by Sushi Das
Since honour and chastity are of paramount importance in Asian communities, the practice horrified Indians in Britain and India, and I recall my parents discussing virginity tests in hushed tones with my uncle and aunt when I was a teenager. I remember the expression on my mum’s face: a mixture of disgust and fear.
In the 1980s British authorities still suspected spouse immigration scams, but by now had become much craftier. There were rumours that immigration officials were subjecting married couples to intense questioning about their wedding day in an attempt to establish whether the arranged marriage was genuine. Undoubtedly, this would have been a strategy employed to sift out those who had engaged in sham marriages as an excuse to get into Britain.
Essentially, this is how it worked: British Indian girl (or boy) travels to India and marries Indian boy (or girl). Girl then applies for her Indian spouse to be allowed to migrate to Britain so they can live together. British immigration officials in the high commission in New Delhi interview the husband and wife separately, asking questions about their courtship and wedding day. The answers are then compared to see if they tally. Any husband and wife team whose answers do not match are presumably put in the ‘sham marriage’ category and the application to enter Britain is knocked back on the grounds of insufficient proof of a genuine marriage.
It was rumoured that just one small slip-up could ruin a new bride or groom’s chance of getting into Britain. Couples felt under pressure to ‘get the answers right’. Even those engaged in genuine arranged marriages started rehearsing their lines. Parents advised their sons and daughters to answer questions carefully, and kids, who’d been told for years that love would grow after marriage, were now being told to behave as if they were already in love.
The surreal summer of 1986, when I said no and Vin said yes, seemed to pass faster than other summers. When winter came round, Vin was off to India with Mum and Dad, where she had a small Hindu wedding and became Dinesh’s wife. (They planned to have a ceremonial wedding in Britain once they returned for the sake of friends and family living there.) When Dinesh applied to migrate to Britain, he and Vin were asked by British immigration authorities in New Delhi to attend separate interviews.
In the waiting room at the British High Commission, fans whirred overhead as newly married couples waited to be questioned. Most women there wore brightly coloured clothes and plenty of heavy gold jewellery – as newly wed Indian women are wont to do. Vin wore a simple flowery dress and high-heeled shoes, and was the only woman wearing Western clothes in the waiting room.
Dinesh was interviewed first. When he emerged from the interrogation room nearly an hour later, he had the air of a shattered man.
‘He looked like he’d been beaten up,’ said Vin, recalling the day. When it was her turn, she entered the room with confidence, reaching out her hand to greet the official behind the desk – who she said bore a striking resemblance to Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India. He rose to shake her hand. ‘I don’t think any of the other Indian women shook Mountbatten’s hand,’ said Vin, ‘but I made that fucker stand up and shake mine. That’s when I knew we were equals.’
He grilled her about her wedding day. Where did she get married? What was she wearing? When did she first meet her husband? Where did they go for their honeymoon?
‘What will you do if your husband is denied entry into Britain?’he asked.
‘It doesn’t matter where we end up living. I don’t care if we have to live on the moon, as long as we’re together,’ she replied.
‘And what colour were the sheets on your wedding night?’
‘I can’t remember, it was dark.’
Vin was taken aback by that question. But she provided an excellent comeback, just as she had the day Dad had questioned her about the skip outside the dilapidated house she never visited in Teddington. A few months later, Dinesh got a stamp in his passport. He packed his bags, said goodbye to his family and flew to London immediately to start a love affair with his wife.
By the time Dinesh migrated to Britain, I was still in Hertford lurching from one panic attack to the next. There were just four months to go before I sat my finals and I was appallingly under-prepared. For two and a half years I had given insufficient thought to my studies. I had begged Dad to allow me to leave home to do a degree and promised I would study hard, but now I feared I would not meet his expectations.
I had already let him down by rejecting the men he’d proposed, and had justified doing so by telling myself I was entitled to choose my own life partner. But there could be no justification for doing poorly in my degree. I feared that what lay before me now looked like a straight path to failure. After three years of paid tertiary study there was no guarantee I would find work, let alone work as a journalist. The year was 1987, and though unemployment had begun to fall, there were still more than three million people trying to get by without a job.
Much of the partying died down as final-year students bunkered down to swot. Flowers peeping through garden fences signalled the reawakening of summer, yet I was unable to feel the optimism they normally brought, for the fearful gloom that had descended behind my eyes showed me a world in black and white only.
Then again, Vin and Dinesh were about to get married, and there’s nothing to lift the heart quite like the joy of a riotous Indian wedding.
It must have been late by the time I left my friend’s place. There was no moon so the night was as dark as it could be. I took a shortcut through a park to my student accommodation. The grass underfoot felt damp and springy and I walked quickly even though it wasn’t uncomfortably cold. I was about halfway across the park when I heard someone behind me, their footsteps squelching in the wet grass. I started running and whoever was behind me started running too. I ran faster and faster, taking great leaps as I went. Panic was pressing on my chest and my legs were an instant away from buckling under me when I heard a man’s voice. ‘Go on, go on,’ he jeered, ‘run to the comfort of your mother.’ I kept running, the stamina coming from sheer terror. I don’t remember opening the front door, only leaping up the stairs two at a time to my bedroom, where I slammed the door shut behind me. The phone started ringing and I looked about the dark room. There was no phone there, yet it sounded as if it was right next to me.
I opened my eyes. Light poured in through the gap in the curtains. My legs were quivering and my T-shirt stuck to my chest as I lay in my bed. I was exhausted. The phone was still ringing. I got out of bed, still shaking, and hurried downstairs to answer it.
‘Hi, it’s John. Hope you don’t mind me ringing – I know it’s earlyish.’
‘Hi.’
‘You okay? Sorry if I woke you.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Hey, I was just wondering – fancy going out for a coffee today or just catching up, or something?’
Was he asking me for a date? I looked in the mirror hanging opposite. My eyes looked puffy and there were small beads of sweat above my top lip. It couldn’t have been a side effect of the antidepressants the doctor had prescribed because I’d thrown them in the bin as soon as I’d picked them up from the chemist. I didn’t need drugs – not that kind anyway.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come over to my place about two o’clock.’
I’d known of John Hobson for about a year because I’d seen him around the campus many times. He was a singularly peculiar-looking student, who tucked his jeans into his thick woolly socks and walked with a purposeful stride. He had extraordinarily large swimming-pool eyes and long, dark eyelashes – longer than a man’s normally would be. His bee-stung pink lips were always ever-so-slightly apart and there was a sharp demarcation where his high forehead ended and his hairline began. You couldn’t forget a face like his because the default expression was one of harmless curiosity, like a three-year-old looking into a camera lens.
He had a good rapport with Sanjeev Bhaskar, a fellow student who, after he finished his degree, went on to become a household na
me with the success of his comedy TV shows Goodness Gracious Me and the The Kumars at No. 42. In the late 1980s Sanj was already wowing students as one half of a duo comedy called The Bhaji Boys. They used to perform at the Boathouse – our student bar. Sanj had a remarkable talent for mimicking accents that John found very impressive. Being a scholarly type, John had started a PhD at the London School of Economics. I first met him when he returned to Hertford to give a one-off lecture. We had swapped telephone numbers then and now he was coming over at two o’clock.
It was raining when he arrived. His soft, zippered leatherjacket smelt faintly of roast beef. I was supposed to be revising, so we didn’t bother going out. We sat in my room and talked over a cup of tea instead.
‘What do you think of the political economy course?’ he said, flicking through my revision notes.
‘It’s okay, I suppose.’
‘What do you know about it?’ He asked the question seriously, like a teacher might speak to a pupil.
‘Not much. I’ll probably fail.’
‘No, you won’t. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’
It was an odd thing to say, but that’s exactly what he did. He spent the next four months travelling from Camden in London, where he lived, to Hertford, taking me through the course in summary form, step by step. Whether it was at my place, his place, in a café, at the Boathouse bar or walking down the street, he engaged me in lively conversation about the theories, the arguments, the counterarguments and the big thinkers that I needed to know about. He read my essays, asked me questions, checked and double-checked that I understood the concepts. He was a masterful teacher: patient, committed and curious to hear my thoughts.
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,’ he once said, sitting in a café mimicking the archetypal nutty professor, and then he burst into laughter with his mouth so wide, I could see he had no amalgam fillings at all. I looked at him warily. ‘Marx, Karl Marx,’ he said, in the tone he would have adopted if he’d been saying, ‘Bond, James Bond.’ ‘We can learn a lot from Marx, even though he’s so bloody reductionist,’ he added.
John was the great-grandson of the famous economist and critic of imperialism J. A. Hobson. John’s father was a capitalist who, no doubt, would have liked to have seen his son become a successful businessman. But John had rebelled against capitalism by becoming a Marxist. He was twenty-four years old and the only person I knew who had read all three volumes of Das Kapital. ‘I just sat in my room with the curtains drawn and read them. It took me six months,’ he told me.
But that was the past. ‘The problem with Marxism is that it’s too neat,’ he said. ‘Marx simply doesn’t have all the answers. I found myself increasingly unable to argue my case. That’s why I’m not a Marxist anymore.’
‘So what are you then?’ I asked.
‘Not sure.’
‘Does that mean you’re a wishy-washy liberal?’
‘Ah! Now, it depends on what you mean by liberal.’ Whenever he started a sentence with ‘Ah! Now . . .’ it usually signalled that he was about to take a complex subject, condense two hundred years of history pertaining to the particular topic and then explain its relevance. Whether he was tossing around the ideas of Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Machiavelli or Thatcher, he would become animated to the point of virtually exploding. He would leave me mesmerised by his very intonation, if not the ideas themselves, and then he would ask for my thoughts on the matter.
If John had any venom in his veins, he saved it all for Margaret Thatcher. Unlike his father, John believed ‘Maggie’ was destroying the country. Social unrest, industrial strife, cripplingly high unemployment, the doubling of inflation, the collapse of the manufacturing industry: these were the features of her rule that he despised. ‘There’s only one word to describe Margaret Thatcher: cruel,’ he thundered, marching around my bedroom, running his hands furiously through his hair and bringing down clenched fists against his thighs. His tendency to exhibit excessive nervous energy and supreme agitation simultaneously made him a charming confusion of Basil Fawlty and George Costanza.
I have a delightful old photograph of him standing next to Margaret Thatcher in a London street, his trousers tucked into his socks, with one arm around her shoulder and the other gently pulling her towards him in a loose embrace. Thatcher is wearing a navy suit and holding a handbag and has her arm around John. Both are looking at the camera and smiling. Behind them, graffitied in block letters on a wall is the word LIFE. There is no one else in the shot.
‘How on earth did you come to be hugging her?’ I asked when I first saw it.
‘Look carefully. The old trout’s a cardboard cut-out,’ he replied. And indeed, if you look at the photo closely, you notice Thatcher is a cardboard cut-out. But the pose is so natural, and the lighting so exquisite, the pair of them look as though they are intimate friends.
John and I spent a great deal of time together, during which he never seemed to tire of teaching me. I got used to the smell of roast beef on his leatherjacket and his obsession with playing U2 cassettes on a loop. I told him about my fear of going home after the finals and the arranged marriage that my parents were expecting me to go through. I told him about the tyranny of the Indian mother-in-law, the social hierarchy of Indian families and how so much hinged on honour, and he was horror-struck that such a subculture could exist in Britain. He was raised in what one might call a very English family, and while he had a handful of male Indian friends, such as Sanj, he had little insight into arranged marriages and what they entailed. He asked endless questions, as if he was an anthropologist discovering the living habits of a new tribe. His studious curiosity, which he employed in a determined bid to dissect and understand the sociology behind this cultural phenomenon, gave me the opportunity to consider it more closely too. And when it was time to sit my finals, John was by my side till the very moment I went in for the first exam. He had done all he could and the rest was up to me. The last thing he said before I went into the exam hall was, ‘You can do it.’
When the results arrived by post a few months later, I was shocked to discover I had passed with a very respectable grade. John was delighted and Mum and Dad were relieved. My three years of parole were over and I returned to Twickenham, to find Vin had become quite enamoured with the idea of marriage and was actively participating in wedding preparations. Raja had grown into a strapping fourteen-year-old who lived in his own world of pop music and mates, and was hardly ever home. If his friends called round at the weekend, Raja would take them to his bedroom, where they would spent entire afternoons. He’d emerge in the evening to tell Mum and Dad he was going out. Vin and I had never been allowed that level of freedom, and privately I was disturbed by my parents’ double standards.
The end of the academic year was always the beginning of summer, which meant Mum would look forward to the Rakhi festival, usually observed according to lunar movements around June, July or August. The ceremony is a celebration of the bond of love between brothers and sisters, and is probably my favourite Indian ceremony because if its simplicity. Sisters tie a thread around their brother’s wrist as a gesture of affection and the brother in return presents his sister with a gift to symbolise his promise to protect her from life’s hazards. As with any Indian festival, the ceremony involves a certain amount of feasting and merrymaking. But in our house Mum always kept it simple, perhaps to distinguish it from bigger celebrations.
Mum and Dad would go ‘Indian shopping’ and buy several ceremonial wrist threads that had attached to them in the middle a small round tinsel decoration or colourful disc. They looked like glittery kitsch watches. ‘Come and choose a Rakhi,’ Mum would trill, and Vin and I would peer into the box on the kitchen bench and each choose a thread. We delighted in choosing the gaudiest ones, knowing Raja would have to wear them on his wrist for the rest of the day. Mum would beam as I tied my thread around Raja’s wrist and then stepped aside to allow Vin to do the same. After th
at, Raja would pull out of his pocket two £5 notes that Mum had given him earlier, and present one to me and one to Vin. We didn’t engage in elaborate gift-giving on this day. In our younger days Raja would complain the ceremony was unfair because he received no money, only a tacky wrist decoration, and Mum would laugh and relish explaining the meaning of it all. Everyone in the family enjoyed Rakhi day because it brought us together and momentarily allowed us to put aside our frustrations and troubles with each other.
Within days of my return to Twickenham I went back to my vacation job at the car showroom, where the salesmen were still vulpine and the cars still overpriced. But this summer I had a lightness in my step. John and I had started a relationship that held all the illicit thrills of secrecy as well as the fear, for me anyway, that Mum and Dad might discover I had returned from college with more than just a degree. I’d come back with an Englishman, of all things. Well, at least I didn’t want to be a poet. I decided I would continue seeing John on the quiet and refrain from bringing discord into the house. As Vin had said, I needed to stop causing trouble, especially since Mum and Dad were happier than I had ever seen them because Vin and Dinesh were about to marry for the second time – this time with a ceremonial British Indian wedding.
