The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  So how on earth then, if marriage is the ultimate goal and you’re not allowed a relationship, are you ever meant to meet someone? In my family, up until me, every single person (well, every single woman at least) had an arranged marriage. My uncles left home and married white women, an easy solution to their own identity issues, removing themselves from their ethnicity, free to do what they want. Oh, the privilege of having a penis! The way the system worked was, you stay at home until your parents find a suitable person for you to marry, you have a big wedding and, if you are the daughter, you then move in with your in-laws.

  My mother’s generation got on with it because they accepted the system and had zero other options. But the world was changing, rapidly, and within one further generation, children born in the UK wanted to have some choice in the small matter of who they were going to spend the rest of their lives with! This meant an easing up of the system. Now, ‘arranged marriages’ became ‘introduction marriages’. Your parents, along with the illuminaunty, would find suitable matches to introduce you to and you are, amazingly, given the opportunity to say no.

  The illuminaunty have been the reason for most Indian marriages for centuries.

  The illuminaunty is global.

  The illuminaunty knows everything about everybody. Knowing everybody’s business is their business.

  The illuminaunty establish where each family falls in the pecking order based on religion, wealth, education, culture, class and sadly, for years, caste. They then sit back and go through the rolodex of families in their busybody brains, brains with a capacity to store a vast amount of other people’s information, until they find another family who is a suitable match.

  Mr and Mrs Sangar, self-made business people, looking for a match for Harpal, their dentist son, who lives at home and drives a Porsche. The calls will go out, word spreads, all the rolodexes from Birmingham to Bradford, Toronto to New Jersey, Delhi to Jallandur, begin spinning. Now, the illuminaunty have upgraded to WhatsApp. Messages are shared around the world in seconds, biodata pinging into smartphones, along with a daily photo of a flower or a cherubesque toddler, with a platitude printed across it or a quote from Buddha or an ayurvedic treatment, until . . . We have a match! Mr and Mrs Sera. Also self-made business people. Their daughter is very pretty and fair and homely and is also some kind of scientist . . . but no one really knows the details of what she does, because she is very pretty.

  Picture this family set up: Granny, the matriarch, is the decision maker, the ball breaker, looms over a large extended family where everyone must do their duty. Spoilt sons, who don’t have to worry about a career or bettering themselves as it’s all handed to them on a plate and who think they can get away with anything because they usually can, will be protected by Mummy. The high-achieving daughter needs to make something of herself because she’s not a son. Arranged marriages are to young, beautiful and suitable women, women who will fit your family’s culture, who smile a lot, say very little and, this is a must, bear children. She must be the right sort of girl, because she will be a reflection of your family. If you’re LGBTQ+ the family, if they know, will keep it hidden from everyone. If you choose to marry someone not deemed to be suitable – let’s say, free-thinking, independent, Muslim, black – then you are Out.

  The family I am actually describing is the highest in this land. Gatekeepers of the Church of England. The one and only Windsors. ‘You know the Vindsors? The royal family? Totally Asian.’ When Meghan and Harry decided to bring up their child the way they wanted and to live their own life (let’s face it, that’s really all that happened), they were stepping out of the joint family network. The finger of blame was sadly and predictably pointed at the new bride, the woman who didn’t fit in, who (wait for this, it’s truly shocking) had her own mind. It feels to me, as discussions about Meghan and Harry rumble on, like I’m watching another clichéd Indian soap opera. Family sagas about ‘disruptive’ daughters-in-law have kept India glued to their small screens for decades. So, you see, Asian family traditions and culture aren’t so alien to this land.

  I opted out of this system, and this was a great source of consternation for my aunts. At 16, I was at a wedding. Don’t ask me whose wedding, I have no flipping idea. I went to so many growing up and very rarely knew whose I was attending. Indian weddings are more than a family affair – you invite everyone you know or everyone who has invited you to a wedding. Most of the time, at weddings of the eighties and nineties, no one knew who was coming or going. You’d easily have 1,000 people on the guest list. The reception would take place in some kind of school hall/sports centre/community hall, with rows and rows of tables, Coke bottles, packets of crisps and peanuts, bottles of Bacardi and Johnnie Walker Black Label and a buffet big enough to feed Britain. A gate-crasher’s paradise.

  This one particular wedding was a seminal moment in my life. It was the wedding where I swore never to attend another wedding. I was dressed in a simple cotton kurta top with adidas trainers. I was ahead of my time and definitely followed no rules when dressing in Indian clothes. If I had to wear something Indian, it had to be super simple paired with my adidas shell toes, a design classic. Mum hated that I was in trainers but she also knew she wasn’t going to get me in heels. She had lost the battle to try and make me girly by the time I was six. I was sitting next to my mum, tucking into my second packet of Walkers cheese and onion, when the illuminaunty clocked me. Had they spotted my shoe choice, they may have thought twice about approaching. It looked like they moved en masse as one single entity. A blob of shimmery sarees and enough gold to sink a ship, all whispering ‘kussur pussur, kussur pussur’, gliding towards us, like a horror movie monster. Five sets of beady kohl-covered eyes all peering at me. One set of eyes spoke to my mother while the other four continued to stare at me.

  ‘Kuri ki kurdiyeh?’ What does the girl do?

  ‘Kuri di ummar ki?’ How old is the girl?

  ‘Munday bhaterey hayge ah.’ There are plenty of boys.

  ‘Can she see that I am sitting right here, Mum? Tell her I’m only 16.’ I walked away fuming. Fuming was a semi-permanent state for me then, you may recall. ‘Don’t mind them,’ my mum would say to try and calm my outrage. ‘It’s just our culture. But . . . they did mention a boy who rides a motorbike and one family has a fleeeeeeeet of Rolls-Royces.’

  ‘The aunty network sounds great,’ my single white friends in their thirties would later say to me. ‘It’s so hard to meet people, why not have a system where someone has gone through a basic checklist before you go on a blind date?’ Maybe the illuminaunty need to branch out into other cultures.11 Maybe they could create a marriage bureau app and call it PREETINDER? Their tagline could be: ‘200 per cent success rate . . . Love comes later.’

  * * *

  ‘It’s all about adjustment and compromise’ is a sentence I’ve heard a lot in relation to how to make a marriage work, but interestingly, it always comes from women. The expectations placed on women are enormous, regardless of what culture you belong to. As someone who hates to disappoint people, I’ve really taken on the pressure to try and keep everyone happy. I have been moulded from birth to try and be the right sort of girl. A girl that is successful and listens to her parents and makes them proud and makes sodding chapattis and, crucially, marries the right sort of boy. Basically, to be it all, to have it all, to do it all.

  The illuminaunty marriage system does work for a lot of people. Not everyone finds it a chore. But for some of us, these expectations don’t accommodate or make space for what you want to do with the only life you have. To do what might make you happy and allow you to make a few mistakes along the way as well. There’s no safety net if you fuck up! The stakes are huge – if you mess up, then you get the booby prize and a big bucket of fetid shame is dropped on your head. So, you live in and move between different worlds if you want to have any kind of romantic life before marriage. It’s a life based on a need-to-know basis. How much do your family need to know? Your fr
iends? There’s the life you build for yourself, if you’re lucky enough to be able to, and the life you want your family to know about. That’s how you have to roll. Shifting in and out of worlds. Imagine skilfully navigating your life like that! South Asian kids of my generation are masters of disguise.

  If it’s happiness you desire, you ultimately have to do what you want. Plus, I’m SO OVER SHAME. Little Anita, do yourself a favour and try and see through the bullshit, keep going down the road of liberation as hard as it may feel, keep walking towards the light. We are the first generation who are having to learn to live between worlds and cultures. Some of us, painful as it may be, have to upset the apple cart to change the world and make it easier for others. We have to stick our necks out and speak out. We need to find our courage and power, to make it easier for others to turn around and say, ‘Nah, you’re alright. I’ll just do me, thanks. If I want a Rolls-Royce, I’ll buy my own.’

  10 There’s a lot of repetition in Punjabi for added drama. We also like to rhyme. Boys woys, girl shirls, friend frund, drink shink and, one of my all-time faves, party sharty. My mate once had a sharty party on New Year’s Eve and had to hide his pants behind the U bend of the pub toilet. It’s a top-secret story but I have to tell everyone I know and now you, because sharting is inherently funny, unless it’s you doing it.

  11 The illuminaunty should have been deployed to do track and trace.

  You Will Party, Whether You’re Allowed To or Not

  Asian kids are adept at living multiple lives and lying to our parents. This is a basic survival technique if we want any kind of social life whatsoever. Sometimes I think Asian parents would be happiest if their children just had no friends. My parents did their utmost to try and curb it.

  ‘Mum, Dad, can I go . . .’

  ‘NO.’

  ‘Can I . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can . . .’

  ‘No.’

  I’ve stood up so many mates because I’d say yes to every invite going, knowing full well the answer from my folks would be NO most of the time. And remember, I had ‘liberal’ parents. It’s easier sometimes to not bother having friends. Or at least keep yourself a little aloof.

  But teenagers will always find a way to party. To get around not being allowed out at night, the nineties spawned a phenomenon in the UK called the Daytimer, a club night during the day. While the rest of the country were raving after sundown, Asian kids, whose conservative parents would not allow this in a month of Sundays, especially not the girls, came up with a cunning daylight, midweek solution. Girls, heading to school or Bradford college, would jump on buses in their modest, parent-friendly outfits, then at the back of the bus a salwar would become a pair of jeans and bright red lipstick would be expertly applied. The best RnB, hip hop, garage, soul and bhangra tunes, Mary J. Blige, TLC, Soul II Soul, Tupac, LLCool J, Achanak, Bally Sagoo, all played while Bacardi and Diet Cokes were sipped and secret ciggies puffed away at. Girls and boys hooking up in their best garms, stand-offs between Sikh boys and Muslim boys, the odd fight. And dancing, non-stop dancing. They’d start at lunchtime, finishing at about 6pm. Then, enough Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit was chewed and The Body Shop’s White Musk applied to get rid of any lingering evidence, and you’d make it home in time for roti. Parents none the wiser.

  My world was that of Bradford Girls Grammar School and my friends were middle class and white, so day-timers were not on their radar. And why would they be? They were allowed out at night and no one, anywhere, was paying attention to or even cared how teenage brown kids were getting their kicks. There had been a British bhangra scene growing in the UK since the seventies and it is now global. But, strangely, it’s still hidden away as a sub-culture, a youth movement, that only us brown kids seem to know about, 40 years on!

  Even if I’d wanted to go to a day rave (and believe me, I did, especially as my brown mates from the temple seemed to be having the best time), once classes began, my school gates were closed and there was no escaping until the end of the day. So, I had to somehow convince my parents to let me out at night and give me a bit of freedom. Why send me to a school where you want me to assimilate but then ruin my social life by never letting me out with my friends? A social life which, by the way, had thrived up until I was 15. Sleepovers were a regular activity my entire school life – I went to every birthday party, weekends away, the odd authentic camping holiday – which was more than my Indian girl friends at the temple were allowed. It’s only when boys and Tumblers came into the picture that there was a slight bump we had to navigate. And not just my parents – every parent at the school.

  Being around alcohol wasn’t the problem, not really. We’d been going to the pub as a family forever. Often, we were the only brown family in our pub in the Yorkshire countryside. My dad loves the pub and he taught us to love it too. Much to my mother’s annoyance. Our favourite pub in Bradford was called Macrory’s, a small Irish place down a set of Yorkshire stone steps, cavern-like, and every Sunday they’d have a live band playing so we’d go along for a drink and a sway. Dad would have a Guinness, I’d have half a Murphy’s, Kul a coke and Mum a Baileys on ice. Or Dad would take Kul and me to Calico Jacks in Little Germany, where he taught us to play the fruit machines and how to shoot pool, while giving us great pearls of wisdom for life: ‘The game’s not over until the black is potted.’ And my favourite: ‘Only go to the pub if you can afford a round.’ Giveaways signs of Dad’s misspent youth!

  Tumblers was the only club in Bradford that would serve underage drinkers and for parents, girls and boys together with alcohol, unsupervised, is a problem. Tumblers was THE place, a club where we were free to hang out with friends at night away from our folks, where I could spend hours dancing away to all the music I loved. No longer couped up in my bedroom, here I could express myself fully. I’d let my bum-length hair down and mosh until my head felt like snapping off my neck. Whiplash was an unfortunate consequence of a night headbanging at Tumblers. Headbanging? What on earth was I thinking? It was only a brief dance phase, which my neck is now very happy about.

  Getting to this heavenly dive bar in the first place was always a mission. First, how do we get our parents to agree to letting us go? Depending on the leniency of your folks you’d have to come up with your own home exit strategy. For some it was just easy: ‘Ya sure, daaarling, just let us know what time you’d like Daddy or me to come pick you up in the Range.’ Others had slightly older boyfriends from the boys’ school that their parents were happy about. Actually excited that their daughters were in a relationship! They were on another planet. ‘Ya sure, daaarling, Freddie picking you up, OK ya, he’s borrowed his daddy’s Merc, OK good, ya sure stay over at his, then Daddy or me will pick you up in the Jag.’

  Those of us whose parents were a little more old-fashioned had to come up with the ‘I’m staying over at Robyn’s house and we are going to Tumblers, Robyn’s parents will pick us up’. Robyn was the most sensible and trustworthy friend I had, she would usually garner a positive response. If this failed, you’d just tell them what they’d want to hear. ‘I’m off for a sleepover at Robyn’s’, omitting the detail that you’ll be swinging by Tumblers. My naughty friend Katie would often jump out of her bedroom window and sneak out. She asked me to stay over at hers a few times but Katie was too wild for me, she wore make-up and had even had sex. Utterly terrifying.

  But getting out of the house on any night out had to be a well-timed masterplan. How do I put on my outfit for the night and leave the front door without smelling of curry? When Mum was home, 99 per cent of the time she was in the kitchen, cooking. Apparently, curry can only be cooked in vast quantities, which I can now attest for. The food was for us to eat as a family, or because we had guests coming round for dinner, or just in case anyone decided to turn up for dinner, or to feed the neighbours, for her colleagues at work, for people at Bradford Cathedral, or the milkman, or postman, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or anyone who Mum sparked up conversation with, or any
one who knocked on the door: ‘You can have some if you want’. I’m sure if I said, ‘Mum, everyone who’s reading my book wants to taste your dhal,’ she’d say, ‘No problem, darling,’ and start getting the pans out. Friday and Saturday evenings were big cook nights. The smell of Mum’s tarka for aloo gobi, matar paneer or chicken curry permeating the entire house, with Dad opening all the kitchen windows and door as he hated the smell.

  When I now make Indian food, the food I grew up with, I love the smell that fragrances my home, making it smell of home. Back in the mid-nineties, however, curry was killing my vibe. I did not want to be the Asian who actually smelled of curry in the pub so the last thing to do before leaving home was a change of clothes: Dad’s trousers, baggy shirt (probably also Dad’s), a dab of patchouli oil on my wrist and dash out out out the front door.

  All to get to this grimy club, where private school kids in Dr. Martens and oversized jumpers drank watered-down cider or cheap vodka with orange cordial (I’m gipping at the thought), and bounced around the dancefloor to the Sultans of Ping. Finally, music blasting out of loud speakers with space to dance that wasn’t the living room or a wedding reception. My musical world was expanding.

  * * *

  Music is my greatest joy, my first and longest love affair, my best friend, my confidante, my consigliere, my sanctuary. Music has defined and shaped so much of my life. I’ve met some of my greatest friends because of our shared passion for tunes. I’ve walked away from otherwise lovely people because our musical taste simply isn’t compatible. Harsh, I know! But totally reasonable.

  It’s through music I was able to feel and express all my emotions and change my mood. I didn’t even have to do anything, just press play and it would work its magic, allowing whatever feelings I had a problem expressing otherwise to simply pop up and exist. And I couldn’t get enough. Music is a master soother. My musical education started in the womb. Mum sings and has a beautiful voice, and she sang all the time. The songs of her childhood brought her comfort in Bradford. The best and sweetest singing was saved for Kul and me, and we got our own intimate private concert every night. We weren’t read to as kids, there weren’t many books in my house, but we were told stories and my mum sang. She sang Hindi lullabies and a song so moving I have never been able to listen to the original without bursting into tears. Music did, and still does, really help me release emotions I didn’t even know were there.