by Meera Syal
‘How much off? Hope your mother does not kill me when she gets back …’
Tara indicated again, her fingers skimming the back of her neck.
As Geeta began to snip, the carefully constructed edifice of spray and backcombing was demolished by the snickering blades. Tara watched the wasted locks pile up at her feet. She was being re-edited; images that could never be seen or repeated now lay abandoned on the cutting-room floor.
Sita was amazed at the change in the house, the change in her granddaughter. She went from room to room, exclaiming at the spanking brightness of everything: the old stuff that now looked new, the sparkling windows, the OCD-neat cupboards, Tara herself with her cropped hair.
‘Oh it looks so … neat!’ Sita laughed, and then, ‘But you will let it grow a bit longer than this, no?’
The news that her mother and Toby weren’t going to be back for a while due to ‘unforeseen circumstances’ didn’t bother Tara much. If anything, she was relieved, it meant she had her grandparents all to herself. She preferred eating with them over at their place, or even better, sleeping there, curled up on their pull-out sofa bed in front of the television. Sita was at first gratified by this display of devotion, then puzzled by her granddaughter’s camping out in their sitting room.
‘Not that we don’t love having you here, beti, but wouldn’t you be more comfortable in your own bed?’
On the contrary, Tara slept better in the over-soft chintzy box than she did on her own queen-size sprung mattress, comforted by the pneumatic snores that drifted from her grandparents’ room in distant stereo. She found herself becoming addicted to the evening programmes on the Asian cable TV channels.
Sita and Prem would pretend to scoff at the soap operas. ‘Look at the size of the houses! Who lives like that? How much make-up has that mother-in-law got on? That bindi is the size of a spaceship. She looks like a clown … Ooof, how bad is the acting? Why does everyone shout or cry all the time? Chalo, they even go to bed in their jewellery … terrible. Such rubbish.’
Yet they couldn’t tear themselves away from the screen, every show a repeat of the same family drama: fathers were either cold tyrants or well-meaning bumblers confused by their wives’/kids’ demands. Mothers were matriarchal martyrs or scheming witches, especially towards their daughters-in-law, who were either long-suffering sweethearts or selfish-bitch modern types, depending on what the mother-in-law was like. There was no point having two nice women on screen at the same time, where was the drama in that? The younger men were either firm-jawed, decent heroes, terribly stressed at the office but never too busy to pat the kids on the head or touch their elders’ feet, or else they were scheming Lotharios, trying to get their hands on someone else’s woman/business/house/land. The teenagers wore ironed jeans and talked like American high-school dudes; the little kids were always precocious and beyond cute, giving the adults a run on the over-acting front, and strangely, there was always a fat one for maximum comic effect. And everyone seemed to live in a mansion, cavernous, ballroom-sized dwellings with rooms large enough to contain three generations in one wide shot.
‘Not exactly EastEnders, is it?’ Tara remarked. ‘Don’t they ever do any dramas about poor people?’
Prem would lose interest fairly rapidly, check the cricket scores and yawn his departure, leaving Sita and Tara bonding over cups of hot tea and the delicious dilemmas of their distant contemporaries. Once Sita had turned in for the night, Tara would switch to the Indian news channels, most of which were conveniently in English, although she would dip into the Hindi-speaking stations, too. She was beginning to understand more words, sometimes entire sentences. It took longer to familiarize herself with the political landscape. The issues seemed epic to her: angry demonstrations against positive-discrimination legislation for lower castes; swathes of villages ruined by the construction of a huge controversial dam; another fall in the tiny tiger population; hundreds killed in seasonal flooding; yet more killed in an unprecedented heatwave elsewhere; an epidemic of farmer suicides; every financial graph rising upwards, pushed by a growing assertive middle class, a new generation all out-earning their parents; Bandra the nightclub hub of the entire country, Bangalore the best place to bag a potential IT-trained millionaire husband; a group called The Love Squad providing safe houses for eloping couples determined to marry without parental consent; the ever-growing success of a debt-collection firm who only employed sari-clad eunuchs, ‘Because everyone is too frightened to say no to a hijra.’
The chat shows were more illuminating, with confident, articulate twenty-somethings locked in furious debate with middle-aged conservatives about corruption, choice in marriage, domestic violence, dowry. Never had the generation gap seemed so wide, it was as if the two groups came from different species, not just different age groups, especially when some village head honcho or religious elder was brought in to balance the debate. Tara occasionally felt sorry for them, these old men with loud voices who were used to having a room hush at the raise of a digit, their eyes darting in confusion as decades of assumptions were snatched from them and shredded like used tissues, the young high on their own self-belief and the rotting smell of dogma way past its sell-by date. It excited her, the approaching tide of change, the rushing inevitability of it, too fast to escape, hold your breath, dive in. The women who often presented these programmes were a world away from the dimply simpering movie-heroine types she’d carried round in her head for years. These chicks had hair as short and sharp as hers and lethal tongues to match, cutting a swathe through the experts yelling over each other, unafraid to look – well, it had to be said, a bit butch. Never was the anger greater than when the subject of women came up, as it often did, from the role of the modern housewife to the rape of five-year-old girls. There was the tearful interviewee recounting her tale of horror, her scars – both visible and invisible – eliciting gasps and tears from the viewers; nods of recognition punctuated the tales of the man on the train who had used his fingers, the husband who had used his fists, the mother-in-law who held the kerosene can, the jilted admirer who flung the acid, the men in the audience who proudly declared their devotion and respect for their mothers/daughters/sisters/wives, the social workers and campaigners with their sprinkle of success stories, their dark and beautiful anger, their bloody and unbowed hope. Some days, it seemed it was everywhere, on every channel in every language: the story of yet another abducted or battered girl or woman. Tara would lie in the dark and try to steady her breathing. It’s always been here, she would tell herself, it’s just that now it is reported more, which is a good thing, isn’t it?
Despite her insomnia, now that her grandparents were back Tara had settled into some kind of routine, one which involved spending as little time as possible out of the house. Sleep, eat, study, hang out with the old people: it suited her.
Suddenly, the news came that Shyama and Toby were on their way home with an unexpected companion. It sent her spinning off her precarious axis. She re-read Shyama’s hurriedly sent email, grabbed a bottle of wine from the kitchen counter and left for Lydia’s house.
‘Hello, stranger!’ Lydia greeted her warmly, not questioning her unannounced arrival. ‘I’m just finishing off with someone. Hang out in the kitchen and I’ll be with you in ten.’
Tara sat at the kitchen counter in her usual place, next to the radiator, beside the cork noticeboard with its various flyers of local takeaways, a timetable of classes at Lydia’s gym and Keith’s cricket fixtures, and photos showcasing some of their frequent exotic holidays. Next to it lay a small green-glass bowl containing Lydia’s collection of old badges. Tara ran her fingers over the lovingly worn metal discs, finding her favourites, which Lydia had described as ‘medals from the frontline of my youth’. The slogans were certainly unequivocal: ‘ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS!’, ‘MAN FUCKS WOMAN: SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT’ and ‘MEN ARE AFRAID THAT WOMEN WILL LAUGH AT THEM: WOMEN ARE AFRAID THAT MEN WILL KILL THEM’. Shyama had once drily observed that she had spent h
er youth trying to be a good wife and mother and no one had given her a badge for that. That had been their connection, Shyama and Lydia’s – the seasoned feminist and the newly hatched divorcee, Shyama having lived through the trials that Lydia had marched about but had never undergone herself. Shyama had embraced the messages on the badges with the zeal of the enlightened during long, wine-soaked evenings when she, Priya and Lydia would laugh and unburden themselves, sometimes forgetting that Tara was there too, in her Princess Jasmine pyjamas, ears flapping, appalled and fascinated by the Stuff That Happens to Women. It was supposed to be her blooding, she saw that now, like the newbie at the end of their first fox hunt smeared with the sticky victory of the kill. She knew her mother must have hoped that being around all this female frankness at a tender age would ensure she grew into a confident, assertive young woman. She at least knew how to do a great impression of one.
The door leading from Lydia’s consulting room to the passage alongside the house banged shut and Tara glimpsed a client passing the window and exiting the front gate. Lydia bustled into the kitchen a moment later and, before she had even sat down, Tara spat it out.
‘Mum’s arriving back on Saturday and she’s bringing her with her.’
‘Sorry, what … who’s “her”?’
‘The Baby Mother. Rent-a-Womb. Whatever you want to call her.’
Lydia was too shocked to say anything immediately and instead opened the wine, carefully pouring out just the one glassful and handing it to Tara. The smell of it hit the back of her throat as she passed it over and she salivated as if anticipating a kiss, but no, she had promised Keith. A spectacular fall off the wagon at a dinner party two weeks ago had resulted in a screaming match with her host, projectile vomiting in the cab home and sitting under a cold shower for half an hour whilst her husband slumped on the loo seat and wept like a baby. That, in fact, was the only bit of the evening she could accurately recall.
‘I had an email from her.’ Tara gulped a mouthful of wine, wincing slightly. It had been weeks since she’d had a drink. She took another gulp, forcing it down like medicine, which it was – anaesthetic.
‘But how … Is she allowed to do that?’ Lydia reached automatically for her herbal cigarettes, then remembered that her last blood-pressure reading hadn’t been too good. She couldn’t even have a bloody biscuit. With growing irritation she peeled an over-ripe satsuma, needing to keep her hands occupied, her mouth busy.
‘I dunno, you know Mum, she must have found a way. Nanima said they have some old college friend in the visa department who arranged it.’
‘But how’s this going to work? So she’ll be looked after here, give birth here?’
‘All Mum said was there had been a “change of plan”. I don’t know the details.’
Tara ran a few of the badges from the bowl over her fingers idly, comforting as prayer beads.
‘I bet I know who does,’ smiled Lydia faintly.
A quick phone call and twenty minutes later, Priya flew into the kitchen, her head wrapped in a towel.
‘She never told me a bloody thing! Pour me a glass … Ooh, your hair!’ She air-kissed Tara and flopped on to a chair. ‘Very Parisian, suits you. Have you lost weight? You’re looking a bit pale … You’re not on drugs, are you?’
‘Like I’d tell you,’ Tara deadpanned. ‘So desperate for gossip you jumped out of the shower then?’
‘It’s my monthly henna-and-indigo treatment. I’m boiling now.’
Priya removed the towel, revealing her head wrapped in layers of clingfilm. Without her usual glamorous mane she looked older, her skin drawn tightly across her cheekbones. She poured herself a generous slug of wine, gave the merest flicker of a glance at Lydia’s glass of water and sighed deeply. ‘Now tell me exactly what your mad mother said.’
Two hours, one more bottle and three cheese toasties later, no one was any the wiser. The facts were that they were all due to arrive in two days’ time, the spare room was to be aired in readiness and the official story to anyone outside the family was that this woman was a family acquaintance who had come to stay.
‘Must have cost them to bring her over,’ Priya murmured. ‘With all the new restrictions on visitors’ visas from outside the EU, they ask for a huge deposit before you land. I’m not sure she will be eligible for any NHS treatment either. Shyama must have put herself up as guarantor or sponsor or something … don’t you think, Lyd?’
‘I’m the last person she’d tell,’ Lydia said. ‘I suppose all we can do is just what we’ve always done … be there if she needs us.’
‘How very noble,’ Tara muttered.
Priya snaked an arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, sweetie, you know how much this means to your mum … how long she’s been waiting …’
Tara shoved Priya’s arm away and stood up. ‘This was your idea, wasn’t it? This whole weird lab-rat thing.’
‘Lab rat? Darling, if it’s good enough for Sarah Jessica Parker and co … and quite a few of the Bollywood folk are starting to do it now.’
‘Baby as accessory. Too busy to breed … I knew Mum could be shallow occasionally, but if that’s the reason …’
‘You know it isn’t!’
‘Maybe she doesn’t,’ Lydia interjected. She turned to Tara. ‘She was trying a long time with Toby, the miscarriage really took it out of her …’
‘Miscarriage?’
‘Quite late, thirteen weeks, I think …’
‘She never told me. But then she wouldn’t, would she?’
‘She didn’t want you to worry, sweetie.’
Priya edged carefully towards Tara – like I’m some care-in-the-community case raving on a bench, Tara thought. She was trying to recall any memory she might have of her mother being sick, absent, depressed. No, there Shyama stood in her mind’s eye, as combative and unbreakable as she’d always been. But all the while she’d been on this campaign, this mission of blood and pain. There was a flicker of sympathy somewhere, but too deeply buried to bother her much now.
Priya was next to her; every time she raised her eyebrows, the clingfilm around her head squeaked softly. ‘Listen, in India this … process has been going on for centuries, family members having kids for each other.’
‘She’s not family, is she? Or maybe she is now, God knows … I’m sure we will have some lovely cosy chats across the breakfast table for the next few months. I mean, didn’t either of you ever once say to my mum – who is nearly fifty, by the way – that this just may be the most stupid thing she’s ever done?’
Priya’s gaze swivelled to Lydia, who spread her hands in resignation.
‘And that’s why she’s gone all huffy with you?’ Tara finally understood why her mother had apparently dumped one of her oldest friends. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘I probably could have handled it better,’ Lydia offered, following Tara as she stomped towards the door. ‘And anyway, it’s done now. Tara?’
‘What?’
Tara knew she was behaving like a bratty seven-year-old, she knew that’s what they both saw now, Lydia and Priya, these women who had watched her grow up. Maybe that was the problem, that in their eyes she would only ever be Shyama’s little girl. And yet what she had wanted this evening was some time alone with Lydia, to tell her about what had happened with Charlie. She hadn’t thought through what she would say, how she would introduce the subject: ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me the other week!’ or ‘Hey, should I be reporting this somewhere?’ or ‘Hey, do I just write this off as part of becoming a woman?’ How was it possible to feel so raw and helpless and yet so very old? Priya’s arrival had ended any hope she’d had of asking these questions, and she simmered with frustrated disappointment.
‘Tara,’ Lydia repeated gently, ‘I know this is going to be really challenging for you …’
‘Save it for your patients,’ Tara snapped, and left.
The two old friends continued chatting for a while, Lydia providing a stream of cups of f
resh mint tea which she threw back like shots. She knew she would be pissing like a Trojan for most of the night, but at least the monster inside her had stopped snapping its jaws. The hunger for a drink had gone and she was becalmed, floppy as a beached seal. They discussed their concerns about Tara, about Shyama and Toby, their empathy tempered by the shameful thrill they both felt at the unfolding saga.
‘You know, whatever happens,’ Priya said, ‘at the end of the day, there is going to be a new baby arriving. Generally when that happens, everyone calms down a bit. You can’t go round screaming at each other when there’s this cute little thing needing your protection. I swear I wanted to strangle my mother-in-law right up until she walked into the delivery room, and then—’
‘You made up?’
‘God no, but I didn’t want to kill her any more. I hadn’t got the energy, frankly. And she’s been a bloody life-saver when I’ve been working away. You rally round when it comes to the kids, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘I hope so. I just hope Shyama remembers she’s got another child.’
Priya sipped her tea and briefly checked her mobile phone.
‘I didn’t think she’d go through with this, you know. I mean when I found the clinic I thought she’d have a sniff at it, think through what it meant, starting all over again at our age with a baby, and then … just give up.’
‘When have you ever known Shyama to give up without a fight?’
‘I couldn’t do it again.’ Priya suppressed a small shudder. ‘The sleepless nights, the inane baby talk.’
‘Then why did you—?’ Lydia began.
‘Because she was in pain and I’m her friend. And maybe it’s not up to us, or anyone, to tell someone when it’s the right time to stop chasing a dream.’
‘That’s quite sensitive, for you.’ Lydia smiled.
