My Daughter, My Mother

by Annie Murray

  As the days passed, Sooky became more and more aware of her mother’s own need to talk.

  At first Meena confided her worries about Raj. Sooky felt very distant from her brother these days. He was so angry, so vile to her, that it was hard for her to find any sympathy for him. But she knew he was suffering too. He had been a sweet, sensitive boy once and they had got along well. As a teenager he had become sullen and troubled, never sure how he fitted in. And now he was so fired up and self-important, it was almost impossible to have a normal conversation with him.

  ‘I am so worried,’ Meena said one day as they walked the children to the park. ‘I am frightened that he is getting himself into something too extreme. Everyone is so angry, talking about fighting. What will happen? I don’t know who he is seeing, who he is talking to – look, there, see what I mean?’

  On the grass near the park gate a group of Sikh men was sitting in a circle under the trees, their turbaned heads close together. Sooky had seen them before, but Meena did not walk out to the park very often. She could see her mother straining to make out whether Raj was among them, even though he was supposed to be at work. But he wasn’t in the group, and Meena relaxed a bit.

  ‘You see?’ She nodded at them. ‘They are always talking about Khalistan – nothing but Khalistan. But we should not be thinking of this, breaking up the country even more. If we do, it will cause more fighting; like before, when they made Pakistan. We need to remain calm – enough of all this hating. Otherwise there will be nothing but more bloodshed.’

  As they settled on the grass with the children, Sooky glanced over at the little knot of men. For a moment she saw them through other eyes: white eyes. How did they look to other people, to non-Sikhs? She had a flash of memory of two boys in her class at school, Patrick Hanlon and Mark Steel. She’d kept out of the way of those two whenever possible. They’d both been poor specimens, without much of a home life behind them. Both had been bullies – Mark especially. He was the one who had sullied her name, creeping up behind her, hissing suggestive, nasty things about it. From then on she had made sure everyone called her Sooky.

  The thing she recalled most strongly about the boys was that they had both stunk of stale fat. This constant aroma of the chip pan made sitting anywhere near them especially unpleasant. They had seemed so alien, with their pink-and-white blotchy skin, their rank smell and lack of manners . . . They had taunted all the Asian kids: ‘Ughh, you smell funny! Eerrgh, your food stinks!’ Had anyone ever found the nerve to tell them they stank too? That they were not necessarily the standard of ‘normal’, from which everyone else was a deviation? There had always been that divide: different skin colours, food, smells; so many little things on a daily basis that you hardly noticed that you were always having to face differences and choose whether to make an issue of them or overcome them.

  At first Meena began talking about her childhood home. She did not raise the subject, but if Sooky asked her something, it would set off a rush of memories.

  ‘What was it like in India when you were young?’ Sooky asked one day, when, once again, they were in the park. ‘Weren’t the British still there? Can you remember that?’

  ‘No, not really.’ Meena sat down with a little grunt, arranging her clothes comfortably. Jasmeet was sitting next to her on the grass. ‘Your grandfather called them the “pink-faced monkeys!” They both laughed. ‘But where we lived, we never really saw them. It was only a small, small place. The life of the village went on. I don’t remember anything about it. Amardeep, stop that – you let her play with you!’

  Amardeep, being older and more agile, was running about with a ball, and Priya was wailing, struggling to keep up. Reluctantly he kicked it to her, too hard, so that she had to run a long way to fetch it, squeaking with indignation.

  ‘Can you remember the village?’ Sooky asked. She didn’t want Meena to stop. She needed her mother to talk and talk.

  A smile spread across Meena’s face. She took the lid off Jasmeet’s bottle of milk and sat feeding her as she talked.

  ‘It was very beautiful,’ she said. ‘All the fields around: green or gold with ripe wheat. And flowers – such lovely blossoms, pink and red . . . And we had buffalo. I remember washing them in the water of the tank nearby, and we drank their milk. Life in the village is very hard work – oh, here it is so different! In the village there is nothing: no supermarket . . . My mother, she was working from sunrise until sunset, cooking over the fire, grinding the spices and flour, kneading the bread, baking. So many tasks all day, it never stopped. No machines for washing clothes and grinding and sweeping; and the oven was made of mud – and the house also!’ She laughed. ‘All day the men worked in the fields, planting, ploughing: there was an ox . . . And the women stayed in the house, always working. Only sometimes late in the evening there was time to sit and rest, and to talk, once the sun had gone down.’

  There were often snippets like this, of her earliest memories. Sometimes in the evening, Meena said, as they sat in the dusk, moths fluttering round the lamp, her mother would massage her father’s feet. Sometimes there was singing. She talked about the games with the other children, remembering the firelight fading to a glow in the darkness, the vast night sky. And about her favourite uncle, Nirmal, her mother’s younger brother, who was only eleven years older than her and had always played with her.

  Sooky had only once met Mama-ji Nirmal, when he came on his only visit to the UK in the early Seventies, when they were living in the first Handsworth house. She remembered a slender, haggard-looking man whose face would light up in radiant smiles. He was full of laughter and jokes. And she had heard his warm, teasing voice on the telephone many times from Delhi. He always booked a call to them around the time of Vaisakhi, the new year, and Diwali. But Nirmal was not enchanted by England.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed to make the switch, beteh,’ he said to Meena. He belonged in India.

  Soon after his visit, he and Bhoji moved the family to a new settlement in Delhi, called Trilokpuri, east of the river.

  ‘One day, we will all visit,’ Meena would say. ‘Now the business is doing so well.’

  While she was talking about these things Sooky understood that she was happy, remembering all that had been lost, in the Garden of Eden before Partition.

  But it seemed so much more difficult to ask about what had happened after that. Sooky understood that her mother’s feelings were torn by conflict. But she didn’t understand fully what the root of this conflict was, or why her response to things was often so confusing.

  Thirty-Two

  One afternoon Meena started talking, across a table strewn with vegetables and tomatoes and half-chopped onions.

  She was moving back and forth across the kitchen, between stirring lamb in a pan and finishing mixing flour and water for roti. Sooky was sitting on one side of the table dealing with the onions and garlic, her eyes and nose running. Harpreet, opposite her, was running her hands through a pan of dal to check for bad bits and stones. On a chair by the sink Priya stood floating toys in a bowl of water and chattering.

  Sooky and Harpreet had been talking about the episode of Brookside they had watched last night, and then a silence fell into which Meena, hands in the dough beside them, abruptly announced, ‘What I have never told you is that the night we came away from our village, travelling in the darkness, my mother was taken away. It was more than three years before we saw her face again.’

  After delivering this bombshell, Meena picked up the blue plastic bowl of dough, set it on the side with a tea-towel draped over it and went to the sink to wash the sticky remnants of it from her hands.

  Sooky and Harpreet both froze, Harpreet with her right hand buried in the pan of dal. Sooky badly needed to blow her nose, but sat absolutely still. Their eyes were wide with shock. Was there going to be more? Should they ask any of the questions that herded into their minds like panicked cattle? When was this exactly? What do you mean ‘taken away’? Is that why we�
��ve never heard much about her? More than three years – what do you mean?

  Meena stirred the pan of simmering lamb. Its spicy, delicious smell became entangled with the silence, which grew longer, seething with emotion. Sooky watched her mother, her apron straps crossed over at the back of her primrose-yellow kameez and tied round at the front as she was so thin. Her elbow, moving the wooden spoon, looked sharp and frail. Sooky thought about how different, how strange, her mother’s life seemed. For a moment an image of her came to mind: a bony scrap of a girl, running at the edge of a Punjabi wheat field, happy, innocent, with no thought that this would not always be her home. It brought tears to her eyes.

  It was a struggle to realize that her mother needed help and that she herself had to find a way of giving it.

  ‘Mom?’ She got up with a glance at Harpreet, whose face was a study in dismay. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea. Why don’t you come and sit down?’

  ‘But there is food to prepare . . .’ Meena half-turned.

  ‘We can do the vegetables and dal together. Come on, Ma-ji.’

  Seeing them all settling at the table, Priya wanted to be included, and she climbed down from the sink. While Sooky heated a pan of tea, Harpreet went to the bowl and scooped out a handful of dough. She sat Priya on her lap and started to teach her how to make roti.

  Sooky brought mugs of tea to the table, sweet and frothy, and sat down between her mother and sister and daughter.

  ‘Tell us – will you, Mom?’

  Meena took the pan of dry dal from Harpreet. She sat running the little green pulses through her fingers in the way they had seen her do countless times before, avoiding looking at the girls.

  ‘At first we were in Amritsar,’ she began. ‘We left our village quite early – in the March or April – and were able to catch a train and survive the journey. People say how lucky we were. Later on, round the time of Partition – in August – thousands left their homes, never to see them again. Very many walked in the kafilas from each side of the border, long snakes of people, carrying everything they could.

  ‘We Sikhs and Hindus were travelling east, while the Muslims were passing the other way, west out of India. It was very dangerous: everyone was afraid. There were many killings on both sides; people seeing those going the other way, knowing that they would take the homes they had just left: the farms, even the animals. Trains arrived each side of the border – in Amritsar, in Lahore – on which there was hardly a soul still left alive. The corridors and bogies ran with blood. Many stayed in camps near the border; they had nowhere to go . . .’

  Meena talked fluently, matter-of-factly, gesturing with her free hand as if, all these years, she had been waiting just to say it all. Priya seemed aware that something special was happening and sat quietly, squeezing dough with her fingers and looking solemnly round at them all.

  ‘My father had a friend in Amritsar and somehow we found a place to live: in the Muslim quarter, where many people had left. Mama-ji Nirmal wanted to go to Delhi – he had the idea that he could make a good living. He loved cars and wanted to go into business, but for the time being my father said no, Amritsar was nearer to home and we would stay there. My uncle, Thaya Gurbir, was a cripple, so he could only do certain kinds of work and they had to find him something. But he was lazy. Only some days he went out, dragging his leg. He preferred just to sit. I stayed with my Thayi-ji Amarpreet.

  ‘My mother had been taken away. That night when we left, she went out into the field to relieve herself and was abducted by men whom we never saw. Many mothers, sisters, daughters were taken away by the Mussalmen, wanting to rape them, to make them convert to their religion. She went into the darkness. We didn’t see her after that. I was my mother’s oldest child, born when she was nearly fourteen years old. I had a sister, Parveen, who was two at that time. My mother carried Parveen with her in her arms and I never saw her again. Even later, when my mother came back, I never once saw my sister.’

  Sooky glanced at Harpreet, who was holding on tight to Priya. Her face wore the same appalled expression that Sooky knew was on her own.

  ‘We were in Amritsar for only a short time – maybe three months – and then the bazaar nearby where we were living was set alight. All the houses were burning. It was dark; night-time. My father was not there – I don’t know why. I think he had gone to see someone about some work and was late back. Thayi-ji Amarpreet had just given birth to her baby son a few weeks ago, and she and Gurbir were asleep upstairs and so was I. There was one room up, one down. Nirmal came in, shouting, shouting at everyone to get out – he picked me up and carried me into the street. Everywhere was full of smoke, of the sound of screaming, everything burning . . .

  ‘My grandparents, Dhada-ji and Dhadi-ji, slept downstairs; they were able to move outside, and I stood holding my grandmother’s hand. There was nothing we could do. The flames were crackling and devouring. We felt their terrible heat on our faces . . . Nirmal went to rouse the others, but they were slow and, as he went back to the house, the roof collapsed.’ She motioned with her hand. ‘Everything fell. He could not go inside. Nothing was left.’

  ‘What about your uncle and aunt – and the baby?’ Harpreet broke in.

  ‘All died.’ Meena paused for a minute. Still without meeting their eyes, she slowly shook her head. Again Sooky and Harpreet looked at each other, out of their depth.

  ‘In Delhi things were better. My father found work in a flour mill, a Sikh business, and after a time Nirmal got a job as a taxi driver.’ Meena smiled. ‘This was his dream. They were able to keep us and buy food for us. We found a humble place to live. I stayed with Dhadi-ji in the daytime – there was no one else. Eventually I started to go to school.’

  Pushing the chair back suddenly, she took the dal to the sink to wash it, wringing the stuff in her hands to shift the dust. She added them to the fried onions and spices, filled the pan with water and set it on the gas. Wiping her hands on her apron, she came back to the table. They all suddenly remembered to drink their cooling tea, stirring away the skin that had formed on top.

  ‘I was missing my mother and sister. I was sad and lost, in a strange place. Only Mama-ji Nirmal was my comfort – and Dhadi-ji. I began to understand that my mother was not the only woman who had disappeared at that time. People were talking, and I would hear. But I didn’t know even then that there were so many. Volunteers from each side crossed the border to look for them, these abducted women. They would go from village to village, questioning, listening to rumour and gossip, following talk of any small sighting. There were some exchanges of such women between India and Pakistan. Your abducted wives and sisters for our abducted ones . . . My father asked them to find her. Over and over he said her name: Jasleen, Jasleen, as if it could make her appear, like snapping his fingers. It took such a very long time, but he never gave up. He was very lonely. I do not know if he despaired. Always he seemed to have hope – he never asked them to stop looking.’

  Sooky listened, an ache filling her body. Harpreet wiped her eyes, trying not to show Priya that she was crying.

  Meena picked up a knife and began slicing off the stalks at the end of the pieces of okra.

  ‘Then, one day, they brought her back. Some men came. My father wept when he saw her, walking between them, being held by her arms. She was wearing turquoise clothing when she came to our door, I shall always remember it.’ Meena paused in her work, but still didn’t look up. ‘When I saw her face I could hardly remember it. My grandmother had died by then and I was left with Dhada-ji, who was an old man. I was eight years old, and for half my life I had not seen my mother.’

  What did she say? Sooky was bursting to ask. What was she like? But she didn’t want to interrupt.

  But Harpreet, who was openly weeping now, cried, ‘Oh, that’s amazing – all that time! She must have been so happy to be back!’

  Meena moved her head in a harsh way that contradicted this.

  ‘No, she was not glad. She was a stranger to u
s, and we to her. Later, when at last she started to speak, we found out that she had given birth to two children in Pakistan. She was already carrying a child when she was taken away, and had since given birth to another – both boys. Those two boys and Parveen, my sister, she had had to leave behind in Pakistan, with their family. The only family they knew. We had become dead to her in that time – and then they came to force her to go back.’

  The full impact of the situation began to sink in.

  ‘But . . .’ Harpreet protested. ‘Didn’t anyone ask her whether she wanted to go back?’

  Meena directed a look of scorn at her.

  ‘She was the property of her husband. Why would anyone ask her? No one asks a woman anything. And anyway, there were agreements – legal arrangements for exchanging such women. She came back to my father, but she was in a foreign country now, a city where she had never been before. She had no choice but to get used to it. My father was a good man and he loved my mother. He wanted her back with his heart – not just because she was his. But she had no feeling for him. I think she had given her heart to another. And she had left her children . . . She had lost not once, but twice. Her own heart was broken right down the middle.’

  ‘What about you?’ Sooky said. ‘You were her daughter too.’

  Meena raised her head and spoke, looking past Sooky, across the kitchen. Her eyes went dull, her voice very flat.

  ‘I suppose she remembered me. Of course she must have done. But I was not the baby of her heart any more – she had lost her two boys. It took her a long time. She was not cruel, not hitting or shouting. Something worse. She was just . . .’ Meena looked down then, fighting her own emotions.

  ‘She never spoke – not for a long time: a year, perhaps more. She was there, but not there. My poor father . . . But then her belly grew big with another baby and she began to speak at last.’