Authors: Meera Syal
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.