My Daughter, My Mother (16 page)

Raj’s blue turban was tied immaculately. Below it he wore a neat, black sports shirt over black trousers. She knew he had practised hard to get the turban right. Wearing it, even with his new growth of beard, made his face look rounder and more boyish, though she would never have aroused the wrath of a warrior for Khalistan by saying so. The sight of it twisted her inside, pride and concern all entangled.

When he was small she had left his hair uncut, tied it up in the traditional topknot worn by young Sikh boys. When they came to England, although there were other Sikh children (some with topknots, some without), Raj had become very embarrassed by it at school. He begged her to let him stop wearing it.

‘They tease me, Mummy – they say I look like a girl.’ She could see his anguished little face now, his eyes full of tears.

Khushwant had ceased wearing a turban and went clean-shaven. He said it was much easier to get a job in England that way, to fit in and build a life in the country. Unlike some people, they had had no thought of going back to India to live. They had already been uprooted once, each of them in childhood, from what was now Pakistan. India had never felt quite like home. Khushwant’s family had come to Delhi from Jhelum in western Punjab. Both families knew what it was to leave their livestock, their crops rotting in fields that their people had farmed for generations, to go to a place where you had no land. Leaving a second time was a little easier. They had cast their lot in the UK and it had to work.

So Meena had untied Raj’s topknot and taken him for a haircut at the front-room barber’s down the street in Smethwick, feeling as if God, the Gurus and every Sikh in the district was breathing down her neck.

And, now, Raj wanted to be a Sikh, to wear the turban and bangle and other marks of his religion with pride. And she was proud of him for it, tender towards him. But she knew that for him it was not just a matter of pride – it was rage and defiance and self-assertion of a kind that Raj had had brewing inside him for years, and this made her tremble for him. To be proud to be a Sikh was one thing; but what of the way Bhindranwale had done it? Blood leading to more blood. In those faces on the TV screen, in the eyes of those young men who followed him, she saw that fanatical hatred and bloodlust that awoke images she never wanted to remember. Things you could never talk about. Eyes she had seen in Amritsar, eyes that led to screams and blood and flames. And sometimes she saw Raj’s eyes looking out that way.

The phone rang. Raj leapt up to answer it, clicking the radio off. A heated conversation followed: in Punjabi, so she could understand it. There were to be demonstrations, arrangements for Hyde Park. Raj was full of fighting talk. ‘We’ve got to show those bastards . . . Fight to the death, if necessary . . .’

Meena watched him: Raj’s whole frame was tensed with anger and self-importance. Now he had a focus for his anger. She sighed from the depths of her. Why couldn’t Raj be like his father and just keep out of it all? But all he could seem to feel for his father was contempt.

‘Won’t you be late?’ she said again, coldly, as he put the phone down.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, dismissing her.

‘Son . . .’ Her voice was gentler now. She was fighting back tears. If she cried, he would despise her more. ‘I am afraid of what will happen.’

He didn’t even look at her. He pushed away the half-eaten cereal so hard that it nearly fell off the table. ‘We’ll handle it. It’s our business. Nothing for you to worry about.’

‘All this violence – it’s no way to—’

‘What do you know?’ he roared, turning on her. ‘They’re going round the countryside in Punjab hunting out Sikhs, killing people –
our
people . . . Oh, you’re just a woman. You don’t know anything . . . Look, I’ve got to go.’

He slammed out. Everything was suddenly quiet. It was still only seven-fifteen and the others were in bed.

Meena slipped down from the stool. She went to the table and sat spooning up the remains of Raj’s cereal. It would go to waste otherwise.

The time she had first told Raj they were going to England was on a warm September afternoon. They had been in Delhi for some time by then, having left Amritsar after the great fire took their house.

Khushwant had left for England in the summer of 1960, but Meena had remained behind with his brothers and acid-faced mother. Their humble family home in Delhi was not far from where her uncle Nirmal lived, which made Meena happy to be there, as she saw him often.

Mama-ji
Nirmal was her mother’s younger brother, who had left Gujranwala with them. With his gentle, humorous ways he had long been the most important person in her life. His proximity, with his wife Bhoji and their children, made life with Meena’s mother-in-law much more bearable. Nirmal was doing well with his taxi business and he often came to see her, bringing treats, bangles and sweets or a little toy for Raj. Somewhere Nirmal had heard about Father Christmas in England and his ‘Ho, ho, ho!’, and that was often how he announced himself when he arrived.

‘Ho, ho, ho!’ they would hear at the door and Raj would run, giggling, to greet Nirmal, whose big teeth always gave him a look of smiling mischief. He would scoop Raj into his arms. A smile spread over Meena’s face as she remembered. Nirmal was always the person who had brightened her day, made her feel safe. He had been the one it had made her heart ache to leave behind.

At the back of the house was a small piece of scrubby ground shaded by a
peepal
tree with its big, rustling leaves, and that afternoon she was sitting beneath it on the dry ground, her little son in her lap.

‘We are going to see your
Pita
-
ji
,’ she told Raj carefully. He had never met Khushwant, who had left for England two months before his son was born in September 1960.

Raj twisted round to look at her. His glossy hair was tied in a little white topknot. His huge, long-lashed eyes shone with excitement.

‘
Pita-ji?
We are going to see
Pita-ji?
Raj was convinced his father was the most exciting thing in the world. The reality had been a betrayal from which she believed he had never fully recovered.

They had been married for seven months when Khushwant left. She must have conceived Rajdev in the first week of marriage, bruised and desperate as she was.

For the first three nights he had set about her as soon as they were alone, slapping her face, knocking her to the ground. Khushwant had been a well-made man, even in those days, though he was not carrying surplus fat. He cut her lip one night and she hid her swollen face the next day. Two of her teeth came loose. All this was the prelude to sexual relations, a fast, thrusting event in the dark, which hurt her even more because of her bruises. For a time she bore it. Bear everything: he is your husband, he is as God . . . On the fourth night a cry burst from her lips.

‘Why are you doing this? What have I done that you punish me like this?’

Khushwant, who was drawing his hand back to strike her, stopped, looking in astonishment at the frail, pretty woman before him.

‘You are my wife!’

‘But why should you hit me? I have done nothing wrong.’

The room was almost dark. She could see the glint of his eyes in the candlelight.

‘It is my place to hit you. It is what I must do.’

Meena’s father had never hit her mother. Even after all that had happened, after the severest of provocation a man could endure: no violence. The two of them had suffered in silence.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘It is not. Why do you think it is?’

Even now, looking back, she was amazed by her certainty and courage. It was almost the only time in her life that she had spoken out.

By the time he left for England the beatings had stopped. Sometimes he lashed out at her, when he was impatient in the way of a husband, but he did not make a session of it, as he had at first. She knew Khushwant was not naturally a violent person. He did not welcome physical exertion. His father and brother had led him to think this was the way to do things – to beat her into submission from the first day. She showed him that he had already succeeded. He did not need to beat her; she would meet his every need and command. There were no feelings – not then. All she hoped for was a life without being assaulted each night, to have a roof over her head, food in her belly . . . and to have a family. By the time Khushwant left she was carrying his child. If he was pleased, he didn’t show it.

Despite all her fears of leaving India, and the wrench of leaving
Mama-ji
Nirmal, she had been ready to go. A woman on her own was useless, of no status, Meena felt, even though she had given birth to a son. She needed to be with her husband.

Lapping up the last spoonfuls of Raj’s milk, she remembered an English saying that Sooky had once translated for her:
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle
.

At first she had stared blankly at her daughter. Then she laughed until her sides ached. ‘Hah! So I am a fish and he is a bicycle. That is marriage!’

She had been ready to come here, to the damp, shared terrace in Smethwick, a mile from the High Street, with its freezing rooms, its outside toilet and pale, incomprehensible neighbours. The friendliest had been Mrs Platt next door, with her hair curlers, jiggling false teeth and little zipped boots, who talked on and on at Meena, even though she could understand not a word the woman was saying. But she always made a fuss of Rajdev, chucking him under the chin and greeting him with, ‘Oooooh, bab . . .’ followed by a string of words that seemed kindly enough. Meena tried smiling and nodding her head, and that seemed to satisfy Mrs Platt, who soon scurried off into her own dishevelled house again.

‘What did she say?’ she’d ask Raj as he grew older and was speaking English. But even then he’d shrug, looking bemused.

‘When are we going home?’ he asked, all through that first winter, his face twisted with misery.

Never had Meena been colder or more lonely. The other four occupants of the house on the Oldbury Road were all single men, and Meena found it was her job to shop, cook and clean for them all. Khushwant came with her at first, to show her where to go, how to shop and use English money. He had learned some broken English by then. She found it hard to go out sometimes, as she didn’t have the right clothes and her shoes were flimsy. All the white people seemed to be staring at her. One day Khushwant came home with a big pair of wellington boots for her, which at least kept the water out, though she didn’t like to wear them. They made her feel like a man.

‘Just be thankful you weren’t here last winter,’ he told her. The early months of 1963 had already become a legend of snowbound endurance. Meena thought the cold this time round was quite bad enough. The greyness and drizzling rain dragged her spirits down.

And though her husband was seldom violent towards her now, it felt as if they were strangers to one another. She had not known him well to begin with, and England had changed him. He and the other tenants were working long hours in a foundry. Khushwant was always under pressure, tired and mostly absent. He had never been a religious man and in those days seldom went to one of the
gurdwaras
that were being set up in Smethwick. At that time Meena did not like to go by herself. It was only later that she made some friends. The men’s favourite way to unwind was over a pint in the local pub. Meena spent many hours alone, on a blanket laid on the linoleum, crouched up by the old gas fire. She never complained; and met troubles with silence.

Sometimes she dreamed of running away, of getting on a boat or a plane back to India. If she begged her uncle, would Nirmal take her in?

That winter the men had clubbed together and bought a second-hand television. Meena left the Test Card on for company when there were no programmes, its jaunty music streaming through the house. On its jumpy black-and-white news broadcast she saw the President of the United States of America being shot, the month after she arrived in England.

Even when Khushwant was home, they didn’t have much to say to each other. Home was for food, sleep and sexual relief.

‘Why doesn’t Daddy come home?’ Raj would ask, hurt.

Khushwant showed little interest in his son, who had arrived in England three years old and a stranger. He had not seen him grow up and had no idea how to handle a child. He seemed to have no feeling for Raj: the boy was Meena’s business, so far as Khushwant was concerned. Raj was to be hustled off to bed as soon as he appeared.

‘Tell him to stop making that noise,’ he would say grumpily if Raj was playing. Now and then, at weekends, he would join in and come on a visit to the park. But Raj knew; he did not feel loved or wanted by his father. Not the way his younger siblings were wanted when they arrived. Nor did he feel in the least English. He was the one born in India, the one who was different. It had always marked him.

It was Sukhdeep whom Khushwant had wanted the most. The first child born in England, somehow she had made things better. Meena had been surprised by this. Sukhdeep was only a girl, after all. But she seemed to help Khushwant belong, to feel as if he was truly part of a family. And Sukhdeep had adored him from the start. They were in tune with each other in a way that he and Raj had never been.

A memory came to her of following Khushwant and Sukhdeep down the street when the little girl was about six, a wiry, bright-eyed little thing. She was clutching her father’s hand and looking up at him, chattering and skip-skipping along. Khushwant turned and looked down at her with a smile, the sort of smile Meena had never seen truly directed at her, spontaneous and full of love. It was a glimpse of what was possible.
It’s not her fault
, she had told herself as the blade of jealousy stabbed through her.
Not her fault if her father loves her . . .

As Sooky had grown older, she had also grown closer to her mother. Meena loved having daughters. As well as enjoying their company, their duty was to fulfil the family’s
izzat
– the honour of doing right in the community. Sooky had been a good student and a sweet, lively child. But then came her marriage.