‘The Dhandas?’ There was a flash of something in her eyes. Meanwhile, the door behind her opened. It was Mum returning with another mound of food, a tray of sticky jalebis and soft gulab jaman.
‘Hai rubba, pehnji,’ protested Surinder, laughing. ‘We’ve only just eaten!’
‘Hush. You should never measure when it comes to food.’
‘Mataji would always say that,’ my aunt informed me.
Mum put the tray down, came back with some tea, and then moved towards the bottom drawer of the display cabinet that stood against the back wall of the room. ‘Look, I’ve got something to show you.’
She produced a dusty old box, the kind my father would file receipts in. But this did not belong to my father – it was hers. Sitting down, she opened it, revealing a bunch of papers, cuttings, postcards and letters. I would pore over them for hours in the weeks that followed, and discover all kinds of things, from letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother, postcards Surinder wrote to my mother, letters my father wrote to the local paper, and one, in return, from Dhanda taking issue with something he wrote (‘Mr Bains mentions the caste system in relation to the Sikhs. He is factually mistaken. We Sikhs do not observe the caste system. Yours sincerely, P.D.’). The idea that my mother would collect written material at all, given her determined disinterest in literature, came as a surprise. But sometimes it is people who don’t read who have the most respect for the written word. And this evening she had something specific to show her sister.
‘I thought it was time you got your A-level results,’ she said, producing a newspaper cutting that had been laminated in plastic.
Surinder yelped at the sight of them. Biology: A. English: A. History: B.
‘They printed all your school’s results in the paper,’ said Mum. ‘Tanvir cut them out.’
‘I can’t believe you kept them.’ She covered her mouth with her silk scarf, then raised it higher as Mum produced a thin scrapbook containing a selection of magazine cuttings and posters that my aunt had compiled as a youth.
‘Oh my! The Monkees!! I can’t believe you kept all this.’
My mum continued delicately. ‘I kept them because they reminded me of you. But also for Mataji. When she visited, she would always want to take a look.’ Tears again. Her voice dropped an octave. ‘I don’t know if this is the time to talk about this, but I have waited years. I know you think that Mataji wanted to marry you off to Dhanda. But she was against the idea. That’s why she sent you to Southall. And you know, I don’t think Dhanda really meant his proposal. He was still grieving for dediji, and I think it came out of that. He is not a bad person. He and his family have been a source of strength to me over the years, and to us, since Tanvir died. Haven’t they, Arjan?’
I weighed up the evidence, trying not to look startled by the revelation for the sake of my aunt. On the one hand Ranjit had, in a roundabout way, caused my split with Freya and totally ruined my life. On the other, he had led me, in a roundabout way, to my aunt. ‘If it wasn’t for Ranjit, I would not have found you,’ I conceded. ‘It was because of him that I met Jim.’
‘You met Jim?’ asked my aunt, her voice unsteady.
‘I think so. To be honest, I’m not sure it was really him. It was a man in Birmingham who answered to his name and seemed to be the right age.’
She asked for a physical description.
‘Yeah, was probably him.’ She looked pale. Produced her BlackBerry, scrolled through the messages.
My mother continued. ‘What happened with him, Surinder?’ she asked. ‘You know, there are lots of people who are divorced nowadays. People remarry all the time. You don’t need to feel ashamed.’
I cringed at my mother’s choice of words. Even when trying to sound modern and liberal, she used vocabulary from 1950s Punjab. Surinder, who had been looking increasingly pained, said she needed to make a quick call, and disappeared into the backyard. Alone with Mum, I castigated her for taking things too far too soon, Massi was clearly not ready to go over everything, and sure enough when my aunt returned, red-eyed, smelling of cigarettes, she announced she had to go home. ‘The last direct train is at seven,’ she said, in an official tone.
Mum looked crestfallen. ‘You’re not staying?’ She stood up. ‘I’ve got your room ready.’
‘Oh, pehnji, I’d love to, but it was hard enough getting time off today. And I’ve got to take Jessie to the vet tomorrow. I promise to be back soon.’
‘When?’
‘Very soon.’ She began putting on her coat.
‘I’ll drive you to the station,’ I offered.
‘It’s no problem. I’ve ordered a taxi. It will be here in a few minutes.’
I don’t think I had ever seen Mum look so happy and so sad within such a short space of time. She took straight to bed after her sister left, where she would again remain for days. As for me, well, I checked my phone and saw that I’d received a message from Freya’s best friend. It said: ‘Offer received on flat. Please pick up your things within next fortnight. Anything you leave will be thrown out.’ The gloom that had been encircling our home re-descended, and this time it felt like it would claim us entirely.
15 – COSMOPOLITAN
BRIXTON HILL MEDICAL Practice had expanded rapidly since 1970, taking on new partners, growing its list of patients and substantially increasing turnover. Not that you would have guessed it from walking around the surgery six years later. The five doctors had 8,500 patients on their lists, but employed just two receptionists between them. And while conventional wisdom dictated that your average doctor’s waiting room should allocate one chair per 100–200 patients on the books, the ratio at BHMP was stuck at around one per 400.
Leaning against a wall, Surinder tried to distract herself from the aches which had brought her to the doctor’s for the second time in a month by taking an interest in her surroundings. A bare, wooden floor, which should have been carpeted to reduce noise. Announcements on the noticeboard: a list of immunisation schedules, and the outlining of consulting hours which seemed to have been set according to some obscure local tradition dating back to the nineteenth century.
But when she still hadn’t been called through after half an hour, she stepped across the desultory children’s play area consisting of a small table and plastic chair and, heading towards the reception desk, did something she hadn’t done in years. She picked up a magazine. There had been a time when she had read for comfort. It had made her feel less alone. But nowadays the perspective provided by the written word just made her feel worse about her place in the scheme of things. The first article she came across, a letter to an agony aunt in a women’s magazine that had lost its cover and was greasy from overuse, illustrated why.
Q. Dear Sarah. I have been with my husband for eight years now, and he is kind and supportive. But I hate being married. Sometimes I feel so unhappy and useless I want to sleep for ever. I seem to live in a velvet-lined prison. What should I do? Annie.
A velvet-lined prison? Surinder dreamt of such a prison. Marriage, in her case, was a cold, unlit, cockroach-infested cell with a bare concrete floor. Jim had turned out to be a drunk. And a seducer. The glint he had in his eye during their first day in London was not romantic love, but excitement about booze and what he might get in bed. When he realised he wasn’t going to have his way, that Surinder was not going to salve his conscience by returning home, he had agreed to marry her. But she lamented daily, sometimes hourly, that she had badgered him into doing so.
Tanvir was right. He had been forever warning her about salesmen. ‘If a rep appears who you’ve never met before, you should never pay him cash, unless he brings in produce and offers a receipt . . . Don’t fall for their off-the-cuff claims, they will say anything for a sale.’ And this was the thing: Jim had, more than anything else, turned out to be a salesman. The promise of marriage hadn’t been his only fib. He wasn’t, it turned out, Irish, except distantly: he had grown up in Essex and put on the accent as part of his sal
es patter. Central London was just as foreign to him as it was to her aunt in Southall, his knowledge of metropolitan life coming from newspapers and magazines. The job in London was a fiction: it turned out he had failed what had been a trial in the West Midlands, and was now reduced to the role of casual labourer, working in dairies and factories. The poems he had sent to her during their courtship were copied from books. His enthusiasm for Hardy was fake, his opinions taken from the comments on the back of paperback editions. And she wouldn’t have been surprised if even the story about being set upon in Wolverhampton was made up too, a trick designed to re-enter her life.
Surinder accepted these revelations, when they came, with equanimity. No one had forced her to elope with Jim. He had exploited her naivety and her family were pushing her into marriage, but that was the culture she had been born into. Looking back she wasn’t even really sure how keen her mother would have been on Dhanda’s proposal, and in her heart of hearts she always knew something wasn’t right about Jim. What was that line again? Ignorance is as structured as knowledge. She knew now that she had chosen not to know certain things. She had been disturbed by Dhanda’s expression of interest, and incensed, panicking, she had taken a gamble on the only available alternative, blocking out any reservations she might have felt. Her elopement was a mistake, a disaster, but it was her disaster, a situation of her own making. There was no way of going back to Wolverhampton. She had done the worst thing a Sikh girl could do, and in the early days of marriage she had tried to make the best of it.
She didn’t complain when Jim drank. Didn’t deny him sexual satisfaction. When he failed to find regular employment, she got two jobs to support them, working in a supermarket during the day and as a waitress in a Spanish restaurant in the evenings. However, it is one thing to accept that your husband is a drunk and a liar. But another to conceal your disdain at him being so. She found him lazy and self-pitying, and couldn’t hide the fact. For his part, Jim found Surinder impatient and condescending, and couldn’t pretend that he didn’t do so. They brought out the worst in each other. And six years into it, though Jim sometimes still found himself seeking her approval – both had largely given up trying. No subject was too insignificant to fight about. Mistakes were pounced upon, never forgiven. Neither of them had a sense of humour when it came to each other. In Surinder’s case, her husband suspected she had no sense of humour at all. They communicated almost entirely through threats and name-calling. And when Surinder glanced at the agony aunt’s reply, she cringed at the platitudes about ‘commitment’ and ‘patience’, and began drafting an alternative reply in her head.
‘Dear Annie,’ she began. ‘Young people sometimes think they know what is meant when they hear that marriage is hard. They imagine there will be times when they will not feel so close to their spouse, times when they won’t be carried to bed at night or brought breakfast in bed. But the reality is more brutal. Sometimes you will actively despise your partner. Married life is not only marked by occasional bouts of antagonism, but also by sustained enmity. The person who was once the centre of your world can become the person you least want to spend time with. The mere reference to the fact that he is your husband will cause you embarrassment . . .’
Surinder was still drafting this letter, thinking about how, if Jim died, she would probably have to peel onions to make herself cry, when she was snapped out of her reverie by the sight of the receptionist running out of the office, separated from the waiting room only by way of a glass partition, with a bucket. The young woman stopped abruptly in front of a toddler, who promptly vomited into it. Doctors’ receptionists probably developed a sixth sense for such things, but it was still impressive to see.
However, admiration quickly gave way to enervation when the child was taken into the consultation room that she had been assigned, delaying her appointment still further. In the time the other doctors had seen four or five patients each, her doctor had seen two. She put down her magazine, picked up another, opened it at random and was confronted with a headline pronouncing, ‘How to spot if your husband is being unfaithful’. The list of ‘giveaway signs’ didn’t do much for her nausea.
‘Angry, critical and even at times cruel.’ Tick.
‘Constant put-downs and little to no patience.’ Tick.
‘Expresses a “my way or the highway” type of attitude during arguments.’ Tick.
She felt her throat tightening. Despite everything, Surinder would not have tolerated infidelity. But then, amid the dread, a reassuring thought: wasn’t she as guilty of many of these cited crimes too? She had never been unfaithful, wouldn’t have known where to find the time for it, but she was ‘angry, critical and even at times cruel’. She subjected Jim to ‘constant put-downs’ and had ‘little to no patience.’ She never ‘consulted’ her ‘partner about purchases’. And she often expressed a ‘“my way or the highway” type of attitude’ towards her husband. Plainly, the author of the article did not understand marriage.
Indeed, Jim and Surinder had casually committed most of these cited offences between them just the previous evening, during one of their regular flare-ups. Surinder had come back from her day job at the supermarket and was on the mattress on the floor she used to avoid sharing a bed with Jim, trying to sleep off the headache and fever that had been bothering her, before heading off to La Tasca, when her husband had turned up and, unsteady on his feet from a day of drinking, bellowed, ‘I need to l-l-lend some money.’
Surinder turned around so that her back was to him. ‘You mean borrow.’
‘What?’
‘You mean, you want to borrow some money.’
‘Look, we are married. You are meant to listen to me.’
Surinder snorted at the irony of his choice of words. Throughout her childhood her mother had brought her up to respect her future husband, to always succumb to his decisions and desires, and now the man who had inspired her to reject that life was appealing to those values.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘There’s some food in the cupboard,’ she sighed, placing a pillow over her head to block out the light and his voice. But she could still hear him through it.
‘Call that food?!’
Jim had a point. Surinder was at this time living almost entirely on packets of Complan, milk powder supposedly fortified with all the vitamins and salts you needed for good health. It was sold in packets at the chemist in Brixton High Street. When she grew tired of the taste, she would mix the powder with fruit squash. If she tired of that, she would drink eggs, raw and beaten up in milk.
She told herself this was because they didn’t have a fridge in their bedsit. But in truth it was the logical conclusion of her avoidance of any kind of flavour or seasoning or spice, the slightest whiff of which could remind her of home and send her spiralling into a calamitous depression. She also bought it for the same reason she sometimes visited the local church for warmth: thrift had become a habit. In Bains Stores, one of her mother’s most frequent complaints was that Surinder was extravagant, that she didn’t, as the saying went, ‘know the difference between a penny and a pound’. But economy was yet another area of life on which she had come over to her mother’s view. Married life is hard. Reading magazines and books puts silly ideas into your head. Thrift is more worthwhile than extravagance, because it requires effort and thought.
Surinder cleared her sore, aching throat and summoned the energy to respond. ‘If it’s not good enough for you, James, you could always get a job and use the extravagant wages to dine in Soho.’
Jim, enraged, pulled the pillow from Surinder’s face and thrust a copy of the Mirror into her face. ‘Do you know what it’s like out there?’ The headline pronounced, ‘1,430,369, IT’S GOING TO GET WORSE’. Underneath, a smaller one elaborated, ‘Foot’s warning as jobless total hits new peak’.
He wouldn’t have dared to have been physically forceful if Surinder had been well. His one attempt to bully her physically had resulted in a broken plant pot
and a visit to Casualty.
‘There is work, if you want it enough.’ She curled her lip.
Jim dropkicked the pillow across the room, sending a cloud of dust floating down from the battered, polka-dot lampshade. ‘I know you have money. Where do you fucking keep it?’
He began rifling through Surinder’s possessions. Seeing it was time to get ready for work, Surinder sat up and lit a cigarette. Breathing in deeply, feeling the smoke clearing out her throat and sinuses, she appraised Jim with the detachment of a parent enduring a toddler’s tantrum. His hair was another of his lies: underneath the dye it was a mousey brown, and now thinning, in that awkward phase between full-headedness and baldness when it develops a life of its own. There were signs of wrinkles near his eyes, hairs growing out of his nostrils and ears. And he was no longer a dandy. He had pawned off the best of his shoes and clothes, which wouldn’t have fitted him any more anyway, and was now rarely out of the same pair of jeans and knee-length boots, even though they seemed to cause him visible physical discomfort.
It wouldn’t take him long to get through all of Surinder’s things. She had over time reduced her belongings, just as she had cut back her diet and could fit everything she owned in a single suitcase. And he wouldn’t find any money. She put everything she earned into a Barclays Bank account. The account book was kept in a bank safety-deposit box, along with her wedding jewellery. And the key for the safety box was accessed by the showing of a passport, which she always kept on her person.
The security measures were necessary not only because Jim was not to be trusted when it came to money, but also because he was right about Surinder hoarding cash. It’s amazing how much you can save when you have no social life, take no holidays, work two jobs, live in a bedsit, and when you manage a portfolio of ten flats and bedsits for your slum landlord on the side.
Sometimes Surinder felt that Mr Grant had been the only good thing that had happened to her since arriving in London. Not that he had looked like good news when they met. A West Indian in his sixties, almost as wide as he was tall, with an overbearing third wife and a brood of children, he charged an exorbitant rent for a single damp basement room in Brixton with a shared bathroom and WC; specialised in renting out to the poor, the unmarried, others who couldn’t finance their own homes; and offered her reduced rent in exchange for sex on the second occasion that they met.
Marriage Material Page 23