Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘Actually, I know it quite well,’ said Surinder.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Will I recognise her?’ she asked.

  ‘Mum? She’ll be the Indian one.’

  Surinder looked down the twee village high street, a slice of the Home Counties in the West Midlands. ‘I see what you mean.’

  ‘Want me to come in with you?’

  ‘Of course, darling. Of course.’

  She cleared her throat, and, putting her arm through mine, I went from feeling like a best man to feeling like the father of a bride.

  The cafe was even busier than it had been an hour earlier, when I had dropped Mum off. The young waitresses could be heard arguing with the kitchen about absent orders. The queue of customers was threatening to snake out of the front door. In the middle of it all, my mother, taking up a table for four, showing no interest in the magazines that had been laid on for her perusal; the coffee I’d bought her, judging from the pristine latte art that still graced the foam, untouched. Peering over her glasses, she caught our eye as soon as we walked in, and I held my breath as I waited for the first words to be uttered.

  ‘Did your train arrive on time?’ Mum asked, in Punjabi.

  ‘Hahnji,’ replied Surinder. She spoke the following sentence in English, albeit with an Indian accent. ‘Reduced Sunday service today. Engineering work.’

  ‘Hai. Hai,’ tutted Mum. ‘And tickets are so expensive nowadays, hunna.’

  Then, apropos of nothing, Surinder, still sporting her sunglasses, lifted up her dog and said, ‘Ah Jessie hai.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mum, awkwardly. She disliked dogs but found it in herself to shake his paw. ‘Kiddha, Jessie Singh.’

  The exchange came to a halt. It was not clear at this stage whether English or Punjabi was going to be the dominant language, and standing opposite each other, the contrast between the sisters made my heart go out to my mother. She looked so tired next to Surinder – and it wasn’t just because of the viral illness she had just endured. Thousands of hours of shop work, her chemo, all of it was suddenly visible in her face and stoop. Her hair used to be lush and glistening as a child, I wanted to touch it all the time, but now it was reduced to a sad rat’s tail.

  In the end the deadlock was broken by a small child on a nearby table. He sneezed. Loudly and violently. As a father castigated his offspring for lack of manners, a flash of anxiety ran across my mother’s face and she said, ‘Oh, we’d better stay here, for now.’

  Surinder removed her sunglasses, revealing that her mascara had smudged.

  ‘Oh, pehnji,’ she proffered in fluent Punjabi. ‘You’re exactly how I remember you.’

  The two sisters stood embracing each other in the middle of the cafe, blocking customers from coming in and going out. A white woman in the queue tutted, I thought how nice it would have been to tell Freya about the meeting, and, having apologetically ordered another latte and a couple of random expensive items on the menu, I grabbed the dog and took it for a walk.

  King Charles spaniels are meant to be, by temperament, easy-going. Highly affectionate, apparently. But Jessie Singh wasn’t. Once parted from his owner, if he wasn’t barking or whining, he was snapping at old ladies and young children who wanted to pet him, jumping at strangers who had no interest in petting him, starting fights with passing dogs, and, more than anything else, crapping everywhere. I’ve never been good with animals, and it turns out I am even less proficient at dealing with their faeces. Every time Jessie soiled a path or lawn, I disowned him, walking determinedly ahead, pretending he wasn’t mine. But it transpires letting a dog crap on a village green is one of the worst things you can do in Tettenhall. The owner of a border collie saw me shirking my responsibility and shouted, ‘PICK IT UP!’ when I attempted to walk away. ‘PICK IT UP!’ they continued as I ran on and Jessie followed. ‘PICK IT UP. PICK IT UP! PICK UP YOUR DOG’S SHIT!’

  I returned to the cafe sooner than expected, sweating slightly, and didn’t object too forcefully when my mother, visibly more relaxed in Surinder’s company, though still not having touched any of the food or drink I’d bought, suggested leaving.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said, gesturing at the cafe, which she kept on referring to as ‘the coffee’. ‘I’ll feed you both some proper food, not this gora rabbit feed.’

  If my aunt hesitated it was only for a moment – it would have been easier to deny a toddler an ice cream on a sunny day. In the car park, as we realised there was one seat too few in the van, we had one of those stand-offs that punctuate Punjabi family life – Mum offering to get in the back, Surinder offering to get in the back, me calling a local taxi firm, which, employing Muslims, refused to take the dog.

  In the end, Surinder surprised us with an unexpected solution: it was decided that I would get in the back with Jessie, while Surinder drove us to the shop. In the driving seat, her sunglasses replaced by red-rimmed designer spectacles, soaring through Wolverhampton at a pace that betrayed her as a one-time Londoner, she was transformed, as chatty as she had previously been taciturn.

  ‘Remember, pehnji, when they began changing the livery of the buses?’ she asked as she pulled up behind a blue bus. ‘When I left, they were just beginning to appear blue and cream.’ The precision of her Punjabi took me by surprise. She spoke like a native. I’d not yet accepted, I suppose, that she was a native.

  ‘Oh God, yes,’ Mum laughed. ‘People thought Wolverhampton was being invaded by Birmingham.’

  ‘You remember the cafe that used to stand there?’

  ‘The Italian one?’

  ‘Yes. The Milano.’

  ‘Always wanted to go there.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘Mataji would have taken her rolling pin and beaten me to death.’ She turned to look at her sister. ‘And, what, you did?’

  I caught a mischievous glance in the rear-view mirror. She laughed, and then, distracted by the sight of a branch of the State Bank of India, gasped. ‘My God, right in the middle of town. Who would have thought. The Asians really have taken over, haven’t they?’

  I saw an opportunity to defend Wolverhampton. ‘Actually,’ I shouted above the din of my aunt crunching the gears, ‘Jaguar Land Rover are building a big new engine plant in the north of the town. And they’re an Indian company now. You could say that the Indians who took the jobs are now creating the jobs.’

  Surinder slowed down for some red lights. ‘Look at that. Exactly the same as it was.’

  From the back I couldn’t see what she was referring to. All I could make out was an unmodernised townhouse, near the centre of town, whose only defining feature was that it was maintained a little better than the houses around it.

  ‘You don’t remember that house, pehnji?’ asked Surinder.

  ‘No,’ said Mum.

  ‘That’s where Enoch Powell lived.’

  My mother barely blinked, but I was taken aback. So this was the constituency home that Powell was living in when he had complained of living ‘within the proverbial stone’s throw of streets which went black’. The constituency home to which the post office assigned a van to make a special run several times a day following his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, so deluged was he with postal expressions of support. The house where, despite the raised temperature, a guard posted around the clock to protect him from retaliatory attacks, Powell found time to garden and read political biographies aloud in bed to his wife each night. In short, one of the most significant houses in the city, and yet it was not marked with a plaque and I had walked past it a thousand times on the way to and from school without realising its significance. It was opposite a care home that I knew was run by a Housing Association providing supported housing to ‘South Asian women’ suffering from mental ill health.

  ‘I wonder what Powell would have made of that,’ I remarked.

  The lights changed and Surinder pulled away. ‘Not much, to be honest,’ she replied in a mixture of Punjabi and English. ‘Do you think he was racist? I
mean, he said things which were racist in modern terms. But his point that many immigrants didn’t want to integrate? Just take a look around.’

  My aunt was, I think, referring to one of several new temples we were driving past, which seemed to sprout up every time members of an executive committee fell out. And the slight needled. My faith was a wavering thing, but I’d recently, in my distress, been finding solace in visits to the gurdwara. Also I had never heard an Asian defend Powell before. My father began voting Tory in the 1980s – though that was, I suspect, because Dhanda had become a Labour councillor. For most people of my generation, Powell was simply a byword for racism.

  However, my mother didn’t seem to share my discomfort. ‘Jes,’ she responded, attempting some English. ‘Bulberhampton full of bloody Iraqi now.’

  I was pretty sure this wasn’t what my aunt had meant. But we were saved from any further extrapolation by Jessie Singh, who marked the return of his owner to Blakenfields after an absence of more than forty years by vomiting all over the back of the van and her nephew’s Levi’s.

  Surinder was so mortified by Jessie, and so preoccupied with the task of cleaning up his mess, and, I guess, Blakenfields had changed so much, that I don’t think she realised that we had asked her to pull into the car park of Dhanda’s superstore until she was approached by Mr Dhanda himself.

  ‘Sas ri akal, Surinder Kaur,’ he croaked. He wasn’t in his wheelchair, was instead leaning against Ranjit, who I had been avoiding for weeks and who by way of acknowledgement of what he would have called my ‘skankery’ sucked his teeth. His father, clean-shaven and sporting a large blue turban, continued in Punjabi, ‘Today is a blessed day. Your father would have been so happy to see you two sisters together again. I am so glad that I have lived to see this. So glad. What a blessed day.’

  There was a long pause and I wondered for a moment if Surinder had not recognised him. She’d obviously seen him – it was impossible, given his girth, not to notice him. I remained uncertain as Surinder, tissues still in her hand, enquired, ‘What happened to the tower block?’

  Dhanda, determined not to be ignored, or oblivious to the fact that he was being ignored, cleared his throat and answered, ‘You know you’re no longer young when you’re outliving buildings you saw being put up.’

  ‘That is Dhanda’s shop?’ resumed Surinder, as if Dhanda wasn’t there. ‘The whole of it?’

  ‘Yes, well, God has been kind to us,’ said Dhanda. He peered at Surinder’s face through his filmy eyes. Looked her up and down in a way that reminded me of his son. ‘It looks like God has been kind to you. You’re looking very . . . healthy. Very healthy, Surinder. And that is the thing that matters most. Good family. Good health. Good health for your family.’

  At this point Dhanda held out his hand as if to bless Surinder, and as my aunt, towering over him, failed to bow her head in response, and then walked off, claiming she had a call to make, any doubt over whether my aunt was deliberately ignoring him dissipated. As a teenager, I had hated this obligation to bow down before elders, not least because it meant I couldn’t fetch a can of Coke from the chiller, or get to the bus stop without my carefully sculpted bouffant being messed up. But I would have no more dared to decline such a blessing than swear at my own mother. It was, without question, a diss. A palpable diss. And Ranjit acknowledged it as such when he sucked his teeth again and, spotting that I had a small dog under one arm and Surinder’s handbag in another, added, ‘Suits you, bro.’

  Dhanda retreated slowly, waddling, leaning against Ranjit. My mother took my arm, and it took us a minute or two to catch up with Surinder, my mother’s stride a fraction of the length of her sister’s.

  When we got to the shop, Surinder was standing on the pavement opposite. She looked wan. She pointed out an art deco portrait of a woman in the window of the hairdresser’s next door, concealed behind a poster advertising cut-price wigs and etched on a glass-panelled door. It was the same as it had been in 1970. Then she pulled out a silk scarf from her handbag. It may have been made by Hermès, but it was also white, the makeshift chuni reminding me that for my aunt this visit was as much a wake as it was a reunion.

  The first thing my mother did when she got into the shop was disappear into the kitchen to prepare food. There wasn’t a single occasion, it seemed, from Diwali to family reunions, that my mother wouldn’t miss by standing slaving over her gas stove. I found it almost as irritating as Surinder failing to offer any food or drink at all on Christmas Day.

  But my aunt didn’t seem to mind. It gave her an opportunity to walk around the house and reminisce, every nook and cranny evoking a memory. Her tearfulness came as a surprise, as did her tactility, and made me wonder if her coldness on Christmas Day had been shock, and her terseness after being picked up at the station a result of nerves. By the time my mother started bringing in the food, bowls of curry and sabzi, the salty smell of butter rising from a mound of freshly cooked rotis, she was overwhelmed.

  ‘Is it too spicy for you?’ asked my mother.

  ‘No,’ replied Surinder, tears running down her face. ‘No, not at all. It’s just . . . it tastes exactly . . . exactly how . . .’

  She didn’t need to finish the sentence. The thought of Mrs Bains set my mother off. I left them alone for the second time that day, to spend a little more time with Jessie Singh, who had been locked in my father’s study upstairs, and to check for only the fifty-third time that day whether Freya had replied to any texts or emails. I missed her more that day than even before.

  When I returned, my mother had the old family photograph albums out. I assumed they were poring over old pictures of my dad and my grandparents, those stilted old portraits from India where everyone was always in their best clothes, and the developer had adjusted the exposure so that everyone appeared paler than they were. But to my mortification my mother was showing my aunt pictures of me. Me at my graduation. Me in something that looked like a dress in 1978.

  It was embarrassing in part because I couldn’t imagine my aunt possibly being interested. But also because the pictures were a cringe-making reminder of the fact that, while we may not have taken many holidays, and our Christmases were far from festive, I was a hideously spoilt child. The Holy Book had been opened at random a few days after my birth, as tradition dictates, the first letter in the left corner dictating my name would begin with the first letter of the English alphabet. But even this was not enough for my lovestruck parents. I was given the nickname ‘Rajah’, translating as ‘king’. I was stationed in a cot behind the counter and anyone who passed was subjected to tales about my advanced achievements, whether it was a word I’d learnt to utter, or a particularly successful bowel movement. From the very youngest age my mother hired pundits and palm readers who, knowing which side their bread was buttered, regaled her with tales of my glittering future.

  ‘He is such a good boy,’ beamed my aunt, seemingly interested in my tedious biography. ‘And Freya is such a nice girl.’

  My mum smiled a tight smile. A knife through my heart. ‘Ah, well, we broke up.’

  ‘Oh no, when did this happen?’ My aunt looked almost as upset as I felt. ‘I thought you were engaged?’

  ‘We were. It’s a long story, Massi. I’ll tell you another day’

  My mother corrected me. ‘It’s Massi-ji.’ Then she started cleaning up. It would, after all, have been a calamity to leave the dishes for a few hours, or, for that matter, actually to use the dishwasher that I had installed. Surinder sidled up to me after Mum left the living room.

  ‘Now tell me, how is your mother? Healthwise?’

  ‘Good. She has been in remission for a while now.’

  ‘Should she be really working in the shop? Why doesn’t she retire?’

  This was another long story, but one worth telling. I told Surinder about my father’s dedication to the shop. About my mother’s refusal to give it up. That I had gradually come to the conclusion that the shop, as nightmarish as it was to run, gave Mum a
sense of meaning and purpose. Obviously, the days when Bains Stores played a central role in the community were long gone. People didn’t pop in to use the phone when the callbox outside was broken; didn’t ask us to call midwives or ambulances, pass on messages, or come in to have knives sharpened. Even the days I dimly recalled when the police would come round to ask if someone’s spending habits had changed were over. But the thing that had made it hardest to get Mum out of the shop was that I could see she got something from the regular auntie conferences, the brief conversations she had with customers about the rising price of carrots, or the laugh they had when she asked for their ID in broken English, though they were over sixty.

  ‘But you can’t want to stay here,’ said Surinder. ‘I looked you up on the internet. Your pictures, amazing.’ I blushed with genuine embarrassment. I’d not thought about painting for months, let alone done any. ‘Why doesn’t she move in with you in London?’

  ‘Why?’ It was one of those questions so big, like ‘Why does God allow war?’, that it was impossible to know where to begin. I wasn’t even sure I would have a place in London soon. In the event I proffered one of the least significant reasons: ‘London wouldn’t suit her.’ I squinted into the bare bulb lighting the room, and finished the orange juice which had been poured into one of the Esso crystal wine glasses. ‘You know what, I am coming to the view that she might be OK if I spend part of the week here. With Ranjit helping out occasionally.’