by Annie Murray
Reaching her next bus stop, she stood behind a skinny Asian lad in jeans and black Puma trainers. He kept circling his shoulders as if they were stiff, and she realized he was very tense. For a moment she was curious, then dismissed it. There were dozens of things he might be tense about. Such was life. But something about the way he was standing reminded her of Jaz.
It set her thinking about Jaz, how she might still be there, in Derby; he in his flash suits, she ministering to his scowling presence. Now and then they’d shared a joke together, at the beginning. Then for evermore it was two magnets, repelling each other. Shame washed through her for a moment, especially when she thought of her parents and of his. Part of the fault lay with her: she should never have agreed to marry him so quickly.
The bus swung into view and she pushed these painful thoughts from her mind. Here she was, with pens and files and pads of A4 paper waiting to be filled. She couldn’t wait to get stuck into her studies. She had been in just once before to fill in forms and meet her study group. Most of them seemed nice, and as they were part-timers, most – like her – were older than normal student age. One or two looked as if they might want to be friends. Life was looking up. And as well as all this, she had Joanne and Amy.
‘I’ll be at the Poly on Tuesdays now,’ she had told Joanne last time they met. ‘So maybe we could meet up some other day – in the afternoon?’
Joanne had looked pleased and grateful to be asked.
The bus swung away. Sooky was in a window seat, and for once the window was quite clean. She looked out eagerly, as if rediscovering life. It was so good just to be out and about! Office blocks slid past, the bus leaned its way round roundabouts.
She thought about her mom. She would never have dreamed of doing anything like this – it was beyond any of her expectations. But Sooky knew that, despite everything that had happened, Meena was proud of her, and that meant everything to her. Life felt so much better now that Mom was talking to her again. She didn’t want the talking to stop. It was like a thread that bound them all together, sharing words and feelings after the cruel desert of silence. Whenever the moment seemed right, Sooky kept asking her things. More and more came out: sadnesses, struggles – about India and Smethwick, and how it had been coming to England. One day Meena had told her about her friend Tavleen and what had happened to her. Sooky felt very tender to her mom, now she had opened up a bit more. And Meena seemed more relaxed too; she was smiling, laughing more.
Sooky thought about her grandmother’s life in the Indian sector of Punjab, of her being first abducted, then forcibly returned – having no say of her own. Then of Mom, making this huge step of coming to England, following her husband. No wonder Mom had clung desperately to the ways she knew from home. And now of herself, a student – probably the first in generations of women in her family ever to be able to read and write properly, let alone in English. And the next generation after that?
She saw Priya’s little face in her mind’s eye and smiled.
Forty-Nine
Meena went to the window and watched as Sooky disappeared along the street, muttering a blessing of her own. Pride swelled within her, not unmixed with other feelings.
The morning of Sukhdeep’s first visit to the Poly for registration, Khushwant had kissed his daughter’s forehead before she left.
‘So, the student begins on her studies. Soon, beteh, you will be Prime Minister – like Mrs Thatcher.’
‘God, I hope not!’ Sooky said.
But there were tears in her eyes at receiving all this support and approval. Meena knew that the question of marriage had been shelved – for the moment. But it would not go away. What else could they do? Should Sukhdeep live at home, shamed, forever?
She was proud, all the same. Two children studying in university! Pav had got two As and a B in his A-levels and had just begun on a degree at Aston in electrical engineering.
Meena took Priya into the kitchen, then put her down. ‘I don’t know why I’m carrying you, lazy girl! You aren’t a baby any more. You want a drink?’ She spoke in Punjabi – she wanted Priya to know the language.
She sat Priya at the table, enjoying the lull before Roopinder came down with her two, her face sulky, belly jutting out. Roopinder loathed being pregnant and made everyone else suffer as a consequence. She expected to be waited on like a queen.
Priya sipped orange juice, suddenly still and quiet.
‘Mummy has gone to college,’ Meena told her, bringing her tea over to the table, a couple of Rich Tea biscuits lodged in the saucer. She sat down, straightening her chunni – yellow today – round her neck.
‘Granny go college!’ Priya said, pointing with an impish grin.
‘Ah, no, no, no,’ Meena laughed. ‘Old ladies do not go to college!’
She felt no envy of Sooky being a student. Not that. It was too far from her, she who had had barely even a basic education in India. Things had been too disrupted – and she was a girl. She had learned the rudiments of reading and writing in Punjabi. But she had never expected much. It had never occurred to her to have big dreams. Her hope had been for marriage and children, a home of her own, for things to work out right. Having Priya to look after now gave her a sense of purpose.
But there was something she envied. She sat, enjoying the few minutes’ peace, cradling her teacup, thinking about it. What was that something?
Picturing Sukhdeep walking away from her to the bus stop, she realized it was the way her daughter seemed to feel at home. This was Britain, the country where she was born. She stepped out of the door in her jeans, a smart leather bag from the factory over her shoulder, seeing only the city where she had grown up. Of course she understood that her parents had come from elsewhere. But she did not spend her life mentally looking over her shoulder at another country, as her mother did; and, Meena knew sadly, as Raj did too. A place that was once home, but could be no more, because they had moved too far from it in every way. Those who went back to visit said things were changing – even in the villages, though they were the last to hear the flutes of time beckoning them into new ways. Many of them had electric lights now, and televisions. Sometimes Nirmal told her things about modern India: women working in shiny office blocks, divorcing even, through their own choice! Of course Nirmal lived in the big city – in Delhi. But Meena still found it hard to believe. In her mind, India was eternal and unchanging, the way she had tried to be herself.
‘Priya go college!’ the little girl cried irrepressibly, holding up her cup as if toasting life.
Meena laughed and reached across to chuck her cheek.
‘Cheeky girl! Yes, maybe you will. But that is a long time away.’
Even Khushwant had noticed that Meena seemed happier in herself. He thought it was because of Pav’s A-level results and Harpreet’s GCSEs (six As, three Bs, one C – the last in mathematics, which she loathed with a passion). All very satisfactory. And Meena was more proud and happy about that than she could say.
But it was the talking as well – the talk of women. She had sat with her daughters and told them things that had been locked in her heart for decades. It had begun to ease her.
That afternoon she took Priya out in her buggy, a blanket tucked round her knees and the rainhood clipped on. She knew that if she pushed Priya along the road, it was the one way to get the lively little girl to sleep at last. It was only spitting a little now and she put on her coat, securing her chunni tightly, and took an umbrella. It was October, and already cold enough to have tights on under her salwar trousers. She cursed this cool, mizzling weather. Why could it not just rain wholeheartedly – or not rain, instead of hanging somewhere in between for days on end? The endless greyness leached the colour out of everything.
On a whim, Meena did something she had never done before: she pushed a sleepy Priya along Hampstead Road and turned into the cemetery of the big red church, the other side of the railings from the park. She knew it was all right to walk in here because she had seen people
in there before, strolling up and down, gazing at the gravestones.
There was no one else there today, though. Half-afraid, she pushed Priya ahead of her along paths that had been reclaimed from the overgrown green chaos, shrouded on each side by trees, so that it was like walking through a tunnel. Bramble thorns scraped at her clothes, and gravestones poked up out of the tall grass as if they were holding their heads above water. An obelisk loomed suddenly in front of her, topped with a hat of ivy.
Some of the graves had graffiti scrawled on them. She saw glue-sniffer havens, reeking plastic bags strewn among the bushes. The thought of all that might go on in here made her shudder. But she did wish she could make sense of the writing on the gravestones and read the names, as a mark of respect. Her lack of English still held her at a distance from this place, which had had to become home.
Reaching a clearer patch, she looked down through the railings to the lake in the park, thinking of her children, her daughters in particular.
It was true that she had talked to them – but there were some things she would never tell them. Things that held too much shame and horror.
Thaya Gurbir, her father’s elder brother, who had left the town with them that night, was one of those things. He had taken everything from her except her actual virginity. On those stifling afternoons in Amritsar, her aunt, Thayi-ji Amarpreet, slept on the floor upstairs, lying on her side to ease the weight of her pregnant belly. Her grandparents would be sleeping too, and Meena would pretend to be dozing beside Amarpreet, all the time with her heart thudding, ears pricked for his every move. He would lean over and shake her, placing a finger to his lips. Sometimes he would even begin to interfere with her beside his sleeping wife, his breath catching in excited gasps. Meena wondered now: could Amarpreet really have been asleep all the time? Did she just turn away, knowing what was going on?
Often he would seize her hand and pull her to the only place in the little dwelling not occupied by others: the stairs. They were brick steps, their hard edges digging into her back, her neck. The harsh, concentrated look on his face stopped her from crying out, whatever her pain.
Amarpreet never left the house. She was afraid in this new neighbourhood so far from home, where violence and fear were woven into every day. Nirmal and Dhada-ji, her father’s father, were the ones who went out to buy food. Gurbir whined his uselessness.
‘I’m no good for this. My foot . . .’ It was twisted and deformed.
So, during those months in that crowded house, every chance he could find, he had molested her again and again. Once, just once, while Amarpreet was cooking, he managed to get her upstairs, his weight pinning her to the floor, one hand over her mouth, stifling her as he jerked against her, her clothes sticky when at last he rolled off; she knew this should not be happening, but could find no words or anyone to say them to. And in those seconds after Sukhdeep told her what Jaz was doing to Priya, her instant thought was: get that little girl away from him. And nothing else had mattered. And afterwards, the clash of anger and shame and sorrow had silenced her.
But there was worse shame even than Gurbir’s disgusting molestation. When he died – oh, how she had rejoiced! She had dreamed of his death, longed for it, so that in some infant part of herself she thought she had caused it. Such wicked thoughts had boiled in her head: I hate you, I hate you . . . ! I’m glad you are dead! Had the flashing loathing in her eyes tindered a spark that started the flames?
She was not glad about Amarpreet or the baby. Her mourning for them was genuine. The terror, the smells and sounds of the fire still came back to her in her dreams. But Gurbir . . . It meant that afterwards she lived just with her beloved Nirmal and her grandparents in Delhi, which had been heaven in comparison. Sometimes she thought that what had happened had been Gurbir’s punishment. The fire saved her.
She walked on, knowing that if she stayed still too long, Priya would wake. The rain was holding off, though there was a strong breeze. But she was restless and turned into the park to walk round the boating lake. Mallards and Canada geese glided close to her hopefully, then retreated again when no food was forthcoming.
It was too cold for sitting. Meena kept walking slowly, round and round. Her thoughts were dark and relentless.
Mother, daughter, granddaughter . . .
Mother, mother, mother . . .
She could still hear her father’s tormented calling into the dense Punjab night: ‘Jasleen! Wife . . . Jasleen!’
His cries were met only by silence. Yet even after Jasleen was returned to them from Pakistan, the brutal silence continued.
It was June, just a few weeks after her mother had come back, to that scrubby part of Delhi where they perched to make a new life. Not like the new, Seventies-built development where Nirmal lived now. He had done well, her uncle, with his beloved taxi.
It was the height of summer: the sun was beating down and Meena had fallen sick. At midday the heat was almost unbearable. Meena’s grandmother was no longer alive, but Dhada-ji, a frail old man now, was lying on a string bed across the room, his stick-legs slack, mouth lolling open. Meena heard flies droning round the room. A truck started up somewhere in the road beyond. Sounds bulged close, then far away in her feverish state.
Jasleen came to her and lifted her swimming head, made her sip water. Her mother’s eyes looked down at her, intent, but detached. As usual, she spoke not a word. Meena felt practical duty coming from her, but not love. Her feet padded into the back room where she did the cooking, the light chink-chink of anklets tracing her every move. The rooms were divided by a threadbare sheet of muslin that hung in the doorway. Sometimes they poured water over it to cool the house, and it helped keep the flies at bay.
Meena lay in a daze, penetrated now and then by tiny sounds from the other room. There were repeated splashes of water, the clink of a brass pot, a light swish of material. Sometime later, out of the silence, after sensing rather than hearing more movements, she heard a gossamer thread of sound, only a fraction louder than the hum of the flies, but it jolted her eyes open, made her heart drum in terror . . .
‘Allahu Akbar . . . Subhana rabbiyal adheem . . . Sam’i Allahu liman hamidah, Rabbana wa lakal hamd . . . Allahu Akbar . . . Allahu Akbar . . .’
Now, so many years later, pushing her granddaughter round this English park, Meena could feel afresh the gut horror that had possessed her when she heard the secret whispering of these Muslim prayers threading through the air of their Sikh household.
My mother is . . . My mother is one of those . . . Those from whom they had fled, who had murdered their people, abducted their women, who were to be hated and feared . . .
Shrouded in fever, she had told herself it was a nightmare. Never again in the years she lived with her mother was she aware of this happening, and her father certainly never caught Jasleen praying as a Muslim. Did he ever know? Jasleen submitted to his ways, went with him to the gurdwara as she had done before. Her husband was a Sikh. She was a Sikh. Meena chose to forget.
My mother . . . All the deaths, the killing of sisters, mothers, daughters, the upheaval of thousands upon thousands to prevent this: conversion, desecration and shame . . . Her mother whispering Mussalman prayers . . . Meena felt the same revulsion rising in her fresh and primitive: it was all they had left home to escape, fleeing to the new India so as not to live in Muslim Pakistan. It was the greatest, unspeakable shame, something she knew she could never reveal, not to her daughters, not to anyone.
What had befallen Jasleen in almost four missing years? Had it been a forced, fearful conversion for the sake of survival? Or had it been love and the turning of her heart to the religion in which she would have had to bring up her two sons?
Meena’s chest ached with the unshed tears of all those years ago, rising fresh in her now. Her mother had been snatched from her in every way. Even years later, though she never once spoke of her feelings, Jasleen seemed only ever to be in Delhi on sufferance. She too must have spent her life looking over her sh
oulder, at that other country that in her heart was home, but could be home no more.
Meena stopped at the side of the water and put one hand over her face. She felt a few drops of rain start to fall.
And what was Raj doing? Her son’s intense face came into her mind. Wasn’t he spending his life dreaming of a country that did not even exist, a Sikh homeland in which to cradle his needs?
She blamed herself – for the example she had set. How had she not taught him to be here, now, in the place where he really was, where he had to learn to belong, instead of living a dream?
Fifty
Joanne stood in the corridor outside the ward at Dudley Road Hospital.
The doors kept opening and closing with a suck of air as people passed in and out. Most of them held one door open and looked enquiringly at her, but she kept shaking her head and staying put by the wall, trying to compose herself.
At last a young nurse, on her way back in, spoke to her kindly. ‘Are you here to see someone?’
Joanne nodded, and then they were inside the door and she was walking past the bays of beds towards him.
What had she expected? It wasn’t a question of blood, of injury or disfigurement. In a way, what she saw was worse. Dave was propped up in bed, looking fixedly across the room towards the window, not doing anything. Just staring.
Joanne couldn’t help feeling suspicious: was this just another way of trying to control her, a self-pitying dramatic act to blackmail her into coming home?
She crept forward into his eyeline, feeling the other patients looking at her. He focused on her, she was sure of it, but gave no reaction that she could see.
Eventually she managed to say, ‘Dave?’
Al and Stuart, the two mechanics at the garage, had found him outside. They had thought nothing of it when Dave went out to the yard, as they all came and went throughout the day. It was some time before they noticed that he hadn’t come back.
