Marriage Material

by Sathnam Sanghera

  ‘So let me get this,’ my aunt summarised. ‘You fell in love with someone, got engaged, lived with her happily, your dad dies and you suddenly decide it might be better to marry a complete stranger because they just happen to be Sikh?’

  ‘When you put it like that, it sounds . . .’ I searched for the word, slightly out of breath. ‘. . . mad, I realise, but isn’t it just easier to be with someone of your own background? I mean, look at Ranjit.’

  ‘Ranjit?’ She came to a standstill. The pupils in her eyes contracted. ‘Are you serious?’

  I made the case for arranged marriages, emphasising the advantage of basing a relationship on something other than passion, having a whole family interested in keeping a relationship going. When I saw my case was having no effect, I added, ‘She left someone to go out with me, what’s to stop her leaving me in turn?’

  ‘So now you want a virgin bride?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’ I sighed. ‘Look what happened to you and Jim then.’

  ‘There’s no comparison between Jim and me, and you and Freya.’ We started walking uphill again. ‘It was a different time, and I hardly knew him before I got married.’

  ‘I just think I might have a better life if I ended up with someone my mother connected with.’

  ‘Arjan, you do realise that your mother won’t like anyone you marry? You are her only son. No one will be good enough. If you marry an Indian girl it will just give her more of an opportunity to fixate.’

  There was some truth to this. I had not once dared to introduce an Asian girlfriend to my mother, anxious about the politics which might ensue. I paused and thought about what she had just said. ‘What I can’t believe is that you, of all people, are making the case for romance.’

  ‘Romance?’ She was speed-walking. ‘I’m talking about kindness and compassion. That’s what I saw in Freya on Christmas Day. And you know what, marriage is a strange idea, it’s a lottery, it can often turn out to be a mistake, but it’s a mistake everyone should make once and it’s the best environment to raise kids. Just get back together with Freya and have some babies, for God’s sake.’

  This was the thing that Massi said most often. The subtext was clear: having children was, in her view, the only thing that mattered. And it was the one thing she hadn’t done.

  I groaned. ‘Massi.’

  We had by this point reached the obelisk. From our vantage point we could see the grand Georgian mansion at the centre of the estate, which like every other Georgian mansion in the Midlands claimed to have once provided a hiding place for Charles II. To one side, we could make out the knot garden in which Mum was sitting on a bench, admiring the flowers. The chemotherapy wasn’t affecting her as badly as it had done the first time, which was encouraging. But she still looked small and frail.

  ‘I really don’t know why your mother insists on wearing those sandals,’ said my aunt. ‘She must be freezing. And that paste henna from India which turns her temples red. And what’s with the patterns? I know as a widow she would never wear vivid colours but everyone knows patterns are best avoided at our age. She won’t listen to anything I say.’

  Surinder’s words made me remember how I used to watch Mum get ready for the temple on Sunday mornings, smothering my face in Oil of Ulay as she smothered her own, spraying a little perfume on my wrist as she perfumed hers, Mum stopping me from using her lipsticks as crayons. But she had given up on make-up at some point.

  I read out the plaque at the bottom of the obelisk which commemorated the man who had built the house, apparently an important example of its style of architecture. Over tea I had learned about how he had never finished his work, instead living a reckless life of drinking and gambling.

  Surinder absorbed the information. ‘In my experience, the thing that most people regret at the end of their lives is that they listened to other people too much.’ She placed the dog down, fastened him to a leash. ‘It is important to live the life you want to lead, not the one you think your mother wants you to.’

  ‘But you could say that things would have worked out better for you if you had listened to other people a little more.’

  She laughed, put her arm through mine. ‘Fair point.’ We were walking downhill now, across the lawn, back to Mum. ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  Our drive back home was, as ever, totally unlike the few family road trips I recalled from my youth. My father was an anxious driver. He would hog the middle lane, driving fixedly at 54mph because he had worked out this was the speed at which the van was at its most economical, not permitting the radio or excessive conversation in case it distracted him. In contrast, when my aunt drove on the motorway in her BMW – and she always insisted on driving – she would do so either at 77mph (arguing you were unlikely to be stopped if you were within 10 per cent of the speed limit) or at 99mph (she claimed, rather unconvincingly, that you got banned only if you tipped into three figures). There would always be music in the background. And she was one of those people fond of ‘lively debate’ to make time pass. In forty-five minutes she challenged my mother on everything, from her view of the monarchy to her increasingly fanatical vegetarianism.

  ‘So you don’t eat meat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you don’t touch food that has been cooked by someone who has cooked meat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you won’t be in the same room as people eating meat?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘But I see you wear leather shoes.’

  ‘It is important to be practical.’

  ‘You know the Gurus hunted animals and the Sikh code of conduct allows you to eat meat, as long as it isn’t halal?’

  Mum grimaced, sank into her leather seat and pretended to sleep. And it was at this moment, more than three months into Surinder’s return, that I accepted a painful fact: the two sisters’ relationship was not as straightforward as my relationship with my aunt. For me, Surinder’s return was an unmitigated joy. She had not only transformed my life in practical ways, and loved me unconditionally, but also changed my relationship with Mum. Communication between us had always been restricted by my bad Punjabi, and our respective awkwardness, but suddenly I found that if there was something difficult I wanted to say, I could ask my aunt to say it on my behalf; she was always there to provide a sensitive translation.

  But while on the face of it the sisters were a tight unit – going to the temple together, liaising about the cash and carry – and while in the shop it was all ‘pehnji’ and ‘hahnji’ and ‘Could I get you a cup of tea?’, their dealings were more fractious. My aunt’s devotion to my mother was total, but when it came to religion, Surinder just couldn’t help but express her doubt and objections, even though we both knew that Mum took solace in her faith. Mum, for her part, was at times actively antagonistic. She baulked at many of my aunt’s plans for the shop, in particular anything that might compromise the decades-old non-compete arrangement with Dhanda’s. She objected to my aunt’s plan to buy a touchscreen till, because she feared she would not be able to use it, objected to any changes which might have involved the removal of anything that my father had installed – the microwave, for instance, or the rusty unused baskets behind the front door. And out of earshot of her sister, and on the phone to me, and sometimes even directly to Surinder, Mum found no shortage of things to complain about, whether it was wearing skirts that came above the knee (‘Leh, a woman of her age’); watching endless DVD box sets late into the night, keeping her awake; ‘wasting’ money by dragging her off to restaurants in places like Ludlow when you could eat better for a fraction of the price at home; not eating the food she cooked at home because it wasn’t apparently ‘healthy enough’; ‘always’ yomping off to the gym or hair salon when not working; leaving her bedroom a mess; drinking occasionally at Singhfellows; smoking; indulging her messy dog; reading all the time; or being disrespectful to Dhanda, not even covering her head when he visited the shop.

  Unfortu
nately, Surinder’s response to her sister’s disapproval would usually involve physically withdrawing and doing something – having a fag, going for a drink at Singhfellows, taking the dog for a walk – that would irritate Mum yet further. I identified with the urge. Sometimes she just had to be alone. But occasionally the tension would become so intolerable that I would have to intervene. Such as the time that Surinder made the mistake of having a cigarette in front of the shop instead of in the back garden, and inspired a despairing rant from Mum about how she was ‘bringing shame upon the family’.

  Surinder conceded immediately. ‘It’s a disgusting habit and I should have given up years ago,’ she said. We were at the cash and carry and I was pushing a giant orange flatbed trolley down the giant orange aisles. My aunt tackled these trips in the same way she walked around National Trust properties: as if someone would die if she dropped below a pace of 4mph. ‘I will try to give up. Again.’ She placed a box of Crunchies – £14.99 for forty-eight bars – on to the trolley, taking time to pat Jessie, who was lounging across a box of beans. ‘But God knows why she gets so upset when she has been selling fags her whole life. Come to that, what I don’t get is why we sell cigarettes at all.’

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that my aunt’s efforts to modernise the shop would eventually hit a wall. I remember my mother once remarking inexplicably that the shop was cursed because it had a ‘wide front and narrow back and was overlooking a T-junction’. It turns out she was voicing an inverse version of a peculiar old superstition which asserts that dwellings that are narrow at the front and wide at the back are ‘cow-faced houses’ and lucky. But she had a point in a way, in that the structure of the shop was against us. Bains Stores was mid-terrace and, unlike Dhanda’s Buy Express, which had been surrounded by vacant lots of land, there was no room for the business to expand, even if there had been a reason or incentive to do so. Moreover, Bains Stores just faced too many obstacles, not least reliance on newspaper and tobacco sales. A large part of the shop’s turnover was tied up in cigarettes, but the profit margin was tiny – we basically acted as an unpaid tax collector. A ban on tobacco displays was on the cards. Also, smuggling was killing the business. A 25g pouch of Golden Virginia was sold for £8.25 in the shop, but my aunt had recently discovered Singhfellows was flogging it illegally for as little as £5. Which explained where Ranjit got his supplies.

  Massi, incongruous in a wrap dress and Ferragamo shoes before an enormous stack of value-brand bog roll, continued. ‘So let me get this straight. Because of some vague, unwritten arrangement between my father and Dhanda, which no one really remembers being made, and no one ever discusses, they get to sell booze and Indian food, and everything else we weren’t selling in 1971, and we get, what, fags? Newspapers? Two dying trades. I mean, everyone sells everything now.’ For some reason she gestured at dog food on our trolley. ‘The car wash next door sells water and sweets. Tesco’s sells Indian food. And have you visited Buy Express recently?’

  ‘You visited Dhanda’s shop?’ I complained.

  ‘I may have popped in yesterday,’ she confessed diffidently, before striding off in the direction of the soft drinks. Suddenly the trolley felt twice as heavy, and as I struggled to catch up, I imagined what would happen next: Mr Dhanda would complain to Mum, Mum would be on at me again, and Ranjit, who was aggrieved that I had stopped seeing him, would send me a succession of aggressive texts.

  When I pulled up, my aunt was using the web browser on her phone to check whether a twenty-four-pack of Lucozade Energy was cheaper at a rival cash and carry. This was one of many reasons why she was a better retailer than me. I would never have bothered, had basically given up even visiting cash and carries when I realised you could make orders online. Surinder resumed her defence.

  ‘Look, the Dhandas visit us all the time, so why can’t I pop into theirs?’ She gestured at the crate; it turned out to be fifty pence cheaper here. ‘Shall we take two?’ She checked the best-before date, then returned to the topic. ‘I went because I needed some saag. Your mum is teaching me to cook. And I couldn’t help noticing while I was there that while they might not sell fags and newspapers, they sell Stardust and Asiana. Who decided Asian magazines weren’t part of the agreement, eh? When was it decided? Did your dad ever mention it?’

  The only thing I could recall on the theme was an argument my parents had when I was a teenager after Amy Wilson had come in and asked if she could take some chapattis for her family tea. ‘Six chapattis for the kids and one for the dog’ was the phrase she had used. Mum had sent her to Dhanda’s, who sold Indian food – enraging my father. He couldn’t see why they couldn’t start catering for such demand. Though I remembered it mainly as a comic incident. ‘Six chapattis for the kids and one for the dog’ became a catchphrase in the shop for a while. But then, like all children, I was blind to the tensions between my parents, their arguments about the shop merging into the noise of arguments about religion and parenting and everything else.

  Massi headed towards the checkout. Racially, the wholesale trade was a reversal of the retail trade: all the customers were Asian, the staff white. We began scanning our purchases. Boxes of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain, followed by Sun Valley oat bars, a case of Pringles, a box of Liquorice Allsorts, twenty to thirty outers of cigarettes. The total came to about £1,650, and as my aunt paid, she said, ‘I just don’t understand why your mother is so insistent on observing this so-called agreement. But you know what, I think your father was thinking about changing things. I’ve got something in the car I want to show you. Found it the other day when I was going through his files.’

  My heart sank. My aunt had been coming up with all sorts of strange theories since she had started going through my father’s historical accounts, wondering out loud the week before, for instance, whether he had been taking cash out of the business. ‘Did he have any gambling debts?’ she had enquired, making me roar with laughter. My father was so careful with money that he didn’t even buy lottery tickets.

  In the car, I took the document and saw nothing of any interest. It was just a leaflet entitled ‘Do I need a licence?’ and seemed to be about the process of applying for an alcohol licence.

  ‘It’s an information leaflet, Massi,’ I said, holding on to my seat and clutching Jessie as my aunt tackled a series of roundabouts at speed, boxes of Lucozade crashing about in the back of the car.

  ‘Take a closer look.’

  I tried. Someone had underlined various sentences. But then my father underlined everything he read – the paper, books. So what?

  ‘He was thinking about applying for a licence, Arjan,’ said my aunt. ‘Look.’ She pointed at something, taking her eyes off the road and a hand off the steering wheel. ‘He has underlined the bit that says, “Any Interested Party or Responsible Authority can make a representation against a new Premises Licence application.” I reckon he was thinking about asking the Dhandas if they would object. It’s a good idea. I mean I’m sure your mum will get better, but whatever happens, we need to think about selling the shop, and when we do that, we will get a better price for it as a going concern with an alcohol licence.’ She overtook a van at illegal speed. ‘We could just go ahead and apply, but it might make it easier in terms of, you know, village politics if you ask Ranjit if they would object. Could you?’

  I murmured vague assent. To be honest, I was only half listening. The way Surinder drove made me travel-sick. And turning the document around, I had seen that my father had made some notes on the back, which included the word ‘Dhanda’. Though it was not the name that had floored me. Rather, it was his painfully neat handwriting, which reminded me of the encouraging notes he would send me at university. The encouraging notes which stopped coming when I switched from medicine to art and broke his heart.

  17 – PENTHOUSE

  I REMEMBER WALKING into Blakenfields Infants for the first time and finding I was already a celebrity, known across the school as ‘the boy in the sweet shop’, an object of wides
pread, if not universal, envy. I also remember struggling with the logic. Spoilt for choice, I had never really developed a taste for chocolate or boiled sweets, preferring instead savoury foods like pakoras, which my mother made on special occasions and which Ranjit’s dad sold in his store.

  Along with this admiration came a degree of fear. My father was notorious for enforcing discipline in the shop. If you came in with a tenner he’d make sure to mention it to your folks when he saw them next. If you were caught pilfering any stock he’d drag you by the ear through Blakenfields, all the way home. God knows what would happen if I had tried that in 2012, but I still met customers who told me that they were warned to behave as children with the threat of being taken to ‘Mr Bains’ if they didn’t.

  Did my father frighten me? No. He was, admittedly, not as gushing as my mother, who incessantly had prayers said for my welfare, and worried obsessively about my diet, so much so that I became totally neurotic about food, eating little more than chips, pakoras and what I called ‘yellow dal’ with chapattis for most of my youth. But my dad was more awkward than anything. For him, fatherhood seemed to be mainly about setting rules and boundaries. He was forever lecturing, assigning exercises, making me pay for anything I broke out of my pocket money, even if it was a jar of Branston pickle in the shop. This was annoying. But never scary.

  It helped, I suppose, that I grew up knowing that, despite the discipline, my father’s life revolved around me. At least, when by 1980 he had saved enough to put a deposit down on a three-bedroom semi-detached in a (relatively) bucolic suburb of Wolverhampton, he did so because ‘Arjan will need more space when he grows up.’ When we singularly failed to spend any time in it, because it was always easier to sleep above the shop at the end of a long day, he rented it out, arguing that ‘Arjan is happier in the shop’ (which I was). It also helped that I knew he adored my mother. As the saying goes, the best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.