My Daughter, My Mother (26 page)

‘I was five.’

‘But why did they send you – couldn’t your mother have gone with you? Our . . . Our grandmother?’ As Karen spoke, Joanne saw the realization break over her that they knew nothing about that grandmother, either. They didn’t seem to know anything.

‘No, my mother was ill. Died soon after, by all accounts.’ This was said with no emotion. ‘I never saw her again.’

A hundred questions ran through Joanne’s mind, but she could see that her mother was on the point of shutting down.

‘So, what was it like?’ she asked, desperate to keep her talking.

‘Oh,’ Margaret said dismissively. ‘It was all right, you know – most of the time.’

Inside, washing up together, the two of them were silent for a time. Then Joanne said, ‘I feel sort of
ashamed
– that we don’t know anything. That we’ve never asked.’

Karen swished water round in the teapot. She seemed angry.

‘I don’t feel ashamed. I feel quite put out actually, Jo. I mean, if we ever asked about our nanna and granddad, we were just told they were all dead – and that was that. I mean, what’s the big secret? I think we have a right to know things like that.’

Joanne dried up a cup, slowly rotating it. ‘Well, maybe we will now, in the end. It’s funny, isn’t it – it’s as if this Valium thing has opened the lid on everything.’

‘Well, she opens it for a second, then slams it shut again.’ Karen banged the pot down on the side. ‘You never know where you are with her.’

Margaret sat on outside as the others tinkered with the lawnmower, glad for the girls to do the washing-up. She sat so still that from a distance she seemed to have fallen into a doze. However, her mind was anything but quiet. Things were rushing to the surface.

That hadn’t been the last time she had seen Tommy, that visit he made to the house in Buckley, as a tanned farm boy who had found a new life.

Not long before she left her father’s house, left him to it with that vicious harridan Peggy Loach, she had seen Tommy again. It was a Sunday afternoon, sometime in the summer of 1946. She remembered it being very warm – the doors open all round the yard.

Her father and Peggy were upstairs in bed, sleeping it off, and she went out to fetch a bowl of water from the tap. A few bits of washing were hanging on the lines outside in the sun and, as she stood waiting for the bowl to fill, she glanced across the yard.

Between the drying clothes she caught sight of someone standing just at the end of the entry: a tall, strong lad with an unmistakable face. He was staring intently along the yard towards their house. She dropped the bowl with a clatter, water splashing her feet. He looked across and, seeming afraid, turned away.

‘Tommy!’ The tap was still running, but she tore after him, saw him leaving the entry. She ran into the street, just as he started to run as well. ‘Tommy – stop!
Stop
!’

Her desperate shriek forced him to stop and turn round, slowly, as if he could hardly bear to look. He was so big now, a fourteen-year-old man, towering above her in a white shirt and waistcoat of rough black serge, trousers, boots.

‘Tommy?’

He stared down at her. She saw the same frank look, the cheeky turn to his lips. His face was a weathered, healthy colour. They just stood there, gazing at each other, trying to take in what was in front of them.

‘Are you coming home?’ She could hardly bring out the words, her throat was so full and aching.

Tommy shook his head and started to step away. ‘No, Sis – no. I can’t. This ain’t home. Not any more. No, never. But I just had to come and . . . Is Mom . . . ?’

‘She’s gone. She passed away soon after we left. You know she has.’

Tommy swallowed. ‘Yes. I knew it really. I just had to come and see – just the once. But I’m off now. I can’t stay, Maggie . . .’

He hurried away. There was nothing she could do. She knew he couldn’t stay, could see that he had belonged to another life for a long time now.

She stood in the street, watching him through the tears, which came then, until he turned the corner and was gone.

Thirty-One

Harpreet had slipped into the house that warm afternoon, home from visiting a friend. The hall was full of delicious cooking smells. She stopped and listened.

Voices were coming from the kitchen, her mother and big sister chatting together, over the sizzle of onions and spices. Harpreet’s round face broke into a smile. Stepping towards the portrait of Guru Nanak, she said, ‘Thank you,
Guru-ji
– that’s
so
much better.’

Later, upstairs, she flung her arms round Sooky.

‘Hey, Mom’s talking to you again, isn’t she? I’m so-o-o happy!’

It was only a few days after the visit from Kanvar, the ‘Young Prince’.

‘Yeah,’ Sooky said, giving her a squeeze. ‘Me too.’

Harpreet’s face creased with anxiety for a moment. ‘They have told the Sohals you’re not going to marry him, haven’t they?’

‘Yes, Dad told them.’

Harpreet sank down on the bed with exaggerated relief. ‘Phew! Fate worse than death! Does this mean things’ll go back to normal now? Are they okay with it?’

‘I don’t know about normal,’ Sooky said, laughing. ‘What’s normal round here anyway? But it’s much better. I think they’ve realized that marrying me off to just anyone might not be the answer now.’

She had cooked dinner with Mom, this time not in the brittle silence that had persisted for the past months. Only now that things were beginning to heal could she look back and take in just how much pain and loneliness her mother’s silent distancing of herself from Sooky had caused.

Harpreet was staring indignantly at her. ‘I should think not!’

‘Hey . . .’ Sooky pulled Harpreet down on the bed beside her. ‘Look, it’s not really just Mom and Dad’s fault. They’ve had to put up with a lot over this as well – you know, people bitching, the gossip.’

‘But that’s just it!’ Harpreet exploded. ‘They get all these horrible things said about them – and you. And you get the blame for all of it when it was all Jaz’s fault! It’s not fair, it’s just
ridiculous
. I don’t get why you’ve just accepted all that, said you’d had an affair with someone else to get a divorce, when you know you hadn’t done anything . . .’ Harpreet was almost in tears.

Sooky sighed, stroking her sister’s hand. ‘I know it’s not fair. It’s
absolutely
not fair. At the time I just wanted to get out of it so badly that I was prepared to take the blame. I feel like a coward now: I should have stood up to Jaz, told someone about his . . . problems. What really gets me is wondering who else Jaz might start on.’ She looked at Harpreet. ‘We’re bound to hear if he gets married again – and I’ll warn her. I honestly will. I don’t know what else I can do now.’

‘But what about you:
you’re
the one who looks bad! And people remember all this stuff forever and ever.’

Sooky stared ahead of her. ‘It’s the whole family honour thing –
izzat
. . . Daughters keeping up the tradition. Mom and Dad are just caught up in that; we all are.’

Harpreet fumed beside her. ‘
I
don’t want to be. I’ll run away. I don’t ever want to get married!’

Sooky squeezed her hand. ‘But then what? You lose your family – you’re all on your own. Oh, I don’t know. It’s all stupid and unfair, and some of it needs to change. But the thing is, I still wish things had been different . . .’ Her eyes filled. ‘That I could have made Mom and Dad proud, the way they wanted me to.’

‘Oh, Sooks.’ Harpreet put her arms round Sooky again and they sat hugging for a minute, both tearful.

‘The main thing is,’ Sooky said over Harpreet’s shoulder, ‘that at least Mom’s talking to me.’

Until all this happened she had never experienced that simple longing for her mother’s presence. She wanted everyday things: for them to cook together, do the chores, look after Priya and chat, the way they had done before. This felt like a sacred part of life. Now she had lost it and regained it, she knew how precious it was.

At first communication was stiff, like an unused wheel cranking into action. Both Meena and Sooky had been polite, but wary of each other. They had to take time to relate to each other on a new footing.

The schools broke up and the weather was hot. Pav spent a lot of the time out with his friends, mostly quiet, studious boys who gave no cause for worry. Harpreet had just finished her GCSEs and was relaxing and socializing too.

Roopinder, who was now six months pregnant, insisted that she needed to rest and seemed to find it hard to tolerate the company of the children she had already. She seemed quite down in herself, sleeping a lot and snapping at everyone. So for much of the time Meena and Sooky were looking after Amardeep and Jasmeet as well as Priya, sometimes with Harpreet there to help.

As the days passed, Sooky became more and more aware of her mother’s own need to talk.

At first Meena confided her worries about Raj. Sooky felt very distant from her brother these days. He was so angry, so vile to her, that it was hard for her to find any sympathy for him. But she knew he was suffering too. He had been a sweet, sensitive boy once and they had got along well. As a teenager he had become sullen and troubled, never sure how he fitted in. And now he was so fired up and self-important, it was almost impossible to have a normal conversation with him.

‘I am so worried,’ Meena said one day as they walked the children to the park. ‘I am frightened that he is getting himself into something too extreme. Everyone is so angry, talking about fighting. What will happen? I don’t know who he is seeing, who he is talking to – look, there, see what I mean?’

On the grass near the park gate a group of Sikh men was sitting in a circle under the trees, their turbaned heads close together. Sooky had seen them before, but Meena did not walk out to the park very often. She could see her mother straining to make out whether Raj was among them, even though he was supposed to be at work. But he wasn’t in the group, and Meena relaxed a bit.

‘You see?’ She nodded at them. ‘They are always talking about Khalistan – nothing but Khalistan. But we should not be thinking of this, breaking up the country even more. If we do, it will cause more fighting; like before, when they made Pakistan. We need to remain calm – enough of all this hating. Otherwise there will be nothing but more bloodshed.’

As they settled on the grass with the children, Sooky glanced over at the little knot of men. For a moment she saw them through other eyes: white eyes. How did they look to other people, to non-Sikhs? She had a flash of memory of two boys in her class at school, Patrick Hanlon and Mark Steel. She’d kept out of the way of those two whenever possible. They’d both been poor specimens, without much of a home life behind them. Both had been bullies – Mark especially. He was the one who had sullied her name, creeping up behind her, hissing suggestive, nasty things about it. From then on she had made sure everyone called her Sooky.

The thing she recalled most strongly about the boys was that they had both stunk of stale fat. This constant aroma of the chip pan made sitting anywhere near them especially unpleasant. They had seemed so alien, with their pink-and-white blotchy skin, their rank smell and lack of manners . . . They had taunted all the Asian kids: ‘Ughh, you smell funny! Eerrgh, your food stinks!’ Had anyone ever found the nerve to tell them they stank too? That they were not necessarily the standard of ‘normal’, from which everyone else was a deviation? There had always been that divide: different skin colours, food, smells; so many little things on a daily basis that you hardly noticed that you were always having to face differences and choose whether to make an issue of them or overcome them.

At first Meena began talking about her childhood home. She did not raise the subject, but if Sooky asked her something, it would set off a rush of memories.

‘What was it like in India when you were young?’ Sooky asked one day, when, once again, they were in the park. ‘Weren’t the British still there? Can you remember that?’

‘No, not really.’ Meena sat down with a little grunt, arranging her clothes comfortably. Jasmeet was sitting next to her on the grass. ‘Your grandfather called them the “pink-faced monkeys!” They both laughed. ‘But where we lived, we never really saw them. It was only a small, small place. The life of the village went on. I don’t remember anything about it. Amardeep, stop that – you let her play with you!’

Amardeep, being older and more agile, was running about with a ball, and Priya was wailing, struggling to keep up. Reluctantly he kicked it to her, too hard, so that she had to run a long way to fetch it, squeaking with indignation.

‘Can you remember the village?’ Sooky asked. She didn’t want Meena to stop. She needed her mother to talk and talk.

A smile spread across Meena’s face. She took the lid off Jasmeet’s bottle of milk and sat feeding her as she talked.

‘It was very beautiful,’ she said. ‘All the fields around: green or gold with ripe wheat. And flowers – such lovely blossoms, pink and red . . . And we had buffalo. I remember washing them in the water of the tank nearby, and we drank their milk. Life in the village is very hard work – oh, here it is so different! In the village there is nothing: no supermarket . . . My mother, she was working from sunrise until sunset, cooking over the fire, grinding the spices and flour, kneading the bread, baking. So many tasks all day, it never stopped. No machines for washing clothes and grinding and sweeping; and the oven was made of mud – and the house also!’ She laughed. ‘All day the men worked in the fields, planting, ploughing: there was an ox . . . And the women stayed in the house, always working. Only sometimes late in the evening there was time to sit and rest, and to talk, once the sun had gone down.’

There were often snippets like this, of her earliest memories. Sometimes in the evening, Meena said, as they sat in the dusk, moths fluttering round the lamp, her mother would massage her father’s feet. Sometimes there was singing. She talked about the games with the other children, remembering the firelight fading to a glow in the darkness, the vast night sky. And about her favourite uncle, Nirmal, her mother’s younger brother, who was only eleven years older than her and had always played with her.