drunk, and there were even some customers at Bains Stores who refused to take change or produce from Tanvir directly, asking for it to be put on the counter to avoid direct contact.

  Mrs Bains had protested on his behalf when this happened, but she ranted and raved about lots of things, and besides, the rules that dictated behaviour in a shop did not alter the ancient and eternal differences between the castes. She could still remember how at village feasts Chamar families were obliged to eat separately. In India, he would not have been allowed into the family kitchen, being regarded as ritually unclean. Why, she could remember how his grandfather, like many of his generation, would have to warn others of his arrival to avoid tension or trouble. In the Punjab, Tanvir would have risked being locked up, beaten up or thrown down a well just for thinking such a thought about a Jat girl. Even in England, if they got married, they would be ostracised by the community. Surinder’s marriage prospects would be ruined by association, the family would face disdain at social gatherings, and close relations would stop visiting. It would be a calamity, a disgrace, even worse than Dhanda marrying Surinder, and Mrs Bains’ extended silence said as much. All she could manage by the time they finally pulled up in front of the shop, Tanvir braking sharply, was: ‘Kamaljit is too young for you.’

  Mrs Bains didn’t know why she said this, perhaps it was what she wished she had said to Dhanda that time but had failed to, maybe she was just babbling, but Tanvir wasted no time demolishing the argument. ‘Kamaljit is twenty. She is older than Surinder, who you are also marrying off. I am twenty-nine. And before you say it, some of the men who have come to see her have been older than me.’

  Tanvir continued his well-rehearsed argument. He had served the family dutifully and without complaint for many years. Furthermore, he had read through the Holy Book with Kamaljit, and they had found nothing objecting to intercaste marriage. The Gurus if anything said it was wrong to discriminate along the lines of caste, that all men and women were equal in the eyes of God. Besides, in England people of all colour and creeds were equal before the law. He and Kamaljit cared for one another deeply, a lesser man would have eloped but he respected the Bains; and if in spite of all this she would not allow their marriage, he would respect her decision, leave the shop that very evening and spend the remainder of his days alone and celibate.

  ‘Right.’ Mrs Bain breathed in and out deeply. ‘So, you actually mean this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He said this in English.

  ‘You’re actually serious?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you have discussed this with Kamaljit? My daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’ Impatience had crept into his tone. ‘Your daughter, Kamaljit.’

  And with that he got out of the van, slammed the door behind him and, having checked the lock on his side of the car twice, walked into the shop and up to his room.

  Sitting in the van, nothing became clearer. Surinder was the one inclined to flights of fantasy. Tanvir, meanwhile, was as solid as a rock. This was the man who every morning had to wash his hands a certain number of times before starting work. Who had to touch objects a certain number of times before exiting a room, who had the mickey taken out of him by the newspaper boys for doing his mental arithmetic aloud (‘Ten pence minus three pence means seven pence back to you’). The idea of the pair of them embarking on some kind of illicit romance was unimaginable. And all that Mrs Bains managed to co
nclude after what turned into half an hour of deliberation was that Tanvir had gone mad under the stress of his work. A holiday would have to be arranged. Kamaljit would have to be exiled to Southall – she had sent the wrong daughter down south. But before that, she would have to call her sister for advice. And before that, she would have to get into the living room without crossing her daughter.

  The feeling was mutual, because when Mrs Bains did finally get out of the van and walked into the shop, Kamaljit, who had been minding the counter, fled upstairs. Mrs Bains was then prevented from calling her sister by an influx of customers. She struggled with the chit-chat and the change, and when she finally got the chance to call, shaking so much that she struggled to dial the number, she was told that her sister had not yet returned from picking up Surinder at Euston.

  She tried every ten minutes thereafter, but it was hours before she finally got through. And she had only begun rushing through the story when her sister emitted a sob. She was grateful for the sympathy; she had been fighting the urge to sob herself, the whole thing somehow feeling much worse because there was no one else to blame – she was the one who had suggested hiring Tanvir. But she hadn’t actually got to the point yet. She resumed her story only to be interrupted by a howl.

  ‘What’s wrong, pehnji? Has something happened?’

  Her sister cried out again. A deep, guttural howl.

  ‘Hai rubba. Has there been an accident?’

  It was worse than an accident. Surinder had not turned up at Euston train station as arranged. Instead, a stranger, a black man in a suit, had approached the aunt with an envelope. Inside was a note, written in English and Punjabi. It read:

  I will not be coming to Southall. I am not going back to Wolverhampton. I know about Dhanda’s proposal. I am getting married to Jim O’Connor, the salesman. I love him. Please do not look for me, or try to contact me, and please do not worry about me. I have taken my wedding jewellery.