Balli Kaur Jaswal - The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters

‘Should we call Shirina again or something?’ Jezmeen asked. ‘She might have gone back to sleep.’

‘Give her ten minutes,’ Rajni said. She glanced towards the hotel lifts. ‘Do you think it’s weird that she didn’t tell us about visiting Sehaj’s family till yesterday?’

Jezmeen shrugged. ‘Maybe she got the dates confused. It sounds like she’s been really busy.’

Rajni frowned. She didn’t look satisfied with this response, and truthfully, neither was Jezmeen, but it seemed that Shirina had become another casualty to marriage, like so many other women Jezmeen knew. Appointments were never set in stone and they often brought their partners along to dinner at the last minute.

‘Is it just me, or does she look … different?’ Rajni asked.

‘She’s gained weight, hasn’t she?’ Jezmeen said. She wanted to sound concerned but she could hear the glee in her voice. Shame on you, a voice scolded Jezmeen.

‘I was thinking more about those dark circles under her eyes. She looks worn out.’ There was pleasure in Rajni’s tone as well. Jezmeen decided it couldn’t be helped. All their lives, Shirina never had a blemish – on her face or her character. If they had to be petty to find one – or two! – so be it.

‘I feel bad,’ Jezmeen said anyway. ‘Maybe something’s going on.’ That would certainly be interesting. After a lifetime of meeting parental expectations, Shirina was long overdue for a crisis. Develop a pill addiction. Join a cult. Something. It would certainly take the pressure off Jezmeen to be the default family screw-up.

‘I gained a bit of weight in the year after I got married as well,’ Rajni said. ‘If anything, it’s good to see some meat on her bones again. She was so skinny for her wedding. Near the end, she was on a steady diet of leaves and broth.’

Rajni had a point. Shirina had been a little obsessed with her figure. ‘I remember going over to Mum’s to help decorate the house for the wedding a couple of days before Sehaj’s relatives arrived. She’d bought all those fairy lights, which took ages to put up and we lost track of time and ordered pizza. Shirina ate one slice and then went to the gym for two hours,’ Jezmeen recalled. She had admired and secretly envied Shirina’s discipline. At an audition the next day, Jezmeen had to suck in her tummy to prevent the casting director from seeing the paunch created by her six slices. She didn’t get the role.

‘She’d tell us if she was pregnant, wouldn’t she?’ Rajni asked.

‘Shirina’s quite private about her life these days,’ Jezmeen reminded Rajni. Shirina hadn’t told them anything about searching for an arranged marriage online. She never even mentioned her courtship with Sehaj – all six months of it – until he came to London to meet her in person and proposed on their second date. Everything happened quickly from that point and nobody objected because Sehaj was such a catch – good-looking, wealthy, and from a respected family. Then she said yes, and moved all the way to Australia. If that wasn’t an effort to keep her distance from her family, Jezmeen didn’t know what was.

‘That’s not something she’d keep from us though,’ Rajni said.

‘Probably not, but I don’t think we’re necessarily the first to know about things with Shirina.’ Were we ever? Jezmeen wondered. For as long as she could remember, Shirina had preferred to keep her thoughts and emotions closely guarded. Next to her, Jezmeen always felt like she was exaggerating whenever she expressed her (admittedly wide and varied range of) emotions.

‘I wish it weren’t like that,’ Rajni replied.

Jezmeen shrugged. ‘It’s her choice,’ she said, although she had been hurt when Shirina announced her engagement. Why didn’t she even tell Jezmeen she was seeing someone?

‘It’s a shame if we can’t communicate. I’d like to think we can talk about things with each other.’

Jezmeen noticed that Rajni had turned to face her and was giving her a Meaningful Look. Oh, don’t you dare, she thought. They were not going to talk about Mum in the same space as speculating over Shirina’s weight gain. In fact, Jezmeen was determined to not discuss Mum’s final moments with anyone, least of all Rajni.

‘The weight gain is probably just a post-wedding thing,’ Jezmeen said. She made a deliberate shift towards the television screen and stared intently at it. The flashing graphics gave her an instant headache but at least Rajni couldn’t try to engage her in any more conversation. The newscaster wore a grim expression, which belied the brilliant hues of her sari and the ticker speeding across the screen announcing the engagement of two Bollywood stars.

When Shirina finally joined them in the lobby at 8.30 a.m., Jezmeen noticed the dark circles under her eyes were gone. Her lips shone with pink gloss and a touch of rouge, which brightened up her face. She was the only one of them wearing a traditional salwar-kameez, with her long hair also pulled back in a bun. The weight gain was still there though, a roundness in her cheeks that actually made her look – Jezmeen felt a twinge of jealousy – a little bit prettier.

It was a short distance from the hotel to the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib but the roads were already clogged with traffic by the time they left the hotel. The taxi could only inch along the wide boulevard under the Karol Bagh Metro bridge. The driver’s window was rolled down, letting in the sound of every puttering engine and trilling horn. People dodged around vehicles, taking their chances every time there was a pause in traffic. Heat shimmered atop the silver surfaces of street vendors’ carts as the taxi crawled along. Shirina’s mouth watered when she caught a whiff of pakoras being deep-fried in bubbling oil.

On the taxi’s dashboard, a multicoloured row of miniature plastic deities created a shrine to Hinduism. It looked like the dashboard of that taxi Shirina had taken home from after-work drinks in Melbourne one night, except it was populated with icons and symbols from all religions, plus one Pokémon bobblehead. Too much wine on an empty stomach had made Shirina chatty that night.

‘Do these guys join forces to protect you?’ she’d asked the driver.

‘Yes,’ he said with a laugh. ‘More religions, more power.’

‘What’s your actual religion then?’

‘I’m Muslim,’ he said. ‘From Somalia. You?’

‘Sikh,’ Shirina replied. ‘From Britain by way of India.’ She spotted a small card bearing Guru Nanak’s picture between a miniature Buddha and a little Arabic scroll on the dashboard and pointed him out. ‘He’s one of mine,’ she said. ‘My mum always said just think of God as your father but that’s wrong, I think.’ The words just kept tumbling out of her mouth. ‘My father died when I was just two.’

The outburst was met with silence. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

The driver waited until he reached a traffic light before turning around, his warm, kind eyes meeting Shirina’s. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘In my car, you have countless blessings.’

Now Shirina focused her attention on the sprawl of Delhi. Shops were stacked like uneven bricks with shouting block-lettered signs: ENGLISH LANGUAGE INSTITUTE; ALIYAH’S BEAUTY SCHOOL; ICCS TECH SOLUTIONS. Simpler services took place under the Karol Bagh Metro tracks – a barber arranged his tools on a low wooden stool and beckoned his first customer from a small crowd of men; a pair of toddlers, naked from the waist down, their limbs coated in soot, helped their mother sort through a pile of plastic bottles.

The road ahead narrowed and widened inexplicably, its borders determined by the debris that spilled out onto the edges – benches from chai stalls, a rusty abandoned wheelbarrow overflowing with rubbish. Rising behind them was a skyline of anaemic pink and beige buildings. The potholed surfaces of the road made Shirina jostle with her sisters in the back seat. A few times, she caught the driver looking at their reflections in the rear-view mirror and she realized his eyes were tracking the movements of their jiggling breasts.