The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  The Punjabi mother likes to cuss. She’ll cuss her husband and her children, but mainly she’ll cuss her own fate, her own kismet. She’ll spend a lot of time asking God, ‘What did I do in a previous life to deserve this one?’

  Punjabi mothers are hassled. Punjabi mothers do everything. Punjabi mothers also know everything, all your secrets, whether you know them yourself or not, and they’ll sometimes use them to blackmail you.

  Punjabi mothers love their own children fiercely but have various weapons of control at their disposal:

  1. Religion

  ‘God sees everything. All the things you do behind my back, God knows.’ Not a Heaven or Hell thing – if you’re Hindu or Sikh, there’s no threat of Hell. Just plain old guilt and karma. If you do bad, you mess up your own karma and you may come back in the next life as an amoeba, or worse, someone with a sticky-out belly button.

  2. Fear of the father

  ‘Wait till your father gets home.’ It always worked, as Punjabis fly the flag for patriarchal bullshit. Well, Punjabi men demand the flag and Punjabi women design it, sew it and then tie it to the mast.

  3. Humiliation

  Sending your child to school with coconut oil on their heads. I’m still working through the trauma of that incident.

  4. Superstition

  My all-time favourite mad method of control! This one is complicated as there are so many superstitions, it’s hard to keep track. All of them are mainly to keep the evil eye away. I’m not sure who has this evil eye and why it’s going to particularly affect me. I have spent a lifetime wondering how people who are not Punjabi and don’t do anything to ward off the evil eye manage to live fulfilling and happy lives. But these are not questions the Punjabi mother is interested in. Not when there are evil eyes to destroy.

  Here is a selection of superstitions I have been asked to adhere to at some point in my life: don’t cut toenails after dark, don’t wash hair on Tuesday, water the plants on Wednesday. If a cat crosses your path, turn around and use a different route. If someone sneezes just as you are about to leave, take your shoes off, sit down, have a sip of water and then go. Hang lemon and chilli above your door, or carry lemon and chilli in your handbag. (This one is useful if you find yourself eating a particularly bland meal.) Wash all your dishes before bed otherwise the pots and pans cry overnight and your home will not prosper. Don’t sweep up after sunset. Don’t leap over small children or they won’t grow. Never leave the house at a quarter to the hour.

  It’s a wonder I’ve been able to leave my front door and live a relatively sane life. There’s also a confusing combination of religion and superstition. When pandits, gurus and soothsayers get involved, Punjabi mothers get serious. There are various moonstones and crystals and rings and trinkets to place around your house or carry on your person. I have a drawer full of things my mum has given me over the years. Each one of them is meant to be placed in a certain part of my house and to be looked at during certain times of the day. I’ve now revealed where they really live and I predict a concerned phone call asking me to place them where they belong. The minute Mum reads this sentence. We will argue and Mum will say, ‘Other people’s daughters just do what their mothers tell them to.’ Deploying another method of control: guilt.

  Punjabi aunties

  The aunty network, or illuminaunty. Be warned. The illuminaunty have ways of downloading and storing personal information about thousands of people. They have unknown secret methods, sinister tactics, they use strategy and subterfuge to glean this information. The CIA, MI5, KGB and the illuminaunty: the most powerful secret services on earth. They have always known that data is the only weapon of control and power you need.

  Their business is your business. If you don’t want them to know your information, I can try and help with my technique. Deploy operation ‘goody two shoes’. Greet Aunty with a namaste, satsriakal or assalamualaikum, then simply smile and nod. The smile and nod can go into overdrive when Aunty starts telling you about her son and how well he’s doing. To tap out of the aunty death grip of boredom, ask her if you can bring her another cup of tea and always, always compliment Aunty on her outfit. The illuminaunty can get through gallons of tea. They are never hungry but will always manage to demolish a plate of barfi. Aunties will turn up to your house unannounced and no matter how much they say, ‘We’ve already eaten,’ they are always hungry.

  When aunties get past a certain age, they love nothing more than getting together and discussing their ailments. It’s a sickness battle. One of their favourite pastimes is comparing notes about how high their ‘BP’ (blood pressure) is. They also love discussing their ‘sugar’. ‘Sugar’ is a euphemism for diabetes. Pretty much every South Asian knows someone with Type 2 diabetes.

  The illuminaunty never gossip. Not according to them. They are spiritual and God-fearing and never gossip. ‘It’s all in God’s hands. Who are we?’ But they can’t resist telling other people’s news to other people. They see this as their ‘community duty’.

  Punjabi uncles

  Punjabi uncles come in two volumes, quiet and loud. Punjabi uncles drink whisky. They get together and gather in sitting rooms, saying very little. The loud ones hold court and tell Punjabi jokes in booming voices yet also say very little, while the quieter ones smile and nod. They are adept at this technique, being married to a member of the illuminaunty. In the eighties, they loved a grey silk shirt, a gold medallion and a gold Rolex. They enjoy eating salty snacks, including raw onions covered in salt and vinegar, while listening to old classic Bollywood tunes. At every occasion, only once suitably inebriated, Punjabi uncles get the urge to move their bellies onto the dancefloor and sing.

  Punjabi sons

  Spoilt. Sometimes aloof and living their own life. If married, torn between wife and mother.

  Punjabi daughters

  Highly educated, switched on, independent and can’t wait to get the life they want. The bridge between two worlds. Permanently guilt-ridden, constantly conflicted between wanting to live the life they want and keeping their families, mainly their mothers, happy. They are cool as fuck.

  Punjabi dogs

  Classic Punjabi dog names: Rocky, Prince, Rambo, Julie, Motthi or Gandhi. Maybe it was just my grandmother who named their dog Gandhi. Punjabi dogs also eat chapattis. Well, Gandhi did.

  Punjabi food

  Bloody delicious! You all agree. The food you mainly get through your local curry house is some kind of bastardised version of Punjabi food. Real Punjabi food is hearty, full of ginger and garam masala. It’s meat, wheat and dairy, food to sustain big, hard-working farming types. Nothing is done in small measure. Anything tandoori is from Punjab. I’ve eaten in enough farmhouse kitchens in the UK to know that hearty food full of love is not just the preserve of Punjabis, but farming communities around the world.

  Punjabi music

  Punjabis dance. Punjabis gave the world bhangra. Music is a core part of the culture. Just like everything else, the music and the dancing is big, bold, sweaty and started life in a field. Most festivals and celebrations in the region are connected to the harvest, including the dancing. The big dhol drum gets hung around a neck and sits on the belly, it’s whacked rhythmically with two sticks to create a beat that somehow gets your body moving involuntarily. You really have no choice, it’s either hypnosis or witchcraft. There’s no worrying whether you’ve got the steps right or how you might look, this is arms-in-the-air and shake-it-like-you-just-don’t-care dancing.

  Punjabis and money

  Punjabis are not shy about money. We love to celebrate success and each other’s success. Once we’ve made a bit of brass, the first thing a Punjabi will invest in is a car. I know cars aren’t for everyone, but Indians, specifically Punjabis, love a prestige automobile. To have a nice car is a sign of success and shows that you are doing well. When you start from zero and work your way up, doing good is celebrated. Every single one of us has known hardship to achieve success. So, the next time you pass a semi-d
etached house in a suburban neighbourhood with the garden concreted over and a Mercedes parked up outside it, chances are it’s a Punjabi family indoors.

  Now you’ve met a few of the archetypes of my tale, let’s go back to the very beginning.

  Go Back to Where You Came From

  My paternal grandad, Kebal Ram, an only child, was the first person from my family to land in the UK in 1953. He left his small town in Punjab and set sail for Blighty.

  ‘Go back to where you came from.’ ‘No one wants you here.’ ‘No one invited you.’

  Actually, they did. The British government did ‘want us here’. They absolutely ‘invited us’. The doors to Britain were wide open to any citizens of the former colonies. The 1948 British Nationality Act gave my grandad and anyone else from the Commonwealth a free pass to enter Great Britain as a British national. How wonderfully generous of the British government, I hear you cry! Great Britain was suffering a bit post World War II and had a labour shortage that needed filling, and what better way to recruit people to do the jobs locals didn’t want to do than invite people from your former colonies. Tried and tested grafters. The first wave travelled on the Windrush from the Caribbean, excited by the prospect of coming to work in the land they’d always believed to be the mother country.

  Grandad took up the offer too. Like most of the men who arrived, he first came over alone in his early twenties. To establish himself a bit, get some work, find a home, and then he would bring his family over. How on earth did he end up in Bradford? Most men would go where the work was – London, Birmingham, Manchester – cities that had big industry, foundries and mills, usually a city where someone from their family, village or community may already have been working. The network was set up by the pioneers who arrived soon after 1948. Often the men would rent a cheap house (from people who were willing to rent to ‘darkies’) between a few of them and share rooms and single beds. They would take shifts sleeping in the beds depending on work rotas.

  A giant vat of dhal would be made in the kitchen, they’d share responsibilities to make chapattis and would share the food they cooked. Food for South Asians is always a communal affair. This is how they started out, how they survived, the old boys, the old uncles who, before arriving in this country, may never have set foot in a kitchen in their lives. Here, it was survival, and they ate the food they knew and loved, the only food they understood and recognised. Food with flavour, food with spice, food with a kick, food of the gods: curry. Maybe someone had brought over a jar of homemade pickle, if they were lucky! Homemade pickle is an essential in every Asian household. The warmth, flavour and satisfaction a piece of pickled carrot or ginger can bring to the soul would have eased away, for that moment at least, any stresses or worries of the day, of their new life in their new alien world, I imagine. But until their wives arrived, they would have to make the one jar brought over on the ship last as long as possible, scraping out every last drop of satisfaction, of home.

  They came here for a better life but also brought their rural, tribal, feudal, patriarchal, peasant mentality with them. Step forward my grandad. Who finally set himself up enough to bring over his wife and two kids – twins, my dad and his sister. My grandma gave birth to four more children in the UK, in Birmingham, then all eight of them moved to Bradford, where Grandad got a job in a mill. (I think there were too many extended family members in Birmingham for Grandad.) Grandma and Grandad were always Grandma and Grandad. They were never Dadi and Dada, the Indian names. Maybe it was part of being British? Always British – somehow being English was never on offer. Bradford in the sixties was rows and rows of terraced, back-to-back houses along cobbled streets with gaslit streetlamps, housing hard-working white families. My family were one of only two Indian families on their street and we remain friends with the other family to this day.

  Although Dad remembers the Asian kids mainly playing together, all the kids, regardless of background, would congregate for a game of cricket. This continued to my generation, with street cricket bringing everyone together, using milk crates as wickets. Dad doesn’t remember any racism towards him as a kid, although he had Enoch Powell banging on in the background of his youth. I’ve never heard my dad talk about any racism towards him generally, but then Dad doesn’t really ever talk about his childhood, says he can’t remember. I asked him a few questions but, in my bones, I can feel there’s just too much buried away for it to be picked at by me. Maybe he’ll share his tale with his granddaughter in years to come – sometimes it takes a generation.

  I always thought that my paternal grandparents were illiterate, but Grandad could read and write Urdu – not Hindi or Punjabi. Prior to Partition, Urdu was the language of administration, journalism and artistic expression in Punjab. Neither of my grandparents could read, write or speak English, however. This meant Dad had his work cut out as their official translator, and as the eldest and the son, the responsibility fell to him. As a kid, he’d have to go everywhere with them, to any official appointments, open official letters, deal with anyone coming to the door. Basically, he had to take charge and grow up pretty fast. He hated the responsibility. A responsibility he has had his entire life.

  So, what the heck do you do if you’re my grandparents? You’ve landed in Britain, it’s the 1960s, you can’t speak any English, you’ve got six kids and you’ve got to make a life. Grandad worked in a mill and Grandma was a seamstress. Sewing was a life skill for that generation of women. Most South Asian clothes are bought as loose material and then stitched to fit you to perfection and in any style you choose – and there are so many styles. My gran would make all her own clothes and would make do with the material she bought at the few Asian clothes stores that popped up, for herself and her three daughters. This is why my aunts were often dressed identically and in the same lurid fabric as the sofa covers. Granny was a very smart dresser – she was also very houseproud. She was immaculate in a perfectly fitting handmade suit, always in some kind of pastel colour. I never saw her in anything bright, always a Marks & Spencer cardigan, and in the depths of winter a fabulous faux fur coat over the top. She always wore thick jam-jar glasses, but the black frames were a little bit fashion, pointy at the end. Gran had a great hairline, a sharp widow’s peak, that would form a perfect V on her forehead. And her gold: gold hoop earrings, a gold necklace and always gold bangles.

  Gold was the only wealth a woman would have when getting married, her bit of security, that turns into treasured family heirlooms. A bride steps into her new married home blinged to the max, dripping in gold and seen as the goddess Laxmi, bringing prosperity to her new family. In theory. Often, though, the yellow metal is valued and treated with more respect than the woman wearing it. But we’ll get to that.

  She was striking, quick-witted and to the point, my gran. She never seemed to age, to me she was always old. She was only 45 by the time I was born in that vintage year, 1977, but she looked the same in her seventies. She wasn’t getting her hair changed at the hairdresser’s or following fashion fads, and she really didn’t wrinkle that much. Her beauty regime was Astral cream and surma or kajal (kohl) for the eyes. Surma is a powder that comes in a little ornate metal bottle with a stick in the top. You run the stick swiftly between your eyelids, swoosh, and you have beautiful, mysterious eyes. The traditional powder used to contain lead, however – this may explain Grandma’s jam-jar specs. Indian women have been wearing eyeliner expertly for centuries. It’s a rite of passage for any brown lass the first time she puts it on. Make sure you have a steady hand because you put it on your waterline and so one false move and you have your eye out, which just makes you cry and ruins the entire effect. Unless it’s the Alice Cooper look you’re after.

  When Grandad wasn’t working in the mill, he was usually down the pub, playing cards, an Indian game called Seep, with all the other old Indian lads, getting tanked up. It was here, getting to know the other men and through talking over pints of bitter and glasses of cheap whisky, they’d hatch their pla
ns. Pubs and Punjabi men were a perfect fit. In pubs like this up and down the land in the 1960s, the first wave of Indian immigrants were coming up with business ideas that would set their progeny up for the future (and some were just getting pissed). It was in these pubs that they laughed together, reminisced about ‘back home’ and drank their worries away. At the pub, they didn’t feel undermined or belittled, here they didn’t feel like outsiders, here they understood the language, they could communicate. Here they felt worthy and equal. From here, they stumbled home. Remembering the harsh, hard reality of their difficult lives with every precarious step, until they got to the front door and brought home the fear, the only place they could wield any power and release their frustrations.

  I don’t know about the other men in that pub, but when Grandad got home, he was always angry. He barked orders at everyone. Never spoke to his family with any respect or love. He didn’t stay working at the mill for long. He too wanted to work for himself, so he acquired a few market stalls and Grandma sewed some of the coats they sold. The markets did well for them and, for a while, it was the family business. It was Dad and my aunts who had to help set up and run the stalls. They had no choice. My grandparents came here to work and make a better life for themselves, but letting their children fulfil their dreams, or have any kind of dreams, was not on the agenda. I’m not sure my grandad particularly liked his kids or his wife. I’m not sure what Grandad did like, apart from drinking and his allotment. He loved his allotment and, even in his eighties, officially registered blind, he grew coriander, spinach and fenugreek.