Anita and Me. Meera Syal

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      ‘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.

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