by Sushi Das
Guidelines for government departments on how to handle cases of forced marriages do not exist in all Western countries, including Australia, where the Indian community has been growing rapidly since around the turn of this century. In particular, there has been significant migration from Punjab.
Australia takes migrants from all over the world and while its recent policies of multiculturalism have served it well, cases of forced marriages come to light from time to time. In 2011, reports of a fourteen-year-old girl, betrothed by her parents to a seventeen-year-old boy whom she had never met and who lived in another country, horrified many people. The story surfaced after the Family Court confiscated her passport in a bid to stop her from being taken overseas to be married by her parents. She was reported to have told child protection workers that she had not been forced into the engagement and would not have to marry him if she changed her mind after they met. In the face of questioning by child protection workers, strangers to her family, a fourteen-year-old is liable to say what she thinks is the right thing to say to protect her family. Regardless of whether she was being forced into a marriage or not, she was clearly unaware that marriage at fourteen is illegal in Australia. The case is a reminder that children and adolescents, who often believe what they are told, are particularly vulnerable to mental manipulation and social coercion.
With increasing migration from South Asia, forced marriage has become an emerging problem in Australia. At the moment there is no law to ban the practice, although early in 2012 a bill proposing a ban was put to parliament. What’s needed is education to reinforce the message that forced marriages are unacceptable. But the education must be backed up by legislation to make them a criminal act, as is now the case in Britain. Of course, no daughter would want her parents to go to jail, but a law banning the practice empowers a woman because at least she then knows that the state is there for her, even if no one else is.
There was no such law or even social support for girls who needed it when I was a teenager. Just before my twentieth birthday I felt more keenly than ever that Mum and Dad were intensifying their efforts to get me to accept their plans. I still had no plan of my own to escape.
‘Sometimes you have to marry when you are told,’ said Mum, speaking in Punjabi to lend her words authority.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, if one parent becomes ill, he or she may want to see their child married off before dying.’ This scenario had echoes of the Bollywood movie she’d been watching the night before: the ageing mother on her deathbed implores her son to marry before she leaves the mortal coil. He, hand in hand with the woman he loves (and whom his mother approves of), vows to fulfill her dying wish. Cut to scene of wedding where the old mother is frail but smiling, followed shortly by a scene of the now married couple weeping as they stand before a funeral pyre.
‘Mum, you watch too many Bollywood movies.’
That evening I had another argument with my parents. Dad complained that Mum frequently suffered from migraines and that I did not talk to her often enough or try to establish a ‘harmonious relationship’ with her. Mum, for her part, referred to my sister and brother by their names, but had now taken to calling me ‘the other one’ – a situation that I thought was hardly conducive to a harmonious relationship.
‘If something tragic happens in this house,’ Dad warned, ‘you will be to blame.’ I figured he was watching too many Bollywood movies too.
By now I was beginning to get responses from universities asking me to come for interviews, but these letters sparked more rows. Mum and Dad simply didn’t want me to move out to study, as this would delay their plans by at least three years. Most interview requests I received were from universities in the north of England and I needed Dad to drive me there. Sometimes he agreed, albeit reluctantly, and other times he simply refused. I was in his hands.
One day a letter arrived with a postmark from Hertfordshire – far enough from home to require moving out, but close enough to allow for regular visits home during term-time. I wanted to attend the interview, but Mum and Dad refused to drive me there. Angry and frustrated, I marched off to Twickenham train station and bought a ticket to Hertford. As the train pulled out, I felt galloping anxiety. I was nineteen years old and the furthest I had ever travelled on my own was to the neighbouring town of Richmond. Catching the train to Hertford, about 70 kilometres away, was at once liberating and frightening.
That week I received a call from the college in Hertford, which later came to be called Hertfordshire University, offering me a place on a three-year degree course. I told my parents I intended to accept the offer and that I planned to study social sciences and to major in political economy, which I assumed would prepare me for a career in journalism.
‘You will not go. I will never let you go,’ screamed Mum.
‘I advise you to forget about further education,’ said Dad. He begged me to at least consider delaying starting the course for a year and to get a job in the meantime. His request surprised me, but when I quizzed him further, he finally revealed his plan for my future.
Dinesh was going to apply to migrate to Britain with the intention of marrying me and Dad felt the immigration authorities would look more favourably on his application if I was employed. As an earning wife I could at least offer him temporary financial support while he looked for a job. So that’s why Dad was trying to stop me from going to university, I thought. Obviously, his plan was predicated on the assumption that I would agree to marry Dinesh.
Tuesday 18 September, 1984: ‘Why should I shape my life and future around a man I don’t even know, let alone wish to marry? Furthermore, what if the idea of marriage with him falls through? . . . I do not think my parents are being fair. They’re playing games with my future because they’re so concerned with that wretched marriage to a stranger.’
The next evening, my aunt and uncle arrived to help my parents try to dissuade me from leaving home to study. I felt outnumbered and I knew that any unconventional action by me would affect my sister and brother’s chances of having an arranged marriage, if indeed that was what they wanted when the time came for them. Raja wasn’t even a teenager yet and remained largely disconnected from what was happening between me and my parents. I doubt he would have even been aware that he too would be expected to have an arranged marriage someday. Vin, on the other hand, looked on with a silence I often found exasperating. There were times when she would reprimand me for upsetting Mum and Dad. Increasingly she failed to back me up in arguments with them.
‘Why don’t you ever support me?’ I once asked her.
‘What do you want me to say? There’s nothing I can say. You’re always upsetting them. You behave selfishly sometimes. You make things worse for yourself,’ she replied. I felt her slipping away. My friends were always there with a sympathetic ear, but Vin, who saw how upset Mum and Dad would become after a row with me, was not always willing to take my side. In my absence my parents would pour out their troubles to her and she was there to listen to them, absorbing their frustrations, taking on their woes, perhaps building a resentment towards me. I think it made her move away from me. Or perhaps it was I who was slipping away from her.
The evening that my uncle and aunt arrived, I don’t recall Vin being in the room. Everyone lectured me on how I should put family priorities ahead of my own, how marriage was important for a woman, and why I should trust my parents to make the right choice for me. I cried and begged that they allow me to leave home to study, but they were adamant. By the end of the evening they had broken me down. I surrendered, exhausted by their marathon lecturing. ‘Okay, okay,’ I yelled through tears. ‘I won’t go.’
After a restless night I woke to find a world turned grey. Crushed, I came down to breakfast to find Dad was already at the dining table reading the newspaper. I sat down.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please,’ I began, and words came tumbling out of my mouth as if it was not me speaking,
but someone else inside me. ‘You could tell people you didn’t want me to leave home to study but you allowed it because you thought it was best for me. You could tell them that you wanted your daughter to have a good education; that in Britain, things have to be done differently. People won’t think any less of you. They’ll think you did a noble thing.’
Dad was silent. I kept my head lowered. I didn’t look into his eyes, but the words kept coming out. ‘If you love a child, you will do whatever makes that child happy. Doing a degree will make me happy.’
‘And if you love your parents, you will do whatever makes them happy,’ he said. I raised my eyes to look at him. His collar was unbuttoned and there was red-rimmed exhaustion in his eyes.
It was just me and him now. We had reached an impasse and we couldn’t stay like this. I knew this was only a dress rehearsal. One day there would be another even bigger clash. That day was coming and we both knew it.
‘Your mother and I are your parents,’ he said quietly. ‘Of course we want you to be happy. That’s all we want.’ He closed his newspaper as if he was closing an entire chapter on our lives. ‘Go then,’ he said. ‘Go and do your degree, and we will always support you.’
I wanted to throw my arms around him and tell him that I loved him, but he would have recoiled at the physical contact.
‘Thank you, Dad,’ I said, standing up.
It was time to leave, time to pack my bags and walk out of the door – if only for three years.
‘Your turn to put the fookin’ kettle on,’ said Bob, reaching for the cigarette papers on the coffee table and grinning at me. The other students had all objected to making the tea, arguing that they had already made it twice in the past month or that they had only just sat down after a marathon walk to the corner shop to get the fags. Everybody always had an excuse. I had moved to Hertford to start my degree course and clearly fallen in with what Dad would have called ‘bad characters’.
For nearly three weeks at the beginning of the first term, Bob had convinced everyone he was allergic to washing-up liquid in order to avoid doing the dishes. ‘Well, go on then,’ he said with a note of irritation. ‘Are you going to make the fookin’ tea or what?’ Bob Taylor was from Birmingham. His inability to speak a single sentence without swearing belied his boyish face and rosy cheeks. I’d been ordered to make the tea all my life, so it seemed natural to do as I was told.
The kitchen was a nasty state of affairs. There were three dirty pans soaking in cold water in the sink and a teetering tower of unwashed plates and mugs on the drainer. A ring of congealed bacon fat marked the level to which the sink had been filled before water started seeping down the plughole. There was a grubby tea towel on the back of a chair and empty beer bottles and stinking ashtrays on the table. Somebody had scribbled a Hitler moustache on a picture of Margaret Thatcher that was hanging on the wall. A paring knife had been stabbed into her forehead. I was glad I didn’t live at Springfield Lodge. Shared student accommodation was the pits. I’d found a room to rent on the other side of town. It was miles away from the campus and I didn’t like it because I lived alone, but at least it wasn’t filthy. I’d find somewhere closer soon.
I looked around for tea-making equipment. At home Mum and Dad always made tea in a pan. Once the water came to a boil they’d throw in some loose-leaf tea and sometimes some cardamom pods, cloves and cinnamon bark too. Then they’d pour in milk and bring the whole thing back to the boil again, before simmering it for at least ten minutes. Voila! Tea – Indian style.
In student shared houses things were different. With all the pans in the sink, I sought an alternative. Luckily, there was an electric kettle on the bench. Mum and Dad didn’t have an electric kettle, probably for the same mysterious reason they didn’t have an ironing board. I was traversing new territory. When the kettle came to a boil, I opened the lid, threw in some teabags, poured in the milk and pressed the button to make the whole thing come to the boil again. I took it into the living room and filled everyone’s mug straight from the kettle, cord trailing behind.
‘What the fookin’ hell is that?’ said Bob, throwing down the copy of a student newspaper he had been browsing and sitting upright in his armchair.
‘Er, it’s tea,’ I said, without looking at him.
‘Well, fook me dead. You call that fookin’ tea? She’s pourin’ it straight out the fookin’ kettle,’ he said, to no one in particular. ‘Are the fookin’ biscuits in there as well?’ Phil, Lou and Dave, who had been engaged in a conversation about whether punk started with the New York Dolls in New York or the Sex Pistols in London, stopped their bickering and looked over. ‘Just ignore him,’ said Lou kindly. ‘Anyway, what the fuck are you doing?’
These were my salad days – so horribly green in judgment. Bob passed me the joint he’d been rolling while I was in the kitchen. ‘Here, get your laffin’ gear round that. I think you fookin’ need it.’
For the three years of my degree course I was effectively out on parole. Dad had stood aside at last to grant me the tertiary education he had venerated in theory but had tried to block me from in practice. Had he come round because he knew his position was untenable? Because he wanted me to be happy? Because of my dogged pursuit of something he secretly wanted me to have but couldn’t bring himself to admit? Mum had no choice but to fall into line with his acquiescence, for he always had the final word. Both Vin and I were relieved that the arguing in our house had finally come to an end with my departure. And on campus no one was ordering me around, asking me questions about where I’d been or what I’d been doing. I was free to do whatever I wanted. I looked upon the world with fresh eyes and ridiculous optimism. The sun was shining and young people were everywhere. There were Geordie accents and cockney accents, southerners and northerners, boys and girls, all united in their private efforts to work out who they were as they elbowed their way to the bar.
Like so many other students, I was irresponsibly making adult choices. I opened a bank account and ran up an overdraft. I bought books and never read them. I found a decent place to live but rarely paid my rent on time. I knew how to cook but never fed myself properly. It’s not easy managing newfound freedom. Even if somebody had shown me how to manage it I would still have carried on drinking, flirting, puking, wasting time and making excuses for late assignments. I fell in love with every tall, skinny guy in tight black jeans that walked past (though I was always too timid to do anything about it). If I could only have seen past the smoke, I might have worked out what I was supposed to be studying. But someone was always ‘skinnin’ up’ and someone always had enough money for at least a Henry (Henry the Eighth – as in an eighth of an ounce of hash).
Off campus, in the real world, bad things were afoot and the fallout reverberated through the student community. Unemployment was over three million, football hooliganism hit the headlines repeatedly, AIDS was spreading and race riots broke out sporadically up and down the country. Handsworth, Brixton, Toxteth, Broadwater Farm in Tottenham – place names indissolubly linked to economic deprivation and racial discrimination. Enoch Powell raised his head above the parapet to tell the country that the 1985 Handsworth riots were a vindication of the warning bell he had sounded in 1968. But, as had been the case for many years, nobody was listening to him anymore.
Unlike my school days, I felt no hostility from fellow students. In fact, these students were not unlike the students I had befriended at Richmond upon Thames College. Nobody called me a nignog or told me to go back to wog land. In the age of multiculturalism, everything ‘ethnic’ was to be celebrated.
‘Oh, I love Indian culture!’ enthused one of the girls in my class. Her parents were both English. She had never been to India but was planning to go backpacking there after finishing her course. India was a rite of passage for many students. ‘I just love the saris, the colours are so rich. Do you know how to tie one?’ I nodded yes. ‘Oh, you must show me – I’d love to wear one. You’re so lucky having a culture. I don’t have a
culture because I’m English.’
‘Of course you have a culture,’ I said. ‘What about Christmas, or white weddings, fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, Morris dancing, for god’s sake – that’s all English culture, isn’t it?’ She blinked quizzically for a few uncomfortable seconds.
‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s not the same, is it? English culture is boring. Indian culture is so exotic!’
If people weren’t banging on about colourful saris and the rich tapestry of my ethnic exoticism, they were asking me for the recipes for lamb rogan josh or chicken tikka masala. I could certainly help them with lamb rogan josh, but maybe they would have been better placed than me to know how to cook chicken tikka masala since the dish was allegedly invented in Britain. (Lizzie Collingham, in her book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, says food critics dismiss this dish as inauthentic since it was the creation of an enterprising Indian chef who whipped up a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, some cream and a few spices to make a gravy for the chicken that an ignorant customer had complained was too dry, thus producing ‘a mongrel dish of which, to their shame, Britons now eat at least eighteen tonnes a week.’)
There was a lot of love for all things Indian. While mostly bewildering and sometimes amusing, I was often infuriated by the blindness this love caused. This fawning, this cringe-inducing toadying, played a part in stopping British people from seeing what was happening right under their noses: Indian girls were struggling to have a say in their own lives.
The groups of friends I hung around with were pro-multiculturalism, but not soppy. They were angry, they were always angry. Mostly they were angry with racism, angry with Thatcher, angry with the police, angry about high unemployment. They hated all forms of social conformity and deference to the crown. They were deeply concerned that a generation of graduates would walk out of universities and polytechnics and simply join the end of the dole queue, and they weren’t going to put up with it. They marched in the streets, held up placards and shouted. They wanted to change the world. They handed out leaflets, did volunteer work and picked coffee beans in Nicaragua. And I watched as if through cellophane. I was more of an observer than a participant. Always there in the crowd, watching my friends protesting, rather than actually protesting myself. I admired their anger and their refusal to accept defeat. They were Brits who could not, and would not, be suppressed.