by Meera Syal
I had seen Tracey, Anita’s skinny sister, gambolling about the yard with the family’s newest acquisition, a stringy black poodle who yapped and widdled excitedly around her knees. Hairy Neddy had already warned Tracey to keep that ‘runty rat’ away from his motor, whose wheels were already becoming the official toilet area for the various mutts in the vicinity. But as Tracey’s dog seemed to keep up a constant stream of pee, regardless of where it happened to be standing, this was not really a problem.
I disliked the animal on first sight; compared to the other neighbourhood dogs – Blaze, the mad collie who raced alongside cars as they passed the park, only just missing their wheels, Patch, Karl and Kevin’s ancient retainer mongrel who did nothing much but sit in a corner and drool and Shandy, the Mad Mitchells’ perky white hound—Tracey’s dog was a characterless apology for an animal, no personality, no menace and no fun. ‘Mum got it!’ Tracey told me, trying to kiss its ratty muzzle. I stepped back slightly, even though I was in my red wellies, not wanting to get sprayed, and wished that Butch had been around to see off this canine catastrophe. Butch, that was the name we had given him, had been a psychotic stray who had wandered into the yard just as the new school term had started. It had been a mad blissful few weeks when Butch had run havoc, tearing down washing, crapping on Mrs Lowbridge’s step and finally biting Sam Lowbridge on the leg when he’d tried to kick Butch ‘into the bloody middle of next week.’ As Mrs Povey had put it, ‘Any dog that takes a chunk out of that bugger is alright by me.’
From that point on, Sam had waged a ruthless vendetta against the dog who had torn a hole in his new black leather motorbike trousers, and spent most days chasing Butch out of the yard on his moped, whooping like a cowboy, until one day, Butch had simply not returned and we mourned him deeply.
‘He’s nice,’ I said, half-heartedly, not wanting to dim the love shining in Tracey’s eyes. ‘What’s his name?’
As if on cue, Deirdre appeared on her stoop and leaned over, patting her hands on her chubby knees to beckon the dog. ‘Nigger! Nigger! Here, darling! Come to mummy!’
My mummy nearly choked when I told her what the Rutters’ new pet was called. She told papa and he laughed uproariously. ‘It is not amusing, Shyam! These no good ignorant English, what kind of a name is that to say in front of your children, anybody’s children?’
‘They don’t know it is an insult!’ papa replied. ‘You remember when we went into that paint shop, they had a colour called Nigger Brown and you complained? The shopkeeper was most apologetic …’
‘Black, brown, what does it matter?’ mama continued. ‘Just because we are not black, it is still an insult! Have you seen any white paint called Honky With a Hint of White, heh?’
‘You ask any man on the street to tell the difference between us and a Jamaican fellow, he will still see us as the same colour, Daljit,’ papa finished off, returning to his paper.
From that day on, mama decided that Deirdre would not be one of the many beneficiaries of her impeccable manners and warm social chit-chat. Of course, to the untrained eye, mama did not treat Deirdre any differently, she still smiled and nodded when they passed each other in the yard to hang out washing, or when we were returning from parking our Mini in the garages near the old pigsties, but I knew what mama’s polite smile meant, what the layers of subtext beneath it were.
Not that Deirdre seemed to notice or care that she and mama hardly exchanged five sentences per month, a minuscule amount for neighbours in Tollington, she always seemed very busy for a woman who claimed not to have a job. Every morning she would leave the house around ten o’clock and not return until early afternoon, just before Anita and Tracey came back from the village school. Sometimes she carried shopping, but most of the time she was empty-handed and flushed, bustling with secrets and self importance.
There was an air about Deirdre that prevented the gossips from asking her outright what she was up to, a haughty, menacing defensiveness that stopped even Mrs Lowbridge and Mrs Povey from launching their usual two-pronged verbal assault. However, whenever Deirdre strutted past them in her stilettos, boobs like two heat-seeking missiles guiding her forward, they would shake their heads conspiratorially and whisper, ‘She’s got it coming to her, that one. Mark my words …’
Unfortunately, my information about Deirdre’s dog had now put my relationship, if that was what it was, with Anita into question, at least in mama’s eyes. The day the autumn fair arrived in the village, a convoy of swaying caravans and belching trucks pulling heavy metal equipment barnacled with light bulbs, dead as fish eyes, Anita knocked on my front door to ask, ‘Coming to see the men unload then?’
Mama looked up from dusting and her eyes narrowed slightly on seeing Anita. She straightened up with difficulty, her hands instinctively resting on her heavy, low stomach, straining the material of her old cotton salwar kameez. ‘Why do you want to see that? Nothing much to see, you’ll just be in the way.’ I knew if I pestered her, she would say yes, I could hear fatigue and defeat in her voice.
Mama had been cooking and cleaning for weeks it seemed because today was Diwali – ‘Our Christmas, Mrs Worrall,’ mama had told her, not wanting to go into huge detail about the Hindu Festival of Light and why the date changed each year, being a lunar festival, and how we did not give presents but put on all the lights in the house and gambled instead to welcome the goddess Lakshmi into our lives, hoping she would bring luck and wealth with her. Christmas was not the best comparison to use in front of me because I naturally expected a carload of presents and the generally festive, communal atmosphere that overtook the village somewhere around late November and continued into January.
But no one else in the world seemed to care that today was our Christmas. There was no holiday, except it happened to be a weekend so mama and I were off school and papa was only working a half-day, no tinsel or holly or blinking Christmas trees adorning the sitting room windows in Tollington, no James Bond films or Disney spectaculars on the telly, and nobody, not one person, had wished me a happy Diwali, despite the fact I had hung around the yard all morning with what I hoped was a general expression of celebration.
Everyone’s indifference had stunned me, and I now understood why my parents made an effort to mark Jesus’ birthday, despite the remarks made by some of my Aunties and Uncles. ‘Meena would feel left out…It is not fair, when all the other children are getting presents. Besides, we all get the day off, so why not?’ This was a typical example of Hindu tolerance, the reason, my mama told me, why so many religions happily coexisted in India – Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism and especially Islam. ‘There are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan!’ mama told me proudly. ‘Every path leads to the same god, that is what we believe, beti …’
Papa would have to repeat these arguments to my Auntie Shaila who held her ears and whispered, ‘Thoba!’ when he once told her that I was a regular visitor to Uncle Alan’s Sunday School at the Wesleyan church. ‘They just read and play, nothing much religious really …’ he offered. ‘All the kids go there, it keeps them out of the cold and out of mischief.’
‘But really, Shyam-saab, you want your daughter to come home reciting hymns and what not?’ Auntie Shaila cried. ‘All that boring sitting around and amen this and that, no joy and those damn hard seats and that awful organ music, like a donkey in pain. Besides, you will confuse the girl.’
Papa did not let on that he was as confused as I was about Hinduism; because of Dadaji’s beliefs, religion had never been an integral part of his upbringing, and his experiences around Partition had removed any lingering religious instincts he might have kept through suspicion or habit. ‘I have seen what we do in the name of religion,’ he once told mama. ‘What I do, how I behave, I will do in the name of humanity. And that is that.’ All the same, I continually mourned the fact that we did not have a shrine.
Auntie Shaila’s shrine took up all of the top of her fridge, where Lord Rama and Shri Krishna and Ganesha, the p
lump, smiling elephant-headed god, my favourite, sat in miniature splendour, surrounded by incense sticks, diyas, fruit offerings and photographs of departed loved ones. I never saw mama or papa bow their heads in prayer or sing one of the haunting, minor key aarlis that Auntie Shaila would regularly perform with closed eyes and a long-suffering, beatific look, I suspect, for my benefit. After the prayer, she would bring the diya to me, holding my hands above the flame, showing me how to waft a blessing over my head. ‘The fire will purify you, beti. Go ahead, have another go.’ I wafted furiously, trying to accrue enough good karma to last me until the next visit.
‘You know,’ Auntie Shaila confided, ‘that we believe whatever you do in this life will come back to you in the next. If you are good, you will come back as a good-hearted, rich person. If you are not, you will have to pay, at some point. Like with the bank, you know?’ I thought back on my lying and murderous thoughts and knew I would be booked in to reappear as a slug in my next reincarnation unless I did some serious damage repair. As soon as we got back from Auntie Shaila’s, I burst into tears and flung myself at papa, sobbing, ‘Why haven’t you taught me any prayers? I want to go to a temple! I want to come back as somebody famous!’
Once I had managed to blurt out what Auntie Shaila had said, papa transferred me to mama’s lap where I sat sniffling whilst he went and phoned somebody. I could only hear fragments of the conversation, which was polite, serene even, ‘…don’t scare her, she is very imaginative…Well, that is our choice, Shaila…Of course, I know you were only trying to help…We will …’ Afterwards, he sat me on his lap and said, ‘Beti, do you know what a conscience is?’ I shook my head; whatever it was, it sounded like I should have one. ‘You know when you do something wrong, when you upset someone, or break something, or even if you are thinking about doing something wrong and you hear a little voice in your head that says, “Meena, you should not do this…”’
I stiffened, alert now. Had he been reading my mind? How did papa know about this irritating other me that sat on my brain and kept confusing me at points of crisis? ‘Well, that voice is your conscience and God gave you that voice to help you…be good. And it will always be there, no matter how many temples you go to. Do you understand?’ I nodded, a sinking sensation overtaking me. So it would always be there, that’s what he said. I was stuck with it. ‘As long as you listen to this voice, it will lead you to God. Even if you do something wrong, if you feel sorry, God knows that too. So don’t worry about being punished. That is what we are here for …’ he added, as an afterthought.
Later on, mama, who had been very quiet during this early crisis of faith, declared that she was taking me to the gurudwara in Birmingham the very next day. This was something of a major announcement on two counts; firstly, because mama also had never shown signs of being overtly religious. Of course, she invoked the name of Bhagwan in times of pain or exasperation, and had often praised the virtues of Sikhism to me, how it was a very fair religion that believed totally in equality. ‘We Sikhs do not believe in the caste system at all,’ she said proudly, and then muttered, ‘Of course, now we have different snobberies, who has the biggest Mercedes and the fattest gold necklace, as if the biggest show-off is the most holy …’
And secondly, (the most worrying aspect of this planned pilgrimage) because the only gurudwara in the Midlands was at least twenty miles away, and that therefore meant that mama intended to drive us there. We had acquired our first car, a green Austin Mini, a few months back and mama had passed her test a week before Auntie Shaila’s attempted exorcism. I knew very well that papa was working the next day, and therefore I was to be the guinea pig on my mother’s first journey as a solo driver.
Mama tried to be a careful motorist, but drove so slowly that the amount of blood pressure she provoked in anyone unlucky enough to be stuck behind her, cancelled out all her good intentions. I had seen her having lessons from papa around the village, caught glimpses of her crawling around a gentle corner or tackling a minor slope as if it were the north face of the Eiger, whilst papa sat impassively next to her, his fingers gripping the dashboard in a parody of a fighter pilot bracing himself for a blast of G-force.
The journey started off pretty much to plan; papa had drawn a detailed map which mama taped to the dashboard, and she packed a thermos of haichi tea and a few parathas wrapped in silver foil in case we became delirious with hunger or thirst along the way. My job was to read out from the other list of instructions which complemented the visual map with precise details of landmarks we would be passing. ‘After this roundabout, which should see a betting shop and a petrol station, the one we filled up at last time we went to Uncle Trivedi’s place for his daughter’s first birthday …’
Mama would nod, like a spy who has just been given the right coded password in a public park ‘…the daffodils are out in Gdansk early this year …’ and rev up all the way into second gear for a few yards, confident at least that the next stage of the trek had been accounted for. Usually we chattered constantly in the car, playing I-Spy or singing songs, but this time mama was in no mood for pleasantries. Her eyes never left the road and her knuckles, clamped around the steering wheel, never got beyond a pale yellow colour. But then we got to Coal Hill, a notorious junction just outside Wolverhampton where five sets of traffic lights and a one-way system met on the incline of an extremely steep slope. If you made the lights, you were laughing, straight down the hill the other side, a clear run to the dual carriageway stretching all the way to Birmingham. But if you didn’t, you knew you were stuck for at least five minutes in a huge queue, doing an A-level in clutch control.
Of course, we would have made the lights had we got above ten miles an hour and if mama had not slowed down at the junction, waiting for the green to possibly change to amber and therefore catch her out, which is exactly what happened. We juddered to a halt to the accompaniment of several angry car horns and mama pulled up the handbrake with a grunt, flicking her eyes to the mirror to check the growing line of vehicles behind her. I decided feigned nonchalance was the best approach, and attempted a whistle as I scanned a facing billboard. On one side of it was a huge caption, GO TO WORK ON AN EGG! with a prancing lion beneath it, and on the other, a poster advertised the forthcoming pantomine at the Grand Theatre, Tinga and Tucker, everyone’s favourite koala bears, starring in Babes in the Wood, with Auntie Jean Morton and a host of TV favourites!
I was about to ask if we could go to see the show when I noticed that the koalas seemed to be moving forwards, and mama’s scream confirmed that actually, we were moving backwards. ‘Get out! Tell the bus driver to go back! Quickly!’ I had never seen mama so panicked before, her feet were slipping off the pedals, those strappy sandals were not a wise choice I remember thinking as I leaped out of the car and began a fifteen minute exercise in ritual humiliation. The bus driver was pragmatic enough, perhaps because he was Indian and had no doubt seen much worse back home, and I did preface my pleading with the word ‘Uncle’, which seemed to do the trick. But in order for him to move back, twenty other drivers had to be similarly charitable, and none of them looked like they wanted to be related to me.
The truck drivers, the taxi drivers, the fat men squeezed into small cars and the thin women rattling around in hatchbacks, all wore the same weary amused expression, as if my mother’s driving had only confirmed some secret, long-held opinion of how people like us were coping with the complexities of the modern world. Putting the car into reverse was, for them, an act of benevolence, maybe their first, as well-intentioned as any of Mr Ormerod’s charity parcels to the poor children in Africa.
I had expected aggression, some name calling, the kind of hissed comments I occasionally endured from the young lads on the council estate near my school, the school where mama taught. But I believed by the end of the queue, I had won them over with my cheeky charm, a sort of Well, What A Mess But It’s Not My Fault expression, and my deliberately exaggerated Tollington accent, thus proving I was very much one of
them, they did not need to shout to make themselves understood or think they could get away with muttered swearing and I would not understand, that I belonged.
By the time I reached the last car, a Hillman Imp containing a sweet-faced elderly woman, I was almost enjoying myself, swept up by the drama of the occasion, imagining how I would recite and embroider the story for my friends at school the next day. I tapped on the window and the old dear slowly rolled it down. ‘Sorry, but me mum’s at the top of the hill and she’s rolling down, ar…can yow move back just a bit? Ta.’
She blinked once and fumbled with the gear stick and said casually, ‘Bloody stupid wog. Stupid woggy wog. Stupid.’
I backed off as if I had been punched and began running up the hill to our Mini, where mama was waiting with the door open and the lights were green. I jumped into the front seat and mama shot off, from nought to thirty in five seconds in first gear, just as the lights changed to amber behind us, trapping the bus which tooted furiously at our retreating bumper. We did not speak at all until we pulled into the car park of the gurudwara, a converted church in an anonymous, treeless side street. Mama said, ‘Wipe your nose,’ and handed me a tissue and we went inside.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the day; there were lots of women, some of whom mama obviously knew, who pinched my cheek and sang along loudly and sharply to the bhajans, led by a solemn turbanned priest. There was a draped canopy beneath which sat the Holy Book, the poles supporting the tented roof were spiralled with fairy lights, and portraits of the Gurus engaged in various bloody acts of martyrdom adorned the walls. There was a small anteroom with a sectioned, open cupboard which contained hundreds of pairs of shoes, which everyone had to remove on entering, and a small cracked sink where we washed our hands before leaving.