Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘It’s hard to cook at my age,’ said the wife. To be honest, it seemed hard at her age for her even to speak, and to breathe. ‘And we’ve been coming here for ever. Must be nearly seventy years!’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Freya. ‘Congratulations. And we hear the hotel is under new management.’

  ‘Oh, yes, she’s a lovely lady. Mrs Barnes.’

  ‘I thought it was Banares,’ her husband corrected. ‘Glamorous lady. From Spain, I believe.’

  I laughed to myself. I had recently watched an internet video entitled ‘Shit Punjabi Girls Say’ where one of the lines, along with ‘Mum, I’m at the library’ had been, ‘People sometimes think I’m Spanish.’

  And then – whoah – there she was.

  I think some Asians will understand when I say I sensed my aunt was in the room before I even looked up. We have an almost supernatural ability to seek each other out, this ethnic version of Gaydar enabling us to sense where all the Asians are in a particular crowd in an instant, and allowing us to work out where a person may be from, how rich they are, their caste, religion and marital status, from the briefest glance. This was one of the reasons I had decided that my aunt should be left alone. If she had managed to disappear despite this, then she must have really wanted to disappear.

  When I dared risk a more direct glance, what I saw left me breathless. It was not just that my aunt looked like my mum, though she did, in her eyes, nose, chin and lips. But she resembled my mother if my mother had been Photoshopped. There was no sign of grey in her short hair, whereas my mother’s hair was almost completely grey and had never been cut. Meanwhile, her skin was clear, her teeth looked whitened, she didn’t need spectacles, and she was thin, ridiculously thin. From the angle I was looking at her, you would have thought she was in her late forties. And her complexion was such that, yes, she might have been Latin.

  Freya, who had spotted that I had spotted her, seemed no less stunned. She nodded along as Mary and Harry continued talking, but her eyes were fixed on Surinder, whose clothes also couldn’t have been more different from my mother’s pastel-coloured salwar kameezes. She was wearing a blue suit, a tight white blouse with a certain amount of cleavage showing, and a pencil skirt revealing calves that suggested hours of gym work. When Freya finally extracted herself and managed to speak, she said, ‘She’s had work done.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I remembered something Ranjit had said about the appeal of Asian women. ‘Black don’t crack, innit.’ Surinder appeared to be going over some kind of list with a male colleague who couldn’t have been over twenty, but who nevertheless seemed ancient compared to the remainder of the staff.

  At this point, the room began to spin. Literally. The sliding partition that divided us from the main dining room was pushed away, maybe at Surinder’s instigation, and a dining room was suddenly revealed, with rows and circles of tables marked out with signs declaring ‘CLARKE’ and ‘MURRAY’. From where I was standing I spotted a small table in the middle of the grand arrangement marked ‘BANGA’, and in the background I could hear Mud playing ‘Lonely This Christmas’. My aunt hurried past us, not making even momentary eye contact as she did so. The last time I had wanted to eat this little, we had been in Pizza Hut.

  ‘Think I might have left the van unlocked,’ I said, employing the exit signal we had agreed upon.

  ‘Can’t imagine anyone breaking into it here,’ replied Freya in a monotone.

  ‘No.’ I wobbled my reindeer antlers in her direction. ‘I mean, I might, you know, have left the van unlocked.’

  ‘Oh, right. You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A squeeze of the hand. ‘Don’t you think we should have a chat?’

  ‘Who’s to say she wants to talk to us?’

  ‘But . . . we have come all this way.’

  ‘I thought we had an agreement.’

  ‘I know, I know, but . . .’ Her big brown eyes. ‘It’s Christmas Day. Aren’t you curious?’

  I was curious, but also terrified. I needed, to use some of the phrases Freya’s self-help authors would have used, to ‘withdraw’ and ‘process’. I felt tense. And I would have gone right then if Freya hadn’t been there, if the alternative wasn’t taking her for a Christmas lunch at a motorway branch of McDonald’s.

  ‘Look,’ offered Freya. ‘How about this. We stay for a couple of courses, make an attempt to talk to her, we don’t have to say who we are, just congratulate her on her hotel, on the meal or something, and then we go home. At least that way, when you write to her, she knows who you are.’

  I sighed. ‘If I write to her.’

  ‘Yes, if.’

  ‘OK. But promise me it won’t go beyond that.’

  ‘Promise.’ I grabbed her champagne flute and emptied its anaemic contents into my mouth. ‘At least we know we won’t be getting scurvy soon.’

  The fact of the hotel’s refurbishment was most evident in the reception area, though the sophistication of the overall effect of the spotlights and artfully discarded copies of Country Life was rather undermined by a brass plaque above the main desk. It celebrated the opening of the extension by a married government minister who subsequently, if memory serves, had to resign for performing a sexual act in public with a rent boy.

  Freya approached the teenager manning the desk. ‘Hello.’ A bright smile. ‘We’re here for the Christmas lunch. Which was absolutely lovely, by the way.’ A lie. ‘I was wondering if we could have a quick word with the manager.’

  The receptionist looked startled. Clearly, having to converse with customers was not something she had bargained for that afternoon. ‘I’m afraid the manageress is not available today,’ she blushed. ‘It’s Christmas Day.’

  Freya continued. ‘Oh, we thought we saw her earlier.’ She leant against me. ‘We’re not looking to complain. It’s just that my boyfriend . . .’ An arm through mine. ‘. . . just proposed to me. And we were wondering if we could ask the manager about the possibility of booking our wedding reception.’

  I could have been sick all over the brand-new cream rug we were standing on. What the fuck did she think she was doing? This wasn’t a game. But it turned out that Freya simply knew what would work.

  ‘Congratulations,’ simpered the girl behind the desk. ‘I’ll just see if the manageress is available.’

  I began remonstrating to Freya as soon as she left, but before I managed to articulate a fraction of my fury, there was my aunt, striding towards us, bearing a bottle of champagne and a teddy bear with the hotel’s name emblazoned upon it. Maybe those Surprise, Surprise fantasies weren’t so unrealistic after all.

  ‘What wonderful news.’ She spoke English without a hint of an Indian or Wolverhampton accent. ‘A Christmas engagement. Just wonderful.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Freya, flushing, I hoped, at least a little out of embarrassment. ‘And would the hotel be available in the summer?’

  ‘Absolutely! I hear you’re here for lunch. But I would love to arrange a tour of our new wedding pavilion before you go.’

  ‘Oh, that’s OK. We just wanted to say hello. Make contact. And maybe leave our details?’

  ‘Let me take a note.’

  The child receptionist handed over a stack of Post-it notes.

  ‘My name is Freya Tunstall. And my fiancé’s name – his name is Arjan Banga. That’s A.R.J.A.N. and Banga, as in the son of Tanvir Singh Banga. And Kamaljit Kaur Bains.’

  Freya said this very quickly, and if there was a hint of recognition on Surinder’s face, I didn’t spot it. ‘I see,’ she said after writing down the name in full. ‘Well, if you have a minute or two, maybe you had better come and talk to me about your wedding in my office.’

  Walking into the manager’s office was like stepping off a film set and into the parking lot which housed it. The budget for the refurbishment clearly hadn’t extended this far. Wires webbed the walls and the floor. Behind her desk you could see that someone had made a desultory attempt to clear up a spillage but given up
halfway through and left a pile of napkins on a shelf. And it was only after Surinder had apologised for the untidiness – ‘I’m of the view that one trip to clean ten coffee cups is much more efficient than ten trips to clean one’ – and shouted ‘Jessie!’ that we noticed a small dog among the detritus.

  Freya immediately grabbed the beast, a small black-and-tan Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and began cooing over him. Her inability to walk past a cat or dog without petting them was something I usually found charming, but at this moment it added to my simmering resentment, for it meant the awkwardness of the explanation fell to me. This was typical of Freya, I seethed: starting something and then leaving me to pick up the pieces.

  ‘We were actually supposed to get married this week,’ I mumbled. ‘We were engaged.’ It was too complicated. ‘I’m sorry for surprising you like this, it probably wasn’t what you were expecting on Christmas Day.’

  Surinder didn’t respond. Instead she did something I could never imagine my mother doing. She took off her jacket, opened the door behind her desk, which revealed a small roof terrace, pulled out an ashtray from her desk drawer, a packet of cigarettes from her handbag and, after offering us a couple, lit a fag.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  She took two deep drags, making sure to blow the smoke behind her. I noticed that the rest of the office was littered with empty cups, stuffed promotional toys and a dirty gym towel. If it is true that a cluttered office is a sign of a cluttered mind, then Surinder was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Blowing the smoke away from the smoke detector, which I noticed had been taped over anyway, she said, ‘So, Kamaljit and Tanvir got together in the end?’

  She said ‘Kamaljit’ in the English way, closer to ‘camel’ than ‘kumul’. And she asked the question without a hint of the gushing we’d got when she thought we were customers. Was she happy about it? Had it come as a surprise? No idea. The tone reminded me of a friend of mine who when presented with a young child would always say, flatly, ‘Oh, it’s a baby,’ before handing it back.

  I gave her the basic facts. The year of my parents’ marriage. The year of my birth. The details of their shopkeeping. My only-child status. Where I went to university. And then, the facts of my father’s death.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette, reapplying lipstick, smudging it with a tissue, only to pull out another cigarette and start smoking again.

  ‘And how is your grandmother?’

  ‘Bibi?’

  ‘Mataji. Mrs Bains.’

  ‘I called her Bibi. I’m afraid she passed away. I was about four. Must have been around 1980. I’m sorry.’

  She bit her thumbnail. Her BlackBerry rang. She glanced impatiently at the screen, diverted the call to voicemail and set it to silent. There followed a barrage of questions. How is your mother? What kind of cancer? What stage? What happened to your father? Did Kamaljit know we had come? Throughout, her BlackBerry vibrating plaintively.

  I guess this was something else I hadn’t expected about reunions: the sheer amount of interrogation. You think the meeting will involve an exchange of information and revelation, but the whole thing reminded me of taking Mum to an appointment with her oncologist, a doctor firing question after question from the other side of a desk. I had a million questions of my own. Did she have children? What happened with Jim? Was that a keyring for a Porsche on her desk? But I didn’t get a chance to ask a thing. And then there was a knock on the door. She stubbed out her cigarette and, waving away the smoke like a guilty teenager, snapped, ‘Come in.’

  It was the boy she’d been bossing around in the dining room.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, Mrs B, but you’re needed in the kitchen.’

  ‘Not something you can deal with?’

  ‘Afraid, it’s the chef.’

  ‘And?’ Impatience in her tone.

  ‘It’s Terry.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath. Swearing was something else I couldn’t imagine my mother doing. She turned to us and in a headmistressy tone added, ‘I’m sorry about this. I will be right back. Please do wait.’

  As soon as she left, Freya put down the dog, went behind Surinder’s desk and examined the label inside Surinder’s blazer. ‘I knew it. Yves Saint Laurent.’

  It struck me as a moronic thing to focus on. Freya returned to her seat.

  ‘What do you make of her then?’

  ‘Cold,’ I replied. ‘She seems cold.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounded disappointed.

  ‘Did you see how her tone switched the moment she realised we weren’t customers? Also, it felt like a job interview. I almost expected her to ask me what I would consider my main weakness.’ The dog sniffed at my trousers. I tapped him away.

  ‘You’re being harsh. This must be a shock to her. She has just found out that her mother has died, that her sister has cancer, that she has a brother-in-law and that he is dead.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I responded dismissively. ‘But she hasn’t even offered us any tea.’

  Looking back, this was a strange thing to say. If anything I found the Punjabi obsession with plying visitors with food and drink annoying. I guess what I was trying to convey was that Surinder didn’t strike me as being like my family. Overbearing hospitality is, after all, one of the defining features of our community life. It is impossible to visit a stranger’s house without the whole family being dragged down to welcome you, small children being sent into the garden to pick olives. Spreading your fingers out over an already full plate of food is our equivalent of the handshake. But my aunt had just sat there having a fag. I was beginning to understand why my parents might have decided to have nothing to do with her, and when Freya responded by saying ‘You sound like your mother,’ I lashed out.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand. This is my family, real life, not The Muppet’s fucking Christmas Carol.’

  Freya’s eyes brimmed with tears. We were right back to the moment with the leaflet for the sheltered housing. But instead of making me feel apologetic, they exacerbated my irritation. She had dragged me into an awkward situation I hadn’t wanted to get into, ignored my reservations and was now trying to make me feel bad.

  ‘Do you want to go then?’ asked Freya, sadly.

  ‘Yes. I want to go.’

  I grabbed a piece of letterheaded paper from Surinder’s desk, on which my aunt had written our names in spidery handwriting, and scrawled my email and telephone number with a short note: ‘Drop me a line if you want to.’ I left it under her laptop. Then we left.

  On the way back, I seethed, didn’t say a word until we got on the motorway. Then, staring out at the empty road, I made the speech I had intended to make all those weeks earlier at Pizza Hut. It all came out fluently, including a full confession about what had happened that night with Ranjit. And actually, this is the best way to end something, on the road, not in a restaurant. Lack of eye contact makes it easier to be frank. And when you have finished, done the brutal deed, you can drop the person off, as I did with Freya at her parents’, and literally move on.

  When I got back home, there was an email on my computer. The subject line was empty but it said:

  Dearest Kamaljit

  Your son and his fiancée came to see me today. They are a wonderful couple. I wish I had had more time to talk to them, but it has been hectic at work today. I’m so sorry about Tanvir. Looking back now, I can see that he always loved you, and it is a sign of my self-absorption that I didn’t notice at the time. I’m so sorry you have not been well. I do not know if you wish to be in touch, but if there’s anything I can help with, please just ask.

  Yours, Surinder.

  I printed it out and handed over the note to my mother, with a translation, struggling with the words for ‘loved’ and ‘self-absorption’. She was quiet for a long while, but eventually she spoke.

  ‘So you and Freya are getting married now?’

  1
3 – EXPRESS & STAR

  NOT EVERYONE ENVIED Tanvir when, within a week of Surinder’s elopement, a day of being married to Kamaljit, and hours of Mrs Bains’ tear-strewn departure to her sister’s in Southall, he found himself running Bains Stores. Even by the standards of the gloom that permanently besets the institution of the British small shop, independent retail was besieged in the 1970s, what with everything from the introduction of VAT to decimalisation and mounting competition from supermarkets. Meanwhile, it says something about Blakenfields that the biggest event of the decade was the demolition of a major chemical factory, and barely a week passed without someone writing in the newspapers that ‘something had to be done for the Great British shopkeeper’.

  But when Tanvir came across these reports – and he became a voracious reader of the newspapers and magazines he stocked in increasing quantities – he did not fret. Running a shop was a relentless challenge, and he had, admittedly, despaired the first time he pushed a trolley down supermarket aisles the width of coffins, gawping at stacks of baked beans priced twopence cheaper than what he could offer, presenting an avocado pear to his wife as if it were a Martian meteorite. But the panic subsided.

  It slowly became apparent to Tanvir that supermarkets were not immune to the challenges faced by small shops. Housewives did not, like the press seemed to assume, examine the US Department of Agriculture world commodity forecasts once a week to keep track of price changes, and the fact was that the small shop had many advantages over the supermarket. It could generally ignore controls on opening hours: in practice, you were unlikely to be prosecuted for opening late and on Sunday. Small shops didn’t have the burden of employing security guards: you are less likely to steal from someone you know. They had the advantage of convenience: if you found yourself short of milk for breakfast one evening, you were not going to go all the way to the supermarket. Also, when confronted with the complexities of retail, the small-shop owner had more options open to him than the supermarket manager. He could work longer, and could, if necessary, delay paying labour (himself) to balance the books.