Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  Anger and cynicism were everywhere all the time, but never more so than at the poll-tax protest demo in London on 31 March 1990. John and I went along, as did thousands of other people, including families with children. Many of our friends were wearing ‘Fuck the Poll Tax’ T-shirts. Mine just said: ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’. It was a beautiful sunny day and from where we were in the crowd things were going along fine until the police stopped everyone near Whitehall. At that stage we didn’t know they were trying to control the numbers of people flowing into Trafalgar Square and nor did they bother telling us. Everyone was jittery and before we could get a sense of what was going on, police on horseback were charging into the crowd. Sticks and cans were thrown about by the protestors. Singing and chanting quickly turned into screaming and shouting. John grabbed my hand and yelled, ‘Run!’

  He was virtually dragging me along as he tore through police ribbon and kicked down barriers. I could hear horses thundering behind us but there was no time to look back to see how close they were. Eventually John let go of my hand and scaled a wall as quick as a lizard. From the top he reached down, I grabbed his hand and he pulled me up in one swoop as my feet scrambled along the wall trying to get traction. We sat on that wall panting, along with god-knows how many other people and watched the horses charge by. It was the singularly most frightening moment we’d experienced at a demo, which the following day’s newspapers described as the poll-tax riots.

  Later, having become separated from the friends we had gone with, we walked around the streets in disbelief. Shop windows were smashed, cars had been turned over, a building was on fire. People were sitting on the kerb with shocked faces. The social and industrial unrest of the past decade had become a tinderbox that burst into flames that day.

  A lot of young people left Britain around that time. We had a friend who left to find work in South Africa. Another moved to France. America was a destination for the disillusioned, too. Young people had lost hope. For many Generation Xers, hope was crushed into the dust, just like the ‘Kill the Bill’ badges and the ‘Ban the Bomb’ badges had been a decade before.

  Back home in our corner of London, the social dysfunction was becoming unbearable. We were burgled twelve times in four years, mostly by teenagers looking for drug money. They’d smash down our door, break windows and go through our drawers and even our casserole pots. The police were useless. Eventually we took down our wooden front door and replaced it with a solid steel security door – similar to the type you see on bank vaults.

  An arsonist burnt twenty-three cars down our road. We woke up in the middle of the night to find flames climbing 12 feet high as windscreens exploded and tyres burst. The police caught the arsonist but he was out on parole within six months. Around the back of our house, on a vacant plot of land on which British Rail wanted to build a concrete factory, rats roamed. Mice ate our muesli more often than we did. A stray cat often came prowling around our back garden, so we held it hostage for a while with the lure of milk, hoping it might eliminate the rodent problem, but it turned out to be the coward of the feline neighbourhood. Travellers set up camp on the land behind our house for weeks at a time and frequently stole our TV aerial.

  John was livid that life was so desolate in Thatcher’s Britain. There was always maintenance to be done around the house, the Mini was constantly breaking down and money was flying out of our pockets. When John put his foot through the rickety bottom stair one evening, his face was so red with anger I thought his head would burst. But it wasn’t until a rat died under the floorboards of our 117-year-old house that things really came to a head.

  We couldn’t remove its reeking carcass because the floorboards ran across the six terraces down the road, rather than along each house (don’t ask why), so they couldn’t be lifted. The local council advised us not to panic as the problem would be gone within a few days after the ‘maggots deal with it’. In the meantime, would we like someone to come and deodorise the area? John told them where to stick their deodorant and slammed the phone down. ‘I can’t take it anymore,’ he cried. ‘I can’t live like this.’

  Maybe that was the day he started thinking about escaping London, and Britain. He would devise a plan he said, to get us as far from the Tories as we could possibly get.

  John’s plan to escape Thatcherite Britain involved finishing his PhD and applying for every available academic job anywhere on the face of the globe. I imagined his chances of finding employment outside Britain were about as promising as my chances of shedding my reputation as the black sheep of the family (pardon the pun). I had quit my job as a death-tax officer after just two years, following a rather unsavoury incident. I had been forced on two occasions, as stipulated by regulation 52b, subclause 2.1, to call an eighty-two-year-old woman and tell her that if she didn’t pay the £11,000 of inheritance tax she owed following the death of her twin sister I would have to call in the ‘enforcement department’.

  On both occasions she had wept bitterly, telling me that to meet her financial obligation she would have to sell the house that she and her sister had lived in for forty years. On the second occasion I had, somewhat unprofessionally, wept in sympathy. I resigned the next day.

  When John announced he had been offered a job as a lecturer at a university in Australia, I dug in my heels. I had just found a new job in publishing as an editorial assistant. It was a step down from being a tax officer and it wasn’t quite journalism, but at least I wasn’t robbing the dead anymore. But more importantly, I had, during my married years, thrown off the handcuffs of Indian culture and was enjoying carving out a clearer British identity – or so I thought. It was like coming out of jail and starting over. For the first time I felt no pressure to behave or look Indian. Nobody was hounding me to speak in Punjabi or constantly reminding me to protect the family’s izzat.

  I spoke English, wore jeans, ate fish and chips and was married to an Englishman I had chosen. Life in Britain was far from easy and John was fuming with rage much of the time. If you weren’t a stockbroker, financial analyst or property developer, life was nightmarishly expensive. From billboards to the pages of the weekend magazines, we were mocked by advertisements for fast cars, quality watches, granite kitchen benchtops and tropical holidays – luxuries we had no hope of attaining. But flushed with the romanticism that accompanies the early years of married life, we were confident we could scratch our way out of our darkness. I was, for the first time, beginning to feel comfortable in my British skin. The last thing I wanted to do was go to Australia, where I imagined nothing exciting was going on because it hardly ever featured in the evening news.

  Australia was not a country I spent a great deal of time thinking about. I only knew three things about the land Down Under:

  1. The prime minister’s name was Bob Hawke.

  2. It was the natural habitat of a certain bouncing marsupial.

  3. The British had stolen the country from black people and the White Australia Policy had been established to stop any other blacks getting in.

  For six months John and I argued about it and in that time I was unable to mount a cogent argument for staying in Britain. My job was fine, but it was hardly where I wanted to be. Communication with my family had virtually flatlined. And British Rail looked set to win the battle against local residents to build a monster concrete plant right behind our house. (A supply of concrete was needed to build the Channel Tunnel.) Our future in London looked bleak. Besides, who was I to stand in the way of John’s career? We had undoubtedly reached a juncture in our lives. So we packed the measly contents of our house and started thinking about koalas and Foster’s beer.

  My parents appeared to take the news well. Their response was disturbingly pragmatic. Did John have a secure job? Did we have somewhere to live? Would I be able to work? Were our passports up to date? I recall no long chats about how we would miss each other or reminiscences into my childhood to tease out memories of joyful parent–child connectedness. I didn’t feel I was mo
ving far away from my parents, perhaps because I felt I had moved away from them a long time ago. Anyway, John’s contract was only for four years. We’d be back.

  When I visited them for the last time Dad said, ‘Look after each other and be careful. Remember who you are. Australia has not always been a welcoming place for some people.’ Mum hugged me on the sofa and I found myself stiffening against her warmth. She was hugging me as if I was a baby, playfully squeezing my cheeks and holding my face with both hands. Her affection was, I thought, an attempt to savour a final moment with a child she was about to lose all over again. But memories of her refusal to acknowledge my presence in that same dining room just four years earlier still stung, and I was embarrassed by her baby-cuddling, the way pinched middle-class British people are privately discomfitted by the easy-flowing emotion of continental Europeans. To display emotion is to lose control of oneself, I thought. And I wouldn’t have thought that had Dad not absorbed the lesson from the English and successfully, yet unknowingly, passed it on to me.

  At the airport, Mum cried till all the tissues in her hand were dense balls of white paper. Everyone was smartly dressed – Vin, Dinesh and Raja, even my uncle and aunt, and my cousins Twinkle, Peen and Ash. Indians always dress smartly for the airport and only they know why. There were endless jokes about kangaroos and Kylie, sharks and crocodiles; a cheery veneer over airport anxiety.

  Dad was the last person I hugged. He returned the embrace with one hand placed momentarily on my shoulder and all the warmth of a folded ironing board. He looked into the middle distance as if checking the flight monitor and sniffed softly just once before giving me his parting advice, ‘Look after yourself. Take care of your health. Do your best. And keep in touch.’

  I waved a final goodbye from the departure gate and still my eyes were dry. That day, even I was shocked to find I had no tears in me at all.

  Nearly thirty years earlier another goodbye, this time in northern India, had generated significantly more tears. It was a bitterly cold February morning. A packed and labelled suitcase stood by the front door of my grandparents’ house. Dad, crying and barely out of his twenties, embraced his mother, who threw her arms around him and sobbed uncontrollably. The pull of blood is a mighty force. He bent down and touched her feet. ‘Stay happy,’ she said, placing her hand on his head.

  His father too was struggling to control his tears. This was his first son, still climbing the early rungs of manhood yet ready to fly off to seek his fortune. Dad, dressed in a dark suit, turned to his father and embraced him. Then he bent down to touch his feet too. When he rose his father took him by the shoulders and said, ‘Look after yourself, son. Take care of your health. Do your best. And keep in touch.’

  Then, at Palam Airport (now Indira Ghandi International Airport) in New Delhi, Dad embraced his wife of just three months. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘We’ll be together again soon.’

  Palam Airport, that storehouse of grief in the 1960s, must have been a terrible place to work. From clerks to cleaners, to witness daily other people’s pitiful loss would have made men weep who otherwise had hearts of stone. Even the optimism of adventure does not temper the sorrow of migrant goodbyes. And because migrants cannot know for certain when they might see their family again (for none of us knows the day nor the hour that death might come knocking), they must necessarily say goodbye as if it were for the very last time.

  It was three o’clock on the morning of 16 December 1991 when John and I landed at Melbourne Airport. There was hardly anyone there, just a handful of people milling about. Had it been three in the morning at Heathrow, the place would have been teeming with people from all over the world. Spectacularly stupid as it may seem, I imagined Melbourne’s airport must be in the outback.

  A few days later, when I woke and looked out of the window of the granny flat where we were temporarily staying in Greensborough, an outer Melbourne suburb, I saw no humans at all. I felt as if I had arrived on the opening pages of a post-apocalyptic novel. There were signs that life must have existed: parked cars, washing flapping on a line; and there was the familiar drift of nature: moving clouds, wind through the trees, a baking sun. But not a single visible human anywhere. And all around the air was thick with silence.

  Within twenty-four hours we had been transported from a foggy and damp London winter with the temperature close to zero to the height of an Australian summer whose temperature hovered around 32 degrees. Every day the sun shone shamelessly. We ventured out to look for people, only to find we had to walk for fifteen minutes in the roasting heat before we saw what we thought must be a mirage: a tatty corner shop labelled ‘Milk Bar’.

  We wandered the streets looking at single-storey weatherboard dwellings. ‘Bungalows made of wood,’ said John. By the afternoon a hot wind was billowing all around us. It was as if a hairdryer on full blast was constantly blowing hot grit in your face. There are better ways to exfoliate your skin than by sandblasting it. By the time we got back to the flat my contact lenses had dried on to my eyeballs like two bits of sticky tape. It must have been three days before I stopped swearing.

  Australia was the land of the giants. Everywhere seemed intimidatingly large: huge sky, big cars, wide roads, spacious houses, gigantic fridges. Even the people were bigger. Sure, wide open spaces and room to move sound like luxuries, but when you’ve lived most of your life in a city squished for space, driving a Mini and peeping at slivers of sky between tall old buildings, bigness can make a person feel very small. And feeling so small, I felt I exerted no power on my environment – or my life, for that matter. Where once I had confidently strode around in my miniature world, blissfully unaware of my size, I was now a Lilliputian scurrying about for a place to hide.

  I had imagined that the move to Australia would be culturally fairly straightforward. It was not unlike Britain: it was largely an Anglo-Celtic country where people spoke English. It had a functioning democracy with a similar legal system and comparable schools and universities. In fact, there would probably be lots of British people in Australia. And the chances were there would be very few cultural hurdles to jump. It wasn’t as if I was moving from a Western country to an Eastern one, or vice versa, as my parents had done before me.

  Well, I was right about everything except the hurdles. Australia, like Britain, might have been a largely white, English-speaking country, but boy did I have a few things to learn.

  I recall going into the North Carlton post office within the first two weeks of arriving and trying to buy two postage stamps. I had no idea how my accent sounded to Australians and I most certainly didn’t expect to be confronted by the brute force of Australian pride. I mean, how was I supposed to know egalitarianism was the opiate of the people here? They don’t tell you that kind of thing in travel books.

  ‘Two first-class stamps, please,’ I asked the man behind the counter, who looked up and stared at me as if I was from Neptune. His face was a mixture of disgust, exasperation and pity, like a high court judge about to sentence a teenager for killing his mother in a drink-drive accident. He leant across the counter slowly and deliberately, and, straightening out a gnarled finger uncomfortably close to my face, said, ‘In Astraya – we yonly have one claass.’

  The little queue of people behind me stopped chatting and a middle-aged blonde woman stacking shelves turned around to look at me. In the silence I thought I heard the wind whistle through a keyhole and a gate swing on its hinge. There’s nothing like learning a lesson the hard way.

  Failure to read social and cultural signposts in another country often leads to exquisite humiliation. But there is some knowledge that only the citizens of a country can instinctively understand because the shine on the fine threads of meaning that are woven through their country’s unique history are immediately visible to only their eyes. National identity is therefore a vast tapestry of fine threads brought together to create a picture with which the majority identifies and recognises effortlessly. Outsiders too can see the larger pic
ture. But it’s only when the light falls in such a way, or the tapestry is viewed from this or that angle, that the outsider can see the shine on those finer threads and therefore catch the meaning that, to the native, comes instinctively.

  Migration means being an outsider, at least for a while. Feeling like a foreigner is uncomfortable – the very antithesis of being a social animal. But for a period of time all migrants must be foreigners and they feel it every time they fail to understand an ‘in’ joke, when they can’t comprehend what is being asked of them, and when they mispronounce words. I died a thousand embarrassing deaths when I was corrected for pronouncing it the river Yaara (as in the name Lara) and not the river Yarra (as in barramundi). But at least I didn’t thank the lady behind the counter for the recee-p-t and not the receipt, as Dad had done once. And Mum – well, she’s always going to irrren the clothes and polish the vindows. Nothing anyone can do about that.

  There were quite a few times John and I didn’t get things right, more often than not in front of his colleagues.

  ‘Thank you for the invitation to the barbecue. We’d love to come.’

  ‘Great, we’ll see you in the arvo, then.’

  ‘In the arvo? Where’s that exactly?’

  ‘Where? No, see you in the arvo. See you in the afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, in the arvo.’

  ‘And bring a plate, if you like.’

  ‘A plate? A dinner plate?’

  ‘A plate of food, a contribution. A salad, or dessert – something like that.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course – a plate in the arvo.’

  Life was hard at first. Our belongings had yet to arrive (by ship) so John and I had nothing but our clothes and a few books when we moved into a big empty house in the inner-city suburb of Carlton. Life had to be rebuilt. We bought two garden chairs so we wouldn’t have to sit on the floor and most nights we ate baked beans on toast and played backgammon. Eventually I bought a little transistor radio and we huddled around it every night listening to the BBC World Service. (The Australian Broadcasting Corporation would switch to the BBC overnight.)