Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  It was a bizarre offer. In India, there is a tradition for mourners to feed the bereaved family after a funeral, but the Bains, as was customary in England, had instead arranged a meal at the temple, gaggles of mourners gathering around Mrs Bains and her daughters to encourage them to eat, reminding them that self-neglect was not going to bring back their loved one. Also, Dhanda had not once offered to cook before. Even during his time working in the store with Mr Bains he was renowned for preferring the produce of the local chippy to toiling over a stove.

  As it happens, Mrs Bains might have normally indulged the offer, however surreal – the rules of hospitality forbidding her from asking him to leave – but after a week of visitors, she ached for peace and found herself being more direct than usual. ‘Listen, Patwant, please feel free to cook for yourself, what is ours is yours, as it always was and always will be, but I think we’re just going to have the food from yesterday, and actually I think I am going to go to bed soon. I am very tired.’

  At this point, Dhanda began behaving even more strangely. Watching him, Mrs Bains was reminded in part of the shoplifters who had recently been caught in the store, one of them making transparently aimless chit-chat with Tanvir in order to distract him from what his friend was doing at the biscuit shelves. She was also reminded of watching the panchayat in her village as a girl – the group of senior residents to whom disputes were taken for resolution. The defendants had a certain posture, their hands resting on their fat stomachs, and a certain way of speaking, mixing flattery with digressions, it being considered inelegant to voice grievance too soon. They would only very gradually come to their point. As did Dhanda. In the end. He offered to buy the shop.

  Though he didn’t put the offer in such direct terms. He said that Mrs Bains had worked hard. She deserved some peace and relaxation. She should be taking it easy after all the shocks she had endured, turn her mind to God. With his money Mrs Bains could pay for her daughters’ respective weddings and still afford to retire respectably in India. ‘Besides,’ he added in conclusion, ‘a shop is not really something a woman can manage on her own.’

  This last remark was Dhanda’s real mistake. Surrounded by a circle of female mourners, she had been spared his excesses over the preceding week, and aware of her husband’s affection for the man, their shared history, she had felt instinctively benign towards him, even enduring his lecture with relative calm. But with that remark, she thought of how she had effectively run the shop alone for years, defying her husband’s reciting of old sayings that ‘gut picche mat’ (‘women lack wisdom’), and that ‘women are like an old coat or shoes and you can replace them when you want’. She remembered how, before that, she had herself taken on her husband’s family to send her girls to school in India, and how, before even that, she had been taught Punjabi, Hindi and arithmetic by her mother in defiance of social norms at the time.

  This then led to deeper, even more stirring thoughts on how her religion had put men and women on an equal level, condemning practices such as purdah and, unlike many other religions, allowed widows like her to remarry. And, having folded the white sheet she was handling so tightly that it was almost the size of a napkin, she thought of how Sikh teachings gave women full equality to participate in religious performances, remembered how her own mother had been a pioneer in her way, the first in her village to wear a modern salwar, and recalled how one evening when Surinder was a baby and about to topple out of her cot on to a brick courtyard in Delhi, one of Mr Bains’ malevolent aunts had remarked, ‘Let her fall, she is only a girl.’ She snapped.

  ‘Listen here, Patwant, this shop may not have my husband’s name on the front of it, but every single shelf, every nook and cranny, is stained with his toil and sweat. My girls and I will run it in his name, in his honour and I will make a better job of it than you or any man could.’

  Her sister had joked earlier that week that Dhanda’s white turban made him look like he had a nappy on his head. In that moment Mrs Bains could have tipped the contents of one all over him. The intensity of her response surprised them both.

  ‘Yes, pehnji,’ said Dhanda, withdrawing meekly. ‘Yes.’ Dhanda walked backwards, taking an apple from the fruit bowl on the table as he did so. She snatched it back. ‘If you ever need any help, I am at your service, as I was for your precious husband, who was like a father to me. And a brother. A brother and a father.’

  After he left, Mrs Bains found herself standing in the centre of the living room, shaking and sobbing into the sheet she was still clutching. She had been crying all week, but these were not the theatrical self-conscious tears you weep when you know you are being watched. They were tears of the snotty and uncontrolled variety, her chuni slipping and exposing the patch of alopecia that had appeared on the back of her head since her husband had died.

  She was not, it turns out, the only one weeping in the house at that moment. In the cellar downstairs, the week’s events had caught up with Kamaljit, and cleaning the stockroom, she had felt overwhelmed. On seeing her, Tanvir had done the thing he had wanted to for days, if not months, beforehand: he had held her in his arms and stroked her hair. Meanwhile, upstairs, Surinder was weeping into a textbook. On hearing her mother’s sobbing, she ran down and gave Mrs Bains what she needed most – a hug. She apologised tearfully as she did so, for not being the dutiful daughter her mother deserved, and, keeping her end of the bargain she had struck during her week of fevered prayers, she promised to be more useful around the shop and, if her mother so desired, to quit her studies and prepare for marriage.

  Mrs Bains was deeply touched by the consideration of her dear, beautiful daughter. She replied that there was no need for her to quit school, she could stay on another year, finish her A levels, but she could do with more help in the shop and Surinder should start fasting on Mondays, in order to ensure she got a good husband. For she realised now that when their father, a man who was worth his own weight in gold, had suggested a double marriage, it came out of the feeling that he was not long for this earth; the guilt that she had deprived him of the basic paternal satisfaction of seeing his daughters married was a torture, the most painful aspect of his passing. And yes, their aunt was right, it was dangerous for young women to be fatherless and unmarried at their age, and the call for boys would soon go out, her request being that the men be of Jat extraction, tall, in the retail trade, turbanned, British residents and modern in outlook. At least, modern enough to appreciate that Surinder needed to finish her schooling before marriage, to understand that the recent loss of a father meant unextravagant nuptials, and to appreciate that the girls would have to approve of the match.

  It would be agony to lose her daughters, but amid all this misery it was some consolation that Surinder was on her side. Knowing that would take the sting out of losing her two beloved daughters at the same time.

  8 – HARPERS WINE & SPIRIT TRADES REVIEW

  THERE WAS NO shortage of challenges during those initial long months of full-time shopkeeping. The brutally early mornings. Balancing the politics of allowing certain trusted customers credit while denying it to others. But the single most difficult and disconcerting thing? The slow but gradual realisation that Ranjit was right.

  Not about everything, of course. Steven Seagal is not a good actor. There is no dignity in consuming drugs in your mid thirties. But take, for instance, his approach to education. Ranjit had always looked down on the life of the mind, preferring to make money than to read books. He left college at seventeen, halfway through a BTEC, for which I had looked down on him in return.

  But which one of us had ended up with the better life? The phrase ‘graphic designer’ may trigger images of attractive men in ponytails being alternative and creative in fashionable offices, but most are badly paid, frustrated artists who spend dehumanising hours working in front of computer screens for projects commissioned by big business. In contrast, Ranjit was his own boss, spent more time in the gym and smoking weed than working, drove a car worth almost as
much as my share of the London flat, owned, with his father, some nineteen buy-to-let properties, including a penthouse apartment in Birmingham which he kept for his own use, and had never had to endure a conversation with an HR department.

  Then there was Ranjit’s antagonistic attitude to the police, or ‘the Feds’, which, if I had thought about it at all, I had dismissed as cartoonish, another consequence of all the hip hop he listened to, along with his faux Jamaican accent, and his insistence on being called ‘Jay’ or ‘Jizz’. But what were the summer riots if not a direct result of a failure in policing? And while I didn’t, in the end, report Nick Wilson, thinking that I wouldn’t really be able to explain Ranjit’s involvement without getting him into trouble, and because the kid got arrested anyway for his involvement in a raid on a sportswear shop that night, when his friends began taking revenge through random acts of abuse and vandalism, the police failed to do anything about it. Ranjit was right: the Feds were incompetent, lazy, self-interested, ineffectual and most likely racist too.

  Another matter on which I reluctantly realised Ranjit had a point: his approach to relationships. If you can call having an arranged marriage at the age of twenty-five to a teenager from India, and having extramarital sex at every opportunity in that Birmingham penthouse flat, an ‘approach to relationships’. It was morally repulsive, obviously. And I do not, in general, buy into the myth of the arranged marriage. Families are the last people who should be entrusted with the task of finding you a spouse, given that they are incapable of appreciating that you may have changed since the age of twelve. As for the high ‘success’ rate of arranged marriages relative to their Western counterparts – it is in large part attributable to the fact that the Indian youths in question are so limited in their encounters with the opposite sex that, when they are married off at random, they have nothing to measure the relationship against and endure behaviour others wouldn’t consider reasonable over a single evening, let alone a lifetime.

  But then again, where had my pursuit of romance got me? Freya and I were living more than a hundred miles apart, talking and seeing each other when we could on weekends, but we were drifting apart emotionally. The tone of our weekly meetings was all over the place, hovering as they did between a prison visit and a play date between estranged parent and child. Meanwhile, Ranjit had security, the support of his parents, the devotion, seemingly, of his spouse and children (who were oblivious to his extramarital activities), a relationship which didn’t require the constant explanation of cultural differences, and also sexual adventure. In his heart of hearts, which man wouldn’t enjoy such a set-up? The more I hung out with him, the more I envied him. Not that I exactly rushed into hanging out with him. Before I would even consider doing that I would have to, over the course of two hard months, become truly desperate.

  Looking back, that early period of full-time shopkeeping might not have been so arduous if Bains Stores enjoyed either less or more custom than it did. In the former case, it would have meant I could have invested my energies elsewhere, or at least spent longer on YouTube, while in the latter I might have been too busy to notice it all. But Bains Stores had just enough customers to ensure that you could never really relax or really get lost in the work.

  Equally, the boredom that came from returning to a town which all my school friends had abandoned a decade earlier, and a social life curtailed by the shop’s punishing 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. opening hours, might not have been so crushing if there had been an end in sight. But the fact was that my return had backfired in terms of getting my mother to reconsider her future plans. If I’d left her to it, the impracticality of running the shop alone might have become apparent, but as I’d returned, she had an excuse to avoid the subject entirely.

  Things became too comfortable too quickly: I’d wake up at half four and open the shop and man the till until 9 a.m.; Mum would wake up at 8 a.m. and, having had breakfast and done her prayers, would take over the till for the duration of the morning. I’d go for a jog and when I returned Mum would have run a bath for me and I’d take over the till again at lunchtime; Mum would be back looking after the shop between two and four, then I would take over until closing time.

  It wasn’t always onerous. I enjoyed talking to the newspaper boys and girls, telling them for instance, why the p and n words were unacceptable, and how ‘electric’ should not be pronounced as ‘elecytrick’. There was a certain satisfaction in helping aunties and uncles with filling out forms. But the long days were exhausting. I used to resent my father’s implication that office work was not real work. He saw sitting at a desk as leisure. Now I realised he had a point. Standing around for more than twelve hours is shattering.

  Even worse than the exhaustion: the intense boredom. At one point the desire for intelligent conversation, or at least the need to talk to someone about something other than the weather or the quality of plastic bags, became so profound that I asked my old schoolmate’s parents out for a drink. We spent two hours in a pub on the other side of town discussing Matt Metcalfe’s stellar career and success, although I hadn’t seen him in four months, before moving on to the problems his dad was having with his prostate. Next, I approached the victim support volunteer we had been assigned during the brief time my father’s death was deemed suspicious, my suggestion of a drink being met with a lengthy silence, and then a polite refusal over text, in which she addressed me as ‘Mr Banga’, a classic distancing device. But even this humiliation was not enough for me to reply to one of Ranjit’s regular text invitations for a drink. I would have to plumb further depths, and did so in my seventh week back.

  On the Monday morning I caught two kids trying to pilfer stock from the drinks chiller. On Tuesday three of our five newspaper boys didn’t turn up, two citing illness, one oversleeping, and the van got a puncture while I delivered the papers. By Wednesday two customers had complained about their newspaper deliveries, one coming in to cancel his order in person, saying his paper had arrived late, that the sections hadn’t been separated and that it was torn (actually it must have got ripped when he dragged it through his letterbox), and that from now on he was going to pick up his papers himself from the Tesco’s in town. On Thursday a sweet-looking girl of about ten buying some crisps on the way to school asked, casually, ‘What religion are you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m EDL and you’re a fucking Paki.’

  ‘Right.’ I gave her change from a pound coin. ‘You realise that racial abuse is against the law and you’re being filmed on CCTV?’

  ‘Good for you. You can have something to wank over later.’ She turned out to be one of Amy Wilson’s grandchildren.

  That afternoon a man I’d not seen before asked for three packets of Marlboro Lights and some medication, all items from behind the counter, and I was just wondering why they didn’t rename ‘Imodium’ ‘Imodi-bum’, given that is what everyone called it anyway, when I turned around and saw that he had made off with the fags I’d placed on the counter. I’m not sure what was more annoying: the fact that I’d fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book, or that I hadn’t spotted he had asked for medication for both diarrhoea and constipation.

  Then on Friday morning I woke to graffiti, painted in gloss white paint, no doubt by Wilson or one his mates, all over the shutters, pronouncing, ‘TALEBAN PEEDO’.

  It came as a shock. Vandalism is an occupational hazard in an inner city. But I could only recall one other instance of racist graffiti, when I was about seven and someone had scrawled a massive ‘KKK’ on to our house door. I remember asking Dad what the letters meant and him replying that they must be the initials of the miscreant in question. I eyed a classmate at my infants school going by the name of Kuljit Kaur Kalirai with suspicion for months afterwards. But in 2011, it was my turn to protect my mother from the truth.

  ‘Ah ki hai?’ she asked as she examined the damage on the pavement.

  ‘Well . . .’

  I didn’t have the Punjabi for ‘paedophile
’, let alone the vocabulary to explain the laboured connection between us and the gangs reportedly grooming young white girls in the north. It’s strange how the first thing you learn in most languages is the smutty words, but with my entire Punjabi vocabulary coming from my parents, I struggled to explain anything that ventured on the sexual.

  ‘It’s just a swear word, Mum.’

  ‘Pee?’ She muttered the words under her breath. ‘As in pe-shab?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Leh, it’s these goras who smell of piss, not us.’

  The racism was casual. But this was one of my mother’s most common complaints about the goras – she even kept a can of deodorant behind the till to spray liberally when particularly stinky customers visited.

  Getting rid of the graffiti turned out to be more difficult than it looked. The gloss paint had dried and got stuck. Bits had gone through the mesh on to the glass underneath. It took an hour of scrubbing, and mockery from passing schoolchildren, to get rid of the ‘O’. At which point I realised I should have started with the ‘P’, because the graffiti now proclaimed, ‘TALEBAN PEED’. In the end, getting nowhere, I figured the only thing to do was add the letter ‘S’ before the ‘P’, and it was at this point, having made Bains Stores look like it had started flogging a range of Islamic amphetamines, that a passing child threw a half-empty can of Sprite at my head. When I got yet another invite for a drink from Ranjit a few minutes later, feeling a sudden and keen need to offload, to get blind drunk, I agreed to meet him at eight o’clock.

  Needless to say, at eight we were nowhere near having a drink. And this is the thing, or at least one of the things, about hanging out with Ranjit: you have to revise your notions and expectations of ‘time’. If you have a conventional social life, like I once did, it probably involves making an arrangement, arriving within ten minutes of the prearranged appointment and then departing after a few hours. However, with Ranjit, if you arrange to meet him for a drink and food at, say, eight, you know he will ring you at eight to say, ‘Hey, just getting into the shower, bare missions today innit, link me at half eight.’ You will then get to his place for a quarter to nine, because you suspect from his spaced-out tone that he will be running later than claimed, at which point he will probably just be getting out of the shower, and you will have to spend an hour or so killing time variously walking around his shop or listening to his father opine upon the good old days, watching Ranjit eat (even if you are supposedly going out to eat), regaling you with the benefits of chicken as he does so (‘Man needs bare protein if he wanna get hench’), being told to take up weights (‘Girls like guys who are hench’), watching him smoke a spliff (‘Just gonna bun dis spliff’), and finally, two, maybe three, hours after originally arranged, any complaints along the way being met with the remarks ‘Leeeave it, bruv’ and ‘Man needs to do these bare missions’, you will find yourself being driven in his massive German 4x4 for a pint in Singhfellows.