by Meera Syal
Mama knelt down next to me and felt my brow. ‘You should not listen to such things. I am sorry.’ She closed the window smartly and made me lie down, tucking the leaden quilt around me. ‘Mrs Christmas did not suffer. She’s okay now. Do you understand?’
I nodded, and then whispered, ‘I saw her. Today. I saw her head. She was watching telly …’
Mama’s eyes narrowed, ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough lying for one day, Meena?’ I opened my mouth to protest but caught the steel tempered with concern snapping in her eyes. I imagined having to retell the whole story, about meeting Anita, the yelling, Mr Christmas’ fury, and then maybe the police would get involved and maybe, and the thought hit me in the solar plexus, maybe Mrs Christmas had been alive until we ran down the side of her house and our banshee wails had shaken her walls and burst the thing in her stomach. Maybe me and Anita Rutter were murderers. It did not matter that it had all been her idea, I had gone along with it, I had done it, and now we were joined in Sin, and we would have to carry around our guilty secret until we died.
‘I meant…last time I saw her. She had the telly on. Ages ago.’ Mama nodded satisfied, and patted me reassuringly before retreating and gently closing the door. I heard engines revving up. I had to see. I got up and went to the window, just in time to catch the ambulance and police car pulling away at high speed and the group of onlookers slowly dispersing. Amongst them, grinning and shivering with cold, was Anita Rutter. For some reason, she looked up suddenly, straight into my eyes, and I could have sworn that she winked.
Three weeks later, having just returned from a short spell in hospital, Mr Christmas died in his sleep. He was buried with Mrs Christmas, whose body had just been released from autopsy, in a pre-booked single grave in the grounds of the Anglican Church in the neighbouring village. This deeply upset Mr Ormerod who had assumed all these years that the Christmases were Wesleyan Methodists like the rest of the community, and thus they had selfishly deprived Tollington and our church of its first funerals for five years.
My mother attended the funeral; she was taking Mrs Worrall anyway in our family Austin Mini, a feat of spatial engineering in itself with Mrs Worrall’s bulk plus her bodyweight again contained in her huge black hat. Mama agonised for hours whether to wear white, as in traditional Hindu mourning, and thus risk upsetting the conventional mourners, which was everybody, or stick to black, the only black garment she possessed being an evening sari shot through with strands of shimmering silver thread, not quite the garb for a midday gathering on a windswept former slagheap. ‘For God’s sake, it does not matter what you wear. That won’t bring the poor old man back, will it?’ snapped my father, who had been strangely depressed since this tragic double whammy.
Mama eventually plumped for a grey trouser suit, the nearest shade she could get to a compromise, and returned from the funeral red-eyed and subdued. She flopped down on the flowery suite next to papa who had not moved the whole time she had been away, but sat glued to the television screen not seeing what he was watching. It was almost the end of the summer holidays, the last week there would be cartoons on in the daytime, all day, Scooby Doo, Wacky Races, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, my favourite programme, with the deliciously pouting Troy Tempest who was in love with the indifferent, amphibious Marina, for whom I developed a deep, passionate hatred. Could she not see how much Troy loved her? Why did she emit bubbles instead of speaking to him? How could she turn this macho marionette down? (I suspect here began my taste in remote, handsome wooden men. Troy Tempest has a lot to answer for…)
Normally, papa would have switched off this marathon fayre of inanimate drama after an hour and ordered me to get a book or go outside and get some fresh air, but today, he just left me to get on with it. Mama moved closer to him, she seemed swollen and bovine, and laid his head on her shoulder, talking softly to him in Punjabi, soothing but firm. It never ceased to amaze me how expertly she rode and reined in my father’s moods, the long silences and intense looks which would send me into a panic and force me to scuttle round him, scanning his face for the return of that tender familiarity.
At times like this, mama operated just like the men on the Waltzer ride in the travelling fair that came to the village every autumn. While we tossed around, shrieking, in our high-sided whirling cars, these men, nonchalantly chewing or smoking, would straddle the heaving wooden floor like they were walking on water, still cocky centres in a screaming storm, tilting their bodies away from every twist and heave so that they remained perfectly upright. Although papa’s moods were unsettling, I never felt they were directed at me, unless I’d done something specifically naughty, and even then I knew forgiveness was never far away. He always seemed more angry at himself for allowing the big black crow to settle on his shoulder and make itself comfortable. When I was upset I was like mama, we cried instinctively and often. But I had never seen papa cry and wondered if he would feel better if, occasionally, he could let himself go.
I caught a few English phrases, half-listening as I fixed on the flickering screen: ‘…can’t worry about them, worrying won’t do anything …’ Mama whispered. Papa said, ‘When they go, we won’t be with them. We will get a letter, or a phone call in the middle of the night…everything left unsaid.’ They were talking about their parents, the grandparents I had never seen except in the framed photographs that hung in my parents’ bedroom.
Mama’s mother, my Nanima, looked like a smaller, fatter version of her, all bosom and stomach and yielding eyes, whilst her husband, Nanaji, towered over her, erect and to attention, regal in his tightly wound turban and long grey beard. Papa’s parents seemed more relaxed, more used to the camera. My Dadaji was smiling toothlessly into the lens, a tall man but stooped by years of tap-tapping at a desk in a faceless government office, who supplemented his existence as a clerk with passionate literate articles in the left-wing press, which he composed on his daily walk to the market for fresh vegetables. And my Dadima, an ocean of goodness contained in a loosely wound sari, a carefree grin belying the suffering that had touched all of that generation.
Papa had got the best of both his parents: Dadima’s generous mouth and affectionate eyes, Dadaji’s pride and cheekbones. And while papa spoke copiously about his mother, her sweetness, her courage, her patience, his references to Dada were less frequent and always more surprising. Once, after we had watched footage of Russian tanks parading past some half-dead leaders on the TV news, papa said casually, ‘Your Dada was a communist. That’s why I never learned any of the prayers, but I can tell you what the GNP of Kerala is …’
I did not understand all of this, though it made mama laugh until she cried, but I did gather that it was somehow Dada’s fault that we did not have a homemade Hindu shrine with statues and candles on top of our fridge like all my other Aunties.
On another occasion, another mehfil, after papa had just finished a song to rapturous Vas!, my Auntie Shaila leaned over to papa and squeezed his arm playfully, her breasts hanging over the harmonium so that they brushed the keys and played a discordant fanfare. ‘Kumar saab,’ she shouted, ‘you should have been in films!’
‘I was offered a contract, when I was younger,’ papa smiled back, ‘but my father refused to let me go. Mindless rubbish, he said, give people politics not songs …’ There was a brief pause and then papa laughed uproariously, cueing Auntie Shaila to join in, turning a father’s edict into an anecdote.
Oh but in that pause, what possibilities hovered! Papa could have been a film star! There was no doubt he had the looks; even then the Aunties would waggle their heads appreciatively when he sang, enjoying his noble profile and almond eyes in a proud, proprietorial way. Mama would sigh at the framed photograph of the two of them which hung above their bed, taken in some small Delhi studio where they looked as if they had had their picture taken through vaseline. ‘Look at your beautiful papa,’ she would say. ‘What did he see in a dark skinny thing like me?’ Funnily enough, papa would often ask me the same rhetorical
question about mama. I presumed that this was what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.
But once I had heard about Dada’s film ban, I became obsessed with what I had missed out on, being the daughter of a famous film hero. Maybe I would have grown up in a palace, had baby elephants as pets and held my papa’s hand as he Namasted his way through crowds of screaming fans who pressed forward to garland him with marigolds…But if I was disappointed, I could not begin to imagine how papa must have felt. Maybe this was why he never talked about what he did for a living, all I knew was that he went to an office every day and came back with a bulging briefcase full of papers covered with minute indecipherable figures.
But whatever he did to make money was not what papa really was; whilst my Aunties and Uncles became strangers when listening to him, papa became himself when he sang. My tender papa, my flying papa, the papa with hope and infinite variety. And then one day I made a connection; if my singing papa was the real man, how did he feel the rest of the time? This hurt me unbearably, and I stopped hanging around the adults to see him perform. I somehow felt it was my fault and not Dada’s, that papa never got into the movies.
Mama and papa were holding hands now, the tension in the room had somehow abated and I began to breathe a little easier. It struck me suddenly how mama and papa had somehow managed to retain something I did not see in most of the Aunties’ and Uncles’ marriages, an openness, a flirty banter which both fascinated and embarrassed me. I knew everyone began this way, I’d seen the same dance of hands and eyes going on between the big boys from Sam Lowbridge’s gang and their interchangeable girlfriends. They would occasionally invade the local park, which conveniently began at the end of our communal Yard, taking over the swings or roundabout, equipped with bottles of cider and endless cigarettes. The boys would begin by teasing the girls, always loudly, aggressively, more for the benefit of their mates than the girls themselves. The girls would feign indifference, sulkily dodge the boys’ attempts to grab them and corner them, but always would end up sitting in between the boys’ lanky denim legs, sharing drags and slurps, rolling their eyes at the boys’ exaggerated swearing and spectacular gobbing in a fond, possessive manner. Their commitment seemed infinite, so it was always a surprise to see the same boys with completely different girls the following week, playing out the same rituals of devotion with the same apparent conviction.
I always watched them from a safe distance, hiding in the hollyhocks and nettles around the old pigsties at the far end of the yard. Their intimacies unsettled me. I knew that nice girls should not behave in this way. (I got scolded for showing my knickers when I did handstands, and sitting between a boy’s legs was presumably much worse.) But despite the fuzzy commas of bumblebees hovering around my ears, and the tall nettles pricking my bare legs, I always had to watch Sam’s gang and their girls. They looked so complete, in on a secret which I worried I might never discover.
I got this same feeling looking at the photographs of mama and papa when they were first married, and living in Indian government quarters in New Delhi. Papa had completed a college degree in Liberal Arts and Philosophy (when I asked him what these were exactly, he had said, ‘A damn waste of time in this country as it happens’ and I did not ask again), and was doing something clerical for the government. Mama had just begun her first teaching job and they lived in a whitewashed single-storey flat-roofed house. I knew this from one of the photos, where they are sitting on a bed in a courtyard, a low bed strung across with hessian mesh which bends under their weight. Just visible on the stone courtyard floor is a dull stain the size of an orange, which papa told me happened when he squashed a passing scorpion under his chappal. Papa sits behind mama, has his arms around her just like Sam Lowbridge with his ‘wenches’ in the park. They are both in white cotton which catches the sunlight and emphasises the nutty brown of their skin. They are laughing, they are at that moment exactly where they want to be.
What I did not understand was why this yearning had not worn off yet. Other parents did not behave like they did; if any of the Uncles attempted to put their arms around their wives in public, this always provoked a chorus of shrieks and mock-naughty-boy slaps from the Aunties. ‘Sharam Tainu Nahin Andi hai?’ the women would laugh, demanding to know why their men had no shame and were admitting in public that they sometimes touched, despite the fact that all of them had at least two kids each and therefore must have touched a few times before, even if it was in the dark. They contacted each other through their children, their hands met as they hugged their sons, tickled their daughters, their fingers intertwined as they ate chapatti from the same plate. But I never saw any of them volunteer kisses and hugs like my parents did, contact which I knew had nothing to do with me.
As for our married English neighbours, I sometimes had difficulty matching up the husbands to the wives as their lives seemed so separate. They were the women, like the Yard women, who stayed home whilst their menfolk slipped out to work, too early for me to catch them. And then the others like the Ballbearings Committee, whose men waved them off to work and then gathered together in the evenings in the local pub, the Mitre, or the Working Men’s Club, leaving their wives to create havoc together at the rival female venues, the bingo hall, or the Flamingo Nightclub near their factory.
The Flamingo was a converted chapel with tinted windows and screaming pink paintwork, which I had occasionally glimpsed through the car window on my way to school. A big neon sign above the door declaimed, ‘Ladies Only Nites, Free Cocktail Before Ten O’Clock!’ You’d always know when the women had been ‘down the ‘mingo’, because you would hear them piling off the night bus on the corner of the crossroads, shrieking with laughter and cursing as they negotiated the potholes in their slingbacks. ‘Yow dirty cow, Maisie! I seen ya eyeing that fella up!’ ‘I never! He was gagging for it any road, he had his hands in his pockets all bloody night!’ ‘Oh me head…Malibu’s a bloody killer, innit?’ ‘Don’t yow chuck up near me, Edie! This wet-look top ain’t waterproof, ya know …’ ‘I wonder if my Stan’s up…probably not. Our chaps are never up when yow need em up, know wharr-I mean, girls!’
I gladly woke up for these nocturnal dramas, their fun was infectious and laced with Sin. I knew if I could hear them, so could most of the Yard, and I wondered what their husbands made of these public dissections of their capabilities. But there was no way of knowing as I hardly ever saw them together, and as for the Yard couples, I only managed to put husbands to wives on Saturday mornings when couples piled into their cars to go shopping.
What mama and papa had was special maybe, certainly different to the other couples I observed. But with the English people, Sam and his wenches, the Ballbearings Committee, there was something that intrigued me, the brazenness of their behaviour, an absence of sentiment and a boldness of self which I could not see in my parents’ almost claustrophobic connection. As I looked over at them now, exchanging whispers on the settee, I could not imagine how I might one day be capable of such sweetness. I could only see myself tripping up in a pothole, clutching my shoes and laughing to the moon.
Papa had stopped discussing his parents; mama was sitting quietly next to him, darting glances at his brooding face. I turned back to the TV screen, ears on radar, waiting for the outburst or the apology, with papa it could go either way for no apparent reason. Papa always got into these moods whenever mortality flitted near our doorstep. The loss of a distant parent would be the final proof, that they had left them and would not be returning. Mama shook herself visibly, snapping into her practical mode. She plumped up the cushions behind papa’s back, he did not move to make it easier for her, and then she snuggled closer to him, a girlish smile playing on her lips.
‘Darling, no more of this, huh? We will have someone else to think about soon. We should not get so upset, jaanoo… We should also tell Meena.’
My ears pricked up at this, I turned round expectantly, accusingly, waiting to hear this secret, another secret, they had
added to the list of things they had kept from me. Papa cleared his throat and smiled at me reassuringly. ‘Meena beti…er…your mama is having a baby soon, a little brother or sister for you to play with. Would you like that?’
A loud cracking sound filled my head, my vision blurred and I turned away hastily, fixing my eyes on Troy Tempest, willing him to steady my voice. It came out hard and distant. ‘No,’ I replied, without turning around.
5
Mama’s belly was a proud high football by the time I bumped into Anita Rutter again. It was late October and Tollington had discarded its usual duffle coat of red brick and dirt, and was prancing around in its ostentatious autumnal cloak. Huge fat leaves of blood red and burnt gold covered every available surface, the pavements, the small neat gardens, the hedges and fields were clogged and carpeted with a blazing crunchy floor which we kids jumped and stamped through, snorting with effort through our assorted layers of woollies.
Anita and I seemed to have avoided each other through unspoken mutual understanding since the Christmas’ demise. I had seen her from afar, strolling up to the tadpole pools near the Mitre pub at the north end of the village, arm in arm with Sherrie as Fat Sally waddled after them pathetically trying to keep up, snuffling and wiping her nose on her cardigan sleeve. I noticed Anita often did this, played off one girlfriend against the other, so it was rare that all three girls walked together, in the same harmonious pace. Whatever the scenario, it was always Anita leading the way with Sherrie or Fat Sally at her side, favoured and blessed, whilst the scapegoat of the hour sulked and straggled behind. I wondered what would happen if I joined the group, if the foursome would split off into twos who would then declare all-out war. But it would be hard to imagine any of us having the courage to actually take sides against Anita, even the thought felt uncomfortably close to sacrilege.
