by Meera Syal
‘Is everything OK, Ram? Um … thoom teek-hay?’
Hearing Hindi come out of the gora’s mouth was almost enough to make Ram laugh and let go, but he had gone too far now, in front of all of them. Shaking his head, he managed to yank Mala away from the big-mouth woman with the stupid red hair and stride for the door. Shyama made to go after them, but even though Toby held out a restraining arm, it was Prem’s voice that halted her.
‘Leave them!’
Shyama couldn’t remember the last time she had heard her father raise his voice. He hated conflict, she could hear it in the tremor of his tone, the careful way he wiped his buttery fingers with his napkin, turmeric-yellow fingerprints on clean white linen.
‘They have taken your charity. Now leave them with some dignity.’
‘This was perhaps a mistake, Shyama,’ Sita added. ‘I know you meant well, but things are done differently here.’
‘What? I shouldn’t try and be nice to the woman who’s going to change our lives?’ Shyama tried to control her breathing, aware of curious eyes on them from different corners of the restaurant. She looked at Toby for support, but he was carefully avoiding her gaze.
‘Darling, it’s just a job to them,’ said Sita.
‘Them?’
‘Please don’t do this. Don’t do your flag-waving thing at me,’ Sita snapped back. ‘You think we don’t think they are human? Two bad harvests and we would have been in their shoes all those years back! But you made them feel … awkward, bringing them here. How could they ever return the hospitality, open their home and pockets to us?’
‘I wasn’t expecting—’ Shyama began.
‘You don’t expect because you don’t know.’
‘I know when a woman is being bullied by her husband. Or is that another local custom I’m supposed to respect?’
‘Shyama! Don’t—’
But Shyama was already on her way out. Toby didn’t need to see Sita’s frantic gestures, he was already behind her.
In the hotel courtyard, Mala pulled free from Ram, heading for some greenery in the side lobby, away from the imperious moustachioed doormen in their mock-maharajah outfits who had given them both fearsome looks when they had arrived earlier. She felt dizzy, either with nerves or speed-eating. The food had been so rich and abundant, she wondered how she had managed to talk as much as she had. But she had managed somehow. Good. She stood facing Ram, who clenched and unclenched his fingers slowly, knuckles cracking. Chalo, she thought, here we go now. Will he hit me finally, this husband of mine? Nostrils flared, ready to buffalo-charge me. Look at him.
And as she looked, she saw something she did not expect: not anger, not violence, but a fearful sorrow. A man burnt by the sun and thinned by hard labour, staring at his wife, knowing he would never understand her and could not control her, so what else remained? How could that peasant mouth ever express the complex poetry in his eyes? Mala saw his soul then, flickering behind his barred pain, and understood he was as trapped as she was. And would keep her trapped too, because even with the money to come, he knew no other way.
‘You …’ He reached for each word. ‘You … disobeyed me.’
‘Yes,’ said Mala softly.
‘Why?’ Ram’s hands kept on opening, closing. ‘Why so quickly?’
‘Quickly?’
‘You … already pregnant. With me it took you months. Why?’
Mala shrugged. ‘Maybe because the doctor did it.’
‘How do I know? I wasn’t here, was I?’
Acha, so this is it. Mala almost relaxed into her relief. Now we get to it. Even though all this tamasha was his idea – his sus-sus whisperings in her ear day and night for weeks, the way he looked at her as if working out which limb would pay for his extra acre of land – now apparently she was the whore. Condemned for a sin she had not even been awake for.
‘What? You think I danced to his hotel room, sang him a song and opened my legs?’
Ram balled his fingers into fists and took a step towards her. From the corner of her eye she became aware of Shyama and Toby arriving on the other side of the glass. ‘You shut your mouth right now,’ he hissed, ‘Or—’
‘Or what? What will you do? What can they do? Rip my child from my belly and ask for their money back?’
‘Your child?’ Ram shook his head, trying to dislodge the words from his ears.
‘My body. His child. But if he had asked me, husband,’ Mala whispered, positioning herself so her back faced the hotel window, ‘I might have said yes.’
Ram never meant to hit her. In fact, he still wasn’t sure that he actually had. All he did was swing his arm back – usually that was enough to shut someone up, the threat of the raised sandal his own mother used to discipline him with. Most of the time she would not even have to take her shoe off; just seeing her wagging finger creep down towards her foot was enough to send Ram and his siblings scurrying into the corner begging for forgiveness. Even afterwards he did not know what had happened. One minute his hand was in the air, the next Mala was lying curled up on the floor, clutching herself and screaming loudly enough for not just red-hair woman and her blond chamcha to come running, but also the two guards who threw him away so hard he had bruises for days afterwards.
He had tried to tell them, in a Hindi these stupid firenge could not even understand, I have never struck her, not once. It was like she ran into my fist. Towards it. I don’t even remember feeling flesh on flesh. But too quickly Mala was bundled away, back into the hotel. People were around her, lying her on the squashy sofa, letting her put her feet up, passing her water. All the while Red Hair was at her side, talking, stroking, holding the cup to her lips, both women’s hands on Mala’s belly, which was now, Ram understood, the centre of the whole universe. He had tried to explain to Blondie that there had been some misunderstanding, but the haramzada had just looked at him like he had just crawled out of a dung heap, and that just made Ram get angrier and shout louder, forgetting that not one word would be understood.
‘Just calm down, OK? Back off, fella … I’m warning you!’
Toby knew he sounded like an inefficient bouncer, but he had to keep talking to hold the man before him at bay, and to stop himself from flying at him and ripping his head off. It wasn’t just that he had attacked a pregnant woman, that the baby she was carrying was his, for Christ’s sake, but the woman herself. Mala – small, crumpled, bewildered – aroused the most primeval protective instincts in him. His fury tasted like acid, he burned with a violence that made him feel righteous and invincible and, worse still, he was enjoying the feeling. We are just cavemen swinging our clubs, he thought to himself. We are both only doing what we are programmed to do, somewhere deep down. We are, in fact, fighting over the same woman. And who has the bigger claim on her now? This made Toby feel both hugely important and deeply insignificant, as if he was representing the whole of mankind in some messy after-hours pub brawl. They finally lapsed into silence, both circling each other, panting. Then Ram spat on the floor and loped off into the night.
Shyama was shaking more than Mala; it was Mala who ended up patting her arm, smiling her reassurance that all was OK.
‘I knew this would happen,’ Shyama muttered. ‘I could see it coming.’
In her head, she was scrolling through the pages of small print in the contract she and Toby had signed in the lawyer’s office just days ago. Vinod Aggarwal seemed to have a clause to cover every unforeseen circumstance, but she couldn’t remember one which advised what their options were when the surrogate’s husband beat her up. What protection could the clinic offer if he kept turning up, threatening trouble? Mala wouldn’t be the only one he would upset. She had read enough articles on the effects of stress on the unborn child and pregnant mother to know that Dr Passi would be as worried as she was. She felt a squeeze on her hand.
‘Madam, I am better. It is late, nah? They will be worrying.’ Mala let the question hang in the air.
Shyama shook her head. ‘He knows
where you are. You’re not going back tonight.’
Back at their hotel, it wasn’t difficult to book an adjoining room now the various wedding parties had gone; they even had a connecting door. Shyama had dispatched Toby to the clinic hostel to explain to the night nurse what had happened, and she had left a long message on Dr Passi’s answerphone suggesting they have an emergency meeting the next day. Sita and Prem had hurried back to Prem’s elder brother’s place, already knowing that Shyama and Toby would not make their flight home the next day. There were cancellation and rebooking fees to consider and arrange, none of it convenient but all of it unavoidable.
‘We can’t just leave her in this state …’ Shyama hadn’t needed to convince Toby, they both knew what was at stake. Their packed cases sat accusingly in the corner of the bedroom. Next door they could hear the faint sound of water running, the toilet flushing; Mala’s proximity was making them whisper, even though they were separated by a thick wall and a double-bolted door.
‘I can’t believe he actually punched her.’ Shyama was still wired on adrenalin, sitting up in bed in the dark.
‘I couldn’t see … just saw her fall, that was bad enough.’ Toby patted Shyama’s bare shoulder. ‘Let it go. She’s safe.’
‘For now,’ Shyama muttered, easing herself down and settling on to Toby’s chest. ‘How can we protect her when we’re not here?’
‘I dunno … we could ask Dr Passi …’ Toby hesitated. ‘Pay Dr Passi to put her up somewhere else, or—’
‘But then what about all the medical checks? The monitoring …’
‘Maybe they have another clinic somewhere else, somewhere he won’t find—’
‘They don’t. I already checked, this is their only one. She’s just expanded the site rather than open other branches. Wants to stay hands-on. I mean that’s what we’re paying for, this level of attention and care.’
They both paused, registering the unmistakable gurgling coming from next door.
‘Is she … she’s running a bath,’ Shyama breathed.
‘Bit late,’ Toby said, suddenly uncomfortable at the vivid image of Mala unwinding her sari in clouds of scented steam.
‘Probably the first time she’s stayed in a hotel.’
They listened to the sound of the rising water, the emptying cistern, the faint strains of a girlish humming, tuneless and unselfconscious as a child’s. As Shyama’s breathing slowed and steadied, Toby’s gradually increased. Then the sound of running water stopped. In the silence he thought he could hear the rustle of clothing removed and shed like a silk skin, feel the weight of her as she entered the water, smell the perfumed bubbles, foamy white against the dark hollows of her body. He turned to Shyama, running his hands over her legs, her thighs, trying to ground himself in the familiar feel of her, wanting to open her up so he could lose himself inside her. But she was fast asleep.
On the other side of the wall, Mala was enjoying the curious sensation of floating almost weightless in the deep enamel tub, only her knees and toes visible through the meringue whips of bubble bath, all four complimentary bottles thrown in together. The deepest she had ever ventured into the river was waist high, and then only nervously; like every other woman in the village, she had never learned to swim. This is how the baccha must feel, she realized, a small boat bobbing in Mama’s sea, every noise sounding like fishtails flapping in waves, faraway music pulsing to the swoosh of my blood. Ram must be sitting outside the hostel now, on his haunches like a faithful dog, waiting to bark at me.
The thought of him waiting all night, watching the dawn rise over the slums, made Mala sad, then defiant. Whatever happened, she was not going back, she knew that now. They would use the money to find a home here in Delhi. It would be a small place, no land to work, but Ram could line up on the roadside like all the other newly arrived refugee farmers and make twice as much on the building sites, if he was picked. She had been listening carefully to the other women in the hostel and their boasts about their husbands – where they worked, how they found work – though they all knew that if their husbands were at all successful, none of them would be sitting on their low beds with heat rash itching under their distended bellies. Now Shyama Madam and Toby sahib had seen what could happen, they would do anything to keep it from happening again. Maybe there would be another fight between the two men outside the hostel, then the idea of putting Mala in a flat somewhere close by, with her own bedroom and bathroom, like this. Maybe even in this hotel. Then Ram would understand and eventually come round to her way of thinking. Someone had to do the thinking, long term, not just hand-to-mouth with no time to stop and smell the samosas.
The heat of the bath was now making Mala uncomfortable; her cheeks felt flushed. How could they enjoy this, sitting in the scum of the day? She stood up carefully, swaying a little, careful careful now. How stupid it would be to slip and break her head after all that had happened this evening.
What Mala didn’t know, would not know till days later, was that Ram was not outside the hostel, but asleep on a bench in the district coach station, waiting for the first bus back to the village.
The house, Tara thought, had never looked cleaner or tidier. Since she had stopped socializing so much, she had found the best way to spend the long evenings was to scrub, polish, dust, de-clutter. She had started with the sitting room, initially to remove any evidence of that night. The zombie movie was still in the DVD player, surrounded by empty bottles, cans, pizza cartons, skanky ashtrays. Everything went into bin bags – sod the recycling, she just wanted to see clear surfaces. Then she had begun to notice other things: the dust on top of the picture rails, the frayed edges of the cushions, the random groupings of the books on the shelves, not alphabetical, not even by any kind of genre. It had taken her three evenings, but the room looked new, or at least redecorated. She’d decided to bin some of the garish knick-knacks and old candles that cluttered various crannies, had looked online for how to remove wax stains from wood and goat smells from old throws. The purging continued through every room in the house, bar her mother’s bedroom, because God knows what she might find in there.
After a week of nightly clear-outs, she disabled her Facebook and Twitter accounts – no point getting anxious about the gossip and get-togethers she was missing. True, there were a few withdrawal symptoms and some separation anxiety – she’d often have to ring her smartphone from the landline to locate it somewhere under a dishcloth or a pile of soon-to-be-recycled newspapers. But within a fortnight, she didn’t bother calling her phone when it went missing. One day she turned up at lectures without it. This only confirmed to her friends that Tara was indeed becoming a bit unfriendly, if not downright weird, eschewing all their social invitations, and now going offline like it was something to be proud of.
Only Charlie expressed anything like admiration. ‘Going old-school, eh? Samuel Beckett could only write with the view of a blank wall.’
But she barely acknowledged him. Even eye contact would have been too risky for her. No one knew what had happened: by the time Tamsin and the others had returned that night, drunker and on their second wind, it was all over. Any illusions she might have had about Charlie wanting to explain himself, apologize, had melted like candlewax by the time they had all finally left, around four in the morning. All the tea lights she had placed around the sitting room were long since dead, blackened wicks in crumpled metal; there was something so sad and stark about light that had eaten itself, the end of the celebrations, the guests departing; a door slammed shut inside her. She knew that what had happened was wrong. She also knew how thin the line was between consent and coercion, no matter how many successful date-rape convictions were reported in the news. No means no, even if you’re so pissed you can’t remember. But she knew that for every conviction there were a dozen that failed, either at the police station or in court, where the skimpiness of her underwear and the apparent enthusiasm of her foreplay would be up for public scrutiny. Imagining her grandparents sitting in the
court gallery or reading a newspaper headline made her feel physically sick. As for her mother, well, if she found out, she would be the one marching her down to the local nick, screaming for justice, no matter who knew and how messy it got for Tara. It would be a point of principle to nail the bastard who had nailed her little girl, despite the whispers, the online judgements and jury, the fractured friendships. Just the thought of it made her feel exhausted, on top of the weary lassitude she now battled every day. She woke up tired, despite being in bed most evenings by ten p.m., windows open just for the pleasure of hearing the chatter of the wild parakeets in the morning as they swooped across the grassy flats, cackling their freedom. She would put on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels before she tried to sleep; a lullaby of the world’s wrongs somehow felt comforting.
For weeks the headlines had been full of male public figures, often pensioners now, who had been outed as sexual predators, their crimes committed decades ago, and finally brought to book. Most of the women who came forward preferred to remain anonymous, but some came out fighting. Maybe that was the wrong word. It disturbed Tara to see these middle-aged women, most of them mothers of grown-up kids themselves, revert to the bewildered, ambushed children they once were as they recounted their experiences in a shaky monotone. Maybe that will be me one day, thought Tara, prematurely grey from sitting on a festering secret in a house with a sideboard groaning with photos, too old to care any more what anyone thinks; Charlie, balding in bi-focals, probably wouldn’t even remember what had happened. Or rather, he would remember it completely differently. As she’d been taught, the story was in the editing.
When she went to her mother’s salon to get her hair cut some days later, she recalled Charlie’s short film, his narcissistic admiration of his own reflection, as she now faced hers in the mirror, Geeta standing nervously behind her with her scissors and comb ready. The embroidered sun on her breast pocket seemed to wink back at Tara, daring her on.
