Читать книгу Anita and Me - Meera Syal, Meera Syal - Страница 9

Mama and Papa were sitting on the mock leather yellow settee, a bad idea if you wanted to have a serious or unnoticed conversation because your every shift would be accompanied by a symphony of leathery farts and squeaks. It was especially thrilling to welcome a new overweight relative to the house, who would invariably be received in our ‘front’ room with its tie-dye Indian hangings and brass ornaments, as opposed to the ‘lounge’, our telly and flop room next to it with its worn flowery suite and ricketty dining table. I got hours of pleasure seeing corpulent uncles parp their way through their starters or alarmed roly-poly aunties vainly hold onto their sari petticoats as they slowly slipped backwards into the marshmallow cushions.

So I knew, when I entered, by the hurried scrapings and scuffles, that mama and papa had been sitting together and talking about me. I decided to adopt my cute over-achiever face as I held my jam tarts aloft. ‘Mrs Worrall taught me to bake. Next week we’re making rum babas!’

Mama got up slowly and brushed past me into the kitchen. I had not seen papa since this morning, a hundred years ago, when he’d dragged me to Mr Ormerod’s shop to extract a confession.

‘Come here, beti,’ he said.

I obeyed, and sat down carefully. The settee pushed me into his side, I caught his smell, Old Spice and tobacco, and sighed with relief as he slipped his arm round my waist. ‘Beti, if you want something in future, you must ask us. Don’t we give you enough? Do you feel deprived?’ I shook my head sorrowfully. I desperately wanted to eat my jam tarts.

‘You have heard the story of the boy and the tiger?’ I shook my head again and snuggled into the crook of his arm. I loved his stories, I loved the timbre of his voice and the places it took me, effortlessly. ‘Once a young boy was gathering wood in the forest and he decided to get some attention for himself. So he shouted to the village that he had seen a tiger. All the villagers came running with axes and torches and lathis and when they got to the forest, there was no tiger. “I did see a tiger,” said the boy. “It must have run away…” The next day …’

I felt cheated. This was The Boy Who Cried Wolf! I had read it hundreds of times in my Golden Anthology of Fables and Tales. Did he think I would swallow an old story dressed up in Indian clothes? I closed my eyes, pretending to listen, and imagined myself in lime hot pants and blonde hair singing ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’ whilst Hughie Green sobbed unashamedly into a large white hanky and the clapometer needle shot off the scale and flew out of the television, shattering the glass…‘And the tiger had eaten the boy. All that was left was one chappal. So you see, if you tell lies too often, no one will believe you when you are telling the truth.’

‘I’m sorry, papa,’ I said, almost meaning it. I left a suitable pause and then asked, ‘Papa? Were you in the war? Like Mr Worrall?’

‘No, beti,’ he laughed. ‘I was only nine when the war started. Besides, it was not really our war. We were fighting different battles …’

‘What battles? Did you have a gun? Did you …’ I was going to say ‘ever kill anyone’, but I remembered mama’s expression when I asked for a rendition of the rickshaw murder story and thought better of it. ‘…Did you do anything dangerous?’

Papa hesitated a moment, looking at me protectively. I could see he was rifling through possibilities, wondering how much he could give away. There was something leonine in his expression, that long noble nose and steady eyes, that tiny teardrop shape above his lips, replicated exactly in my face. I stroked my finger into the well beneath my nose. I liked looking like him. ‘Well, there was one occasion …’ He checked the kitchen quickly, making sure mama was still occupied, ‘when we lived in Lahore, just before Partition …’

I knew something about Partition, about the English dividing up India into India and Pakistan, and of some people not knowing until the day the borders were announced, whether they would have to move hundreds of miles away, leaving everything behind them. However, I had fallen upon this information inadvertently, during one of papa’s musical evenings.

Papa’s mehfils were legendary, evenings where our usual crowd plus a few dozen extra families would squeeze themselves into our house to hear papa and selected Uncles sing their favourite Urdu ghazals and Punjabi folk songs. Once the mammoth task of feeding everyone in shifts was over (kids first, men second, then the women who by then were usually sick of the sight of food), the youngsters would be banished to the TV room. A white sheet was spread in the lounge upon which the elders sat cross-legged, playing cards, chatting, until someone would say, ‘Acha Kumar saab, let’s go!’ Then papa would take down his harmonium from the top of the wardrobe, unwrap it from its psychedelic bedspread, and run his fingers over the keys whilst the other hand pumped the back, and it coughed into life like a rudely-awakened grumpy old man.

Then the fun would begin; papa would start off slowly, practising scales maybe, then playing a simple folk song with a chorus that everyone could join in with. ‘Ni babhi mere guthe na keree’…he would intone, singing in the voice of a young unmarried girl who is begging her sister-in-law not to do her hair as the long oily plaits remind her of snakes…Why she was worried about dreaming about snakes, I did not figure out till I was much older. The men would shout the refrain to the verse, holding their hands to the sky, as if expecting gold to be thrown in the face of their massive talent. The Aunties would grab nearby utensils, spoons, pans, even using the bangles on their wrists, to keep a beat going, performing mock blushes and flirty reprimands in the face of their husbands’ smiling innuendoes.

Then suddenly the mood would change. Papa would wait for the laughter and joking to die down, and close his eyes, drawing breath deeply from down in his stomach. And then he would open his mouth and a sound came out which was something between a sob and a sigh, notes I could not recognise hung in the air, so close in tone yet each one different, a gradual ascent and then pure flight as his throat opened up to swallow the room. Then the words, words always about love, a lover departing or arriving and how the heart bled or bloomed in response, a whole song about the shadow cast by a lover’s eyelashes on her cheek, a single line which somehow captured life, death and the unknown.

During these ghazals, my elders became strangers to me. The Uncles would close their eyes with papa, heads inclined, passions and secrets turning their familiar faces into heroes and gods. The Aunties would weep silently, letting the tears hang like jewels from their eyelids, tragedy and memory illuminating their features, each face a diya. The only sound besides papa’s voice came occasionally from one of the Uncles who would raise their hands and simply shout, ‘Wah!’ The word had no literal meaning, mama told me later, but what word would there be for these feelings that papa’s songs awoke in everyone? I did not often stay for these mournful ghazals, preferring to creep off to bed unnoticed whilst my younger cousins slept in milky heaps like an abandoned litter. There was no point in my being there; when I looked at my elders, in these moments, they were all far, far away.

And it was during one such evening when I was awoken by shouting. I jerked awake to the sound of a man’s voice berating someone, something. I checked out of the window, all the cars were still there, parked haphazardly on the sides of the country lane, so I knew the Uncles and Aunties had not left yet. I crept slowly along the darkened landing and down past the bannisters, avoiding the creaks on the third and seventh stairs, and was relieved to see that the door separating the winding staircase from the front room was slightly open. It was my Uncle Bhatnagar shouting, I recognised his gravelly boom even from that distance.

‘But it was a damn massacre!’ he was spluttering, and then he talked in Punjabi of which I recognised a few words, ‘Family…money…death …’ and then, ‘They talk about their world wars…We lost a million people! And who thought up Partition? These “gores”, that’s who!’ Then everyone launched in, the whispers squeezed through the gap in the door and I could make out familiar voices saying such terrible and alien things.

‘My mother and I, the Hindus marched us through the streets…our heads uncovered …’ That must have been my Auntie Mumtaz, one of our few Muslim friends. ‘They wanted to do such things to us…but we had left the house for them and everything in it, and my father…he was a judge, he had been so good to them …’ There was a long pause, I thought I heard someone sniff. ‘All the time we were walking, mama and I, papa was lying dead, his head cut from his body. They found it later lying in the fallen jasmine blooms …’

‘We all have these stories, bhainji,’ Uncle Bhatnagar again, addressing her as his sister. ‘What was happening to you was also happening to us. None of us could stop it. Mad people everywhere.’ There was a murmur of consensus, subdued, fearful maybe because of all the old wounds being reopened. ‘We were on the wrong side of the border also when the news came, none of us knew until that moment if we would be going or staying. My whole family, we walked from Syalcote across the border…We maybe passed your family going the other way. The bodies, piled high…the trains pulling into stations full of dead families…Hai Ram. What we have seen …’

My heart was trying to break out of my chest. I had to hold onto the bannister to steady myself, terrified I would be discovered and they would clam up and deny me more. Were these my Uncles and Aunties speaking? Were these stories truly theirs? How could they have kept all this from me for so long? Then a sob broke into the low chatter, I knew immediately it was my Auntie Shaila. The fattest, noisiest and most fun of all the Aunties, she could only express herself in extremes of emotion, banshee howls of disbelief or ear-splitting yodels of joy. That and a taste for loud bright saris with over-tight blouses underneath always guaranteed she was the centre of attention. But I had never heard her sound so broken as this.

She struggled for words through the sobs. ‘Sister …’ she gulped. ‘Meri bhain…Sumi…We were walking, along the river, trying to find the road to Delhi…We could see the Muslims on the other side…Don’t look, mamaji said, don’t look…Sumi looked and they were crossing the river on horses…mad men, mad eyes, sticks with red tips…They just took her. She was too beautiful. They took her. Where is she? Hai mere dil… where is she now?’

The whole room seemed to be sighing, I could make out mama’s soft weeping, it was muffled. She must have been negotiating the complicated geography of Auntie Shaila’s cleavage. No one said ‘I am sorry,’ like an English person might have done. In the silence that followed, I felt a hundred other memories were being briefly relived and battened down again.

It was papa’s voice which finally broke it. He was deliberately upbeat. It was his host’s voice, he knew it was his job to steer his friends away from the rocks that might shipwreck them all. He spoke in his characteristic blend of Punjabi and English, but enough for me to understand. He said he and his family had all been living in Lahore, which became Pakistan within a split second of the announcement. His parents then had the job of smuggling eight children across the border. They decided to head for Delhi. ‘We just left our house where it was, we took nothing. We split up, all of us. Some in carts with Muslim friends, some of us by train. I went with my father on the train. It stopped suddenly, a tree on the track.’ He described how the whole carriage began panicking as it became clear they were being hijacked, but no one knew if it was by Hindus or Muslims.

‘There was a Muslim in our carriage. He began praying. A Sikh next to us began cutting off his hair quickly. He offered to shave the Musselman’s moustache but he refused. “Allah will save me,” he said. The Hindu goondas entered the carriage …’ Papa paused a moment. ‘They looked at us, my father quoted the Gita at them, the only time I have ever heard him quote any religious script. They tore the trousers off the Musselman, saw he was circumcised, and cut off his head …’

Papa must have realised then that his plan of jollying up the party had gone sadly wrong. He cleared his throat. ‘I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a refugee camp with only what I stood up in. But I thank God, because if I had not gone to Delhi, I would never have met Daljit …’ Then the room broke into cheers and relieved laughter. The Uncles began teasing papa for his admission, the Aunties, I could hear, were tittering away and no doubt poking mama in the ribs.

After this, I remember climbing slowly back to my bed and swathing myself in my heavy Indian rajai. My sleep that night was full of blood red trains screaming through empty stations, scattering severed limbs as it whistled past, of beautiful sisters in churning rivers, and old men’s heads in flowerbeds. I wanted to know so much more, but now I was afraid to ask. I realised that the past was not a mere sentimental journey for my parents, like the song told its English listeners. It was a murky bottomless pool full of monsters and the odd shining coin, with a deceptively still surface and a deadly undercurrent. And me, how could I jump in before I had learned to swim?

So as I sat in papa’s arms, heard that word, ‘Partition’, and I held my breath with delight, not daring to exhale until he began. This was a gift to me, this was his way of saying he had forgiven me for lying and I accepted it gratefully. ‘On this occasion,’ continued papa, ‘my friend and I…Kishan it was, we met some policemen, at least they said they were police. But these were the stupid days, everyone waiting to see if Partition would go ahead, all kinds of ruffians and rogues wandering about …’ He smiled, ‘Like us, I suppose. We wanted to sniff the air, maybe become heroes, freedom fighters, you know? These men, they called us over. Gave us a parcel and some money, just a few annas but a lot to us. They asked if we would go and deliver the parcel to some building, not far away. A merchant’s house, I think …’

Papa swallowed slightly, he held me tighter. ‘We walked through the streets with this package, we stopped to boast to our friends, we were on some kind of mission, we had money. We did not hurry. When we got to the merchant’s place, there was nobody in. A big place, he was a rich man, Muslim, well known. Well respected. So we just left the parcel in the doorway. What did we care? We had our payment. When we reached the end of the street…there was a huge bang. An explosion. We fell to the ground, people began running, screaming for cover. There was smoke everywhere, falling stones. We looked back. The merchant’s house had gone. It was dust.’

Papa exhaled deeply and I sighed with him. ‘A bomb!’ I breathed. My father had planted a real live bomb! I wanted to go round to Anita Rutter’s right now and spit on her father’s crummy tattoos. ‘Of course, we did not know. We could have been killed. Those goondas did not care about us. But they must have been Hindu, like us …’

‘Was anyone in the house?’ I asked, couldn’t help myself this time.

‘I don’t…No. Of course not. No,’ said papa, with a final note that meant the story was over.

I was so grateful that I kissed him hard and said, ‘I’m sorry’ again for good measure, meaning it fervently and forever.

Papa kissed me tenderly on my head. ‘Now eat. Mummy’s made you something special …’ As if on cue, mama came out of the kitchen holding a plate upon which was a large pile of fishfingers and homemade chips.

It was the ambulance siren that woke me up, in my dreams it sounded like laughter but I soon guessed what was happening by the voices outside and the flashing blue light throbbing behind my drawn curtains. I quickly pulled them apart and saw that the ambulance was parked outside the Christmas’ house, its back doors wide open. I spotted Mrs Lowbridge, Sandy who was clinging onto Hairy Neddy, Mrs Povey, in her curlers and nightie, Mr Ormerod in his brown overall over his pyjamas, papa, who looked pale and strange in the strobing blue pulse, and Roberto who was comforting a hysterical Deirdre, fully made-up in pink mules and a minidress.

Everyone suddenly stopped talking as two ambulancemen struggled through them carrying a stretcher with a body on it, covered in red blankets. Mr Ormerod closed his eyes and began muttering a prayer but no one bothered to join in. It was only then I noticed the two policemen who came strolling out, flanking a gently smiling Mr Christmas, still dressed in his tank top and vest. He paused to wave shyly at everyone before being carefully helped into the police car parked behind the ambulance. I jumped as my bedroom door opened and mama entered, in her nighttime salwar kameez.

‘What are you doing?’ she said sharply and then, ‘What are they saying?’ She leaned over me and opened the window, letting in with a blast of cool night air the renewed babble of voices, the loudest of which was, predictably, Deirdre’s.

‘I went over…‘cos, you know, Mr Christmas had said summat to my Nita…and he asked me in…and I saw her…like in front of the telly…no face left. Gone. Eaten away.’

Sandy piped up, ‘The ambulance blokes said she’s been dead for weeks …’

‘We should have known. Shocking. Bloody shocking,’ said Hairy Neddy, holding Sandy closer.

‘Indeed,’ intoned Mr Ormerod, ‘what happened to neighbourly love? They should let the poor old man go now. He didn’t know what he was doing …’

‘He always doted on her, ar,’ said Mrs Lowbridge, shaking her head. ‘Sixty years married. I couldn’t manage six months, me …’

I didn’t hear much else; my head began swimming, the back of my neck suddenly turned to sticky ice and I slumped down on the bed. I had seen a dead body. I had seen Mrs Christmas’ poor white head poking out from the top of her settee and all that time…I had wanted to touch tragedy and it had come and smacked me on the cheek, and if it had not been for Anita Rutter shouting down the entry …

Mama knelt down next to me and felt my brow. ‘You should not listen to such things. I am sorry.’ She closed the window smartly and made me lie down, tucking the leaden quilt around me. ‘Mrs Christmas did not suffer. She’s okay now. Do you understand?’

I nodded, and then whispered, ‘I saw her. Today. I saw her head. She was watching telly …’

Mama’s eyes narrowed, ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough lying for one day, Meena?’ I opened my mouth to protest but caught the steel tempered with concern snapping in her eyes. I imagined having to retell the whole story, about meeting Anita, the yelling, Mr Christmas’ fury, and then maybe the police would get involved and maybe, and the thought hit me in the solar plexus, maybe Mrs Christmas had been alive until we ran down the side of her house and our banshee wails had shaken her walls and burst the thing in her stomach. Maybe me and Anita Rutter were murderers. It did not matter that it had all been her idea, I had gone along with it, I had done it, and now we were joined in Sin, and we would have to carry around our guilty secret until we died.

‘I meant…last time I saw her. She had the telly on. Ages ago.’ Mama nodded satisfied, and patted me reassuringly before retreating and gently closing the door. I heard engines revving up. I had to see. I got up and went to the window, just in time to catch the ambulance and police car pulling away at high speed and the group of onlookers slowly dispersing. Amongst them, grinning and shivering with cold, was Anita Rutter. For some reason, she looked up suddenly, straight into my eyes, and I could have sworn that she winked.

Three weeks later, having just returned from a short spell in hospital, Mr Christmas died in his sleep. He was buried with Mrs Christmas, whose body had just been released from autopsy, in a pre-booked single grave in the grounds of the Anglican Church in the neighbouring village. This deeply upset Mr Ormerod who had assumed all these years that the Christmases were Wesleyan Methodists like the rest of the community, and thus they had selfishly deprived Tollington and our church of its first funerals for five years.

My mother attended the funeral; she was taking Mrs Worrall anyway in our family Austin Mini, a feat of spatial engineering in itself with Mrs Worrall’s bulk plus her bodyweight again contained in her huge black hat. Mama agonised for hours whether to wear white, as in traditional Hindu mourning, and thus risk upsetting the conventional mourners, which was everybody, or stick to black, the only black garment she possessed being an evening sari shot through with strands of shimmering silver thread, not quite the garb for a midday gathering on a windswept former slagheap. ‘For God’s sake, it does not matter what you wear. That won’t bring the poor old man back, will it?’ snapped my father, who had been strangely depressed since this tragic double whammy.

Mama eventually plumped for a grey trouser suit, the nearest shade she could get to a compromise, and returned from the funeral red-eyed and subdued. She flopped down on the flowery suite next to papa who had not moved the whole time she had been away, but sat glued to the television screen not seeing what he was watching. It was almost the end of the summer holidays, the last week there would be cartoons on in the daytime, all day, Scooby Doo, Wacky Races, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, my favourite programme, with the deliciously pouting Troy Tempest who was in love with the indifferent, amphibious Marina, for whom I developed a deep, passionate hatred. Could she not see how much Troy loved her? Why did she emit bubbles instead of speaking to him? How could she turn this macho marionette down? (I suspect here began my taste in remote, handsome wooden men. Troy Tempest has a lot to answer for…)

Normally, papa would have switched off this marathon fayre of inanimate drama after an hour and ordered me to get a book or go outside and get some fresh air, but today, he just left me to get on with it. Mama moved closer to him, she seemed swollen and bovine, and laid his head on her shoulder, talking softly to him in Punjabi, soothing but firm. It never ceased to amaze me how expertly she rode and reined in my father’s moods, the long silences and intense looks which would send me into a panic and force me to scuttle round him, scanning his face for the return of that tender familiarity.

At times like this, mama operated just like the men on the Waltzer ride in the travelling fair that came to the village every autumn. While we tossed around, shrieking, in our high-sided whirling cars, these men, nonchalantly chewing or smoking, would straddle the heaving wooden floor like they were walking on water, still cocky centres in a screaming storm, tilting their bodies away from every twist and heave so that they remained perfectly upright. Although papa’s moods were unsettling, I never felt they were directed at me, unless I’d done something specifically naughty, and even then I knew forgiveness was never far away. He always seemed more angry at himself for allowing the big black crow to settle on his shoulder and make itself comfortable. When I was upset I was like mama, we cried instinctively and often. But I had never seen papa cry and wondered if he would feel better if, occasionally, he could let himself go.

I caught a few English phrases, half-listening as I fixed on the flickering screen: ‘…can’t worry about them, worrying won’t do anything …’ Mama whispered. Papa said, ‘When they go, we won’t be with them. We will get a letter, or a phone call in the middle of the night…everything left unsaid.’ They were talking about their parents, the grandparents I had never seen except in the framed photographs that hung in my parents’ bedroom.

Mama’s mother, my Nanima, looked like a smaller, fatter version of her, all bosom and stomach and yielding eyes, whilst her husband, Nanaji, towered over her, erect and to attention, regal in his tightly wound turban and long grey beard. Papa’s parents seemed more relaxed, more used to the camera. My Dadaji was smiling toothlessly into the lens, a tall man but stooped by years of tap-tapping at a desk in a faceless government office, who supplemented his existence as a clerk with passionate literate articles in the left-wing press, which he composed on his daily walk to the market for fresh vegetables. And my Dadima, an ocean of goodness contained in a loosely wound sari, a carefree grin belying the suffering that had touched all of that generation.

Papa had got the best of both his parents: Dadima’s generous mouth and affectionate eyes, Dadaji’s pride and cheekbones. And while papa spoke copiously about his mother, her sweetness, her courage, her patience, his references to Dada were less frequent and always more surprising. Once, after we had watched footage of Russian tanks parading past some half-dead leaders on the TV news, papa said casually, ‘Your Dada was a communist. That’s why I never learned any of the prayers, but I can tell you what the GNP of Kerala is …’

I did not understand all of this, though it made mama laugh until she cried, but I did gather that it was somehow Dada’s fault that we did not have a homemade Hindu shrine with statues and candles on top of our fridge like all my other Aunties.

On another occasion, another mehfil, after papa had just finished a song to rapturous Vas!, my Auntie Shaila leaned over to papa and squeezed his arm playfully, her breasts hanging over the harmonium so that they brushed the keys and played a discordant fanfare. ‘Kumar saab,’ she shouted, ‘you should have been in films!’

‘I was offered a contract, when I was younger,’ papa smiled back, ‘but my father refused to let me go. Mindless rubbish, he said, give people politics not songs …’ There was a brief pause and then papa laughed uproariously, cueing Auntie Shaila to join in, turning a father’s edict into an anecdote.

Oh but in that pause, what possibilities hovered! Papa could have been a film star! There was no doubt he had the looks; even then the Aunties would waggle their heads appreciatively when he sang, enjoying his noble profile and almond eyes in a proud, proprietorial way. Mama would sigh at the framed photograph of the two of them which hung above their bed, taken in some small Delhi studio where they looked as if they had had their picture taken through vaseline. ‘Look at your beautiful papa,’ she would say. ‘What did he see in a dark skinny thing like me?’ Funnily enough, papa would often ask me the same rhetorical question about mama. I presumed that this was what love meant, both people thinking they were the lucky one.

But once I had heard about Dada’s film ban, I became obsessed with what I had missed out on, being the daughter of a famous film hero. Maybe I would have grown up in a palace, had baby elephants as pets and held my papa’s hand as he Namasted his way through crowds of screaming fans who pressed forward to garland him with marigolds…But if I was disappointed, I could not begin to imagine how papa must have felt. Maybe this was why he never talked about what he did for a living, all I knew was that he went to an office every day and came back with a bulging briefcase full of papers covered with minute indecipherable figures.

But whatever he did to make money was not what papa really was; whilst my Aunties and Uncles became strangers when listening to him, papa became himself when he sang. My tender papa, my flying papa, the papa with hope and infinite variety. And then one day I made a connection; if my singing papa was the real man, how did he feel the rest of the time? This hurt me unbearably, and I stopped hanging around the adults to see him perform. I somehow felt it was my fault and not Dada’s, that papa never got into the movies.

Mama and papa were holding hands now, the tension in the room had somehow abated and I began to breathe a little easier. It struck me suddenly how mama and papa had somehow managed to retain something I did not see in most of the Aunties’ and Uncles’ marriages, an openness, a flirty banter which both fascinated and embarrassed me. I knew everyone began this way, I’d seen the same dance of hands and eyes going on between the big boys from Sam Lowbridge’s gang and their interchangeable girlfriends. They would occasionally invade the local park, which conveniently began at the end of our communal Yard, taking over the swings or roundabout, equipped with bottles of cider and endless cigarettes. The boys would begin by teasing the girls, always loudly, aggressively, more for the benefit of their mates than the girls themselves. The girls would feign indifference, sulkily dodge the boys’ attempts to grab them and corner them, but always would end up sitting in between the boys’ lanky denim legs, sharing drags and slurps, rolling their eyes at the boys’ exaggerated swearing and spectacular gobbing in a fond, possessive manner. Their commitment seemed infinite, so it was always a surprise to see the same boys with completely different girls the following week, playing out the same rituals of devotion with the same apparent conviction.

I always watched them from a safe distance, hiding in the hollyhocks and nettles around the old pigsties at the far end of the yard. Their intimacies unsettled me. I knew that nice girls should not behave in this way. (I got scolded for showing my knickers when I did handstands, and sitting between a boy’s legs was presumably much worse.) But despite the fuzzy commas of bumblebees hovering around my ears, and the tall nettles pricking my bare legs, I always had to watch Sam’s gang and their girls. They looked so complete, in on a secret which I worried I might never discover.

I got this same feeling looking at the photographs of mama and papa when they were first married, and living in Indian government quarters in New Delhi. Papa had completed a college degree in Liberal Arts and Philosophy (when I asked him what these were exactly, he had said, ‘A damn waste of time in this country as it happens’ and I did not ask again), and was doing something clerical for the government. Mama had just begun her first teaching job and they lived in a whitewashed single-storey flat-roofed house. I knew this from one of the photos, where they are sitting on a bed in a courtyard, a low bed strung across with hessian mesh which bends under their weight. Just visible on the stone courtyard floor is a dull stain the size of an orange, which papa told me happened when he squashed a passing scorpion under his chappal. Papa sits behind mama, has his arms around her just like Sam Lowbridge with his ‘wenches’ in the park. They are both in white cotton which catches the sunlight and emphasises the nutty brown of their skin. They are laughing, they are at that moment exactly where they want to be.

What I did not understand was why this yearning had not worn off yet. Other parents did not behave like they did; if any of the Uncles attempted to put their arms around their wives in public, this always provoked a chorus of shrieks and mock-naughty-boy slaps from the Aunties. ‘Sharam Tainu Nahin Andi hai?’ the women would laugh, demanding to know why their men had no shame and were admitting in public that they sometimes touched, despite the fact that all of them had at least two kids each and therefore must have touched a few times before, even if it was in the dark. They contacted each other through their children, their hands met as they hugged their sons, tickled their daughters, their fingers intertwined as they ate chapatti from the same plate. But I never saw any of them volunteer kisses and hugs like my parents did, contact which I knew had nothing to do with me.

As for our married English neighbours, I sometimes had difficulty matching up the husbands to the wives as their lives seemed so separate. They were the women, like the Yard women, who stayed home whilst their menfolk slipped out to work, too early for me to catch them. And then the others like the Ballbearings Committee, whose men waved them off to work and then gathered together in the evenings in the local pub, the Mitre, or the Working Men’s Club, leaving their wives to create havoc together at the rival female venues, the bingo hall, or the Flamingo Nightclub near their factory.

The Flamingo was a converted chapel with tinted windows and screaming pink paintwork, which I had occasionally glimpsed through the car window on my way to school. A big neon sign above the door declaimed, ‘Ladies Only Nites, Free Cocktail Before Ten O’Clock!’ You’d always know when the women had been ‘down the ‘mingo’, because you would hear them piling off the night bus on the corner of the crossroads, shrieking with laughter and cursing as they negotiated the potholes in their slingbacks. ‘Yow dirty cow, Maisie! I seen ya eyeing that fella up!’ ‘I never! He was gagging for it any road, he had his hands in his pockets all bloody night!’ ‘Oh me head…Malibu’s a bloody killer, innit?’ ‘Don’t yow chuck up near me, Edie! This wet-look top ain’t waterproof, ya know …’ ‘I wonder if my Stan’s up…probably not. Our chaps are never up when yow need em up, know wharr-I mean, girls!’