by Poorna Bell
By the second day, it’s raining, but I want to kayak despite the water still looking a bit choppy. As I drag the boat to the water, I realise, as wave after wave hits me, that I am not going to be able to get this thing in or, indeed, even steer it back. I feel the tug of the sea and it is saying, I am older and stronger than you, little girl, try it if you think you’re hard enough.
I look back at the house and Felicity is half-laughing at my antics, and half-concerned the sea is going to swallow me whole.
So I decide to go for a swim. I have never gone for a swim when it is raining, and the water is far from warm, but I’m already wet.
I feel the round discs of clams beneath my feet, shuffling like cards, digging deep into the sand. The surf pounds against me, like a lover trying to close the door in my face, Not today, not today.
I kneel down in the sea, the cold water travelling up to my chest, the rain a soft pitter-patter from the sky, and I close my eyes.
I feel the spray, the scent of water and earth in my nose, the smell carrying the thoughts of an ocean, the shells of sea creatures crunching beneath my knees, the heartbeat of surf that pumps and swells against my body. It is like a dance I can never match, that moves far too elegantly for my feet. And then I remember: the sea moves. It shifts constantly, changes; it is never the same thing for more than one moment.
And this is what the land tries to make us forget. The land makes us think we are fixed, that all that happens to us is all we will ever be, that we are in control of our lives. It makes us believe that if you stay in one fixed place, you can be in charge of it all, you can be safe.
But it is a lie, utterly.
Chapter Three
I was never the type of girl who dreamed about weddings.
Perhaps that was because Indian weddings are horrendously long, the music sounds like bagpipes played by drunk people and there are thousands of guests. By the end of it, the bride and groom look like the propped-up corpse from Weekend at Bernie’s because they have to stand on a stage the entire night and wait as each and every one of those people go up to congratulate them.
They also have to shake hands with the more enthusiastic guests – some of whom I’ve personally seen scratch their bums/pick their nose/not wash their hands after using the loo – and, no, the couple are not allowed to use hand sanitiser or wear disposable gloves.
It’s even harder for the bride because along the way some masochist decided that not only was she going to have to don an extra-heavy sari or a lengha (a skirt and top that can weigh up to sixteen kilos), but the amount of gold she wears is only deemed sufficient when her spine curves like a coat hanger.
However, although Indian weddings are boring, the highlight is the food.
None of your insipid salmon en croute shit or shoe-leather roast lamb – Indian food is superb at weddings because the longer it sits, the more flavoursome it becomes. And because caterers rely so heavily on word of mouth, and that mouth tends to be a collective of extremely critical aunts, any business serving bad food wouldn’t last a minute.
But guess what? The bride and groom are lucky if they even get a sniff of it. They have to shake all those goddamn hands before they can even touch a plate, and Indians are notoriously good at honing in on all the best pieces of meat.
So, at around 1am, the bride and groom end up with a plate of prison food: yellowing rice and some gravy.
Thanks but no thanks.
Aside from the wedding ceremony, I also couldn’t comprehend meeting someone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
Which wasn’t to say that I didn’t believe in romance, but while I had found myself dreaming about what my soulmate would be like, I’d never done the same with a husband. In the case of the former, I knew how I wanted to feel – which was safe, loved, like I was the centre of the other person’s world. That they would make me laugh even when I felt grumpy and that I would never get sick of their company. Humming along the same wavelength.
But a husband is a completely different proposition. Choosing a husband or a wife requires practicality of a specific kind.
It doesn’t matter if they like Taylor Swift and you like techno, or they like reality TV and you like Nordic noir. (But, hey – at least you’ll have one thing in common: both your music tastes are terrible.) Unless you met at high school or university, you are likely to have a diverse range of interests and, guess what, none of that matters.
What matters is the big stuff. Do you want the same things from life? Do you share some of the same values? If one of you wants kids and the other definitely doesn’t, or if one of you really wants to get married and the other doesn’t believe in marriage, just shake hands, say thanks for coming, and walk away. You’ll be saving yourself from a lot of repressed angst and stomach ulcers.
The reason why I didn’t dream of a husband was because I didn’t believe a man like Rob was possible.
During my twenties, I predominantly dated Asian men – by that I mean from the Indian subcontinent, which includes India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. I just assumed I would end up marrying someone from my own culture because things like family, duty and a mutual desire to have kids was just easier when someone already knew what the deal was.
Like not having to explain to someone what a bucket bath was. This may not sound like the stuff of fairy tales, but it was about comfortableness and not having to deal with someone saying, ‘Ew! You people have a bath out of a bucket?’
For the record, this happens mainly in India where showers and bathtubs are extremely wasteful because water is such a precious commodity. When you’re bathing out of a bucket using a beaker, you become a lot more attuned to how much water you actually need. You also save money on a bathroom radio as you won’t be in there long enough to squeeze out even half a Taylor Swift song.
I’m not saying I ever wrote: ‘Dear Diary, when will I meet my prince who understands bucket baths? Sigh . . . ’ But I think I unconsciously veered towards men from a similar background, which didn’t make sense because my parents, and extended family for that matter, are pretty liberal. Unlike a lot of other British Asian parents – some of whom go loco if their daughter or son so much as looks at someone from a different caste, let alone a different country – they didn’t really care about that sort of thing.
‘The most important thing,’ my parents frequently said, ‘is that we want you to be happy.’
For someone who didn’t think she’d ever get married, when I did get engaged I spent terrible sums of money on stuffed parrots from Paperchase, went on endless Etsy searches to find bird-themed stationery and cocktail sticks. My fiancé liked birds and he’d get birds.
Rob observed this with amused detachment.
‘Do you think the bird thing might be getting out of hand?’ he said, lifting one of the clay bird Christmas decorations I’d bought from the local garden centre, while I was furiously gluing bird wallpaper to a tin can.
‘You’re the one who likes birds, remember!’
‘Yes, I like bird-watching. As in live birds.’ He mimed flapping motions. ‘This is starting to look like the collection of crazy people obsessed with unicorns or porcelain piglets.’
‘Get out.’
A few months before, Rob and I had flown to Malaysia, with conversations about getting married tucked away neatly alongside our passports. I knew he was going to propose at some point, and that the ring was somewhere on his person, but I just didn’t know exactly where or when.
I waited a couple of days but there were no obvious signs. Then he suggested going bird-watching. He had tried to coax me on bird missions around England, but I’d always refused on account of it being cold and muddy.
Malaysia was different – it was our favourite kind of weather, hot and humid. At night we lay under a fan, curled into each other’s bodies, and the day was spent in shorts while drinking cold beer.
After a couple of days of this, we visited Gunung Raya, the highest mountain in Langkawi,
which was home to hornbills, one of his favourite birds.
The mountain rose above dense, green rainforest, peaks covered in a tight carpet of trees that spread into mist at the furthest reaches of our eyeline. As we drove up, Rob periodically stopped the car, and we’d get out to watch and be still. He took out the binoculars I bought him for Christmas and peered into the distance.
Birdcall sounded, their final words of the day echoing around the mountain range as sunset drew in. No hornbills: we dejectedly headed back to the car.
Then across a dip in the forest valley, we saw an entire flock of them flying over sedately, their huge wings cutting through the warm, soupy air, their beaks a distinct shape against a dark pink sky. We stood in silence, enrapt, holding hands and needing no words to say how beautiful it was, how lucky we felt.
That would have been a perfect moment to propose, wouldn’t it? But no such luck.
A couple of days later, we went to Telaga Tujuh, or Seven Wells, a place of milky waterfalls and views of the sea, an aquamarine shimmer in the distance. This was less romantic than it sounds. On the way there, Rob kept stopping the car to bird-watch, and then we had a steep climb to the top, which involved sweating heavily. That’s why I look like I’m having a stroke in most of my engagement photos.
When I finally got to the top and passed out under a tree, he said: ‘Come here, I want to show you this new bird I’ve spotted.’
‘NO. No more. I don’t give a shit about birds. Take your birds and fuck off.’
But he insisted and by the time I grumpily hobbled to the edge of the waterfall, wiping beads of sweat from my forehead, he got down on one knee.
‘Would you do me the honour of being my wife?’
On the walk down, I couldn’t stop looking at my ring, a teardrop diamond. He kept saying the word fiancée with a huge smile on his face. Then, as an odd seal of approval as we got in the car, we saw a hornbill perched on top of a tree nearby.
That night, we spent the whole evening drinking beer with our feet dug in the sand of our beachside bar and sketched out our wedding plans.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to have a Catholic ceremony?’ I asked, partly because we would have to have a Hindu ceremony and partly because I was angling for another wedding dress.
He scoffed at the idea. ‘No way,’ he said.
‘But your parents? Won’t they want you to have one?’
He shook his head.
My family may have been liberal, but I knew that a Hindu ceremony was definitely going to happen. It wasn’t that they insisted on it, but having grown up around these ceremonies, I wanted one even if it was more cultural than religious.
Who really knew whether walking around the fire seven times bound you to seven lifetimes? It was the smell of fire and ghee, the red sari against brown skin and a long line of clinking bangles, eyes outlined in kohl and blessed sweets on the tongue, that made it a ceremony that bonded two people in marriage.
Rob’s unquestioning acceptance of this was yet another reason why I knew he was the right man. Because to my family, it didn’t matter that I was marrying a white man (who had a tattoo on the back of his head); what mattered was that he respected our family and culture.
Their initial concern was that he’d try to use white man’s voodoo to lure me away from the holy bastions of Indianness – curry, bucket baths and familial duty – but they didn’t prepare themselves for his zealous cultural uptake.
When they saw Rob attempt to eat with his hands, although he didn’t quite get the technique right – you’re supposed to use the tips of your fingers to eat the food, not smear it all over your hand like a glove – they appreciated the effort. When he wore a lungi – that’s our version of the sarong – around the house teamed up with a Ramones t-shirt, they were stunned. While my mother bragged about it to our relatives, I lived in constant fear that the lungi would fall down – which it did once, ending up around his ankles as he was washing the dishes.
But, above all, Rob had a very strong sense of family and duty. We spoke at length about the family we wanted to create. We both had similar ideas of respect. He would offer to help Mum and Dad with the chores when we went over to visit. Unfailingly, he would take part in my mother’s garden tour, where she would walk around like a conservationist at Kew, showing us which plants were new, which were blooming, which needed to be pruned. He was utterly engrossed in what she was saying, while I made fake snoring noises as I trailed behind.
Although I made fun of his local gardening harem, which consisted of a bunch of women in their sixties and seventies, he felt it was important to maintain a link with the older generation. ‘It’s important for me to have that,’ he said – also referring to his male bird-watching friends – ‘because my family, especially the older people in my life, are thousands of miles away.’
What I found difficult to reconcile was how he had such a strong sense of family, yet had spent nearly fifteen years living outside of New Zealand. The distance and cost of travelling alone meant he had seen his parents a handful of times in that period. My parents got needy if I didn’t see them for three weeks, let alone three years.
I assumed the same would be true of him and, in fact, thought that a Catholic ceremony would be a nice way of honouring his parents and their faith. And did I mention I would get a second wedding dress?
But his lips drew thin when I pressed the matter. I didn’t bring it up again, sensing bigger, deeper things swimming inside of him, unwilling to rise to the surface.
Chapter Four
If we unravelled ourselves, unpacked every strand of DNA that makes us the human beings we are, it would unfurl a ladder to the sun and back. Our physical matter could stretch to other parts of the solar system, yet here we are, condensed and tightly packed into one tiny body.
We are arranged in so many different ways that not one of us is the same. Our brains are capable of thinking similar thoughts, but no two brains are identical. We are shaped by so many different things, from dealing with something as huge as death to the first ice cream we enjoyed on a summer’s day.
Yet despite this, despite our individualities and the thousands of things that happen to us, the many nuances that make you the only you to have ever existed, we believe that illnesses of the brain can all be treated in the same way. And, even more damaging, that there is such a thing as a ‘fix’.
The idea that we can fix mental illness (which, of course, implies you must be broken if you are suffering) is one that muzzles those who have it, and perpetuates a lot of stigma and myth for those who don’t have it.
An illness such as depression affects about 20 per cent of people in the world, yet, as Professor Mark Williams of Oxford University, one of the most articulate and empathetic authorities on clinical psychology, would say, people think they know how heavy it is, and they don’t know at all.
‘None of us think we know the cure for cancer,’ he said, ‘but we all think we know the cure for depression.’
When Rob told me he was depressed, I genuinely thought it would be fixed. He mentioned antidepressants, and I assumed that at the end of it, he would be fine and back to normal.
To some people, 20 per cent may not sound like a lot, but that’s one-fifth of the world’s population. And for anyone with long-term depression, as Rob had, it recurs every year and to such a debilitating degree that it can last for up to four months. So the scale of it, says Prof. Williams, is much bigger than we think.
The US has the highest rates of depression; in the UK, one in four people will have a mental illness at some point. But when you view these statistics in light of how many people there are who feel they cannot talk about their depression, the numbers just don’t add up. There must be so many people like Rob, who can’t admit to having depression and openly talk about it. There must be so many people like me, who don’t always get it right.
If we had lived in a world which valued honesty around mental illness, perhaps Rob could have spoken about
it. And perhaps I would have been able to listen.
Rob and I had been married a year. During the first three years of our relationship, I worked as a travel journalist, which meant some pretty amazing holidays and nights in hotels we could never afford in real life.
We visited Zanzibar and ate seafood suppers on beaches of white sand. We stayed in the best hotels in Malaysia when he proposed. On our first weekend break to Rome we had an actual, real-life butler named Maurice.
‘He creeps me out,’ I said.
‘Well, you don’t have to go on a date with him,’ he replied.
I was sure Maurice was giving us a ‘I know you scumbags can’t actually afford this room, so I’m going to secretly take a shit in your toilet while you’re out’ look.
I can’t imagine what other guests at these hotels thought, they with their trust funds and Rob striding across the resort, tattoos, skinhead and book in hand, but somehow he always managed to make friends wherever he went. From the middle-aged Austrian couple who smoked clove cigarettes in Bali, to the Australian couple we had dinner with in Malaysia, he would be nattering away by the time I joined him after a run.
He was unapologetically friendly in that regard, and he’d say hello to people even if they didn’t say it back, and had no qualms about age, race or craziness. It was a long-held belief that his ability to connect with people (and inspire us to do the same) was one of his most admirable traits.
Wesley, one of his oldest friends from New Zealand, summed it up best when he described how he met Rob.
‘I met Rob (the only person I have ever known to have his name be an acronym for his full name, Robert Owen Bell) a long time ago at a party held at Louise Russell’s place. We were fifteen.
‘He walked right up to me, long hair, trench coat, a Ramones t-shirt and cargo shorts, looking just like Eddie Vedder. He thrust out his hand and said: “Hey, mate, I’m Rob. What’s your name?” I answered Wes, to which he replied: “All right, Wes, how you doing?”