Caryl Phillips - A Distant Shore

Strangely enough, she still trusts this lithe man who briefly visits her table on the way to her bed. When he first spoke to her outside the confines of the newsagent’s shop, he did so with a candour that she was sure Feroza had never been privileged to hear. He sat in her living room loudly sipping strong tea, and nervously rubbing one blue-socked foot on top of the other. She told him that last week she had been furious at the ill manners of the woman ahead of her in the queue at the shop. The woman had complained that she could smell curry on her copy of Hello! magazine, and when poor Mahmood had offered to refund her money, the rude so-and-so had simply stormed out. But they both knew that by itself this incident did not explain her asking him over for tea. She had framed the invitation as an opportunity for social intercourse and cultural exchange in an English home, but as he continued to sip loudly at his tea, her conversation stumbled and she heard herself comment that they had not had much weather of late, and then she fell silent and waited for him to talk. Which, in due course, he seemed eager to do. He told her about his first marriage at the age of twelve in his Punjabi village, and how his family had arranged everything without any concern for his feelings. Mahmood told her that he was traded as though he were a mule, and used as the bargaining tool in a dispute between two families. He told her about his childish attempts at sex with his fourteen-year-old bride, who quickly developed an appetite that a twelve-year-old boy could not satisfy. He admitted that, in an attempt to master his “woman,” he beat her, and he recalled the many times she ran away, and how her own father had once been forced to drag her back by her long black hair, screaming and kicking. The father slapped her face and then, suddenly remembering himself, he begged forgiveness from her husband, a twelve-year-old boy, for this act of transgression. Mahmood rose to his full height and thanked his father-in-law for returning his wife. In his heart Mahmood felt no anger towards his father-in-law; he felt only an embarrassment that his wife had humiliated him for all the village to see. She had made it plain that he could not control her, which by extension suggested that he could not control any woman. His fellow villagers not only sympathised with Mahmood, they despised his wife for her refusal to play the part that had been assigned to her.

Eventually, when he was sixteen, a delegation of men visited Mahmood, and while they were careful to pay him all the respect that his position demanded, they suggested to him that unless he was prepared to beat his wife as though she were a carpet, he should return the woman and shame her. Despite the indignities that he had suffered, Mahmood could not find it within himself to habitually raise his hand to his wife, and he knew that it would be impossible to jettison this woman and keep his honour intact. Therefore, after the departure of the delegation, he made a decision. He had seen the many photographs that the men in England sent back to the village, photographs in which they posed holding a radio, or standing beside a television set, or sometimes just clutching a fistful of five-pound notes. Mahmood made up his mind that he would leave for England and join his older brother in Leicester, where he owned three restaurants. He imagined that there would be no problem finding a well-paid job of some description in Mrs. Thatcher’s country, and after he had saved some money his ambition was to go to university, hopefully to study law or medicine. Mahmood dreamed of one day returning to his village in triumph as the most important man in the region, and he intended to spit in the face of the woman who had publicly humiliated him.

But she knows that Mahmood runs a modest newsagent’s in a small town in the north of England that boasts neither a cathedral nor a university. Mahmood lives in a place where if, on a Saturday afternoon, one happens to turn on the television set as the football results are being read out, towns of unquestionable insignificance will be freely mentioned, but Mahmood’s small English town will simply not exist. After ten years working in the kitchens of all three of his brother’s restaurants, and rising to a position where he ultimately had sole charge of The Khyber Pass, Mahmood had managed to save enough money so that he could consider starting up a business of his own with his new wife, Feroza. However, Feroza was aware that her husband could no longer stomach the disrespectful confusion of running a restaurant. The sight of fat-bellied Englishmen and their slatterns rolling into The Khyber Pass after the pubs had closed, calling him Ranjit or Baboo or Swamp Boy, and using poppadoms as Frisbees, and demanding lager, and vomiting in his sinks, and threatening him with his own knives and their beery breath, and bellowing for mini-cabs and food that they were too drunk to see had already arrived on the table in front of them, was causing Mahmood to turn prematurely grey. Feroza persuaded Mahmood that the newsagent’s business would be better for them both and, having been born and brought up in Leicester, Feroza knew all the intricacies of how to sell the day’s news to the English in either tabloid or broadsheet form. She persuaded her husband that they should leave the Midlands and raise their family in a small English town with decent schools and among people who still had some manners. And so Mahmood had fled Leicester, thus incurring his brother’s wrath, and only a year ago he had arrived with chubby Feroza to be greeted by the hospitable gloating of those who lived in this town.

Dorothy says very little about her own life, being concerned to make sure that the dominant narrative is male. After all, his story involves passion, betrayal, migration, sacrifice and ultimately triumph. Mahmood is a success. Her story contains the single word, abandonment. Curiously enough, she realises that both stories seem unconcerned with the word “love,” but she keeps this thought to herself. And then one evening, during the second month of their understanding, Mahmood asked her about her life, and specifically about her husband. She blushed which, given the fact that she was lying in bed with Mahmood at the time, suggested that she still carried within her the painful residue of a relationship whose memory she had been trying to shed for the past five years. “He left me and ran off with a younger woman.” She paused. “And then I left Birmingham and came back to live here.” She slowly inclined her head away from him, and wondered if a trip to the bathroom, or excusing herself to go and make a cup of tea, might be considered impolite. He said nothing. She imagined Brian parking his car in a succession of country lay-bys and spending the late afternoons wondering just what on earth had happened to his life. And why not, for she was probably at their home with a glass of sherry asking herself the same question. Her teaching career no longer interested her, and although she still derived pleasure from music, it no longer gave her joy. Joy was an emotion which soared on wings, which suggested transcendence, but her life with Brian was firmly anchored. No joy. And then there were Brian’s women who, like Brian, she imagined to be overweight. She smirked at the thought of the dreadful collisions that she presumed must pass for sex, with portly Brian no doubt casting himself as a star performer. But it was pathetic really, for she could always tell when he was at it because he stopped wearing a vest. Mahmood said nothing about Brian having run off with a younger woman. She turned to face him and pulled herself up and onto one elbow. “Are you really interested in my life? I mean there’s not much to it, you know.” Mahmood continued to stare at her with his dark eyes.

She began by explaining that, as the eldest, she was expected to set an example. And this she did, much to the annoyance of her younger sister. She worked hard, but she did not regard university to be a viable proposition. However, when she was accepted to read music at Manchester, her shell-shocked parents took her and Sheila out to a restaurant for the first time. Her father was uncomfortable handling the menu, and both girls noticed, but their mother simply laughed nervously and kept looking about herself in the hope that she might see somebody she knew. When the bill came, her father added and re-added it three times, all the while muttering under his breath about forking out money for something that his wife could have whipped up with one hand tied behind her back. He had spent his working life as a draughtsman, reluctantly hovering on the fringes of middle-class respectability, but this close proximity to what he perceived to be “white-collar smugness” served only to increase the fervour with which he preached “the value of brass.” Sadly, the celebration dinner at the restaurant merely reminded the girls of the restrictions which had long blighted their young lives, and the evening propelled Sheila one step further along a path that would finally lead her clear away from home.