The House of Hidden Mothers

by Meera Syal

  ‘So, didi, why did you not come also with your parents? It would have been good, the whole family here.’

  ‘Oh, I really wanted to, Bitoo, but college work, you know?’

  Bitoo nodded gravely. The Indian lot all understood that nothing interrupted Studies. Although in truth, Tara could have easily gone: she had completed all her assignments for the term and being there with her grandparents would have been wonderful. They could have put the right names to all the photos in the dead relatives’ gallery, shown her around their childhood haunts, been her translators when her own limited Punjabi dried up and rendered her a smiling, grinning idiot. As she was now, faced with Bitoo’s wavering, wide-eyed face. The miles between them and the years apart made Tara feel she was on some weird speed-dating site, searching for a conversation opener that would get them through until the wine arrived. With a shock, she realized this was how she would feel all the time once her grandparents had gone. They were her strongest link to India, speaking history books, their old, gentle bones the creaky bridge between her and her sepia-washed ancestors on the wall.

  ‘You are doing exams right now, yes?’

  ‘Um no, there aren’t many exams on my course, Bitoo.’ She could see the growing consternation on his face. ‘I get assessed continually though,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I’ve just made my first small film, my end-of-term project.’

  ‘You’re doing movies?’ Bitoo’s excitement subsided as he remembered, ‘Oh yah, right, you are doing some media-style degree, isn’t it?’

  ‘Media-style. That about sums it up, yep.’ The sarcasm went unnoticed.

  ‘I am also studying hard, didi. Right now I am making applications to universities. I have a good chance of getting a scholarship to study abroad. So then I will also be talking to everyone on Skype like you!’

  ‘Oh congratulations, that sounds amazing. You hoping to come to London?’

  ‘No, no, didi! America. Everyone wants America only right now.’

  Of course they did. She understood then how he saw her: the oddball relative living in a swampy backwater, doing an irrelevant subject in an increasingly irrelevant country. Tara felt a headache begin thrumming at her temples.

  ‘So where’s Nanima … um, I mean Thayee-ji?’ She used the correct title that Bitoo would understand for ‘elder uncle’s wife’.

  Bitoo swallowed again. It looked like a small animal was trying to burrow out of his throat. ‘Um, they have gone upstairs … to their bedroom …’

  Bitoo darted nervy glances towards the door, where raised voices of welcome were now filtering through. A figure appeared behind him fleetingly. Tara recognized the voice and now understood why her grandparents had made themselves scarce. It was Yogesh. He did a comedic double-take at the screen, so cheesy it almost made Tara laugh out loud. It was disconcerting – wrong, somehow – how much he looked like his brother, Prem. He cleared his throat noisily and looked down into the camera.

  ‘Hello, Tara, beti! How are you?’

  This is all your fault, Tara realized. You are the reason we stopped coming over. You broke that thread of continuity, dropped us like a bad stitch, unravelled our shared history with your greedy hands.

  ‘Hi, Uncle. Have you given my grandparents their flat back yet?’ Tara asked loudly.

  Yogesh’s smile flickered for just a moment. ‘Very bad connection, hah? See you soon!’

  Yogesh left the room quickly.

  Bitoo got up clumsily from his chair, sending it clattering to the floor. ‘I’ll just see if they are coming now, OK, didi?’ he croaked, and fled to safety.

  Tara felt better after seeing Prem and Sita. Bitoo had taken the laptop to them in their bedroom. Yogesh must have still been lurking around downstairs, but her grandparents did not seem perturbed if he was. Tara enjoyed their delight at being able to finally see her clearly.

  ‘Theklo, Prem, it’s like she is just next door! Kamaal hai, hena?’

  Her grandmother’s favourite phrase, kamaal hai – how extraordinary is the world, how often it shocks and delights us, how small we are.

  She had looked well, was optimistic about the imminent hearing, even hoping they might get an eviction date within six weeks, before their tickets ran out. Prem, however, had seemed less chipper. He looked as if he’d aged since he’d left. He had sat quietly whilst Sita shouted their news at Tara, but her eyes were on her grandfather. She could have helped them. What they needed were some Western bad manners and bovva-boy bravado, someone who didn’t give a toss about all the family niceties. It shocked Tara that her grandparents still stayed in Prem’s eldest brother’s house, which Yogesh would call into regularly, unchallenged. No one had the balls to say out loud what he’d done, just as no one would allow Prem and Sita to stay in a hotel, not when they could be fed and watered by their kin. Everyone’s doing it, she thought. Faking it, like me.

  ‘You’re OK, beti?’ Sita shouted. ‘Eating OK? Doing your school work?’

  School work. She would always be a child to them, even when grey-haired herself, battling her own dodgy knees and acid reflux. They wouldn’t be around to see her age, maybe would never see their great-grandchildren. The thought made her well up, loneliness flooding her throat so she could only nod her goodbyes. However clear the picture, they weren’t in the next room; she couldn’t smell them, hold them, enjoy silence with them. Life through a glass screen, antiseptic and untouched.

  Tara ended the Skype call just as the doorbell rang downstairs. Cursing, she covered the two flights of stairs in ten seconds and opened the door to the same group of friends who had been round virtually every night since her family had left.

  ‘Hey,’ Tara panted as they trooped through, Ben, Felix, Lucy, Polly, another Lucy, Jem, all bearing alcohol, party snacks and carrier bags full of must-see movies on DVD. They all knew their way around by now, filing noisily into the kitchen and living room, discarding their wind-chilled coats. Tara was enjoying the fantasy of playing hostess in her own house, feeding people from her own kitchen, playing music as loudly as their neighbours would tolerate. Anything was better than being alone. She was about to shut the door behind the last straggler when an unexpected couple brought up the rear.

  ‘Hey Tara, you said turn up if we were free – well, here we are. Hope that’s OK?’

  ‘Tamsin! Course … yes … come in.’

  Tamsin laughed her breathy girl-child laugh, revealing small white dolphin teeth, and held aloft two bottles of Prosecco. ‘And Margherita with extra jalapeno! Ta-da!’ She waved at her lanky, woolly-hatted companion, who was standing behind her juggling an armful of pizza boxes. ‘They’re still hot, I think. Char-lie, find some plates.’

  Charlie barely looked at Tara as he struggled after Tamsin. She threw her coat over the bannisters, revealing her usual uniform of embroidered ethnic-print top, skin-tight jeans and biker boots. Her hair fell in a complimentary curtain halfway down her back.

  ‘Gorgeous place, by the way,’ she said as she followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. ‘My dad says these houses are gonna be worth a million when the new Tube line’s finished.’

  Tamsin’s father did something in banking. She kept the details hazy – they probably wouldn’t sit well with her image as a radical eco-warrior. She was considered one of those in Tara’s year who would do well when they left their academic bubble behind. Her weekly blog, Boudicca Babe, was gathering quite a following, once described in the Sunday Times style section’s online picks as ‘Caitlin Moran meets the Jolly Green Giantess’. She was beautiful in that ethereal, willowy way that made men want to protect her and made other women want to swear loudly and chug pints, in order to avoid a direct comparison which they knew they would lose. Tamsin loved all things Indian – the vegetarian food, the primal prints, the bindis, the androgynous blue-skinned gods – and this was the main reason, Tara suspected, that she had turned up tonight. Tamsin also happened to be going out with Charlie, with whom Tara had spent much of the last week arguing furiously.
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  The issue over which they had clashed had been resurrected in the kitchen – everyone was discussing their recently completed assignment. They had all had to direct and shoot a five-minute film, their only brief being the title ‘Now What?’ and that they should limit their shoot to a maximum of two actors and one set. The challenge had thrown up the predictable re-hashing of childhood traumas and relationship car crashes: Jem re-created the moment his bi-polar father had been found wandering on a dual carriageway and subsequently sectioned; Tamsin shared her first sexual encounter in a barn in France. Tara’s film featured a mother and daughter arguing over a coffin, each blaming the other for the demise of the soon-to-be-cremated corpse. Heavy silences gave way to lots of shouting; the students she had co-opted from the college drama department seemed to enjoy the shouting a bit too much, in Tara’s opinion. Still, her tutor had commended her film’s ‘sensitive honesty’, and her friends had been eager to know if it was based on her own life. They became less interested when she said that it wasn’t.

  Tara entered the kitchen as Charlie was loudly holding court, feet up on the table as if he lived there. He had framed himself perfectly: the deep red of a feature wall behind him, spotlit from above so his killer cheekbones flashed like knives.

  ‘… switched off after thirty seconds, all those soapy close-ups … bit misery memoir-ish for me,’ he declaimed, pausing as he caught sight of Tara.

  The temperature in the room shifted, the laughter slowly dribbling away.

  Tamsin jumped in, her voice bright and loud. ‘Shall I crack open the Prosecco, peeps?’

  ‘Talking about my film, were you, Charlie?’ Tara said evenly.

  ‘That description fits all our films, don’t you think?’ Charlie grinned at her. ‘They may as well have asked us all to have a communal wank.’

  ‘No doubt you’d have come top of the form then,’ Tara flipped back at him, unable to pass him until he slowly removed his feet from her kitchen table.

  ‘Oh, my cri de coeur not to your taste?’

  Charlie’s offering had been five minutes of a young man – himself – staring in the mirror, deciding which side he should part his hair for a first date, posting continual pictures of himself to an army of online friends throughout. Tara had fumed all the way through it, enraged that he thought a couple of fancy camera angles and some amateur gurning constituted a cohesive piece of work.

  ‘I might have enjoyed it more if you hadn’t been in it.’ Tara didn’t look at him as she grabbed mugs from a cupboard above his head. A ‘Whooo!’ and scattered applause came from the others, who were enjoying the sparks of one of Charlie and Tara’s usual spats.

  ‘Well, I couldn’t trust any of those scenery-chewing Drama lot to do my work justice.’ Charlie picked at his front teeth with a finger. ‘Though luckily it was to Robbo’s taste.’

  Robert Keen was the feared head of their course, a hard man to please.

  ‘What? You’ve got your mark already?’ Tamsin coughed through a mouthful of crisps.

  ‘Happened to bump into him as I left today. In fact,’ Charlie continued, not taking his eyes away from Tara, ‘he described my little film as “a brilliant deconstruction of the obsessive narcissism of certain forms of social media”. And then gave me a first.’

  Tara poured herself a mug of something nearby and took a long gulp, the alcohol searing her throat as it went down. God, she hated him.

  She slipped out of the kitchen and headed into the sitting room as the Prosecco cork finally popped to a chorus of cheers. She began rearranging the embroidered cushions on the sofa, punching the soft velvet with unnecessary force. She knew Charlie’s type – all thrust and gob – only too well. The same brand of casual machismo that reminded her of her father and which she had loved when she was a little girl. Daddy would decide everything – where they were going, when they would eat, what kind of fun they would have together. It had made her feel like the centre of this powerful man’s world, and as though anyone who messed with her would surely come to grief. This paternal protectiveness became more pronounced when her parents finally split up, her father thrillingly purchasing a studio flat in the Docklands where Tara would spend alternate weekends. She felt as if she had flown to Manhattan for a mini-break, sitting on his tiny balcony with hot chocolate and a blanket, the sleek, steely monoliths of city skyscrapers winking at them from across the Thames. Those weekends didn’t feel like real life at all; time was pliable as plasticine, stretching to accommodate last-minute theatre trips, spontaneous market rambles, outdoor music festivals, lunches in remote eateries or visits to random friends of her father’s, where she would be presented to other strange kids and told to play nicely. Often she would find herself being driven up the motorway on an unexpected business trip, and she would find herself perched in some far-flung office with a pile of sweets and magazines whilst her father sat at several computers talking in a language she never understood. In fact, she still didn’t know exactly what he did, other than that it involved designing security software. He got paid ‘shitloads of money for very old rope’, according to Shyama. During that rose-tinted period, she and her father became giggly conspirators against her mother, who was cast as the moany one, the one who would insist she did her homework or wore something warmer/cleaner, or complained because Tara had been brought home way past her bedtime. Her father would roll his eyes, grinning at Tara, making a secret yak-yak sign with his hands – there she goes again! Tara would roll her eyes back at him, bursting with pride that he had chosen her as his ally, fuelled all evening with burning righteous resentment at the sucking-a-lemon-faced nag who spoiled all their fun.

  And then, inevitably, Tara began to grow up. She asked questions, she voiced opinions, she had other plans occasionally that didn’t fit in with her father’s. They began to argue. He accused her of disrespect and a shallow disregard for his feelings, of preferring her mother to him, despite the fact that Tara wasn’t asking to spend more time with her, she just wanted some time to herself. He punished her by ignoring her calls or sending texts summoning her to see him now or not at all, a test to see how far she would bend. She bent and wept and raged, turning up to meet him already angry, but mostly grief-stricken at why he didn’t seem to like her older and bigger, why he only seemed to have loved her when she was little and cute and didn’t answer back. It was only when he introduced his girlfriend to her that she began to understand why she had fallen out of favour. This woman was less than a decade older than Tara, but mentally she seemed a lot younger. She was surprisingly pretty, doll-like, East European –‘From Macedonia, actually,’ she trilled, throwing adoring glances towards Tara’s father. Ah, there it was, that look of unquestioning devotion, puppy-dog eyes and cute pet-me whimper. I used to look at him like that, realized Tara, and now that I don’t, he’s found it somewhere else. Silly me. For a while, this softened Tara’s attitude towards Shyama. She began to have an inkling of what it was that had pushed her parents apart, how her mother must have also bent as far as she could before something finally broke. It was the reason behind her film, which she had been all ready to show Shyama, to begin the dialogue that had evaded them for years. A mother and daughter having a brutally honest conversation over the corpse of someone they loved – surely she would get the hint. But then the whole baby thing had blown up and the moment had passed.

  ‘Wow! I totally looo-ve this room!’ Tamsin wandered in with a slice of pizza and a glass of fizz, which she waved at Tara. ‘Hope you don’t mind, I found a flute. Just can’t drink bubbly out of china … No way – is that you at the Taj Mahal?’

  Tamsin held up the framed photo that always took pride of place on the mantlepiece, the only one featuring Tara’s father that Shyama didn’t seem to mind having on general display. Tara was about nine, on her last trip to India and the last as a family – her parents parted months later. Her memories of the actual building were hazy: hot white stone beneath her feet, the constant click of cameras, elbows in her face, a sp
ectacularly large wasps’ nest hanging like a furry bloated chrysalis beneath one of the massive carved doors leading to the inner shrine. What she remembered most was the tension between her parents. She could smell it, sour and sad, feel it in the way they would both hold on to her too long and hard, as they were doing in this photo. Smiling into the sun, they clasped each other in a desperate embrace, the monument to eternal love squat and silent behind them.

  ‘Is it as amazing as everyone says? How long were you there? Have you got loads of family over there?’

  Tamsin curled into a corner of the sofa, waiting for enlightenment. Tara knew how this ought to go now. Oh, she could talk a good talk about her mother culture. She had done it often enough. She could regale her fellow students with her memories of eating mangoes in a monsoon storm (true, she had the photos to prove it), or concoct hilarious tales of her huge extended family (partly true, but heavily embroidered for maximum comic effect), enjoying their rapt and envious expressions. But often she felt like a poor actress in a sketchily written role, all broad brush strokes, no fine detail or emotional depth, a parody of what she ought to be. The truth was, most of the time Tara felt like a fraud, studying a course that led to nothing in particular, eating food for which she had no appetite, engaging in brittle battles of wit which left her bitter and light-headed afterwards, living in a family in which she felt she was an unwanted and temporary lodger. Only with her grandparents did she feel remotely grounded. She missed their familiar ballast. She should have gone with them.

  Tara made for the door. ‘You know what? How about we get a film on? I’ll get the others.’

  Some hours later, Tara was trying to stuff a pile of pizza boxes into a bin bag when Charlie walked into the kitchen. The others were lolling around the sitting room watching some high-concept zombie movie, Tamsin’s self-consciously dramatic yelps of fear punctuating the ongoing group commentary.