Deirdre Rutters and the Glenys Lowbridges were putting on lipstick and waltzing off to pubs and bingo and dances and Mrs Worrall’s big treat was an extra lemon puff in front of Crossroads, whilst her husband dozed off.
Not all the English were selfish, like mama sometimes said, but then again, I did not think of Mrs Worrall as English. She was a symbol of something I’d noticed in some of the Tollington women, a stoic muscular resistance which made them ask for nothing and expect less, the same resignation I heard in the voices of my Aunties when they spoke of back home or their children’s bad manners or the wearying monotony of their jobs. My Aunties did not rage against fate or England when they swapped misery tales, they put everything down to the will of Bhagwan, their karma, their just deserts inherited from their last reincarnation which they had to live through and solve with grace and dignity. In the end, they knew God was on their side; I got the feeling that most of the Tollington women assumed that He had simply forgotten them.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I mumbled, backing away on Bambi legs, ‘Mum’s waiting …’
Mrs Worrall wordlessly helped me into the kitchen which now smelt like a bakery, yeasty and welcoming and warm. She retrieved the metal tray from the oven on which stood ten perfect tartlets and one which resembled a relief map of Africa. Nevertheless, she filled it with lemon curd from a twist-top jar, and threw in another two tarts for mama and papa, warning me, ‘Wait a minute, or that curd’ll tek the skin off yer tongue.’
I carried the three trophies on a napkin carefully to the door, and then paused to call out, ‘Bye Mr Worrall!’ as cheerily as I could manage. I did not expect an answer but I felt Mrs Worrall’s eyes gently guide me to my back door.
Mama and Papa were sitting on the mock leather yellow settee, a bad idea if you wanted to have a serious or unnoticed conversation because your every shift would be accompanied by a symphony of leathery farts and squeaks. It was especially thrilling to welcome a new overweight relative to the house, who would invariably be received in our ‘front’ room with its tie-dye Indian hangings and brass ornaments, as opposed to the ‘lounge’, our telly and flop room next to it with its worn flowery suite and ricketty dining table. I got hours of pleasure seeing corpulent uncles parp their way through their starters or alarmed roly-poly aunties vainly hold onto their sari petticoats as they slowly slipped backwards into the marshmallow cushions.
So I knew, when I entered, by the hurried scrapings and scuffles, that mama and papa had been sitting together and talking about me. I decided to adopt my cute over-achiever face as I held my jam tarts aloft. ‘Mrs Worrall taught me to bake. Next week we’re making rum babas!’
Mama got up slowly and brushed past me into the kitchen. I had not seen papa since this 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