Authors: Meera Syal
I carried the three trophies on a napkin carefully to the
door, and then paused to call out, ‘Bye Mr Worrall!’ as cheerily as I could manage. I did not expect an answer but I felt Mrs Worrall’s eyes gently guide me to my back door.
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 …’