Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  I texted her one afternoon, during the quiet period in the shop between lunch and the end of school. She rang back minutes later, as I was serving a customer, then called again and again until I finally picked up – tears in her voice, a barrage of questions – and drove up to see us that very evening. She stayed the night, even though she had not planned to do so, leaving in the same clothes she had arrived in, asking me to make an emergency visit to a chemist for some contact lens solution. She returned the following weekend, with a wheelie suitcase this time, spending two nights in the shop. She accompanied Mum to her next appointment, insisted on arranging for a second opinion with a private doctor, despite my mother’s protestations about expense. Looked into clinical trials. Went down to a three-day week at the hotel, to help out more meaningfully at Bains Stores. Then, as Mum finally began a course of chemotherapy, Surinder, without really discussing her plan, only remarking on the way to her leaving do that she had never really enjoyed working for someone else, took early retirement and moved into the house, taking over my father’s former study, and trading her Porsche in for a BMW estate which Mum could manoeuvre in and out of with more ease.

  It seems odd, looking back, that I accepted her return so uninquisitively. But I think I did so in part because she was only doing what I had done, and in part because she was a Punjabi woman, and the defining characteristic of Punjabi women, after all, is self-sacrifice. Also, analysing it would have been like questioning a pools’ win. It was all just too useful to fret about; with Massi, right from the beginning, without me even explaining my situation, refusing to countenance the idea of me working in the shop for more than a few hours, insisting she could manage with Mum, more often than not adding, ‘Just get back to that lovely girlfriend of yours.’

  Not that my mum’s news had suddenly brought Freya and I back together. But it did bring about a cessation in hostilities. She let me keep my things in our flat until the sale finally went through. And while she rebuffed any notion of getting back together, she suggested we do our breaking up via a counsellor. There was a time when any kind of couples’ therapy would have brought me out in hives, and the idea of having marriage guidance to break-up a prospective marriage struck me as odd, to say the least. But I read on the relevant website that some people had couples’ therapy when they weren’t in a relationship at all, and I was grateful, to be honest, for any kind of contact, for even a glimmer of hope.

  A new routine developed. In the week, I travelled to London for freelance work; Freya would let me know when she wasn’t around and I would then use the flat. But otherwise I would either commute from Wolverhampton or work from home, toiling in my bedroom above the shop, except when my aunt and mother were visiting hospital, when I would man the counter. On Saturday mornings I would travel to Nuneaton, where Freya and I would sit for an hour in the front room of a ‘culturally sensitive’ mixed-race mother of three and talk about what had gone wrong. Then, after hugging awkwardly on the pavement outside, I would return to the Midlands to help my aunt and mum with shopkeeping duties for the remainder of the weekend.

  It was a surreal time, life felt like it had simultaneously come to a standstill and was galloping on at an uncontrollable pace, though the weirdest aspect of it all was watching my aunt go through a version of what I had been through, being hit as if by a brick by the tedium of Black Country retail. Except she had a rather more proactive approach to it all than me, managing to transform the shop in just her first day of involvement by getting rid of the hectoring signs in the window – ‘Only 2 School Kids at a Time’, ‘CCTV in Operation’, etc. – having the window shutters fixed, and dumping the pile of £4.99 shirts at the back of the shop, unwanted gifts from Indian weddings, which Dad flogged to the men who would turn up in ripped clothes at 5 a.m. on Saturday mornings.

  The changes became more pronounced when Surinder moved in. She altered the way the newspapers were displayed, moving the piles we stocked on the counter on to a modern newspaper stand, arguing that the front pages increased the likelihood of impulse sales. She began stocking sandwiches in the chiller cabinet, pointing out that with Britons spending £5 billion on them every year, it was daft not to. Every time I came back from London, something was different, whether it was Surinder delisting the slowest-selling 10 per cent of the confectionery and crisps ranges, or putting the best-selling products in the best positions, or introducing a rack of greetings cards, or replacing the pizza and out-of-date oven chips in the ice-cream freezer with actual ice cream.

  All this energy was, I think, mainly the result of her natural entrepreneurialism. She didn’t enjoy talking about herself, would try to change the subject if you enquired, but I slowly managed to piece together the basic elements of her business biography. She had, apparently, been given a chance to buy the mansion block she had been managing in South London in 1980. She took the opportunity, purchasing it using her savings and a series of loans, and buying the flats next door during the ’80s property boom, before getting planning permission to convert the whole thing into a hotel. It was successful for some time: she specialised for several years in catering for the homeless, getting paid a premium from the local authority to house them. But there were financial difficulties during the recession of the 1990s, the banks repossessed some of her portfolio and she ended up taking a break from running a business to study for an executive MBA.

  Which brings me to the other thing that drove her: her intellectual belief in independent retail. As she was keen on pointing out, if the small shop was done for, then why were Turkish families and supermarkets getting into the convenience-store trade? Why did the Dhandas own three Audis and a portfolio of nineteen rental properties? The fact was that small shops were not dead, but small shops that didn’t adapt to the marketplace were dead. It was clear that if she was going to be stuck in Bains Stores, she was going to make sure it was successful. In her first two months, she managed to double turnover. And, amazingly, she did this while shortening opening hours. Bains Stores now opened between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., cutting two hours off the start and the end of the day. And, in a truly remarkable development, on Sundays we shut at lunchtime, so that we could go for walks together in the English countryside.

  These jaunts felt no less spectacular for having been originally conceived as something significantly more ambitious. If memory serves, it all began during one of Surinder’s first weekends back. It was about nine on a Saturday evening, I had endured a shattering counselling session earlier that day in which Freya had admitted to sleeping with her Canadian ex over the New Year, and the three of us were sitting together in the living room, in worlds of our own.

  I was vacantly scouring the web on a laptop, wondering if it was too early to go to bed. My aunt had just written a letter to the local paper expressing dismay at the failure of the council to build the much-heralded estate of eco-homes opposite the shop, and was now reading the Financial Times, lounging about in a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. My mother, sitting opposite us, in an armchair, her hair unplaited, enveloped in shawls, was watching a TV show on an Asian satellite channel hosted by a bearded yogi who seemed to be suggesting that consuming turmeric could prevent the common cold, or that he could cure AIDS with Ayurvedic drugs that were conveniently sold through his online store. To be honest, I wasn’t really listening.

  ‘You know,’ began Massi, her legs crossed. ‘There’s no reason you should stay here. You could sell up and retire.’

  ‘He’s right about turmeric,’ said my mother in my direction. ‘My gums stopped bleeding when I started taking it. You should have it in milk once a day – you’re always sniffling.’

  My aunt tried again. ‘You know, pehnji, we could always sell up and go travelling.’

  The expression on my mother’s face reminded me of one I had confronted a few weeks earlier, when I had tried to explain the couples’ therapy Freya and I had embarked upon. The fact was that my mother had no talent for leisure in the way that we, as a family, had no talent fo
r Christmas. As a child, I remember nagging my parents into a day trip, having claimed, fraudulently, that my complete ignorance of the sea was holding me back at school. They had a conference, and one Sunday we headed off, after the newspapers had been delivered, to Rhyl. It wasn’t a success: after a three-hour journey during which I threw up twice in the back of my father’s VW van, my mother produced a five-course Indian meal amid a crowd of sunbathing locals. I nearly died of cringe, and after just forty-five minutes it was time to head home.

  ‘And go where?’ said Mum eventually, her voice dripping with disbelief.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said my aunt. A pause. ‘New York?’

  If Massi sounded uncertain it was because she was. The idea of America was clearly inspired by the picture of the Empire State Building emblazoned on her newspaper. A workaholic, she had travelled as little as my mother.

  ‘I have no interest in going abroad,’ pronounced Mum, with an air of finality.

  ‘What about the Punjab then?’ offered my aunt, uncrossing her legs and sitting up to make her case. Her hair, blow-dried, smoothed down and flicked up at the ends, belied the fact that she had just returned from the gym. ‘Neither of us have visited India since we were children. The doctor says it would be good for you to be out and about. Don’t you think it would be fun?’

  The use of the English word ‘fun’ was a strategic error. Mum didn’t do fun. Even buying birthday presents for her was a nightmare: she didn’t want chocolates, gave anything she didn’t need away to the temple, rarely shopped for clothes and would complain bitterly if she thought money was being ‘wasted’. I knew what was coming.

  ‘I have appointments to keep,’ declared Mum. ‘The shop to consider. We can’t afford it.’

  At this point, my aunt took the remote from the arm of my mother’s chair, turned down the volume and made a rare biographical admission. Watching her, I could see she was uncomfortable going over it, and she made no eye contact while she spoke, instead glancing at the newspaper on her lap – she was always reading, whether it was a book, messages on her phone, or some magazine or paper – but she pointed out that she had taken gold jewellery from her mother when she had left home. She had justified the theft to herself at the time on the grounds that it was something that would have come to her anyway in the event of marriage. But in the years that followed, the guilt of taking it had gnawed away at her. She should have returned it when she started making money but had instead used the proceeds to help buy the building that became her hotel. It could be argued it was the ultimate source of her not inconsiderable savings, and she now wanted to make amends, to return the investment, and spending the money on her sister seemed an apt way of doing so.

  There was a lengthy pause as Mum digested the argument. There is a Punjabi tradition with presents, that when you first receive them, you refuse them, and then, if the giver persists, you say in mitigation, ‘Oh, that’s too much, please halve it.’ But in this case, Mum didn’t even want half.

  ‘I would never in a million years waste our father’s hard-earned money on such nonsense,’ she protested. ‘To think how he worked all those years in the shop, the goras giving him hell, no wife or children or family around to bring him roti at the end of a long day, just to make money that his daughters would eventually waste swanning around foreign hotels, eating steak sandwiches in swimming pools for breakfast.’ I have no idea where Mum got this image from, but it was clearly in her view something that decadent white people did on holiday. ‘I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.’ She had not just taken the moral high ground, but once on it, she had taken a hot-air balloon flight.

  Surinder withdrew meekly – ‘Whatever you think best, pehnji’ – hurt, but trying not to show it. My aunt had a natural air of authority. She had a way of asking for things, of ending her sentences, which made people instinctively obey her. This was the reason she had made inroads into the £4,000 of newspaper debts that my father and I had accumulated, why the pilferage and vandalism that had afflicted Bains Stores since my return, had ceased. Not only were local ruffians wary of her, the police almost always responded when she called. However, my mother was the one person immune to her charm.

  I assumed that was the end of the holiday idea. But it turned out Surinder didn’t give up. She kept on at Mum, emphasising the health benefits of getting out of the shop, suggesting a break in England when Mum objected to travelling abroad, introducing the concept of a day trip when Mum objected to a week away, and eventually, Mum made a concession. After a while, walks in the country became as much a part of Bains Stores’ weekly routine as trips to the cash and carry.

  There were many astonishing things about these jaunts, not least how we looked: my mother, the shorter and stouter of the two ladies, dressed in a shapeless pastel salwar kameez, wearing chappals with thermal socks; my aunt, stately, in a Barbour jacket and fashion trainers completely unsuitable for cross-country trekking, almost always on her phone, her hair underneath a silk scarf; me, clutching a travel-sick spaniel wrapped like a sausage roll in a duvet.

  Then there was the unique way we tackled the walks. Mum, who struggled with the concept of ‘views’, objected to the countryside on the grounds that ‘there is nowhere to sit down’ and had no interest in the nature or the history around us, would often stop at random points, insisting we continue and pick her up on the way back, and if she ever saw a corner shop, she would insist on popping in to have a look at the produce and compare the prices with those at home. Meanwhile, my aunt would combine a need to keep up a brisk pace with an insistence on sticking to clean footpaths, which in practice usually meant walking around the gardens of stately homes in circles, slightly ahead or behind me, taking a call or checking for a mobile phone signal, breaking off occasionally to chase after Jessie, who was in the habit of disappearing into bushes and flower beds.

  The phone thing was constant. I know it is a cliché to wonder out loud why shopkeepers are always on the phone – but in the case of my aunt, I really did wonder. Who on earth was she talking to, given she had given up her job and there was no sign of any close friends? And one afternoon, while encircling the grounds of yet another stately home in Staffordshire, feeling not unlike Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, who famously passed time in Spandau prison pacing out a circular course, I dared to ask.

  ‘Just a friend,’ she replied, shoving her phone into her Mulberry handbag and increasing her already considerable pace.

  ‘A boy . . . friend?’

  Silence. I had never met anyone who could combine such warmth with such awkwardness.

  ‘That was Vivek.’ I was almost jogging now to keep up with her.

  ‘Ah, Indian. I see.’

  Massi was bought some time by Jessie, who had scampered into some rhododendrons, causing walkers around to exclaim in dismay. My aunt, passing her handbag to me, ran after him. ‘Jessie! Come back!’ She returned with the dog under her arm, ignoring the tutting around us. ‘This dog. A nightmare, aren’t you?’ She kissed him – something my mother hated seeing her do – and returned to the subject. ‘Anything else you want to know?’

  I ignored the mockery in her tone. ‘How long have you been seeing each other?’

  ‘Oh, on and off, about ten years.’ She was almost mumbling.

  ‘Wow. And you haven’t even mentioned him before. Can we meet him?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she snapped.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not going anywhere.’

  ‘Is he not marriage material?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, he is. In the sense that he is married already.’

  ‘Ah.’ I blinked. Tried to pretend I wasn’t surprised. ‘Will he leave his wife?’

  ‘Wants to. Hence the drama on the phone. But to be honest, I know I’m not really cut out for marriage.’ She brushed some dirt off Jessie. ‘Anyway, this is depressing. What about you, Arjan? When are you going to give us something to celebrate?’

  ‘Massi. You’re
turning into my mother.’

  I’m not sure why I said this. The truth was that my mum never nagged me about marrying Freya; all she really wanted to know was when we would finally call it a day. Maybe what I meant was that Surinder shared a certain relentlessness with her sister.

  Surinder continued, regardless. ‘Freya is such a lovely girl.’

  ‘I know she is. She is great, but . . .’

  We had by this stage done six laps of the courtyard. And as I began updating my aunt on couples’ counselling, still carrying my aunt’s handbag, I made a break for it – veering off the gravel path on to a lawn, walking towards the obelisk which towered over the southern part of the estate. I told my aunt, unsteady in her trainers and slowed down by the task of carrying the dog, that there had been some progress. Freya and I both liked our counsellor and, sitting in her front room, surrounded by pictures of her happy mixed-race children, she seemed like someone whose advice was worth taking. We missed one another. Our therapist had remarked upon how comfortable we were in each other’s company, for a couple who were breaking up. Some of the exercises we were set afterwards, such as having to ‘discuss how sex was regarded in your family’, were inadvertently entertaining. But others, such as the half-hour we had to spend listening, without interruption, to each other talk about our relationship, were less so. It turned out that Freya couldn’t forgive me for my infidelity, I was finding it difficult to forgive her for sleeping with her ex, and, if I was honest, many of the issues about cultural incompatibility remained.