by Sushi Das
I’m no medical expert but I suggest the administration of such treatment is more likely to leave the practitioner with a bad case of shock and hysteria, rather than cure the patient. I thought I was doing the right thing, but what I had in fact done was slap my mum, really hard. Nobody in the family believed me when I said I was trying to treat her hysteria. They thought it was the ‘real me’ taking revenge for not being allowed to go to the pub. Vin has dined out on that little incident for years. ‘Remember that time when you slapped Mum? You idiot.’
For days, if not weeks, I felt ghastly about what I had done. I vowed never to lie about my whereabouts again – after all, that is what had started the migraine in the first place. I promised myself I would never say I was working late in the library when in fact I was at the pub; promised I would never say I was at Kathy’s house when in fact I was at the pub.
A few days after the slap, I told Dad, with an invigorated boldness, that I was going to the pub with my friends on Friday evening. His answer was swift and wounding: ‘No, you are not. You must remember to maintain the honour of an Indian girl. You are the eldest and therefore must set a good example to your brother and sister. You can go to the pub when you are married.’
Dad was a master of bringing things to a close with a brutally executed ‘No.’ He knew how to kill fun. He could flatten frivolity in one sweep. If decorum broke down at the dining table, the place we were meant to talk about serious things like politics, it was his job to restore equilibrium. If a bout of childish, unstoppable giggling broke out, he knew exactly how to handle it. First, he’d always allow a few minutes of laughter.
‘Okay, that’s enough,’ he’d then say. Vin and I would continue giggling.
‘I said enough.’ If that didn’t work, and sometimes it didn’t, he’d get serious. Very serious. ‘Laugh, go on laugh. Laugh to your heart’s content while you are living under your father’s roof. Because once you are gone from this place, you won’t be laughing so much.’ His words were enough to bring us hurtling back to reality.
If Dad was the disciplinarian, Mum was the keeper of the moral code. She would lecture me endlessly in Punjabi about the role of women, the duty of daughters, the responsibility of the eldest child and the biggest, heaviest, most profound topic of all, izzat – family honour. She always lectured me as she performed her domestic duties, often when she was chopping onions. That way the whole lecture could be delivered as part of her daily chores. To her, life lessons were meant to be passed on as a matter of routine, not a special event where you sat together, made eye contact and talked woman to woman. Perhaps her mother had once delivered the same lecture as she milked a buffalo somewhere in rural India.
English being my first language, there were times when I didn’t understand the words she used or the poetry of her Punjabi proverbs. I absorbed the meaning of those parts of the lecture from her cadence. Once she started, it was almost impossible to find a natural break in her monologue, a suitable pause, where one might politely ask to be excused.
‘You are my eldest daughter,’ she would start, ‘the product of my first love, a fragment of myself. Your father and I have worked hard to feed all three of you children, clothe you, educate you. Look at your father – how hard he works. Without him this family would be nothing. I work my fingers to the bone. Feel how rough the skin is on my fingertips. We ask nothing from our children but to respect us and protect our family’s izzat. Your father’s father was a wise man with a very high standing in his community. Your father is also greatly respected. He is a learned man and many in our community come to him for advice and guidance. It’s important to maintain our standing. Never take any action that will bring your father’s good name into disrepute. Remember, no one ever gets lost following a straight path. A girl can bring ruin to a house. Ruin for herself and for her family. Look how some girls behave, how they have ruined everything. We don’t want our family to be like that.
‘When I was a young girl, out of sheer respect, I never looked directly into my own father’s eyes. He was a strict man, but it was for my own good. Parents know best. Your father and I wish for nothing more than happiness for all our children. Live long. No matter where you end up in this world we hope you will always be happy. I hope god bestows all my children with good health, prosperity and happiness, and never lets any harm come to any of them.
‘It won’t be long before you and your sister leave this house to make your own homes elsewhere. There comes a time in every girl’s life when she must marry and look after her own home. A holy man might perform your marriage ceremony, but he won’t manage your house for you. That is your duty. Remember, if you love your husband with your whole heart and respect him, he will always return your love. Before you know it, the responsibilities of motherhood will be upon you, and then you will learn the true meaning of sacrifice. This is a woman’s lot. Look at me – I sacrificed everything. I was only eighteen years old when I married your father. I was nineteen when you were born. I was just a girl. What has been my life? It has hardly been a life at all. This is my destiny. But what else is there? All you can do is work hard, live for your children, serve your husband. That is all.
‘What I am saying may not mean much to you now, but one day you will remember your mother’s words. Never forget: your family’s izzat always comes first. Don’t bring shame on this family. Your father would never be able to hold his head up high. People would taunt us, accuse us of losing control over our children. Please, I beg you, please remember there is nothing, nothing more important in life than maintaining your family’s izzat.’
By now she would be weeping small fitful sobs of sadness, grieving over the loss of her own youth, her onion tears mixed with her real tears. I was helpless – unable to offer hope, comfort or cheer. Dispirited by her melancholy and discomfited by my own uselessness, I would inch backwards towards the kitchen door and simply acknowledge her misery: ‘Okay, Mum.’ And then I would take my leave.
Izzat is a multi-layered concept that can mean several different things: honour, self-respect, reputation, even virginity. The whole idea is laced with male pride. It is the pivot on which Punjabi family life spins, and women’s behaviour can hurt or destroy izzat more than anything else. Ultimately, any unconventional behaviour by a woman can pose a very real danger to her family. A family without a good reputation is liable to be ostracised or cut off from the rest of the community. Indeed, izzat is not just a Punjabi or Indian concept. The broader idea of reputation is a powerful controlling force that can be found across Asia.
In Indian communities, particularly among Punjabis, a woman can bring shame on her family by doing things that are considered quite acceptable in Western societies today. She can do it by drinking alcohol, smoking, wearing make-up, fraternising with men, dressing immodestly, getting pregnant out of wedlock, marrying below her station or rejecting an arranged marriage for a love marriage to a man her parents consider unacceptable. If a woman has hurt her family’s izzat, the family can redeem itself by making her an outcast. This can take the form of disowning a daughter – literally casting her out of the house or, in extreme cases, killing her.
At the time of writing the last honour killing recorded by British newspapers was that of Amrit Ubhi, a twenty-four-year-old Sikh girl who was murdered in 2010 by her father in Telford, Shropshire, because he could not accept her Western lifestyle. Her boyfriend was a British soldier. Her father, Gurmeet Singh Ubhi, was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He claimed he had only applied ‘minimal pressure’ to her neck after they rowed about her playing music too loud.
The idea of izzat is entrenched in customs that some Indians have practised for hundreds of years. These days it may only be peasant communities (although not always) that follow these customs with unbending strictness, but the long shadow cast by centuries-old ideas falls unmistakably on Indians everywhere, including those living in Western countries.
These days India’s economy is on speed. Its eye-popping grow
th rate has been accompanied by brisk modernisation that has allowed women into the workforce in ever larger numbers. They have greater representation in parliament and the business world, and many more attend universities now. But, still, the old fashioned idea of female modesty runs deep in this patriarchal society. Even within the world of Bollywood, which is no stranger to liberal concepts, movies do not show a full kiss on the mouth. There may be erotic wet-sari scenes and bared midriffs, but there will always be some representation of female piety and modesty. Nor has the idea been diluted within the Indian diaspora. In London, Vancouver, Durban, Dubai, Melbourne, or any other part of the world where Indians have settled, female modesty remains paramount.
And it is worth noting that female modesty and the behaviour expected of women are not imposed and controlled entirely by men. They are also perpetuated, nurtured and policed by women themselves.
For Punjabis, where there is izzat, there are dhanē (taunts to insult and humiliate). Roger Ballard, a British anthropologist and expert in emigration from Punjab, argues that women, who do not have the brute force of men, have developed dhanē to a fine art and use them as verbal weapons. Punjabi women are often very skilled at delivering dhanē enclosed in double entendres, he says. Insulting taunts may seem harmless enough, but their power should not be underestimated. Taunts are not only directed at women in order to keep their behaviour in check, they are also fired at parents who fail to keep their daughters under control. The psychological impact on those subjected to taunts, especially in a close-knit community, can be devastating, and in some families it might become a matter of life and death. Ballard identifies dhanē as a distinctive feature in cases of honour killings.
My parents were deeply fearful of dhanē from the Indian community. I understood their wish – that the daughters of the house were seen to be doing the right thing to avoid a reputational calamity befalling our family. But, foolishly perhaps, I believed I could negotiate a path where I could please my parents by being a good Indian girl and simultaneously enjoy the freedoms that a Western lifestyle had to offer. It might have made sense to work out first how I was actually going to achieve such a balance. But immaturity, that great provider of optimism, led me to believe that while there was a big gap between the Indian and Western way of life, each was only one leap away from the other and one could conceivably spend one’s life alternating between the two. The only problem was undesirable elements.
If Dad could have had his way, he would have banned boys from phoning the house or being within a one-kilometre radius of either of his daughters. In his mind’s eye, any period of time Vin and I spent outside the house was time that we were vulnerable to the hordes of men who were presumably waiting to leap out from behind lampposts to lead us astray. Or was it we girls who might lead them astray?
Dad strongly objected to me wearing red clothes, which suggests he thought women had the power to ruin men. ‘Red is the marriage colour. It attracts the eye,’ he said. Somewhere, rattling around in his head, was the ancient idea that women were born of Eve. And taking his logic to its final end, a woman could, even without being aware of it herself, drive a man into a wild sexual frenzy beyond his control. We were all just animals – the females unconsciously sending out mating signals, as the males, to whose behaviour could be attached no moral or immoral value, simply responded instinctively. Why, on top of this precarious scenario built by nature, would a girl want to place herself in the path of danger by wearing that most lewd, eye-catching and lurid of all colours?
I was ordered to stay away from red clothes. But, being a teenager, it was my duty to engage in gross acts of defiance. In the heart of Twickenham was a school uniform shop called Len Smiths. There I found a bright-red blazer worn by the pupils of a school in the vicinity. It was far too small for me but it was the only red one they had, so I bought it and wore it around the house for several weeks.
Strangely, Dad didn’t say anything, although Mum was keen to know why I was wearing an ill-fitting blazer belonging to a school I did not attend. Dad lost that battle. But my victories were short-lived. He generally won any fight relating to the telephone. Whenever the phone rang, it was usually one of my friends – a female friend, because male friends had been told not to call me in the evenings when my parents were likely to answer, as this could land me in a spot of bother. And there had been many spots of bother. If male friends ever dared to call, Dad immediately told them I was either out, asleep, too ill to come to the phone, in the bathroom or simply unavailable. I found out about their calls days later from them.
If a call from a boy was an offence of the most grievous kind, then a boy discovered in the house would take on the gravity of a major diplomatic incident.
Richmond upon Thames College had a reputation for being an ‘arty’ sixth-form college. Many of the students were the sons and daughters of parents who were politically active, socially aware and well educated. Many had connections that stretched into political, media or academic networks. The group of young people that I fell in with took great interest in art, music and literature. They were witty, sarcastic and cynical. They opened doors to other worlds for me and I longed to be like them.
The days of unchecked racism that had roamed my schoolyard had been buried and multiculturalism was all the rage, particularly among the kids of the metropolitan middle class who became my friends. I was entirely comfortable in their company but nonetheless felt myself to be an outsider in the group since I couldn’t join them in activities such as film-making at weekends, seeing live bands or going to the theatre. Despite my dad’s pressure to consider studying the sciences in the hope that I might become a doctor, I had veered firmly in the direction of the arts, much to his disappointment. ‘Don’t come home one day and tell me you want to be a poet,’ he warned. ‘There’s no money in poetry.’
It didn’t take long before I fell in love. Paul was the drummer in a band. He had long mousey hair that fell around his shoulders and a generous mouth that never smiled, only grinned. He rode a bike he called Ulysses, and wore paint-stained dungarees to college nearly every day. I thought he was the bee’s knees.
Under no circumstances would Dad have approved of me dating a boy, let alone one who dressed like a hippie and played the drums. Paul would have been, in my dad’s eyes, the antithesis of the very idea of a man. So when Paul and I started a relationship, it became my big secret. I didn’t even tell Vin. I followed him to band practice, fawned over his poetry and generally behaved like a lovesick fool. He sang me songs, invited me to his house and borrowed my money without returning it. There are pages and pages in my diaries devoted to the celebration of anything and everything Paul-related.
Many of my college friends played musical instruments, even the economics students. Take John, an intelligent fellow with a dry mop of blond hair, who wore a pinstriped navy jacket with jeans – a look that was neither here nor there. He played the trumpet and had an obsession with Miró. Economics classes were the ones I missed most frequently, but living around the corner from the college was handy. John would pop round and leave me his notes if I missed a class.
After five months of college life I decided it would be an interesting experiment to see how Dad and Paul got along. I was certain that the last thing Paul wanted was to meet my scary dad, and Dad most certainly would not have been interested in meeting anyone called Paul. Paula maybe, but not Paul. Nonetheless, against my better judgment I decided to bring them together, and the only reason I can offer for such a monumentally stupid act is, of course, faithfully recorded:
Thursday 3 February, 1983: ‘I’m sure if they did meet and perhaps talk, some barriers would be broken. Perhaps Paul and my father would become more understanding. Well, I shall see how it goes tomorrow. I’m confident for a change! Bought some flowers for my mother, just to be nice, but she did not notice them.’
I asked Paul to come to the house to hang out at one o’clock the following day. Dad would almost certainly leave the office a
nd come home for lunch around that time and both would conveniently bump into each other. So that Dad didn’t get an unexpected shock from an undesirable element in the house, I would ring him in the morning to warn him that a fellow student called Paul would be popping by around lunchtime to pick up some study notes.
As it happened, it was I who in fact needed some study notes because I’d missed a recent economics class. Good old John offered to pop by the house at eleven the next morning to drop them off. So I had it all planned: get the notes from John in the morning, Paul and Dad to meet at lunchtime.
Now, life is a slippery thing. Chance meetings can’t be prearranged and prearranged meetings can turn into most unfortunate coincidences. Unpredictable things sometimes happen when East and West meet. Everything I had planned so carefully for that Friday went frighteningly wrong. It was as if Lucifer himself was in the house, intent on causing unforgettable mayhem.
John, who was supposed to drop by with the notes at eleven, was late. He didn’t arrive till midday. He had time to kill before his next class and was angling for a cup of tea. It would have been rude not to accommodate him – he had after all been kind enough to give me his notes. So we made a cup of tea and chatted in the living room, where he pulled out a cigarette and asked if I minded him smoking. Not wanting to sound prudish or unworldly, I waved a dismissive hand and said, ‘Of course you can. I’ll get you an ashtray.’
Nobody in our family smoked, so all I could find was a saucer from Mum’s ‘special’ tea set, which I brought into the living room and placed on the coffee table. I watched him light a cigarette and the smoke immediately invaded the homey air of my parent’s living room. By the time the clock had clicked around to a quarter to one I was beginning to feel anxious about how to get rid of him so that Paul and Dad could have their chance meeting. But before I had time to think about a plan within a plan, I saw through the living room window Dad’s car pulling up outside the house. He was fifteen minutes early! That’s when I realised I had forgotten to call him that morning to warn him about Paul, who was allegedly popping round to pick up my notes.
