Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  Surinder

  10 – TOP GEAR

  IT’S A BITTERLY cold Sunday evening in November and I’m sitting in a German 4x4 with 3,000 miles on the clock, tinted windows that do not, as the law states, allow at least 75 per cent of light through the windscreen, and heated front seats which, when switched on without your knowledge, make you feel like you are slowly soiling yourself. The satellite navigation system identifies the location as a suburb of Birmingham, while the 1,000W stereo blasts out a bhangra track in which the vocalist pleads for his beloved to remove her veil so that he can admire her beautiful cat-like face.

  Ranjit and I are on a ‘mission’. Not one of his usual kind, i.e. popping to the cash and carry, or picking up a bucket of chicken from KFC, but an actual real-life mission – worthy if not of Steven Seagal or Bruce Lee, then at least of a detective played by David Jason in a prime-time ITV drama. We are staking out a house which may or may not be the home of my long-lost aunt Surinder, and my uncle Jim, both of whom I hadn’t realised, until a few weeks earlier, existed.

  The journey has been a challenge. If Ranjit wasn’t distracted by the task of lighting up a spliff, or enraging fellow motorists by reacting to traffic signals with the kind of lethargy most people reserve for filling out tax returns, he was fretting in his paranoid dope-addled way about being followed by ‘the Feds’. Though just establishing my uncle and aunt’s names, and where they lived, had been even more arduous. After casually informing me of Surinder’s existence, and being subjected to a barrage of questions, Ranjit had vaguely alluded to my aunt marrying a gora, before suddenly complaining of feeling unwell and heading home. He then became as unobtainable and uncontactable as he had previously been obtainable and contactable.

  The sudden sheepishness was no surprise. The first rule of chuglia is: don’t get caught trading in chuglia. Being branded a gossip in the village that is Bulberhampton, or being accused of interfering in another family’s private affairs, is the only thing worse than not hearing the gossip in the first place. Also, as far as scandal goes, a Punjabi woman eloping with a white bloke in 1970 was pretty scandalous. I understood why he might have immediately regretted mentioning it and I also understood why my parents might have hushed it up. More than forty years later, I still lacked the courage to bring up the subject with my mother. But I couldn’t leave it alone, and when Ranjit didn’t respond, I popped over to Buy Express anyway, to see if his father might be more helpful.

  As with his son, conversing with Mr Dhanda was far from a straightforward affair. His English was excellent, so much so that it made me realise that, as with human civilisation at large, one generation of a family does not necessarily build on the achievements of another. But a lifetime of barking orders, whether as a shop owner or as a local politician, combined with age and decades of obesity which made even getting up a challenge, had turned him into more of a projector than a listener. He sat at the back of the shop, sometimes in a wheelchair, sometimes on a chair, and shouted at his staff, his customers, his wife, children and grandchildren. Visiting him invariably required being subjected to lectures about Wolverhampton racial politics; accounts of Punjabi political bodies which always seemed to be disbanded after the outbreak of infighting among the leaders; reminiscences about my grandfather; and an account of his own family history, which like all Punjabi family histories seemed to involve a grandmother who was reputedly a hundred years old, a cousin called Happy whose life unfurled in distinctly unhappy fashion, and endless impenetrable violent disputes over farmland in India, which might have been triggered by anything from a murderous betrayal to a misjudged glance at someone’s wife.

  This time, when I did finally get an opportunity to explain the purpose of my visit, tentatively enquiring whether he could tell me anything about the youngest of Mr Bains’ daughters, he acted as if he hadn’t heard; being a little deaf can be a useful thing. Instead, he launched into a lengthy account of the activities of the General Secretary of the Council of Khalistan, who in 1975 was apparently imprisoned for thirty days in Pentonville prison for riding his motorcycle while wearing his turban, in order to protest against the law as it stood.

  ‘1975?’ I inserted. ‘Interesting. MY AUNT SURINDER WOULD HAVE LEFT WOLVERHAMPTON BY 1975. Do you remember anything about Surinder, babaji?’

  ‘The problem was that Section 32 of the Road Traffic Act 1972 said it was compulsory to wear a helmet.’

  I sighed.

  ‘Did you know that in the 1974 General Election, an activist called Baldev Chahal stood as a candidate in Southall on the issue?’

  God knows what this had to do with anything. Mercifully, I was saved from much more by a customer who came up and asked where he could find the Weetabix.

  ‘Second aisle, top shelf, at the end,’ responded Mr Dhanda quickly, suddenly recovering the facility to hear. Before he could get started on another lecture, I got down on my knees, right in front of his chair, uncomfortably close to the diabetic boil on his bare foot, and shouted out loud, something I had seen Ranjit do when he really needed his father to respond. ‘I KNOW THAT MY BABA HAD TWO DAUGHTERS, MY MOTHER KAMALJIT, BUT ALSO A YOUNGER DAUGHTER CALLED SURINDER. YES, SURINDER. DO YOU REMEMBER HER? YOU MUST DO. I THOUGHT SHE HAD PASSED AWAY, BUT SHE MIGHT BE ALIVE. DO YOU RECALL WHO SHE MARRIED? DO YOU KNOW WHEN SHE LEFT WOLVERHAMPTON?’

  He could no more ignore me than a pedestrian could ignore an HGV hurtling towards him on a zebra crossing. And it seemed as if he would have preferred to face one. A look of infinite exhaustion passed over his prehistoric face, his tiny eyes withdrew even further into his head, and his stringy neck suddenly seemed to strain under the weight of his large, lopsided white turban. I remembered something my father would say: ‘Never trust a man with a turban but no beard.’ Eventually, he waved his hand dismissively and said, ‘Listen, the past is the past, some things, best left.’

  I laughed. ‘Look, I really need to speak to her if she’s still around.’ I added, ‘My mother is alone now, apart from me. She needs all the help she can get. I think Mr Bains, my grandfather, would have wanted his two daughters to know one another, to help each other in old age. Don’t you think?’ I made a cynical attempt to push his buttons. ‘In the way he was looked after by you. Families should be together. Ranjit mentioned that she had married a gora.’ There was a time I hated the g word, it was as bad as the n and p words. I had been so cross when I heard my mother using the term in relation to Freya once, but nowadays it tripped easily off my tongue. ‘Do you remember anything about him? His name? Where he was from? What he looked like?’

  ‘Um.’ He suddenly sounded about twenty years older. ‘I think the man, that man, if memory serves, he was someone who visited the shop.’

  ‘A customer, you mean?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Someone from the council?’

  ‘A rep.’

  ‘A rep? For who?’

  ‘A sweet company.’

  ‘Do you remember which one?’ I mentioned the two big outfits.

  ‘No.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Cornell, Connell, something like that.’

  ‘Do you remember his first name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you remember where he lived?’

  ‘Never met him.’

  Clearly, ‘Cornell, Connell, something like that’ was not much to go on. But the conversation was proving exhausting. I figured there couldn’t be many Surinder Cornells or Connells around, and it looked like it was all Mr Dhanda was going to give me, anyway. So I thanked him for his time and left him alone, and back at Bains Stores I gave up avoiding mindless chit-chat with customers by pretending to be on the phone and instead avoided chit-chat by searching for my aunt on the internet.

  However, after a fortnight there was nothing to show for my efforts but an email account jammed with spam from the social networks I had joined and messages from a handful of Cornells/Connells telling me they had no idea who I was looking for. I was considering a
return to Dhanda when there was a sudden, accidental breakthrough. I was visited by a sales rep from a confectionery company and mentioned the problems I was having locating a former employee called Cornell/Connell. She informed me there was an association for former sales reps, so I got in touch with them. At the mention Cornell/Connell, the person in question guessed who I might be on about and, seemingly oblivious to the Data Protection Laws, and the right of individuals to privacy, she sent me the last known address of Jim O’Connor, which turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from where my mother lived.

  You might have thought from the elation I felt on getting this information, the first time I think I had felt anything resembling joy since my father’s death, that I’d got my father back. And, looking back, my excitement was rather disproportionate. After all, it’s not as if I grew up deprived of aunties. From the youngest age, as the result of growing up in a shop, I have been surrounded by aunties who pet me, aunties who compare me favourably/unfavourably to their own children, aunties for whom I am obliged to perform menial tasks purely because I am told they are aunties, aunties who are black, aunties who are white, aunties who are my aunties because they come from the same Indian village as my parents, aunties who still pinch my cheeks and chuck my chin in my thirties, aunties who claim to have nursed my grandfather, aunties I am scared of, aunties I fancy, aunties in India I don’t recognise but who I am nevertheless obliged to talk to in bad Punjabi for at least five minutes when my mum makes me call them up for her on Skype.

  But an actual, real-life biological aunt – that was different. Surinder. A blood relative. The importance of her role as an aunt emphasised by the specific title – ‘massi’ – she got as a result of being my mother’s sister. Someone to consult about my mother’s future. Someone who knew my parents when they were young. I suppose, in a small way, I was getting my father back: Surinder-massi would be able to tell me things I had never known about him. Though after I had shared the news of my discovery with Ranjit, who finally picked up the phone, accounting for his absence by citing flu, and after I had taken him up on his suggestion that we drive out to Birmingham to ‘check out’ the house, this sense of purpose started to flag rather.

  The suburb had looked green enough on an internet map, and according to the satnav we were surrounded by parkland. But the shopping trollies strewn across front gardens and the groups of youths drinking high-strength lager in doorways told a different story. It didn’t help that it was raining and it was dark and we were sitting in a car which, with diagonally stitched leather upholstery, and plush, two-tone cognac/cedar natural leather interior was the vehicular equivalent of Blenheim Palace. But I doubt it would have looked any better from the windscreen of my father’s dilapidated van. As for the house, it might have once been a reasonably attractive 1930s semi, if they hadn’t done one of the worst things you can do to such a property, by installing UPVC frames in the massive bay windows. Meanwhile, the front garden had been paved over, to make space for a battered old Rover.

  I found myself ethnically profiling the house, examining it for signs of Indian residence (property being another of the defining things about my people). The preoccupation with wealth and the idea of living as an extended family, with grandparents looking after children, and brothers sharing responsibility for parents, seems to have translated into an obsession with buying houses. I remember Ranjit expressing bemusement that I hadn’t bought a flat when I was still a student, and my ex may have been just twenty-six, still resident with her parents, but she nevertheless owned a flat in Earls Court which she rented out for profit. However there was nothing obviously Asian about this house. No shoe rack in the porch, no gold door handles. Moreover, it looked like council housing, and I knew no Sikhs who lived in local authority property, or who drove a Rover, for that matter. I struggled to imagine Surinder living in it.

  This doubt gradually morphed into anxiety. Why had I come? I could hardly suddenly present myself to Surinder as the offspring of the family she had disowned decades earlier, without giving some kind of notice, without having prepared myself for it, and without consulting my mother. Though Ranjit’s response to my concern, when I vocalised it, was predictable – ‘Leaaaave it, yeah?’ It’s the thing he says most often. What he meant was: ‘Have a smoke.’ And while I normally declined the offer, this time, because I didn’t know what else to do, because I actually needed to chill out, I took a drag. Then another. And then: Jesus. It turns out that either spliff or my metabolism have altered significantly since I last smoked because I suddenly feel like I’m on crack, not weed.

  Before I know it I’m saying the words ‘dude’ and ‘whoah’, I’m asking ‘What is this shit?’ and he is telling me ‘skunk’, and I am addressing Ranjit as ‘Jay’, allowing him to address me as ‘A’, and the bhangra track on the stereo is making complete sense, even though the singer seems to be talking about how the shawl belonging to his beloved matches the colour of his turban.

  ‘Turn it up, Jay,’ I say.

  He turns it up.

  ‘What they singing about?’

  ‘It’s one of the all-time classics, man.’

  ‘What they singing about?’

  He provides a running translation. Apparently, the vocalist is telling us about how he threw some kind of flower at his beloved’s cheek, and it left a bruise on it, which spread like black eyeliner, because she is so fair, and the sight of this, in turn, left the black bees speechless, as if a snake, or some kind of reptile, had stung their tongues. To be honest, I struggle to follow the translation, the metaphor is puzzling, I can imagine a snake being stung by a bee, but can’t imagine a bee being stung by a snake, but the beat is mesmerising and I turn it up some more and nod meaningfully, sensing a connection to my culture, feeling like I am watching myself in the third person (if that makes sense), like I am in a silent movie, with sound (if that makes sense), and suddenly, everything, from my father’s death, to my mother’s predicament, to my floundering relationship with Freya, seems clearer, the answers to all my problems sitting behind the white UPVC front door.

  ‘Hey, Jay, shall we go and say hiii?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s say hiii.’

  ‘To who?’

  ‘The people in the . . .’ I momentarily lose my train of thought. ‘The house people.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ responds Ranjit. ‘Let’s go and say hiiiiii. Check them out, innit.’

  Getting out of the car and to the front door takes an eternity: the fact that I can’t unbuckle my seat belt sparks a giggling fit; the fact that Ranjit leaves the engine running sparks another. The sight of a Phil Collins CD on the passenger seat of the Rover has us both bent over in hilarity for three or maybe four minutes. All the while, every bit of me is tingling and when Ranjit presses the doorbell, and it emits the chimes of Big Ben, time seems to slow down between one bong and the next, and when the door is finally opened by a young man, of about eighteen, sporting a baseball cap, barely making eye contact and grunting ‘Yeah?’, I experience an intensification in my symptoms, everything feeling dark and yet bright at the same time (if that makes sense), like I am dreaming and yet I know that I am not (if that makes sense), and in that moment it becomes obvious why I am here, why I have been sent, why this was the right thing to do, what has been propelling me on this journey: my loneliness.

  You see, if you’re Asian, people expect you to have a big family. ‘You probably have lots of brothers and sisters,’ people say. Or ‘I don’t have a big family, like you.’ But unlike Jay’s enormous brood, there has never been more than three of us. My father’s family, almost entirely in India, hardly represented at his funeral; my mother’s family in Southall, a cold and self-absorbed bunch. Never anyone to play with, measure myself against. No brothers to bear down on bullies, no sisters to tie a rakhri around my wrist in August, no reason to complain afterwards about the colour running from my wrist on to my brand-new white shirt. But now, finally, a cousin, a young brother to call
me paji, if not to play with, because actually we might be too old for that, then someone at least to take to the pub, hang out with, and I am imagining taking him out for a drink, introducing him to drink and skunk, wonderful skunk, when I hear Ranjit speaking in an English accent that sounds like it has been lifted from a Merchant Ivory movie, or most probably from a character in a Chuck Norris vehicle.

  ‘Hello, we’re from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.’ He licks a finger and smooths it over his eyebrows. ‘I’m Frank, and this is Andy here. Could we speak to James O’Connor Esquire?’

  The youth glances at us with the kind of scepticism and disdain that two stoned men with a combined age of more than seventy frankly deserve, takes a few steps backwards and kicks the door behind him in the hallway. ‘Oi, fatso! You got visitors.’ As he slinks away, I sober up enough to ask Ranjit, ‘Frank?’ And ‘Inland Revenue?’ I kick him in the shins. ‘Do we look like tax men?’ He’s in a hoodie and Nike Air Force Ones, while I am in a jumper and jeans and Converse. ‘And why would two tax men be visiting on a Sunday evening?’

  ‘Leeeave it, yeah?’ he responds, now, for some reason in a Jamaican accent. He sways on the spot. ‘It’s gonna be aiiight.’

  The shock of Ranjit’s idiocy, and my cousin’s disrespectful tone to his parents, has the effect, if not of sobering me up, then at least providing enough focus so that by the time ‘Fatso’ appears at the door, round and heavy, completely bald, teeth so yellow that I make a mental note to whiten my own, I make an attempt to take control of the situation.

  ‘Hi,’ I say quickly, before Ranjit has a chance to say anything stupid. I glance at him anyway, in part to discourage him from interrupting, in part just to check that I have actually said this word out loud rather than just thought it. Then, taking in Jim’s face, with its creases and crevasses, his enormous belly, too big even to laugh off as a pregnancy, I continue, ‘We’re from the local council.’ A pause. ‘Yes, we’re from the council. Just doing a quick check of who lives in certain properties . . . for reasons of . . . council tax.’ My intonation, for no particular reason, rises at the end of my sentence. ‘According to our records . . .’ I suddenly feel the absence of a pen or notepad in my hands – something, anything, to make me look more official, less of a waster. ‘According to our records we’ve got one . . . James O’Connor, age sixty-three, at this address.’