(Un)arranged Marriage

by Bali Rai

  Ady had got us onto the guest list of this new club just outside town, where his brother was a doorman and where the house DJ, Bump Allen, was playing. I’d heard him once before, back before I was expelled from school and he had been wicked. Normally I only listened to ragga or jungle, but Ady said that we should broaden our horizons, musically, and I was up for that, especially as it was free.

  ‘Honeyz, man. Nuff gal,’ he said as we stood by the bar in the upstairs room, trying to avoid spilling our drinks. It was heaving in there, and the air-conditioning didn’t seem to be working. For a moment the temperature reminded me of being in India because my shirt was stuck to my back and my forehead was dripping with sweat. I gave Ady my beer to look after and headed through the crowd for the toilets, wanting to throw some water on my face to stop me looking like a sweaty geek – even if everyone else in the place was sweating the same way. I walked in past two girls who were giggling at each other, pissed up to a point where they thought it was clever to be in the men’s toilets. One of them was wearing a see-through black dress with only a thong on underneath and the other had on a short black dress that showed off how big her tits were. I gave them a sly look on my way back towards the bar but not for too long. My mind was on Lisa, whether she was going to turn up – and what I was going to say to her if she did.

  When I got back, Ady was chatting to Sarah but still eyeing up every other girl that went by. Sarah didn’t look even slightly bothered by what he was doing but after so long, I suppose she was used to him playing the idiot. I knocked my beer back, then headed downstairs to the foyer area. Steve, Ady’s brother, was standing just inside the door, chatting to a tall blond girl. I gave him a smile and walked outside. Around twenty people were milling about in the car park, doing the same as me. I went and sat on the car-park wall, facing the door. About ten minutes later, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, expecting to see an old school friend and my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

  Lisa.

  ‘Hello stranger.’

  I didn’t even reply. Jumping off the wall, I hugged her so hard that she went red, then broke away and looked at her. She looked wicked. Her hair was a lot shorter, almost cropped to her head, and she had a really deep tan which stood out against the little white top she was wearing. I couldn’t look away. I just stood there staring at her and holding her hand. And then she started to cry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  November

  SUNDAY NIGHTS BECAME a regular ‘overtime’ slot for me at work. I’d leave the house at six and come back in at around eight the next morning, having spent the night with Lisa at her parents’ house. After meeting up again that night, it was like we’d never been apart. Lisa told me that she had missed me as much as I had missed her, and that she had been worried that I might not come back from India at all. Her parents had been great, welcoming me back like a long-lost son, and telling me that I could stay whenever I wanted to. My cheat was all but planned by then and I let Lisa and her dad in on it. They were a bit shocked but still told me that I had their backing.

  Having Lisa to confide in again really helped to sort my head out. I had talked to Ady about things quite a lot but Lisa had this totally different way of looking at things. She kept on telling me that I had to get out, get away from the whole marriage thing, today. Now. Her argument was that I didn’t need to get revenge on my family. I should just tell them to leave me alone and walk out. After all, I had a job now and I was earning good money for a seventeen-year-old, enough to rent a flat. The thing is, it wasn’t what Lisa said that made her so special. It was the fact that she totally believed in me, and did her best to understand my situation. She was like another version of Jag, only not as wise yet, with her ‘you have to do it’ attitude. There were times when I would begin to doubt what I was going to do. Was I gonna be able to just walk out on my family. How was I going to survive? All that sort of stuff. Lisa was like my straight and narrow path guide, pushing me on in the right direction. And I loved her for it. Especially as the wedding drew closer and closer.

  Two weeks before the actual day of the wedding, the girl’s family came round on a Sunday afternoon. The girl didn’t actually come with them. There were about fifteen of them, all crammed into our living room, drinking tea and eating samosas. All of them were looking at me, but not one actually spoke to me or asked me anything. I felt like some kind of prize bull surrounded by farmers eager to get their cows pregnant. They were all assuming that I was fine with the whole thing, and I let them think that way. To tell you the truth, I was past the point of caring by then. One half of me was scared and nervous, still questioning what I was doing, and the other was defiant. Man, I had the secret code. All I had to do now was type it in and the cheat would work its magic and take me on, up to the next level, past all the monsters in my way.

  I just sat there, on my chair, staring down at the floor or up at the ceiling. At one point the girl’s aunt made a crack about how I was shy and embarrassed which made all the women and some of the men laugh. I zoomed out of the room, out of the whole situation, until I was like a fly on the wall, looking down at what was going on, watching and studying my subjects. Anyone looking in would have seen a happy gathering of in-laws on a warm Sunday afternoon in November. Everyone was chatting and smiling, passing round food and cups of tea, and talking with excitement about the forthcoming wedding. But zoom in close and it was a different picture. My old man was sitting in a ruffled beige suit, his Sunday best, with his eyes all bloodshot and his hands shaking from a lack of booze. My supposed father-in-law looked pretty much the same as my old man, only his suit was black and he had a turban wrapped around his head. My brothers were sitting, slurping their tea and stuffing samosas into their gobs – water buffalo at feeding time. My mum was talking about how lucky we were to be such a well-off family, with such good sons. Not like the family in No. 52 whose son had run off with a white girl, or the daughter from No.63 who married a Hindu. And then there was the Muslim family in No. 25 whose grandfather and father were in prison for smuggling heroin and weed. Me, the intended groom? I was being told in a low whisper by Jas to smile. Don’t upset the apple cart. DON’T UPSET THE APPLE CAR . . .

  Only the apples were rotten and I didn’t want them anyway.

  Later, after my ‘in-laws’ had gone, my old man came up to me as I was getting ready for my ‘overtime’. He was carrying a wad of cash in his hands and smiling. I was in the kitchen, making myself a cheese and pickle sandwich, and, although I tried to ignore him, he came up and grabbed the back of my neck in his big, meaty hand. The smell of booze invaded my nose. So much for not drinking on Sundays I thought to myself. He must have had a couple of crafty shots when no-one had been watching.

  ‘Good boy, ju are the good boy, Manjit,’ he said in his broken, dodgy English before switching to Punjabi. ‘Here, take this money and buy yourself a suit for the wedding. Get a shirt and tie too.’

  ‘I’ve got all of those already,’ I told him, not wanting to take his dough.

  ‘No! You have to take it. You have done me proud, beteh.’ His eyes started to well up as the booze in his blood began to make him all emotional.

  ‘I’ve got a suit and all that. I don’t need another one,’ I said, hoping that he’d wander off and leave me alone. He didn’t. He just stood there, squeezing my neck even harder, tears in his eyes.

  ‘I remember when I got married,’ he told me. ‘We couldn’t afford a suit so I had to borrow one from my cousin, Jit. Oh what a happy day that was. We drank so much whisky and ate so much meat. Just like you youngsters do now. The best party of your life is the day of your marriage.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure it is,’ I replied in English, all sarcastic, but he didn’t hear me. He just kept on talking.

  ‘You’ll see. You thought that we were trying to ruin your life with this but you will see. Even after all the bad things that you have done to us, Manjit, you have still turned out to be a good Punjabi man. You’ll see. Soon you w
ill have a wife and children to look after and then you will know what I have been through, the pressure I have to face.’

  I looked at him and wondered whether he was telling me all this stuff to make me feel bad or because he just wanted to get it off his chest. I had heard him say the same shit to my brothers and always when he’d had a skinful to drink, like he couldn’t open up unless he was so drunk that he was close to passing out. Sometimes I’d felt bad for him, wondering what made him drink so much. But there was nothing wrong with his life. He had a house and a job and all his kids had done what he wanted – apart from me. He was just a pisshead. An alcoholic. And that was no-one’s fault but his own.

  ‘Here,’ he said thrusting the money into my hands. ‘Take this and make me proud of you, Manjit.’

  I counted the money quickly. It was around six hundred quid in twenties and tens. Realizing that he had just provided me with the last part of my cheat, I pocketed the money and said thank you, feeling bad for a minute that I had taken it, before I went back to thinking for me and not for him. After all the punches and the kicks and the beatings with sticks that I had taken from him throughout my life, not to mention all the lies and the emotional stuff, surely I was entitled to take his money, especially as it was probably going to be for the last time.

  I’d explained to Ady what I had planned and what I needed him to do. He was cool about it but still wanted to know why I was going to wait for so long. Why not just walk out now? The answer was no. Right or wrong, it was something that I wanted to do. That I needed to do. I had to show them that I was different from them. An individual. That all their threats and violence and money and everything couldn’t stop me being what I wanted to be. And once I had explained all of that to Ady he started to agree with me.

  ‘Listen, Manny, do what you feel an’ that, but make sure you understand. Once you do this, they’re gonna want your blood.’

  ‘I know, Ady. And I don’t care. They’ve had enough of my blood already.’

  ‘And you know that you’ll never be able to go back.’

  I looked at him and tried to smile, only I couldn’t. ‘Yeah. I know that this will be the end of my relationship with all of them. That’s all I’ve thought about for the past year. For the past four years. It’s too late to change it now.’

  ‘What, definitely?’ asked Ady, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘Yeah, One hundred per cent. I’m never going to forgive them for all the shit, India and all that. Never.’

  ‘Well in that case,’ smiled Ady, ‘you can count on me, boss.’

  ‘Thanks, man. It means a lot to me.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Cool.’ I looked at him and winked.

  ‘Now,’ replied Ady, winking back. ‘We gonna synchronize watches or what?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Friday 28th November

  ‘I’M GONNA TIDY up my room in a bit, get it all cleared up and ready.’

  Harry winked at me and grinned. ‘You’re gonna have to get rid of all your magazines now,’ he said. ‘Never mind, you’ll be getting plenty of the real thing soon, innit?’

  ‘Don’t be so crude, Harry,’ replied Jas, acting as my protector. ‘Manny isn’t like you. He’s a much more sensitive man.’

  I let them carry on: Harry laughing at the fact that Jas had called me sensitive – not that he knew what it meant anyway; and Jas acting as my favourite sister-in-law and best friend rolled into one. I just smiled and let them get on with it, buzzing with the thought that they had all fallen for my little act and laughing inside at how easy tricking them had been. Man, they were like one hundred per cent stupid. I mean, as far as they were concerned I’d had a complete personality change – gone from being totally against getting married only a few weeks earlier, to being up for it. I had stoked the fire a bit by admitting to Jas that I was ‘looking forward’ to settling down, that I’d realized my duty to the family and all that shit. She had passed that on to Ranjit, who in turn had told the old man. Even my mum had come up to me earlier in the day to tell me what a wonderful son I had finally become. Easy as. And I didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty for it. They only liked me again because they thought that I had caved in to all the pressure. They weren’t interested in me, the person that I was, not if it didn’t match their idea of right and wrong. The more that they were nice to me, the more I saw just how two-faced they really were. And that made me mad. It was like my old man saying, ‘Hey, I know that I’ve kicked seven shades of shit out of you for most of your life, but look at this. I’m sorry, I really am and here’s a wife and lots of money to prove it.’ They made me sick, All of them.

  I left them to their fake joy and went upstairs to my room to ‘tidy up’. Punjabi weddings are traditionally stretched out over three days, with the actual ceremony on the last of those days – and the first two days of this were today and tomorrow. It’s an excuse to have a big party, although there are all these mini-ceremonies that have to be done at set times on each day. The house was full of people. Although it was still early on Friday morning, some of my uncles, aunts and cousins were beginning to arrive already, all of them congratulating me on my good luck and telling me that I was making my old man very happy, and for that I was a good son, and could I talk to so and so who was on the path to wicked ways and needed the guidance of a good Punjabi boy to straighten him out. It was a complete head trip and there would be even more people turning up tomorrow. Thing was, all the people around gave me the cover I needed to get phase one of my cheat into action. I had told Jas that there was a lot of junk in my room, lots of things that I wouldn’t be needing now that I was going to be a ‘man’ and all that. I was going to put all that stuff into black bags and carry it all down to Evington Road and dump it at one of the charity shops. Jas offered to drive me but I refused, saying that I needed the air and that I was a bit nervous about the wedding and wanted to get my head straight. Because I had agreed to the wedding, I was like a freeman of the city as far as my family were concerned. No more questions about where I was going and what I was doing. No more suspicions. All of which suited my plan.

  I made four trips in all, packing into the bags all the things that I couldn’t do without. The heaviest one contained my books and stuff, so I took it first. It was a long walk to Ady’s place with a heavy black bag in each hand, and by midafternoon my arms were aching, but at least I now had the majority of my things out of the house. I used the clothes and other bits that I was leaving behind to disguise the fact that I had moved out in all but body: a pair of old jeans over a chair, a few CD cases on the bed, some magazines and so on. No-one asked me a thing as I moved my stuff. I mean, I passed by my old man, my mum, Harry, both my sisters-in-law, uncles, aunts, you name it. It was like I was invisible to them as they went about the preparations for my wedding.

  After I had returned from my last trip to Ady’s, I shut myself in my room and chilled out, looking forward to the party later that evening, not because I was happy or excited about the wedding, but because I was nervous and excited about my new future, the one that I had in my head. I kept on turning it over and over in my mind until my brain started to ache and I needed to be able to forget about it. The party would be the perfect way to do that, with all the free booze everywhere and no-one bothered about whether I was pissed or not. They would probably encourage it, my family, because they saw hard drinking as a way of proving that you had become a man. To my brothers it showed that I had become ‘one of them’, and for my own purposes I needed to let them believe that for the next two days.

  That evening I had to go through a ceremony where this yellow dough shit is slapped all over your face. It’s called a saggan, which means ‘blessing’, and the dough is made up of flour, turmeric powder to give it colour and mustard oil. I’d seen it done to my brothers and thought that it was nasty then, but actually having the stuff slapped all over my face and neck by Jas and Baljit and all my aunts was like a nightmare. There I was, surrounded by all th
ese cackling hags, all trying to coat me in this foul-smelling stuff that took about twenty minutes to wash off and I couldn’t do anything about it. They did it out in the garden too, and because it was the end of November, it was quite cold.

  Later on my family had gathered for the first of the pre-wedding parties. Some party it was going to be, not that I’d expected it to be much in the first place. All family parties went the same way. The men got together in one room, getting drunk, while the women congregated in another, gossiping and watching old wedding videos. There were some kids on the stairs – the sons and daughters of various first and second cousins, half of whose names I wasn’t too sure of – and as I tried to get past them and up the stairs, I heard Ranjit call out after me from the front room.

  ‘Oi! Wedding boy. Where you goin’? Come and have a beer, innit.’

  ‘In a minute,’ I replied, ‘I’m just going to eat my dinner.’

  ‘What you got there? Samosas?’

  ‘No, just a cheese sandwich.’

  ‘Cheese? Why you wanna eat cheese for? We got tandoori chicken coming in a minute an’ you eating cheese. Come and have some of the real food, innit.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘Then you coming to the pub with us, Manjit. Just us young ’uns. None of the fogeys.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll pass, man. I’ll come down tomorrow. I’m a bit tired tonight.’ There was no way I was going down the pub with them – act or no act. Instead I took a walk up to Ady’s to finalize the plans for my cheat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO