by Preethi Nair
‘Quite,’ I mumbled.
‘Yes, I’ve got better things to do with my time,’ she replied.
‘Like make apricot statues?’
Felicity looked up from behind the reception desk, shocked.
‘I don’t like your tone, Nina,’ Boo said.
‘I don’t like your work, but there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?’
‘Nessun dorma', which was playing in reception, seemed to be playing unusually loud in my head as Boo started ranting. I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying but just gazed blankly at her, watching her lips move and hearing the Guru’s words telling me again and again that I was cursed. The only thought I had was to get out of there.
‘Boo, Nina has been under the weather recently, haven’t you, Nina?’ Simon said, hearing her shouting and coming out of his office to try to placate her.
‘Yes, under the weather, under a cloud, a dirty grey sky. I have to go, I have to leave.’
There was silence: the kind of silence that is desperate to be filled.
And Simon didn’t stop me. Over three years at the firm, sweating blood, pampering over-inflated egos and making him money and he didn’t even say, ‘Come into my office, let’s talk about it.’
Maybe if he had I would have stayed, because all that I needed was some reassurance that I was worth something.
‘Right,’ I said, getting my coat. ‘I’ll come back for the rest of my things later.’
‘I’ll make sure Felicity sends them on to you,’ Simon replied.
I splashed through puddles, wandering aimlessly, feeling numb. I should have been elated, relieved at least that I had left work; but the way it had happened was out of my control, he was essentially showing me the door. After everything I had done, that’s how much I meant. What would I say to my parents? Not only would I crush them by saying that I was marrying Jean but now my dad’s biggest fear of me losing my job had come true. Perhaps it was better to break it to them all at once: if I didn’t have a job I couldn’t go through with their list system anyway so that didn’t matter, and at least I had Jean. Jean would be there no matter what. He would return home later that evening and between us we could find a way to break it to them so that it wouldn’t completely crush them. Things weren’t that bad, I tried to convince myself. I’d just attempted to put the whole Guru thing behind me – there were good things to look forward to. Jean and I could finally settle down. I felt excited at the thought of seeing him again, having him wrap his arms around me and reassure me that everything would work out. As I had time on my hands I decided to go to his flat, make us dinner and wait for him: he was due back around six.
A short time later, my shopping basket was bulging with colourful vegetables. I had no idea what I was going to do with them but anything that had any colour went into the basket. Jean liked chicken so I decided to throw one in and figure out how to cook it later. I picked up a recipe book, some wine, flowers and candles and made my way to his apartment.
I smiled at the concierge as I entered the building, but instead of smiling back he glanced down at his feet.
‘Busy morning, John?’
‘Yes, miss,’ he replied, calling for the lift. I could sense that he wasn’t in the mood for chatting so I waited in silence for the lift to come down.
The tiles and mirrors reflected the huge ceilings of the apartment block and the lift was rickety and had an old-style caged door. I had always thought I’d get stuck in it. Before Jean Michel went away on his trip he had stopped the lift as we were halfway down. I had panicked. ‘I’ll take care of you, cherie,’ he said. ‘Always, you know I will. Nina, I want you to marry me.’
And although I was overwhelmed the first word that came out of my mouth wasn’t ‘Yes’ but ‘Dad'. All I could see was my dad’s face, so absolutely crushed.
Jean tried not to appear disappointed. I asked for time to think about it. He said he understood, but now my head was clear I would have a chance to make it up to him.
We had met two years earlier at a party. The moment he walked in half the women in the room turned to look: he was six foot two, with blue eyes, jet-black hair and a big smile. I watched his every move from the corner of my eye and my heart jumped with disbelief as he made his way towards me.
‘Are you OK?’ he said in a deep, confident voice, as if he had always known me.
I turned to check that it was me he was talking to and that I wasn’t mistaken: out of all the women in the room, he had chosen to speak to me.
We talked for hours and as I left he said he’d call. The days seemed interminable as I waited and my stomach did all sorts of things each time the phone rang. He called two days later, said he had wanted to phone straightaway to see if I got home safely but had held out as long as he could. There was something very solid about him: he was confident yet also excitingly passionate and spontaneous. There was no routine in our lives, no planning; things just happened.
He whisked me away from the world of the semi, Croydon and list systems, away from practicality and duty, and made me feel beautiful. He had all the qualities I lacked and when I was around him I never felt inadequate. Ki said he was what I needed; that he made me see things differently, beyond the values and concepts that had been drummed into me.
She, like Jean, was also a risk-taker, but ended up with someone who seemed safe, reliable and predictable … although he didn’t turn out to be in the end. Ki was laid out in her coffin in her red bridal sari. Her boyfriend, who was supposedly madly in love with her, hadn’t wanted to marry her, but her mother insisted that that was the way that she wanted to be dressed. Had she known towards the end that her boyfriend’s visits had become more and more infrequent? He didn’t even manage to make it to the funeral and three months later he was seeing someone else.
Jean Michel saw me through that period. Although my way of coping was just to get on with life and try not to think about things too deeply, I knew if I needed to talk he would listen. He always listened; he always tried to understand.
I turned the key to Jean’s flat and it wasn’t double locked.
‘Careless as usual,’ I thought. ‘Goes away for four days and forgets to double-lock the door.’
I carried the shopping into the kitchen and thought I heard a noise. Maybe the cleaner was in, although it wasn’t her usual day.
‘Hello,’ I shouted. Nobody responded so I began unpacking the shopping. The fridge had half a bottle of champagne in it along with some pâté. There was another noise.
‘Hello, is anyone in?’ I said, going towards Jean’s room.
Jean suddenly came out, making me jump.
‘Jean, I didn’t know you were home. When did you get in? Didn’t you hear me? I’ve got so much to tell you.’
He looked very pale.
‘Are you ill? What’s wrong?’
His bedroom door clicked closed.
‘What’s going on? Who’s in there? Who is it, Jean?’
‘No one, Nina,’ his voice sounded odd. ‘Don’t go in there.’
I went in and saw this woman emerging like some weasel out of a hole. She had a mass of red curls and was half-dressed.
All I could think about was the concierge, party to as many secrets as he was keys. He could have said something like, ‘Miss, don’t go up there, the gas men are seeing to a leak, come back in a few hours.’ I would have listened.
I stood there, completely frozen, trying to comprehend an obvious situation. There were no clichés like, ‘It’s not what you think’ or ‘She’s not important.’ In a way I wish there had been because in those moments of silence I understood that he could not possibly love me and that he loved himself much more. He expected me to say something, to do something, but I just stood there in silence, staring at him. And then I walked away.
I ran down the stairs and out of the building, cars beeping as I flew recklessly across the road, not caring if they knocked me down. I ran like I never wanted to stop but when my sides began to ache I c
ouldn’t go on any more. Stumbling on a bench in Green Park, catching my breath, the tears began to trickle down my face.
The only other person apart from Ki who knew me inside out was Jean. I had showed him who I truly was and he had rejected me. Was I not good enough? Was that it? Was I fooling myself that he loved me? Did he mean it when he asked me to marry him? Did I make that up too? Was it because since Ki’s death I had been distant, or was it because I made him wait? He said that he would wait for as long as it took.
My arm and my chest, the ugly blotchy creases – he had pretended that they didn’t matter? Did she have ugly blotchy creases that he ran his fingers down while whispering that he loved her, every single part of her? Was that it? Was he touching her, saying that he was there for her, while the Guru was touching me? Did he pretend to love me because he pitied me?
Tears streamed down my face.
‘Help me, Ki, please, I need you. Show me a sign if you’re around. You said you would. Please. Are you seeing all this? Are you?’ Nothing came. ‘You lied to me. You said you would always be with me but how can you be? If you were with me you wouldn’t let any of this happen. None of this. But you’re dead and dead people can’t do anything, can they? I trusted you and you lied. I let you give up because you promised you would always be with me, but you deceived me just like everyone else.’
The rain began falling. I sat on the park bench thinking that there was really no such thing as fate: imagining providence having a hand was just a way of not feeling alone, a way of making sense of a pointless journey. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. Speak to me like you said you would. Go on, I’m listening now. Do you want me to beg? I’ll beg if you want.’
I crawled down onto my hands and knees. ‘See, I’m begging you. Please.’
Still nothing came.
Clutching at the blades of grass I fell forward on my knees onto a patch of muddy wet grass and began sobbing my heart out, oblivious to who was watching me. I looked up at the grey, miserable sky and the bursting rain clouds. ‘Fall harder, go on, is that the best you can manage? I don’t care what else you throw at me, send someone else to feel me up, go on, I don’t care any more. You’ve taken everything, everything. Do you hear me? You probably don’t even exist, do you? All made up, all of it, lies.’
I sat back on the bench and was aware that I was making an awful gut-wrenching sound. The wailing came from feeling cheated by the death of my closest friend, cheated by love and the injustice of being touched up and having my faith simultaneously taken away. Unable to fight any more, I let the rain pour down on me. It soaked through my coat as I sat there continuing to think. I thought about the nature of love and how that too was a lie. Ki’s boyfriend had left her to die. Jean Michel had fooled me into believing that it was possible to love. All along my parents had been right. Life wasn’t about emotion, emotion was for people who had nothing better to do with their time. It was about coping and easing the struggle, being practical and realistic, that was what my dad was trying to prepare me for. Their ideas about love were practical, they left no room for emotion and no room to be hurt, let down or disappointed. They were right: romantic airy-fairy notions of love did not exist, and if they did they were impractical and could only lead to disappointment. Life was all about survival. Trust no one as everyone was out for themselves, have no expectations: that way you could not be let down.
Eventually, when I could take the cold no longer, I made my way to the train station.
I was soaking wet so that each time I moved slightly the seat made a sloshing sound. Water ran down from my hair into my face and then dripped onto my coat, which was covered in mud. A scummy dark mess of brown on a brown coat; dirty on the outside, dirty on the inside. The commuters desperately avoided eye contact with me and tried not to look when I emitted that erratic sound; that noise when you can’t quite control your breathing. By the time I got to the High Street I had assimilated the day’s events. I managed to go into McDonalds and clean myself up a bit and by the time I reached our road I had tried to pull myself together. When I got to the blue front door of our semi, I even managed a fake smile.
My mother was in the kitchen making rotis and my father was in the sitting room, snoozing under his newspaper despite the Hindi music blasting out of the television. Their world rotated the same way it had done since 1972 when they came to London. In the evenings, Mum rolled out the rotis and made sure they were perfectly circular. During the day she worked at a tailor’s and sometimes took home extra work making Indian garments. My father had been on the same route for twenty years and wasn’t taking retirement until he saw me married; something else he succeeded in making me feel guilty about.
Although I could see the connection between retirement and marriage, he managed to find a connection between marriage and most things, and if it didn’t provoke a response in me he would bring out the death card. ‘Tell me, who will look after you, Nina, when I die?’ And if he wanted to provoke an extreme response he would say, ‘Are you going to do the same as your sister?’ This, however, was rare, as he did his very best not to mention her.
My sister Jana had left when she was eighteen. Her departure deeply wounded my parents as she had gone off to live with a ‘white boy'. They decided the best way to handle it was to pretend nothing had happened and not to talk about her, exiling her into the recesses of their minds. The jewellery my mother had saved for her wedding was safely packed away in the hope that at some stage it could be used for me. So I knew it was madness going out with Jean Michel because it couldn’t lead anywhere, but he convinced me that everything would work out and that he could win them round. Foolishly, I believed him.
Outwardly my parents hardly ever showed signs that Jana’s departure had affected them, and in those intervening years many things happened but their routine remained the same. At exactly seven o’clock they would eat and by eight they would both be in bed, flicking between Zee TV and ITV.
‘Didn’t you take your umbrella, beta? What has happened to your coat?’ my mother asked, putting down her rolling pin and handing me a multi-stained tea towel to wipe myself down with.
‘I fell over.’
‘Go and get changed,’ she said, picking up the rolling pin and pointing it at me.
‘Ma …’
‘Hmmm …’
‘About Raj, Ma, you know, the accountant man.’
She put down her rolling pin again and turned to look at me. Her eyes lit up like all her prayers had finally been answered.
‘I’ll see him. You can call his mother to arrange it.’
Why exactly these words came out of my mouth remains a mystery; perhaps it was easier than, ‘Ma, I’ve been touched up by a Guru, I’ve lost my job, found my boyfriend with someone else and have accepted that Ki is dead.’ Or maybe it was just that I was finally ready for the kind of stability they had: a gale-force wind could descend upon them, or an earthquake that measured eight on the Richter scale, and they would still be unaffected. In the words of my father, ‘This is what the routine and the discipline are both bringing.’
I went to have a shower, vigorously scrubbing every part the Guru had touched until it hurt while I began figuring out ways to break the news to my dad that I no longer had a job.
He was sitting there in the front row when I graduated. That’s when he really got into power dressing – wearing red and looking like Santa. It also gave him a certain amount of status in the community to say that his daughter was a lawyer and he would often get out the graduation photo and tears would form in his eyes.
That’s why I couldn’t tell them when I went back downstairs. He munched through his rotis asking if I had had a good day, not really stopping to listen for an answer but telling us about some rude passenger who had refused to pay full fare and how he ‘bullocked’ him and how he was tired of the ‘riff-raffies’ on his bus. Mum had put Raj’s CV safely to one side and kept looking over at it and touching her heart as if to tell me that it would break i
t if I went back on my word. I couldn’t eat anything so told them that I had had something after work, had had a long day and needed to go to bed.
Unable to sleep, I had lots of questions with no answers and an aching feeling of emptiness and solitude, compounded by the fact that I wanted to scream and scream out loud and not stop. But I couldn’t. The day had begun with the Guru’s hands touching me, his fingers circling my lips, and ended with me covering my mouth, making some pathetic, muffled sounds under the duvet so that nobody could hear.
That weekend I didn’t get out of bed. I was running a temperature and was in a state of complete delusion. I could hear my mum faintly in the background, pottering about, bringing food to me, mumbling something about not taking an umbrella, but I slept through it in a blissful state of illusion, imagining that I was married to Jean Michel, that everything had been a nightmare. It was only my dad’s voice that managed to penetrate through my dreamlike state.
‘You’ll be late, Nina. Don’t want to get the sack, get up, you’re better now, no?’
Waking up that morning, when every part of me wanted to remain in a heap, was hell.
‘You’ll be late, Nina,’ my dad shouted again, and then I heard him say to my mum, ‘When I was her age I had to get up at five o’clock every day, even when I was sick. And I was married.’ He said it like marriage had been a double punishment but my mum wasn’t listening. Her mind was still on her future son-in-law.
Dad married Mum under a fog of controversy. It was controversial in the sense that he felt he had been duped. The story goes that he had a chesty cough and went to a chemist, well not really a chemist as you would expect but a shop somewhere in Uganda and that this beautiful woman served him. He was, at the time, searching for a wife and was utterly taken with her. He made a few enquiries as to her eligibility but it turned out that she was already married to the man who owned the chemist’s. In true Indian style, not letting an opportunity go, the woman said she had a sister who lived with her parents in India who would be perfect for my father.