Anita and Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

sent on a non-existent errand so my mother could finish the latest piece of yard gossip whilst the Aunties would listen wide-eyed, ears flapping, moustaches quivering, glad they had made the perilous journey from the civilised side of Wolverhampton to catch up on the peculiar goings on of the ‘gores’. There was much affectionate laughter, but laughter all the same, tinged with something like revenge.
    But mama was not laughing today. The sun was hot now and I felt sick with all the sugar I had consumed; every sweet had tasted only of one thing, Guilt. Through the open front door, I could hear my parents having what they called one of their ‘discussions’, which began as a stilted, almost embarrassed conversation as if two neighbours who barely knew each other had met on the steps of a VD clinic, progressed to a strangely musical monologue by my father, accompanied on percussion by mother banging down various pots and pans, and always ended with a male vocal explosion and a tangible female silence which invaded the house like a sad damp smell. I wondered vaguely if they were arguing about the house.
    Whenever my father got sick of our three-up-three-down with its high uneven walls and narrow winding stairs, sick of the damp in the pantry, the outside toilet, the three buses it took to get to work, taking a bath in our bike shed and having to whisper when he wanted to shout, he’d turn to my mother and say, ‘You wanted this house, remember that.’
    My mother grew up in a small Punjabi village not far from Chandigarh. As she chopped onions for the evening meal or scrubbed the shine back onto a steel pan or watched the clouds of curds form in a bowl of slowly setting homemade yoghurt, any action with a rhythm, she would begin a mantra about her ancestral home. She would chant of a three-storeyed flat-roofed house, blinkered with carvedwooden shutters around a dust yard where an old-fashioned pump stood under a mango tree.
    She would talk of running with her tin mug to the she-goat tethered to the tree and, holding the mug under its nipples, pulling down a foaming jet of milk straight into her father’s morning tea. She spoke of the cobra who lived in the damp grasses beneath the fallen apples in the vast walled orchard, of the peacocks whose keening kept her awake on rainy monsoon nights, of her Muslim neighbours whom they always made a point of visiting on festivals, bringing sweetmeats to emphasise how the land they shared was more important than the religious differences that would soon tear the Punjab in two.
    Yet, in England, when all my mother’s friends made the transition from relatives’ spare rooms and furnished lodgings to homes of their own, they all looked for something ‘modern’. ‘It’s really up-to-date, Daljit,’ one of the Aunties would preen as she gave us the grand tour of her first proper home in England. ‘Look, extra strong flush system…Can opener on the wall…Two minutes walk to all local amenities …’ But my mother knew what she wanted. When she stepped off the bus in Tollington, she did not see the outside lavvy or the apology for a garden or the medieval kitchen, she saw fields and trees, light and space, and a horizon that welcomed the sky which, on a warm night and through squinted eyes, could almost look something like home.
    At first I would listen entranced to this litany of love, imagining my mother as I had seen her in those crumpled black and white photographs hoarded in a shiny suitcase on top of her wardrobe. She was skinny and dark then, all eyes and stick insect limbs protruding from a white pyjama suit with paper-sharp creases in the legs. She retained this image, of a country girl lost in the big city, throughout her teens and early twenties, only the costume changed. Here was mama in a school play, a coat hanger for a home-sewn robe, mama winning a race as All Delhi College Champion, running in full length salwar kameez , mama as a lecturer, standing in front of