God knows how much time passes before he speaks, everything has slowed down, but the gap is long enough for me to become suddenly aware of my hands and experience another moment of clarity, albeit a less exhilarating one, about why I am here. I’m here because of Freya. Our relationship is strained, we are drifting apart, but in the good old days when I was still trying to get my mother to like her, the one thing I longed for more than anything else was a successful interracial Sikh couple I could point at and use as an illustration of what was possible. I can see now my excitement at finding my uncle and aunt was in large part about finding a precedent. But the sight of this man has made me doubt how useful an example he would have been.
Eventually, he replies, ‘Yes.’
Phew. I am not sure what I felt more relieved by: the fact that he hasn’t seen through our lame identity fraud, or the fact that I have actually found my uncle.
‘Yes!’ I exclaim, before immediately apologising for yelping. ‘Sorry. And your wife . . .?’ My heartbeat quickens and I peer into the hallway, hoping, I guess, to see some photographs or other evidence of matrimony.
‘What about her?’
‘We have her down as aged . . .’ I’ve worked out the dates. ‘. . . fifty-nine?’
‘Fifty-nine?!’ He laughs like he has just heard the funniest joke in the world, or been at some of the skunk soaring through my bloodstream. Ranjit starts laughing too, as Jim shouts behind him, ‘She will absolutely LOVE to hear that. Michelle! Some blokes out here have a question for you!’
They say that with marijuana you tend to notice things you’ve never noticed before, that it makes your senses more acute, but in my case the drug seems to be having the opposite effect. Having somehow overlooked the fact that the boy, my ‘cousin’, doesn’t look remotely Indian, I somehow manage to overlook the name ‘Michelle’, and brace myself to see my aunt walking down the hallway. But the penny finally drops when the woman who appears is in her forties, Chinese, and visibly not my aunt.
Jim – if that’s who is, to be honest I am no longer sure – continues, with an arm around his wife, ‘These young men have a question for you.’ Laughing. ‘Go on. Ask her.’
I feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to lie down on the floor and sleep for a very long time. This intensifies when Ranjit turns to me and whispers, ‘He’s got jungle fever.’ And then: ‘He’s of the Asian persuasion, innit.’ But I also know I have to carry on, to find a non-degrading exit or at least a way out that doesn’t involve us getting arrested. I find the energy to continue from somewhere. ‘We just needed to check your age, madam. For our records.’
‘I’m sorry, but who are you with?’
Dammit, Michelle is sober. ‘The council.’ Suddenly, my mouth feels as if it is full of cotton wool. ‘Birmingham Metropolitan Council.’
‘You mean Birmingham City Council?’ Busted. ‘Can I see some ID?’
Ranjit, to my mortification, opens his mouth. ‘Of course, madam,’ he says, now seemingly mimicking a BBC newsreader. ‘I’ll just get it from the company vehicle.’
There is no way he is going to leave me there alone. ‘I’ll give you a hand, Frank.’
We turn on our heels, breaking into a run, and make the least discreet, least competent getaway in history: the stereo blasting out a thousand watts of bhangra as soon as we get going, the 460bhp engine almost blowing birds out of the trees, a bright yellow car with an orange Khalistan flag flying out the back window and a private number plate identifying us as JAT 14, and turning the wrong way into the cul-de-sac before having to turn past the house again.
I can’t, I’m afraid, account for what happened next in great detail. I think I may have taken another drag of another cigarette to calm my nerves. Or perhaps running to the car made the chemicals warping my brain have a deeper effect. But both of us were so stoned that despite travelling in a car with 3D satellite navigation and surround-view and night vision with pedestrian recognition, we got completely lost. I remember getting out of the car at a series of roundabouts, each one looking exactly like the one before – with a sign pointing out the A38 and the M6, and a branch of McDonald’s standing temptingly on a corner nearby. There probably isn’t anywhere that is particularly good to get lost when you’re totally wasted, but Spaghetti Junction must surely be among the worst.
Nevertheless, we somehow managed to make our way into Birmingham city centre, and ended up in a dimly lit bar playing a mixture of hip hop and bhangra, and serving a selection of lethally potent cocktails. I remember Ranjit taking off his wedding ring and ordering champagne at our table. I remember being surrounded by a phalanx of Asian girls, some of them half our age, all of whom seemed to know Ranjit well. And God, if weed has changed since I was a youth, so have Asian women in the Midlands. They were unrecognisable from the ones I recalled from my youth, who would only meet in libraries in case they were seen with a boy.
The first one I talked to asked me what kind of girls I liked, to which I, in avoidance, asked, ‘What kind of boys do you like?’ She replied, ‘Men in glasses,’ before, ironically, removing mine and sticking her tongue down my throat. I managed to extricate myself, only to end up in conversation with a friend of hers who stroked the biceps I had developed since taking up weights on Ranjit’s advice, wanted to know if I had a girlfriend, and when I said that I had, asked, ‘Does she let you fuck her up the arse? Because I would.’
I was, despite my utter inebriation, scandalised. To think that just a few decades ago, these girls’ grandmothers or mothers were in the Punjab, and if they so much as exchanged a glance with a member of the opposite sex, let alone made signs at a boy from the balcony of their house, would face being married off into oblivion.
The next thing I remember is being in Ranjit’s penthouse flat in the city centre and gawping at the terrible art on his walls: massive Jack Vettriano repro prints hung like installations. The door knobs were gold, the furniture was white, and the table on which he produced two lines of coke, two lines of ketamine and a line of MDMA was made of glass. We snorted one each. I’m not sure who ended up with what, but Ranjit disappeared into a bedroom with one of the three ‘friends’ he had bought back, another curled up and fell asleep on the sofa, while the third removed her underwear and determinedly undid my jeans.
My remorse, afterwards, was instant, but perhaps not all that deep because after I had taken a shower, to get rid of the smell and the guilt, still buzzing on everything I had smoked and snorted over the course of the evening, the girl who had been asleep joined me in the bathroom and, to use one of Ranjit’s favourite expressions, ‘put it in her mouth’.
I’m not sure how I got home. Maybe I got a cab back. But the next thing I recall is standing outside the shop, my eyes red, my mouth dry, feeling an urge to listen to Pink Floyd on a loop, and bemoaning the fact that fast food outlets close so early in the West Midlands. At some point I must have recalled I ran a corner shop, as I remember eating a microwaveable burger at the counter – one of the items, along with much of the medication shelf, that my father would stock via the local pound store, buying ten or twenty at a time for a pound each and flogging them for £1.59.
The cheeseburger tasted amazing; it may as well have been something served at The Fat Duck as far as I was concerned. So much so that I put a second into the microwave before I’d finished the first. And then I remember freezing in horror as I heard Mum coming down the stairs. I’m not sure what I was most worried about: Mum seeing that I had eaten beef, her seeing me stoned (she had never even seen me drunk), or picking up on the fact that I had been smoking. In my confusion I grabbed the air freshener Mum kept behind the till and sprayed it all over myself. And then I hid, switching off the light, trying to conceal myself between the chiller and the freezer.
I might have got away with it if the microwave hadn’t pinged when she peered in. She switched on the light to find me slumped on the floor against a wall, shielding the remains of my cheeseburger as if protecting a prized haul from bandi
ts.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
A long pause. ‘What time is it?’ I slurred back.
‘Half four.’
Shit. Morning already. ‘I’m tying my shoelaces,’ I added by way of explanation.
‘What’s that you’re eating?’ She sniffed the air.
‘A veggie . . . burger,’ I lied.
‘And what’s that on your shirt?’
I looked down and there were patches of red lipstick all down the front. I blinked. ‘Just some ketchup.’
11 – TIME OUT (LONDON)
THE EDWARDIAN DINING room, with its crystal mouldings and Boucheresque murals, was designed to dazzle. But Surinder was more taken by details regular diners would have considered banal: tablecloths starched and ironed to cardboard stiffness; people scooping soup from bowls in smooth, outward movements, sipping from the sides of spoons. On the table next to her, a lady was wiping her plate with a piece of bread, which itself was on the end of a fork, while straight opposite, a man was eating a banana with a knife and fork. White people would, it seems, do anything not to touch their food with their hands.
Then there was the menu she had been given to examine while Jim visited the bathroom. She guessed, with her schoolgirl French, that ‘carré d’agneau Sarladaise’ might be a duck salad of some variety, and that ‘apéritifs maison’ were the house drinks. But what was the difference between ‘les hors d’oeuvres’ and ‘les entrées’? What on earth was ‘croustade de langoustines’? And as for ‘tête de veau’ – she knew it translated as either ‘new head’ or ‘head of eyes’ or ‘head of a cow’. But the idea of anyone dining on any of these things made her giggle, just as she had giggled when Jim had proposed dinner with the question, ‘Cantonese or Polynesian?’
She had suggested he decide: whatever he wanted was fine with her. In the end he had picked this fashionable French place on the edge of Soho, once apparently the haunt of Whistler, a famous painter whose work she pretended to be familiar with, and staffed by waiters who spoke English in Parisian accents so thick that when one slid towards Surinder as if on wheels and asked if she wanted a drink, she responded, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak French,’ before adding, ‘Je ne parle pas le français.’
He repeated himself slowly and gravely. ‘Non . . . non . . . can I get zee laydee a dreeenk?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She blushed and glanced in the direction of the bathroom into which Jim had disappeared. ‘I think I will wait for my fiancé.’
The waiter withdrew, walking backwards for his first few steps, bowing slightly, unaware that being able to utter the exotic word ‘fiancé’, a word with no apparent counterpart in Punjabi, gave Surinder more of a thrill than any of his fine wines would have done.
She took a deep breath and, alone for the first time in London, tried to digest the events that had led her to this table. Jim turning up at school one home time in his car, offering her a lift home. Jim turning up a week later even though he had been firmly rebuffed, suggesting he take her to visit the perfume counter at Beatties. A month later, he was still at it: driving along as she walked home, pleading for a moment or two of her time. She was flattered and touched, but, more than anything else, terrified. She knew of just one Sikh girl who had ‘married out’, and her family had cut her off completely – when her mother talked of her children, she referred to three, not four children. It was worse than if the daughter had died: it was like she had never been born. The girl herself had been cut off by all her relations and friends; no one would have her around in case she influenced children and others. She was a leper. And she had only married out of her caste. A gora? People had been killed for less.
But Dhanda’s request changed everything. The desperados and losers she had to meet on Sunday afternoons were one thing – but that fat creepy old man? It was sickening. Horrifying. And when Jim reappeared and suggested lunch that week, she accepted his invitation, surprising him with her sudden acquiescence. There followed another visit to the cafe. Then a meeting in the Central Library. A kiss on the village green in Tettenhall. An afternoon in the back row of the Odeon when she should have been at school. Then, in quick succession, a tearful confession to Jim about her family’s plans; Jim’s horror and suggestion that they elope to London; her insistence that she could not elope without getting married first; Jim’s assurance that they would marry as soon as they arrived in the south; an engagement ring in the form of an elastic band; her mother’s convenient suggestion that she spend the summer in Southall; and then, the journey to London.
On the train, Surinder didn’t have time to look out of the window, to watch the cooling towers and gasometers give way to green countryside, any more than Tanvir seemed to have time to wave goodbye. She bolted into the toilet as soon as the train pulled away and began the task of applying make-up, squeezing a pea-sized amount of foundation on to the back of her hand, as she had seen her mother do before weddings, dabbing it all over her face like a cream, applying black eyeliner, flicking it out at the corners.
It was harder than it looked and her concentration kept on being interrupted by passengers knocking on the door, like her sister had kept rapping on the bathroom door the night before, as she had washed her hair with lemon shampoo and rinsed it with water and vinegar. She had brought her mother’s sewing scissors along to cut her hair, but in the end she didn’t have the nerve, worrying that the results would be worse than what she had, and instead just rearranged it in a manner that her mother would have regarded as vulgar.
She had spent days and nights fretting about the details of her elopement, worrying about the arrangements, about whether Jim would actually turn up on time in Coventry to meet her, and almost having a cardiac arrest when it looked like her mother would not let her get on the train. But in the event she was the one who nearly missed the stop. An Asian man of Tanvir’s age, who had kept trying to catch her eye, helped her off the train, and she saw Jim padding anxiously up and down at the other end of the platform. But she didn’t dare wave at him until the man had withdrawn back into the carriage. Jim eventually spotted her and ran to greet her – smart in a blue-striped suit, a white cotton shirt, a cotton cravat. He kissed her on the lips, right there, in front of everyone, tasting of strawberries, and a little bit of the beer he had been drinking in the pub as he waited. Surinder stiffening as he did so, keeping her eyes open, scanning the area for spies.
Jim caught her and launched into a version of the speech he had made dozens of times before. He reminded her that she was eighteen now, an adult, and could therefore do what she wanted, that legally speaking her family could not drag her back. She knew he was right, and understood that a reliable friend of his was going to hand over the letter they had written together to her aunt in Euston, that her family would have no reason to call the authorities. But she just couldn’t relax, and in Jim’s car she slumped down in her seat as low as possible, hoping, like a bank robber, to avoid detection.
However, a few hours later, sitting on a pavement table outside a Soho wine bar, having dropped off her belongings at a luxury hotel in Mayfair, allowing Jim’s fingers to linger in her mouth as he fed her French fries, the paranoia began to subside. The anonymity of London, its sheer size, soothed her. In Wolverhampton a white man would never have been able to sit outside with his Indian girlfriend: the National Front would have got to them, if the Sikhs didn’t get there first. However, here no one seemed to care. She felt invisible among the crowds of black men ‘shooting crap’ on the pavement and office workers on the way to work.
There was also the dizzying, paradoxical familiarity of it all. The capital was new to her and she was beginning to realise that her family’s references to Southall as ‘London’ were ludicrous. But she recognised the black taxi cabs and red buses and shops from films and TV shows and magazines, while the plaques on the walls of houses alerted her, reassuringly, to the former residences of Henry James, Mary Shelley and other authors she had read. Then: the startling diversity
. Everyone she saw seemed to look different, had their own way of dressing, and the variety of it all made her feel less self-conscious about her unfashionable long hair, her skin colour, her home-made dress.
Nevertheless, Surinder leapt at Jim’s suggestion, in Carnaby Street, that they pop into a boutique to look at new clothes. She had planned her elopement primarily in the form of outfits, and had made several dresses for the weekend, under the pretence of producing outfits for Mr Dhanda, telling herself as she sewed fringe and appliqué flowers on to her creations that making your own dresses was better than buying them, because they were truly expressive of your own feelings and taste, and fitted more closely. But when the opportunity came, Jim pushing a tenner into her closed fist, she took it.
He had hung around as she tried things on, a pair of flared trousers, followed by a small rib sweater with short sleeves, proffering opinions and suggesting alternative items. However, his ideas – a bikini, a near-backless, fire-engine red swimsuit – were too much for a girl who had not worn jeans in public before; for a girl, moreover, who knew all too well that this was the season of the floor-length skirt and the midi, which looked best without an inch of leg showing. And when he suggested he leave her to it, while he did some shopping of his own, and they meet up later in the wine bar opposite, she was touched by his consideration.
The truth was that she had given up on Jim endless times. There was, for instance, the moment when Mrs Flanagan had noticed her grades were slipping, had called her in and said, ‘I hope I haven’t made a mistake with you, young girl.’ Then Jim’s relentless efforts to get her into bed, even hiring a hotel in Ironbridge one afternoon for the purpose. But now she was beginning to feel the rightness of her decision. All her life she had been trained to put her husband first, and taught the importance of duty. But she had swapped it all for a man who cared about her feelings, who put her first.
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