by Sushi Das
Luckily, the bride and groom didn’t need a car painted with ‘just married’ to drive into the sunset because both of them were already at home. Presumably, after all the wedding guests had left, Mum and Dad just moved the furniture around so that my uncle and aunt could share the same room. It had all turned out conveniently neat. Two brothers married to two sisters, living in the same house. There isn’t anything that Indians can’t arrange.
It wasn’t long before my aunt and uncle had earned enough money to buy a house of their own, and then my grandparents did the same. Those were the days when able-bodied people in ordinary jobs could realistically save enough money in a reasonable period of time to put a deposit on a house.
Soon after, there was great joy in our house when my brother was born in 1972. At last my parents had a son. There were big smiles and much hearty slapping of backs. As is the custom, Indian sweets were distributed to friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. Indeed, such was the delight, he was named Rajesh, meaning ‘king of kings’, and my mum’s status in Indian society automatically became upgraded from mother to mother of son. I was eight years old when he was born and Vin was six. His arrival was clearly a big moment in our household, and with the nonchalance of kids, we took it in our stride. But it was a turning point in my parents’ lives. Bearing a son gives an Indian woman confidence and Mum was emboldened. Dad was a proud man and now ready to show his children off to his own father and mother in India.
Within a year my family made our first trip to India. My grandparents lived in a newly built cream-coloured house with a spiral staircase and two kitchens (a Western kitchen for cooking standing up and an Indian kitchen for squatting and cooking). This house was built with remittances sent back from England by my dad and uncle.
There is method in migration. Young male migrants don’t move overseas just for fun and adventure. They send money back to their home country so the wealth can be spread among members of their family. For Indian migrants, the object of the game is survival, everything else – holidays, entertainment, fashionable clothing, the very apparatus of what is commonly known as ‘lifestyle’ – takes a back seat. Earning money and sharing it among your people becomes the priority.
During our three months in India, Vin and I discovered a magical world full of peculiar and wonderful things. Each day, we pumped water from a hand pump just outside the house. There were no taps. We saw women make patties from cow dung and leave them in huge, finely balanced piles to bake in the sun to use for fuel the next day. We plucked huge swollen purple jamun fruit off trees and gorged ourselves till we looked like little sated vampires with bloodstained mouths. Geckos lost their tails on the verandah and goats bleated like babies. We celebrated the spring colour festival of Holi with local children who ran amok, laughing and throwing handfuls of coloured powder till every street and laneway looked like god had spilled a palate of paint.
Vin and I were timid little girls in my grandfather’s presence. He walked with the help of a stick and spoke to us gently. He had a full head of polar-white hair but his thick moustache still carried a faint reminder of the colour his hair had once been. It was on this trip that I saw Mum speak to him through her georgette dupatta, pulling it across one side of her face and holding it there with feminine fingers, her profile slightly visible through the sheer fabric.
Afternoons were yellowy warm and languid, and life was lived on the verandah. My then one-year-old brother, who was now walking, was often the centre of adult attention, while Vin and I found our own little corner where the two of us, like chattering chimps, could sit giggling and teasing one another.
Amid the chitchat and banter sat a very old man, cross-legged and silent, on a rope bed in the sun, usually with his eyes closed. He wore a loose white turban wrapped around his head and a pair of round metal-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. Bare-chested, with only a white dhoti wrapped around him, he looked like Gandhi, except he was much, much older. He was as thin as a man could be and his golden brown skin hung loosely from his armpits, groin and knees. ‘This man,’ said my dad in a hushed tone, ‘is your great-grandfather.’
My dad had built a house for my grandfather, and my grandfather in turn was looking after my great-grandfather in it. The power of duty can produce a remarkably efficient system of care. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my dad and my baby brother – all on the verandah together. Those three months in India were the only time I saw four generations of males in our family gathered in the same geographical spot.
Throughout our school years and with only a short break when my brother was born, Mum worked non-stop. Indeed, if she was not working, the earth was off its axis for her. She was incapable of relaxing, even at home, because there was always something to do: soak the dal, make the lunches, knit mittens, sew duvet covers, yell at Dad for reading the newspaper, sweep the kitchen, pound the dry chillies, whack the kids with a wooden spoon. Mum’s work was never done. Over the past forty or so years, apart from rearing three children, serving her husband and boxing fruit and nuts, she has also made nameplates for motor cars, laundered other people’s clothes, checked rubber washers for defects, assembled car wipers, soldered components onto printed circuit boards, massaged heads at a hair salon and fed old people.
And did she do all this without a single word of complaint? Of course not. She will readily spill her woes, even if only the doorpost is listening. And does anyone contest the depth of her sacrifice? Of course not.
When Vin and I started school, Mum was working virtually every available hour. It was usually our nanni who met us at the school gates when it was home time. On the odd occasion, when Mum had a day off work or had left work early for a dental appointment, she’d pick us up from school. At home time, we’d leave our classroom and look for nanni with her green coat and ‘emerald’ buttons among the knot of parents near the school gate. On the surprise occasions that we spotted Mum, smiling and waving at us, we’d break into a sprint, cut across the grass and arrive panting, circling her like excited terriers.
But the regular pattern of our lives usually meant Mum was forever getting ready to go to work, her face anxious, her bag at the ready. She’d comb her long black hair and plait it quickly, flicking it over her shoulder when she had finished so it hung like a rope down her spine. Then she’d stand in front of the mirror, examine the mole on her chin, and smile a false smile to flatten her lips so she could apply her red lipstick in a couple of swift strokes. It made me happy to watch her getting ready for work, not because I was pleased she was leaving the house, but because I liked the way her face looked when she put on her lipstick. I thought she was smiling because she was happy.
But happiness was a thing of the past. She was no longer a girl. Her courtship had been conducted by mail. The romance of marriage had lasted just three short months till Dad had left for London, and by the time she saw him again nearly a year and a half later, she carried with her all the burdens of motherhood. And now there was nothing but work ahead. But at least she was no longer alone. She was no longer sitting next to a heater drying the nappies. She had her sister to talk to and her parents weren’t far away. Dad had his brother near him and the bonds forged within a small extended family provided comfort in a strange and sometimes peculiar land.
While Mum moved from one job to the next, full-time to part-time and back again, accommodating the various stages and needs of her children, Dad stayed relatively stable in his work. After a few years he left the engineering company and trained to become a tax officer – a good ‘government job’ as Indians like to call such work. He was posted to a tax office in Twickenham and there he remained for the rest of his working life, devoted to robbing people of their hard-earned cash on behalf of Her Majesty’s government.
‘I’m looking after the tax affairs of Hot Chocolate,’ he announced one evening.
‘What, Hot Chocolate, the pop group?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much money do they make?’
‘I can’t tell you that. It’s confidential.’
‘But we’re your kids. We won’t tell anyone.’
‘Sorry. Tax is a private business. I can’t tell you their private business.’
My dad: honest, ethical, upright citizen of Britain.
Whatever he turned his hand to, he achieved successfully. Except one thing: teaching Mum to speak English properly. Admittedly, he was up against forces beyond his control. No matter how hard he worked at helping her with her pronunciation and spelling, the Cockney influence of the people Mum worked with in factories rapidly undid all Dad’s efforts. As far as she was concerned, she was fluent in Hindi and Punjabi and competent in English, so why all the fuss over pronunciation and getting every single word right? What she developed over time was a unique way of speaking English without an Indian accent, but with an unmistakable Indian style overlaid with a slight Cockney lilt. We three kids tried to help her, but she resisted our attempts too.
‘Gimme help with irrrening, may.’
‘Mum, it’s help me with the ironing – iyuning. And you shouldn’t call me “mate”. I’m your daughter.’
‘This is wor I say: gimme help with irrrening.’
‘It’s what! Not wor! It’s what, you say. T, T, T where’s the T?’
‘Iss in the cupboard.’
Most of her issues related to pronunciation, but her biggest problem was with the word ‘the’. She simply never worked out where to put it in a sentence: ‘Chapatis is made. Call the dad. Dinner is ready.’ Even her swearing was back to front and upside down. ‘He charge me three pound for tomaterr. Bastard bloody. I say him you charge me extra. He just look me. Three pound! Bloody.’
Talking to Mum in English was mostly successful, sometimes frustrating and occasionally embarrassing. Dad was always patient, but in public her word-mangling skills could leave him red-faced – especially if she spoke too loudly.
‘Why don’t you take some photos?’ she yelled to him during a family picnic at Kew Gardens. ‘Where your Tampax? Check that bag. I think your Tampax in there.’
‘Pentax, it’s Pentax,’ said Dad through gritted teeth. ‘You see why I don’t take you to the office Christmas party.’
And things have never got much better.
‘So, what does your daughter do, Mrs Das?’
‘She is a generalist.’
‘A generalist?’
‘Yes, she write the story in the newspaper.’
‘Oh, a journalist.’
Eventually we gave up trying, although I still throw corrections into the conversation sometimes. Dad is mostly philosophical: ‘If she had only just tried a little harder, she might not have been stuck working in factories all her life. She could have got a good job in the post office like Mrs Singh.’
It was four in the morning and the click of my parents’ bedroom door opening woke me. I heard my mother’s footsteps on the carpet as she crept downstairs to the kitchen. I turned over in my warm bed. It was still dark outside. I knew what she was doing.
At the kitchen sink, the spot where she could most often be found, she was filling a small silver jug with water – the one she used every year – and placing it on a round tray. Then she would place on the tray a small heap of uncooked rice grains, a few pieces of fresh coconut, a stick of incense and a knob of sweet, fudge-like confection. Standing in her nightdress and slippers, with the cold night air circling her exposed ankles, she would put her hands together and close her eyes to say a solitary prayer before the morning gloom seeped through the curtains. Soon daylight would come tumbling into the house but she would eat breakfast before it did, because afterwards she would not eat or drink again until she saw the moon in the evening.
It was the day of the Kurwa Chauth ceremony, when Hindu married women fast from sunrise to moonrise to pray that their husbands live a long life. Millions of Indian women have performed this ritual for centuries. And my mum would, as she had done ever since her status was elevated from unmarried girl to married woman, sacrifice nourishment without complaint to demonstrate her utter devotion to my dad.
Traditionally, her small meal before daybreak, or sergi, would be prepared by her mother-in-law, but my mum was in London and her mother-in-law was in India so she always made her own sergi – some fruit, maybe some chapati and a cup of tea. And so it went, every year on the fourth day of a waxing moon in the Hindu lunisolar calendar month of Kartik (usually September, October or November), Mum celebrated a custom that was the very essence of what she lived for: her husband, her protector.
Every morning she made the tea and Dad washed the breakfast dishes. When they left for work they never kissed each other goodbye – physical affection in front of the children would be unseemly. Kurwa Chauth this year was much like any other. By the time I hauled myself out of bed, they had already gone to work. I lurched downstairs for breakfast and saw Mum’s tray on the kitchen bench. On a chair in the living room she had left all the things she would need in the evening: one of her finest saris, bangles, some make-up, a bindi and a small amount of sindoor, vermilion powder to daub in the parting of her hair – the distinctive mark of an Indian woman whose husband is alive.
When we were younger schoolgirls, Vin and I would be home by four and Mum would be waiting with a scarf covering her head. She didn’t normally cover her head at home, but on the day of the Kurwa Chauth, when it was time to tell the Kurwa Chauth story, she would pull her dupatta over her head as a gesture of piety and Vin and I would be handed scarves to cover our heads. If my aunt had the day off work, she would join us, but often there was only the three of us: Mum, Vin and me. We would sit in a circle on the floor with Mum’s tray in the middle. She’d drop a few silver coins into her jug of water and then give me and Vin a pinch of rice each from the tray, and take some for herself.
There would be a strange sense of excitement and trepidation as the three of us sat cross-legged with our heads covered – as if Mum was about to start a séance. Eagerly, we would search her face for a sign that she was about to begin. She would look down, start massaging the rice in her cupped palm with the fingers of her other hand and then slowly and deliberately start narrating in Punjabi the story she told every year at exactly four o’clock in the afternoon on the day of Kurwa Chauth:
A long time ago, there lived a girl who had seven brothers. After she married and it was time to perform her first Kurwa Chauth ritual, she happened to be visiting her parents. She took sergi before sunrise and kept a fast all day. No food, no water. By the time the evening came, she felt weak with hunger. But she could not eat because the moon had not risen yet. Her brothers became worried for her; after all, she was their only sister and the youngest. So they hatched a plan to dupe their sister into thinking the moon had risen. A couple of them went into the forest and lit a fire behind a hill. Then they called for their sister. Her brothers said, ‘Come, sister, come into the forest – there is a glow behind the hill. The moon has finally risen.’ Seeing the glow and mistaking it for the light of the moon, she returned to the house to break her fast.
In her first mouthful, she bit into a stick. In her second mouthful, she found a hair. When she took her third mouthful there was a knock at the door. She opened it to find a messenger, who had come to deliver bad news: her new husband was fatally ill and on his deathbed. The girl’s mother told her to immediately return to her husband’s house and if she met anyone en route to touch their feet as a mark of respect so that they might bestow on her a blessing that her husband should survive so that she would remain a married woman.
So, grief-stricken, she ran and ran until she met a woman walking the other way. The girl touched the woman’s feet and the woman blessed her, but the blessing was not the one she desired. She continued on her journey until she met a second woman. The girl touched her feet and the woman blessed her, but again it was not the precise blessing that she required. The girl continued like this until she met a seventh woman. The girl bent down and in desperation cl
ung onto her feet. The woman blessed her, saying, ‘Bless you, my child – may you always remain a married woman.’
The girl thanked her and asked, ‘But how can I remain a married woman? I am on my way to my husband’s house and he is on his deathbed.’ Unbeknown to the girl, the woman who blessed her was the mother goddess, and she said to the girl, ‘Your husband lies on his deathbed because you did not maintain your fast until the moon rose. I was on my way to bring death to him, but you took hold of my feet looking for a blessing and now I must keep your husband alive. Here, take this holy water. When you get home, sprinkle it over your husband’s body and he will remain alive. May you always stay a married woman.’ The girl ran home, sprinkled the water on her husband and to her joy he awoke, and she remained a married woman.
God willing, may all husbands live long lives, so that we may remain married women.
With these words, my mum would bring the story to a close, drop her grains of rice into the silver jug and gesture for me and Vin to do the same. Following a short prayer, which sounded as if she was chanting, we would be allowed to go about our business and Mum, no doubt very hungry by then, would start preparing the evening’s feast.
When Dad returned from work, we would have to wait until moonrise before we could eat dinner. From about eight o’clock Mum would go into the garden at regular intervals and look up at the sky, searching for the moon. We would all become increasingly worried if there was cloud cover and the moon was not visible. Frequently around autumn time in London there were heavy clouds and there were many occasions when the whole family would be in the garden looking up at the sky. Mum, Dad, Vin, Raja and I, by now all hungry, turning circles looking skyward in the hope that someone might catch a glimpse of the moon as it slid out from behind a cloud.
Eventually, there would be moans of ‘I’m starving’ from me, Vin or Raja and Dad would turn to Mum and say, ‘Come, the children are hungry, perform your prayers and let’s go in and eat.’ But Mum, pious, faithful, devoted Mum, would say, ‘No, how can I? I have not seen the moon yet.’