Jaya wanted to speak to her dad. As was (possibly) the habit of somebody who had been moments away from a potentially life-endangering battering (it was actually two –she could have been the one Paul had picked that day, but as was the mysterious ways of the cosmos, she didn’t know about the second), she was itching to get some form of relief from the chaotic murmerings in her head. She needed catharsis.
So, as Mr Chakarbatti turned on the radio in his office (previously the front room lounge; Mrs Chakarbatti made it perfectly clear in 1976 that she did not want him working away from home) and closed his accounting books for the day at 8.30pm, Jaya Chuck-Your-Batty was feeling distanced and needed an excuse to disturb him.
She made a cup of tea and brought it to him. Speech radio quietly fluffed up the room, with the droning voice of the presenter; the kind of voice that personified cold rainy lonely Sunday mornings:
“Multiculturalism has failed, they say, as though we care, as though it is our fault, as though it should matter... They are indebted to us and cannot afford such criticisms. People from the Indian subcontinent lost three million lives from the communal conflicts engineered by British colonialism and their agents during the partition in 1947. EDL, the BNP and other racist agents of the British state will not be allowed to spread their poison and create communal conflicts in Britain. Their ‘divide and conquer’ strategy will not work on the Sikhs and Muslims.”
Another throaty voice responded: “In India, every five miles the language changes, the religions morph, yet they’re still one people. Look at Britain, struggling to integrate despite having English as a common foundation. You don’t hear anyone saying multiculturalism has failed in India, do you?”
‘What else do you call the Mumbai Oberoi Hotel attack as?’ Jaya scoffed. Mr Chakarbatti looked up at her. Either he would dismiss her or humour her.
‘Now you’re confusing culture with religion. Islam is different to fundamentalism.’
Success! ‘Why can’t our people control our own? We have these high folluted ideas of community and family values, so where did these terrorists come from?’
‘They’re not one of us. They’ve been infiltrated by the Middle Easterners. Our people are mainly Sunni; far too moderate for this kind of violence.’
‘So why didn’t their mothers or ‘family’ spot what was happening to poor little Tariq or teenager Usman as they were brainwashed by the terrorists?’
‘Because the West has instilled in them something which our youth hasn’t faced before. Anger.’
‘Anger is hardly a Western concept.’
‘Look: have you ever been faced with a threat to your identity? You’re plodding along nicely in your life, with your classmates, all happy and then suddenly, boom. Literally. And everybody turns on you. When you’re faced with that kind of threat to who you are, you’re going to strike out. You’re lumped in to the same category as the ignoramus. Naturally, there’s an element of role-fulfillment in there for the immature ones. And the rest, well, you know how it is. They adopt this hyper-orthodox stance to who they are. That’s why so many ‘Asian colonies’ exist in Britain. These immigrants have faced a threat to their Asian-ness, in the face of racism or whatever, and they introvert more and more in to themselves til they’re practically living a caricatured version of who they were back home. Although for some, when they left back home, time stood still; they get so busy with their lives here, they forget to see the progression in their home countries and think things are still the same as when they left them in the 70’s.’
‘It seems that we’re always victims of the circumstances.’
‘Yes; but isn’t that what makes the world go round?’
‘No; why can’t we become the instigators and control what happens to us?’
Mr Chakarbatti sighed. ‘We are a weak people. Who knows why; perhaps after years of having our land plundered and our people confused, whatever it is. But look at India, the fastest growing economy in the world, it is. There is a tremendous amount of manpower that will learn to get mobilised.’
‘Learn from who? What system will they follow? The Englishes, I suppose?’
‘They do not own capitalism, or systems. They don’t even own the English language. They do not exclusively belong to them. They have a bloody good PR system and a great pomp about what they do. Look at these greatly coloured cereal boxes, and look at the plain ones in Bangladesh. Who is making more profit? Who has the least expenditure? Back home, there is great wealth in the land; untapped gas resources, petrol, such and such. The problem is, they just need to organise themselves, and not bow to these age old colonial inferiority complexes. Most of London is owned by Arabs and Chinese, anyway. We have a long way to go; it is not a battle between the brown and the white. We are so insular sometimes.’ He looked out of the window. ‘Although, the richest man in the world is a brown. And you know,’ he looked pained, ‘sometimes our people can be so vulgar sometimes.’
‘So can every other culture.’
He laughed. ‘No, that is a cop-out of an excuse. If you don’t learn the value of sweeping generalisations, you’ll never win a debate. We have certain characteristics that are very specific to us. They’re not in our blood, but they are what we have evolved with. Some idiots say that poverty and disorganisation is in our blood -there are some things that are in the blood, but that is too highly philosophical for most to understand- but these things aren’t in the blood. You see, when people live together for years and years within the same boundaries, they develop the same moral code, the same rules of survival. These are superficial things that change as we cross boundaries. Some people mistake these rules as ‘nationality’. They think, that when you come to another boundary, you can survive with these rules; they don’t adapt. They cling on to it, and call these superficial rules their ‘heritage’.’ He sighed. ‘I have a heritage; I have an ancestry, yes, so do you. That is unchanging, and you can learn a lot from the past. But these other things, well, people confuse them, don’t they?’
Jaya looked up, questioning, confused, attempting to weave the fray of threads forming in her thoughts.
‘Some people think heritage is doing what your forefathers did. They call it tradition, or culture, or whatever. But that idea is more universal; a lot of people naturally do what their parents did, because they want to make their parents happy. And you keep your parents happy and bide your time til they die, and then you beckon in what makes you and your children happy. See? We are all living half in half out. My father was not happy that I was coming to England to be educated; he wanted me to look after the hardware shops. But I came here, but sent him money, and I balanced them both while he was still alive. I didn’t have the patience to wait til he died.’ He chuckled. ‘Yes, we were different, but you know what is the same?’ He adjusted his skull cap. ‘This. We lived together in Islam. That was our father-son unifying theme.’
‘And they’re even trying to take that away from you.’
He waved his hand, dismissing her; she felt pathetic for attempting to sympathise.
‘Everybody tries to take something away from the newbies. Even the most moderate of our factions are being accused of fundamentalism; mosques aren’t allowed to be built because they say it encourages isolation, that its like a magnet for similar people and creates ghettos. They will get bored of it one day. You don’t worry about being the mouthpiece for somebody else. Look inside your head and act out of kindness, and forgiveness. But don’t be a walkover. And remember to make money, or you’ll end up on your arse with nowhere to go when your husband kicks you out.’ His body bounced gently in a silent laughter.
‘It’s tough when they generalise.’
‘This is the thing with you young people. You think everybody is out to get you.’
‘I know what’s going through their heads; they feel resentment towards us. Once a seed is planted in their heads, it’s there forever. And our people have so much to lose, but don’t speak out enough. And only when it builds up, then
they get angry and start stomping and shouting…and that just perpetuates it…’
‘Yes; our Bengali people didn’t have much to start with, that’s why they get defensive. They didn’t even have a language to write in. Now those people, they have a reason to get angry, when people attempt to take something away from them. The only way to preserve their part in history is what is written about them in other languages; in English, Urdu, Italian, whatever. So you see, when you are new somewhere, and the memoirs, articles, films written about you show you in a negative light, you will get defensive. You only get one first impression. Our community feel that people have surpassed their core values, ignored the majority of their goodness, and skipped straight to all the modern stuff, all the ‘cool’ stuff like philandering and discontent and rebelliousness. When a community has had its majority values established, that is fine, but somebody who came in and read literature and watched films in English about our peoples, this brand new generation, they’d think we were all malcontent. You know that’s not true. I’m happy and get on with it; you see Mr Ashik, he has his accountancy business? Him too. And Mr Nawaaz, with his big restaurant. We are loaded. We have children who are the new generation and yes, you lot have various issues. But we are all tarnished with the same brush.’ He took a deep breath. ‘So you see, this is why when you lot wield the tool of your newly acquired language in such a loud and brash way, we worry that everybody else will think we are the same. We are afraid to lose our identity. So that is why we get defensive. We haven’t developed enough confidence to laugh at ourselves yet.’
‘We’ve been here long enough.’
‘It’s not the number of years, Jaya. It’s the quality of life.’
Jaya stirred in the sweetener in his tea, quietly and without tapping the spoon on the rim of the mug (‘quietly and discreetly or people will think you are seeking attention’), and walked to her room. Again, as seemed to be permanently the case recently, her head was heavy with the mist of a jigsaw-like confusion; the pieces were there, she understood them, but didn’t know where they fit.
Pluralism was something she had denied herself (although it did squeeze it’s slippery head out occasionally) and it seemed that relativism was skewed. Pathos, Ethos and Logos, Adaptation and all sorts of other theories cummed out by the Intellectuals, which she had savoured til her mouth literally watered, were increasingly chuckling at themselves and making a fool out of her.
Wounded, she began to induce boredom. Boredom, which was stifled out the by the other shit and crap that people occupied themselves with. Boredom, which harboured creativity but seemed to be facing a losing battle in the face of noise: clicks, yibberyabber, coffee machines, flickering screens, r ‘n’ b videos, rustling broadsheets, car doors, tin bins, bleeps, bloops... an avalanche of noise and images the Englishes distracted themselves with. But here in their household, there was quite. It was the default setting for their home. The room stood quietly. It was in the quiet that prayers could be perceived as real; that history had a perfect platform and it was where the future timidly unfolded itself. Simple living, high thinking, Mr Chakkarbatti would say, his eyes closed, his head bobbing from side to side, a content smile on his face, in his armchair, his legs not quite long enough to reach the floor. Yes, it was the silence in their home that really gave birth to the grandiose knack their family had of talking less and sweeping people off their feet. There was no collective hobby they did together as a family –nothing as vulgar as watching TV shows together or reading together or singing together or even sharing the same life philosophy. No thread joined them, no bizarre notion of an interlocking thread that they wove together. Just silence. It was a bliss they lived in and protected, and occasionally granted to visitors who always somehow had a heavy heart when they left at night, trademarked by the few seconds they would hover on the straw ‘Welcome’ mat outside the door.
Sat on her bed, her knuckles brushing the sitar lightly, she manipulated the silence and lay a platform in her mind, which immediately became crammed with several things –the restlessness of youth took shape.
Being comfortable with the ambiguous nature of her own existence and with a knack for web-thinking, Jaya Chakra-Borty often thought she placated the world with her forgiving, contexualising thought, rather than using her special knack to negotiate with it. This was something she had to confront with Kulsuma that night. There were times when she couldn’t remember the last time she’d changed someone’s mind, and found herself simply weaving her way in to those minds instead, becoming a fixture. Was she simply being a walkover? Or was being part of the furniture a good thing?
Wishy washy didn’t sit with her, and she became intent on turning her confusing thoughts in to something decisive, until the hours ticked onwards, the cigarette butts mounted and she’d been resting her head on the sitar strings for so long that seven finely grooved lines appeared on her face. Dawn broke; but on this morning where she couldn’t sleep and the birds had annoyingly started tweeting at 4am, she wondered where all the introspection was leading her. She still had no idea what to do after graduation and was weighed down with the fact that studying an art left her tragically short of any negotiating power in to a true profession (of which, of course, there were only two).
(Had the next day passed or was she imagining it? But) She lay next to her sitar all night, not getting under the covers, as though something was supposed to happen; as though inspiration was supposed to ooze in to her from the dead piece of wood and its living threads. Was there something wrong with her? Why did some call her too Asian and some too white? She was quintisentially neither, the bastards. So she didn’t identify with street wise cockney Balti Boys who had obsessions with Bruce Springsteen and other random pop icons, or the trendy short-back-and-sides Samosa Suzies who had Andy Warhol-style posters of Asha Bhosle on their walls; so what? She hadn’t grown up in the 70’s. Why did she feel guilty about not identifying with her heritage in the same way others did theirs?
The situation had reached critical mass and fiddling about on her mobile phone and the impotent presence of the sitar wouldn’t help. She stood up and paced her room. The laminate floor almost froze her soles.
Everything seemed so bloody naff. She looked around her room, at the books, the photos. These stupid remnants of somebody else’s history she attempted to claim as her own.
What the fuck did she care about the Southall Riots for? The boy in Leeds who had ‘Holy Smokes’ tattood on his arm for some reason had felt that she’d be interested in his story and she, like the sponge she was, had conned herself in to thinking she was part of that history (she wasn’t to know that the police officer who truncheoned a man to death was to occupy lots of her time as she read comments on an anti-fascist march). Why did she spend money on books that sat on her shelf, chronicling the lives of other peoples’ histories, which she hunted and gathered like pieces of somebody else’s jig saw?
Did she still think the browns had a collective identity? That didn’t seem to cut it anymore. Things were much more subtle; garish generalisations didn’t work. But then nor did outright rejection. Had the shift changed? Was it because her generation had learnt to pick and choose what they liked about their outgoing heritage, that no outsiders could possibly predict exactly what to stereotype anymore?
What was the future of this generation? White couples were now allowed to adopt Black and ethnic minority children; inter racial marriage was thrown about willy-nilly, Muslim gays were getting nikahs, some Asian kids, despite having immigrant parents, didn’t know how to speak the Mother tongue...
And in the back of her mind, none of it mattered. Her father had said the rules didn’t stay the same when the barriers were different. Perhaps it was natural. Perhaps finally, having brown skin didn’t matter, didn’t govern the way somebody acted.
But still...the unending pathos in her mind could have easily finished on the idea that being a brown was more part of life’s nuance than the whole picture, and the ide
a that everyone had different parts that governed different lives was just the ultimate namby pamby conclusion.
She took a deep lungful of tobacco and thought of the way Eleven’s hair had mingled with the strings on the sitar. There was another sacrifice that was inevitable. Another shadow that would have to eventually recline in to the creases of her mind. Another self sacrifice.
Self sacrificing occured to achieve an ideal. Whose ideal? was the question for Jaya. When the needed sacrifice to achieve one’s personal ideal isn’t achieved, you have to sacrifice to fill someone else’s ideal. At least there’s be one happy party. It was win-win. The recyling of happiness at least stayed in the family.
So Jaya, too scared, unwilling and afraid of the hellfire to sacrifice her family for the sake of her sapphic ideal, decided that she woud have to sacrifice her sapphic ideal for the sake of her family. It was a neat switch which karmic theory supported as coming full circle, no energy lost, optimum result achieved –at least (seemingly) in the bigger picture of things.
So that was it: she would have a voluntary marriage. Not a freefalling taken-in-the-stride-of-life kind of marriage, which existed in and for itself, but a voluntary marriage: suffixed and proactively shoehorned in to her life because it wasn’t a natural fit. A liaison that would last 50 or so years and pinch together two different families at one point in time, forever changing the course of both dynasties.
As preperations began for the Chakkarbatti family to go on their yearly holiday to Bangladesh in the middle of the summer monsoon –as they did every year no questions asked- this time, Jaya would pack the salwaar kameezes made of soft schiffon, and crushed silk, and plunging necklines. The ones with the huge cascading scarves that hid nothing but her real intentions. She would go back to university and finish off her Finals and spend the last few days of her University life as she had promised she never would; not deep in thought about post-graduation or putting the finishing touches on her soon-to-be rank of ‘Educated Girls.’ No. She would push out all thoughts of anything and watch endless videos on YouTube, indulge in marathons of House and Daria and South Park. She would tune in to the television and tune out of the world, detoxing her brain of the need for substance. She would numb her mind to things that would distract her from fulfilling what she was meant to do; to carry on the bloodline heritage and the dusty palaces and desert plains and tea-gardens. She would leave behind this world, as she signified every so often in prayer, putting her hands up to her ears, palms frontwards, shunning the world behind her with the backs of her hands. She would effectively turn her whole life in to a prayer.
Jaya wore a beanie hat, jeans and a black t shirt to visit Eleven today. For maximum lesbian effect, she contemplated hangin a bandana from her pocket or even wearing a hoodie but thought this was going a bit too far. Just as the government had stigmatised smoking, they’d almost outlawed hoodies, so this too was out of the question. She thought she ended up looking nondescript and decided that this was really the best way to end the relationship to the love of one’s life. Unpretentiously and without vanity.
She got a taxi to Birmingham this time, and met Eleven inside the Coachcard Warehouse, full of discarded boxes and plastic packaging, shutters open wide, the last building on the long stretch of Birmingham’s gay scene, people not quite sure whether it qualified as being a gay building or not.
Eleven was sat atop one of the empty upturned brown boxes, watching people pass on the street outside. Her long legs were crossed, her hair wild. She looked up as Jaya walked in, hands in her jacket pockets.
Eleven sighed. ‘You want to talk about something serious, don’t you?’
Jaya couldn’t bring herself to smile. Her insides suddenly felt dry.
‘Jaya, what is it?’ Eleven stood up.
‘I’m going to Bangladesh.’
‘Don’t you go to Bangladesh every year?’
‘Yes, I do… But this time it’s amidst… well, you know. The whole marriage thing.’
Eleven nodded. ‘Yea, I know, I was expecting that to come along at some point, but you’re not gunna get married when you go this time, are you?’
‘Well…’
‘O come on Jaya, I expected more from you. You’re going for a maximum of, what, five, six weeks? You can’t meet a guy to marry in such a short space of time. And what about us?’
Jaya looked up. ‘What about us?’
Eleven scoffed, suddenly angry. ‘Jesus, I know you don’t like telling the world about us, but I thought at least you knew what ‘us’ meant.’ She started pacing. ‘I bet you haven’t even told anyone about this, have you?’
‘I don’t need the world to see this; they wouldn’t understand.’
‘Do you even know what this is?
‘Yes; I’m in it, if you hadn’t noticed. On paper I know this seems wrong, but in black and white, most stuff seems wrong.’ She looked nervous; her cheeks were red, she was rubbing the pads of her thumb against her index finger like she was twirling around a piece of string; but there was nothing there.
Eleven sat down. ‘What is it to everyone else anyway? It’s not like we’re affecting them, so just chill out.’
‘I’m chilled. But it’s not me who’s freaking out over this; it’s everyone else.’
‘Trust me, that’s guna continue no matter what you do or who you end up with, you might as well get used to it.’
Jaya sighed, rubbing her temples. ‘This was never supposed to get this serious.’
Eleven looked up.
‘No? Doesn’t quite fit in to your master plan then?’
‘Don’t be petty.’
‘You need to control what comes out of your mouth.’
‘I’m sorry. It just came out.’
‘You’re an adult; get a filter.’
‘Well anyway, nice to know this was a productive conversation.’ She turned to go.
‘Walking away isn’t going to solve anything.’
‘I don’t think we should bother anymore.’
‘With what?’
‘With us.’
‘You know that’s not going to work, although you can try. But you know when you’re faced with your demons late at night, or when you’re bored, you’re going to give me a text message and come crawling back.’
‘You can keep on flattering yourself. You’re delusional. Do you honestly think you can start a relationship with another woman while you’re still married? Do you genuinely believe that’s even possible?’
‘Do you genuinely believe that you could either, when you’re headed towards marrying a bloke?’
‘No, but I don’t think this is a real relationship and I fully acknowledge that.’
‘Then how do you propose to end something that didn’t even exist in the first place?’
Jaya walked on to the pavement.
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘This conversation isn’t going anywhere,’ Jaya said, without turning around.
‘No, I mean to Bangladesh.’ Eleven spoke quietly, her head bowed, her eyes closed. Jaya turned around and walked back in to the room.
The futility of the situation was never, at any point in their liaison, too tightly tucked away in their minds; but now it danced about in the air between them. For all her binge thinking, Jaya Chakarbatti from a line of cane wielding peer-sahibs knew wisdom was best done post-event.
She cleared her throat. ‘I understand. There’s nothing I can do, though. It’s only six weeks.’
‘That’s six weeks too much. We have very little time before you-’ Eleven shuffled her feet, an awkward motion on somebody who could have strangled an interfering in-law with a single stare, ‘you know,’
‘Yes. But that doesn’t mean we should put our lives on hold until then. It’d probably end up doing more damage to us anyway.’
Eleven didn’t look up.
‘Are you seeing anybody else?’ She looked up, but immediately shook her head. ‘No, actually, I don’t want to know.’
She sighed. ‘Look, do what you need to do. You’re a good girl, and I know you’d do anything for your parents. Just go to Bangladesh, and have a good time-’
‘Ok you don’t have to feed me meaningless lines,’
Eleven chuckled, her brows set low, her eyelids almost closed, her back hunched, her usually full pout downturned. ‘Go, then.’
Jaya stood for a minute, looking at her. She didn’t blink; if there was one image she wanted to burn in to her memory forever, it was this one; the sum of all her decisions. A moment of panic flared up; had she retained enough? Did she remember enough to last her for the rest of her life? Had she taken enough pictures and kept the letters and notes written on pakora wrappers, full of sweet nothings? Did she remember her smell, of white flowers and soft cotton? Would she remember the way Eleven’s hair would feel around her face as they lay in bed biting each others’ teeth? What about her feet; what was her shoe size? How did she like her coffee? What were her childrens’ names?
She looked down, as the thoughts almost overwhelmed her. The retention of memories –the kind of things wars were fought for- was ruining this, her last moment with the quiet breeze that had filled her lungs when everything else was crushing her (for this was the last time they would ever meet). She took a deep breath, stepped out, and closed the door behind her.
Chapter 10