My Daughter, My Mother (20 page)

For this largeness – while others, judging and spiteful, were whispering behind their hands – Meena loved her.

Mostly they didn’t mention Tavleen. A lot of time and many other joys and tragedies had passed since then, but once in a while, if they happened to meet around the anniversary of
that day
, they spoke of her.

That day
was 24th November 1965, a grey, ordinary Wednesday morning. Tavleen had got up early and, leaving her arrogant, sadistic husband and two-year-old twin girls asleep, had taken four-and-a-half-year-old Jasvinder in her arms and carried her out of the house.

Jasvinder had been born with multiple handicaps. For one thing, she was not a boy, which her father regarded in itself as almost amounting to a crime. She had very little sight and could not walk or speak. The arrival of twin girls two years after her had given Tavleen’s husband even more sense of entitlement to beat and bully his wife. To tell her she was a failure. Where was the son he had planned on?

As well as receiving many beatings, her body bore tight, shiny scars where he had thrown a kettle of boiling water over her. A few days before Tavleen carried her daughter through the dawn to Smethwick Rolfe Street station, where she put an end to their suffering forever, she had heard that her beloved sister had died in India, of tuberculosis. Her hopes of one day being reunited with her were snatched away.

‘We did not know how bad things were,’ Meena and the other women had said to each other in the stunned weeks afterwards. They had known about some of the violence. Tavleen had not been able to hide everything. But she had suffered courageously and mostly in silence. In any case, what could they have done?

To Meena she had been the sweetest of companions. Tavleen was much more softly spoken and shy than Banita. The women got into the habit of congregating together. None of them worked, except a few who did bits of piece-work with a sewing machine at home. Meena had done piece-work for a while, when Khushwant was getting his factory going. She had sewn dresses for a Smethwick firm called Sunshine Fashions.

The women were all looking after children, and it was seen as a lowering of status for a wife to leave the house to work. They would meet in Victoria Park when the weather was fine, or in each other’s houses. But it was never Tavleen’s house where they met.

The other women all liked Tavleen, with her ready smile. Her two top middle teeth crossed over one another in the middle and the effect was attractive. When they met to chatter or do
gidha
, traditional dancing, she always brought sweets or cakes. And she was kind to everyone’s children. Rajdev adored her.

‘Is Auntie-
ji
going to be there?’ he would ask of any outing. As soon as he saw Tavleen pushing Jasvinder’s buggy, he would run to her and she would always halt the buggy and bend down to hug him and give him a special sweet. Looking back, Meena thought she had sensed a kind of loneliness in Raj that echoed her own. This thought pained her as much as any other.

After she died, Raj cried inconsolably. He was quiet for weeks. And Meena saw Tavleen everywhere. At times it was as if she was walking at her side, as she had so often done, and she would find her lips moving, talking to her. She would see her friend buying groceries in a shop and rush in without thinking, to find it was someone else. The sight of a bright-coloured Punjabi suit disappearing round a corner could have her speeding up, to check, just in case . . . Could it all have been a dream, a mistake? Sometimes she heard Tavleen’s soft voice when she was alone in the house and would whirl round. At times she feared for her own sanity. Grief, she realized, did strange things to you.

And always there was the sense of guilt. Should Tavleen have been able to talk to her more? If she had known more, couldn’t something have been done? But there was always this silence – a silence of fear and of loyalty to tradition. Sometimes a silence that went on until it was all too late.

Tavleen’s husband sent the twins back to India to be cared for and disappeared from the community. Soon it was rumoured that he had been seen in Yorkshire.

Tavleen’s death changed things for Meena. Until then her own marriage had been functional, nothing more. She expected nothing much from it other than to bear children, to cook and clean and be her husband’s servant.

Meena started to look more closely at Khushwant. What she saw was a man who began to touch her emotions. Khushwant was not a leader or a thinker. He liked to keep his head down and be told what to do. He had begun their marriage by beating her because he believed that was what was expected. But he had learned and changed.

That year, as her belly bulged outwards with the growth of Sukhdeep inside her, among the men Khushwant worked and drank with there was a growing discontent. Pubs like the Waggon and Horses operated an unofficial colour bar.

‘They are saying,’ Khushwant explained to her, ‘that the pub gaffa tells us we can drink in this room, but not in that. That room is for whites only. Whites can drink anywhere, but we have to keep to one or two rooms only. Some people are getting angry about it. A lot of pubs are doing the same thing.’

There was also anger that the black immigrants always got the lowest-paid, hardest work, with no chance to develop to something more skilled.

‘Always a “mate” to the white worker, you see,’ Khushwant explained. ‘They get all the skilled jobs, when we could learn to do the job – easy – and get better pay.’

Meena could see how unfair this was, but when there was talk of forming a union to get things changed, Khushwant slid away from it.

‘I don’t want to get involved in all that,’ he would say wearily. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate. Let others do it, if they want.’

She realized he was afraid. He was not one to stick his head above any parapet, or be political. He did not like change or disturbance. Seeing this, she realized it had taken him a particular kind of courage to leave his homeland, to make this great transition to England and build a future for their family. She admired him afresh for it.

Four months after Sukhdeep was born, in June 1964, there had been a General Election, which affected Smethwick in a particularly ugly way. The Labour candidate, who had held the seat for the previous four General Elections, was expected to win comfortably. However, he was ousted. Smethwick, which had chosen Oswald Mosley as its MP in the late 1920s, voted in a Tory called Peter Griffiths on the slogan, ‘IF YOU WANT A NIGGER FOR A NEIGHBOUR, VOTE LABOUR.’

Meena was, as usual, protected from the raw impact of all this by her lack of English. She still rarely spoke to anyone who was not a Punjabi like herself. But everyone was talking about it. Cradling Sukhdeep in her arms, she felt a deep sense of belonging with her new daughter, with her people and with her husband who had to confront such problems and hostility every day.

It was all because of his hard work, she saw, that they were about to move into their own terraced house in Smethwick. For the first time they would have hot water: an Ascot heater in the kitchen. Later there were more moves. To the first house in Handsworth, a bigger terrace with a bathroom. This was after Khushwant and his friend Sachman had got together to set up the leather-goods factory. In the end, Khushwant had bought Sachman out. He had enabled growth upon growth in their fortunes by his dogged hard work.

After Sukhdeep was born it felt as if they were more united. Khushwant truly seemed to feel he had a family now, and he doted on his little girl. Raj observed this and sometimes played up. Pavan and Harpreet followed. In 1978 they moved to Handsworth Wood.

One evening when they were still living in the first, smaller Handsworth house and Harpreet was roughly twelve months old, Meena had gone through all the day’s usual routines. She had fed the older children, who now clamoured for fish fingers and baked beans instead of rice or
dal
. (‘Why don’t you learn English?’ Sukhdeep asked her sometimes. ‘There are classes you can go to.’ Meena never felt the need. It seemed too late, after all these years.)

That evening Khushwant was, as ever, working late at the factory. She had cooked him Indian food:
dal
and rice and potato and cauliflower curry. The children were all in bed.

At about nine o’clock she heard Khushwant’s key in the lock and stood up to greet him. Going through to the front room, she saw him for a moment with his back to her, his hand still on the Yale lock, fastening the door. His clothes had the sagging look of cheap garments that had been much sat in. He was not so fat in those days: the business sapped his energy. It was a heavy, anxious struggle for an already anxious man. Every line of him – the droop of his shoulders, his lank hair and slow manner – spoke of exhaustion.

In that moment Meena knew for the first time that she loved her husband. The feeling swelled and glowed inside her.

He turned, his smile growing uncertainly to meet hers.

‘Come,’ was all she said. ‘I have food ready.’

This growth of love was a certainty she had clung to through the years. It was right: God-given. It made sense of everything about the system in which she lived. The English criticize us for arranged marriages, she thought. But this is how it is. We marry a stranger, we create a family, struggle together through thick and thin. We make a life and, with God’s help, we grow into love for each other. She saw this in Banita also. She could dismiss Tavleen’s husband: Tavleen had been married off to a man who was evil and godless from the start. In her mind she placed him in a different category. Though it was Tavleen’s death that had bequeathed her the gift of looking at her husband and starting to see the good she had.

Now she clung to the certainty that her religion, her culture was right. If two good people came together with their families’ help and God’s blessing, they would learn their way into a marriage. The belief made her feel steady and safe. It helped to heal things about her past, the rupture that had happened in her parents’ lives. This was the wisdom of God, unchanging and benign, and it was wise to surrender to it. It was the way to be a woman: it made sense of everything in life.

Or it did until the end of Sukhdeep’s marriage.

Twenty-Four

Birmingham, 8th May 1945

Margaret sat on the edge of her bed in the darkening room, the blue envelope in her lap.

She could hear the buzz of celebration from outside. There were tables all along Upper Ridley Street, with adults and children alike crammed along them. Strings of bunting rippled over their heads and the children waved paper Union Jacks and wore party hats. Everyone had pooled meagre rations and done their best to make it into party food, laying out plates of sandwiches, dry cake and jelly, and here and there a precious bottle that had been saved up for a celebration.

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY GERMANY!

So far as Europe was concerned, the war was over! It was Victory in Europe Day and a public holiday.

Mrs Jennings from next door had done her best to involve Margaret in everything, although she was rushed off her feet herself and was scatty at the best of times. Out of loyalty to Alice Winters, and fondness for the little Margaret she remembered from before the war, she looked out for her, trying to bring some care into the misery of her life. Dora Jennings’ four children were older than Margaret, but she was kind enough to let Margaret tag along.

The morning had been full of busyness. The men who were at home gathered anything they could find in the way of tables; the women were preparing food. There was an atmosphere of wild excitement, and those who were full of grief instead of celebration tended to keep to themselves. One woman in the back court where they lived had lost her son at Monte Cassino. Another’s husband was a prisoner of war. Even Ron, Mrs Jennings’ husband, who was usually a chirpy soul, was attacked by a fit of gloom.

‘It’s all very well,’ he said through a cigarette stub, rifling around in the scullery, ‘but will there be any jobs now it’s all over?’ (Rattle, clatter.) ‘It’s all right when there’s a war on, but the dole queues’ll be back again.’ (Bang!)

‘What
are
you looking for, Ron?’ Mrs Jennings called out. She, Margaret and Sally Jennings, who was sixteen, were spreading bread with fishpaste and jam. Dora Jennings had her dark hair up in a scarf. Her handsome face turned, exasperated, towards the scullery.

‘I’m trying to find the hammer,’ Ron said. ‘There’s a nail sticking right out of that table – could do someone a nasty injury. I know we had a hammer . . .’

‘It’s in the bedroom,’ Dora said, going back to spreading the bread.

‘What the hell’s it doing up there?’

‘I don’t know, Ron.’ (Spread, spread.) ‘You most probably must of left it there . . .’

Margaret’s spirits lifted a little as she carried food out to the tables and felt the party atmosphere. Odd bits of song kept bursting through, and the colourful bunting made it look really cheerful.

It was a beautiful, warm day and everyone sat out, eating and enjoying themselves, still hardly able to believe it was all really over.

‘Your pa not around, then?’ Sally Jennings asked Margaret, in between eating Madeira cake and joining in the cheering. The air was full of the smells of food and cigarette smoke.

‘No.’ Margaret shrugged. What difference would it have made if he was? Ted Winters showed no fatherly feeling towards her. She might as well not exist, except as a skivvy.

Later on in the afternoon, as the other kids played around the tables and there was well-oiled singing, she could not bear it any longer and slipped away. She knew no one would miss her. They’d just think she’d gone to the lav.

Slipping inside the house, she went up to her room. She sat staring at nothing for some time. Then, as she so often did, she reached under her pillow for the letter.

Orchard House,

Buckley,

Worcestershire

15th December 1944

Dear Maggie,