Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  His self-ascribed nickname, meanwhile, was ‘Enoch’, on the confused grounds that he (a) opposed race relations legislation that made it illegal to discriminate when it came to letting out property (‘It is my right to decide if I no want my house to be stink up with goat curry’), and (b) Powell had said, ‘In this country in fifteen or twenty years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ (‘Now there is a brother who understands black power.’)

  Grant’s brutal tenant management methods, meanwhile, seemed to be a subconscious response to the chaos of his home life, involving, as they did, dumping cooked potatoes on floors, leaving dead rats in beds, sprinkling itching powder on bedding, removing slates from the roof, taking up carpets, cutting down washing lines, putting snakes in bathrooms and, his favourite tactic, standing for hours outside windows and staring at the tenant when they were alone.

  But times were changing, and when the amendments to the Rent Act were introduced to legislate against greedy and incompetent landlords, and families found they automatically had security of tenure provided they paid the rent, Grant found himself facing a tribunal and turned to Surinder for advice. No one was more surprised by this request than Surinder, given that she and Jim had been among the tenants he had, until recently, been trying to remove, kicking their door whenever he passed it and persuading all the children in the building to do likewise. But it turned out not to be a request based on friendship or trust or any such conventional human emotion. He had spotted, during one of his illegal inspections of Surinder and Jim’s living quarters, some of Surinder’s old books from Wolverhampton, and not being good with paperwork, and not knowing anyone who was, he assumed she could help.

  Surinder could. Having been trained at Bains Stores in the art of filling out forms for the illiterate and, at times, criminal, she slipped into the role, wrote letters, made calls and, in exchange for a month’s rent, got Grant off the hook. It was the easiest money she had ever made, and after it was over she decided to take advantage of Grant’s disproportionate gratitude by offering her services as an agent. She had heard there were small businesses that found tenants for landlords. She knew lots of people looking for rooms through work, and offered to start finding reliable tenants for Mr Grant in exchange for discounted rent.

  She made her case carefully and fluently, pointing out that if he had better, more reliable tenants, he would have fewer rent reviews and, in turn, an easier life. She made sure that the arguments were backed up with examples and, where possible, numbers. It was a presentation, in fact, worthy of a professional estate agent. If professional estate agents made presentations in corridors, that was, and if the proposed client wasn’t drinking lager throughout and gawping at your breasts as you spoke. Grant refused outright. Furiously so. Banging his fist against the wall in the corridor he conducted most of his meetings in, displacing loose plaster with every thump.

  Surinder admonished herself as he did so. What had she been thinking? He was never going to agree to something so rational. This, after all, was a man who co-owned an unlicensed drinking club on the Railton Road, and yet complained incessantly about the traffic and litter caused by other unlicensed drinking clubs near his digs, who professed to loathe the police (‘They bust a case in your arse for just walking down the street’) and yet, when there had recently been riots in Notting Hill as the result of the arbitrary harassment and arrests of young black attendees, he had decided he would never rent to the blacks again (‘Ain’t no white man not paid me rent on time.’) He was an idiot.

  But it turned out that Grant was cross not about her suggestion; he was infuriated because he had something else in mind for Surinder. He didn’t want her to find him tenants, but she could manage his whole property portfolio for him, if she so desired. He had been left shaken by his brush with the law. The brave new world of responsible landlording with the drafting of contracts and furniture inventories was not for him, and if she could take over the whole thing in exchange for a percentage fee, he could extricate himself from his nightmare family and professional obligations and one day move back to Jamaica, where he would sit around on the beach ‘raising pussy’ and living off the proceeds.

  ‘I don’t wanna spend me twilight years dealing with tenants making rab ’bout towel rails. Enuff is enuff. Time I reap the rewards for the toil I put into this godforsaken country. It’s yours if you want.’

  Surinder wanted it. Soon, when she wasn’t stacking shelves in the supermarket or being sexually harassed in the restaurant, she was checking references and fixtures and fittings, writing contracts, returning deposits (less any charges), putting adverts in papers. And making, as Jim suspected, a shed-load of money.

  ‘I know that fat bastard gives you cash,’ shouted Jim, resuming his rant. ‘How often do you have to fuck him for it? Are you sending it to your family?’

  Most of Jim’s insults washed over her like small talk about the weather – she had heard it all before. But the comment about her family riled. It was astonishing to her that Jim still seemed to have no appreciation of the sacrifice she had made to marry him. Did he really not understand that there was no way she could ever contact her family again? And, more importantly, did he really not understand how proud she was?

  Pride, after all, was the defining characteristic of her people, dearer to the average Punjabi than life itself. It was what made Sikhs good soldiers, the thing that made them susceptible to vendettas and family disputes that rumbled on for decades; it was why her father had lived in a house with fifteen other men, surviving on baked beans, while he worked in a foundry to save up enough to set up his shop, when it would have been easier to return home; why Mr Jolly really would have, if necessary, gone through with his threat to set fire to himself in the road directly outside Wolverhampton Town Hall ‘in the mid darkness with only four or five companions’ if Wolverhampton Transport Department hadn’t conceded on the point of the turban.

  But Surinder knew better than to express her annoyance. It would give Jim too much satisfaction. Instead, she got up and got ready for work, applying make-up, smoothing her hair, which she had for the last year worn short, jaw-length and streaked, cutting her own fringe every two weeks, and getting changed into the tight white polyester blouse and tight black cotton skirt that amounted to her uniform. She had asked to be allowed to wear trousers instead, with the unisex, long-sleeved tunic that the waitresses in the Italian restaurant opposite wore. But her manager wouldn’t permit it, and as she put on her shoes, she wondered whether he had also deliberately ordered her uniform one size too small. Once ready, she lit a cigarette, took a drag, smiled at Jim and remarked, ‘The thing about you, Jim, is that you really are quite thick.’

  Jim was, for some reason, standing in the middle of the room clutching a saucepan. ‘Right. That’s it. I want a d-d-divorce.’

  ‘Very well,’ she agreed quickly between puffs. ‘You can have one. Please. I would love a d-d-divorce. Get your lawyer to write to me.’

  Jim’s stammer had once seemed charming. But this was another thing about marriage: it could turn the vulnerability that once enticed you into a fair target. Jim fled from the bedsit, slamming the door behind him. The whole episode had bothered Surinder no more than if she had mislaid a dessert spoon. Doubtless Jim would return in a day or two, and they would go through the whole thing all over again.

  The pain and the fever had worsened by the following morning and Surinder, to the astonishment of her colleagues at the supermarket, tarnished her immaculate attendance record by taking the morning off to go to the doctor. Her appointment was at 11 a.m. but it was gone midday by the time she was called in. However, the relief of finally getting to see a doctor was momentary. For on opening the door, it transpired that the GP she had been assigned was the worst thing possible. He was Indian.

  Since coming to London, Surinder had avoided all things Asian. If anyone spoke Punjabi or Hindi to her, she would profess not to understand. No ‘Hare Krishnas’, as Grant re
ferred to people of her background, got a chance at a room. If anyone asked where she was from, and people seemed to ask where she was from fifteen times a day, she would say she was half Spanish, answering any follow-up questions with the back story of one of her restaurant colleagues, a 23-year-old graduate from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, whose estranged father had been an airline pilot, and whose mother lived in Streatham.

  There had been moments of weakness, such as the time she visited Tooting in a fit of homesickness, knowing it to be home to a sizeable Punjabi community. But there was no pleasure in the nostalgia. She felt self-conscious with her short hair, was convinced the aunties could smell cigarettes on her, and lacked the courage to enter the temple in her Western clothes. In the end, she went into an Indian grocery shop and, almost choking on the aromas of methi and mirch, bought some pomegranates and the ingredients for chapattis. Back in the bedsit, she put herself through the ritual she had once resented at home, mixing the dough, turning it out on to a lightly floured board, kneading it until it became smooth and elastic. She didn’t have a thava – just an English frying pan. Her first effort fell apart as it cooked. She did better with practice, but consuming the fruits of her labour with baked beans merely highlighted the gap between her efforts and the memory.

  That evening she had penned a postcard to her sister, even though Kamaljit was, for all she knew, no longer living in Wolverhampton, or even in England. There was nothing therapeutic in the writing; it just made her feel even more lonely. The act of sending it simply made her finally appreciate the futility of dwelling on her past, and she had since become expert at shutting things out, so practised at lying that she almost believed her fictions herself. And as she took a seat in the doctor’s consulting room, still warm from the preceding visitor, and as the doctor wrote up the notes for the previous patient – appendicitis, it turned out – she planned how she would lie if he called her ‘pehnji’ or, after that Indian yes/no head roll, enquired about which part of India her parents came from.

  In the event, she needn’t have worried. He spoke the kind of English that was only spoken by the upper classes and the graduates of private schools in India, and barely looked up from his notes when he did so. ‘You’re being treated for a urinary infection, I see,’ he remarked by way of introduction. ‘Dr Barker gave you amoxicillin. Any good?’

  Surinder breathed out in relief. Clearly he was the kind of doctor more interested in disease than people.

  ‘No. I’m feeling quite a lot worse.’

  ‘Did he examine you? Do any swabs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Treated you blind,’ he said to himself, making a note. ‘Could you describe your symptoms?’

  Surinder didn’t know where to begin. But focusing on the books on the shelf behind the doctor’s head – The National Formulary, Prescriber’s Journal – she tried. Unfortunately, the more information she provided, the more questions there were. What kind of pain was it? Was there vaginal bleeding between periods? She answered as fully as she could bring herself to, but then, to her dismay, Dr Chaudhari, peering at her through his spectacles, asked, ‘Married, it says here. Is there pain during intercourse?’

  Oh God. Maybe it would have been better if they had acknowledged their shared ethnicity after all. At least, her Indian family doctor in Wolverhampton would never have been so direct. How on earth could she possibly explain her sex life to a complete stranger when she couldn’t face acknowledging it to herself? In the beginning, it had seemed to be about frequency for Jim, rather than quality or length. But it had been the first thing to go, as their marriage floundered. In the preceding year they had slept together just once. She was at the time having one of her periodic attempts to make things, if not work, then tolerable. She had decided that she would have one more shot at being a wife. So when Jim went on at tedious length about something utterly inconsequential, she resisted the urge to say, ‘You’re making a big deal out of things for no reason.’ She tried not to wince when he spoke in clichés (‘That’s life . . . you have to break a few eggs’), tried not to roll her eyes when he returned every story and situation to himself (‘That reminds me of the time . . .’). Jim had responded in kind, if not quite complimenting her, then telling her about the efforts he was making to find a job and to drink less. But it was going to bed with him that brought home the hopelessness of her efforts. When he touched her, her instinctive reaction was to lash out. Sleeping with almost anyone else would have been preferable. She knew that she could not go through it again.

  Surinder had taken in most of the surgery – the flat-topped desk, the examination couch – before answering. ‘It might be painful,’ she said vaguely, unable to use a personal pronoun.

  The doctor glanced at her directly for the first time, with the hint of a raised eyebrow. He wrote down something which Surinder couldn’t decipher. Then he put both hands on his desk, looked at her directly and said, ‘Right. You have a choice. I could do a swab of the cervix here today. We have a female chaperone. Or I could refer you to a clinic.’

  Surinder glanced at the examination table, the trolley containing plastic gloves, imagined the shame of sliding off her pants, lying down on the table, her feet in the air, the doctor squirting gel on his glove-clad fingers, and opted for the clinic.

  ‘I’ll get my receptionist to write up a referring letter,’ continued the doctor. ‘It will be ready by four this afternoon. But we are open until six.’ He slid back on his chair and rose. ‘I’d get to the clinic early – long queues in the day. Plenty of fluids in the meantime.’ He opened the door. ‘And rest.’

  Surinder took the doctor’s advice and didn’t go to work that day. Instead, she slept, rising at half five to check that a departing tenant had left his single room at the top of the mansion block in good order. A large part of being a landlord, or a surrogate landlord, involved preparing rooms as people arrived and left. And this tenant, an overly polite Kenyan student with a job in the centre of town, had, as she expected, left his room in pristine condition. The plain red fitted carpet was as new. The hessian curtains had been cleaned. Even the Hoover had been serviced and the mop head replaced.

  She felt a wave of warmth for the boy. He was reliable and clean – the perfect tenant – and also utterly beautiful. A face unlike any other she had seen, different from every angle you viewed it, and eyelashes longer than she had ever seen on any man. Letting out to single black men was something else Grant was wrong about: the ones she had chosen had turned out to be much less trouble than the couples and families.

  Walking around the room, looking out of the window at a patch of urban greenery, she found herself envying the next tenant of the flat. It was so quiet and peaceful upstairs compared to her basement bedsit, and as she desired it, she wondered whether her main mistake in life had been confusing desire for romance with desire for solitude. She had replaced the clamour on Victoria Road – children cowering as their mothers admonished them, her mother yelling at the top of her voice – with a marriage of bickering and strife, when what she had really needed was peace and quiet. It was not something most Indians could conceive, but maybe solitude was the key to contentment.

  Little did she know that in a few hours’ time, she would have it. On collecting her referring letter from the doctors, she would move her meagre belongings from the room she shared with Jim, have the locks changed and throw her husband’s bits and pieces into a bag, which, in turn, would be left out on the street. You see, on opening Dr Chaudhari’s referring letter, she realised there was one sign that Cosmopolitan magazine had missed out in its article on ‘How to spot if your husband is being unfaithful’: when you find yourself being sent to a VD clinic.

  16 – GUARDIAN

  RANJIT, ULTIMATELY, PROVED right about another thing: my aunt. The idea of finding Surinder so that she might free me from my retail obligations worked out better than either of us could have imagined. By February she was spending every weekend in the shop, pitching in behind th
e counter. And by spring of the New Year, she had taken early retirement and moved in, insisting as she did so that I return to London to find work. The whole thing happened at the speed of light. It felt like a miracle. But if it passed without a single expression of delight or joy, it was because it was prompted by the most painful of developments.

  The illness that my mother had succumbed to over Christmas, and again when Surinder departed suddenly on New Year’s Day, was not, as I had assumed at the time, psychosomatic. She turned up for her annual check-up in the first week of January, and a key biomarker in her blood was elevated. There followed a CT scan, and an appointment with an oncologist at which she was informed that the cancer was back in her spleen and in the lining of her diaphragm.

  My mother took the news with her habitual what-will-be-will-be, chaloo-koi-gaal-nahi composure. She continued working in the shop, and embraced the consultant’s suggestion that she needn’t embark upon treatment until she felt worse. She didn’t even allow me to shut up shop to accompany her to appointments, instead taking up the hospital’s offer of a translator. The only real change was a slight increase in her praying and a minor uptick in the religiosity of the conferences she had with her auntie friends in the shop every other day.

  I guess I should have been philosophical too – I had been through it before and was aware the cancer might come back. But knowing is not the same thing as accepting, and the return of the disease made me appreciate how much my father had protected me the first time round, how great Freya had been throughout, and I missed them both almost as intensely as I worried about my mother. I descended further into depression, went from running all the time and not being able to sleep at all, to sleeping as much as I could, going to bed early and snoozing in the middle of the day, like a Punjabi farmer during the height of summer. In the shop, the most common remark from customers went from being ‘Are you open?’ to ‘Cheer up, it might never happen.’ But the thing is: it had. And it says something about the hopelessness of that time that it didn’t even occur to me to inform my aunt about Mum’s news until several days afterwards.