by Preethi Nair
I left the easel, put the tape on, reached for Paynes Grey and squeezed it out into an empty paint-pot. My parents had lived in East Africa after they were married and my dad took care of one of his uncle’s tea plantations. Years later, when his uncle died, everything was left to my dad. The story from here on changes depending on who is telling it: my dad says that he built up the plantations across East Africa and had amassed a fortune, whereas his cousin, my Uncle Amit, says that he ran the business into the ground and the extent of the debts he had run up were not discovered because Idi Amin came to power and made all the Indians leave.
My father, having amassed a fortune or not, was told to leave it all and go. My parents’ lives were turned upside down when they, along with thousands of others, were told to leave. We were bundled into a van, my dad holding my mother who was clutching onto me – her baby – and my big sister. It must have been hard: one day they were surrounded by fields, the next they were looking out onto lonely pavements.
Our world shrunk to a two-bedroom flat above an Indian restaurant in Croydon which we had to share with my dad’s brother, my Uncle Nandan, and his wife, Auntie Leena. Mum and Dad had to get jobs straightaway and they took the first thing that came, out of desperation. My mother worked in a factory and my father got a job with London Transport. It must have been hard for him because he had to exchange everything he had for a bus. I don’t think he ever dared to dream bigger, just in case someone took those things away too; or maybe the fight for survival in England precluded the luxury of dreaming. Whatever it was, he remained trapped in his double-decker and pinned all his hopes and aspirations onto his two girls.
At that moment in time, one of his daughters was thinking about painting elephants and the other … nobody knew where she was. I left the grey paint and took out the tube of Cadmium Red. It was the colour of my dad’s double-decker, the colour of his favourite shirt, the colour of his pride, his sadness and his anger. Most of the canvas was covered with it except the space where I wanted the elephants to go.
My dad was close to Jana. His face lit up when she walked into the room and this must have hurt my mother because she had never had that effect on him. Jana was beautiful and had a mass of black curls. When she used to collect me from school everyone said that I had a very pretty mother.
‘She’s my big sister,’ I would say proudly, correcting them.
Taking the pot of grey and thinning it slightly with water, I outlined an elephant shape and then painted it.
When I was little I had an obsession about cutting sheets of paper and gluing them back together. Jana was the only one who knew this, in fact she was the only one who knew most things about me as she was always with me. I loved to either cut and glue or play in the middle of the kitchen floor with my collection of Matchbox cars. Jana would watch me play while cooking for the others and waiting for them to all arrive back from their jobs.
One day, as she was making dinner, the phone rang. She told me to stay where I was, saying she would be back in a minute. I’m sure she was gone for more than a minute and I only wanted to help her. I took a chair, put it next to the cooker and stood on it so I could stir the dhal. The spoon dropped to the side just next to the blue flame and as I went to get it my sleeve caught fire. Blue quickly turned to orange which turned to black. At first I just watched the flames; they rapidly spread up my arm across my chest, and as I watched it was almost as if I wasn’t there. It was the smell that brought me back – a charred, burning smell – and then I felt excruciating pain and began to scream and scream. My sister got to me in seconds but just at that moment my mother came back from work.
She took a towel, soaked it and threw it over me, and shouted at my sister to call an ambulance.
Jana was crying.
‘Do it,’ my mother shouted.
The rest I remember vividly not just because of the pain but because I have never seen my mother so angry. Even today I have never met again the woman she turned into that day.
‘Look what you’ve done to her,’ she screamed when my sister came back. ‘You can’t even look after her for five minutes, always thinking of yourself, you’re so selfish. You’ve always been selfish. It would be better if you –’
‘Ma, it wasn’t my fault, I only –’
‘It’s never your fault, nothing is ever your fault. Go and speak to your boyfriend, don’t think I don’t know, go speak to him again and let her burn.’
Then my mother fell silent as she looked down at me and continued rocking me in her arms. ‘It’s OK, beta, mummy’s here. Mummy will look after you.’
The ambulance men came and Jana was told to stay behind and wait for my father.
Later that night when I was asleep in the hospital bed, I had this strange feeling that Jana came to visit me. She told me that it was time to leave and kissed me, whispering that she would always love me.
When I got back home from the hospital she wasn’t there. My dad said she had gone on holiday, and each time I asked she was still on holiday. It made no sense to me – there were no letters or phone calls – and when she’d been gone for three months, my parents said she had decided to stay where she was. One day I heard my mum and dad talking, and my dad was sobbing when my mum told him what had happened and about the ‘white boy'. They both agreed never to mention her name in the house again and for the purpose of the list system – to avoid any controversy and avert scandal – she was erased.
I know it broke Dad’s heart when she left and so all his attention went on me. Now when I walked into a room his eyes lit up. Everything he did, he did for me, and I tried my very best not to disappoint him. It made me feel even more guilty for the lies I was now telling him on an ever-increasing basis.
A few inches to the left, just beneath the grey elephant, I painted a smaller elephant in white. Both softened the red background in which they were set.
The tape had stopped a while ago but I hadn’t noticed until I put the brush down. I played it again and sat for a while eating chocolate, packets of crisps and drinking Coke that I’d bought from the newsagent’s on my way to the studio. I never ate junk but in my studio there were no rules; everything was made up as I went along.
When the tape had stopped again I decided it was time to go home. Why I took the tape of Madame Butterfly with me I have no idea. Maybe because the studio felt like another world, somewhere where there was peace and nothing else existed, and I wanted to bring something of this world into the semi.
The moment I walked through the door my mum put her rolling pin down and came at me with a list of plans and things that needed to be done.
‘I’ll go over it after I’ve had a shower.’
‘Yah, but don’t forget most important thing is to invite Raj home day after tomorrow. Call him now to ask him.’
‘Good day, Nina?’ my dad interrupted.
‘Yes, you know, same old thing.’
‘Good, good,’ he said, returning to his newspaper.
‘You’ll call him, no?’ my mum insisted.
After coming out of the bathroom my mum was still shouting up the stairs, making all sorts of suggestions for the engagement. I put the tape of Madame Butterfly on to drown her out, turning it up louder and louder with every question asked.
Dad came up to my room, banging on the door.
‘What are you trying to do to me, Nina? Kill me? I have to listen to Kavitha in the morning and now you make me listen to this. Why is that lady screaming like that? She got no job or husband?’
‘She’s found out she’s been deceived,’ I replied calmly. ‘Fooled,’ I rephrased, using his terminology.
‘No, Nina, you have been the fooled, buying such music. People they buys anything these days. Maybe I should put Kavitha on a tape and make the money. Turn the lady off or make her more quiet.’
I switched the tape off, called Raj, and went to discuss the preparations with my mum.
When I left home in the mornings it was dark and when I came ho
me it was dark. Everything was artificially lit by streetlamps, deceitful night pretending to be day and daylight cut short prematurely and swallowed up by night. In these hours of darkness I found myself on the train, preparing myself to go from one world to another, and it was only at these times when I actually thought about the insanity of what I was doing. As I climbed up the underground steps and walked to the studio, it didn’t seem so insane. And when shafts of light entered my studio it was the only thing that was real; painting was the only time I could be myself and totally free. In the studio there was no pretending to be anyone else other than who I was, no wedding, no expectations, nothing. Yet, ironically, whole realities that did not exist were created with colour. Around evening, when I looked up at my skylight and saw the grey clouds encroaching, it was time to prepare myself to be someone else.
As my train arrived at London Bridge, I put all wedding plans and what would happen out of my mind. By the time I got out of the station my thoughts were consumed with what to paint next. No one had reclaimed the boots, which were still outside, but someone had unwrapped them. The table in the studio was a mess with empty Coke cans, chocolate wrappers and crisp packets. I left it all on the table, got changed, put the elephant painting against the wall, switched the tape on and sat in front of my easel. I turned around to stare at the canvas and the little elephant.
White; white like the writing on the Coke can, the sling that protected my arm, the gobstopper Ki had once given me all those years ago, the sheet that she was wrapped in to be laid to rest. White, like innocence, anticipation; the start of something new.
On the way home from school, Jana always made sure we stopped off at the newsagent’s and bought me sweets. I wasn’t allowed to tell Mum and Dad this because the money she was given for housekeeping wasn’t supposed to be spent on confectionery, but every day we got something and she sat me up on the wall outside while I ate. Sometimes her friend David came and sat with us. He worked in a garage across the road but I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone this either.
That’s how I met Ki. Ki was the newsagent’s daughter and one day I saw her in his shop behind the counter. I recognised her from school and smiled. She didn’t smile back; she probably didn’t need any more new friends as she already had loads of them, all of them huddled around her at break-time when she got out her assortment of sweets. That’s the kind of power a packet of cola cubes had back then. She had big round brown eyes and I remember thinking that my eyes would be as round as hers if my dad had a sweetshop.
The sweetshop girl ran from the counter and went to balance on a broom. I held my sister’s hand like I too had something to be proud of. We saw her most days after school and that was all she did, run and balance on her broom head as if it were her most prized possession, but she never said anything to me there or at school, not even hello. But my sister spoke to her and she spoke to the owners of the newsagent’s; Jana could talk to anyone.
Not until months later when I had been off school for a while and had my arm in a sling did broom girl come and talk to me. She came up to me one playtime shortly after I had returned to school and offered me some gobstoppers.
‘You don’t come to the shop any more,’ she said.
Like she really cared. After my sister went on holiday, my mum stayed at home to take care of me and didn’t know about the sweetshop. I glanced at the packet of gobstoppers being tempted at me. I said nothing. No one could buy me like that.
‘What happened?’ she said pointing at the sling, her cheek bulging in the shape of a round ball.
I shrugged one shoulder and she thrust the packet in my face again, took out a gobstopper and placed it in my hand. The information was worth one gobstopper.
I tried to explain the sequence of events but it must have sounded confusing, and as I got to the part about my sister I began to cry.
‘Here, take them,’ she said trying to console me, handing the whole packet over. And then I found her looking out for me every playtime.
The canvas was painted white.
‘Do you want to be the witch?’ she said when my arm got better and all that was left was the scarring. At the time, being the witch was a privilege, but I didn’t know this. I assumed it was because she thought I was ugly and the scars could add to the character portrayal. But when we played with the other girls there would always be a fight as to who would be the witch and if any of the girls said anything about my arm, she’d beat them up. Those were the roles we fell into; she took care of me and I let her. I still missed my sister desperately but I grew to love my new friend.
A year later, my sister began sending letters to me at Ki’s sweetshop. I don’t know how she knew I’d get them, maybe she didn’t as she began each letter with, ‘I don’t know if you’ll get this, my little one.’ Ki’s mother secretly read them to us. Jana was living in Manchester with her friend David but didn’t leave an address at the top so I could write back to her. Every birthday and Christmas she sent me a card but that all stopped abruptly when I was twelve. Every day after school, without fail, I would go into the sweetshop hoping for a letter that never came. Ki’s mother would shake her head and cuddle me. Her family became mine.
Around this time, Mum and Dad bought their own house, and it was round the corner from Ki’s. If I wasn’t in her house, she was in mine, but I preferred to be there as her parents let us do pretty much what we wanted. If my dad was at home we couldn’t really run about as he would track us down and make us sit at the dining-room table while he read bits from the encyclopaedia or The Reader’s Digest which he’d begun to subscribe to. On Saturdays, Ki’s dad would let us help him out while he went to the cash and carry. We could unwrap all the packets of sweets, drinks and crisps and then her mother would give me a carrier-bag full of stuff to take home. I’d draw her lots of pictures as a way of saying thanks. Ki’s mother put them on her fridge door although I bet she wished she hadn’t done that because week after week she got more and more garish pictures.
Ki and I didn’t end up going to the same secondary school but it didn’t matter, because after school we were inseparable. She was very popular at her school but I didn’t have a gang as I was shy, very self-conscious of my scar, and was forced to wear this awful grey oversized anorak that my dad had got down the market. On top of that, I had the misfortune of having to sit next to Rita Harris, who was the class babe. One day Rita drew up a list where she paired up the girls and the boys. She decided to leave my name out as she said none of the boys would want to be paired up with me. When I told Ki about this, she came to our school at lunchtime and beat Rita Harris up and made her say sorry to me in front of everyone.
Shortly after that, things turned. I got rid of the anorak, made new friends and began to believe in myself a little more. Even my Uncle Amit who hadn’t seen me in years remarked on the change and said I had turned into a swan, though at the time I had some difficulty understanding this as he pronounced it as ‘wone’ – it was only after further clarification when he mentioned the ugly duckling that I knew what he was going on about.
The only time Ki and I didn’t speak for weeks was when I said that she was being dumb leaving school to do a secretarial course.
‘God, Nina, you’ve been spending too much time with your dad.’
‘But you can go to university.’
‘Have you ever thought that I might not want to? I don’t do things to please other people.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘At least I don’t spend my time creeping around pretending to be someone I’m not. Why don’t you tell your dad you’re doing an art A-level. It’s spineless.’
‘Spineless?’ I repeated. ‘You’re just spoiled. You’ve always been a brat. Anything you want, just go ask daddy.’ And as soon as I said it, her eyes looked as if I’d dropped the heaviest rocks in them.
Normally after an argument it was me that went quiet, but I couldn’t handle her silences; they were of a different kind – they could completel
y freeze you out. Even so, every day I went to her house as normal, watched videos and listened to her tapes despite the fact she wasn’t speaking to me, and chatted away with no response. Then one day, as I was telling her how I had caught my dad blowing the television a kiss when Cilla Black was on, I could tell she wanted to laugh, so I threw my arms around her.
‘You’re such an idiot, Nina,’ she laughed.
‘Dad and Cilla can always break you down.’
It was a given that we’d always be there for each other and forgive each other anything.
Ki worked for the same travel company for years. When I started at Whitter and Lawson she got into a pattern of temping and travelling until she met her boyfriend Sanjay. Her trip to Southeast Asia was to be her last before she got married.
She bought me a buddha from a market stall in Bangkok. She was in Thailand and was meant to go on to Australia, then Sanjay was going to meet her and together they’d go to South America. But Ki came home early with the pain in her leg that kept getting worse. The buddha was bought for me in haste as a souvenir.
Every time she went somewhere she got me something, as if to entice me out of my life in London. Some of the things she brought back wouldn’t have got me out of Croydon.
Towards the end was the only time when I looked after her, but I had to, I had to make her fight, not let her go. She pretended she was getting better, that she was getting stronger and I believed this because I wanted to. If you stare at something long enough you can see whatever you want to.
The canvas was still blank. Where was she now? What would she be doing? Where did an energy like that go? It couldn’t just dissolve into nothingness. I dented the Coke can with my fist, first in one direction and then in another; things were really so fragile. Taking thick, bright red I painted a buddha in the colours and shapes of the Coca Cola tin, adding white so there were different hues of red. It took hours and hours to replicate the detail and the dents of the can and when I looked at my watch it was seven o’clock; time to go.