The Sitar Read online

  Chapter 2

  Mr Abdul Chakkarbatti was worried as the police asked him for a statement to describe the person who stole his car, because all white people looked the same to him.

  ‘Well, brown hair, he had. And, uhm, aaahm, he has white skin and such such…’

  He faltered and became irritated with himself. Jaya had let her pernickety Westernised side get the best of her and forced him to tell the police their shiny but dented Mercedes had been stolen.

  Mr Chakkarbatti thought this was a waste of time. The police here came with their notepads and judgements and raped their little Muslim household with their big white presence. And goodness, they talked a lot. Although, Mr Chakkarbatti always found their words strangely reassuring, as though simply talking was actually doing half the work. Yes, this he had always approved of with the white peoples.

  ‘Well Mr Chakra-Borty, we’ll certainly do our best, and we’ll be in touch.’

  Aaah, the distancing words of the White Goodbye. He closed the door behind them, feeling a little violated that his Mahal had been infiltrated.

  His wife emerged from the kitchen after coyly hiding while the police finished questioning him.

  ‘Tut,’ she shuffled about the place readjusting things the visitors hadn’t even touched, ‘Ish, Ish! Coming in to the house when they eating the pork and drinking the alcohol, ish!’ She hitched up her sari, wound up the loose end around her fat Buddha-belly and savagely tucked it in to the hip. She then proceeded to read a series of Quranic verses and furious dusting, to cleanse the place of invisible remnants of pig and alcohol.

  Abdul sat back at his desk and sighed. It was end of the tax year and he had to finish off his clients’ accounts, pray at the mosque, collect some rent, and deposit some money at the bank. The Mercedes was replaceable. But little else was.

  He stared at the figures in front of him. He still did his books by hand.

  ‘Wife, where is Jaya?’

  ‘She is revising at her friend’s house.’

  There was a long silence. It was one currency they used to pay the price for bringing up their children in England.

  Jaya was often described as a coconut. Her wholesome middle-class English accent was a freak accident in the middle of Coventry’s ghetto. Her university education belied the gun-crime statistics of her area. David Cameron’s policies sat nicely with her as much as they grated on her neighbours. She did not lend herself well to exotic, fetishized images of British-Asian ‘otherness’ for posh white lecturers and be-sandled Guardian columnists to salivate over.

  She was angry, horny and informed.

  Jaya also had something bubbling inside her belly that was unexplainable; an idea, a potential, deep in the pits of her belly, no, lower than that, her gut. Somewhere embedded in the cilia of her intestines. It was such an intensely concentrated mixture of somethingness that it was highly sensitive, and whenever she came near to something that could fulfil it, she ran away, unable to handle the intensity.

  She was pretty sure it was this abstract and somewhat pretentious aspect of her life that drove her forward and made her special; for she was special of course yes she was.

  But unfortunately this somethingsomething was a distraction. It meant that she was always somewhere else in her head, chasing some other idea lifestyle girl grade car career philosophy, that she was always deeply unsatisfied about where she was.

  This made her a yearning personality. It showed in her eyes. Teamed with the anger, it was an intoxicating combination.

  Well, it wasn’t just Jaya’s eyes, per se, that fucked with peoples’ heads. It never actually is the eyes, she thought; it’s a romanticised notion. If a person’s eyeballs were ripped out of their face, did they relay any emotion? No. It was the area around the eyes; the eyebrows, the wrinkles, the eyelids, where the emotion was.

  She always knew that was why Asian girls pioneered threading in Britain (every shopping centre from Putney to Bradford had a little hut with a bitchy-looking Asian girl offering her twisted string). They weren’t lost in inaccurate romanticising a la ‘eyes are the windows to the soul’. They were beaten with the stick of reality and knew what the deal was. They were expected to be a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.

  It was in the eye brows.

  For Jaya, though ,eyebrows and all of their romance were as transient as the frost on her breath. She was walking through the ghetto of Coventry, her farcically cursed home town, leaving her house in the bitter January cold, past the row of grim terraced houses, net curtains drawn, hush hush about what went on inside. The thoughts of Hamida at No. 42 who was about to run away with the rice delivery boy. The convictions of Little Asif at No. 13, who had just hit puberty but had already learnt how to construct a small bomb using ingredients from the local bric-a-brac shop. The inner whisperings of Mrs Choudhury’s head, who relentlessly cooked curry after curry in the hope that the steam and the bubbling would choke the voices that told her after 40 years of marriage is was time to listen to the NHS leaflet about Domestic Violence written in badly translated Bengali, and delivered to No. 38. The resentment felt by Mrs Kaur who had once heard on Sunrise Radio that the reason British Asians were so prone to obesity was because they came from famine-struck countries and their genes dictated that they store all their fat for survival, so that now they were in England, a country of Abundance, their waistbands expanded hugely. Imagine! Being fat in this country was a tell-tale sign of a beggar’s heritage! As a result, Mrs Kaur starved her daughters… she didn’t want anyone thinking they were anything other than the wealthy Kaur’s of No. 10 who didn’t dilute the Fairy Liquid with water…

  These were houses whispering secrets, pantry’s full of masala and gin stuffed in bedroom drawers.

  Jaya walked past these houses pumping out their smells of onion at various stages of cooking. She pulled on her leather gloves and absentmindedly plumped up her back-combed jet black hair, proudly void of Paki-Copper highlights. Her skin was winter milky, the kind that attracted secret mutterings of black magic from jealous housewives in Bangladesh. She always got mistaken for an Italian; she didn’t admit it, but it made her proud. Anything to belie the short-and-dark Bangladeshi DNA. It was the only neo-colonial indulgence she allowed herself (or so she thought).

  She walked with her head down; it was something the after-school mosque lessons has taught her and stuck for life. Jaya’s was a strange posture: her head was bowed, weighted with the shyness taught from religion; her back was straight and self-important, from a proud education, her walk was quick, from the humility taught from parents from a cripplingly poor country (quick walkers, to get out of everyone’s way). Today, her stride was wide, from her coital exploits of last night.

  But this morning was not about her Lassi Lesbians; no no! Today was Jaya’s day of revelling in the jarring nostalgia of her childhood! She was in Coventry, the Ghost Town of 1983, the bastard cousin of Birmingham, the shit that slipped out with the last few farts of the deflated car industry, the bastion of urban decay and its disgusting decrepit twisting series of ring roads and concrete and breeze blocks and piles upon piles of pissed-on bricks and broken bus stops and shattered cider bottles and potholes and flattened speed humps.

  Glorious, towering blocks of flats housing overcrowding immigrants on one side, and St George’s flags hanging off the balcony on the other side. There were alleyways, lots and lots of them, everywhere; but Jaya strode past them, she ignored the swastika painted on the side of the mosque, didn’t look as the hooded boys at the bus shelter skulked, hardly noticed the beggar in the subway, or the Somali prostitute outside the casino. No, they were the Invisibles. They were interwoven in the fabric of the city, simply background detail, fodder, like the sawdust in the coke.

  Jaya was in the final year of university, enjoying an end of term holiday away from the ponces at the University of Leeds, in that bizarre period where she was ecstatic with the end of hearing countless nonce’s intellectually masturbate a
bout post-colonialism and identity crises and multiculturalism and diasporas, in their middle-class drone and painfully flowery academic theses which they prescribed to all their students.

  On the other hand, she would miss being the only Asian in her English Literature year of 400. She would miss how everybody would pay extra attention to her during seminars, acting as though she wasn’t their only brown friend. She would miss the arrogant sense of security university gave her, the temporary ground it lent her to look down at those unemployed bastards kicked in the balls by the recession.

  She faltered for a moment. What awaited her on the other side of summer? All the textbooks and pussy and prayer during exams and results and graduation would have to end… and of course everybody knew postgraduate degrees were for people who failed to find a job after their undergrad… she couldn’t fail the burning ambition burning in her bloodline… her sister was a plastic surgeon… her father an accountant… impossible! She would HAVE to either kill herself or find her slot in the world… her untouchable position in the Chakarbatti heritage, the lofty ideals had to be fulfilled. She had Asian Superwoman Syndrome; what a label! Her ancestors had not graduated from Cambridge and sat around in the tea gardens of Bengal waxing lyrical about the Partition just to be insulted by Jaya’s inability to get a job in the midst of the UK’s credit crunch!

  Akram Chakarbatti The Closet Womaniser of Dhaka, 1972, did not ostentatiously overpay the riksha-wallah in front of his neighbours just to have his legacy crushed by a lesbian from Coventry!

  And on the eve of Britain surrendering it’s hold over India in 1947, a one Farhana Chakarbatti did not become the first educated female to start a violent protest to have her efforts abruptly ended by her great great great (and so on) granddaughter who was too preoccupied with boobs! No! The efforts went back, back through time, back through the dynasties, the British Raj, the Moghul era, the Khilji reign, the endless planes of battlefields and evolution, hot deserts and palm trees and leather water sacks and Eastern philosophies and scriptures…

  And landed here outside a pub in the bowels of Urban England. Jaya looked up guiltily at the big red ‘Filly & Firkin’ sign, had a quick look over both shoulders, and slunk inside. The only thing that would sizzle away those heavy thoughts of lineage would be a shot of Bombay Sapphire; bottling the glory days of the Empire and selling it back to them on their tiny little island of failure.

  ‘How much cinammon do you like in your tea?’ Mrs Datta asked, her maternal beam showering over Jaya, who consciously didn’t talk too much in case the gin could be smelt. Mrs Datta was a Hindu and Jaya and her sister would get beaten with the wooden curry spoon if they came home smelling of incense and methi after visiting the Datta’s in their childhood. But now, Jaya would drop by, since Mr Datta had died of testicular cancer, her son was a drug dealer and her daughter Ananya was the city slut. But still, Mrs Datta would wear her dignified gold and purple sari’s, her eyes dull but kind, her smile knowing but young, her voice croaky but intrigued, making her tea in a saucepan like her in-laws had always loved, but who never came round anymore for they blamed her for Mr Datta’s death from a cancer prevalent in his family history and his 30-a-day smoking habit.

  ‘As much as you think is right for me, please,’ Jaya smiled, and welcomed the masala chai. She walked in to the living room and pretended to not notice Ananya hurriedly turn the page away from the Bollywood column in the Metro –it was something everybody secretly did but didn’t admit to.

  The girls hugged; it was genuine. There was an understanding that even though they only bothered to see each other twice a year, there was something unifying about being the only English-speaking Bengalis in the area.

  The news headlines read inane stories about government policies and Islamic militants, commentaries on 9/11 and 7/7 anniversaries and a spout of comments about halal slaughter Vs stunning. It had suddenly become normal for a mainstream working-class paper to carry articles on age-old beliefs and for work experience kids to compile commentaries on British Muslims. Jaya laughed at the finding that Wembley stadium was serving halal meat unlabelled; she’d know for years; Patel’s Halal Butchers round the corner took most of their outsourcing requests. Hardworking little bastard that Patel was, he undercut the prices of almost anyone in England, rounded up his Midland Meat Men (one in Coventry, two in Birmingam) and supplied pretty much all meat eaten in major venues across the country. Undeclared, tax-evading, underhanded genius that he was, even he could not understand white peoples’ taste for eating congealed pig’s blood and thought he was doing the country a favour.

  The evening wore on and the girls talked and Mrs Datta shuffled about in the kitchen, nobody noticing her eyes getting sadder and the lines on her face getting deeper. That her daughter worked in a call centre –which was something she could have done if they’d stayed in India- and her son was selling drugs cheaper than in Punjab, strained her heart hugely. That it was suddenly OK to let a Muslim girl visit their house freely, hurt her even more. That the Muslim girl was more respectable that her own family, well, that would eventually kill her.

  She fixed her sari and put some more tea in the saucepan.

  Chapter 3