Meera Syal - Anita and Me

For my parents and brother

with gratitude and love

And for Shekhar and Chameli, as always

Cover Page

Title Page Anita and Me Meera Syal

Epigraph

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About the Author

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I do not have many memories of my very early childhood, apart from the obvious ones, of course. You know, my windswept, bewildered parents in their dusty Indian village garb standing in the open doorway of a 747, blinking back tears of gratitude and heartbreak as the fog cleared to reveal the sign they had been waiting for, dreaming of, the sign planted in tarmac and emblazoned in triumphant hues of red, blue and white, the sign that said simply, WELCOME TO BRITAIN.

And then there’s the early years of struggle and disillusion, living in a shabby boarding house room with another newly arrived immigrant family, Polish, I think would be quite romantic; my father arriving back from his sweatshop at dawn to take his place in the bed being vacated by Havel who would be off to do his shift on the McDouglas Biscuits assembly line, my father sweeping away crushed garibaldi crumbs from the communal pillow before sliding gratefully into oblivious sleep, my mother awake at his side, counting the kicks from the daughter inside her who would condemn her, marry her to England forever.

I slept in a drawer, probably, swaddled in back copies of the Daily Mirror. My mother only found out about Kennedy’s assassination two weeks after the event, when she read the reversed newsprint headlined on my damp backside. She didn’t follow the news, no telly, no radio, no inclination, being a simple Punjabi girl suffering from culture shock, marooned and misplaced in Wolverhampton.

Of course, this is the alternative history I trot out in job interview situations or, once or twice, to impress middleclass white boys who come sniffing round, excited by the thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a trinket on their arm. My earliest memory, in fact, is of the first time I understood the punchline to a joke. I was watching some kind of Royal Variety television show on ice – I remember that because it was a balmy summer evening and I wondered how they had managed to keep the floor so cold. A man in a lime green jumpsuit raised a gun and took aim at a fat female ballerina who was gliding towards him like some vast, magnificent galleon, pink tulle emanating in a cloud from around her strong marbled thighs like ectoplasm. The man raised the gun, fired once, twice, and the ballerina fell dramatically to the floor to hilarity and applause.

‘Oh my dearie,’said the man. ‘I think I shot her in the tutu.’

My mother said I laughed so much that I threw up and at one point, called in Mrs Worrall from next door who put her teeth in and solemnly declared that I’d probably ‘had a turn.’ But I’ve always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.

‘I’m not lying, honest, papa!’ I pleaded as he took my hand and pulled me towards the kerb, briefly checking for traffic along the twisting country lane. It was hot and I could feel beads of sweat and fear threading themselves into a necklace of guilt, just where my itchy flesh met the collar of my starched cotton dress. Papa did not look angry, he had the air of a man on a mission. He was walking along with that jaunty air that my mother said had made her fall in love with him, a hop of optimism in his walk that belied a sensitive, introspective-looking face. His features effortlessly combined those same contradictions of vulnerability and pride, the sharp leonine nose that swooped down towards the generous questioning mouth, meeting in what looked like the fleshy imprint of a single teardrop.

I scuttled after papa along the single road, bordered with nicotine-tipped spiky grass, the main artery which bisected the village. A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads, uneven teeth which spread into a gap-toothed smile as the houses gradually became bigger and grander as the road wandered south, undulating into a gentle hill and finally merging into miles of flat green fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. We were heading in the opposite direction, northwards down the hill, away from the posh, po-faced mansions and towards the nerve centre of Tollington, where Mr Ormerod’s grocery shop, the Working Men’s Club, the diamond-paned Methodist church and the red brick school jostled for elbow room with the two-up-two-downs, whose outside toilets backed onto untended meadows populated with the carcasses of abandoned agricultural machinery. There was only one working farm now, Dale End farm, bookending the village at the top of the hill, where horses regarded the occasional passers-by with mournful malteser eyes.

From the crest of the hill, on a clear day, you could see the industrial chimneys of Wolverhampton, smoking like fat men’s cigars, and sometimes glimpse the dark fringes of Cannock Chase, several square miles of thick conifers bristling with secrets and deer, where every so often, forgotten skeletons of ancient victims were discovered by local courting couples. But the horizon gradually disappeared as we marched down the hill towards Mr Ormerod’s shop, down into the valley of…I wished I’d never gone to Sunday School, I wished I did not know the name for what I was now feeling. Sin. One word, three letters, eternal consequences. Unless I confessed all now. I swallowed and looked around, as if for help. There was my home, halfway down the hill, standing on the corner of the crossroads, one of the miners’ tithe cottages huddled around a dirt yard which was the unofficial meeting place for our small community. There was the small overgrown park next to the Yard, where the swings and ricketty slide were watched over by the witch’s hat of an ancient metal roundabout.

I could see children riding their bikes, screeching in and around the parked cars and lines of washing, practising noisy manoeuvres which threw up clouds of dust, punctuating each skid like exclamation marks. I could see my mother, even at this distance her brown skin glowed like a burnished planet drifting amongst the off-white bedsheets of her neighbours. She was wearing one of her slop-around outfits, a faded Punjabi suit whose billowing trousers rippled in the breeze, mercurial wings fluttering at her ankles. She paused, gathering some bundle from a basket at her feet, and then with one motion shook out a peacock-blue sari which she began tacking to the washing line. It puffed outwards in a resigned sigh between her hands. She looked as if she was holding up a piece of the sky.

Maybe someone from the Big House would come out and save me. The Big House, as gloomy and roomy as a set from a Hammer horror film, was the only building set apart from the main road and lay at the end of an uneven track which began five hundred yards from our front door. The Big House occupied its own island of private grounds, shielded by high mournful trees and a barbed wire fence. Two ancient, lopsided wooden signs declared NO TRESPASSERS! and BEWARE OF GUARD DOGS! The latter featured a slavering Doberman frothing at the mouth, except the paint had peeled around his muzzle, replacing what were once ferocious teeth with flaking splinters so he looked like he was chewing on a loo brush.