by Sushi Das
‘What?’
‘Have you finished praying?’
‘No, I’ve only got up to the “Bless nanna and nanni” bit.’
Minutes later: ‘Hey, Vin.’
‘Shut up. I haven’t finished. How come your prayers finish so quickly? Are you actually saying any prayers?’
I did not pray, not only because I wasn’t sure which god I was supposed to be praying to, but because I didn’t know how to pray. I thought praying was a list of things you wanted to get done. ‘Dear god, please let me pass my maths exam. Please let Mum be in a good mood tomorrow. Please let me somehow meet Bob Geldof. Thanks, amen.’
Once, I did the thing you’re never supposed to do, ever. I tested god. ‘Dear god, I’m praying because Vin told me to. If you’re really there, could you please leave £10 under my pillow? Thanks, amen.’
He never listened to any of my prayers, so I didn’t bother with them. But I didn’t let Vin know.
‘I’ve said mine,’ I told her. ‘I just say them quickly. I don’t go on and on, boring god like you do.’
‘Liar.’
We decided to put in place a system to officially stop prayer interruption. Once a person had finished, they would give a signal, which in our case was the word ‘ding-dong’, sung softly like a doorbell. Needless to say, I was the one ringing the doorbell all night. Most nights Vin fell asleep mid-prayer and I’d lie awake wondering how to make myself white or whether I should starve for a husband.
I figured I didn’t have the constitution required to be a believer. If god was really there, why did he make me an Indian living in Britain? I could have handled being an Indian in India or a Brit living in Britain, but an Indian living in Britain? Hadn’t he heard of culture clash?
Vin joined Archdeacon Cambridge’s school a year after me, along with a handful of other Indian enrolments. Twickenham had a relatively small Indian community, unlike Southall in west London, where it was becoming increasingly difficult to spot a white face. I didn’t play with the other Indian kids. I didn’t think they were very cool. There was a Sikh boy called Balka. Too young to wear a turban, his mum would twist his long hair into a tidy knot on the top of his head and wrap a white hanky around it, using a rubber band to hold it in place, the way grannies put a rubber band around a piece of material on the lid of homemade jam. Poor kid. Some of the English children said he kept his lunch under the hanky, but he didn’t. He used to have school dinners like the rest of us.
I was an observer rather than a participant at school, always peering out of my face. I spoke English and Punjabi fluently, but had no historical perspective on England or India. Somewhere in the cultural moshpit, I was scrambling around on the floor looking for the basic building blocks of myself while everyone else, confident in their skin, was getting on with their lives and having a great time to the music.
God provided no anchor. I didn’t buy the spin. That left me with no hook on which to hang my coat. I was adrift, unable to find, define or refine whatever I was searching for. I had two heads – one for my Western friends and one for my family, yet both joined together on one body. I was a human Y, constantly popping into one or other head. A girl at school asked me, ‘When you think in your head, do you think in English or Indian?’
Good question, but I did not know how to tell her about my two heads, my East and my West, my twin unbelongings, and, in between, the great gulf into which I was always falling, falling, falling.
It was a regular Sunday night. Dad was ironing on the floor again, using several folded sheets to protect the carpet. I have no idea why we didn’t have an ironing board like normal people. Mum was in the kitchen making cheese and mango-pickle sandwiches for his lunch the following day. If she added a few slivers of onion to his sandwich, she would slip a couple of mints into his lunchbox too. Best to have fresh breath, even though your suit smells of curry.
Vin and Raja were watching TV when they were meant to be doing their homework. It wasn’t a picture of domestic bliss, but there was at least a semblance of familial harmony, with everyone occupied with matters of either comforting routine or relaxation. Except me. I was in my bedroom, frantically filling in my diary and fuming at all the injustice in the world. But, more importantly, I was hatching a cunning plan to get out of the house that Friday evening so I could go to the pub with my friends from college.
I had finished secondary school at the age of sixteen with a clutch of respectable grades in my exams, and was continuing my studies at Richmond upon Thames College, a sixth-form college around the corner from our house. This seemed a natural progression, as I intended to keep studying until I had a degree. The longer I studied, the further away the dreaded arranged marriage seemed. I was eighteen years old and considered myself mature enough to go to the pub, as did the law. But I was a daughter whose status had not yet been upgraded from unmarried girl to married woman, which meant I was still subject to the rules of my father’s house. And according to his rules, a young girl drinking alcohol in a pub in the company of men was totally unacceptable and strictly prohibited. That’s why I needed a plan. I put away my diary and went to speak to my dad.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘Some of my friends from college are going to see a play next Friday. It’s at the theatre in Richmond. I’d be back before eleven o’clock . . .’
‘Why do you need to go to the theatre again?’
‘Just for entertainment.’
‘What is the purpose of entertainment?’
‘To enjoy yourself?’
‘Finish your studies first. You have the rest of your life for entertainment after that.’
‘But Daa-aad,’ I whined. ‘What’s wrong with entertainment? Everyone needs to go out from time to time.’
‘That is all you ever want to do: get out of this house. Who else is going?’
‘A group of my friends from college.’
‘Will there be any undesirable element?’ This was my dad’s reference to boys.
‘No, it’s just girls.’
He was pushing the nose of the iron into the awkward corners of the shirt with unnecessary force. There was an excruciating silence before he spoke.
‘What are their names?
‘It’s just going to be me, Clare, Kathy and Fiona.’ I didn’t mention Dan and Paul and John.
The plan was going well, I thought. The interrogation suggested there was a possibility he might give me permission to go. Better than an outright refusal.
‘Why do you insist on making these unreasonable demands?’ he said, putting down the iron. ‘Why do you have to go out all the time? It’s too much for your mother. She can’t bear it. We are sick of your lying.’
‘But I’m not lying,’ I lied, raising my voice.
‘Watch your tone. I am your father, show some respect. Your non-stop demands to go out are hurting your mother. She is not strong. Why are you killing her like this?’
‘I am not killing anyone,’ I cried. ‘I just want to go to the theatre with my girlfriends. Why is that too much to ask? You never let me go out. You never let me go anywhere.’
‘Have you finish the irrening?’ yelled Mum from the kitchen, making her presence felt without entering the room. She received no reply.
‘Enough,’ snapped Dad.
‘So, can I go?’
‘No.’
‘But Dad . . .’
‘I said no.’
I had lied one too many times in the past – and been caught out. I was as convincing as a used-car salesman. My lies weren’t always watertight. I was rarely home by the time I said I would be. If I phoned home mid-evening, Madonna at top volume or the sound of clanking pint glasses suggested I wasn’t where I’d said I would be, and I could never truly hide the smell of cigarettes in my clothes or the watery look in my eyes as I staggered through the front door. It was a relief to come home when Mum and Dad had already gone to bed. But there were nights when the lights would still be on and they would
be waiting for me, armed with the dreaded question: ‘Where have you been?’
I would repeat the lie I had told them before I went out. They would demand answers: ‘What time did the play start? What time did it end? How did you get from the theatre to the station?’ Sometimes the questions were too tricky for me to handle. ‘If the play finished at nine forty-five and the train left at ten o’clock, as you say, you should have been home by eleven o’clock at the latest. It is now half-past midnight. Where have you been all this time?’
After too many vodka and tonics, it can be exceedingly difficult to answer such questions with any degree of accuracy, especially when the questions are fired at you faster than your brain can think. Invariably, I would trip up and someone would start crying. Usually me. Exasperated, I would sometimes admit the truth – that I’d been to the pub and there had been boys present, and my parents’ rage would boil over. There would be a horrible, dry lecture, and their voices would bury me like gravel being poured on my head from a tip truck.
Mum would start crying until she became stricken with hypertension or a migraine. Sometimes it would be palpitations and nausea. I once dared to suggest her sudden maladies were the tools of emotional blackmail to keep me in check, and was severely reprimanded for my cold-hearted insolence.
I was the cause of much unhappiness for my parents. Everything I wanted was anathema to them. Ours was a house of slamming doors, shouting people and wretched tears. So much time lost fighting.
I wasn’t the only one who lied. Vin told lies too, just not as often as I did. On one occasion she said she was going to a friend’s engagement party, where only girls would be present. She managed to get permission without a row. She had not been caught lying as often as I had, so she still had good behaviour credits in the bank. And she was Mum’s favourite daughter. I know because Mum would put her arm around Vin’s shoulders and say, ‘This is my favourite daughter.’ Irrefutable evidence. I attributed Vin’s favoured status to the fact that she had not been a constantly crying baby and her nappies hadn’t needed drying in front of a paraffin heater because Mum had access to a washing line by the time she was born.
As requested by Dad, Vin wrote on a piece of paper the name of her betrothed friend, her telephone number and the address where the party was being held. Who knows where she was really going, but there were bound to be undesirable elements there.
About an hour after Vin had left, Dad picked up the piece of paper, put it in his pocket and said to me, ‘Put your coat on.’ Raja put his coat on too, but Dad insisted he stay home. Presumably wherever Dad and I were about to go was no place for a ten-year-old. The age gap between him and his older sisters meant he remained largely outside the day-to-day dramas in which Vin and I often became entangled.
Dad and I drove to the address in the neighbouring town of Teddington that Vin had given as her destination. I felt giddying unease and my adrenal glands started working overtime. I was a spy’s accomplice.
When we arrived, Dad parked the car on the other side of the road and we both stared at the house in horror. The windows were boarded up and there was a cracked glass panel in the front door. Weeds were trying to climb out of the garden and one hinge held the gate in place. Looking past the skip of old bricks and rubble that stood outside, we could see there were no lights on in the house.
Dad turned the key in the ignition and we drove home in frightening silence. Of all the addresses in Teddington, Vin had picked a half-dilapidated house in which to pretend she was attending a respectable, all-girl engagement party. I quickly tried to think of a plan that might help her explain her lie, but I couldn’t get past my first thought: ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
When Vin returned, Dad led her into the living room. I followed, chewing my nails.
‘How was the engagement party?’ he inquired calmly.
‘Great,’ she replied.
‘What was the house like?’
‘It was a normal two-up, two-down.’
‘Was there anything unusual about it?’ Dad persisted. Vin darted a look at me. I tried to indicate with my frozen face that she was in big trouble – big, you-totally-fucked-this-one-up, trouble.
‘No,’ she said.
‘You didn’t see a skip outside? Windows and doors boarded up?’ asked Dad with a tone that suggested he was on the cusp of nailing her.
‘A skip?’ she said without hesitation. ‘Oh yeah, there was a skip outside the house next door.’
‘But this piece of paper,’ said Dad, pulling it out of his pocket and unfolding it. Vin grabbed it out of his hands and looked at it briefly.
‘Oops, sorry, I wrote 28 Manor Road. I meant 26,’ she said, smiling apologetically. ‘Anyway, how do you know there was a skip outside the neighbour’s house?’
Checkmate. Later that evening, as we climbed into our beds, I asked Vin, ‘So where did you really go?’
‘None of your business,’ she snapped and turned off the lamp.
Leaving the house for any form of teenage fun necessitated military planning: documentation recording our whereabouts and carefully crafted timetables giving arrival and departure times had to be submitted to Dad. For our own benefit, a contingency plan was always a good idea, or at least the mental agility to effect an adroit move at short notice if circumstances required.
Dad had an in-built radar that was constantly scanning for the presence of undesirable elements. So Vin and I frequently operated under the radar, using covert means and secret rendezvous. But even then Dad was able to outfox us by introducing bizarre bans, outlawing activities that our peers took for granted – like going to the local pool.
Wednesday 5 August, 1981: ‘Dad said that Mum was not to take us swimming. He thinks it’s indecent for grown girls like Vin and I to parade around in swimsuits. He thinks Indian men might be there. BIG DEAL.’
Even within the house there were rules to obey and standards to maintain. Take off that make-up, you are still a child. Don’t loll in the doorway with your arms akimbo. Do you know what kind of women stand in doorways like that? Don’t stomp around the house in shoes, wear slippers. Your jeans are too tight. Go to your bedroom and put on your Indian clothes. Don’t wear your hair loose, it is a sign of mourning in our culture. Tie it up. Why are all your clothes black? That skirt is too short. It’s cold outside, put on a longer one. Don’t bite your nails. Who was that on the phone?
Despite our parents’ strictness, we managed to satisfy our desires for a social life by lying, thatching over our lies when the rain came in and covering for each other when necessary. When a person is unjustly imprisoned, I thought, any means to escape is acceptable, as long as one’s means are not found out, which would explain why the first page of my 1983 diary states:
‘There is no harm in deceiving society as long as she does not find you out, because it is only when she finds you out that you have harmed her; she is not like a friend or God, who are injured by the mere existence of unfaithfulness.’
E. M. Forster (A Passage to India)
There is a direct proportional relationship between the elaborateness of the lie and the desperation with which one wishes to achieve a particular outcome through deception. For me, the obstacles to achieving the simplest of outcomes were many and I developed a James Bond-like ingenuity to overcome them.
During term breaks I could not leave the house without having to account for my every move. Conveniently, my college was a one minute walk from our house. Inconveniently, Dad’s office was not much further away. During his lunch hour he would sometimes come home, and if I wasn’t there, I would have to explain where I was. On other days he would ring the house at random times, and if I didn’t answer, I would have to explain where I had been when he returned from work.
In those days the telephone, an old-style ring-ring phone with a dial, sat on a highly polished wooden cabinet in the dining room. At the back of the phone was a small protruding shelf. Occasionally, while Mum and Dad were at work, I would leave the house for
a couple of hours at a time to catch up with friends or go shopping or see a movie with a girlfriend. Had I told Dad where I was going, or what I was doing, it was sure to have necessitated a great deal of paperwork pertaining to my movements, and possibly a row, so I didn’t bother.
Instead, I would place a small amount of talcum powder (very useful stuff, talcum powder) on the small shelf at the back of the phone. If the phone rang, the vibrations would knock some of the talc onto the surface of the polished cabinet. I would note the time I left the house and the time I returned. If there was talc on the cabinet when I came back, I’d know Dad had probably been ringing to check up on me. So when he came back from work at the end of the day, I would lend credibility to my lie by anticipating his questioning.
‘Dad, did you call this afternoon? I think it was some time between two and four o’clock?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, sorry I didn’t answer. I was in the garden hanging out the washing. When I came in, I heard the ringing, but it stopped.’
Being able to narrow the window of time to a mere two hours was the key. Remarkably successful though this tactic was, I could use it only sparingly.
On one occasion I tried a new tactic, with spectacularly unsuccessful results. It was a few days after one of my mum’s malady incidents. My waywardness had prompted a ferocious row and the rapid onset of a migraine, the mischief being that I had lied about my whereabouts again and gone to the pub with my friends. Although commonsense suggested Mum would want to lie down in a dark room and stay quiet, her behaviour was inexplicably hysterical. She was crying and hollering, almost ululating at one stage. She appeared to have become completely unglued.
In my dad’s Reader’s Digest Family Health Guide and Medical Encyclopedia, I had read that hysteria could be quelled by a firm slap across the face, followed by a reassuring hug. So I grabbed her by the shoulders and brought my right hand down firmly across her face. I thought she’d thank me for it. Instead, she stared at me in shock as if I had killed an innocent child. Iattempted to draw her close to me to deliver the ‘reassuring hug’, but she pushed me away as though I was the devil and wailed even more loudly.