by Meera Syal
Tania’s ruby-red sari shimmered like some rippling beacon under the lights. Her hand ached from the hundreds of palms she’d pressed, her jaw from the millions of thank you for comings, her cheeks tingled from a billion fleeting you’re so clever kisses. Martin was playing minder, co-ordinating arrivals into her orbit, refilling her glass, bursting with pride and envy, a heady cocktail which made him imbibe too many margaritas and allow his eyes to linger a little too long on Tania’s perfect, bitable bosom. He always fancied her when she was unreachable and in ethnic dress; enjoyed knowing that when the world had done with praising her, he would take her home. And then he wondered if she ever felt like that about him.
‘Mart,’ she whispered, handing him an empty glass, ‘make sure that bald guy with the blonde woman are put in reserved seating . . . Channel 4 people, and she always tries to leave early, so put her in the middle of the row.’
‘In between two very fat people with big hats?’ Martin suggested, but Tania was already air kissing a circle of new people. Martin finished the rest of his drink and went, via the bar, to find Tania’s guests.
Deepak watched Martin disappear in the throng and tapped his foot restlessly. He wanted to go over and say hello to Tania, just to be polite of course. But he wanted to do it alone, not in line with the rest of her fan club. Everything about her seemed fluid tonight. She was all water, the way her head turned fanning her hair behind her, the slow undulations of her limbs, the uncertain smile that flowed in and out of the creases of her face. Only Deepak could spot that she was nervous as hell. He raised a hand, an anchor in the waves, a port in the storm. She saw it and waved back, teeth flashing, lighthouse beams, siren eyes. The past trickled away slowly through the gaps between their good intentions. It would not hurt, surely, to say good luck. He moved forward, only to feel a small hand tugging at his jacket.
‘Jaan? Have you seen Sunny?’ Chila’s moon face was clouded with concern. ‘She sort of ran off. I think she’s a bit upset . . .’
‘Ladies loos are the best bet,’ said Deepak patiently, ‘and I think that will have to be your job.’
‘I’ve checked there, and I don’t feel safe looking outside.’
Every other time, Chila’s soft appeal and liquid eyes melted Deepak’s reserve. Tonight, it made him want to shake her. Why couldn’t she be like those other women here, who would march out into the darkness rolling up their sleeves, armed with a pair of nutcrackers? Tania had flipped her tail and swum away; he could see the back of her head in glimpses, obscured by the bobbing bodies of others. Deepak fastened his jacket and made his way towards the exit, not waiting for Chila’s thank you jaan.
Sunita sat shivering on the upstairs terrace of the bar, which looked out over alleys and industrial yards. A jaundiced moon heaved on an inky raft of clouds. The stars looked tired, blinking against the passing aeroplanes and the illuminated pyramid of the Canary Wharf tower. Sunita’s arms ached. She slowly rolled up her kameez sleeve, and examined the tiny criss-cross of recent cuts which segmented her upper arm. Although they stung now, she had not felt a thing when she’d moved the razor from leg to arm, deciding the hair on her calf should stay, and the skin on her biceps should bleed. Snip snap; so easy, so fascinating to see how frail her armour was. It wasn’t planned. It happened in the frantic period between breakfast and leaving the house, when she had her precious private ten minutes in the bathroom. Nikki was wailing to be let in, she could hear Sunil splattering his cereal around in the kitchen. And more than anything, she wanted to feel . . . something. There, she said afterwards, I am alive, told you. She covered up the evidence of her still-beating heart with Mr Bump novelty plasters, opened the door and gave her beloved daughter a welcome hug.
Akash hadn’t noticed. She made sure she wore long-sleeved pyjamas to bed, and although he kissed her tenderly every night, it was to say good night, I’m going to sleep now, a matey, nice to see you, come again kiss, a kiss that bound her to him and at the same time promised nothing. Ironically, one of the books lying next to the bed on his side was called The Politics of Snogging, a perky user-friendly tome with lots of cartoons. Sunita had read it in the bath in one sitting, while Sunil slept and Nikki splashed happily about at her feet. It was all common sense really, she thought, turning the pages, how a kiss isn’t just a kiss after all. The chapter headings listed the Platonic Smooch, the Dramatic Mwaah!, the Maternal Pucker, the Passionate Pout, the Kiss-Off. Sunita closed her eyes and tried to categorize Akash’s nocturnal nibble and opened them when she felt Nikki rubbing her soapy flannel gently over her inflamed arm.
‘Hurt, Mama? I make it better,’ Nikki said. Little girls starting so early, taking the pain for someone else.
‘It doesn’t hurt, baby,’ Sunita told her, doing the same back.
That night she pulled out some hair from her fringe and carefully stuck them with spit over the covers of Akash’s bedside books, the ones he often claimed he had to read before tomorrow and maybe Sunita should just go ahead and sleep. The next morning, she checked them, every hair unbroken, every book unread. So Sunita had started reading some of these books herself, never in front of him, sometimes at work in her lunch break, often on the tube, seldom when the kids were awake, always when he was upstairs in the study tapping away and she could sit in the kitchen, eating leftovers. It made her feel better to know there were people worse off than herself. Maybe one day, she could even help Akash in his work. What she really wanted was to find on some page, in some paragraph, a description of someone who felt exactly as she did. Then she would know she was not alone.
‘Sunita? You OK?’ Deepak hovered at the balcony door, unsure of whether to move forward. ‘Chila’s been looking all over for you.’
Sunita nodded and absent-mindedly picked at a scab under her sleeve.
Deepak edged towards her. He hoped fervently there wasn’t going to be a scene. Surely this was her husband’s job. ‘Um, they’re about to show the film. Everyone’s being seated. Chila’s saved you and Akash a place next to us.’
Sunita got up wearily. She turned to Deepak, her face now visible under the on–off flash of the fairy lights.
Deepak smiled at her reassuringly, thinking it was almost impossible to believe that his Chila and Sunita were the same age. He thought of his mother’s friends, who seemed ancient to him when he was a boy, but whom he now realized were in their mid-thirties at that time. These same women had married with eighteen-inch waists and downcast eyes, and somewhere in between had ballooned to loud muscular matriarchs who seemed to enjoy clipping him round the ear and sending him into the kitchen for hundreds of pointless glasses of water. Why was it, once some women had married, they felt it was OK to let themselves go? This attitude, now we’ve got him, we don’t have to bother. He imagined Chila three stone heavier in a food-stained cotton suit and was dismayed to find it was easy.
‘Deepak, why do you love Chila?’
Deepak blinked rapidly for a moment. Sunita was next to him, almost touching. God, he hoped she wasn’t going to cry. Women cried around him a lot, although he hadn’t worked out why yet.
‘Why?’ he began. ‘She’s . . . very lovable.’
‘And?’
Deepak shifted from one foot to the other. He would be really pissed off if he missed the beginning of the film. ‘OK, because she’s sweet and kind and beautiful and . . . she loves me.’
‘A-ha!’ shouted Sunita, making Deepak flinch. ‘Yes, because she loves you! You see?’
‘Not really,’ said Deepak miserably, now avoiding eye contact altogether.
‘The question is,’ Sunita said, almost whispering in his ear, ‘do you need her because you love her? Or do you love her because she needs you?’
Deepak looked at her then. A strange clammy sweat settled on the back of his neck. More questions. An evening of interrogation and now it was making him uneasy. Somewhere through a fog a small light flickered, just for a second, revealing rooms he had not known were there. Somewhere down a hallway, in
one of those rooms, on a bed, someone laughed at him and rearranged silken red folds. He had been here before, it was just that he had forgotten when exactly. If he took one step inside, all would be lost. He would have to dismantle everything and start again.
‘The first one,’ he said, taking Sunita’s arm, his fingers not registering the bumpy scars which pulsed beneath them, a millimetre of silk away.
Tania sat at the back, way back, hugging a corner of the bar. She had wanted Martin to sit with her other friends, but he had refused so noisily she gave in, to his surprise. So he sat next to her, having made buddies with the barman and received a free jug of margaritas for his pains, his last sober thought spent in contemplation as he scanned Tania’s unnaturally calm face.
Tania, for maybe the first time in her life, knew now what it meant to go with the flow. She watched all the people she loved, worked with, competed with, take their seats, chattering excitedly. She remained aloof, watching it all from her icy mountain top, resigned to whatever would happen next. So this is what it meant, this whole Zen thing, the quality she had always admired so much in Chila, to accept without rage. The only difference was that while Chila met the future with innocence, Tania had already prepared a likely script. There were a few possible endings. She decided to welcome any and all of them with equanimity. She sipped on her mineral water. She was ready.
The lights went down and a ragged cheer went up. A long sitar note vibrated through the darkness, the voice of a priest chanting the holy marriage vows over it, a translation on the black screen in white italic script. ‘She promises that from henceforth, all other men will be but brothers to her. He promises that all other women will be but sisters to him . . . they will give each other’s parents love and respect in equal measure . . . she will support him through his troubles, he will put food on their table for their children . . . from this moment, they will be known as one . . .’
The music snapped into a pumping garage beat with searing female vocals over it; a kaleidoscope of images and faces passing too quickly for anyone to cheer their appearance, fragmented photographs of erotic temple carvings, footage of anti-dowry marches, newsreel of the bandit queen Phoolan Devi addressing her gang of dacoits. Sunita caught a glimpse of her and Akash side by side. Chila saw her grin fly past, and clutched Deepak’s arm, enchanted. It was as magical as she had hoped and, somewhere in there, she was immortal.
Then suddenly they were in Akash’s consulting room. Mr Dhillon was describing how he and his wife met, his voice counterpointed by shots of Akash’s books, the ticking clock, the fruit bowl, a hole in Akash’s shoe. People began tittering, then whispering as the camera focused in on Mrs Dhillon’s face, caught in an expression of undisguised disgust. Akash shifted uncomfortably and sneaked a glance round to see if the Dhillons were in the audience. Their conversation was taken from an early session, when things had been going well. The close ups came from somewhere else. It told a story, but not how he remembered it.
The scene switched to a marriage bureau office, shots of hundreds of Polaroids of happy couples on the wall. A pair on their first date, chatting nervously at a restaurant table, then pulling back to reveal a sullen grandma sitting at the next table, sucking on a cocktail. The buzz was creeping around the room. It was clever, witty stuff, slick, snappy cuts, subtle visual counterpoints, the camera an ironic eye, the quiet one in the corner no-one takes much notice of until it’s too late.
Sunita was getting slightly queasy at the speed of it all, the thump of the music and the constantly changing angles.
‘It’s like one of those pop videos that my son watches,’ Leila stage-whispered to Chila. ‘When are they getting to your stuff, sweetie?’
On cue, Chila appeared in glorious Technicolor on the three screens around the room. Leila led a burst of spontaneous applause. Chila sighed; if she had known the camera was going to be so close, she might have toned down the blusher and the gold eyeshadow. Still, her sparkly suit looked lovely. It was her face all right, but there was something about it, her expression, that she didn’t recognize as part of herself. Before she had time to register this, she saw that she was walking around her kitchen, pointing at various recent purchases. ‘This is a multi-chef. It’s got this really amazing bit that grinds, so you can have fresh home-made masala instead of the shop stuff . . . and my Deeps really loves his desi food.’ Chila sat on her hands, shocked at the sound that came out of her mouth. Was her accent that strong? Did she really do that silly Minnie Mouse giggle at the end of every sentence? ‘This washing machine is computer chip controlled and it’s got this bit that . . . well, you put shirts in and they come out almost ironed! With the number of shirts Deeps goes through, ’cos you know he’s quite high up in finance . . . No, I don’t know what he does exactly . . . funny that.’
The camera swung round and focused on Deepak, sitting reading the paper and throwing pistachios into his mouth. One of them missed. He looked at where it lay, left it, and turned a page. The giggles around the room were quite audible now. Chila looked up at Deepak, who was watching impassively; a tiny muscle shivered just above his right eye.
Then some other people began talking in the film. An angry man began shouting and throwing chairs and Akash was hiding under a table. The audience were aghast, their gasps audible and impressed. But Chila barely registered any of this. She was trying to eavesdrop on Leila and Manju’s fierce whispers which had begun while Chila had been on screen. She heard the words ‘Hilarious’ and ‘That wallpaper’, and tried to refocus on the ongoing drama, her vision slightly blurring. She checked her watch. The film had only been running for twenty minutes. Maybe the best bits were to come.
Sunita recognized the mess before she heard her own voice coming at her in Dolby stereo. There were the tangle of discarded children’s clothes on the kitchen floor, the pile of newspapers awaiting recycling, the rows of empty wine bottles (how had they managed to get through so many?), the unwashed dishes in the sink. She heard herself say, ‘We were lucky to find one another when we were so young . . . and we were free to make our own choices, so there wasn’t any pressure as such . . . I think we have a good life together . . . It’s what we expected.’
Akash’s jaw had dropped into his lap, his fists tight balls on his knees. When Sunita glanced back at the screen, for a moment she wondered who that sad-eyed, frumpy housewife was sitting next to her husband, whose knee twitched throughout her chatter, whose fingers roamed aimlessly around each other, who prefaced every answer with a tremulous sigh. There was a faint roaring in her head, the whole of the sea in the shell of her ear. She knew who the woman was now. She made to get up and felt Akash’s gentle hand on her back, soothing her, pushing her back into her seat.
He kept hold of her hand and kept watching as he said to camera, ‘Of course, in my work you get to recognize the warning signs in a bad relationship very early on.’ Close up of Sunita twisting her wedding ring round and round. ‘The main problem is communication. Men tend to ignore the problems and hope they will go away.’ Shot of Sunita vacuuming around Akash’s pile of books. ‘Women are more eager to talk, but first they have to be listened to.’ Akash playing with his children while Sunita sits slumped at the dining table, staring into space. ‘And if they’re not, much of their anger and anguish goes inwards.’ Close up of Sunita, but grainy, sound quality muffled, only half her face and no overhead light, as if she was unaware that the camera was there.
Sunita heard a familiar whimpering. She wanted to close her eyes now but could not. ‘Whenever people ask us how many kids we have, I always want to say three . . . We should have had three. But we got rid of one . . . for the best.’ Akash’s hand slackened its grip on Sunita’s. She felt him slipping away from her, limp and cold as a dead fish. ‘I want to talk about it, but he’s so busy and . . . you know what it’s like—’ The scene ended abruptly, seemingly in mid-sentence, freeze frame on Sunita’s open mouth, slow fade to complete silence.
Everyone in the room seemed t
o be holding their breath. Sunita could feel people around her craning their necks to catch a glimpse of her face. And then, suddenly, the screen burst into life and colour: a wedding scene. The two awkward virgins who had shared a first date were now getting married, and the room relaxed, even managed a brief burst of grateful applause. This was the happy section. Blushing engaged couples, blissful married couples, couples emerging from counselling with a spring in their step, young men talking about their ideal woman being strong, independent and a true friend, young women laughing at a hen night, none of them even thinking about marriage before travelling the world and making their first million, old couples still in love after fifty years together, sharing their secrets: ‘Don’t take it all too seriously . . . Always make up before going to bed . . . Lots of sex is a good idea . . . Love your partner for who they are, not who you want them to be . . .’ The audience cooed and sighed and felt reassured. It wasn’t impossible, you could have it all. The bride’s family cried as their daughter left them for her new home, and suddenly, Sunita remembered.
She remembered where the end of her sentence had gone. She had been drinking wine with Tania. They had finished filming, or so Tania had told her. Tania was being very sweet and understanding and asked her loads of questions and Sunita had started crying and, yes, the camera was on the table, and at the end of it, she had said, ‘You know what it’s like, Tania, because you know me.’ You know what it’s like – cut.
Chila thought she was safe now. The credits began rolling and she felt she could risk exhaling. But then, oh shit, here she was again, filling the screen, holding her wedding photo album proudly up for inspection. ‘See, this is me and Deeps in a bush. It’s really artistic, isn’t it?’ No-one knew what Chila said after that. The room rocked with glee as Chila turned page after page, her mouth moving, her eyes alive and proud, as she showed everyone the images from what she had always thought, until now, was the happiest day of her life. At the end of the scene, just as the last credit flew by, Deepak entered the room from the lounge. He saw the wedding album and barked, ‘God no! Not those bloody photos. Put them away.’ ‘But Deeps,’ began Chila. Deepak grabbed the album and stomped off, slamming the door behind him, to a few hisses from the audience.
