My Daughter, My Mother (39 page)

Michael, the one with the face of an angel.

‘Marcia says she’s got form – with adults as well. It’s not just her old man who’s violent.’

They all tried to comfort Mariam, and their kindness needed no translation. Doreen stroked her back gently as the tears ran down her face. Soon the interpreter came, Mrs Akhtar, a motherly middle-aged lady who took charge of the girl.

Joanne fed Amy, her thoughts racing. The incident had shaken her deeply. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. After all this, even Dave suddenly felt comfortingly familiar, when contrasted with the world of Gina and the other women, the cycles of violence and depression in which they existed. Surely Dave must have had time to see sense now, at least enough for them to talk? She just had to go home and try and sort things out.

The house was quieter that night without Gina’s boys. Joanne decided to phone earlier than usual. She’d been touched by Dad speaking to her the other day – and he’d had a little chat with her again just the other night. He never had much to say at the best of times, but at least he was trying. Mom was unlikely to answer the phone anyway. Once she’d got Amy down to sleep, she got some change out of her purse and called them, determined to announce that she was going to come back and give it a try.

Karen answered the phone, her ‘Hello?’ sounding guarded and anxious. ‘Oh!’’ she cried when Joanne announced herself. ‘Thank God, I’ve been doing my nut!’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘Look, something’s happened. It’s Dave . . . You’re going to have to come – straight away.’

October–December 1984

Forty-Eight

Sooky buttoned her mac and bent to pick up her bag while Meena stood watching, with Priya in her arms.

Guru Nanak also observed the proceedings with a benign expression from the wall behind them, his hand raised in a blessing, which Sooky truly needed and appreciated. She felt very vulnerable this week, a new student and leaving Priya behind.

‘So, you have everything – money, food, all your books for study?’

Mom was fussing around the way she did when Sooky was a little girl going to school, and Sooky was touched by it.

‘Yes, I’m fine
Mata-ji
. I’ve got all I need.’

Meena looked her up and down: her Sukhdeep, a modern young woman, today in jeans and her black blouse, the smart, tan-coloured raincoat over the top, the belt tied tightly at the waist, hair back in a pony-tail.

‘You look nice,’ she said, suddenly shy. ‘
Chic.
See, some English words I know.’

Sooky grinned. ‘Actually I think that’s French, but never mind.’

‘Mommy go?’ Priya said, reaching for her. But Sooky could see she was all right – she was already used to staying with her grandmother.

‘See you later . . .’ Sooky kissed her daughter and mother and slipped out into the drizzle to catch the first of her two buses across town to Perry Barr.

It wasn’t a very nice day, and when she stepped off the first bus in town into the drizzle, she wished she’d brought an umbrella. Walking among the crowds in Corporation Street, all on their way to work, or students like herself, Sooky felt a surge of happiness amid her nerves.

She glanced up at the high, elegant buildings, loving being anonymous in a crowd where it was unlikely there would be anyone who knew Mom and Dad from the neighbourhood, the
gurdwara
or any of the other Sikh networks that seemed to loop like vine tendrils round the city, their eyes wide-open for gossip. It wasn’t as if she wanted to spend her whole time obsessing about being a Sikh, the way Raj did. She just longed to get on with her life! Out here, this morning, she felt younger again, and strangely naked not pushing a buggy. Just her on her own – a student. She was going to do a degree, achieve something! It felt like a miracle.

Reaching her next bus stop, she stood behind a skinny Asian lad in jeans and black Puma trainers. He kept circling his shoulders as if they were stiff, and she realized he was very tense. For a moment she was curious, then dismissed it. There were dozens of things he might be tense about. Such was life. But something about the way he was standing reminded her of Jaz.

It set her thinking about Jaz, how she might still be there, in Derby; he in his flash suits, she ministering to his scowling presence. Now and then they’d shared a joke together, at the beginning. Then for evermore it was two magnets, repelling each other. Shame washed through her for a moment, especially when she thought of her parents and of his. Part of the fault lay with her: she should never have agreed to marry him so quickly.

The bus swung into view and she pushed these painful thoughts from her mind. Here she was, with pens and files and pads of A4 paper waiting to be filled. She couldn’t wait to get stuck into her studies. She had been in just once before to fill in forms and meet her study group. Most of them seemed nice, and as they were part-timers, most – like her – were older than normal student age. One or two looked as if they might want to be friends. Life was looking up. And as well as all this, she had Joanne and Amy.

‘I’ll be at the Poly on Tuesdays now,’ she had told Joanne last time they met. ‘So maybe we could meet up some other day – in the afternoon?’

Joanne had looked pleased and grateful to be asked.

The bus swung away. Sooky was in a window seat, and for once the window was quite clean. She looked out eagerly, as if rediscovering life. It was so good just to be out and about! Office blocks slid past, the bus leaned its way round roundabouts.

She thought about her mom. She would never have dreamed of doing anything like this – it was beyond any of her expectations. But Sooky knew that, despite everything that had happened, Meena was proud of her, and that meant everything to her. Life felt so much better now that Mom was talking to her again. She didn’t want the talking to stop. It was like a thread that bound them all together, sharing words and feelings after the cruel desert of silence. Whenever the moment seemed right, Sooky kept asking her things. More and more came out: sadnesses, struggles – about India and Smethwick, and how it had been coming to England. One day Meena had told her about her friend Tavleen and what had happened to her. Sooky felt very tender to her mom, now she had opened up a bit more. And Meena seemed more relaxed too; she was smiling, laughing more.

Sooky thought about her grandmother’s life in the Indian sector of Punjab, of her being first abducted, then forcibly returned – having no say of her own. Then of Mom, making this huge step of coming to England, following her husband. No wonder Mom had clung desperately to the ways she knew from home. And now of herself, a student – probably the first in generations of women in her family ever to be able to read and write properly, let alone in English. And the next generation after that?

She saw Priya’s little face in her mind’s eye and smiled.

Forty-Nine

Meena went to the window and watched as Sooky disappeared along the street, muttering a blessing of her own. Pride swelled within her, not unmixed with other feelings.

The morning of Sukhdeep’s first visit to the Poly for registration, Khushwant had kissed his daughter’s forehead before she left.

‘So, the student begins on her studies. Soon,
beteh
, you will be Prime Minister – like Mrs Thatcher.’

‘God, I hope not!’ Sooky said.

But there were tears in her eyes at receiving all this support and approval. Meena knew that the question of marriage had been shelved – for the moment. But it would not go away. What else could they do? Should Sukhdeep live at home, shamed, forever?

She
was
proud, all the same. Two children studying in university! Pav had got two As and a B in his A-levels and had just begun on a degree at Aston in electrical engineering.

Meena took Priya into the kitchen, then put her down. ‘I don’t know why I’m carrying you, lazy girl! You aren’t a baby any more. You want a drink?’ She spoke in Punjabi – she wanted Priya to know the language.

She sat Priya at the table, enjoying the lull before Roopinder came down with her two, her face sulky, belly jutting out. Roopinder loathed being pregnant and made everyone else suffer as a consequence. She expected to be waited on like a queen.

Priya sipped orange juice, suddenly still and quiet.

‘Mummy has gone to college,’ Meena told her, bringing her tea over to the table, a couple of Rich Tea biscuits lodged in the saucer. She sat down, straightening her
chunni
– yellow today – round her neck.

‘Granny go college!’ Priya said, pointing with an impish grin.

‘Ah, no, no, no,’ Meena laughed. ‘Old ladies do not go to college!’

She felt no envy of Sooky being a student. Not that. It was too far from her, she who had had barely even a basic education in India. Things had been too disrupted – and she was a girl. She had learned the rudiments of reading and writing in Punjabi. But she had never expected much. It had never occurred to her to have big dreams. Her hope had been for marriage and children, a home of her own, for things to work out right. Having Priya to look after now gave her a sense of purpose.

But there
was
something she envied. She sat, enjoying the few minutes’ peace, cradling her teacup, thinking about it. What was that something?

Picturing Sukhdeep walking away from her to the bus stop, she realized it was the way her daughter seemed to feel at home. This was Britain, the country where she was born. She stepped out of the door in her jeans, a smart leather bag from the factory over her shoulder, seeing only the city where she had grown up. Of course she understood that her parents had come from elsewhere. But she did not spend her life mentally looking over her shoulder at another country, as her mother did; and, Meena knew sadly, as Raj did too. A place that was once home, but could be no more, because they had moved too far from it in every way. Those who went back to visit said things were changing – even in the villages, though they were the last to hear the flutes of time beckoning them into new ways. Many of them had electric lights now, and televisions. Sometimes Nirmal told her things about modern India: women working in shiny office blocks, divorcing even, through their own choice! Of course Nirmal lived in the big city – in Delhi. But Meena still found it hard to believe. In her mind, India was eternal and unchanging, the way she had tried to be herself.

‘Priya go college!’ the little girl cried irrepressibly, holding up her cup as if toasting life.

Meena laughed and reached across to chuck her cheek.

‘Cheeky girl! Yes, maybe you will. But that is a long time away.’

Even Khushwant had noticed that Meena seemed happier in herself. He thought it was because of Pav’s A-level results and Harpreet’s GCSEs (six As, three Bs, one C – the last in mathematics, which she loathed with a passion). All very satisfactory. And Meena was more proud and happy about that than she could say.

But it was the talking as well – the talk of women. She had sat with her daughters and told them things that had been locked in her heart for decades. It had begun to ease her.

That afternoon she took Priya out in her buggy, a blanket tucked round her knees and the rainhood clipped on. She knew that if she pushed Priya along the road, it was the one way to get the lively little girl to sleep at last. It was only spitting a little now and she put on her coat, securing her
chunni
tightly, and took an umbrella. It was October, and already cold enough to have tights on under her
salwar
trousers. She cursed this cool, mizzling weather. Why could it not just rain wholeheartedly – or not rain, instead of hanging somewhere in between for days on end? The endless greyness leached the colour out of everything.

On a whim, Meena did something she had never done before: she pushed a sleepy Priya along Hampstead Road and turned into the cemetery of the big red church, the other side of the railings from the park. She knew it was all right to walk in here because she had seen people in there before, strolling up and down, gazing at the gravestones.

There was no one else there today, though. Half-afraid, she pushed Priya ahead of her along paths that had been reclaimed from the overgrown green chaos, shrouded on each side by trees, so that it was like walking through a tunnel. Bramble thorns scraped at her clothes, and gravestones poked up out of the tall grass as if they were holding their heads above water. An obelisk loomed suddenly in front of her, topped with a hat of ivy.

Some of the graves had graffiti scrawled on them. She saw glue-sniffer havens, reeking plastic bags strewn among the bushes. The thought of all that might go on in here made her shudder. But she did wish she could make sense of the writing on the gravestones and read the names, as a mark of respect. Her lack of English still held her at a distance from this place, which had had to become home.

Reaching a clearer patch, she looked down through the railings to the lake in the park, thinking of her children, her daughters in particular.

It was true that she had talked to them – but there were some things she would never tell them. Things that held too much shame and horror.

Thaya
Gurbir, her father’s elder brother, who had left the town with them that night, was one of those things. He had taken everything from her except her actual virginity. On those stifling afternoons in Amritsar, her aunt,
Thayi-ji
Amarpreet, slept on the floor upstairs, lying on her side to ease the weight of her pregnant belly. Her grandparents would be sleeping too, and Meena would pretend to be dozing beside Amarpreet, all the time with her heart thudding, ears pricked for his every move. He would lean over and shake her, placing a finger to his lips. Sometimes he would even begin to interfere with her beside his sleeping wife, his breath catching in excited gasps. Meena wondered now: could Amarpreet really have been asleep all the time? Did she just turn away, knowing what was going on?

Often he would seize her hand and pull her to the only place in the little dwelling not occupied by others: the stairs. They were brick steps, their hard edges digging into her back, her neck. The harsh, concentrated look on his face stopped her from crying out, whatever her pain.