My Daughter, My Mother (11 page)

The parents had talked amicably enough.

‘Sukhdeep is a good student,’ her father had told Jaz’s parents. ‘She’s a good girl.’

Her mother, of course, laid it on about how she could cook, which was the truth. Mom had taught her well.

She and Jaz had a few minutes to talk alone.

‘What d’you like to do in your spare time?’ she’d asked him.

‘Oh, you know. Films, music, that sort of thing.’ Obviously neither the drinking and being insulting nor the inclination to be sexual with small children was laid out in his CV.

‘You’d like Derby,’ he’d told her assuredly. ‘It’s better than Birmingham – smaller and not so ugly.’

She hadn’t liked or disliked him. She had been seventeen: Mom and Dad had started looking for someone for her. Now she wondered why she hadn’t expected more, demanded more. They wouldn’t have forced her. Jaz was only the second man who came; there could have been more. It was almost as if she’d known it was inevitable and just wanted to get it over. She realized later that Jaz, who was then twenty-two, had felt the same.

‘You marry as strangers,’ Mom had counselled her. She seemed in her element, the wise older woman who had been through it all, passing on her knowledge to her daughter. ‘But you are not strangers for long. You live together, work together, have children. You look after him properly, do cooking, cleaning, bedroom things – he will respect you.’

After she’d met Jaz she’d crept upstairs to where Harpreet was waiting. Harpreet had been twelve then, and so shy that she’d begged to be let off the family meeting, but she was fit to burst with curiosity. She grabbed Sooky’s hand and yanked her into the room.

‘So, what was he like? What did you
say
?’

‘He’s all right. I said yes.’

She hadn’t felt anything much. It had been a bit like going to the dentist for a filling. It just had to be done. And at that time the wedding itself seemed quite far off.

She’d missed Harpreet terribly once she had moved in with Jagdesh’s parents. He had no sisters, just two brothers, one already married and living elsewhere, the other a year older than Sooky, but silent and unsociable. Jaz’s mom was glad to have a girl in the house, and Sooky quite liked his parents. Everything had felt strange and lonely, but that was to be expected. It was bearable. With other people around, the fact that she and Jaz already disliked each other could be disguised. But once they moved out into their own little terrace in Derby, two months before Priya was born, things had gone quickly downhill and there was no one else to hide behind.

Sooky pushed the buggy along the path by the boating lake, relieved to see that Priya had fallen into a doze. She stopped, staring out over the water. There was a thin sheen of oil on the surface close to her. No one was out with a boat at the moment, and the only other person she could see was a man sitting up at the other end on a bench.

They’d never had much to say to each other, she and Jaz. There was nothing in common. She found him arrogant, insecure and limited, driven solely by the desire to make money. What intimate life they had was cold. Their rare lovemaking – and that was no name for it – happening mechanically in the dark, with no words or kindness. Maybe it would get better, she’d thought. He didn’t hit her, he earned his money. She knew she could not say anything to anyone. No one would take her complaints seriously.

Once Priya was born, it all changed. After the initial excitement of the birth, his attitude to her hardened. He became colder and insulting.

‘Where’s my food, you skinny bitch,’ he’d say, arriving home at night. When she gave it to him, sometimes he would hurl it back at her, the spices seeping into the carpet, staining it. He turned his back on her at night as if she was invisible, treating her as if everything about her disgusted him. All he wanted was Priya, in a cloying, overblown way, as if she was a new toy brought on Earth especially for him.

At first Sooky had been pleased when he wanted to help, to change Priya and spend time with her. But her suspicions grew. One day, when Priya was about six months old, she had come into the room to find Jaz holding her, kissing her on the mouth, and not as anyone kisses an infant – his eyes closed, and she could tell by the movement of his mouth that he was pushing his tongue between Priya’s lips. The baby was squirming, starting to cry, struggling to breathe. Jaz didn’t realize she had been standing watching as long as she had. He laughed it off.

He started taking Priya off into the bedroom, enraged if Sooky came in. Sooky felt like a servant, not a wife.

‘What are you doing in there with her?’ she asked.

‘Just having a lie down with my daughter! What d’you ****ing think I’m doing, you nagging bitch?’

She couldn’t say – not then. Thinking about it now, she searched her soul to see if there was anything else she could have done. She knew girls in marriages where they were cruelly beaten, shrunk into silent shadows of the bright girls they had once been, who felt they had no choice but to keep quiet. They were married: this was how it was. If they left they would be turned out of the community in disgrace – outcast, penniless and treated as nobody. In comparison, she knew she was lucky.

One Sunday afternoon when Jaz had taken Priya upstairs, telling her she’d better not disturb him, she crept up and listened at the door. There was no sound for a time, though she thought she could hear little movements inside. Then she heard a cry from Priya. Her stomach tightened with dread. Very quietly she opened the door.

Priya was lying on a towel, completely naked, kicking her legs in the air at the freedom of it. Jaz was on all fours on the bed over her, his flies undone, a hand working at himself.

Sooky closed the door very carefully, then opened it again, rattling the handle.

Jaz jumped away from Priya, too shocked to be angry.

‘Sorry,’ she had whispered. ‘I just came up to get my cardigan. Oh,’ she pretended to be surprised, ‘she’s not asleep yet then?’

‘I was just changing her,’ he said.

That Monday, once Jaz was at work, she packed a bag and took Priya back to Birmingham on the train. She told her mother everything. Meena stared at her as she spoke, sobbing as the words poured out. Meena’s face was very grave and every so often she rolled her eyes up to the ceiling as if silently imploring God. Then she turned her face away. Sooky waited for her to say, ‘You must go back. It is your duty. He is your husband.’

Instead – and even now Sooky found this the most puzzling aspect of everything that had happened – Meena seemed to be in shock. It took an age before she said anything. At last, in a very quiet voice, she said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I think I’d better stay here for a bit.’

Sooky knew she meant forever, but it seemed too big a thing to say.

‘What if he comes?’ Meena said.

‘He won’t.’ Jaz must know that she knew about him. He didn’t want her any more than she wanted him.

She wrote to him, telling him that if he came anywhere near Priya she would personally tell his parents what she had seen, and would contact both the police and Social Services in Derby. She had no idea what he had told his family, but it all went quiet and stayed quiet. Two months later he wrote back saying he wanted to divorce her on grounds of her adultery, which he expected her to admit. She decided to agree, knowing that it would bring shame upon her own head, but she wanted to be rid of him. And who would believe her if she said anything else?

Now she was tormented by doubt again. Why had she agreed to something so unjust? And should she have told someone? What if Jaz started his behaviour with some other child?

A pair of mallards drifted past on the water below. Sooky tried to think sympathetically about Jaz. Should she have been able to help him, to do something to make things better? But she knew it would have been impossible. Jaz hadn’t liked or trusted her. They had married as strangers and become enemies. And if she ever heard that he had married again, she ought to warn his new wife. That was something she promised herself to do.

She moved further along, away from the patch of oil, and knelt down on the bank. Leaning over, she looked down at her reflection in the water, her yellow
chunni
pulled over her head. Her eyes stared sadly back at her. She knew she was glad to be away from Jaz, though she was sorry about his parents, about not being able to explain. And living back here, even in disgrace with Raj and Roopinder on at her, was better than the desolation of her marriage.

But what broke her heart was her mother. This stony, complicated silence, which made her feel so hurt and desolate. Would she ever see her mother smile at her or hear her talking to her properly ever again?

Thirteen

Meena drew up her legs, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, and stared at the television: the dancing after a wedding on the back patio of a house, a swirl of women’s clothing, purple, orange, turquoise, and everyone chatting and eating sweets. Usually she found watching the wedding videos soothing. They showed her things as they ought to be, everything fitting into the right place, the old traditions handed down over centuries, tying them to home.

She gazed for a long time at the flickering images, soon ceasing to see them. Her mind was elsewhere completely. Eventually she picked up the remote control, and the red button folded the pictures away into darkness.

Silence. Roopinder had gone out with the children. It was very seldom the house was this quiet.

Meena looked down into her lap, fingering the hem of her
kameez
with its edging of coffee-coloured sequins, which felt rough, like tiny pieces of shell. Emotions boiled inside her. Her limbs were aching and heavy and a swelling sensation rose in her, as if she might vomit.

The past was all mingled with the present. Having her daughter Sukhdeep anywhere near kept her in a state of permanent turmoil. Her outrage with Sukhdeep could barely be contained: that she had dared to challenge her husband, to leave him and overturn everything that was expected of her, to disgrace her family. She was a woman – her duty was to accept her fate, her
kismet
, to bear everything, forgive everything.

And yet, there was the reason she had left . . . There were some things that could not be forgiven – at this thought the feeling of sickness became doubly oppressive – some things a young child should never have to experience. Then her rage turned like a white flare on Jagdesh, her serpent of a son-in-law, so smooth and deceitful in his smart suit with his Western ways and his computers and business talk. The feelings came so strongly that her body began to tremble and she had to breathe hard to calm herself.

And now, with the upset in Punjab, what the Indian army had done . . . She began to rock back and forth in distress. ‘And my own son, my foolish Raj,’ she muttered. He had become so savagely angry, so uncompromising. She was afraid for him – of him. And that Bhindranwale whom he worshipped. He was supposed to be a holy man, but why had he filled the holiest of all places with bullets and grenades? It was all so horrific, so confusing. And all of it began to revive those memories of the deep past, of the Punjab of her birth, which she had tried to bury forever, never to look at or speak of, even in the very darkest places of her own heart.

Western Punjab, April 1947

She remembered the rhythmic creak of the bullock cart, the brightness of the stars in the vast canopy of sky and the merest shred of a moon.

Lying in the cart, she had felt the itch of straw against her bony back, smelled the dung fires as they stole through the lanes at the edge of the town and heard the barking of dogs, which at last faded to a silence broken only by crickets and that rhythmic creak, creak . . .

Every so often there would be a whimper from her little sister Parveen and their mother urgently silencing her, ‘No crying! You must be quiet.’

Before this there had been the thick darkness, the smell of fear, sitting all together in the
gurdwara
, showing no light, everyone deadly quiet. Then they were all squashed onto the cart, women, children and her Uncle Gurbir, because of his crippled foot. It was a cool night. Gurbir had been wearing a brown knitted hat instead of a turban.

Meena’s mother Jasleen, with Parveen in her lap, had shivered beside her with cold and fear. Jasleen had been heavily pregnant, as had her sister-in-law Amarpreet, Meena’s auntie. Meena’s father had walked alongside the cart, as had Nirmal. Her beloved
Mama-ji
Nirmal, her mother’s youngest brother, had been only fifteen then and he was always kind and looked out for others.

The journey had lasted a very long time. Meena slept, her cheek pressed to the back of her hand, breathing in the smell of the night.

They were heading for the border – or at least the border that would be officially drawn in four months’ time, in August 1947, between Muslim Pakistan to the west and Hindu India to the east. Just then no one was completely certain where this slicing line across Punjab would fall. Would Lahore be part of Pakistan? Would Amritsar?

What they did know, the Sikhs whose homes fell to the west of the line (as the Hindus knew), was that they were no longer welcome. Those who were about to find themselves in Muslim Pakistan when the border fell would have to fight for survival or leave. The Muslims on the east side faced the same dire choice.

Only much later did Meena hear the stories that had made them flee. All over this western area Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, who had shared the streets of towns and villages for generations, took violently against each other. More and more blood was being shed. Sikhs were now terrified of their Muslim neighbours.

But it was the news that came from the north, from villages in the Rawalpindi district, that chilled their blood. Villages where the Sikhs, often themselves gathering their forces for violence, were vastly outnumbered and had gone into hiding from the gangs of Muslims who came raiding their villages, taking away their women and making them convert to Islam, slaughtering anyone who was not one of them.