(Un)arranged Marriage Page 12

  MY MUM AND dad left for Jullundur the next morning with Uncle Piara. Harry and his wife followed suit in the late afternoon sunshine. Baljit had wanted to leave earlier but Harry was having trouble coping with the intense heat during the early part of the day, so they had decided to travel later when the breeze picked up and cooled everything down. Thing is, he was so flabby that I wasn’t surprised that he felt bad. Harry needed to do some serious exercise.

  They were getting into a taxi as I approached and I waved to Baljit. Harry just smiled at me smugly, not bothering to say goodbye, although to tell the truth I wasn’t all that concerned anyway. With him and my parents away for a few days I had free rein to do what I wanted, and that was fine by me. I gave him one last look and then headed for the house where Inderjit had already opened two bottles of beer for us. I think that he was looking forward to spending a few days away from the discipline of his old man too.

  ‘This is the life, bhai-ji,’ he said smiling as I joined him. ‘My dad and your dad away in Jullundur and Uncle Gurvinder busy with a new tube well. We will be able to do what we want.’

  We sat up late that night, drinking more bottles of beer than we were allowed and smoking cigarettes in the yard when everyone else had gone to bed. I loved the way Adumpur felt and sounded at night – the insects chattering and buzzing, the way that the fireflies appeared as if out of nowhere to fly straight at you, the small lizards that sat on the walls, deadly still, watching and sleeping at the same time. Moths as big as sparrows flapped around the light bulb and a soft, cooling breeze blew in across the flat fields. We sat and talked about England, Inderjit’s fascination with my life as strong as the first day that I had spoken to him. It felt like a lifetime since I had arrived in the village, even though it had only been just under two months, and I found myself talking about the silliest and most boring little things as I remembered Leicester.

  I told Inderjit about sitting on the top deck of the number 22 bus on the way into town, and the way that people carved messages to each other on the backs of the seats; the no smoking signs that people blew smoke rings at; about getting on for half fare when you were too old to qualify for it. I talked about the way the city centre was so busy on a Saturday, with everyone getting in each other’s way; the bad boys that hung out around McDonald’s and by the Clock Tower; the smell of the po’boy sandwich stall that was supposed to be authentically New Orleans and the way that I’d buy one of the sandwiches and pretend that I was a tourist visiting the USA and not just this skinny Asian kid that liked to watch people go by and daydream about living a different life to the one that I was.

  I think I lost Inderjit after a while but I had stopped caring by then. The way that I was talking about my life made it feel as though it was something way back in my past. I felt like some old bloke sitting in a nursing home, talking about the War and the way that England was so much better before the Blacks and the Pakis arrived – just like one I had met during a primary school visit to an old people’s home once. By the time I had stopped talking, Inderjit had fallen asleep on his manjah, and I decided to do the same, not bothering about the mosquitoes which had already left enough marks on me for a lifetime.

  The next day Uncle Gurvinder informed us that we were going on a trip north to a place called Anandpur, to visit some famous gurudwaras up in the hills. The journey itself was going to take the best part of a day, he told me, so I had to make sure that I packed plenty of spare clothes.

  ‘We will be back in time for when your parents return from Jullundur,’ he smiled.

  ‘So what’s this place, Anandpur, Like?’

  ‘Beteh, Anandpur is a place to be seen. Beautiful. The gurudwaras are carved out of the hillsides and some of them have been made out of marble.’

  ‘So we’ll be a few days?’

  ‘No, we should be back in about a day. Bring your camera, Manjit, it is very beautiful.’

  As I packed my shoulder bag I realized that I was looking forward to the trip. I mean, I had hardly seen anything of India outside of Jullundur. It would be fun to travel with Inderjit too. Maybe he’d be able to show me what made his country special, the way that I had described England to him.

  I searched the house for Ranjit’s camera, which Jas had made him leave behind for me to use. I found it sitting on top of my suitcase, in a side room that my uncles used to store things. I noticed that only my suitcase was in there, alongside some boxes and a battered old fridge that was rusting badly. Harry had obviously taken his with him to his father-in-law’s, and my parents’ suitcase was in the room where they had been sleeping, a room that Aunt Pritam insisted should remain locked to keep out the mice and the lizards because it was her guest room. I suppose she wanted to make a good impression on her guests.

  We left at ten that morning in a mini-van that my uncle had hired. The driver looked like he was younger than Inderjit and all the way to Anandpur he drove barefoot, never looking in his rear-view mirror nor signalling any of his manoeuvres or turns. Just like the bus that we caught from Delhi, most of the glass from the windows of the van was missing too, all except for the windscreen and the glass in the back door. The seats were better though, but only in as much as they had flat leather cushions on them. Every so often I would see a cockroach or a beetle crawl out of the holes in the leather where it had cracked and broken with age. The van smelt musty too, just like a damp old mattress that my parents had in the garage back at home; it was so mildewy and mouldy that Harry and I occasionally used it as a punch bag – when we weren’t using each other’s faces that is.

  Inderjit and Jasbir had come along too, as well as Uncle Gurvinder and his wife, Harpal, Inderjit’s oldest brother, Rana, his wife Sukbir and their two kids, Ranjit and Harjit. The van was pretty noisy, especially as Harjit and Ranjit spent most of the time trying to hang out of the windows, screaming every time Sukbir or Rana pulled them back and sat them down. I sat right at the back, with my arm hanging out of the window. Every time we passed anything going in the opposite direction, I instinctively pulled it back in, remembering just how close the vehicles passed each other.

  As the journey went on and we passed through village after village, the land started to become less flat. At one point we drove downward into a deep valley that looked like a dry riverbed or lake. I asked Inderjit about what had happened to the water and he pointed into the distance.

  ‘There is a dam, bhai-ji, about five miles from here, that holds back the water and diverts it another way.’ I nodded at him and looked out into the valley. It felt strange to be driving through an area that had once been under millions of tons of water, now only held back by a gigantic brick wall. I mean, what if it decided to leak? I kept on thinking the same thoughts until the van driver, who hadn’t stopped for a break all day, began the ascent up into the hills along narrow winding dirt roads that in places were only just wide enough for us to pass. As we drove up, higher and higher, and the riverbed started to seem further and further away, the size of the vertical drops grew. At one point we rounded a bend and I looked out into nothing but thin air, the land thousands of feet below us, and the other vehicles crossing the valley only tiny dots in the distance. At times I had to look down at my feet as my stomach lurched with nerves, and I became convinced that we would fall off the steep hillside and crash to our deaths. By the time we reached a guest house at the foot of the hills which led up into Anandpur, I was a nervous wreck and I hit my manjah sleeping, not waking until the next morning.

  Anandpur was as beautiful as my uncle had promised it would be. We spent the best part of a day wandering up in the hills, exploring the different gurudwaras that seemed to appear right out of the hillsides around each turn. The view as we climbed higher and higher was breathtaking and I spent more time looking out across the valley below us than I did concentrating on the history lesson that my uncle gave us as we reached each site. The temples were amazing too. One of them, the very last one that we got to, was only approachable by climbing up around
seventy or so stone steps. It was like two days of football training rolled into one climbing those, and by the time I had reached the top of the moss-covered steps I was dripping in sweat and breathless. The effort was definitely worth it. As I stepped out onto a rock plateau, in front of me loomed a huge white marble temple, the stone reflecting the afternoon sunshine. It was astonishing to think that someone, hundreds of years ago, had scaled these hills and carved a space out of the rocks, before building a monument that was every bit as wonderful as the Taj Mahal. From where I stood, a pathway laid with marble slabs ran about two hundred metres in front of me through a stone archway and into the actual temple itself. As Inderjit and Uncle Gurvinder came up the steps behind me I set off down the pathway, camera at the ready. I took a picture of the pathway itself, a picture of the stone arch, one of the front of the temple – more pictures than I had taken on the rest of the trip. It was so beautiful.

  We walked back down at about seven that evening, taking a permanent road that had been built on the other side of the hills. It followed the descent of a fast-flowing river which was ice-blue and gave off a welcome spray of cool water. When I told Inderjit that I’d like to jump into it to cool off, he explained that the water was freezing cold and that it was basically melted ice which flowed down from the Himalayas and through the Kashmir and Simla valleys into the Punjab. It was an amazing deep-blue colour and I was almost tripping on it as we walked down the hillside towards the village at the bottom where the driver had agreed to meet us. It only took us a couple of hours to get down to him using the actual road, which made me laugh because it had taken us all day to climb up the other side of the hills along the worn old tracks and up the giant stone steps.

  ‘Why didn’t we just come up this way?’ I asked Inderjit, as we walked past a couple of snake-charmers sitting by the side of the road.

  ‘Where is the fun in that, bhai-ji? Think of all the things we would not have seen.’

  He had a point because we had seen some really wicked caves and things on the way up, but my aching legs didn’t quite see it that way. By the time we reached the village again, I needed my bed and a nice cold drink. I was knackered. Thinking that we would be staying at a guest house for another night, I began to get my backpack out of the van.

  Uncle Gurvinder saw me getting my things and laughed. ‘No, no, Manjit, we are not staying. We will drive back tonight, after we have had some food.’

  ‘In the dark? Across those hills?’ I wasn’t really hearing this, was I? I mean, it had been bad enough travelling in the van on the way here, in daylight. The thought of having to make the return journey in the dark with a driver who thought he was the Punjabi answer to Damon Hill kind of made me a little nervous.

  I imagined dying – all my writing ambitions unfulfilled, not having had a number one record, never having scored a winning Premiership goal for Liverpool. I could see it now, the headlines back in England: POTENTIAL GENIUS KILLED IN CRASH. Or TEENAGE SENSATION’S POTENTIAL TRAGICALLY TAKEN. My daydream must have turned into a really deep, sleep-dream because when I woke up, covered in sweat with a mouth like an Alsatian’s armpit, I was back in the Punjab that I was used to with its flat fields and shanty-style villages and all the potholes in the road – the van rattling and shaking as it avoided people and animals that wandered into its path.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  August

  ‘NO!’

  I glared up at Uncle Gurvinder and Inderjit, blinking as the tears streamed down my face.

  My uncle held onto my arms, stopping me from struggling away from his grip, trying to calm me down, only it wasn’t working. I kicked out with one of my legs and found Inderjit’s shin, or was it my uncle’s? I really didn’t care. They were all liars, all of them. In it together from the very beginning and they had tricked me. Like in that game, Duke Nuke’em, where you think that you’ve killed all the aliens on that level, only to have your final life nicked by another alien, hiding behind you. Game over. GAME OVER!

  ‘You’re all liars, all of you!’

  ‘No, Manjit, no.’ My uncle let go of my arms and stroked my hair, still trying to soothe my anger. ‘We didn’t know. They didn’t tell us anything. Not a thing.’

  ‘Liar! You knew, you all knew. That’s why you arranged the trip to Anandpur. To get me out of the way.’

  ‘No, bhai-ji, no.’ Inderjit had decided to join in. ‘We never knew a thing about it, honest. They decided with my father before we went. Before we went.’

  ‘So how do you know so much about it all now? You have a dream or something?’

  ‘No, bhai-ji. Nothing like that. All I know is what my mum told me about it when we got back.’

  ‘Listen to him, Manjit. It’s the truth, son.’

  I thought about it for a minute and then decided that I just didn’t give a toss who had known. My old man, my mum, Harry, Baljit, they had all tricked me. Made me believe that they had gone to Delhi or to visit relatives in another town. The truth was that they had gone back to England and left me in India.

  My uncle held me by the shoulders and shook his head in sympathy. I turned to Inderjit who gave me a concerned look and then I decided that I wanted to be on my own. I shot off towards the courtyard and ended up by the water buffalo, not knowing where I was going or what I wanted to do. The tears started streaming down my face again and my throat felt so dry that I began to dry heave. I bent over and rested my hands just above my knees, waiting for some kind of fluid to pass, only nothing came. I just carried on dry heaving and every time that I retched, my head started spinning a little more, until eventually I closed my eyes and the whole of my world started spinning around and around, my head and my chest thumping. My stomach felt as though it had been turned inside out. I stood there like that, swaying, for about ten minutes before the dry heaves stopped and then I felt myself collapse.

  Someone, probably my uncle, lifted me and carried me back into one of the bedrooms. I didn’t bother to open my eyes at all. Only one thought entered my brain and then swam around and around inside my head. My parents and my brothers had tricked me, duped me into believing that everything was cool. Made me feel easy and relaxed so that I wouldn’t see what was right under my nose. I had stopped thinking of them as the enemy, let my guard down, and missed all the clues that in Leicester, I would have seen clearly. All that crap about losing the tickets and passports. Their need to go to Delhi and confirm the seats. Dodgy travel agents. Lies. All to prevent me working out that they had intended on leaving me in India right from the start.

  And then I recalled the argument that I’d had with Harry, the day that my old man had told me about our passports being stolen.

  ‘You think you so clever, Hey? Try laughing next month when you’re still here, innit.’

  I hadn’t even picked up on it then. Now his words stayed in my mind, laughing at me and telling me how stupid I was to have believed them. Not to have seen all the clues. They were like one of those rolling, pounding drum and bass tunes, playing havoc with my brainwaves, over and over and over. No matter how I thought about it all, lying there in the midday heat with my eyes closed, it all came out the same way. They had tricked me. And all along I never saw it coming because like an idiot, I had trusted them.

  My legs and back still ached from the overnight journey back from Anandpur and my stomach felt like it had been washed out with Domestos. I needed to sleep really badly and the sweat was streaming into my eyes and down the sides of my face. I remember wanting to cry again and then I fell asleep in my clothes, the heat in the darkened room sapping my energy. I dreamt that I had scored a hat-trick at Wembley for Liverpool, only to end up on the losing side at the final whistle. I was on my knees, exhausted and crying, trying to work out how much more could go wrong for me.

  I spent the next few days in the same kind of state, not really talking to anyone and eating my food alone. Apart from eating all I managed to do was shower or sleep. During the day I sat around in the shade and wrote thi
ngs to myself in one of the little notebooks that I had brought with me from England. Occasionally I went off by myself, walking out to the farmhouse and smoking cigarettes in the mango grove. I was past caring what my family thought. I mean, what did it matter now? It’s not like my mum and dad or my stupid brothers were around to give me any grief. My uncles just left me to my own thoughts and Inderjit and Jasbir tried a couple of times to cheer me up by bringing me drinks or cigarettes, but mostly I just ignored them and kept my thoughts to myself. Uncle Piara had returned the morning after we had arrived back in the village and had tried to get me to listen to his explanation about what my family had done. He had wasted his time too, because all I did was blank him. As far as I was concerned he was as much to blame for it all as my own father and it was too late for him to pretend that he was concerned about me after he had helped them to trick me.

  I had discovered a disused yard around at the back of the farmhouse, something that Inderjit called the haveli. It was walled in and used as open storage for wood and other stuff. At one end there were two small rooms without doors and next to them a chicken coop. Someone had planted two trees in the middle of the dirt yard, about two metres apart. Strung between them was a hammock, like something out of Robinson Crusoe. It twisted and turned when I tried to lie down on it but it became my little private area, that yard, and within a few days I had learnt how to adjust my body weight so that I could sit or lie on the hammock without falling onto the dirt floor. I spent most of my day in there with my little notebook and my fags. The only visitors were Inderjit or Mohan, Naseebo’s husband – head of the lower-caste family that worked for my uncles.

  Mohan had seemed quite pleased to find me there, like he was glad of the company, telling me that it was nice to see another human face out there. Once he’d worked out that the little pile of cigarette butts that I had hidden in a corner were mine, he kept me supplied with cigarettes, using the money that had been left for me by my father. He was cool, Mohan, and he made me smile by telling me stories from his childhood and the things that my old man had done when he was younger. It was nice to get a different viewpoint of life in the village for a change, from a man whose family had never had any money and had always relied on other people to provide work. I asked him about the caste system all the time, and each time that I asked a question, he’d smile his crooked, yellow-toothed smile and tell me that some people were born to be kings and some peasants. That made no sense to me at all and I remember telling him that I believed that everyone was the same and should have the same rights.