by Bali Rai
The old man’s reaction had been like a bomb going off. No-one had escaped the fallout. Even my mum had got shouted at for not bringing me up in the right way and being too soft on me. My old man had had a really strict upbringing. My grandfather was in the Indian army and he had made my dad and his five brothers run five miles each morning before they went into the fields to turn the soil using ploughs that were harnessed to water buffalo. We had a lot of land and half was kept for growing corn whilst the other half was paddy fields of water and rice plants. That whole way of life shaped the way that my old man thought about everything. The way that he saw it, he had been made to work hard from an early age, and that was the best way to bring up a kid. Hard work and strict discipline. It was one of the reasons he disliked Ekbal’s old man so much – because he saw him as soft.
When Harry told him about me and the shoplifting, it was like I had challenged his whole way of life – all his beliefs about what was right and wrong. And he had taken it out on everyone in the house. By the time he had finished he had made me feel like a leper. No-one in the house would talk to me or come near me. I began to realize what it must feel like for all those homeless people that we saw in town on Saturdays.
Now, this Sunday, the old man button-holed me as I sat on the sofa, my eyes glued to the live football game on the TV. Liverpool were at home to Spurs and Robbie Fowler had just missed a sitter. The game was really open, end-to-end stuff, but I could feel my dad and his bloodshot eyes glaring as I tried to keep my mind on the game.
‘Manjit, I am talking to you.’ His voice was super-calm, which was a pleasant surprise.
‘Yes, Daddy-ji,’ I replied, as Michael Owen went on one of his runs, dribbling past the Spurs midfield with ease. We were going to murder them. No problem.
‘I have spoken to a friend of mine in India, about his daughter.’ He paused for a moment. I think maybe he was waiting for me to say something. To react. But I just kept my eyes on the game and wondered what he was going to say next, about what he had agreed with his friend in India. I knew that it had to be about marriage because it had been exactly the same when he had told Harry.
We had been in the back garden playing Badminton with this cheap £9.99 set from Argos; it had a net that you tied to sticks. Harry had been getting all upset because I’d been making him look like the big whale that he was. He’d been all sweaty and out of breath when my dad walked up and told Harry that he was going to get married to the girl whose photo he had seen the week before. Just like that. My dad had already sorted everything out. They’d shown Harry a photo of the girl, dressed up in traditional gear and wearing too much make-up, then told him that it was his choice. They wanted him to make a decision – yes or no. It was all a con really. Harry didn’t really have a choice, or the opportunity to say no. All the decisions were made for him by my dad and the girl’s father. Harry had known what his answer had to be. And, for Harry, it was probably the only way he’d ever get a girl, anyway.
Thing is, I was totally different to Harry. Totally. And there was no way that I was going to say ‘yes’ to marrying some girl from India just by looking at a photo of her. No way. So I began to concentrate really hard on the football, even though my mind was all over the place, and much of what my old man said at first went in one ear, and straight out the other. I was hearing but not listening.
I managed about five minutes before the old man’s words started to cause my stomach to turn over. He was talking about me. And some girl. From India. He already had it all sorted out just like it had been with Harry. All that remained was the wedding itself. She was six months older than me and coming over to England on a visitor’s visa in July. Two months away!
‘I have told her father that you will marry her after next summer, when you are both seventeen. If we leave it any longer there will be too many questions from the immigration people. Once you are married she will have the right to stay in this country and I will have my final daughter-in-law.’
The look on my face must have said everything that I was thinking. My palms were getting all sweaty and I wanted to get out of the house. Just run. Be anywhere but where I was at that moment. I wanted to scream at him and shout and swear. Hit him. But I couldn’t do anything. My legs felt like they were frozen, like two sausages waiting to be defrosted. My mind was all jumbled up and I kept on hearing this ragga tune that Ady had about being locked up in prison for a crime that I didn’t commit. If I hadn’t caught myself, I think that I would have ended up humming the melody out loud. And then, to top it all, Spurs scored to make it one–nil. It was like a sign. I was in trouble.
My dad obviously saw my reaction because he changed his lecture to one about how it was my duty to uphold his honour, his izzat. To protect the family name and all that.
‘I do not want to be like the other men that they laugh at in the gurudwara: the ones whose sons and daughters have run away and become druggies and prostitutes, or married unsuitable people – Muslims and Hindus and goreh or, God forbid, kaleh. That is not why your mother and me brought you on to this earth. To ruin our name and rubbish our izzat. We brought you up to be a good Punjabi. And I won’t let you ruin it all because you think that you are something different from us. Something special. Blood will always be blood, Manjit. And your colour will always be your colour. Look in the mirror. You are a Punjabi, not a gorah. You are not from this country, even if you were born here. These people are not the same as us. They are not the same. We have to protect our culture, Manjit. Our way of life.
‘And do not think that I am stupid, Manjit. I have seen the way that you have been headed recently. Stealing and messing about at school. I found a cigarette in your room last week, too. You think that I will let you carry on this way? Ruining my name. No!’
I could see the anger beginning to rise up in him, like he was about to explode. His face was going red all over and the little blood vessels that he had on his cheeks and over his nose, from being an alcoholic, were showing more clearly than normal. My mum had come into the room and she sat down opposite me. I could tell from her face that she was about to launch into the kind of hysterics that she had gone into with Harry, emotional blackmail before he said ‘yes’. And he had wanted to have an arranged marriage. Just to get a girl.
‘Your poor mother has cooked and cleaned for you all these years. Wiped your backside and fed you. Think of her when you are out with that kalah of yours, smoking and chasing dirty white girls. Think of her and what the neighbours say to her when they see you walking around on Evington Road like a tramp. A criminal. Smoking your cigarettes in front of our relatives and friends, with no shame. What do you think you are, Manjit? Why do you think that I will let you be the one to ruin our name, when all of your brothers and sisters have not? Das mehnu (tell me)? Why? Do you want to kill me? Is that it? Do you want to kill your mother?’
Almost right on cue, my mum started crying and calling out to God. It was all ‘Hai Rabbah’ (Oh God) and slapping her thighs the way that Punjabi women do at funerals. I already knew that she was gonna do it – knew that she was just putting on an act to scare me into accepting their way of doing things. But even knowing this, seeing my mum crying and wailing made me feel guilty and upset, just like I was supposed to. My dad just carried on having a go at me, telling me that he was going to pull me out of school and send me to India until I agreed to do as they said. And my mum just cried. In the end I ended up crying too because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt like I was stuck. Like I had no choice. I mean, how could I become the cause of so much grief and sadness for my parents?
How could I?
CHAPTER NINE
June
TWO WEEKS AFTER that afternoon I found myself sitting in the classroom of the head of Year 10, Mr Sandhu. It was lunchtime and outside the sun was shining. It was hot for early June and we were about a week and a half from the summer holidays. I could hear all the other kids outside, messing about and having fun. And I was stuck in a stuf
fy classroom, waiting for Sandhu.
He had sent a Year 8 kid into my English lesson to tell me that I had to see him during the lunch break. It was a welcome distraction because we’d been studying World War One poetry. Some bloke called Wilfred Owen. Talk about boring.
Mr Sandhu was a proper tyrant. A teacher who ruled the classroom with fear. He was one of the deputy heads, so he was always banging on about standards and uniform and stuff. And he lost his temper really quickly, over the smallest things. He was also the school troubleshooter. The one who told kids that they were being suspended or expelled. We were supposed to be like some football team, us kids, all pulling in the same direction. Sandhu, he was like the headmaster’s sweeper – the one who cleared up all the loose balls that slipped through the net.
At first I thought I was going to get suspended but I hadn’t been in trouble for at least a couple of months and, even then, it had been nothing major. Just a scrap with a Year 11 who had been bullying me and my friends. No, it was obviously about something else. Maybe something had happened to my family or one of my friends? What if he was to tell me that my entire family had died in a car crash? Sitting there, listening to the noise from the playground, my imagination created little images: me at my entire family’s funeral, crying; then me, back at home, having the run of the place, with no-one to watch over me or tell me what to do; me doing an interview with the Leicester Mercury about the terrible tragedy. After a while I began to feel ashamed of myself. My family had all been killed and I was daydreaming about how that would lead to the freedom that I always wanted.
It was while I was feeling guilty and asking myself if serial killers began their lives daydreaming about the death of their families that Sandhu walked into the room with a cup of strong-smelling coffee in a Leicester Tigers mug. He put the mug down on his desk, walked up to the table that I was sitting at and pulled up a chair. He was so close that I could smell the coffee on his breath. He looked out of the window and ran his fingers through his grey hair.
‘Well, Manjit,’ he began. ‘I suppose you are wondering what I wanted to see you about?’
I shrugged my shoulders. I was looking at him and then looking at the clock above the classroom door, hoping that he would get on with it. I wanted to go outside and chill with Lisa. Our time together in school was precious to me because I was going to have to do some real serious storytelling to my old man to see her over the summer. Over a year together and still I had to lie about her all the time.
‘I have had it brought to my attention,’ Sandhu continued, ‘that your performance in school is dropping. Your form tutor has picked this up from one or two of the other teachers. Are they right, hmm?’
‘Dunno, sir.’ I shrugged my shoulders again.
‘Oh come along, Manjit, you do not need to play ignorant with me. We both know that you are an intelligent young man. Surely you can stretch your vocabulary to more than “dunno”. Hmm?’
It was hard to work out what was more irritating about Sandhu. The typically Indian way that he pronounced my name, so that the ‘jit’ sounded like ‘jeet’, or the way that he finished every sentence with ‘hmm’. I was really tempted to tell him to stick his vocabulary but my head told me to play along. My cheat didn’t go as far as getting myself thrown out. Sandhu got up and fetched the mug from his desk. As he sat down again, the smell of the coffee made my stomach turn.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘That’s better, hmm? Well, what do you think, Manjit. Has your performance dropped?’
‘How do you mean . . . sir?’
‘Well, up until last year you were one of the top students in your year group. We had you in all the top stream classes, did we not, apart from possibly Maths, hmm?’
‘Yeah . . .? I mean . . . Yes!’ I corrected myself real quick.
‘What we would call a promising student. On course for As and Bs across the board possibly. I know that you have a particular dislike for Maths, Manjit, but certainly you are good enough in all the other areas. Or rather you were, hmm?’
‘Suppose so, sir.’
‘You see, after your tutor – Miss Jones – expressed her concern to me, I had a word with all of your teachers. What they told me, Manjit, was not very good.’ He was looking straight at me now, his eyes fixed on mine. But he wasn’t getting angry at all. If anything he looked kind of concerned. Sandhu! Concerned. I had to be tripping.
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘Well, let’s put it this way. You are half way through your GCSEs, Manjit, and your predicted grades, if we did them today, would be as follows: English, Lit and Language, D stroke E, and that is probably your strongest subject. Sociology, D. Sciences, E. History, D. And so on. Somewhere between leaving this school at the end of Year 9 and going through Year 10, you have managed to slide from the very promising into the below average. And so I have had to ask myself why? It certainly isn’t because the work is any harder. And you cannot suddenly have become far less intelligent than you were nine or ten months ago, hmm?’
I looked at him straight in the eye for as long as I could manage before I had to look away. What was I supposed to tell him. The work wasn’t any harder. It was almost too easy for me. It was just that I couldn’t be bothered with it. All I thought about was that dreaded arranged marriage and how I could escape it and live happily ever after. How could I tell him that? He was Asian himself and probably the same kind of age as my dad. He probably had the same views and everything.
‘Is there a problem with the work, Manjit? Or something else in school that you aren’t telling me about?’
‘No, sir, not at all.’
‘Are you being bullied, Manjit? By one of the older pupils?’
‘No way, I ain’t scared of any of Year 11.’
‘But you had that trouble recently, hmm, with Manish Kotecha in 11CM. Is that all finished with?’
I wanted to laugh when he said that, but I held back. Manish was the Year 11 who had bullied me and Ady since we had first come to the school. When we’d been younger we’d hide from him and stuff. But I was the same height as him now and he’d stopped looking so scary. If anything me and Ady were now bullying him.
‘That’s all over, sir. Manish doesn’t bully me any more.’
Sandhu looked thoughtful, like he was trying really hard to work out what the problem might be. He had his chin in one hand, and was flicking the nails of his other hand against the coffee mug. I watched him do this and wondered whether he already knew that it was something else, my problem. Maybe he had guessed?
‘So you are not the subject of bullying. The work is not too difficult for you. Yet your standard of achievement when you are in school is well below that which you are capable of. And your record of unexplained absences continues to grow.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Tell me, Manjit. What do your parents think of your relationship with Lisa Jenkins . . .?’
CHAPTER TEN
June
‘HE ASKED YOU what?’ Lisa looked really shocked when I told her. ‘How did he know about us?’
‘I don’t know. He’s probably seen us together around school. It’s not like we hide our relationship. He wasn’t having a go at me or anything. He was concerned.’
It sounded amazing but it was true. Sandhu knew that I was having problems at home. He’d asked me about Lisa and how my parents were about it. When I told him that they didn’t know about her, he just laughed and started banging on about the generation gap and the pressures of being young and Asian in Britain.
‘He was talking about the difference in culture and things like that. He said he understood all about it.’
‘So did you tell him about the way your parents are forcing you to have an arranged marriage?’
‘A little bit. I just told him that my parents expected me to be something I’m not and about how they think school is a waste of time. And the craziest thing is that he’s married to a white woman.’
‘Who? Mr Sandhu?�
� Lisa looked amazed.
‘Yeah, told me himself. Says that if I think it’s hard now, imagine what it was like for him in the 1960s.’
‘I don’t think I want to. Some of the looks I get when we go into town are enough. Aren’t people really strange?’
‘No, some of them are just stupid and can’t see past what colour a certain person is.’
‘I’m glad my parents aren’t like that.’ She looked at me with her bright green eyes and then looked away in embarrassment. ‘I don’t mean that I’m glad that your parents are like that. It’s just that . . .’
‘Hey, chill out. I know what you mean.’
We were sitting on some steps that led up to the tennis courts during the afternoon break. Ady wasn’t in school, or at least no-one had seen him. He had been hanging around with his brother quite a lot recently, and I hadn’t really heard from him. Knowing him, he was probably with Sarah somewhere, listening to underground garage music and talking rubbish with his cap on back to front. I realized suddenly how much I missed him and decided to try and call him. As I thought about him Lisa gave me a peck on the cheek and the teachers came out to round up everyone for the last lessons of the day.
