The House of Hidden Mothers (53 page)

And there they were, waiting. Ahead of him, the bride's welcoming committee stood in the doorway of the crumbling hall, garlands of flaming marigolds in their hands. His own Baraat, the menfolk from his side who were his companions on this journey from callow youth to fully paid up member of the respectable married classes, roared their arrival. Bow and be grateful, the man who will take your daughter off your hands for ever is here! His future mother-in-law teetered forward, her face shining; brown moon, white horse, grey snow. Deepak drew his tinsel curtain back over his eyes and felt the warm horse rumble and heave beneath him.

Chila looked at his toenails and felt a strange sense of dread. His feet were fine; brown, not too hairy, clean enough. But she could not tear her eyes from his toenails as they walked round the fire (about to be wed, head bowed submissively just in case anyone might suspect she was looking forward to a night of rampant nuptials). Ten yellowing, waxy nodules crowned each toe, curled and stiff as ancient parchment, a part of him she had never noticed before, feet that demanded attention because of their glaring imperfection, the feet of a man who might read
Garden Sheds Weekly
every evening instead of loving her. Chila told herself off. This was unfair, sacrilegious even, on your wedding day.

Or maybe it was just being prepared, like her mother was. Her mother who had handed over a parcel of brand new and frilly pink lingerie which she had bought as part of Chila's trousseau, ready to wear when her daughter finally moved in with Deepak tonight, man and wife, all official. Her mother who had coughed with embarrassment as Chila discovered the sprinkling of rose petals hidden amongst the Cellophane, shyly folding in on themselves like her own fingers were doing now. ‘Sweet, Mum.' Chila smiled, ignoring the subtext in her mother's eyes, My poor baby will have the dirty thing done to her tonight. Chila had not had the heart to tell her the dirty thing had already taken place many months ago in a lock-up garage just off the A406.

‘Move, didi!' her brother Raju hissed, pushing her round the holy fire. She could not look up even if she wanted, weighed down by an embroidered dupatta encrusted with fake pearls and gold-plated balls. The heavy lengha prevented her from taking more than baby steps behind her almost-husband to whom she was tied, literally, her scarf to his turban. She would have liked to wear a floaty thing, all gossamer and light, and skip around the flames like a sprite, blowing raspberries at the mafia of her mother's friends whose mantra during all her formative years had been, ‘No man will ever want that one, the plump darkie with the shy stammer.' But she had shocked them all, the sour-faced harpies, by bagging not only a groom with his own teeth, hair, degree and house, but the most eligible bachelor within a twenty-mile radius.

She stole a sneaky glance at Deepak, who was checking his profile in the fractured reflection of the silver mirror ball above their heads, each winking pane with its own tiny flaming heart, a thousand holy fires refracted in its shiny orb. Bloody hell, he was fit and he was hers. She wanted to celebrate. But instead she was mummified in red and gold silk, swaddled in half the contents of Gupta's Gold Emporium, pierced, powdered and plumped up so that her body would only walk the walk of everyone's mothers on all their weddings, meekly, shyly, reluctantly towards matrimony. Chila tilted her head with difficulty and took in a deep gulp of air before she began the next perambulation, glad of the momentary rest while Deeps adjusted his headdress. She locked eyes with Tania, sitting straight-backed on the front row. She's looking a bit rough today, thought Chila, with an unexpected tinge of pleasure.

Tania shot Chila a reassuring wink and just managed to turn a grimace of discomfort into an encouraging smile. She ached all over and the new slingbacks she'd bought in five minutes flat yesterday had already raised blisters. She was squeezed between two large sari-draped ladies, fleshy bookends who exchanged stage whispers across her lap, giving a wheezy running commentary to the great drama unfolding before them.

‘You see, how nicely she walks behind him? She will follow his lead in life. That is good.'

‘Oh, now the father is crying. About time. Daughters are only visitors in our lives, hena?'

‘Hai, they are lent to us for a short while and then we have to hand them over to strangers like—'

‘Bus tickets?'

‘Hah! But then where does the journey end, hah?'

‘Hah! Yes. Only God knows, as he is the driver.'

‘Now the sister is howling. I'd howl if I had a moustache like hers . . .'

Tania leaned forward pointedly, hoping to obscure their view of each other and save herself another half-hour of homely wedding quips in stereo. But the women merely adjusted themselves around her, heaving bosoms into the crevices of her elbows. She suddenly remembered why she had stopped attending community events, cultural evenings, bring-a-Tupperware parties, all the engagements, weddings and funerals that marked out their borrowed time here. She could not take the proximity of everything any more. The endless questions of who what why she was, to whom she belonged (father/husband/workplace), why her life wasn't following the ordained patterns for a woman of her age, religion, height and income bracket. The sheer physical effrontery of her people, wanting to be inside her head, to own her, claim her, preserve her. Her people.

Tania checked her watch, angry at herself for hoping that the wedding might be running to schedule. Indian time. Look at the appointed hour and add another two for good measure. Memories of family picnics, outings to relatives' homes, rare but treasured cinema visits, where she would bring up the rear, mute with shame at her clan's inevitable late entrance. ‘So what if the food's cold/the park shuts in ten minutes/the film has started?' her father would boom. ‘Nobody minds, hah?' Tania minded so much she got migraines. She closed her eyes as the priest began another mantra, willing the familiar words to take her back in time and get rid of the small voice that chanted in time with the distant finger bells, the voice that said, You don't belong.

Sunita slipped into an empty seat at the back of the hall, just as Chila and Deepak were making their final round of the fire. Nikita stood at her side, shivering in her pint-size silk suit, so cute on the hanger and sodding useless in the snow.

‘Come here, Nikki,' Sunita whispered, pulling her daughter close to her and moving her sleeping son to the other arm, plumply snoozing in his rabbit-eared Baby-Gro. She rubbed Nikita's hands and face until she felt the glow returning, and heaved her onto the remaining inches of lap. The pristine magenta suit she'd squeezed into this morning was now a map of motherhood, marked out by handprints, chocolate streaks and a recent vomit stain which bloomed from her breast like some damp crusty flower.

‘Look at Auntie Chila, Nikki! She's getting married, see?'

Nikita nodded dumbly, absorbing the fairy grotto effects around her.

This is where it starts, thought Sunita, a little girl at her mother's knee wanting to be the scarlet princess whose beauty lights fires. Sunita felt a green stab of envy, seeing Chila, dark, dumpy, dearest friend Chila, parading her joy like a trophy. Sunita had been a perfect size eight when she wore her wedding sari. Akash had kissed each of her fingertips that night, awed by their perfection. She used to paint her nails then.

‘Mama looked just like Auntie Chila when she got married to Papa,' Sunita told Nikita with a kiss.

Nikita blinked. Disbelievingly, Sunita thought.

Deepak and Chila finished their seventh round of the fire and paused before the priest, who held his hand up dramatically, waiting for hush. Pandit Kumar was pregnant with his own importance at this solemn point, emphasized by his impressive belly, which strained the seams of his beige and gold-trimmed shalwar kameez. He often thought of Elvis Presley at this juncture in the wedding ceremony, how the King would possess the microphone, angle that profile just so to the watching cameras with a daring insouciance, toss that quiff and casually break a thousand hearts. At such moments, Pandit Kumar forgot he was bald, sweaty and bandy-legged. He had the stage, he held the futures of two young lovers in the palms of his hands and he had a god-given duty to put on a good show.

He shiftily checked that the squinty videoman had adjusted to close-up mode before he cleared his throat, swallowed a sizeable phlegm-ball and began: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now I will ask the bride and groom to swap their seating, symbolically showing that dearest Chila will now pass into the hands of dearest Deepak and his loving family. Her old life as her father's daughter has ended. Her new life as her husband's wife has begun. Chila, Deepak, please will you now be seated!'

Chila gathered her sari about her and did a clumsy do-si-do with Deepak, negotiating fabric and high heels and the coconuts hanging from her wrists until, at last, she came to rest on a seat warm with Deepak's body heat. She saw Deepak's mother grinning mistily up at her from the floor. Chila grinned back, suddenly light-headed, feeling her stomach trying to rise up and displace her heart. She realized, with a shock, what it was that had possessed her body. She was happy.

Deepak reached over and squeezed her hand. He stared from Chila to his mother and back again. So this is what it felt like, he thought, to belong, finally. He leaned into Chila and whispered something into her ear, which made her titter and blush, and precipitated a spontaneous round of applause which began at Sunita's seat, rippled through eighteen rows of smiling, satisfied guests and reached the platform in a wave of goodwill and joy. The videoman risked an ambitious wide shot of the hall. Pandit Kumar raised a funky fist in the air and shouted, ‘All right! Let's hear it for Chila and Deepak! All right!'

‘So what did he say, then?' Tania demanded, before lighting up a slim menthol cigarette.

‘Not in here, Tania!' gasped Sunita, instinctively swivelling to the door of the tiny anteroom, ears pricked to the noises of celebration outside.

‘It's locked.' Tania smiled mockingly at Sunita. ‘Calm down, Auntieji, we will not let the evil fumes ruin Chila's reputation.'

‘I'm thinking of Chila,' Sunita retorted, cheeks burning. ‘Chila's mother-in-law's hovering outside.'

‘She's still ours, though.' Tania exhaled. ‘Officially, until the doli. So they can wait, hey Chila?'

Chila wobbled on one foot, trying to squeeze a leg into bright pink silk pyjamas.

They made an odd threesome. Tania was svelte, sharp-featured, with long-lazy limbs and a leonine mane (never cut, odd for a Modern Girl), dismissive of the beauty that was her passport out of East London and into cosmopolitan circles where she was now termed merely exotic. Sunita and Chila had feared they might lose her, when Tania broke loose from her traditional moorings and drifted into an uncharted ocean with her English man and snappy Soho job. But they also knew, when she did return, it was always for them. And they forgave her, for when she did breeze in smelling of leather office chairs and tangy perfume she seemed to drag the world in with her, full of possibilities, on spiky heels. ‘Here I am! Back with the pindoos,' she'd trill, back with the village idiots, she'd joke, although, Sunita noticed, Tania still sat like one with them, crossed legs, shoes off, unknotting herself in a way that suggested, despite her protestations, that part of her still responded to them like Home.

Sunita, they had all three decided, was always the one Most Likely to Succeed. She'd sailed through school and college with straight As, and was halfway through a law degree when she'd met Akash. He'd called her a scab as she'd entered the university refectory to buy a pasty and lectured her right there on the pavement, in his open-toed sandals and fraying jumper, about the oppressed canteen staff within, who relied on their support for their ongoing work-to-rule protest. Sunita barely took in a word. She was trying to work out what planet he'd landed from, this man full of fizz and fury with Medusa-messy hair, and why the hell hadn't she known that there were Asian men around like this one. She failed her finals, unsurprisingly really, as most of her revision had taken place on Akash's bedsit mattress. Ten years on, the fledgling battling barrister had a comfy desk job at a local Citizens' Advice Bureau, and the children of the revolution's children held them, comfortably, together. Sunita's delicate, doll-like features were now softened by the fleshy mantle worn by married Indian ladies in their mid-thirties. It was like a uniform, the designer silks, the ostentatious gold jewellery, collected on booty trips to Bahrain, the rippling belly rolls escaping from painted on sari blouses. No guilty aerobic sessions for them. The old rules still applied; coming from a place where starvation was a reality rather than a fashion statement, fat meant wealth and contentment. So Sunita could claim her cellulite was a political stance, rather than something, like many other things in her life, which had crept up on her unawares.

And then there was Chila, wrestling with fuchsia folds. Known as Poor Chila for years, while relatives and educationalists alike mistook her innocence and unworldly joy for stupidity. First she was slow, then thick, then sweet, and finally, concluded her sorrowful parents, unmarriageable, for didn't the boys nowadays expect smart yet domesticated women with both culinary skills and a Ph.D.? But Chila's close friends knew better; Tania and Sunita had noticed early on the cinnamon smiling girl standing by herself in the corner of the playground. They had even briefly joined in with the mob teasing of all the unfortunate rejects who were herded into the prefabricated hut reserved for the Special Children. They had watched through the hut windows, giggling, as Chila and her classmates, mostly black and Asian children, cut out pictures from catalogues with blunt scissors, tongues out in concentration, and wondered why she never got angry or embarrassed at their gawping. And one day, suddenly, Chila appeared in their classroom, clutching her folder nervously, and was shown to the empty desk behind them. The news spread that Chila had entered an essay into a schools' competition and won. The school had assumed that the recent refugee from East Africa could not speak a word of English, never mind compose a lyrical treatise on the joys of spring. Chila's essay was pinned up outside the headmaster's office. It was full of violent African blooms and flame-coloured birds, a different kind of spring that briefly inhabited a musty corner and made those who read it sigh longingly and wish for the sun. Chila never wrote anything as good again. In fact, she consistently failed every exam going, as if that single swansong had depleted any formal intelligence she may have possessed. But by then Tania and Sunita had adopted her and discovered that the girl they'd once tagged the Dark Dumbo was funnier, sweeter and kinder than anyone else knew. They kept the secret like they kept each other's friendship: close, to themselves.