by Sushi Das
But when Dad was working in the bakery, before Raja, Vin and I were even born, how he might raise his children in Britain was the last thing on his mind. He was busy sorting loaves of bread and packing currant buns from daybreak to nightfall. With his Bachelor of Commerce and Master’s degrees in Business Studies, he was absurdly over-qualified to be a bakery boy, but it paid the rent and it taught him, strangely, a thing or two about lack of want.
One evening as he was packing up to leave at the end of his shift, he saw two young men, fellow workers, playfully kicking a bread roll around in the flour on the bakery floor. ‘Arré! What is this?’ he thought. ‘Kicking the staff of life?’ In India, malnourishment for millions of people was, and still is, a daily peril. But in Britain, where people had never had it so good, bread was a football. It was a deeply shocking sight, and one that Dad recalled, unprompted, nearly fifty years later, sitting in his house in London one afternoon idly reminiscing about his youth.
But ask him specifically about his first impressions of England and he won’t mention miniskirts or bread rolls. ‘The British were disciplined and well dressed. They had good manners and I was impressed,’ he says. ‘I never regretted coming. I had moments when I felt I had left my family back at home and I had no people to talk to. But because I was working full-time and overtime, I didn’t have time to reflect. I didn’t have time to plan. The first priority was to build a financial base. Everyone was working wholeheartedly, and also we had to send money back home. But I wasn’t disappointed at all.’
I always think of Dad’s admiration for the British as a reflection of Jawaharlal Nehru’s pro-British attitude before he abandoned Western attire and turned to wearing the Indian sherwani and leading his country to independence from British rule. Dad was ten years old when India gained independence and Nehru became the first prime minister. Indeed, Nehru was still the prime minister when Dad left for England.
Just three months after Dad’s arrival, on 28 May 1964, he bought a copy of The Times, as he did daily, to discover that the only Indian prime minister he had ever known, and the man who had shaped his thinking about the importance of education, had suffered a heart attack and died. He was deeply affected and kept that copy of The Times for years, not only because he is a compulsive archivist but because it was a modest memento of an era of his own life that had passed.
The future was all about Britain now and the next thing on Dad’s to-do list was to bring to England the beautiful, bashful eighteen-year-old girl he had left behind in India. They had been brought together in an arranged marriage just two and a half months before he migrated – enough time for his new wife to knit him a woolly jumper – the one he was wearing when the winter air greeted him at Heathrow.
Mum was fifteen years old when the sound of a rickshaw pulling up outside the house woke her one Sunday morning. She was staying at her aunt’s house in Hissar, Haryana, about 160 kilometres north-west of Delhi. There was much fluster over the visitors as her aunt ran about making tea, shouting orders and finding a colourful outfit for Mum to wear. Nobody had said anything about visitors coming to the house that day, certainly not about a handsome young man with a thick head of glossy raven-black hair and a moustache so thin it could have been drawn on his upper lip with a fine-tipped pen. She was given a yellow salwar kameez and a black dupatta. ‘A suitable boy has been found,’ said her aunt, smiling, ‘and he’s here to see you.’
Struck by something akin to stage fright, Mum lost her tongue. My dad, twenty-two at the time, had arrived with some relatives. He asked for a glass of water, providing an opportunity for Mum to enter the room to serve him, but she turned away shyly when he tried to look at her face. Had he had the chance to see her face properly, he might have noticed the mole on her chin, her unique mark. Later, he came into the kitchen and commented favourably on the dal that she was stirring on the stove but she stayed silent. He can’t have drawn an accurate picture of who she was, or any picture at all. It would surely have taken a considerable period of time before he discovered that she was in fact a jolly, sometimes childlike and very superstitious young lady. And perhaps even longer to discover that she was bolder than him, more outspoken and less daunted by life.
It rained heavily that evening and the visitors were invited to stay the night. The next day, Dad again attempted to speak to Mum, asking her for a towel. Without a word, and with her head covered, Mum dutifully fetched one and handed it to the handsome boy, who had by now completely stolen her heart, even though she had not spoken a word to him. Dad, too, was interested.
‘So, do you like her?’ asked the matchmaking aunt.
‘Yes, I like her,’ he replied.
Mum’s aunt, pink-cheeked with excitement, set about putting in train preparations for the forthcoming Roka ceremony. Hindu arranged-marriage traditions are elaborate and ritualistic. They begin long before the wedding day. The Roka is the first pre-wedding ceremony and marks the beginning of a formal relationship between both families. Roka comes from the word halt or arrest. The ceremony signifies that the couple is formally engaged and so stops either party seeking a match elsewhere. Dad was arrested with confectionery and a symbolic single rupee. His side of the family sent my mum five kilos of cardamons, dates, bangles and bindis.
That was the only time my parents set eyes on each other until their wedding day – four years later. In that time they courted by writing love letters. My parents have been married nearly half a century and Dad still has the letters Mum sent him. When I recently asked Mum to reflect on the day that Dad first came to see her, she said in her crooked English, ‘He was good-looking. I was excited. I didn’t look him in his eyes. He try to talk to me but I am shy. We don’t refuse whatever our parents chooses for us. He was educated, he was working, he had civil service job in Delhi.’
On their wedding day Mum was eighteen years old and Dad was twenty-five. He arrived wearing white and in a horse-drawn carriage. ‘He look like Elvis Presley,’ said Mum, giggling. ‘He had a lot of big hair on his head.’
Arranged marriages have been a part of Indian culture for centuries. Practices vary from region to region, but essentially parents choose who their son or daughter will marry. Such marriages hold an enduring fascination for Westerners, whose romantic trajectory starts with meeting someone, dating and falling in love. This continues until one of three things happens: separation, cohabitation or marriage. When this type of courtship leads to marriage, Indians call it a ‘love marriage’ – a strange description perhaps, since it implies that all other types of marriage do not involve love.
When Mum said, ‘We don’t refuse whatever our parents chooses for us,’ she was conveying several tenets of the arranged marriage system. First, that choosing a life partner is a huge undertaking and parents are better equipped to do this as they have more life experience and therefore wisdom. Second, accepting someone your parents have picked shows respect that ultimately maintains order in a community. And third, that the coming together of two individuals is important but not necessarily the sole aim of marriage. The future economic stability, prosperity and longevity of both families are the real aims.
So, an arranged marriage is not a contract between two individuals, it is an economic joining of two families into one big community. Not a negotiated individual transaction, more a company merger.
This doesn’t mean there is no tradition of love in Indian society. Indeed love as an ideal is everywhere you look. Whether it’s in Urdu poetry, Bollywood movies, Punjabi folk songs, or stories from Indian mythology, love plays a central role. Indian women from my mum’s generation dreamt of romantic love and hoped to find it within the walls of their arranged marriages, but the undeniable reality is that married life for many represented the end of their carefree girlhood and the start of life as a child-bearer and husband-server. Romantic love did not always get a look-in.
Such expectations of women have faded or are fading fast among urbane, educated Indians and among diaspora Indians too. But
to know where these ideas originated we only have to look at how the perfect woman, whether as a wife or a lover, is described in the Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Through the centuries these epics set the ideal patterns of behaviour and presented women as the indispensable half of man. A passage from Erotic Art of the East, by art expert Philip Rawson, describes the ideal wife as depicted in Indian art and poetry:
‘Her whole aim in life should be to efface herself completely, and minister with total dedication to her husband. She should look upon him as a god, treating his lightest whims as divine commands; she must eat only what he leaves uneaten and bear him as many sons as possible. She must observe total obedience to her mother-in-law, fear her father-in-law; she must never speak to her husband unless he first addresses her. She must never speak to another man, never stand in the door gossiping, always walk a few paces behind her husband, and sit on a lower seat than him. She must not complain at, but rather glory in his amorous adventures. She may never display any public tokens of affection towards him or her children, nor may he to them or to her . . . When her husband dies the widow should if possible follow him to the next world as faithfully as she followed him in this, burning herself upon his funeral pyre as a Sati – a good wife. By this means she will stay close to him when they are both reborn. If she fails in this duty the only life to which the widow can look forward is miserable indeed, for only widows of the lower castes may remarry. A respectable widow will only be someone else’s burden, and a prey to the sexual appetites of all and sundry. A woman whose husband leaves her has no hope of heaven.’
Such a frightening ancient ideal springs surely from the imaginations of men. Perpetuated by women, perhaps, but initially born of the male mind.
My mum would never wait for Dad to address her before she told him it was about time he cleared the garage of all the junk he’d accumulated over decades, but she has always walked a few paces behind him – a habit my dad finds intensely irritating. ‘Why don’t you walk alongside me?’ he would ask. ‘It can’t be because I am walking faster than you. You are walking at the same pace as me, otherwise you would be getting further and further behind.’
Mum was always obedient to her mother-in-law and feared her father-in-law. And there was a time when she would refuse to eat dinner before Dad got home, no matter how long he had been delayed.
My parents’ arranged marriage has lasted since 1963. It was the mode of marriage they were brought up with, accepted and wanted for themselves. No matter how hard things get, divorce is simply not an option. Ever. Their love developed after marriage and matured into respect. I suppose it is also enormously helpful that their relationship is equal too – sort of. Mum defers to Dad’s superior knowledge of anything that falls within the purview of the ‘big picture’ and Dad defers to Mum’s superior knowledge of all things within the purview of the ‘small picture’, by which I mean the domestic sphere.
Naturally, they consult each other, but this neat division of responsibility works for them because they know where they stand. That’s equality within their arranged marriage. Of course, it also helps that no matter what purview we’re in, or who has or has not been consulted, ultimately, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, Dad is the head of the household and he has the last word. Enough said.
So from the day Elvis Presley with his big hair arrived to sweep Mum off her feet, her life changed. Her status became upgraded from unmarried virgin living under her father’s roof to married woman living under her husband’s roof. With this elevation came the understanding that a husband is to be revered because his happiness is the route to a wife’s own happiness.
Three months after their wedding Dad packed his bag and migrated to Britain. As is often the case with Asian migrants, men travel alone first to prepare a base before they call their womenfolk. Dad had only been in London a few months and was still absorbing the news of Nehru’s death when he received a letter from Mum telling him she was expecting a baby. He asked her to join him in London immediately so that the baby could be born there (always thinking ahead, he wanted the baby to have British nationality), but Mum was just a child herself and frightened of the changes that were taking place within her body. Traditionally, Indian women go to their parents’ house when a baby is due and that’s what Mum wanted. She was a new bride, a mother-to-be and a terrified teenager. She chose to stay in India to have her first baby and that’s how I came to be born in Punjab in the town of Moga, delivered by my grandmother at ten o’clock in the morning on 9 October 1964.
My mum: engaged at fifteen, married at eighteen, mother at nineteen.
It was not an easy birth. It took Mum months to recuperate. I was the baby who never stopped crying and Dad wasn’t there to comfort Mum. ‘I should have known you were going to be a difficult child,’ she once said. ‘You were screaming from the minute you were born.’ Actually, I haven’t stopped screaming. I was about six months old before Mum was ready to travel to Britain. Alone, with a babe in arms, she boarded a plane for the first time in her life and jetted off to a new country to live among people whose language she couldn’t even speak.
There are three stages of culture shock and anyone who has migrated recognises them instantly. The first stage is the romance of arrival: you are excited, everything is different, you love your new life and you’re high on traveller’s delight. The second stage is filled with resentment and longing: things are not going to plan, you hate your new life, all these terrible things wouldn’t be happening if only you were back in your own country – oh, how you miss your old friends. The third stage is reconciliation: you’ve been a migrant for so long you’ve got used to things. It’s not the same as home – some things are better, some things are worse – but you’ve stopped comparing your old home with your new home. Romance, resentment, reconciliation – a migrant can always be found walking somewhere along that path.
Unlike Dad, who progressed through each stage methodically, Mum skipped the first – the romance of arrival – and went straight to stage two: resentment. She was isolated and lonely. Her days consisted of feeding a baby, washing nappies in cold water and drying them next to a paraffin heater so they were ready for the next day’s drudgery. Homesickness became her best friend as memories of India danced in her head, only to be locked away by day’s end.
Mum and Dad’s landlord, who worked night shifts, slept through the day. Not wanting to disturb him with her child’s constant crying, Mum went to the local park and pushed me around in a pram. No sunshine, no friends, no laughter. Only misery, she thought. ‘I don’t like it here. I don’t want to stay,’ she told Dad. But there was no turning back now. Returning to India without giving it a go in Britain would have been failure for him.
So Mum carried on trudging through the park daily until one day she stopped to chat to a withered old Indian woman who was on her way home from her shift at a local factory. Mum thought, ‘If this old woman can work, so can I.’ Within a week she had found herself a job packing boxes of fruit and nuts. Dad was pleased. He didn’t mind her going out to work because they needed the money. I was nine months old and grown-up enough to be left with a carer called Mary. When Vin was born two years later, Mum stopped work briefly and then returned, leaving Vin with a carer called Jane. Work and saving money became more important than ever before, for not only were there now two little mouths to feed, but two big dowries looming on the horizon too.
Even with employment to occupy her mind, Mum found no comfort in an isolated existence. The extended, intergenerational joint family was the norm in India and she missed the company of other women, in particular her mother and younger sister. So it wasn’t long before my parents embarked on a plan to bring members of their family to join them in Britain. My dad sent for his younger brother (who was in his twenties and of marriageable age) and my mum sent for her younger sister (also of marriageable age) as well as her parents. And before you could say chicken tikka masala, it was obvious th
at a marriage would have to be arranged soon.
For two and half years Mum and Dad lived in rented accommodation, until they had saved enough money to buy their first house: a three-bedroom terrace for £5000 in Twickenham. Mum shopped by pointing at things and smiling, and Dad, having found better paid work at an engineering company that made parts for the shipping industry, upgraded his Zeiss Ikon camera to a Pentax.
When my dad’s brother and my mum’s sister arrived in the late 1960s, they lived with my parents. We kids simply referred to them as uncle and aunt. After all, we knew of no other uncles and aunts so there was no need to suffix their titles with names. Mum’s parents, who we called nanna and nanni, also migrated and came to live with us. All eight of us, three generations, in a three-bedroom house in a particularly white part of Twickenham. Only Indians know the oriental secret of cramming an army of people into the tightest of spaces.
My uncle was a skinny, bespectacled, unnecessarily humble, mathematically inclined young man and my aunt was a chortling, thigh-slapping, rotund young lady with an ear for a joke and an eye for fashion. They didn’t have anything in common, but at least marrying them off would help organise the household’s sleeping arrangements better.
So with as little fuss and chaos as an Indian family can muster, my uncle and aunt were married in the back garden of our house. Somehow, with deft use of those karmic powers, my mum and dad managed to squeeze what seemed to be half the population of Delhi into a garden the size of a postage stamp. We saw our polite English neighbours peeking out from behind their net curtains to catch a glimpse of the bride dressed in her wedding finery of red and gold silk, bangles jangling, hair bedecked with flowers.