(Un)arranged Marriage Read online

  Harry came back first, pushing a trolley. Sitting on the top was my black backpack which I pulled off and then hung from my shoulder. Inside it was my personal stereo and four packets of Benson & Hedges which I had hidden underneath some paperback books and a copy of Loaded. The bag also contained an A4 writing pad and a set of four smaller notebooks that would fit into my back pocket. It was my boredom survival kit, my escape route back into the world that we had left behind after flying for nearly ten straight hours. You see, I was looking forward to being in India, to seeing how different it was from England, and at the same time I didn’t want to be in India when I could be in Leicester. I was excited about the travelling because I had always dreamed about going to new places and doing new things, but not with my family in tow. In my daydreams I would travel the world with Ady or with Lisa, or one of my other friends. Sometimes I’d even travel alone. Those were always the best daydreams. Not in any one of those dreams would I be travelling with Harry or Ranjit, or cringing with the shame of hearing my mum shouting at the top of her voice in Punjabi across the crowded check-in lounge at Heathrow.

  I wanted a cigarette really badly and I looked up and down the main foyer of the airport building, looking for the toilets. Then I told Harry where I was going and he grinned like an idiot.

  ‘Going for a fag, I bet.’

  I smiled back at him, kind of sarcastically, before heading off. I walked straight into one of the cubicles and locked the door before rummaging around in my bag for my cigarettes. The smoke was like sandpaper as it entered my dry mouth and I realized that I also needed a drink. Badly. At least the sweat had stopped streaming down my face. I pulled the toilet lid down and sat, trying to work out how I was going to get Indian money from my old man to buy more fags with and where exactly I was going to buy them from.

  Outside the airport we made our way towards the main bus station. It didn’t matter where you wanted to go in India; once you got off the plane at Delhi airport, the next part of your journey started at that bus station. The air outside was really dry and the smell of diesel was all around us. Everywhere I looked I could see people milling around, some of them travellers, but mostly beggars. They searched my face as I walked by, holding out their hands. There were men, women, old people and toddlers. And they were everywhere. All of them wearing rags – if they wore anything at all – and none of them wearing any shoes. I was kind of shocked by it all. I had seen homeless people begging in Leicester before but only ever a few at a time. Here I was in the country that my old man was always calling the best in the world and there were hundreds of them. If I had been carrying any money, I’m sure that I would have given it all away. I mean, some of the naked kids were just babies, maybe two or three years old, and I was beginning to feel really sorry for them and guilty about being so rich in comparison. My own nephew was about that sort of age himself and I wondered how I’d feel if he was put in the same situation. I was having all these well heavy, deep thoughts looking at all the beggars and I’d only been in the country an hour.

  We caught a battered old bus to somewhere called Kashmiri Gate where, according to my father, we’d be able to get a coach for Jullundur which was the main city in Nawanshar, the area where my father’s village was. The bus had all the glass from the windows missing and the seats were just wooden slats screwed onto metal posts that stuck out of the floor. Every minute or so the wheels hit potholes or rode over things that had been left on the road, and the bus jolted around really badly.

  The road was in total chaos. There were animals walking around and people who just wandered in groups, across the path of the bus. I saw a motorcycle, crushed in some kind of accident, that had just been left in the road and every time another vehicle rumbled past I was convinced that we would hit it. Some of the huge trucks that went by every few minutes came so close to my face, I thought I was going to get pulled out of the bus by the rush of air. It was a nightmare.

  It was a nightmare that got worse. At Kashmiri Gate we couldn’t find the right stand for our coach and the drivers just wandered about, not bothering to answer anyone’s questions. I asked Ranjit why we didn’t just find the ticket office and he laughed at me.

  ‘You stupid, guy, or what? They ain’t got ticket offices here. You just pay the driver, innit.’

  I looked at him, not knowing what to say. I felt as if I was almost in shock. There were loads of buses and coaches and around each stand there were hundreds of people, all pushing and shoving each other, whilst in amongst all of the travellers, hundreds more homeless people begged for money. It was mad. Ranjit pointed to a stand at the far end of the open courtyard which made up the station. The old man was standing by it talking to a huge bloke in a red turban. They talked for a bit and then my dad handed over some money. Ranjit grabbed me and told me to follow him. Jas, holding Gurpal, my mum and Baljit were already walking over to where my dad was standing. I couldn’t see Harry. Just for a moment I hoped that we had lost him back at the airport, only to feel his hand on my shoulder, and his mouth near my ear.

  ‘Watch your bag man. These chamarr (low castes) will rob anything. Best the government should just round them up and kill ’em, innit.’ I was so disgusted at what he said that my head started to shake, of its own accord. Harry just grinned at me – a big, stupid, fascist ape.

  The ‘coach’ turned out to be the twin of the bus that we had taken from the airport, only this one still had a few pieces of glass in some of its windows. The driver was a Punjabi man who had agreed to take us to the Punjab for a price. Jas told me that he was a private hire driver who was supposed to be on his way home for the night. My dad had offered him money to hire his ‘coach’ and he had agreed even though he looked like he had just finished a long day. He produced a couple of cushions to make my mum’s ride more comfortable, but all I got was more wooden slats. I suppose it was good that the only other people on the bus were the couple from the airport, but I was annoyed at the state of it. My dad had been promising me all the way from Leicester that we would travel on a luxury coach. The only luxury I could find was a seat next to another window missing glass and a whole piece of wood to myself, although by then I had wised up and was using my top as a cushion. At least it couldn’t be that far to the Punjab, I told myself. Wanting to make sure, I turned around to Ranjit, who was sitting behind me, with Gurpal sleeping on his lap, and asked him.

  ‘Not long, innit,’ he grinned. ‘’bout six, seven hours. Maybe eight.’

  He started laughing as he saw the look on my face. Eight hours! How was I going to put up with that? I turned to look out of my window and watched the same chaos that I’d seen on the road from the airport to the bus station over every road all the way through Delhi – past roundabouts covered in sleeping homeless people, grass verges with bulls and pigs roaming wild on them, and over what felt like a pothole every ten seconds. Once out of Delhi the road was in total darkness, the only light coming from the headlights at the front of the bus. Every few miles a huge truck sped past us, appearing out of nowhere, with neither the bus driver or the truck drivers giving an inch. There didn’t seem to be any rules on the road about which side to drive on, or staying in lane, speed limits. Nothing. Realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, not comfortably anyway, made me feel even more miserable. The only person asleep was my nephew and he could sleep through anything. I suppose it wouldn’t be a lie for me to say that I spent the entire journey bricking myself every time another bus or truck passed us, convinced that I was going to die. By the time it began to get light I was all bleary-eyed and in a daze. I was hot, smelly, tired, thirsty. Dying to close my eyes and just sleep. Like, for a month.

  We made it to Jullundur at just gone one in the afternoon and the sun was beating down, melting the cheap tarmac used on the roads. I had never felt heat like it. Ever. If you took the hottest day that you’d ever seen in England and added ten degrees, you’d be close to feeling the kind of heat that I was feeling. I couldn’t even sweat any more bec
ause the last drinks we had stopped for had been about four hours earlier, and the fluid from them was already well out of my system. The local people at Jullundur just milled about like it was nothing. I would have given up my new Air Max for a can of Coke straight from the fridge. We got off the bus in the centre of the city and my dad went off to find a taxi, leaving us all standing in the heat by the roadside.

  We stood around for about half an hour or so before the taxi turned up. My dad had hired it to take us to the village which was about half an hour’s drive from the city according to my mum. The taxi itself was an old Ambassador, like a 1930s American gangster’s car although not as old as that. It was a pretty big car but I couldn’t see how all of us would fit in it. I mean, with all of us and the other couple, there were eight adults, one almost adult – me – and a toddler who seemed the most comfortable of all of us in our strange surroundings. Somehow the driver managed to get all of our luggage into the big boot at the back, apart from a couple of the bigger suitcases, which he tied to a rusty-looking roof rack. In the front of the car there was only one continuous seat and my father shared that with Harry, the man from the next village and the driver. I got to sit in the back, squashed against the passenger side door, next to Ranjit, whilst Baljit, who was really thin anyway, was virtually sitting in Jas’s lap along with Ranjit’s son, Gurpal. And next to them the two old dears. Squashed up like sardines in a can, we began the final stretch of our journey to the village where my father had grown up – Adumpur.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  June

  AS WE APPROACHED Adumpur, I began to take a look at the landscape. I noticed that the village was surrounded on all sides by really flat land. For miles in each direction there were only fields and the occasional village. The first houses that I saw were square, box shapes and none of them had a roof. They were all shabby-looking and coloured off-white. A group of about five houses lined the right side of the dirt track that passed for a road; to the left there was a huge lake, in which a herd of water buffalo were standing. It couldn’t have been very deep because some of the animals were almost standing in the middle of it, and floating on its surface there was some kind of scum. The water looked horrible, all dark and murky. I saw two young kids, probably only two or three years younger than me, watching the herd. One of them, tall and skinny, held a long stick in his hands which he used to guide the water buffalo.

  The taxi moved slowly through the village, along streets which in places were so narrow that the taxi was the only thing that could pass. The house fronts were all painted in pastel shades – pinks and blues and yellows – and the windows had steel bars, netting and shutters. Almost every other house had hanging baskets of flowers above the windows and suspended over the doors. These houses were only two storeys high and my dad told me that they were like townhouses; most of the richer families, including ours, had houses out in the fields too, built around wells. Farmhouses. I was getting impatient. I wanted to see our house now, compare it to the ones that I had seen so far. The old man told me that our house was on the other side of the village, past the central square and the shops. The ‘shops’ turned out to be open-fronted huts and there were only three of them. Without getting out of the taxi, I couldn’t tell you what they sold, although I did notice a fading cigarette advert posted by the side of one of them. I made a mental note to explore the area when I got the chance.

  Past the centre of the village the streets widened and we passed a gurudwara that was painted in brilliant white and decorated with outside lights, like a Christmas tree. Its huge front doors were wide open and inside it looked rather ornate, not like the ones in England. The temple stood on its own and the next house that we came to was massive. It must have taken up the same amount of space as five or six of the smaller townhouses that we had passed earlier. The house was set back from the street, a wall about three metres high running right around it, with two iron gates at the front. Behind the wall was a garden and a really English-looking driveway. There were two cars standing on the drive, one a Jeep and the other a Mercedes lookalike that Ranjit said was a Tata. The house itself was four storeys high and each upper storey had a balcony that seemed to run right around each floor. The ground floor had a glass-fronted veranda and through the glass I could see plants and hanging baskets. At the very top of the house were turrets and at the front, in the very middle, there was Punjabi writing on a plaque.

  ‘What does that say, Daddy-ji?’ I asked in my best Punjabi. ‘That sign?’

  ‘It spells out the name of their family, Manjit. Letting everyone that sees it know how well they have done for themselves.’

  ‘Which family, ours?’

  ‘No, it is another family. They own factories in Birmingham. Make plenty of money, and I tell you, not one of them went to university and bloody college.’

  I looked at the house as we passed it by and then back at my dad.

  Ranjit pointed at the house, Smirking. ‘What’s this anyway? We are going to build a better house than this when we get the chance. Isn’t that right, Daddy-ji?’ Ranjit’s Punjabi was a lot better than mine although I knew that mine would improve. After all, That was all I was going to be speaking for the next two months.

  My dad just sighed and put his hands together in prayer. ‘Only if God wills it,’ he replied. And then quickly added, ‘And my sons wish to honour my name.’ He looked at me. I returned his look and then turned my head to carry on staring out of the window.

  My father’s childhood home wasn’t quite the place that he had been describing, continually, on the plane journey from England. I had imagined it painted in a bright colour, with guava trees growing in the courtyard and maybe a couple of mango trees. Climbing plants and flowers would be growing across the walls with hanging baskets crowded with wicked colours. A tractor, gleaming bright-red, would be in the yard and there would be pets running around with colourfully dressed kids chasing them. All the wonderful things that my dad used to tell us about it as kids.

  A two-storey building with an open rooftop and a courtyard at the front, the house had obviously been wonderful and colourful once. But now it was painted a shade of pastel pink in a mixture of whitewash and colouring. It looked as though it hadn’t seen a new coat for a few years. Here and there the paint was flaking from the walls and in a few places cracks had appeared, running the whole length, from ceiling to floor, or the other way round as I was told later. I couldn’t tell the difference myself. The gates into the courtyard from the street were rusted and looked in need of new hinges as they scraped across the floor to let us through. In the courtyard the first things that I noticed were the water buffalo tied against a wall in the farthest corner from the house. There were three females and two young calves. One of the females was pregnant, my dad told me, the biggest one. Again I couldn’t tell the difference because they all looked massive to me. There was a trough of water alongside the water buffalo and sitting on top of it was a little kid dressed only in shorts. He must have been about five or six and, even though he was really skinny, already he had more muscle definition across his stomach and chest than I had. I was almost jealous. He smiled and waved at us as we walked in and I kind of nodded back at him, wondering who he was.

  The floor of the courtyard was covered in about a centimetre of dust and dirt and it crunched under the soles of my Air Max. Opposite the buffalo were two or three sheds. Only one of them had a door and it sat open with what looked like bales of hay falling out. Running across the yard, in front of the house, was a low wall painted the same shade as the house, with a gate in the middle. At various points along the wall there were little shrubs planted in the dirt and, in each corner, a guava tree. Diamond-shaped holes formed a pattern across the width of the wall.

  As we walked across the courtyard towards the house a man came out to greet us. He was wearing a light-blue open-necked shirt and matching drawstring bottoms – a kortha, the traditional outfit of Punjabi males. On his feet he wore brown sandals without s
ocks and his hair was shaved in what looked like a number two, close to his head. I couldn’t stop staring at him. Apart from the neatly trimmed moustache and beard, he was the twin of my old man, although younger and not so fat around the waist. My dad walked over and hugged him before calling me over.

  ‘Manjit, say hello to your Uncle Piara.’

  I looked at him and smiled, replying in my best Punjabi. He smiled back and hugged me.

  ‘At last I get to meet you too,’ he said. He had met my brothers and sisters on previous visits to India, before I was born. ‘Comeon, Manjit,’ he continued. ‘You’ll dry up out there.’

  We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing in the house, resting after our long journey. The inside of the house wasn’t what I had been expecting either. The rooms that I saw, all of those downstairs, were pretty basic. The floors were covered in stone tiles and the walls were painted in a light-blue colour. There were no sofas or armchairs, nothing like that. No pictures hung on the walls or shelves loaded with photo frames. I couldn’t even see a TV or hi-fi and realized that my decision to bring a Walkman had been a good one. We sat down on manjeh, which are like traditional beds and seats rolled into one. they had wooden frames which were about the length and width of my single bed at home. Around each frame were strands of rope that criss-crossed each other and were tied in each corner. These strands, woven together, made up the ‘mattresses’. The weave on them looked like the stitching on those dodgy cable knit sweaters that all old Asian men seemed to wear in England, although the manjeh were actually quite comfortable to sit on. It was only slightly cooler inside the house and on each ceiling there were fans that made a whirring sound and moved warm air around the rooms. I was sat next to my Uncle Piara, feeling myself sweat really badly. When I complained my dad laughed and told me that he’d show me where the shower was soon. I was dying for a cold drink when the first of my cousins, a skinny boy called Inderjit, appeared with bottles of cola so cold that my throat started to ache as I drank it down.