by Sushi Das
I suddenly felt sick, and it wasn’t just the smoke that was making me nauseous – the smoke that was seeping its way into Mum’s curtains and carpet with the speed and vehemence that only cigarette fumes can. I looked at John and said urgently, ‘John, you’re about to meet my dad.’
Having heard some frightening stories about my dad’s strictness and his hatred for alcohol, cigarettes and boys, John instantly reached for the saucer to hide it. ‘Leave it,’ I said abruptly, like a housewife issuing an order to her hen-pecked husband. As Dad approached the front door I saw him look at John through the bay window. His brow tightened and his face took on a fearsome expression. I opened the front door for him and he gave me an arctic stare, his nostrils flaring and the whites of his eyes suddenly more visible. Without a word he marched into the living room, threw open the windows and turned to face John.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said tersely.
‘Good afternoon, Mr Das,’ replied John, his cigarette quivering between his fingers as he reached forward to put it out on Mum’s saucer.
Fresh air blew in through the window. John’s face was so red I thought he was holding his breath. Dad sat down on the chair furthest from him and rustled noisily through the pages of the Guardian till he found the page he wanted. John watched him as I collected the teacups and made a cowardly escape into the kitchen. Dad started a conversation about university and I heard them talking in short, tight sentences. Holy mother of god, I thought, Dad is meeting the wrong guy!
When I returned, both men fell silent. I stood frozen, wondering what to do, when suddenly I saw a sight through the window that made my bones tremble. It was Paul walking up the garden path to the front door. I felt suddenly winded as if I had been slammed in the stomach with a hefty swing of a rounders’ bat. There was a corresponding sharp pain in my chest and I wondered if I was having a cardiac arrest. It was going to be hard enough explaining to Dad what John was doing in the living room, let alone trying to explain why Paul had arrived too. Not to mention how I was going to explain to Paul why I was introducing John to my Dad.
I rushed to the front door to shoo Paul away before he rang the doorbell. Dad was disgusted enough with one undesirable element in his house. Two would be unconscionable, if not downright immoral. I flung open the front door and started waving my arms around like a fishwife.
‘Go, just go,’ I hissed. ‘Quick, just go. Just . . .’ I turned around to find Dad standing in the hallway staring at me. Momentarily the world fell away. I was looking at Dad through a tunnel and I felt rising within me a sense of impending universal doom. Dad glared at the long-haired lout in his front garden and said to me, ‘He was coming into the house too, was he?’
‘No, I was just passing,’ said Paul limply. What, passing up the garden path? A likely story, lad, I thought, trying to mimic and thereby preempt Dad’s thoughts.
Paul left, closing the gate behind him, and Dad followed me back into the living room, where John was sitting with an expression only an executioner could have seen on a man’s face before. I picked up my bag and said, ‘I’ve got to go – I’ve got a class.’ John hastily reached for his bag too.
‘He can go,’ said Dad, nodding towards John. ‘You, Sushila, sit down. I want to talk to you.’
After John had gone, Dad delivered the mother of all lectures. What kind of girl was I? How indecent. How immoral. How disgusting to have one man in the house – smoking, if you please – while another knocked at the door. What did I think I was doing? The shame and ruin I was bringing on our household. What debauched and sinful things was I allowing to happen under my father’s own roof? Had I no decency? No decency at all?
Had it not been for the fact that Dad had to go back to work, the lecture may never have ended. I felt crushed. There would be no reprieve. I had lost my father’s trust, probably forever, and possibly even his love. What a disaster. My attempt to engineer a meeting between Dad and Paul in the hope that they might like each other had turned into a scene from the B-grade movie that was my pathetic life. He was an angry father on the brink. They were unsuspecting boys caught in the middle. She was a harlot on a mission. Undesirable Elements – coming to cinema near you.
On Thursday 9 June, 1983, I voted in a parliamentary election for the first time. The Conservatives, under Margaret Thatcher, won by a landslide, while the Labour Party flopped around. Voting confirmed I was a grown-up now, but that triumph was at odds with my status in my parents’ house, where I was still an unmarried girl and expected to ‘eat with the kids’ when relatives or other visitors came to our house.
I have no idea how anybody in my family voted. Dad, who I’m sure always told Mum who to vote for, kept his own intentions strictly confidential. Voting was a private business, he said. A bit like Hot Chocolate’s tax affairs.
My uncle declared he would vote for the National Front.
‘The National Front?’ I screeched, shocked that anybody in my family would even consider voting for a far-right group of extremists. ‘Why would you vote for a bunch of ugly racists?’
‘Because I want to go home,’ he grinned.
Then again, migrants do often drift right of centre, usually once they are firmly embedded within stage three of culture shock: reconciliation. That’s around the time they stop being grateful for being given a chance to start a fresh life in a new country (I’m not suggesting they ought to be grateful) and start espousing incomprehensible views about the unsuitability of more migrants like themselves being allowed in. My mum can be like that.
‘The government should stop any more Indians coming into this country,’ she once said.
‘Why?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘It’s Britain’s migration policy that allowed you to come here and build your life.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she replied. ‘But too many Indians are moving into Twickenham now and they are bringing down the price of our house.’
Margaret Thatcher talked a lot about reducing the role of government, rolling back the state and increasing individual self-reliance. It sounded very much like the message Bob Geldof had been yelling about: ‘I am an island/Entire of myself/And when I get old, older than today/I’ll never need anybody’s help in any way.’ He might not have wanted to roll back the state, but he was fighting to get out of a plastic bag and he wanted to be himself. He didn’t want to rely on anyone else and that’s what I wanted too.
But I couldn’t leave the house without interrogation, a social life involving the pub was strictly out of bounds, boys weren’t allowed to phone me and I couldn’t risk letting them into the house – ever again. Meanwhile, my oestrogen levels were blasting off the Richter scale.
Brian Eno and Ziggy Stardust kept me company while I filled in my diary each night, frantically and pompously recording ‘the injustices of my life’. I filled my time reading books – anything and everything that came my way (a childhood fascination with fairytales, which fed my hunger for escapism, had morphed into a penchant for science fiction). All the while, I continued to lie, unconvincingly, about my whereabouts, creating havoc at home when I was found out. ‘Oh, will Mum and Dad ever learn that I know how to look after myself!!’ I ranted in the diary. I couldn’t bear it.
Things weren’t going well on the boyfriend front either. Paul and I didn’t last longer than about a year. A secret relationship is at first a breathless adventure full of electric winks, nods and double meanings, but latterly it becomes a tedious hindrance to a properly functioning existence. Paul’s band, predictably, broke up, and so did we. He said he didn’t love me anymore. His so-called love for me was a hitherto undeclared feature of our relationship, but I was nonetheless heartbroken. It was my first lesson in the fickle nature of men’s interest and their constant hunt for fresh flesh.
Mum never knew about Paul, but she had her views on English men: ‘These English boys, these Angrez boys, they go when they finish with the girl. Indian boys get marry. English people is different to us. English parents want to kick the children ou
t of the house when the child reach eighteen. If the children stay, they pay the rent to the parents. Hai hai, they take rent from their own children! Indian parents, we don’t do that.’
But the source of my deepest angst came not from my lost boyfriend or my parents’ strictness, but something much worse: the idea of my impending arranged marriage. It had been a slow-burning worry that had taken years to reach the point of extreme anxiety. At first, I only wondered about it, like we wonder what we want to do when we grow up. Then I started worrying about when it would happen and who would be chosen for me. These were underlying nervous worries, similar to the apprehension induced by living in the midst of a nuclear arms race. They were followed by an intense anxiety that filled my sleep with nightmares.
Thursday 13 August, 1981: ‘Slept very badly last night. Firstly, it was extremely hot, and secondly, Vin and I didn’t get to sleep until half past one – we were chatting. Then to bring the night to a treacherous climax, I had a bad dream. My marriage was arranged at the age of 16 to an English boy – looking like Lady Diana’s brother. Mum arranged it in a terrible hurry, I wasn’t dressed properly for the occasion, and the main thing was, that I didn’t want to get married at the age of 16. I thought it to be too young, I told dad, he listened, but was unable to do anything about it, because mum over-powered him tremendously. She was very excited about my wedding and was running around arranging things IN A HURRY. It was a horrible dream and it’s been nagging me all day.’
Even if my parents had been contemplating an underage marriage into British aristocracy, they still wouldn’t have asked for my views on the topic. By the age of eighteen my anxiety had morphed into open panic. It made me sick to think about arranged marriages.
There was constant talk among my parents and my uncle and aunt about keeping children ‘under control’. I came to believe that I was actually in a sort of prison; that my bedroom was a cell and my parents the wardens. Yet I had committed no crime. Well, only thought-crimes against my parents.
I spent unfathomable amounts of time trying to engineer an escape. Like algebra, the more I thought about it, the harder it got.
The core issue remained that I had to manage the escape without it blackening my family’s reputation. It was too late to run away from home, and besides, it would have induced maximum shame. So that option was dead.
There were only two other choices I could see. One, I could marry a man of my parents’ choosing, make them happy and live in misery for the rest of my life because I certainly could not see myself being a good Indian wife, serving my husband, bringing up children and fasting for the Kurva Chauth ceremony every year. I had plans for a career.
Two, I could marry a man I chose who my parents did not approve of, ruin my family’s izzat, be potentially disowned by Mum and Dad and live happily ever after – sort of.
Neither option appealed. It was a stark choice and a horrid bind. But I could not see a third way. It was them or me. Sacrifice or selfishness. The family as a whole was a bigger entity and a larger force than me alone, so I was sure to lose. But I could never abide the thought of being the loser in the fight against an arranged marriage. These thoughts loped about, troubling my daytime dreaming and haunting my night hours.
‘My civil liberty has been curtailed!’ I thundered in the diary. ‘I am a human being. I have a right to have a right.’
My college friends listened kindly and patiently to my problems and suggested simplistic solutions: ‘Just tell your dad you don’t want an arranged marriage and move out.’ But move out to where? And live on what? They didn’t understand. I wasn’t just looking for a way to get out of an arranged marriage. I was looking for a way to get out of it without my family losing face. It was the losing face part they didn’t grasp, because they were Westerners and losing face is a wholly Asian concept. My friends knew more about getting off their face than they did about saving face. I put their somewhat glib suggestions down to a lack of knowledge about Indian culture. But I had no right to expect them to have the answers to my problems, and I was grateful they listened to me. Where once I might have turned to Vin for solace, I now turned to them.
Vin was still at secondary school, wearing a uniform. We no longer saw each other in the playground or shared school tittle-tattle. I now hung out with people who dyed their hair and talked about what was wrong with the system. Against my nascent sixth-form-college cynicism, Vin appeared young, wholesome, naïve and ever so slightly further away.
I don’t know how I came across the National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty). Maybe I picked up a leaflet at the library or saw a documentary on TV, or maybe I heard my college friends talking. I rang and was told they promoted the values of individual human dignity, equal treatment and fairness as foundations of a democratic society. They protected civil liberties and promoted human rights. Sounded good to me, so I made a donation and joined.
Making a donation, like voting for the first time, meant I could help to effect change. I had a say in something. I also joined Amnesty International and diligently wrote letters and postcards to brutal dictators around the world to pressure them to release political prisoners (something Amnesty International encouraged in those days). But there was no authority to whom I could write to lodge a complaint against migrant Asian parents who wanted to control the lives of their sons and daughters by putting them through archaic marriage practices. I had no power to stop the juggernaut that was gathering momentum and hurtling towards me.
Dad had been alert to news of a suitable boy for some time, but after a visit from my grandmother in India, he set about looking for a match with renewed vigour. Mum, who felt she had been robbed of a life of glamour and romance, seemed determined to derive vicarious pleasure through the search for a husband for me and by arranging my wedding.
We were in the pre-internet age and a potential spouse was identified through family and friends using word-of-mouth and usually a matchmaker or a neutral go-between. Should negotiations between two families break down or a match prove unacceptable, using a go-between could avoid accidental disrespect and offence being caused. Nowadays, urban Indians living in nuclear families lack the social reach once enjoyed by the extended family, and the internet has proved to be an excellent modern matchmaker. The Indian matchmaking website shaadi.com claims to be the largest matrimonial service in the world.
The criteria for a good match vary. If my parents could have provided a full and frank list of their demands, it might have read something like this:
AGE: groom must be a few years older, but not too much older than our daughter.
RELIGION: Hindu, or at least a believer in some sort of god. No atheists.
HEIGHT: must be taller than our daughter (i.e. more than 5 foot, 8 inches).
EDUCATION: must be educated to around the same level as our daughter or slightly more, but definitely not less.
WEALTH: income or family assets must be sufficient to support a wife and family comfortably.
CAREER: must be in a respectable profession, e.g. doctor, lawyer or civil servant. Poet, drummer in a band or ballet dancer are unacceptable.
FAMILY STATUS: groom’s family must have a good reputation, with izzat intact. Professional and marital status of his siblings should also be sound.
ASTROLOGICAL ATTRIBUTES: groom’s characteristics and destiny must be compatible. [An astrological reading that indicated a man was destined for, say, an early death or poverty, would be considered unacceptable.]
ANCESTRAL LINEAGE: groom must not be a blood relative.
PERSONAL HABITS: a moderate social drinker and meat eater is acceptable. A smoker is unacceptable.
IN-LAWS: ideally groom’s parents should live in another country so that our daughter does not have to be subjected to the demands of a nasty mother-in-law, but will readily accept groom who lives with his parents if all other criteria are satisfied.
VALUES: liberal thinker would suit our Western-raised daughter, but groom should mai
ntain traditional Indian values – even if our own daughter has gone off the rails.
My parents often lamented that Indian boys brought up in Britain had lost their ‘Indianness’. They became too Western, chasing after pleasures of the flesh and wasting time drinking. They ran away from the responsibilities of manhood and failed in their duties as sons. In effect, they lost their Indian values. Boys brought up in India, on the other hand, were considered better value. They were uncorrupted. No additives. They always put the family first and respected their parents – or so my parents thought.
In Indian families, particularly those from northern India, there is a hierarchical structure, and people’s behaviour towards each other is shaped by the position they hold in this hierarchy. In my family two brothers are married to two sisters. (My dad is the eldest brother in his family and my mum is the eldest sister in her family, so my uncle and my aunt form the younger pairing.)
In the hierarchy, older men outrank younger men (so my dad outranks my uncle). Men, in general, outrank younger women and those of a similar age (my uncle outranks my aunt, but he does not outrank my mum). Younger siblings must show deference to older siblings. They are often encouraged to address them by respectful terms for brother and sister, rather than their names. (My mum would frequently remind my younger sister and brother to refer to me as didi, an affectionate term for sister. Although both of them ignored this instruction, neither would dispute the fact that I am more senior than them in ranking.) A new bride holds the lowest position in the family hierarchy and answers directly to her mother-in-law.