Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ