Anita and Me
Meera Syal

For my parents and brother

with gratitude and love

And for Shekhar and Chameli, as always

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Epigraph

I do not have many memories of my very early childhood, apart from the obvious ones, of course. You know, my windswept, bewildered parents in their dusty Indian village garb standing in the open doorway of a 747, blinking back tears of gratitude and heartbreak as the fog cleared to reveal the sign they had been waiting for, dreaming of, the sign planted in tarmac and emblazoned in triumphant hues of red, blue and white, the sign that said simply, WELCOME TO BRITAIN.

And then there’s the early years of struggle and disillusion, living in a shabby boarding house room with another newly arrived immigrant family, Polish, I think would be quite romantic; my father arriving back from his sweatshop at dawn to take his place in the bed being vacated by Havel who would be off to do his shift on the McDouglas Biscuits assembly line, my father sweeping away crushed garibaldi crumbs from the communal pillow before sliding gratefully into oblivious sleep, my mother awake at his side, counting the kicks from the daughter inside her who would condemn her, marry her to England forever.

I slept in a drawer, probably, swaddled in back copies of the Daily Mirror. My mother only found out about Kennedy’s assassination two weeks after the event, when she read the reversed newsprint headlined on my damp backside. She didn’t follow the news, no telly, no radio, no inclination, being a simple Punjabi girl suffering from culture shock, marooned and misplaced in Wolverhampton.

Of course, this is the alternative history I trot out in job interview situations or, once or twice, to impress middleclass white boys who come sniffing round, excited by the thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a trinket on their arm. My earliest memory, in fact, is of the first time I understood the punchline to a joke. I was watching some kind of Royal Variety television show on ice – I remember that because it was a balmy summer evening and I wondered how they had managed to keep the floor so cold. A man in a lime green jumpsuit raised a gun and took aim at a fat female ballerina who was gliding towards him like some vast, magnificent galleon, pink tulle emanating in a cloud from around her strong marbled thighs like ectoplasm. The man raised the gun, fired once, twice, and the ballerina fell dramatically to the floor to hilarity and applause.

‘Oh my dearie,’said the man. ‘I think I shot her in the tutu.’

My mother said I laughed so much that I threw up and at one point, called in Mrs Worrall from next door who put her teeth in and solemnly declared that I’d probably ‘had a turn.’ But I’ve always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.

1

‘I’m not lying, honest, papa!’ I pleaded as he took my hand and pulled me towards the kerb, briefly checking for traffic along the twisting country lane. It was hot and I could feel beads of sweat and fear threading themselves into a necklace of guilt, just where my itchy flesh met the collar of my starched cotton dress. Papa did not look angry, he had the air of a man on a mission. He was walking along with that jaunty air that my mother said had made her fall in love with him, a hop of optimism in his walk that belied a sensitive, introspective-looking face. His features effortlessly combined those same contradictions of vulnerability and pride, the sharp leonine nose that swooped down towards the generous questioning mouth, meeting in what looked like the fleshy imprint of a single teardrop.

I scuttled after papa along the single road, bordered with nicotine-tipped spiky grass, the main artery which bisected the village. A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads, uneven teeth which spread into a gap-toothed smile as the houses gradually became bigger and grander as the road wandered south, undulating into a gentle hill and finally merging into miles of flat green fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. We were heading in the opposite direction, northwards down the hill, away from the posh, po-faced mansions and towards the nerve centre of Tollington, where Mr Ormerod’s grocery shop, the Working Men’s Club, the diamond-paned Methodist church and the red brick school jostled for elbow room with the two-up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes.

From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars, and sometimes glimpse the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer, where every so often, forgotten skeletons of ancient victims were discovered by local courting couples. But the horizon gradually disappeared as we marched down the hill towards Mr Ormerod’s shop, down into the valley of…I wished I’d never gone to Sunday School, I wished I did not know the name for what I was now feeling. Sin. One word, three letters, eternal consequences. Unless I confessed all now. I swallowed and looked around, as if for help. There was my home, halfway down the hill, standing on the corner of the crossroads, one of the miners’ tithe cottages huddled around a dirt yard which was the unofficial meeting place for our small community. There was the small overgrown park next to the Yard, where the swings and ricketty slide were watched over by the witch’s hat of an ancient metal roundabout.

I could see children riding their bikes, screeching in and around the parked cars and lines of washing, practising noisy manoeuvres which threw up clouds of dust, punctuating each skid like exclamation marks. I could see my mother, even at this distance her brown skin glowed like a burnished planet drifting amongst the off-white bedsheets of her neighbours. She was wearing one of her slop-around outfits, a faded Punjabi suit whose billowing trousers rippled in the breeze, mercurial wings fluttering at her ankles. She paused, gathering some bundle from a basket at her feet, and then with one motion shook out a peacock-blue sari which she began tacking to the washing line. It puffed outwards in a resigned sigh between her hands. She looked as if she was holding up a piece of the sky.

Maybe someone from the Big House would come out and save me. The Big House, as gloomy and roomy as a set from a Hammer horror film, was the only building set apart from the main road and lay at the end of an uneven track which began five hundred yards from our front door. The Big House occupied its own island of private grounds, shielded by high mournful trees and a barbed wire fence. Two ancient, lopsided wooden signs declared NO TRESPASSERS! and BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS! The latter featured a slavering Doberman frothing at the mouth, except the paint had peeled around his muzzle, replacing what were once ferocious teeth with flaking splinters so he looked like he was chewing on a loo brush.

On windy nights, the trees around the Big House, a thicket of towering chestnuts and poplars which sometimes blocked the sun and filtered damp green light into my bedroom, would talk to me urgently, telling me to open the window, spread my arms and flap over the fields to their waiting branches. At least that’s what I told my mother when she found me crouching on the windowsill with a copy of the TV Times in my hand. I tried to explain what the trees had whispered, that the Golden Shot was a fix and Bob Monkhouse, the devil himself. I was not allowed to watch any television for two weeks after that.

The Big House, as usual, seemed deserted. I noticed papa was unconsciously clenching and unclenching his fingers around mine as we walked, and I wondered if it would be a good or a bad move to take away my hand. Then I got distracted, noticing a kestrel hovering behind the old pithead of the mine, visible just behind the grey green slates of the Big House’s roof. The Tollington mine had once employed the whole village; it had been feted as a small but plucky contributor to the Black Country’s industrial growth, not as technically impressive as the nearby Cannock Pit, not as imposing and thrusting as the one further afield in Wirley, but a respectably productive enterprise all the same.

Our adjoining neighbour, Mrs Worrall, had once shown me a yellowing newspaper cutting commemorating the day the Mayor of Wolverhampton had come to visit Tollington mine. It must have been during the war, for some of the grainy bystanders were decked out self-consciously in their Home Guard uniforms and a coalman’s dray was parked in the left hand corner of the photograph, where a shire horse lurked with pricked ears. The mine and the village had been as intertwined as lovers, grateful lovers astonished by their mutual discovery; you could see it in the stiff backs of the men and the proud smiles of the women. Mrs Worrall had pointed to an indistinct blob whose elaborate hat was just visible behind the mayor’s jowly face, ‘Me, that is,’ she said grandly. ‘That hat cost two weeks’ egg rations,’ claiming her moment of fame by association.

Then the mine suddenly closed down in the late Fifties, no one seemed to know why. A few of the luckier miners were offered temporary jobs in the adjoining pits, but most of the able-bodied men with families had moved on to look for work, leaving behind a gaggle of wheezy old geezers and dozens of stout, dour-faced miners’ widows who had nowhere else to go. It had been a community of tough, broad-armed women and fragile old men until a few new families started moving in, drawn by the country air and dirt-cheap housing – families like us.

But no one, not even Mrs Todd who was eighty-five and kept her colostomy bag in a sequinned pouch under her pinafore, not even she could remember seeing anyone ever going in or coming out of the Big House since the mayor’s visit. The owner in those days was a ruddy bouncing ball of a man, who in the newspaper cutting is holding onto the mayor’s hand with two fat fists whilst a woman I presumed was his wife, in a shapeless smock, stands at his side looking faintly embarrassed.

However, a few years later, someone else bought the mine: someone who never cared to mix with his neighbours or his work force but delegated all his duties to faceless officials; someone for whom the pit closure apparently had no repercussions, or at least not any that would make him want to emerge and share the grief and confusion; someone who presumably still lived there because we would occasionally see smoke curling out of the chimney. There were occasional flurries of excitement, when every few months a delivery van from one of the posh stores in Wolverhampton would back up to the peeling gates, and discharge siege-worthy supplies of groceries. Some of the local women would gather around the van, shaking their heads at the sod-off grandeur of the delivery, muttering at the parade of wines, preserves, spices, monogrammed biscuits and extra soft toilet roll, each item taken as a slap in the face from a stuck-up stranger. But despite their unashamed snooping and straining to glimpse through the always drawn curtains, the Big House’s inhabitants remained a mystery so incomprehensible that it was no longer even discussed.

The kestrel gave out a faint cry, sharp and forlorn all at once, and plummeted from view. Papa quickened his pace. I realised, sadly, that whoever lived in the Big House would not break their solitude to save a little Indian girl who had been caught telling lies.

We passed Mr Topsy standing outside his postage stamp garden, a riot of blazing rhododendrons and grinning gnomes trying to burst out of their fenced-in borders. Nearly everyone’s garden was like this, making up in content what they lacked in space, every frontage crammed full with miniature ponds and stone clad wishing wells, tiny porches stuffed with armouries of shiny horse brasses and copper plates, a row of Santa’s grottos all year round.

It was a constant source of embarrassment to me that our front garden was the odd one out in the village, a boring rectangle of lumpy grass bordered with various herbs that mama grew to garnish our Indian meals. ‘This is mint, beti,’ she would say, plucking the top of a plant and crushing the leaves under my nose, ‘This one thunia… coriander I mean…this lemon verbena, you can make tea from this …’ I did not want things growing in our garden that reminded me of yesterday’s dinner; I wanted roses and sunflowers and manicured hedges and fountains where the blackbirds would come and sip. I wanted to see mama in a big hat doing something creative with a pair of pruners. I looked at Mr Topsy’s garden and felt furious. Suddenly, somehow it was his fault that I was standing here in front of him waiting to be tried and punished by a jury of grinning gnomes with no genitals and fishing rods.

‘How you doing, Topsy?’ Mr Topsy had christened me thus as he claimed he could not pronounce my name, and I returned the favour by refusing to ever learn his. He talked out of the side of his pipe, like Popeye, and had a bullet shaped face softened with a dusting of white and grey whiskers. He scratched his belly absent-mindedly and I became suddenly fascinated by the size of his trousers. There was enough material in one leg to build a den and his fly stretched all the way from knee to navel like an operation scar.

‘Alright, Mr Kumar?’ My papa paused and exchanged pleasantries, still holding tightly onto my hand. I could not speak, as by now my teeth were embedded in the strawberry tarmac of a penny chew which I had sneaked from my dress pocket. I thought I might be able to swallow the evidence of my crime before we reached Mr Ormerod’s shop. I hurriedly unwrapped another and stuffed it in, gagging on the goo. I looked up at papa. His silhouette momentarily blocked out the sun and his eyelashes seemed spiked with light. He could traverse continents with a stride and hold the planets in the palm of his hand. He was going to kill me.

We reached Mr Ormerod’s shop and stopped outside the window. The display had been the same for years: a huge cardboard cut-out of a Marmite jar dominated the space, bleached on one side where the sun had caught it, the Player’s Capstan cigarette display behind it, featuring a saturnine sailor’s face in the centre of a lifebelt. A few days earlier, Anita Rutter had told me that this sailor was in fact her father.

I had been in my usual spot outside Ormerod’s window having a visual affair with his sweet display when she had sauntered past, arm in arm with her two regular cohorts, Sherrie, who lived at Dale End Farm and Fat Sally. As they came nearer, they began exchanging excited stage whispers and clumsy dead-arm punches. I had instinctively stiffened and busied myself with reading the small print on the Marmite jar, my heart unaccountably flipping like a fish. Anita stopped and looked me up and down, her top lip beginning to rise.

She pointed at the Player’s Capstan sailor and said, ‘That’s my dad, that is. He wuz in the Navy. He got medals for blowing up the Jerries, like …’ I wondered why he had taken a particular dislike for men with this name but before I could ask, Sherrie and Fat Sally burst into side-hugging laughter. Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden. I knew they were all at senior school, I had seen them round the village in their over-large uniforms, customised with badges and cropped-off ties. I was nine but felt three and a half as this particular day, mama had had one of her ‘You Always Look Like A Heathen’ moods and had forced me into a dinky pleated dress, which despite my efforts at ripping and rolling in mud, still contained enough frills and flowers to give me the appearance of a bad tempered doily.

I shot Anita a haunted look, I told her silently that this was not me. She paused and then spun round, scowling, the other girls’ smiles melted and slowly trickled out the side of their mouths. Then Anita broke into a beam of such radiance and forgiveness that my breath caught and my throat began to ache. They linked arms again and walked away, leaving questions buzzing around my head like a heat-hazy fly. It had been the first time Anita had ever talked to me and I had wondered what I had done to deserve it.

The day after this encounter, I happened to see Anita’s dad, Roberto, standing at the village bus stop. He had his blue Dunlop tyre factory overalls on and was dragging deeply on a butt end. He did not look much like his photograph any more, but maybe it was the trauma of his wartime experiences that had caused his beard to fall out and his eyes to change colour. I ambled past and smiled at him. He winked back, ‘Alright, chick?’

I stood before him for a moment, waiting for courage to open my mouth. He smiled at me again and dropped the butt into the road, squinting up the hill for any sign of the asthmatic single-decker which would take him to town.

‘Mr Rutter,’ I squeaked, ‘do you miss the sea?’

‘Ey? Rhyl you mean? Oh ar, was alright.’

He did not want to remember. I could see pain and confusion contorting his face. I changed tack. ‘Have you got any tattoos?’

He smiled proudly and rolled up the sleeve of his oily overall, stabbing a finger at his forearm. ‘Look at this, chick.’

The flesh looked like the exam paper of an unhappy dyslexic; a row of names in blue fuzzy ink ran up his arm like a roll call, Brenda, Deirdre, Janice, Gaynor, just legible under unsuccessful attempts to cross them out with what looked like blue marker pen. He tugged the sleeve up further to reveal the name perched on top of an undulating muscle, still pristine and untampered with, three letters set in a faded red heart, MUM. ‘That’s who I miss, chick. No one could replace her. No bugger alive.’ He sniffed loudly and rearranged his Brylcremed quiff. Suddenly he raised a hand to his eyes, scanning the top of the hill, and shouted, ‘Bus, ladies!’

All at once, several cottage doors flew open like airholes on a concertina and blew various women out of their houses adjusting headscarves, closing handbags, shouting at husbands, voices hoarse with cigarette smoke or muffled by herbal cough sweets but all dipping and rising in that broad Midland sing-song where every sentence ends in a rhetorical swoop. ‘What you done to your hair, eh? Dog’s dinner or what, aaar! Am you gooing up bingo tonight or what, eh? Mouthy wench, that Sharon, aaar? Ooh, yowm looking fit today, Roberto duck, getting it regular then, aaar?’

These women were commonly known as The Ballbearings Committee as they all worked at a metal casings factory in New Town, an industrial estate and shopping centre and our nearest contact with civilisation. The factory had opened, by way of compensation, soon after the mine closure, and everyone had assumed that the jobs would be given to the ex-colliers. But it was not the men they wanted; they wanted women, women who would do piecework and feel grateful, women whose nimble fingers would negotiate their machines, women who, unlike their husbands, would not make demands or complain. So it was that in the space of a few months, the hormonal balance of Tollington was turned upside down. There must have been a time when women waved their men off on doorsteps with lunch boxes and a resigned smile, but I could not remember it. It seemed to me that they had always run the village and they had always been as glamorous and shocking as they were now.

There was not much room for dialogue with these women, whose communal tone of voice said, I know the answer but I’ll ask you anyway but make it quick, chick. They appeared ensemble as coiffured maenads in belted macs and bright lipsticks who all worked together, lived together and played together, and bounced off the village boundaries like a ballbearing against the sides of a pinball machine. Too much energy and nowhere to put it, and though I knew some of their names, Mrs Dalmeny, Mrs Spriggs, Mrs Povey, they seemed to exist and function as a group.

Indeed, their husbands were incidental; all I knew of them was what I would glimpse through half-open doorways on these regular morning panic runs from porch door to approaching bus, men in vests and braces, with rumpled hair who clutched half-read papers and fiddled absent-mindedly with their testicles whilst their wives flung them hurried goodbyes. I noticed there was never any show of affection, no hugs or kisses, not like my parents for whom every leavetaking was accompanied by squeezes, contact numbers on the journey in case of breakdown or terrorist kidnap and always a folded white hanky. Maybe, I told my mother once, they did not love their husbands, that was why we never saw them out together. ‘Oh no,’ my mother replied. ‘They do. They work so their husbands can eat. Their husbands must feel like ghosts. Poor men. Poor women.’

I did not think they were impoverished, watching them teeter across the road, shouting and laughing until they met and merged together like mercury. The bus coughed to a halt and Roberto made a great show of holding the automatic doors open for the women. They all flew past me in a tornado of perfume and smoke and shiny snappy handbags, pinching my cheek, ruffling my hair, ‘Alright chick?…Ooh, she’s a little doll, in’t she?…Them eyes, eh? Ey Roberto, gooing to come and sit by me, aaar?’ They drew energy from me like a succubus and I deflated as the bus doors closed with a sigh and pulled away. I could see Roberto chatting and flirting with the women but only I knew how bravely he concealed his terrible tortured past. I envied him. I wished I was a tortured soul.

My eyes travelled from the sailor’s grimace to the rows of sweetjars above his head. I knew my father was waiting for me to say something. I took in the plump, cloudy bonbons, snug in their glass jar, the cherry lips smiling back at me, the flying saucers whose paper surfaces dissolved into acid on your tongue, the humbugs and rainbow drops and Blackjack chews, adorned with the face of a grinning piccaninny. Wouldn’t anyone be tempted? I wanted to say, but I didn’t. ‘Well,’ said papa. ‘Are you going to tell me the truth? Or shall we go inside and ask Mr Ormerod what happened?’

I glanced at the brass crucifix in the centre of the window display and then shot my father a look. We both knew this was an empty threat. No one instigated conversation with Mr Ormerod if they wanted to get home before their next birthday. A sentence as innocuous as ‘How much is the thicksliced Sunblest?’ would result in a chirpy monologue which took in Harold Wilson, global disaster and the price of peas, somehow always ending in a hallelujah chorus about the glory of God. Mr Ormerod was hyperactive in the local Wesleyan Methodist church, the only church in the village, the centre of over-organised events we laughingly termed a social life, and the best way he knew how to make us feel at home was to continually try and convert us to the ways of Jesus Christ, his Saviour.

‘Have you seen this leaflet, Mr Kumar?’ he would enquire innocently, thrusting a flyer into papa’s hands with his change. ‘Lovely speaker we’ve got for the Harvest celebrations, Mr Delaney has just come back from Rhodesia. In Africa. We’re having a collection. They asked for a plough but we thought a few tins and preserves would tide them over for a bit.’ You could see it in his face, he’d made the connection, Africa was abroad, we were from abroad, how could we refuse to come along and embrace Jesus for the sake of our cousins? Papa always did refuse but with such grace that Mr Ormerod never lost hope; he just filed us away under ‘Waverers’, rearranged the pens in the breast pocket of his brown overall, and waited for next time.

‘Now,’ said papa. ‘For the last time, did Mr Ormerod give you those sweets for nothing? Or did you take that shilling from mummy’s bag and spend it on yourself?’ I was mute with shame and anger. I hated him for forcing me to stoop to such a grubby act; if he had listened to me in the first place and just given me the sodding money, I would not have had to steal anything. I lifted up my head slightly, saw the ice in his expression and felt doomed. If papa was so angry now, what would he be like when he found out what had happened to me at school only last week?

I had been publicly beaten in front of all my class mates whom I now hated without exception. It had been during a Modern History lesson, when our bullfrog-faced teacher, Mrs Blakey, asked us if we knew why the area we lived in was called the Black Country. Peter Bradley, who had a stammer and a predictable habit of deliberately dropping pencils so he could peer up the girls’ dresses, raised a sleeve covered in snail trails of snot and said, ‘B…b…because so m…many darkies…live here, miss?’ I laughed along with everyone else but the next time I heard Peter snuffling around under the desk, pencil in hand, peering optimistically past reinforced gussets and woolly tights, I aimed a quick kick and was surprised to see him emerge with a fist clamped over a bloody nose. As Mrs Blakey karate-chopped the back of my legs with a splintered wooden ruler, I tried to explain that we were the only Indians that had ever lived in Tollington and that the country looked green if anything to me.

My humiliation had been compounded by the fact that mama was an infants’ teacher in the adjoining school; we were separated by a mere strip of playground, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before she got to hear of my behaviour. I knew I should tell papa everything now, Confess said the Lord and Ye Shall Be Saved. Papa’s expression made me wonder if this only ever worked with English people, but I had to say something because if we entered Mr Ormerod’s shop, my crime would become public shame as opposed to personal failure and that, I knew, was something papa hated more than anything.

Somewhere a front door slammed shut. It seemed to reverberate along the terrace, houses nudging each other to wake up and listen in on us, net curtains and scalloped lace drapes all a-flutter now. Everyone must have been watching, they always did, what else was there to do?

‘Right then. We’ll ask Mr Ormerod what happened.’

Papa pushed open the door of the shop, the brass bell perched on its top rang jauntily. Its clapper looked like a quivering tonsil in a golden throat and it vibrated to the beat of my heart.

‘I was lying,’ I said in a whisper.

Papa’s face sagged, he looked down and then up at me, disappointment dimming his eyes. He let go of my hand and walked back towards our house without looking back.

2

I sat on the front step and finished the rest of my sweets, feeling the bile rise as I chewed with the pace and rumination of a sulky cow. I knew I would end up feeling ill but I had already paid for my haul in shame and saw no point in wasting good food. It would serve them right if I did choke on a raspberry poppet and had foaming convulsions right here on the step. As I tried to unstick my jaw, I remembered the mad dog that had wandered into our communal yard some years ago, whose drunken walk and white-flecked muzzle had sent the mothers screaming for cover, clutching their protesting children to them. I managed to find an airhole in the folds of mama’s trousers and had gazed on the object of all this terror, a mottled, scrappy mutt of a dog who seemed proud of his madness, freed by it, whose expression was one of unconcerned, off-the-planet bliss. I really envied him, or rather the effect he was having on the local harpies who, in normal circumstances, would arm wrestle each other for a parking space. If what that dog had was madness, I wanted some of it. Even then, I felt I spent most of life saying sorry.

I also knew what it was like to almost choke to death. It had happened two years ago, we had celebrated my seventh birthday with a trip to Wolverhampton, where we saw Bedknobs and Broomsticks and then went for a rum baba in the nearby Stanton’s cake shop. I had been promised a party but at the last minute, my mother had been taken ill. Papa found her lying on her bed, crying. He’d said it was a migraine and then talked softly to her in Punjabi, which I knew was a sign that something was a secret and therefore, probably bad news. I still recognised a few words in between mummy’s sobs – mother, money, and then a furious invective in Punjabi with ‘bloody fed up’ stuck in the middle of it. (Swearing in English was considered more genteel than any of the Punjabi expletives which always mentioned the bodily parts of one’s mothers or sisters, too taboo to sit on a woman’s lips.)

But I was relieved; I did not want a party as I would not have had anyone to invite, anyone interesting anyway. In the village I was stuck in between the various gangs, too young for Anita’s consideration, too old to hang around the cloud of toddlers that would settle on me like a rash every time I set foot outside my front door. Going out with the grown-ups was much more exciting, although lately, mama’s moods had begun to intrude upon every family outing like a fourth silent guest, whom I saw as an overweight sweaty auntie with lipstick-stained teeth and an unforgiving expression.

In Stanton’s, after the film, I could tell that whatever had been upsetting my mother was still going on. She sat silent and moist-eyed, looking down into her cup of weak tea, running her finger round and round the edge of its rim. She was dressed in a dusty pink sari with small silver lotus blossoms on its borders, whilst my father wore his blue serge suit and a tie striped like a humbug. Whenever we went ‘out’, out meaning wherever English people were, as opposed to Indian friends’ houses which in any case was always ‘in’ as all we would do was sit in each others’ lounges, eat each others’ food and watch each others’ televisions, my parents always wore their smartest clothes.

My mother knew from experience that she would get fewer stares and whispers if she had donned any of the sensible teacher’s trouser suits she would wear for school, but for her, looking glamorous in saris and formal Indian suits was part of the English people’s education. It was her duty to show them that we could wear discreet gold jewellery, dress in tasteful silks and speak English without an accent. During our very special shopping outings to Birmingham, she would often pass other Indian women in the street and they would stare at each other in that innocent, direct way of two rare species who have just found out they are vaguely related. These other Indian women would inevitably be dressed in embroidered salwar kametz suits screaming with green and pinks and yellows (incongruous with thick woolly socks squeezed into open-toed sandals and men’s cardies over their vibrating thin silks, evil necessities in this damn cold country), with bright make-up and showy gold-plated jewellery which made them look like ambulating Christmas trees. Mama would acknowledge them with a respectful nod and then turn away and shake her head. ‘In the village, they would look beautiful. But not here. There is no sun to light them up. Under clouds, they look like they are dressed for a discotheque.’

But she was quiet now, no light in her face. Papa said, ‘Have something to eat. A cake. Have one of those…what you like…those meringue things.’ ‘She won’t,’ I chipped in, scraping my fork into the spongy belly of my rum baba. ‘You know what she will say, I can make this cheaper at home.’ My mother never ate out, never, always affronted by paying for some over-boiled, under-seasoned dish of slop when she knew she could rustle up a hot, heartwarming meal from a few leftover vegetables and a handful of spices. ‘I bet you couldn’t make this at home,’ I continued. ‘How would you make a cake? How would you get it round and get the cream to stand up and the cherry to balance like this? You have to buy some things, you can’t do everything you know …’

‘That’s enough!’ barked papa. ‘Mind your manners now or we’re going home!’

My mother shook her head at him and put her hand over mine. I snatched it away and finished my cake in silence.

My father showed he was sorry by buying me a hot dog on the way home. I sat in the back of the Mini and concentrated on licking the tomato sauce off my fingertips whilst singing ‘Bobbing Along on the Bottom of the Beautiful Briney Sea’ in between slurps. Mummy and papa were talking again, soft whispers, sss sss sss, my mother’s bracelets jingled as she seemed to wipe something from her face. This was my birthday and they were leaving me out again. I squeezed my hot dog and suddenly the sausage shot into my mouth and lodged firmly in my windpipe. I was too shocked to move, my fingers curled uselessly into my fists. They were still talking, engrossed, I could see papa’s eyes in the mirror, darting from my mother’s face to the unfolding road. I thought of writing SAUSAGE STUCK on the windscreen and then realised I could not spell sausage. I was going to die in the back of the car and somewhere inside me, I felt thrilled. It was so dramatic. This was by far the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

The car went over a bump in the road and the offending chipolata slipped out of my mouth and into my lap, leaving a red stripe across my yellow satin dress. When my mother looked round, my face was wet with tears and I was panting and pointing the sausage at her like a gun. ‘Just look what you’ve done to your dress! Can’t you be careful?’ I did not tell her what had happened. This was my near death experience and I would make damn sure I’d use it on her one day.

Mama rarely raised her voice but when she did get angry, she looked like one of the ornamental statues I had seen on my Auntie Shaila’s shrine. The goddess she resembled most when in a strop, the one that both terrified and fascinated me, was Kali, a black-faced snarling woman with alarming canines and six waving arms. Every hand contained a bloody weapon and she wore a bracelet of skulls around her powerful naked thighs. And her eyes, sooty O’s of disbelief and also amusement that someone insignificant had dared to step on her shadow.

Mama could look like that at me sometimes, when she had caught me tearing carefully sewn ribbons off my dresses, cutting up earthworms in our back yard with her favourite vegetable knife, and most usually, when I was lying. The size of lie never made a difference to her reaction; it could have been one of my harmless fabrications (telling a group of visiting kids in the park that I was a Punjabi princess and owned an elephant called Jason King), or one of my major whoppers – telling my teacher I hadn’t completed my homework because of an obscure religious festival involving fire eating…She was always furious at the pointlessness of it all; stealing was understandable if distressing, violence antisocial yet sometimes unavoidable, but lying? ‘Why do you do this, Meena?’ she would wail, wringing her hands unconvincingly, a parody of a Hindi movie mama. ‘You are only four/seven/nine…Isn’t your life exciting enough without all these stories?’

Well naturally the answer was no, but I did not want to make mama feel that this was her fault. Besides, I enjoyed her anger, the snapping eyes, the shrieking voice, the glimpse of monster beneath the mother; it was one of the times I felt we understood each other perfectly.

Of course, no one else outside our small family ever saw this dark side of mama; to everyone else, she was the epitome of grace, dignity and unthreatening charm. She attracted admirers effortlessly, maybe because her soft round face, large limpid eyes and fragile, feminine frame brought out their protective instincts. Tragedy, amusement and bewilderment would wash across her face like sea changes, flowing to suit the story of whoever she was listening to, giving them the illusion that they could control the tides. She was as constant as the moon and just as remote, so the admiration of the villagers was always tempered with a deferential respect, as if in the company of minor royalty.

‘Oh Mrs K,’ Sandy, the divorcee two doors down, would sigh, running her fingers through her hennaed hair, cocking her head to one side whilst widening her bright blue eyes, giving her the air of a startled parrot, ‘you are a duck.’

This was after my mother had lent her butter or given her a lift down to the shops or taken her son, Mikey, in for some pop and crisps when Sandy missed her bus back from work.

‘You’re so lovely. You know, I never think of you as, you know, foreign. You’re just like one of us.’

My mother would smile and graciously accept this as a compliment. And yet afterwards, in front of the Aunties, she would reduce them to tears of laughter by gently poking fun at the habits of her English friends. It was only much later on that I realised in the thirteen years we lived there, during which every weekend was taken up with visiting Indian families or being invaded by them, only once had any of our neighbours been invited in further than the step of our back door.

The Aunties all had individual names and distinct personalities, but fell into the role of Greek chorus to mama’s epic solo role in my life. Although none of them, nor their husbands, the uncles, were actually related to me by blood, Auntie and Uncle were the natural respectful terms given to them, to any Asian person old enough to boss me around. This was an endless source of confusion to our English neighbours, who would watch tight-lipped as mama and papa’s friends would phut-phut into the communal dirt yard and heave themselves and their several kids out of their hatchbacks, unfurling shimmering saris and clinking with jewellery, holding up their embroidered hemlines from the dirt floor. As I dutifully kissed every powdered or stubbly cheek with a ‘Namaste Auntie, Namaste Uncle’ and led them towards our back door, I could see our neighbours shift uncomfortably, contemplating the apparent size of my family and the fact we had somehow managed to bring every one of them over here.

I once tried explaining to our next door neighbour, Mrs Worrall, why my parents seemed to have so many siblings. ‘It’s just being polite, see,’ I said. ‘Like saying sir or madam, to call them Auntie and Uncle. ‘Cos we have different words for proper relatives, like my dad’s younger brother is called a Chacha, his elder brother is called a Thaya. But me mom’s sister is called a Masee, and my dad’s sister a Buaji…So you know the difference between pretend ones and real ones.’

It was a litany I knew well, from being sat down in front of photos from India and forced to memorise my parents’ many brothers and sisters by name, occupation, and personality quirks. ‘This is your Thaya,’ papa would say. ‘Clerk, sweet tooth, married, prone to crying over nothing in particular as if committing them to memory would make up for not being with them.

Mrs Worrall listened carefully to my monologue and then said, ‘Yow must be mad. What do yow want more relatives for? Yow want extra, tek a few of mine. Selfish sods, all of em,’ and lumbered back into her kitchen.

But I could not imagine existing without them, although I hated the way they continually interfered in my upbringing, inevitably backing up my parents’ complaints. ‘Look at you, like a “jamardani!”’ mama would exclaim when I tumbled into the lounge smelling of pig dung after a good rambling session. ‘Hah, a sweeper!’ the Aunties would mutter in stereophonic sound. ‘Spoiled your lovely smock and all …’ But it would never end there. This was a moral marathon, and they took up the baton with pride, passing it amongst themselves long after mama and papa had run out of breath and were having a cold drink on the sidelines.

‘Why behave like a boy all the time?…Stand with your legs together…Are those nose drippings on your sleeve?…Why don’t you grow your hair, do you want to be a boy, Meena?’ And so in a few short phrases I had progressed from a slightly messy girl into a potential sex change candidate, all done in this jocular caring way, as they showed how much they loved my parents by having a go at me on their behalf. And then suddenly the session would be over and I would be enveloped in crackling silk bosoms and rough clumsy hands, fed morsels off over-loaded plates and shunted away to sit in the Kids’ Room, which was wherever the television was, all recriminations forgotten.

I rarely rebelled openly against this communal policing, firstly because it somehow made me feel safe and wanted, and secondly, because I knew how intensely my parents valued these people they so readily renamed as family, faced with the loss of their own blood relations. I understood this because of the snippets of stories I would hear when the grown-ups would sit around on the floor, replete and sleepy, exchanging anecdotes that reinforced their shared histories, confirming that they were not the only ones who were living out this unfolding adventure. ‘I got off the train at Paddington,’ papa would begin, stifling a satisfied burp, ‘sick as a dog from that damn boat, twenty-five pounds in my pocket, and I looked up across the platform and I saw …’ ‘Me!’ my Uncle Amman would say proudly. ‘Va, you looked like a film star, Kumarsaab, that Jimmy Cagney suit and all.’ ‘So, naturally, I go up and introduce myself, and …’ ‘And we found out our cousins had gone to the same college! So we went back to my home and that was that!’ Uncle Amman would finish with a flourish, as if it were perfectly natural to meet a total stranger and within ten minutes, find him a meal, a home and a list of Situations Vacant.

During this particular story, mama would always listen with a patient, fond look, absorbing the history she had not been around to witness. Papa had left her in Delhi whilst he tried his luck in England, promising to send for her as soon as he had discovered the promised gold beneath the dog shit on the streets. We have the photograph taken on the day of his departure, it looks like a still from one of the old black and white movies I used to watch on Saturday afternoons (after the football and before the wrestling). Papa is leaning out of a steam train window in a brilliant white shirt, an overcoat slung over his waving arm. The smoke rises like cold-morning breath around his face and he is backlit by a rising sun. He is smiling his gap-toothed smile, though his eyes are intense. Mama stands on the platform, the fingers of one hand slightly raised, as if she is afraid to wave him goodbye. She is impossibly young and utterly bereft, her long chiffon dupatta is frozen in mid-curl, lifted by the wind. Even in such a small photograph her longing is palpable, the way her fingers say what her mouth cannot.

This was always one of my favourites, this image of my parents as epic, glamorous figures, touched by romantic tragedy. I knew there was plenty more where that came from too; I have heard the excited whispers between the Aunties whenever my parents’ marriage was mentioned, odd words from which I concocted a whole scenario – ‘…Saw her riding her bike round college…At first sight it was…Her parents, of course…Long negotiations…Such a love story!’ I was in a fever of excitement the first time I eavesdropped on these juicy morsels. My parents in a love story! I kept myself awake imagining them chasing each other around old Indian streets (which were basically English streets with a few cows lounging around on the corners), mama on a bicycle laughing loudly as papa tried to grab onto her saddle and haul himself beside her whilst various old people looked out of half-shuttered windows and tutted under their breath.

But when I confronted mama about her courtship adventures, her face closed up like a fan. ‘Don’t be so silly!’ she sniffed. ‘We were introduced by an uncle. It all was done through the proper channels. Listening to your elders’ conversation again …’ And that was that. I did not have the courage to ask her why there was only one single photograph of their wedding, when all the other Aunties each had a van load of nuptial albums, which they would whip out at the slightest excuse, and sigh over their eighteen-inch waists and demure demeanours, neither of which would ever return. In my parents’ album, this single photograph is given a page all on its own. Mama and papa are seated in the back of a car. Papa wears a turban with strings of pearls attached to the front which obscure his face, except for one guarded eye. Mama is in the foreground, her delicate neck seemingly bent under the weight of a heavily encrusted dupatta. She looks up into the camera lens with the expected posture of all new brides, a victim’s pose showing passivity and bewilderment, stressing the girl would much rather stay with her family than drive off to a bed with her new husband. But mama is not crying, although her head is bowed, her gaze is direct and calm, and there is a light in her pupils which papa said was the camera flash, but which I recognise as joy.

Individually, the Aunties were a powerful force, my mother was an Auntie to several kids in her own right too, but together they were a formidable mafia whose collective approval was a blessing, and whose communal contempt was a curse wrapped up in sweet sari-shaped packages. I found myself continually surprised at how these smiling women who would serve up their husband’s food first with such wifely devotion, could also be capable of such gentle malice.

For example, when I once confronted my mother about the Front Garden dilemma, I unwisely did this in front of the Aunties. Under their benevolent gaze, I tried to explain to her what a social embarrassment it was to have such a bare, ugly display in front of our house and could she not possibly consider buying an ornamental well, make some effort to fit in with the neighbourhood? Mama shot her posse a knowing look and explained that all this garden frippery, gnomes, wells and the like, was an English thing. ‘They have to mark out their territory …’ It was on the tip of her tongue to add ‘…like dogs’, but the Aunties recognised their cue and launched into their own collected proverbs on English behaviour. ‘They treat their dogs like children, no, better than their children …’ ‘They expect their kids to leave home at sixteen, and if they don’t, they ask for rent! Rent from your kids!’ ‘They don’t like bathing, and when they do, they sit in their own dirty water instead of showering …’ ‘The way they wash up, they never rinse the soap off the dishes …’ ‘You know that barmaid-type woman from up the hill has run away again, this time with the driving instructor. He is called Kenneth and wears tank tops…It’s the children I pity …’

At this point I would be sent on a non-existent errand so my mother could finish the latest piece of yard gossip whilst the Aunties would listen wide-eyed, ears flapping, moustaches quivering, glad they had made the perilous journey from the civilised side of Wolverhampton to catch up on the peculiar goings on of the ‘gores’. There was much affectionate laughter, but laughter all the same, tinged with something like revenge.

But mama was not laughing today. The sun was hot now and I felt sick with all the sugar I had consumed; every sweet had tasted only of one thing, Guilt. Through the open front door, I could hear my parents having what they called one of their ‘discussions’, which began as a stilted, almost embarrassed conversation as if two neighbours who barely knew each other had met on the steps of a VD clinic, progressed to a strangely musical monologue by my father, accompanied on percussion by mother banging down various pots and pans, and always ended with a male vocal explosion and a tangible female silence which invaded the house like a sad damp smell. I wondered vaguely if they were arguing about the house.

Whenever my father got sick of our three-up-three-down with its high uneven walls and narrow winding stairs, sick of the damp in the pantry, the outside toilet, the three buses it took to get to work, taking a bath in our bike shed and having to whisper when he wanted to shout, he’d turn to my mother and say, ‘You wanted this house, remember that.’

My mother grew up in a small Punjabi village not far from Chandigarh. As she chopped onions for the evening meal or scrubbed the shine back onto a steel pan or watched the clouds of curds form in a bowl of slowly setting homemade yoghurt, any action with a rhythm, she would begin a mantra about her ancestral home. She would chant of a three-storeyed flat-roofed house, blinkered with carved wooden shutters around a dust yard where an old-fashioned pump stood under a mango tree.

She would talk of running with her tin mug to the she-goat tethered to the tree and, holding the mug under its nipples, pulling down a foaming jet of milk straight into her father’s morning tea. She spoke of the cobra who lived in the damp grasses beneath the fallen apples in the vast walled orchard, of the peacocks whose keening kept her awake on rainy monsoon nights, of her Muslim neighbours whom they always made a point of visiting on festivals, bringing sweetmeats to emphasise how the land they shared was more important than the religious differences that would soon tear the Punjab in two.

Yet, in England, when all my mother’s friends made the transition from relatives’ spare rooms and furnished lodgings to homes of their own, they all looked for something ‘modern’. ‘It’s really up-to-date, Daljit,’ one of the Aunties would preen as she gave us the grand tour of her first proper home in England. ‘Look, extra strong flush system…Can opener on the wall…Two minutes walk to all local amenities …’ But my mother knew what she wanted. When she stepped off the bus in Tollington, she did not see the outside lavvy or the apology for a garden or the medieval kitchen, she saw fields and trees, light and space, and a horizon that welcomed the sky which, on a warm night and through squinted eyes, could almost look something like home.

At first I would listen entranced to this litany of love, imagining my mother as I had seen her in those crumpled black and white photographs hoarded in a shiny suitcase on top of her wardrobe. She was skinny and dark then, all eyes and stick insect limbs protruding from a white pyjama suit with paper-sharp creases in the legs. She retained this image, of a country girl lost in the big city, throughout her teens and early twenties, only the costume changed. Here was mama in a school play, a coat hanger for a home-sewn robe, mama winning a race as All Delhi College Champion, running in full length salwar kameez, mama as a lecturer, standing in front of a class of bored Delhi teenage girls, looking younger than all of them. On paper her achievements were remarkably impressive—actress, athlete, teacher—incarnations from other lives, trumpeting talents I would never see fully realised. But I still found it comforting that in every face she wore, I still saw the incredulity and bewilderment she so often turned on me. I liked knowing I could still surprise my mother.

But gradually I got bored, and then jealous of this past that excluded me; she had milked goats, stroked peacocks, pulled sugar cane from the earth as a mid-morning snack. She had even seen someone stabbed to death, much later on when the family had moved to Delhi and partition riots stalked the streets like a ravenous animal. A man in a rickshaw, she said. The driver gave him a bidi, took one himself and indicated he needed a light. As the customer fumbled in the pockets of his ill-fitting suit (and this memory seemed to upset her greatly, remembering how his shirt sleeves protruded from worn linen elbows), the driver reached into his dhoti and brought out a knife which he plunged into his fellow smoker’s head, a lit match still in his victim’s twitching hand.

That was my favourite, but she would not repeat it more than twice. The last time I had asked her to tell me the Rickshaw Story, she looked at me much as I imagine Damien’s mother looked when she gave her smiling baby his first shampoo and found three sixes curled up like commas behind his tiny pink ear. But the story did not fascinate me because of the violence, what obsessed me was this meeting of two worlds, the collision of the epic with the banal. A shared cigarette and a hidden knife, a too-small suit, probably borrowed from a brother who was expecting it back that evening, and a bloody betrayal. I listened to this tale and heard huge boulders moving somewhere, my centre of gravity shifted and I saw the breath of monsters gathering on the horizon. Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned.

I recognised this feeling; it was the same feeling I had when I had almost asphyxiated in the back of our car, that a birthday treat could end with a screaming headline in the Express and Star, TOT CHOKES ON UNCOOKED SAUSAGE! BIRTHDAY RUINED, SAY WEEPING PARENTS! Death itself did not frighten me; I had grown up examining the crushed slippery bodies of baby sparrows who had fallen prematurely from their nests to land under our gables, filmy eyes and bloody beaks open with surprise, maybe with their last thought that mama had made flying look so easy. We local kids regularly gathered round the mangled corpses of cats, foxes and badgers left at the side of the road, their fur patterned with tyre marks, their bluey-white entrails trailing the murdering vehicles’ exit like accusing fingers. What frightened me was the excitement I felt when death became possible, visible, bared its teeth and raised a knife in Indian moonlight. There was so much more I wanted that I could not name, and brushing mortality, all those hot dog moments, helped me name it. Was this all there was? When would anything dangerous and cruel ever happen to me?

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