Dani’s Diary

by Narinder Dhami

  ‘Someone like Ravi?’ Nan suggested gently. ‘Well, good luck to them. This time I’ve left Meeta to make her own decisions. Anyway, I don’t think your mum would give Ravi up even if I discovered he was—’

  ‘A mad axe murderer?’ I broke in.

  ‘Exactly.’ Nan nodded. ‘So how are you getting on with Lalita?’

  ‘Oh.’ I pulled a face. ‘I’m not.’

  ‘But you’re moving in with them,’ Nan said, her eyes searching my face keenly. ‘You’ll have to make an effort, Dani.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked sulkily. ‘She won’t.’

  Nan clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘It’ll make the whole situation worse if you go into it with this attitude,’ she warned. ‘You have to try and get along.’

  ‘Like you’re doing with Lalita’s gran?’ I muttered. ‘I haven’t seen you speak to her all day.’

  ‘Don’t be a cheeky madam,’ Nan said sternly, wagging her finger at me. ‘I greeted her very warmly this morning when we met for the first time.’

  ‘And then kept out of her way as if she had the plague,’ I added.

  Nan frowned at me, but didn’t argue. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, almost to herself, ‘but she reminds me of someone. I just can’t think who.’

  ‘Cruella De Vil?’ I suggested.

  ‘Danjit!’

  I know I’ve gone too far when Nan calls me by my full name.

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘But if Lalita doesn’t want me and Mum to move in, being friendly to her isn’t going to make any difference. And we’re going to be in each other’s faces all the time, now that we’re going to the same school as well.’

  ‘You are?’ Nan looked puzzled. ‘I thought your mum had agreed that you could stay at Oakfields because there weren’t any free places at Lalita’s school?’

  ‘There weren’t.’ I heaved a sigh. ‘But the headteacher, Mrs Bright, phoned yesterday and said that someone in Year Seven had left unexpectedly, so I could start after Easter. Mum never wanted me to stay at Oakfields anyway because it means getting two buses from Ravi’s house, so …’ My voice tailed off miserably. Staying on at my old school with all my friends, Amana, Tia and Charlotte, had been the one thing that was keeping me going. Now even that was being taken away from me.

  ‘Which school is it?’ asked Nan.

  ‘Coppergate Comprehensive.’

  ‘Coppergate!’ I wasn’t prepared for Nan’s reaction. She sat up in her chair, her eyes flying wide open. ‘The school in Banbury Road?’

  I nodded, wondering why she was looking so interested.

  ‘I went there myself in the nineteen sixties,’ she explained. ‘Only it was called Coppergate Secondary Modern then.’

  Surprised, I stared at her. Nan had told me lots of stories about her childhood. I knew she’d come to England from India with her mum and Hardeep in 1963 to join her father, who was already here. Nan had described the village they’d left behind in the Punjab; she’d told me about coming to England, studying hard, going to university, getting married and becoming a doctor. But she’d never mentioned Coppergate School before.

  ‘Nan, is that true?’ I asked, feeling quite thrilled. ‘You never said.’

  ‘No.’ For some reason, Nan’s initial excitement seemed to have faded very quickly. There was a bleak look on her face that I couldn’t quite understand. ‘I wasn’t there for very long, only a couple of years or so. We were living in a rented flat at the time; then my father bought a house in a different area and Hardeep and I had to change schools.’

  ‘But still’ – I beamed at her – ‘it’ll be great to go to the same school you did!’

  Nan shook her head. ‘It’s not quite the same school,’ she explained. ‘The old building was knocked down quite recently. I think they built a new school just across the road.’

  ‘Oh.’ Now I was the one whose excitement was fading rapidly. It would have been fun to go to the same school as Nan. But although it had the same name, it wasn’t really the same at all. I felt a bit cheated.

  Nan was staring across the room, but I didn’t think she was looking at anything or anyone in particular. There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if she’d gone inside herself. I patted her arm.

  ‘Nan?’

  ‘Sorry, Dani.’ She shook herself out of it and smiled. ‘You’ve just reminded me that I have something for you.’

  I watched as she opened her handbag. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what she pulled out. In her hand was a thick, tattered exercise book with a blue cover. It was held together with sticky tape in several places.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘My diary.’ Nan handled the exercise book tenderly, as if it was something very precious. ‘I started it in nineteen sixty-three, the day my mum, Hardeep and I left the village to come to England to join my dad. I was twelve, just like you are, Dani.’

  I stared eagerly at the exercise book. Nan had never mentioned it before and I’d had no idea it existed.

  ‘I began my diary on the day I started a new life,’ she went on. ‘And today you’re starting a new life too, Dani. I know you already keep your own diary, but maybe reading mine will help.’ She held it out to me. ‘I was going to give it to you later, but now seems a good time.’

  ‘Oh, Nan!’ I took the exercise book just as carefully as Nan had handled it herself, laid it on the table and flung my arms round her. ‘Thanks – I’m dying to read it!’

  Nan returned my hug. ‘You’d better take a look inside,’ she suggested, eyes twinkling. ‘You may not be so keen then!’

  I opened the covers. The thin white paper had yellowed over the years and it felt very fragile. Each page was covered in writing, the lines very close together.

  ‘Nan!’ I groaned. ‘It’s in Punjabi!’

  ‘Of course.’ Nan was trying not to smile but couldn’t help herself. ‘I could speak English in nineteen sixty-three, but my written English wasn’t very good.’

  ‘It’ll take me ages to work it out,’ I said with a sigh.

  When I was young, Nan had insisted on speaking Punjabi to me whenever she could, and she’d taught me to write it too. I’d complained a few times that none of my Indian friends could write in Punjabi, even though they sometimes spoke it at home. But I hadn’t really minded. Nan had a way of making things fun, even learning the alphabet. My spoken Punjabi was good, but since I’d started at Oakfields, I’d had so much homework I didn’t have time to practise written Punjabi, so I knew translating Nan’s diary wasn’t going to be easy.

  ‘Well, it’ll be good practice for you,’ Nan replied with a satisfied chuckle. ‘Have you still got that Punjabi dictionary and grammar book I gave you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good.’ She laid her hand gently on my head for a moment. ‘Now make yourself scarce, putar. I can see Mrs Garewal homing in on me like a heat-seeking missile, and you know what a busybody she is.’

  I jumped up, clutching the diary, and kissed Nan quickly on the cheek. ‘Thanks,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh, here you are, bhanji.’ Mrs Garewal, moving remarkably quickly for someone so rotund, zoomed over to nab my empty chair. ‘How are you? This must be such a sad day for you …’

  I started backing away.

  ‘Not at all, bhanji,’ I heard Nan reply robustly. ‘Why should I be sad because my beti’s marrying such a nice young man?’

  ‘For the second time,’ Mrs Garewal riposted immediately.

  ‘Well, you know the old saying, “Third time lucky,” bhanji,’ retorted Nan. ‘That means Meeta’s got another chance if this one doesn’t work out.’

  I grinned to myself as I slipped away. Good old Nan. She might not be very happy about this, but she wouldn’t let anyone know it. Especially not an interfering old busybody like Mrs Garewal.

  The doors to the hall stood open, so I slipped outside into the car park. I could have gone back to join Sangita, but I wanted to keep Nan’s diary all to myself. As I smoothed the crump
led covers, I could hardly wait to start translating it. Even though I knew that Nan was growing up during the 1960s, to me it seemed as far away from today as ancient Egypt. All I knew about the sixties was The Beatles and mini-skirts.

  I could see a patch of grass in the sun at the corner of the car park, so I headed over to it. I’d sit and look at the diary for a while. Maybe I could manage to work out a few sentences without the dictionary …

  Then, to my dismay, as I wove my way between the cars, I saw Lalita right in front of me. She must have popped out to collect something from her dad’s black BMW, and now she was slamming the door and locking the car again. I didn’t have time to move away or hide because, in that split-second, she looked up and saw me.

  We stared at each other in hostile silence.

  ‘Hello,’ I offered eventually.

  Lalita glared at me as if I’d insulted her, her family and her whole way of life.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Don’t you get it? I don’t like you, I don’t want you moving into our house and I don’t want your mum to be my stepmother.’

  ‘And don’t you get it?’ I snapped, forgetting everything Nan had just said. ‘I don’t want those things either.’

  ‘I just want you to know’ – Lalita took a step towards me; I didn’t move, even though she’s much bigger than me – I wouldn’t give her that satisfaction – ‘that if there’s anything – anything – I can do to get rid of you and your mum, I will.’

  With that, she brushed past me and went back into the hall.

  So here I am, sitting in bed in Nan’s spare room, my diary on the duvet in front of me. Mum and Ravi are on their way to Italy on honeymoon. Lalita is staying with her gran. And that’s how it is for the next week until we all move in together. Just one big (un)happy family.

  I can see it all now, and my heart can’t sink any further.

  But I don’t want to think about all the problems which lie ahead. Instead I reach for Nan’s diary and open it at the first page …

  Chapter Two

  December 1963

  THE ONE THING I really wanted to see, apart from my dad, of course, was snow.

  I’d seen pictures in books at school, but it looked so unreal. Pure white, thick and soft. But pictures can’t tell you how things really feel or sound or smell, and I wanted to see for myself. I imagined England covered with snow most of the time, especially when my dad wrote and told us that the winter of 1962 was so bad, he hadn’t been able to take his bus out on the roads. I’m not sure why Dad is driving a bus now. He used to be a teacher when he lived here with us. He’s very clever and he’s got a university degree, so maybe bus drivers are really important people in England.

  I haven’t seen my dad for two years now. Well, two years, thirteen weeks and five days. I worked it out. I would never say that in front of my gran though. She hates it when I do maths in my head. She thinks girls only need to learn how to cook, clean and sew so that they can get a good husband.

  ‘Asha, putar, why have you always got your nose inside a book?’ she’d say with a frown. ‘Come here and I’ll teach you to make roti instead.’

  So I hid my books under my bed and read them in secret.

  Bibiji says girls don’t need to learn anything. She even grumbled about me going to the village school, which everyone does. I don’t know what she’d have done if I’d said I wanted to go to the high school in the city, like Dad did. She’d probably have fainted with shock because girls just don’t do that. So I couldn’t believe it when Dad said in his letters that everyone in England, boys and girls, have to go to school until they’re fifteen. It’s the law. I’m so happy that I get to go to school, I feel like singing at the top of my voice.

  Anyway, when Dad was at home, he never listened to Gran moaning about me learning things. He’d just say Yes, Ma and carry on teaching me anyway! Before Dad left, he helped me with maths and he gave me books to read and he taught me and Hardeep English. That’s going to be useful because now we’re travelling to England to join him, I’ll be able to understand what people are saying. So Bibiji was wrong. Girls do need to learn things.

  Today, two special things happened. I started my diary and we left the village. A taxi came from the city to take us to the railway station, and everyone, every single person in the village, turned up to help us pack our suitcases and boxes and bags inside it. Dad had told us not to bring very much with us, and I didn’t think we had, but within minutes the taxi was filled to bursting. My mum insisted that we bring the quilts from our own beds, but the fat rolls of fabric wouldn’t squash inside the car, so one of my uncles got some rope, climbed onto the bonnet of the cab and strapped them to the roof.

  ‘You won’t be able to breathe out too much,’ he remarked as he climbed down again.

  From the railway station we were taking the train to Delhi, where some of my mum’s relatives lived, and staying the night there; they were taking us to the airport the following day. Hardeep was so excited to be going on an aeroplane, he couldn’t keep still. Mum was nervous though, and so was I, a bit. I kept trying to imagine being thousands of miles up in the air with nothing between me and the ground except sky.

  ‘Time to go,’ said my uncle.

  Mum had been crying on and off for most of the morning, and now she started again as she hugged the family for the last time. Come to think of it, everyone was crying, even Hardeep. Although I think that was because he’d had to leave his toys behind. The only thing he was taking was his cricket bat, and he held it tightly in his hand, as if he thought someone was going to take it away from him.

  I didn’t have anything except my clothes and my diary. Well, that’s what Mum thought anyway. She said I couldn’t take my books because they were too heavy, but I had secretly rolled up my favourite ones inside my quilt. The only other thing I had was a tiny sandalwood box, which fitted into my pocket. Inside, lying on a thin piece of white cotton, was a pair of gold earrings. They were long and intricate, with three tiny bells hanging off the end of each one, and a round, flashing ruby which sat in the middle of the ear lobe. My aunts had given them to me. They were for my wedding, they said, and they made me promise that I’d come back to the village to get married. I’d nodded. After all, we weren’t going to England for ever, were we? In a few years we’d be back. Maybe I wouldn’t go back to the village to live; maybe I’d go to the city and become a school teacher or a lawyer or a doctor. But at one time or another, I would come back to the village to get married, and I would wear the earrings, just like my aunties wanted.

  My gran was saying blessings for us, now that we were going thousands and thousands of miles away, and that made me cry. As we began to wedge ourselves into the last three remaining spaces in the cab, I felt someone tug at my sleeve. It was my friend Kulwant, from the house next door.

  ‘Don’t forget all about us now that you’re going to England, will you, Asha?’ she whispered. ‘I bet you’ll be living in a big palace with lots of windows and eating off gold dishes!’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said, although Dad hadn’t mentioned anything about palaces and gold dishes. Still, everyone in England lived like that, didn’t they? Several houses in our village already stood locked and silent because whole families had gone to England, and they sent back lots of money and clothes to the relatives who had been left behind. Dad had sent coats for us all because it was so cold in England. I was wearing mine already, even though the sun was warm. The coat was bright red, soft and cuddly, and it had big silver buttons. I’d never had anything so wonderful before.

  So it was obvious to me that everyone in England, including Dad, was as rich as a rajah.

  As the taxi bumped off along the dusty track, Mum was still crying. I twisted round as much as I could between the piles of suitcases to take a last look at our house. There it was, the sun-baked walls and the stairs up to the flat roof where Hardeep and I had played and argued and sat learning English with Dad before he left. A single peacock
strutted along the edge of the roof, and in the background, very faint, like smoke against the pale blue sky, were the snowy caps of the Himalayas.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered. I did feel sad and a bit scared, my tummy fluttering inside like butterflies’ wings. But I was so excited.

  Now that we’re on the aeroplane, I have time to write in my diary again. I even have a little table on the seat in front that I can pull down to lean on. Hardeep loved this and kept pulling and pushing the table up and down until the man in the seat in front told him off.

  When the aeroplane took off, the noise nearly knocked my ears right off my head! Although Hardeep was excited at first, he got really scared and wanted to sit on Mum’s lap. The stewardess wouldn’t let him though; he had to stay in his own seat. Hardeep’s such a baby, even though he’s only three years younger than me. Mum looked terrified and was muttering prayers under her breath, so I held her hand until our tummies had turned the right way up again. I loved looking out of the tiny aeroplane windows and seeing the puffy white clouds all around us. It looked as if we were bouncing from one cloud to the next.

  Now it’s dark outside and Mum and Hardeep are both asleep. I can’t sleep, I’m too excited. I keep thinking about seeing Dad again, and wondering what our house will be like and what my school will be like. This is such a big adventure …

  So much has happened. It’s hard to believe that two days ago we were in the village where the sky was blue, the sun yellow, the fields green. Here everything is grey. Grey and pale and cold. But I love it!

  When the aeroplane landed, I thought Dad would be waiting for us right there at the bottom of the steps. I grabbed my bags and my coat and ran to the exit doors before anyone else, leaving Mum and Hardeep behind. As I reached the open doorway, I gasped with shock. Freezing air hit me in the face like a slap.

  ‘What’s that coming out of your face?’ asked Hardeep, arriving behind me and poking me in the back with his cricket bat.

  I breathed in and out. A smoky white cloud poured from my mouth. ‘It’s my breath!’ I said, full of awe.