Deranged Marriage

by Sushi Das

  Raja wanted to please Mum and Dad, just like Vin had, but perhaps it was life experience that led me to believe that, despite his good intentions, the likelihood of him taking a course of action that would simultaneously please our parents and keep him happy was highly unlikely. I too had once aspired to an outcome that satisfied all parties, only to quickly realise that no such avenue existed. I felt sorry for my parents – they would probably have to tolerate a love marriage one more time.

  During his stay, my brother and I, for the first time, talked about growing up in Britain. We both had lots of English friends, although he also had a few Indian ones, which I never had. His friends were a merry band of lads, who would spend time at each other’s houses talking about football, laughing and eating crisps. I told him about my playground nignog experience and he was pensive.

  ‘I got beaten up once,’ he said suddenly. ‘I was in the foetal position on the ground trying to protect my internal organs.’

  His use of the words ‘internal organs’ made me feel panicky.

  ‘What! When? What happened? Where?’ I asked. So he told me his story.

  ‘I was coming home from school one day – I must have been about eleven or twelve years old. I remember it was a hot day, I had my blazer on and my rucksack was full of books. There were two bigger boys on the other side of the road. I recognised them from school, even though they weren’t wearing their uniforms. I think they must have been about fourteen or fifteen. Anyway, they crossed the road and came towards me. Then one of them hit me in my chest. Just completely out of the blue. I lost my balance because the rucksack was so heavy and I fell on the ground. They called me Paki and wog, and kicked me while I was on the ground. They told me to go back to my own country and then just walked off.

  ‘It was a life-changing moment, really. I felt bruised when I got up; it hurt when I breathed. Anyway, I went home and Mum opened the door. I told her what had happened and she was pretty upset. She told Dad and he said, “Some people are frightened of things they don’t know anything about.” ’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘Well, he was trying to tell me people who don’t know any better are either scared or angry about things they don’t know about, and that’s why they do stuff that doesn’t make sense. Dad told me not to get angry and, you know, start thinking about revenge and all that. He told me to try and understand why those boys did it.’ Raja paused. He’d started telling me the story slowly but as he spoke his words had tumbled out faster and faster. He paused to step out of the moment.

  ‘Why was it a life-changing moment?’ I asked instinctively, slipping into journalist mode. He took a beat of time to think before answering.

  ‘I felt a lot of anger at the time. I wanted to take revenge on them for doing that to me. But that anger was immature. It was Dad who stopped me from taking revenge. It was life-changing because Dad made me see things from a different point of view. There were other incidents, but that’s the one that sticks in my head. What gets me is that it was unprovoked.’

  ‘How do you feel about it now?’

  ‘I just think there are some people who don’t have enough life education. They’re not experienced enough to know that I’m no different to them.’

  Having finished his story, he got up and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. His tone had been direct, as if he was giving me directions to the nearest train station. Neither of us said anything after that. We just sat and drank our tea.

  By way of comfort, I might have been inclined to tell Raja that his was an experience from the past – that the world had moved on – had I not encountered a discomfitting experience of my own in the office just weeks earlier. I had leant my earplugs to a fellow reporter at the newspaper and needed them back so I could listen to an interview I had recorded. When I asked him for them, he opened his desk drawer, pulled them out and sniffed them. ‘They smell of curry. They must be yours,’ he said as he handed them to me.

  Mortified, I took them and quietly returned to my desk. But later, seething with anger, I demanded an apology in writing – and I got it. No covering my face with my hands this time, no shouting swearwords into the air, no lump in the throat – not anymore.

  On the day of Raja’s departure I drove him to the airport and we hugged when they called his flight. ‘You should come back home now,’ he said. ‘Mum and Dad want you to come back, and so do I.’ And with that and a final wave, he was gone, his leatherjacket disappearing into the crowd as he went through the departure gates.

  Perhaps I should have gone home straight away. I don’t know. I was an experienced journalist in Melbourne and I enjoyed my job. I worried I wouldn’t find an equivalent job in London. Newspapers all over the Western world were laying off staff as more and more people turned to the internet for news, and advertising revenue leached away. I missed London, heartily, but returning with no job, no partner and no property made me feel uncomfortable. Already I could hear the Indian gossips: ‘Did you hear about Das’s eldest daughter? Married a white man and ran away to Australia. Lost everything, came back with nothing. Too Westernised, huh! Too Westernised.’

  Looking back now, I don’t think anyone would have said that. I was a migrant to Australia, and like every migrant to any country before me, I was trapped in a slice of time from the past. Many migrants stay frozen in the pocket of time they existed in when they left their home country.

  Mentally, I was aware that Britain’s Indian community had moved on, become less restrictive of their daughters and better integrated into British life, but emotionally I still existed within the framework of the 1970s and 1980s – when Indian girls feared bringing shame on their families or dreamt of running away. My fear, of course, was induced by my parents’ conservative morality, a hangover from 1960s India.

  I felt trapped in a cage within a cage within a cage. Imaginary though my incarceration might have been, the iron bars of my mind were as strong as those of any real cage.

  I finally decided to visit my parents in London in December 2000 – four years after I separated from John and a month after I was officially divorced. I was thirty-six years old.

  There they were: Mum, Dad and Raja, waiting for me at Heathrow. Airports are such horrible places, full of crude emotion. Mum was crying even before I got out from behind the barrier that separates the travellers from the collectors.

  ‘You are so thin,’ she cried. ‘Only your bones I can see. You lost too much weight.’ Apart from occasionally wondering how my clothes had become so expanded, I hadn’t noticed I had become so much thinner. I’d always been a slim person, but now I looked like a whippet. The best way to lose weight, other than by contracting a life-threatening illness, is to live through a divorce, no matter how amicable.

  It’s unsettling to see age catching up with your parents, if only because it’s a forewarning of sorts. Mum and Dad had both taken to dyeing their grey hair black, yet they appeared older because of it. I was shocked to discover that Mum had had the black mole on her chin surgically removed, leaving behind a small shallow crater. I was cross. She had no right to stop looking like my mum. Dad was the same as ever, except he’d upgraded to a digital camera. ‘Film always gives an excellent picture,’ he said, ‘but digital has some very superior qualities.’ I felt a small burst of pride that he had so willingly embraced modern technology, rather than hankering for what he’d always known.

  ‘You should come back to England now,’ said Mum. ‘Iss time to come home. Nothing left for you in Australia.’ Perhaps she was right. What else was there to return to in Australia but journalism and childlessness? Next year, at the age of thirty-seven, my fertility would start its steep and merciless decline. What were the chances of meeting a new life partner and starting a family now? Grey hairs were appearing at my temples. Cynicism had gnawed its way into me. The world and I were getting older.

  Dad wondered if I might find a job on a newspaper in England. It was an overt acknowledgment that he had reconciled hims
elf to my career, and it pleased me. Ever since my teenage years we had been discussing world politics in one form or another, and though he never sat me down and specifically taught me about abstract concepts, I know my understanding of compassion and justice arose from the conversations we had.

  Dad was proud and fascinated by my career. He never said so, but that was the obvious conclusion to draw from his interest in the workings of my newspaper. Where did it stand politically? How broad was its foreign coverage? Who owned it? What kind of man was the editor?

  Most times Dad was across the news better than I was. He even knew what was going on in Australia – the BBC World Service, ever his friend. Every now and again I would present him with a new angle on a story, but it wasn’t often that I had something to teach him. After all, what can you teach your father? What can you teach the man who assured you fairyfloss would not get stuck in your throat like a ball of cotton wool? What could you teach the man who took his five-year-old daughter into the garden one morning, just as the sun was warming the trees, and crouched down to carefully point with one finger to a glistening teardrop poised on the end of a blade of grass. ‘Dew,’ he had said. ‘It comes in the morning.’

  Comfortingly, nothing in Mum and Dad’s house had changed, except Mum had her own TV now, on which she watched Indian soap operas in the living room at the front of the house. Dad used his TV to watch the news in the living room at the back of the house.

  ‘He watch the news all day,’ complained Mum, bustling about, crashing pots and pans in the kitchen. ‘In the morning he watch the Pakistani news. Then he watch Indian news. Then he read the newspaper whole the day. In evening time he watch the news on BBC. All day iss same news.’

  ‘Why do you get so worked up about it? You have your own TV now. He’s not stopping you from watching whatever you want,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but he cut the newspaper and leave in every corner. His junk everywhere. Have you seen the garage? His junk in there. He never clean it. I ask him so many times, but he busy watching the news. He is not bread-winning anymore. He watching the news.’

  ‘He is watching the news,’ I said.

  ‘See? Wor I tell you, he never stop. Bloody news.’

  At least she had better command of her swearing these days. Later, in the living room at the back of the house Dad said, ‘Your mother is obsessed with these Indian soap operas. Zee TV,’ he put a mocking emphasis on Zee. ‘She gets it on cable. I don’t know how to stop her.’

  ‘Just leave her, Dad. If she enjoys them, what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘You don’t understand. They are affecting her thinking. She becomes too emotional.’

  Be it an arranged marriage or a love marriage, bickering is presumably a universal phenomenon. But Mum and Dad, despite their needling, sometimes looked at each other with an expression that exhibited equal helpings of bewilderment, capitulation and curiosity. An expression that said, ‘I understand you, but sometimes I really don’t understand you.’ Their love had grown and grown over thirty-seven years and there would be no end to it. They had their own language. If anyone inadvertently threw out Dad’s newspapers, Mum would be the first to retrieve them from the bin, and any suggestion that Indian soaps were rubbish would be met with a flat response from Dad: ‘Yes, but your mother enjoys them very much.’

  No matter what, they would always be together because they believed fate had brought them together, and they accepted their fate. All Hindus accept their fate. The longer my parents were married, the more they baffled each other, but there was love and a calm acceptance of destiny: this is not a good life or even a bad life, this is just life unfolding, as it is meant to.

  On the night of Saturday 12 October, 2002, terrorists detonated bombs on the island of Bali, killing 202 people: 38 were Indonesians, 88 were Australians. I was a news editor at the time and rostered to work the following day. It was going to be a big news day, so I got to the office early the next morning and began commissioning reporters to fly to Bali, keeping an eye on further breaking news and coordinating reporters on the ground in Melbourne. I had to work closely with the foreign editor, who was in touch with our foreign correspondents.

  Some years earlier, Tom Hyland, that slow-speaking moustachioed Tasmanian who had given me my break in journalism, had quit his job at the wire service and moved to The Age, where he eventually took over as the foreign editor. His once brown hair had turned completely white by then. The day after the Bali bombings, Tom and I worked together to coordinate the newspaper’s coverage of what was, at the time, the world’s single biggest terrorist incident since 9/11.

  Tom guided anxious reporters, spoke calmly and offered leadership and assurance. He was a steady pair of hands: dependable, experienced and utterly unflappable. I recall the day, not only because watching a professional at work was illuminating, but because we worked well as a team and I learnt a great deal from him. But if somebody had told me that I would one day marry Tom, I would have thought them barking mad. He was ten years my senior and by then I was most certainly not looking for a partner, let alone a husband. I had given up on men and had decided that living alone, an existence that is 50 per cent joy and 50 per cent guerilla warfare with oneself, was actually the best option for me. Thoughts of having children had faded. I was ready for a life of childlessness.

  Most of my interaction with Tom was at the daily afternoon news conference, at which the various section editors would gather to brief the editor on the stories and pictures of the day. It was a relatively small conference room and with the doors closed the unlaboured breathing of the fifteen or so people gathered around the table would quickly cause an oxygen deficit, leaving previously compos mentis individuals in either a soporific torpor or a bizarre state of professional hysteria. Occasionally the decorum of the conference would collapse into low-grade one-upmanship about Australian Rules Football, that game of base thuggery in which players are required to run about as if in a schoolyard, spitefully snatching the ball off one another and punching each other in the head – all under the guise of manly sportsmanship. The room would become unnecessarily animated, discussing which team had won at the weekend, which player had gouged out whose eye and whether so and so’s cruciate ligament injury would debilitate him for the remainder of the season. I despised those moments because I despised this babyishly named ‘footy’. The only other person in the room who I’d heard also had little time for the sport was Tom. I’d look at him wearily across the table and pull a cross-eyed cartoon character’s face, tongue hanging loosely out of one side of my mouth. He’d stare at me unblinking, his moustache acting as a disguise to conceal his expression. I could never tell what he was thinking.

  Once conference started in earnest, the editors ran through their lists of stories for the day one by one, each vying for one of their own yarns to be the front-page splash. As the foreign editor, Tom’s stories usually involved tongue-twisting foreign names of mass murderers, brutal dictators and far-flung war-torn cities, which he would pronounce with eyebrow-raising aplomb.

  ‘I practise the pronunciation for at least an hour before going in to conference,’ he confided to me. He was a solid performer who disliked being interrupted. When on one occasion the editor started a random conversation with the person sitting next to him during one of Tom’s briefings, as he was wont to do sometimes, Tom stopped recounting his news list and continued seamlessly on an entirely different path: ‘Meanwhile, in other news,’ he announced, ‘German armoured columns have crossed the Polish frontier. The British prime minister has issued the chancellor with an ultimatum and the Australian prime minister is about the address the nation. It looks like there’s going to be another war. And the other story we’re keeping an eye on is the Oscars.’

  The dozy elite of Melbourne journalism stirred from their slumber and sniggered as the editor acknowledged Tom with an apologetic nod. The Age’s foreign editor had a way of commanding attention with sarcasm.

  But Tom didn’t need to us
e sarcasm to command my attention. I found him rather fascinating, not unlike a paleontologist discovering the fossil of a hitherto unknown dinosaur. His ever-so-slightly robotic manner eased when he was away from the office, as if somebody had oiled his joints, and he leant back comfortably in his chair when he talked about his son and daughter from a previous marriage. And while talking about his kids, who were both in their late teens, he’d find himself chasing memories of his own childhood growing up in a small town in Tasmania.

  ‘My mum and dad both migrated from Ireland and came to Australia on the same ship. In fact, they fell in love on that ship and got married a year after they arrived,’ he said. A romantically quaint story, so different from my own parents’. ‘My father had a rich, expressive I rish brogue,’ Tom continued. ‘There were five kids in our family and we would cluster around him when he sat in his armchair to read to us every night.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever rebel against your parents?’

  ‘Yes, I had a rebellion. I was a dope-smoking, long-haired hippie, but I still went to Mass – had to really. There are some things you can only rebel against slowly. Catholicism, I’m afraid, is one of them.’

  Had we not enjoyed hours engaged in random musings, we might never have discovered that we harboured a mutual respect for fountain pens, had a penchant for anchovies and savoured unforgivably bad language. He was a welcome companion at a time when I needed some human company.

  One day, after the war on Iraq had started and my working days were angsty-fast, Tom popped over to my flat for a cup of tea and to debrief. He had with him a brown paper bag that he handed to me, saying, ‘Here, these are for you.’ I peered into the bag and saw three small tomatoes and two brown eggs. ‘The tomatoes are from my garden and my chickens laid those eggs today,’ he said.