(Un)arranged Marriage

by Bali Rai

  ‘You are right, Manjit. We are all monkeys in the end. It’s just that we do not have tails,’ he replied, laughing again.

  ‘You see, I knew you’d agree.’

  ‘Ah, but even in the monkey world there are big monkeys and little monkeys. Leaders and followers.’

  ‘So you’re a follower-monkey then?’ I smiled.

  Mohan scratched the greying stubble on his chin before replying, ‘Maybe so, Manjit. It is too late for me. This is all I really know. My sons may be different, who knows?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you want though, Mohan-ji?’

  ‘What we chamarr want and what we are allowed to have, well, that is two different things.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think us Jat are any better than you. We just have all the money and the land, and that doesn’t make us any better.’

  Mohan began to laugh again. ‘For such a young monkey you are very wise,’ he said.

  ‘Just haven’t got a tail.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, lighting a Four Square that I had given to him. ‘You just haven’t got a tail. That’s all.’

  For such a skinny little man, Mohan was also very strong and on a number of occasions I was astounded to see just how much weight he could carry. He’d pick up a cast-iron plough like it was nothing and regularly carried several bundles of wood across his shoulders whilst I only just managed to lift one bundle to waist height. I suppose he must have been around forty or something but the muscles in his back and arms looked better than those on a twenty-year-old weightlifter.

  ‘Come, Manjit,’ he’d say as I watched him lift things as if they had no weight. ‘Let’s build up your strength for you. You foreigners are too soft.’ When I complained, he’d just laugh at me and go on about how easy life was for all the people who had left India and gone to England or America. Thing was, easy or not, it was my real life and even though my conversations with Mohan cheered me up, it was the life that I wanted to have back.

  I got a letter from Jas about two weeks after my parents had returned to England without me. It was around the third week of August and I had been in India now since the beginning of June. Aunt Harpal handed me the envelope – one of those blue airmail things – and I wanted to tear it open straight away. I made myself wait until I had reached the privacy of my little hideaway before I finally did though, to make sure that any reaction that I had to it would be in private. The first page of the letter was full of apologies from Jas about what had happened. How she hadn’t known anything about what they were planning and how my dad had planned it all from the start. If she had known, she wrote, she never would have encouraged me to travel with them.

  Harry had been in on it too, although Ranjit only found out about it on their return to Leicester, which I found hard to believe. Basically they had left me in India so that they could arrange a date for my wedding and get everything planned. My old man had been worried that I might do a runner if I returned to England and had told Jas that it was all for my own good, that the experience would make a man of me. Anyway, the wedding was arranged now, a few months later than originally planned, now set for November, the day of my seventeenth birthday. I was to marry the girl that my father had told me about ages ago – the one who had apparently come over last summer for a visit. He was going to send me a ticket towards the end of September and Ranjit and Harry were going to meet me at the airport. I sat back and thought for a minute. Something was bothering me. Something that I felt I should have picked up on. I thought a little more and then continued to read Jas’s neat handwriting.

  . . . you received a letter last week which I collected and opened for you, I hope you don’t mind. It was from one of your old classmates, Ady. He wanted to know where you were and what was going on. Apparently he has tried to get in touch all summer. Anyway he gave his new address and asked you to write to him. He also wrote that a girl called Lisa had been asking about you via the Internet. Is that another of your old classmates? Her e-mail address was in his letter too and I have written them both down for you at the end of this page. Your dad doesn’t know that I have written to you and I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell him. I just feel so guilty that you have been left there all by yourself when we are all at home. You may not believe me but I really miss having my little brother-in-law around to talk to. I really do. I’m so sorry about what has happened. I honestly didn’t know that they were planning any of this.

  See you in a few weeks

  Love Jas.

  Once I had reread it all, I folded the letter and put it in the breast pocket of my short-sleeved shirt, removing my fags at the same time. I lit one with a flimsy match that had more sulphur on its head than wood on the stick and settled back into the hammock. A whole football team of little thoughts started playing a match in my head and I tried to make sense of them all. Ady, Lisa. Had Ady e-mailed her? Or Sarah? Were they in regular contact? Where was she – still in Australia? Was Ady a dad yet? Had he realized that I was missing? Had he told anyone else?

  And then a problem hit me. My passport. For me to get back home I needed to have my passport. That meant that they couldn’t have taken it back with them, and it certainly couldn’t have been stolen by some dodgy travel agent. It had to be in the house somewhere, hidden from me by Uncle Piara. I made a mental note to try and find out where before I re-lit my cigarette and thought about Lisa for the first time in weeks.

  I must have fallen asleep on the hammock again because I was woken by the sound of a booming voice. Something about the way that it sounded was familiar although I couldn’t quite identify what. As I blinked into the sunlight I tried to work out who was standing beside my hammock. The man repeated himself and I worked out what he was saying to me.

  ‘Who’s this monkey sleeping in my hammock?’

  His voice was really deep, or at least it seemed that way to me and something about the whole situation was strange. His voice sounded familiar but not, and I felt immediately confused. Sitting up and looking at him, I saw that he was about my father’s height and had long, curly hair down to his shoulders – like mine would have been if I let it grow. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans that looked like 501s, a blue Adidas sweatshirt and a pair of Nike trainers that I’d never seen before – and I knew my trainers. I blinked at him in the sunshine and tried to work out who he was and why he was so normally dressed, or at least normal in the way that I understood it.

  ‘Come along, out of my bed, young man,’ he said, smiling at me.

  Again, he sounded familiar. My brain was playing a second period of extra time trying to work out who he was when I saw Mohan approaching. I raised my eyebrows at him and then looked at the man in front of me. Mohan came over, grinning like an idiot and gestured to the man.

  ‘Say hello to your youngest uncle, Manjit.’

  I looked up at him and blinked some more.

  ‘And get yourself out of my bed.’ He was grinning too, my uncle, and as I muttered a weak greeting to him I realized what was so strange about the whole situation. Mohan and I, we were talking in Punjabi. My uncle had said everything in perfect English. As I realized this he smiled at me and he winked, reading my thoughts before they connected to my mouth.

  ‘Yes, I am your youngest uncle and, yes, I can speak English. It’s nice to meet you, Manjit.’ He smiled and offered me his hand. ‘I’m Jag.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  August

  THE DAY AFTER I first met Uncle Jag he left to visit some friends, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to him at first. He intrigued me, partly because he was the black sheep of the family – the one who was hardly ever mentioned – and partly because he looked to me like a normal bloke, like the people back at home. He also spoke English without an Indian accent.

  He was gone for two days, time which I spent asking questions about him of anyone who would answer. Inderjit and Jasbir didn’t really know much; most of what they told me was just the two of them parroting the stuff that they had been told by their pare
nts. Inderjit told me that Uncle Jag was a strange man, not proud of the family like everyone else, not willing to lend a hand with the crops or the upkeep of the house and spending most of his time in other countries. His father, my Uncle Piara, had warned Inderjit away from Jag, calling him a bad example for the rest of the family.

  ‘He is not a good man,’ Inderjit told me as we sat in the mango grove smoking cigarettes. ‘There is too much rubbish going on in his head. My daddy-ji told me that he has all these fancy ideas about things and is not proud to be a Jat like we are.’

  ‘He has strange ideas about our traditions and our religion,’ added Jasbir, flicking a matchstick into the air. The midmorning sun was sweltering again and I had a line of sweat heading its way across my forehead just below my hairline. Even in the shade, the heat was clinging to me like a jacket. I sat and smoked my fag and thought some more about my youngest uncle.

  Then I remembered listening to a conversation that my old man had once had, over the phone with Uncle Piara and what had followed. I had been about eleven at the time. The old man had sworn down the long-distance line at his brother. ‘We don’t need Jag’s dirty money,’ he had shouted before slamming the phone down and storming into the kitchen to look for his bottle of Teacher’s whisky. I remembered waiting for him to calm down so that I could ask him about all the fuss but he just kept on swearing to himself as he walked into the living room and sat down in his favourite chair, a full tumbler of whisky in his hands, eyes pointed at the telly. He went on and on about the family name, his father’s honour. About how someone should have held someone else down and beaten him into a real man.

  All I’d wanted to know was who this ‘Jag’ actually was and when I eventually managed to get a word in, all I did was start him off again on one of his rants about family honour. He told me that in every family there was always one who wanted chol (rice) when everyone else had to eat roti: something that he would accuse me of later in my life. When I asked Ranjit, he told me Uncle Jag was a bad man who didn’t like the rest of the family.

  Harry’s contribution was predictable. ‘He’s gay anyway, innit. The poof,’ for which he got a smack in the mouth from Ranjit. Not because Ranjit wasn’t homophobic, oh no. It was because, according to my eldest brother, being gay was something Punjabi men didn’t do. Especially not in our family.

  ‘So what has he actually done?’ I remember asking.

  ‘He’s sent some money to Uncle-ji in India, innit, to buy some lands with. After all the time he ain’t been in the family, now he wants everything. Daddy-ji won’t let him though cos it ain’t right, is it. He just wants to take our lands and that, you know.’ I just nodded at Ranjit, pretending that I understood what it was all about, so that they’d think of me as a grown-up and not a kid. That had been my earliest recollection of Uncle Jag’s name being mentioned in our house and I suppose that it had shaped the way that I thought about him and the person that he was. To tell you the truth, until he’d told me to get out of his hammock in perfect English, I hadn’t really given him that much thought. Now he was fast becoming the only intriguing person in my entire family, someone who had broken away and done what he had wanted and not what the family expected of him. I was dying to find out some more.

  Later on that day I was helping Aunt Harpal with some chores around the house and I asked her about my wayward uncle. She gave me a funny look as she swept dust and dirt from the living room out onto the veranda that ran across the ground floor of the house. She waited until she had finished sweeping before answering me.

  ‘Jag is a very strange man. We think that he has a wife and children somewhere but no-one is really sure. He spends a lot of time in Australia and other places, travelling and working, I think. I don’t really know and he never talks to me or anyone else in the family about it.’

  ‘But he seems quite nice, Aunti-ji,’ I replied, trying to defend him even though I didn’t really know him.

  ‘What you see, Manjit, is only one part of him. He can be very nice but also very uncaring. When your grandfather died he didn’t even send a letter, never mind come back for the funeral.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know,’ I said, trying to remember when my grandfather had died.

  ‘Beteh, he knew. Your Uncle Piara sent him a telegram to let him know. He was working in Saudi Arabia at the time.’

  ‘Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘Yes, beteh. He has worked in many different countries – just never his own.’

  ‘But what does he do?’ I asked, watching Aunt Harpal flicking a fly from her face and then smiling.

  ‘Who knows, beteh. He tells no-one and no-one asks him about it.’

  My face must have shown my surprise and lack of understanding of her attitude towards my youngest uncle. She laughed and then said something about helping her clean out the water-buffalo feeding-pen. I decided to wait until my uncle got back from his trip so that I could ask him for myself.

  On the morning that Uncle Jag was due to return, I went down to the haveli earlier than usual. It must have been around eight in the morning and the sun was trying to break through the white clouds above me as I lay in the hammock. It was already very warm and I was glad that I had decided to wear a light cotton T-shirt and some shorts. It was going to be yet another scorching day, just like every other that I had seen since arriving in India.

  According to Inderjit and Mohan it should have rained by now and they were worried that the crops would suffer if the rain stayed away. Personally, I was thankful for the drought because it kept both of them busy in the fields and I wanted some time to myself, alone to think. I had Jas’s letter with me and I read and reread the part about Ady before looking at his new address. He was living in Highfields, on Cedar Road, where we used to mess about as kids. Maybe he had moved in with his brother. Or was he working and renting somewhere of his own now?

  I really needed to write to my best friend, to explain where I was and what had happened. Just be able to get all of my feelings off my chest in the way that I was used to. Thing was, the shops in the village didn’t sell airmail envelopes and the post office had been closed since I got there. The nearest one was in Jullundur and I wasn’t allowed to leave the village on my own. Uncle Piara had refused to give me an envelope when I had asked, telling me that I had to wait, on my old man’s orders, until I got back to England. I wasn’t allowed to write any letters or to phone anyone and I had no idea what they had done with my passport.

  As I lay there thinking about it I began feeling very depressed. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about Leicester and the fun I had as a kid, but it didn’t work. The more that I thought about positive things, the more the negatives outweighed them. I ended up lying on the hammock staring up at the sky, convinced that, despite the sunshine that beamed down, a personal grey cloud was following me around.

  I must have fallen asleep because when I awoke the sun was right above me, burning down over the fields and the houses, dry and hot and airless. I felt like I was suffocating, my head throbbing. Each time I closed my eyes I saw blood-red dots and sweat was pouring from me. I fell out of the hammock as I tried to get up and the force of my landing on the dry floor cut gashes across both my knees. I blinked into the sun, my eyelids faster than a camera shutter at a show-biz exclusive and then tried to get up, slowly. My head spun around as I brushed the sandy dust away from my cuts. All of a sudden I felt I was going to puke. The cut to my left knee poured blood, trickling slowly down the hair of my shin. I closed my eyes, trying to clear my head, but all I saw was more blood and blinding dots that flashed red then yellow, then red then yellow. I opened my eyes and tried not to sway from side to side as my stomach turned over. The haveli was about two hundred metres behind the main house and I started to make my way back slowly. The walk should have been a short one, only every time that I put weight on either foot, I felt a shooting pain in the shin and knee. I felt like I had been walking for ages by the time that I reached the house. I walked around to the fron
t and into the courtyard, the blood from my left knee now in my trainer and my eyes watering from the pain. My head throbbing in the dry heat, I looked around for a member of my family.

  The courtyard was empty except for the water buffalo in the corner. Hobbling across the yard and on to the veranda, I caught raised voices, shouting at each other in Punjabi. One of them belonged to Uncle Piara and the other to Uncle Jag. They were in the living room that I had helped Aunt Harpal to sweep out the day before and I decided to hobble towards them, trying not to collapse as my head swirled around like water going down a plug hole. As I reached the door their words became clear.

  ‘. . . defending the family name. That’s all I’m doing.’

  ‘It’s called kidnap in any other country,’ shouted Uncle Jag.

  ‘What do you know with your stupid ideas, Jagtar? It is for his own good. It’s something that we should have done with you at the same age. You might be a real Jat now.’

  ‘But you never could . . .’

  ‘And look at what you have become. A disgrace!’ replied Uncle Piara. They both took a breath before Uncle Jag answered.

  ‘He’s just a child. What is wrong with all of you? Why can’t you let people alone to be what they are?’

  ‘What, so they can end up whoring around the world like you?’