by Sushi Das
Tony Wood, a vegan anarchist with dreadlocks, was a Londoner and sort of the leader of the pack. He was older than everyone else, wore a rubber coat and sold beer at the Glastonbury festival. When he talked about the inherent failings of capitalism and what was wrong with ‘the system’, it was as if he was coughing up all the grit and grime that had accumulated since the beginning of the industrial revolution. He hated the police more fearlessly than anyone else I knew, and I loved him for that! I recall him distributing a telephone number that people were to call for legal representation if the pigs arrested them at the demo they were preparing to attend. ‘Write it on your arm,’ he said. ‘That way you won’t lose it.’
In the big, grown-up democratic world of student demos, people had the right to speak out against the system. The very act of protesting was legitimate, not like at my mum and dad’s house, where protesting against any parental rule was entirely illegitimate; where questioning the Indian system was objectionable, and more so if you were female.
Being away from home allowed me to think about things other than arranged marriage, and boy did I need the mental relief. But temporary relief was all it was, not a solution.
Mum and Dad would have been happy for me to marry an Indian boy if I’d met one while studying, but only if he met all the various criteria, and I knew very few Indian boys. Instead of focusing on my studies, I confess I wasted valuable, never-to-return time boring my friends with my conundrum or escaping the whole thing through whatever mind-bending opportunities came my way.
Some nights I barely slept for fear of the nightmares that visited me with terrifying regularity. One night I dreamt I was dying on the road outside my parents’ house. Vin rushed to help me. She was on the ground with my head in her arms, Dad was looking down at me and a crowd was gathering. ‘I think she’s going,’ said Vin, panicking. ‘We’re going to lose her, Dad. She’s dying.’ Two men dressed like tradesman approached. ‘Let me see,’ said one of them, kneeling on the ground. ‘I can help.’ He reached over and put his whole hand in my mouth. After a moment, he pulled it out again. ‘Nah, mate,’ he said, looking up at my dad. ‘Too late. She’s gone.’ Vin laid my head on the ground and stood up crying. Dad looked at her and said angrily, ‘Why did you let those men come near her? You shouldn’t have let them touch her.’ I woke up stunned. It was the first time I had dreamt I’d died.
In my first year in Hertford, I returned home to Twickenham every weekend because my parents expected me to. They had more control over me if I was right there in front of their eyes. But our weekends were too often filled with conflict. Why had I cut my hair? I looked far too Western. When was I going to wear sensible clothes? (I had painted my shoes banana-yellow using Dulux gloss.) Why did I have to wear such a large nose-stud? By the second year I went home less frequently, but even then Dad managed to exert his influence from afar. I’d come back to my digs at the end of a day of lectures to find my letterbox stuffed with reminders of overdue library books, rent bills and, from time to time, a buff-coloured envelope with a second-class postage stamp addressed to Miss. S. Das in Dad’s unmistakable cursive. I’d open it and there would often be no letter, just newspaper clippings: ‘Racism in Britain Today’; ‘Fears for Missing Student’; ‘Girl, 8, Graduates with Honours’.
The engine of the arranged marriage juggernaut was idling while I was away from home. Efforts to find a match never actually stopped. But now that I’d started my course, Dad, true to form, wanted me to do well. He was always afraid that I’d fail my degree, or – even worse – come back after three years with more than just a degree. ‘If you come home and tell me you want to marry an Englishman,’ he once said, ‘you will never see anyone as dangerous as me.’
Most of the time he suspected I was spending too much time with friends and insufficient time studying. I read newspapers a little more frequently, and Dad’s clippings were always interesting, but like most students I got much of my news from the TV or radio and I didn’t always pay as much attention as I should, because my new life held far too many distractions. Dad would use my trips back home at weekends to quiz me relentlessly on my knowledge of international current affairs.
‘What’s happening in South Africa?’
‘I don’t know. Apartheid?’
‘Every damn fool knows about apartheid. I mean, what happened there this week?’
‘I don’t know. Tell me, Dad. Tell me what happened there this week.’
So Dad would explain the latest development in detail: that the P. W. Botha regime had declared a nationwide state emergency and what its implications were likely to be, or that the British had imposed sanctions and how this might play out.
‘It is vital to read the newspaper,’ he said. ‘One day there might be a war and you won’t know where to go for shelter because you won’t have read the front page.’
‘If there’s a war, Dad, and there’s not going to be, but if there’s a war I’ll know about it because I will have heard it on the radio.’
Living away from home gave me the confidence to exercise impudence when I returned. Once I had merely posed questions about the prevailing orthodoxy, gingerly probing the parameters of the world, but now I used retorts and sarcasm to try to shape that same world. Things had turned upside down. It was Dad who had not wanted me to leave home to study or to consider journalism as a career, yet here he was, wanting me to get good grades and read newspapers. It was I who had wanted to do a degree and become a journalist, yet here I was, without a care for my studies or the slightest inclination to pick up a newspaper. After one fraught conversation I found Dad staring at me with fixed eyes. ‘You’re a lion at home and a lamb outside,’ he said, felling me with one blow.
In the summer of 1986, after two years of being away, I was at my parents’ house during the end-of-year break. I had a summer job working as a clerical assistant in a car showroom. It was mindless work. The filing was brain-jarringly dull and the salesmen were lecherous, but I earned £100 a week and that was a lot of money for a twenty-one-year-old student. One sunny evening I came home to find Mum and Dad hadn’t been to work. I smelt the familiar aroma of cumin seeds sizzling in oil as I entered the kitchen. Mum was standing over a pan wearing an apron she’d sewn herself, complete with frilly edge. Dad was folding plastic carrier bags for recycling. He never thoughtlessly scrunched them and shoved into a bag for later use. He always folded them neatly so they took up as little room as possible.
My parents both had a somewhat cheery disposition. Dad looked as if he was trying to suppress a smile and Mum was humming. I was instantly alarmed by their behaviour. Through the window I caught a glimpse of a stranger sitting in a chair on the lawn in the back garden – an Indian man enjoying the warm evening breeze. He looked vaguely familiar.
‘Who’s that in the garden?’ I asked.
‘That’s Dinesh, the doctor from India,’ said Dad. I looked around the kitchen quickly for clues about what was going on. Was Mum making one of her special feasts? Were more visitors coming? Nobody had told me Dinesh was in the country, let alone visiting us today. Upstairs I could hear Vin laughing with Raja and a radio playing. Why was her laughter always so bloody carefree? She would be confronting an arranged marriage too, one day. Didn’t the dead weight of that impending horror crush the laughter out of her? Why was her breathing so free and easy, while mine was short and shallow?
For the years that I had been away from home, Vin had lived without my influence, perhaps even my bad influence. She disliked the fact that I would return home each summer to disturb the tranquility of the house with my rowing, sneering and seething, and then leave for the start of the new term, like a hurricane blowing through a dingle-dell cottage.
‘I don’t want to be like you,’ she once said. ‘You’re the most irritating person in the world and you hurt Mum and Dad all the time. It’s always either your way or the highway. Why don’t you just stop causing trouble?’ We weren’t the same person anymore and we probably never woul
d be again.
I put down my bag and stepped into the garden. Dad followed. Dinesh looked up and we greeted each other. He had light brown skin and looked younger than he had in photos I’d been shown. His hair was very black, as if dye was concealing its natural light and dark tones. He didn’t smile much. Vin and Raja, I later discovered, had already met him. He had visited our house before, but I had been in Hertford at the time. So everyone in the family had met him, except me. Vin and Raja joined us in the garden and everyone chatted with ease, mainly about Dinesh’s career as a medical practitioner. Dinesh was a match put forward by Dad’s side of the family in India, most of whom were also doctors.
It’s odd how memories of significant moments can only be recalled as disjointed snippets which, when pieced together, form the whole picture, but not seamlessly. Yet irrelevant and insignificant memories, like the hugeness of a doorknob in your child hand, or the smell of dry elm leaves on the way to school, can remain alive at the fore of your mind for no apparent purpose at all.
I can’t remember exactly what I spoke to Dinesh about in the garden, but I know we talked about diabetes, and somewhere in the conversation I mentioned the islets of Langerhans, the part of the pancreas that produces insulin. There’s no accounting for the bizarre details one absorbs from Reader’s Digest articles. Dinesh looked at me, surprised.
‘You know about the islets of Langerhans?’ he said.
‘Yes, I do.’
I recall that particular snippet of conversation not because I have a special fondness for pancreatic juices, but because, momentarily, there was the possibility that I might have impressed him. It was a bud of a moment that, if allowed, might have flourished into something more mature. I let it pass by because I lacked the will to capture it.
Later that evening while Mum chatted to Dinesh in the living room, I took Dad aside in the kitchen and we spoke quietly.
‘No, Dad.’
‘Why not?’ he asked gently.
‘He’s okay. He’s nice, but I don’t want to marry him.’
‘But what’s wrong with him?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I just want to finish my degree. I have another year to go yet.’ It was a legitimate reason.
‘Love will grow,’ said Dad in a half whisper, as if he was finally revealing one of life’s hidden secrets.
‘Dad, I could live with a smelly sock for the rest of my life, and grow to love that too.’ He looked at me, bewildered. It was quite possibly the daftest analogy I had ever used. It simply fell out of my mouth. Words, especially unwise or hurtful words, once said, cannot be retrieved by the speaker. They exist as a form of regretful pain, if not in the ears of the listener, then always in the memory of the speaker.
Perhaps Dad took this imbecilic comment as a sign that he ought not to push the conversation further; perhaps he had expected me to say no. Perhaps he already had a contingency plan. At any rate, his earlier muted cheeriness evaporated and he said nothing more to me for the rest of the evening. I retreated to my bedroom. Mum and Dad stayed up late talking to Dinesh – much later than they would ordinarily have done with a visitor.
The next morning I was getting ready for work when I heard muffled conversation from the living room, directly below my bedroom. Mum and Dad were talking with Vin, but I couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. As I went downstairs I noticed the living room door was slightly ajar. I could hear Vin’s voice: ‘He’s okay, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know him.’
I hesitated on the stairs and then decided to join them to find out what was being discussed. But at the bottom step, I found myself walking towards the front door. ‘I’m off,’ I yelled. ‘See you tonight, about five-ish.’ I closed the front door behind me and took the long way to the car showroom: up to the end of the curvy road, past the bus stop and across the main road, near the big roundabout. Was Vin the fallback? Were they going to try to marry her to Dinesh? Would she feel compelled to step in to avoid our family being humiliated because of my rejection? Would they be able to talk her round?
Since I’d been away in Hertford, she had left school and was building a career in fashion while still living with Mum and Dad. She managed a number of women’s clothing shops in London and was proving to be a deft sales coordinator. ‘No, that dress does you no favours,’ she once told an overweight customer who came out of the fitting room, her rolls of fat stuffed into a tight white dress. ‘Here, try this orange one. The kaftan look is all the rage this summer. Ever thought how glamorous you might look in orange?’ I wondered if Vin had become bored selling clothes to women. And now that I had said no to Dinesh, had she seen an opportunity to move out of Mum and Dad’s house and build a new life for herself with him?
Given that Dinesh was a match suggested by my paternal relatives, there was a great deal at stake for my dad. With two daughters approaching a ripe age for marriage, he had declared he was in the market for suitors for them. His family in India had dutifully put forward an eminently suitable boy, who had gone to the trouble of making a reconnaissance trip to Britain. Dad had welcomed him warmly as if he was in own son. The fact that I had rejected him was embarrassing enough. To have two daughters saying no would be catastrophic. And for such gross humiliation to be visited upon a man with a reputation in the community as impeccable as my dad’s would be mortifying.
I spent the day at the car showroom agitated and distracted. Constantly looking at my watch, wishing I could fast-forward the day so I could rush home and talk to Vin. As the clock struck five I was already out of the showroom, running home the short way. I ran through the house calling for her, even though I knew she couldn’t be there because the locked porch door signalled I was the first one home. As I was trying to regain my composure I heard a key turn. I rushed into the hallway and threw open the door. Vin looked smart in her work clothes – fashionable and classy, with her hair tied in a high ponytail.
‘What happened this morning?’ I asked urgently. She walked past me and up the stairs, straight into the bedroom without saying a word. She closed the door and kicked off her heels.
‘They asked me what I thought of Dinesh,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘I said he was okay.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, sitting on the bed. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know either.’
We both sat in silence for a while. ‘Look,’ I began. ‘I have another year before I finish my course. There’s no way I’m going to have an arranged marriage before or after it’s finished. I’m going to marry who I want.’
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘You don’t know him,’ I lied.
I didn’t know him either, of course. I didn’t even have a boyfriend. But two years of freedom in Hertford had confirmed in my mind that I would never be able to go through with an arranged marriage. And my decision had implications for Vin. ‘One day I’m going to tell them,’ I said urgently. ‘I know I’m putting a noose around my own neck. I know I’m the eldest and I’m supposed to get married first, but as soon as I tell them I don’t want an arranged marriage, our family’s finished. Then no one will marry you. Do you understand? I don’t want to destroy your chances of getting married, Vin – not if you want an arranged marriage. Don’t wait for me. You have to make a decision. And if you really want to marry Dinesh you might be better off doing it before I drop my bombshell.’
She looked at me with a face devoid of emotion. She didn’t share her thoughts with me much these days. ‘Do you want an arranged marriage?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know. I suppose it could work. I’m not completely against them. The only thing is, I don’t know what he’s like.’
I honestly didn’t know whether she would say yes or no to Dinesh, but I felt it was only right that I told her of my intentions.
Days later, Mum and Dad sought an answer from Vin. Would she marry Dinesh? They asked her to decide as he was about to
return to India and they wanted to know whether to officially start talks with his family. They told her I was a lost cause and that only she could give the family a good name. Standing precariously between my impending bombshell and her desire to meet parental expectations, Vin agreed to marry Dinesh on the condition my parents allowed her a long engagement to get to know him better.
Mum and Dad were overjoyed and relieved in equal measure. Suddenly, there was a lightness in the air, as if someone had pulled back all the curtains in the house and let the sunshine in. My parents were floating with happiness and, from then on, things happened very quickly. By the end of the summer, Vin was formally engaged to Dinesh. He returned to India to await a date for the wedding and wind up his affairs before migrating to Britain, and I returned to Hertford for my last year of parole.
Many years later I asked Vin, ‘Did you feel pressured to marry that summer?’
‘Yes,’ she said flatly.
‘By Mum and Dad? By what they said?’
‘Partly,’ she said. ‘But what you said about your bombshell was a big contributing factor.’ It gutted me to know she felt pressured to marry because of me.
In my final year I barely went home at all – two, maybe three times. Mum and Dad were preoccupied with wedding plans that were becoming increasingly complicated. With our family being spread between Britain and India, it was decided that Vin and Dinesh should marry in both countries.
An additional concern was immigration technicalities. The days when a man in a Commonwealth country could simply apply for an employment voucher and get into Britain were gone. By the 1970s British authorities suspected immigration scams by spouses from India and Pakistan and embarked on a frightening and disgusting form of crackdown. Indian and Pakistani women hoping to emigrate to Britain to marry were subjected to intimate personal examinations by immigration staff to ‘check their marital status’. Virginity tests were banned in 1979 after a British newspaper revealed that an Indian woman had been subjected to a virginity test at Heathrow by a male doctor. In 2011 the Guardian published reports showing that the practice had been more widespread than first thought, particularly in British high commission offices in India and Pakistan.