by Annie Murray
Meena forced the memory from her mind. Speedily fastening her hair into one braid again, she stepped out of her slippers, pulled back the bedclothes and climbed in. Khushwant, who by now would usually have been snoring, was wide awake and looking round at her. She met his troubled gaze.
‘You are thinking about that Sohal boy?’
‘Boy? You couldn’t call him a boy. He looked about thirty-five years of age!’
There came a wheezing sound and Khushwant’s body was shaking suddenly. A guffaw of laughter finally escaped from him, his fleshy face all creased up.
‘My God – they really are sending us the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. I’ve seen a dead dog with more life in it!’ He lay wobbling with laughter. ‘And much more handsome too!’
Meena watched him. What was so funny? she thought sniffily. As ever she was the serious one, the one who took everything heavily. The very sight of Kanvar had made her heart sink so low that she could hardly bear to look at him. Enraged as she was by her daughter’s situation, the thought of shackling Sukhdeep to that ignorant, stinking reptile of a man made her feel like vomiting.
‘That poor Mr Sohal – they’ve got properly saddled with him!’ Khushwant was still laughing. ‘They’ll spend the rest of their lives hunting for a bride. A woman with very bad eyesight will be required.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure; there are plenty of desperate girls,’ Meena said. ‘He is a clod – but the Sohals are nice people. They seem decent.’
‘Yes,’ Khushwant agreed. ‘Nice enough. Poor things.’ He looked round at her, serious suddenly. ‘You are going to stop now – this not talking to Sukhdeep? It is creating a very bad atmosphere in the house. It is not good for the others, either. And what will it achieve? It is over; we have to think of her future.’
Meena looked ahead of her towards the mirror, the long green curtains. She felt her mouth tighten, as if clinging to her silence. She knew Khushwant shied away from trouble – of any kind.
‘Wife, you have punished her enough. It is hardly her fault if her husband had perverted habits. This she could not be responsible for.’
Meena lowered her head. In a very small voice she said, ‘I am afraid. I don’t know what to do. Everything is changing.’
Khushwant was snoring now, the fulsome, intermittent snores of a fat man. Meena lay beside him, staring upwards. There was a crack of light round the door. Raj must have come in and was still up. Roopinder, thankfully, had kept out of the way all evening.
As Khushwant fell asleep, she had almost turned to him and spoken. I am not punishing her, she wanted to say. You’ve got it wrong. Something had fallen into place like a coin fitting into a slot. Yes, she was angry about Sukhdeep’s failed marriage. But, in truth, it was not Sukhdeep she was angry with: it had not been her fault. It was that filthy dog Jagdesh who was to blame.
Instead, the helpless, conflicted rage that seethed within her was aimed towards life itself: at the blows it dealt, at the way she had no control over anything, could do nothing about any of it, and never had been able to. Her silence had been the only way she could contain her feelings. She could find no words for what happened to her mother, to her ravaged country; for Uncle Gurbir; for those cold, desolate beginnings in Smethwick; for Tavleen and others . . . It was all locked inside, eating at her. The English were always talking about things – she heard this from Sukhdeep, and from her friends. Talking, talking. But who was she supposed to talk to? Who had there ever been who wanted to hear her voice? What is the voice of a child when a country is being torn apart? Or the voice of a child with a man’s thrusting weight on top of her?
She squeezed her eyes shut. She must not think, must not remember. Kanvar’s face swam into her mind, so gross, cruel and ignorant. The moment she had seen him she had known Sukhdeep would refuse him. It was an ugly prospect: that her beautiful, clever daughter could ever be shackled to that filthy village oaf. The thought filled her with anguish.
She had not met Khushwant before their wedding. They were living in Delhi by then, so the full ceremonies usually observed back in the village had been diluted. She did not have to sit out all day in the heat being walked round, examined and commented on by all the relatives, as if she were a stone statue. Of course they all voiced loud opinions anyway. But the main thing she remembered was the moment when she and Khushwant first sat side by side. She had glimpsed him through the red weave of her wedding sari. Beside her he seemed solid, as big as a bear, though he had not been fat then. He seemed both fearsome and reassuring. When she saw him face-to-face, she liked his eyes and thought they looked kind.
When the beatings began, his strength became terrifying to her, his attempts to act out what he had been told was rightful and male. But then he was gone, and when she came to England, he still had no idea about women and children, or how to be a husband. He had no sisters and he had taken a long time to learn.
He even sent someone else to meet them from Heathrow on that grey October day.
‘Is that my Pita-ji?’ Raj had asked, seeing the gangling young man whom Khushwant had sent with a car.
On the journey to the Midlands, Meena had sat huddled in her flimsy clothing, still reeling with amazement at the toilets in the airport and the strangeness of it all. She stared out at a sky the colour of an iron pot, wondering if England was always like this. Khushwant had not thought to warn her about the cold. In more than three years he had only written home once a year – to his mother. He had told them hardly anything. On departure she had said goodbye to his family and to her own. It was her uncle Nirmal who had shown most emotion when she left, and Bhoji his wife. Her own mother went through the motions with no sign of feeling. Jasleen was like a woman in a tomb. Meena felt certain she would never see her again, and she was right. Jasleen had died in 1978 and Meena had never returned home.
But on that car journey, though cold and afraid, she was also excited. She was joining her husband! She was in a new country as a married woman. To marry and to reach England were seen as huge fulfilments.
They moved through streets of smoke-blackened terraces. The house had a thin, dark hallway. As the door opened, she stared at Khushwant’s face and, to her relief, recognized it. If anything he looked thinner. Her one shock was his short hair, a fringe falling in a wave across his forehead.
‘Sat Sri Akal,’ he said solemnly. ‘Welcome, Wife.’
He paid the young man and Meena took her first step into the house. She remembered him leading her and Rajdev into the back room, where there was a battered sofa covered in a shaggy grey fabric. He told her to sit while he made a cup of tea. She always remembered that cup of tea. His making it for her had felt kind, had warmed her, and it had been strange drinking from the mug he handed her, which was pale brown, with ears of wheat painted on it in dark blue. Of what they had said to each other she had no memory at all. That night, on a creaking metal bedstead, he was almost romantic, falling on her like a man starved, sobbing with pleasure as he throbbed inside her.
Weeks went by in which she hardly felt she saw him at all. The foundry where he worked was not far away, in Spon Lane. But with overtime he was working a fifty-hour week. After work he spent the remainder of most evenings at the Waggon and Horses, quenching the thirst brought about by the hottest and filthiest job of them all: working with molten iron. There a group of them could gather and speak Punjabi together. It was their one indulgence. Most of the men whom she saw lived very frugally – saving, always saving to send money home, to return home themselves or to bring wives over, as Khushwant had done.
The other men in the house, also foundry workers, would be out too, and Meena was left alone. Even anyone who was friendly, like Mrs Platt next door, she could not communicate with as she had no English. She was afraid to go out into the grey streets and gritty air, hated being stared at and the rude comments, even if she could not understand them. As she did not understand English, she was spared the signs in the windows advertising rooms to let: NO CO
LOUREDS – NO IRISH – NO DOGS.
In the house the other men had their own rooms. She and Khushwant had the biggest, upstairs at the front. Inside, on the brown lino, stood their bed, one chest of drawers and one wooden chair. The walls were covered in ancient, flowery paper with strips torn off and there was a small fireplace with a gas fire. Apart from the tiny kitchen with its stove, sink and drainer there was nowhere else to go downstairs, as all the other rooms were slept in.
‘We have combined our funds to buy this house,’ Khushwant told her when she complained at being so crowded. ‘You are lucky. Before, we were sharing: fifteen, sixteen in a house. This way we can buy. One day we will have our own house. You should stop complaining.’
In his busy working life he could not understand the isolation of hers, or the sad disillusion of their son who was desperate for his attention.
That winter she attended to the household tasks of cooking and washing. She would hum to herself, her voice bouncing off the damp walls. There was a thin garden at the back where she hung out washing, which the smoke from the foundries soon turned grey. Sometimes it all froze solid on the line. The outside lavatory had been a challenge too. The cold seat made her want to scream, and she was worried about snakes out there at first, until Khushwant told her there were none.
She spent almost all the rest of the time in their bedroom, only going out when she was forced to buy food or take Raj for some fresh air. Often she got into bed to keep warm. It was very hard to occupy her little son, cooped up in the room. She watched him turn pale and silent. Khushwant had obtained a couple of toy cars for him and Raj resorted to playing endless games with them.
When she was so cold she could not bear it, Meena would take a match to the gas fire, seeing the pale honeycomb strips flare orange, and sit with a cup of tea, in all the woollens she had, and her coat too, huddled close to it. She tried to make her mind a blank, or to think only of what she must cook for dinner that night: dal, rice, some meat once a week . . . For what was the use of dreaming? Home was nothing to dream of, except for the warmth of the sun. And in England? She had no idea what sort of future she might dream of. Her duty was to follow her husband and do his bidding.
As the winter closed in, she would sit for hours, staring at nothing. Later, when they bought the television and rigged it up in one of the downstairs rooms, she sat on the edge of a bed and stared at that instead.
Now, looking back on all those years, she felt grief at the smallness of her dreams.
‘You should go to the gurdwara,’ Khushwant kept telling her. ‘That way you will meet others.’
She had walked past the Guru Nanak Gurdwara on the High Street a number of times, but in her depressed state did not have the courage to go in anywhere that she was not forced to by necessity. When Khushwant and the other men went, she stayed alone in the house.
Khushwant told her that the gurdwara had first been set up in a school further away in Brasshouse Lane.
‘They hired a room, a few of them – and they made arrangements for the Guru Granth Sahib to be transported here from India. Now they have funded the purchase of that church building on the High Street.’
Meena listened to him solemnly. She was awed by these bold arrangements. The idea of making such changes, of asking for the things that were needed – bringing the holy book on an aeroplane all the way from India! – seemed extraordinary to her. It was almost beyond her imagination.
Though not an especially religious man himself, Khushwant seemed to grow taller with pride speaking about it.
‘It is the first gurdwara outside London,’ he said.
When she agreed to go at last, feeling also that Raj should go, she realized that other men were beginning to bring their wives to England. Gradually her world expanded. She met Tavleen and Banita, who became her closest friends and in turn introduced her to others.
As the summer came, they started taking their children to the park together. And Meena realized she was expecting another child.
Slowly, life began to get better.
Twenty-Three
Of the friends she made back in the 1960s, the one Meena was still most in touch with was Banita, whose family also came to live in Handsworth.
Handsworth, like Smethwick, had grown into a ‘little India’. So much more was set up now: gurdwaras, shops and banks, places where you could watch Punjabi films and networks for everything you could need.
Banita had always given Meena courage. She was several years older and, when they met, already had three children. Tall and thickset with flashing eyes and wide hips, she favoured pinks and oranges for her clothes and invariably decorated her fulsome lips with bright surkhi powder. Her husband, despite being officially in charge because he was male, was more than slightly afraid of her. She was loud, forceful and hardworking. In the terms of the community, Banita never put a foot wrong. She bore healthy children – four out of six of them sons – she was devout, saying her morning devotions and attending the gurdwara. She was a pillar of the langar, the big canteen in the gurdwara where the communal meals were prepared. In the hot, steamy atmosphere she could always be found cooking up vats of dal and rice pudding. In her rough, country way she was also very kind.
Now, twenty years on, Banita had a nice big house, six grown-up children, a wide, self-satisfied girth and a deep belly laugh. She also appeared to have a contented husband.
Meena was always happy to see her, even though she felt like a skinny little twig in the shadow of Banita’s fulsome looks. Banita, a true friend, was one of the ones who had been kind about Sukhdeep’s failed marriage.
‘Sukhdeep is a good girl,’ she said. ‘She would not do such a thing to harm anyone on purpose. That husband of hers was a bad lot, a pervert. Best for the child to be out of there. Divorce is not good, but sometimes it has to happen. Times change, you know.’
For this largeness – while others, judging and spiteful, were whispering behind their hands – Meena loved her.
Mostly they didn’t mention Tavleen. A lot of time and many other joys and tragedies had passed since then, but once in a while, if they happened to meet around the anniversary of that day, they spoke of her.
That day was 24th November 1965, a grey, ordinary Wednesday morning. Tavleen had got up early and, leaving her arrogant, sadistic husband and two-year-old twin girls asleep, had taken four-and-a-half-year-old Jasvinder in her arms and carried her out of the house.
Jasvinder had been born with multiple handicaps. For one thing, she was not a boy, which her father regarded in itself as almost amounting to a crime. She had very little sight and could not walk or speak. The arrival of twin girls two years after her had given Tavleen’s husband even more sense of entitlement to beat and bully his wife. To tell her she was a failure. Where was the son he had planned on?
As well as receiving many beatings, her body bore tight, shiny scars where he had thrown a kettle of boiling water over her. A few days before Tavleen carried her daughter through the dawn to Smethwick Rolfe Street station, where she put an end to their suffering forever, she had heard that her beloved sister had died in India, of tuberculosis. Her hopes of one day being reunited with her were snatched away.
‘We did not know how bad things were,’ Meena and the other women had said to each other in the stunned weeks afterwards. They had known about some of the violence. Tavleen had not been able to hide everything. But she had suffered courageously and mostly in silence. In any case, what could they have done?
To Meena she had been the sweetest of companions. Tavleen was much more softly spoken and shy than Banita. The women got into the habit of congregating together. None of them worked, except a few who did bits of piece-work with a sewing machine at home. Meena had done piece-work for a while, when Khushwant was getting his factory going. She had sewn dresses for a Smethwick firm called Sunshine Fashions.
The women were all looking after children, and it was seen as a lowering of status for a wife to leave the house to work
. They would meet in Victoria Park when the weather was fine, or in each other’s houses. But it was never Tavleen’s house where they met.
The other women all liked Tavleen, with her ready smile. Her two top middle teeth crossed over one another in the middle and the effect was attractive. When they met to chatter or do gidha, traditional dancing, she always brought sweets or cakes. And she was kind to everyone’s children. Rajdev adored her.
‘Is Auntie-ji going to be there?’ he would ask of any outing. As soon as he saw Tavleen pushing Jasvinder’s buggy, he would run to her and she would always halt the buggy and bend down to hug him and give him a special sweet. Looking back, Meena thought she had sensed a kind of loneliness in Raj that echoed her own. This thought pained her as much as any other.
After she died, Raj cried inconsolably. He was quiet for weeks. And Meena saw Tavleen everywhere. At times it was as if she was walking at her side, as she had so often done, and she would find her lips moving, talking to her. She would see her friend buying groceries in a shop and rush in without thinking, to find it was someone else. The sight of a bright-coloured Punjabi suit disappearing round a corner could have her speeding up, to check, just in case . . . Could it all have been a dream, a mistake? Sometimes she heard Tavleen’s soft voice when she was alone in the house and would whirl round. At times she feared for her own sanity. Grief, she realized, did strange things to you.
And always there was the sense of guilt. Should Tavleen have been able to talk to her more? If she had known more, couldn’t something have been done? But there was always this silence – a silence of fear and of loyalty to tradition. Sometimes a silence that went on until it was all too late.
