by Sushi Das
Every evening he watched the BBC News at nine o’clock. Chattering, giggling and smirking were prohibited during the broadcast. Anyone who wanted to talk or laugh was sent out of the room. Even Mum was ordered out once. Things got unbearable if the newscaster ever mentioned the ‘bloody war in Northern Ireland’, which he did virtually every night. Without fail, the word ‘bloody’ would induce uncontrollable laughter from me and Vin, and we would be marched out of the room immediately. Dad was never more angry than when his nightly news was ruined by our frivolous twittering.
The BBC’s foreign correspondents Kate Adie and John Simpson seemed to be on the news every night. I would dream of wearing a khaki flak jacket, standing in front of a tank delivering news reports from strife-torn regions with an urgent, authoritative yet compassionate tone of voice. Reporters with scruffy hair wearing a safari suit or hunter’s jacket with epaulettes excited me. I thought the BBC must have an endless supply of those jackets, and I wanted one.
It was the romance of journalism that attracted me. After all, I was unaware of what the job actually entailed – a bit like girls who wanted to become glamorous air hostesses, unaware that the job actually meant being a dehydrated servant in the sky to irritable travellers. In truth, I didn’t read the front page of newspapers – not because I was uninterested in the news, but because the world was complicated and I didn’t always understand the news. Nonetheless, I wanted to be part of the adventure of gathering it. I was in love with the idea of being a journalist, not in love with the news itself.
Dad took journalists seriously but it was not a role he wanted for his own daughters. ‘It’s a man’s job. Look at him,’ he said pointing to John Simpson on the TV. ‘He used to be a young man. How quickly he has aged. It is a hard job, unsuited to women. You will never be settled in one place, it will be difficult to have a family life, and I don’t think they get much money.’
I suppose I will never know whether my desire to be a journalist was a result of my early exposure to newspaper clippings, or whether a growing feeling of being an outsider to my parents’ culture drew me to a vocation built on scepticism and inquiry. I was inflamed by injustice, and there was so much injustice that people didn’t know about. Indian girls in Britain couldn’t even choose who they could marry. Did anyone out there know about that? There was a veneer of choice, but when you lifted the veil, there was, I thought, repression underneath. By the time my teenage confusion ripened into indignation, I was sure I wanted to be a journalist because I felt an urgent desire to tell people things they didn’t know.
But Dad had other plans. I wouldn’t be allowed to choose my own husband and I shouldn’t pursue the career I wanted. What injustice. I felt a profound uneasiness, a creeping anxiety that all my problems stemmed from being a brown girl in a white world.
Everywhere there were currents pushing me this way and that and I was muddled. I heard the untroubled laughter of my friends, their free and easy manner; I saw people kiss with open lips on TV; I heard the Sex Pistols tell the Queen she ain’t no human being; and I watched Kate Adie make it in a man’s world. I was lifted by ‘Jerusalem’ at the end of term, the way my teachers sang full-throated; I saw the gleam on my prefect’s badge, the placards on the streets, and the world at Heathrow.I wanted to tell people everything was not okay. I wanted everyone to be as indignant as I was and for women to have everything men did. I wanted to speak freely, to question the world, to mock the prevailing orthodoxy. I hankered for it all.
Nearly four years later my suitcase was still under the bed. When I packed it, and for a long time afterwards, I believed I might one day get the hell out. But when the time came it was always raining, or there was homework to be handed in. Once, I had everything sorted: coat on, money for the bus, suitcase out from under the bed. Heart galloping, I was about to go down the stairs when Mum and Dad came back early from Tesco after doing the week’s shopping. I heard the key in the lock and had to rush into the bedroom and put the suitcase back in its hiding place. Vin wanted to know why I had my coat on, but I told her to mind her own business.
I never told her about my plan for two reasons. First, she would almost certainly have thought it an irrational idea and tried to dissuade me; and second, her knowledge of it would have made her an unwitting accomplice. Mum and Dad would have questioned her after I was found missing. She would be scolded for failing to stop me, or for not telling them of my plan, and I couldn’t let that happen.
I was eighteen years old now, well past the age my departure would be classified as running away. At eighteen I could legally walk out of the house and never return. But in fact I couldn’t leave, not only because there was nowhere to go, but because I lacked the courage. Besides, an unmarried Indian girl leaving her parents’ house without permission would have brought great shame on my family. Still, I kept that suitcase packed, hidden and at the ready because it was possible that one day I might do something that would force Mum and Dad to disown me – and if they threw me out of the house, at least I’d have my things ready. I just didn’t know what that something might be.
I was living in a state of low-level panic by now. Mum and Dad had stepped up their search for a suitable boy. They were making phone calls and asking friends and family if they knew any boys of marriageable age. The hunt for marriage material was on and I had no say in the matter.
Girls. They are an economic liability for Indian parents. They cost money to raise. They can trash a family’s reputation with the power of immodesty. They need a dowry when you marry them off, and what do you get in return? Nothing but worry and misery. Boys, on the other hand, are productive economic units. As men, they earn a salary, bring home a wife, scoop up a dowry and act as the welfare state for elderly parents. Who wouldn’t crave sons?
Luckily, we had a son in our family. My brother’s birth brought not only joy, but relief. Mum had carried and brought safely into the world that most precious of cargos. She was no longer just a mother of daughters, she was the mother of a son. The only thing better would have been to be the mother of several sons, but Mum was grateful for just one.
Vin and I were pleased to have someone else to play with. We remained, in our youth, totally ignorant of the meaning of a brother. In manhood, he would be the carer of his parents and the protector of his sisters – a notion that satisfied my parents profoundly. Mum in particular felt she had been rewarded by a higher authority and she was able to extend her deepest sympathy to any woman god neglected.
Mum had a friend – an Indian woman with seven daughters. Yes, seven. People were always kind to her. An epic tragedy had befallen her house. A misfortune for every day of the week. What was the poor woman to do? You couldn’t accuse her of not trying to have a son. Look where that had got her. But the woman was remarkably sanguine. Always smiling and confident that things would turn out well in the end. The kind of person who would start a crossword puzzle with a pen. Her beautiful girls graced our house when they visited. Seven sylphs with intelligent, mouse eyes, swan necks and confident smiles. All seven together could turn a room into an oil painting.
But it’s hard for Indians to see seven girls and not also see the shadows of seven dowries, seven opportunities for the family’s honour to be sullied, seven burdens.
When Mum’s friend fell pregnant for the eighth time, everyone prayed for her, including my mum. A son, please bestow her with a son. When she gave birth to twin boys, it was as if the heavens had opened up, sending forth great rivers of rain after seven hundred years of drought. There were tears of joy, elated hearts and sweet, sweet relief. Not one, but two boys. Sons at last, sons at last, thank god almighty, we have sons at last.
Life for Indian boys is different. Right from the day of their birth, which, by the way, is celebrated with a great deal more gusto than a girl’s, things are easier. Parents are much more reverential towards their sons – after all, they are the ones who look after them in their old age (or, more accurately, it is daughters-in-law who will loo
k after a boy’s parents in their old age).
More importantly, boys’ sexuality is nothing to fear (unless they’re gay – that would no doubt be considered a calamity). They can’t fall pregnant out of wedlock and bring shame on their families as a daughter can. Yes, they can bring shame through acts of criminality or gambling or drinking, but shame through sexual immorality, the really serious kind of shame, is a disgrace that only women can bring crashing down on their family. All things considered, boys are best.
But sometimes even my brother Raja was no consolation for my mum’s deep frustrations with my failings. ‘You’re too tall,’ she often complained, as if I was deliberately growing beyond the stipulated height for an obedient Indian girl. ‘We have to find a boy taller than you.’
Her concern with my height was dwarfed by her alarm over the size of my bust, the correct size presumably being a pair of plump mangoes. I didn’t make the grade. When a marriage is being arranged by an Indian mother, a defective daughter can be a big problem, or, in this case, two small problems. A girl with no breasts. Two aspirins on an ironing board. Damaged goods.
I was ordered to visit the doctor to find out what was wrong with me. Dr Hall, who was shorter than the average man, told me I was not alone – lots of girls wished they had bigger boobs. ‘I wish I was a couple of inches taller,’ he added pointlessly. When I told him I was quite comfortable with my lighter than average load and that it was Mum who felt burdened with my deficiency, he kindly offered to talk to her.
That evening he called her. I listened from the top of the stairs. ‘Yes, doctor, yes, doctor. Yes, thank you, doctor,’ I heard her say before she hung up and made her way slowly up the stairs.
‘That was the Dr Hall calling on the phone,’ she said in her wonky English, sitting heavily on my bed with a disappointed sigh.
I waited for the verdict.
‘He was drunk.’
‘What!’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He say you are healthy, attractive girl. He say nothing wrong with you. Definitely drunk.’
Some months after the drunk-doctor incident, she was sitting on the edge of my bed again, crying: ‘It’s my fault, it’s all my fault,’ she sobbed, nodding in the direction of my chest. ‘In India, when I discovered I was pregnant with you, I went to see a special doctor,’ she continued in Punjabi. ‘I asked him to make you a boy. So he gave me some herbs.’
‘What! You went to see a witch doctor?’
‘I took the herbs,’ she continued. ‘But when you were born, you were a girl and I just assumed the herbs hadn’t worked. But now that you’re older and things haven’t grown properly, I see that the herbs only half worked.’
She burst into a fresh round of sobbing. I was at a loss to know how to console her, a task made harder by the anger ballooning in my flat chest. Not anger with her naïve and superstitious belief that when she was pregnant, the child she was carrying could be turned into a boy with a magical potion. Not anger with her instinctive maternal drive to blame herself for something she should have known was clearly beyond her control. But anger with myself for having the misfortune to be born into an Indian family coming to grips with raising daughters in Britain. In such moments, I could see before me a chasm of communication between me and my parents. Their Eastern expectations. My Western desires. Any thoughts beyond that were rendered shapeless by immaturity and simply fell off the cliff into a sea of self-loathing.
Dad migrated to London from New Delhi in February 1964 at the age of twenty-six. He was carrying a Zeiss Ikon camera and little more than bare essentials when he arrived, but his suitcase was heavy with hundreds, if not thousands of years of cultural baggage. He had no family in Britain to greet him, but several friends, who had migrated earlier, were at the airport to pick him up. It was going to be the adventure of a lifetime.
They found him a rented room in Twickenham, in south-west London, which he shared with two other young Indian men. Within a week he had a job at a local bakery. Just as well, because when he stepped off the plane at Heathrow he had only £3 in his pocket.
Two years earlier, in 1962, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s government had introduced employment vouchers for skilled and unskilled Commonwealth citizens to come to Britain and work in areas where there was a shortfall of local workers. Britain, which more than a hundred years before had looked to Ireland to plug acute labour shortages caused by industrial expansion, now turned to recruiting from the Commonwealth to fill skills gaps created by the post-war boom.
Dad had left his home state of Punjab in northern India and had been working as an auditor for a government department in New Delhi for five years when he applied for an employment voucher. His university degrees, youth and fluent English ensured his passage to Britain was mere paperwork. ‘At that time there was a sort of craze among people to go abroad and make a life,’ he says. ‘There was an attraction for better living.’
He wasn’t a refugee escaping from brutality; he was looking for excitement and a chance to improve his life. And where better to find such things than in London in the swinging sixties? However, I doubt he was expecting to find a city in the throes of a historic cultural revolution that even the British found confronting. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll pervaded the cultural landscape. Just days before Dad arrived in London, The Beatles had landed in New York to an absurdly tumultuous reception at JFK Airport from a throng of manic, screeching fans. The newspapers reported Beatlemania had spread to the land of the free.
It was all happening at a cracking pace. Doc Martens were on sale for the first time, women could buy the Pill, the Great Train robbers were in the dock and the Queen was about to give birth to her fourth child. The steel, coal and motor car industries were booming. The whole country was richer. The average weekly wage was £16. Macmillan’s oft-quoted words must have been ringing in the ears of people up and down the land: ‘Let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good,’ he had told a Tory rally just six years earlier. ‘Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor indeed in the history of this country.’ In this environment the need for labour from the Commonwealth was essential for future growth. Britain needed men like my dad.
Just as well he arrived when he did. There was mounting unease over the influx of ‘coloured’ people, so the following year Harold Wilson’s Labour government modified the Immigration Act, getting rid of vouchers for unskilled workers and dramatically cutting the number for skilled workers. But that wasn’t the most dramatic feature of 1965. A far more startling development was about to take place, one that would shock not only new arrivals such as my dad, but the whole of British society: the launch of the miniskirt.
Suddenly, pointy-boobed girls in short skirts and tall boots were everywhere, along with long-haired men and newspaper reports about marijuana use and free love. Hedonism for all, sex aplenty. And there was Dad with his side-parting and Errol Flynn moustache fresh off the plane from a third-world country where grinding poverty carpeted the land, female modesty held up the sky and family duty marked the boundary between economic success and moral decline.
In Punjab it would have been highly immodest for a woman to wear anything that exposed expanses of flesh or brazenly showed off the contours of her body. The traditional Punjabi dress is the salwar kamiz – the salwar being a loose-fitting pant that gathers into a cuff at the ankle, and the kamiz a tunic, generally knee-length but sometimes shorter. The ensemble also includes a shawl or long scarf known as a dupatta, a versatile symbol of modesty and an integral part of Indian women’s clothing. It can be used to cover the head to show respect and piety, slung over both shoulders and tied in a knot at the back to keep it out of the way when performing domestic duties, or worn across both shoulders but pulled down to cover the breasts when modesty is required.
I recall Mum talking to her father-in-law ‘through’ her dupatta. She was
covering her head to show respect. But she also pulled it forward on one side of her face, and held it there while she spoke to him, using it as a veil of modesty – extreme respect, when head-covering is not enough. I never once saw my maternal or paternal grandmothers with their heads uncovered.
For Britain’s growing Indian community in the 1960s, immodestly dressed white girls were bemusing, but they also represented a somewhat distasteful aspect of Western society. Wild and wanton women equalled wicked Western ways. Dad never passed judgment on the way British women dressed – his was a ‘live and let live’ Hindu attitude. But he was acutely aware of the views of others in the Indian community, particularly those who, unlike him, had migrated from rural areas. As a collective force their point of view mattered to him because, in the bigger picture, he was of the Indian community. He was not of the English community, no matter how much he admired their courteous niceties, their efficient bureaucracy and their exemplary educational institutions.
As a father, Dad was very strict. Vin and I had an exceptionally disciplined upbringing: we were instructed to speak respectfully to elders, discouraged from pursuing careers that involved music or dance and ordered to dress modestly in Indian clothes at home, particularly at the dining table. Tight jeans, leggings and short skirts were unacceptable. Whistling was frowned upon, as was wearing our hair down. While Dad may not have minded how British women conducted themselves, he certainly did not want his own daughters dressing like them and he was prepared to take whatever action he thought necessary to protect them from such influences.
Sons, on the other hand, were a different matter. Indian boys were encouraged to be brave, even experimental – within boundaries, of course – as these are the qualities that could be the harbingers of wealth and fortune. My brother was by no means mollycoddled, but the restrictions imposed on him were looser. There were expectations that he should do well at school, pursue a career and look out for his sisters, but he was never reprimanded for whistling, or ordered to wear traditional dress, or discouraged from having English friends, including girls.