Marriage Material Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Sathnam Sanghera

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Asian Trader

  1. Hairdressers’ Journal

  2. Wolverhampton Chronicle

  3. Bunty

  4. Psychologies

  5. Indian Observer

  6. Combat

  7. The Times

  8. Harpers Wine & Spirit Trades Review

  9. Jackie

  10. Top Gear

  11. Time Out (London)

  12. Country Homes & Interiors

  13. Express & Star

  14. Good Housekeeping

  15. Cosmopolitan

  16. Guardian

  17. Penthouse

  18. Black Country Bugle

  Epilogue: Asian Bride

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  To Arjan Banga, returning to the Black Country after the unexpected death of his father, his family’s corner shop represents everything he has tried to leave behind – a lethargic pace of life, insular rituals and ways of thinking. But when his mother insists on keeping the shop open, he finds himself being dragged back from London, forced into big decisions about his imminent marriage and uncovering the history of his broken family – the elopement and mixed-race marriage of his aunt Surinder, the betrayals and loyalties, loves and regrets that have played out in the shop over more than fifty years.

  Taking inspiration from Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale, Marriage Material tells the story of three generations of a family through the prism of a Wolverhampton corner shop – itself a microcosm of the South Asian experience in Britain: a symbol of independence and integration, but also of darker realities.

  This is an epic tale of family, love and politics, spanning the second half of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. Told with humour, tenderness and insight, it manages to be both a unique and urgent survey of modern Britain by one of our most promising young writers, and an ingenious reimagining of a classic work of fiction.

  About the Author

  Sathnam Sanghera was born in 1976. He is an award-winning writer for The Times. His first book, The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton, was shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award and the 2009 PEN/Ackerley Prize and named 2009 Mind Book of the Year. Marriage Material is his first novel.

  Also by Sathnam Sanghera

  The Boy with the Topknot:

  A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton

  Marriage Material

  Sathnam Sanghera

  For Jasveen and Simran

  ‘The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact he is a West Indian or an Asian still . . . he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running out against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing “in England’s green and pleasant land” the haunting tragedy of the United States.’

  Enoch Powell, Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, November 1968

  ‘They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.’

  Alexander Pope

  PROLOGUE – ASIAN TRADER

  YOU LEARN TO expect certain questions in this business. Like ‘Are you on the phone?’ And ‘Do you have any bags?’ And ‘Where are the eggs?’ And ‘Why are you always on the phone?’ And ‘Could I have a bag for the eggs when you’re off the phone?’

  But there is one query that comes up more often than any other: ‘Are you open?’ A pet irritation for many shop owners, given that they probably wouldn’t choose to wake up at 4 a.m. seven days a week to stand in front of a fag stand unless they were actually trading. But in the case of Bains Stores, it’s a valid query. An advert in the window for a discontinued chocolate bar suggests the shop may have closed in 1994. The security shutters are often stuck a quarter open, adding to the general air of dilapidation. A push or kick of the door triggers something which is more ‘grating alarm’ than ‘tinkling shop bell’.

  We could, frankly, make more of an effort. But, believe me, your entrepreneurial spirit would also be blunted if the tower block opposite your shop had been demolished to make way for an estate of eco-homes that failed, continually, to be built. If a long-standing non-compete arrangement with Buy Express, a nearby Indian superstore, meant you could not stock alcohol, lottery tickets, or other material which might make Bains Stores a financially viable concern. If you had to spend fifteen hours a day being patronised (‘You. Speak. EXCELLENT. English’); having your name mutilated (‘Ar-jan, is it? Mind if I call you Andy?’); dealing with people paying for Mars bars with £20 notes; giving detailed directions to surly motorists who buy nothing in return; dishing out copies of Asian Babes to shameless septuagenarians; smiling serenely as locals openly refer to your establishment as ‘the Paki shop’; serving people who turn up in their slippers and pyjamas and sometimes even less; being told you’re ‘posh’ because you pronounce ‘crips’ as ‘crisps’; being called a ‘smelly Paki’ by people reeking of booze and wee; and dealing with seemingly endless chit-chat.

  My God, the chit-chat. ‘Ow bin ya? Bostin day, ay it? It ay stop raining in yonks. Weren’t the Blues good yesterday? Soz, yow must be a Wolves man. I’d kill for a kipper tie. Bostin’ carrier bags, these. Tararabit, cocka, see yow tomorra.’

  It seems that while war may be 90 per cent waiting around, retail is 90 per cent mindless small talk. And despite what the term may imply, there is nothing minor about the long-term effects. If you spend your waking hours talking to people who get their news from the Daily Star and talkSPORT, pass most of your day discussing nothing more substantial than the weather and the price of things (which, let’s face it, is all customers over a certain age want to talk about), you slowly begin to feel like you don’t exist. Your local Asian shopkeeper will, whether he wants to or not, work out so much about you – which way you vote (from your newspaper); whether you might get lucky tonight (from those emergency condoms) – but I bet you can relate nothing of his biography in return.

  At least nothing beyond the eye-rolling clichés of a man arriving in Britain with just £5 in his pocket, who sets up shop to avoid the racial prejudice of the job market, and builds a business through the Asian predilection for family slave labour and tax avoidance. One of the most onerous things about my father’s passing was that when the local newspaper he sold and delivered for nearly five decades devoted some column inches to his death, it couldn’t come up with much beyond ‘hard-working immigrant’ and ‘self-made’. ‘Everyone on the Victoria Road in Blakenfields seemed to have a tale about their newsagent,’ claimed the journalist, before singularly failing to produce any tales whatsoever.

  He could have been anyone. Or no one. And that’s the thing, if you’re Asian and happen to run a shop, you are anyone. Or no one. There are few more stereotypical things you can do as an Asian man, few more profound ways of wiping out your character and individuality, short of becoming a doctor, that is. Or fixing computers for a living. Or writing a book about arranged marriages.

  I struggle with these generalisations. On the one hand, they clearly apply to lots of Asians, and they are a useful way of highlighting broad truths. But on the other, they are reductive and sap us of any hope of personality or individuality. To stand behind the counter of a shop as an Indian man is to face a barrage of expectations and assumptions, with people assumin
g you are richer than you are (‘Bet you’ll be a millionaire soon’); more ambitious than you are (the plural is misleading: there has never been more than one Bains Stores); or cleverer than you are (‘Guess you’d be a doctor back home’).

  It goes the other way too, of course. To some of my customers, sometimes those on benefits, I am a parasite, somehow sapping British resources and bleeding the public dry. To others, often Indian ones, I am a physical illustration to their children of what will happen if they don’t work hard enough at school (‘You wanna end up loik that?’). Then there are the ones for whom I am a raghead who wants to impose sharia law on Britain, and who, in his spare time, grooms white girls for exploitation.

  The sexual predator thing is a recent development and I didn’t, at first, make a connection between the insults occasionally hurled in my direction and the headlines passing over my counter. After all, the gangs reportedly grooming young white girls are based in the north, and I am in the West Midlands; most of the offenders are Pakistani, and I am of Punjabi Indian heritage; and while some of the perpetrators run takeaway and taxi firms, I run a newsagent. To be honest, I barely blinked the first time I was called ‘a dirty Paki pervert’ – if memory serves, by a teenager who had just tried to buy a pornographic magazine. You get used to being called all sorts of things in this business and one tends not to dwell on the semi-coherent rantings of people so dim that they are seemingly unaware of the existence of the internet, which offers mountains of free porn.

  Moreover, it’s difficult to tally shop life with sex, in any way whatsoever. There are certain places that bristle with sexual tension: libraries, Tube carriages on hot days. But your Asian corner shop, reserved for the purchase of emergency milk and Rizlas, is not one of them. Occasionally some gross individual will make a sexual remark to my mother while buying bread (‘Nice baps’) or when paying by credit card (‘Want me to push it in, eh?’), but, in general, the sexual invisibility is just another aspect of the overall invisibility of the Asian shopkeeper.

  The penny only really dropped the morning I found graffiti declaring ‘TALEBAN PEEDO’ on our semi-functioning shutters. The realisation wasn’t a cheerful one. We Asian blokes have never exactly been at an advantage in the sex game, our undesirability reflected in statistics from dating websites which show that, along with black women, Indian men are among the least popular demographic groups, no doubt a victim of the endless, though obviously entirely groundless, insinuations about penis size.

  I remember once talking to an Aussie girl in a nightclub in Bombay, her surveying the crowded dancefloor and moaning at length about the seediness and lecherousness of Indian men, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was one too. In the end, I pointed it out. Her response? ‘You international Indians are different.’ But are we? I’m not so sure. Reading the papers, it sometimes feels as if the world sees all brown men as perverts. It’s enough to make you miss the days when we were just invisible. Enough, even, to make you want to give up selling the newspapers that plant and perpetuate the stereotypes in the first place.

  Indeed, sometimes, given that we are for many customers the only interaction they have with multiculturalism, I think the Asian shopkeepers of Britain should cut out the middle man and present themselves to be questioned directly by the great British public. To spend, perhaps, a day or an afternoon a year answering not queries about the location of eggs and the quality of plastic bags, but serious questions about our religion and culture.

  At least, I would welcome the opportunity to explain that a Sikh is not the same thing as a Muslim. That while I did once sign up for medical school, I was until recently working as a graphic designer in London. That while I have a white girlfriend, Freya, my fiancée, she is an adult, and we met in the most boring, conventional way possible, through work.

  For what it’s worth, the life of the Indian man who originally set up this newsagent was not a cliché either. Admittedly, Mr Bains came to Britain with no more than a shilling in his pocket. But he wasn’t, as was often the case with Asian entrepreneurs, driven into retail by racism. When he arrived in Wolverhampton in 1955, aged forty-nine, an Asian immigrant was a relatively rare thing, and if a white person ever accosted him on the street, it was usually to ask if they could stroke his luxuriant beard.

  The sole survivor of a family butchered during Partition, he regarded Britain, if anything, as a haven of racial tolerance, and when in 1958 he took over number 64, Victoria Road, he did not do the predictable thing and start catering to his own people. He took it over determined to run it as it had been run for more than thirty years by Geoffrey Walker. A place where brown paper and string was used for wrapping produce. Where fresh bread was flogged over a marble counter, and where customers could rely on being served by someone who knew their name and would, on occasion, let them buy something on tick. By far the best thing you could have said to him was that walking into his store felt like stepping back in time.

  As it happens, my father’s life was not as clichéd as it may first seem either. In his way, he fought to be an individual, to be seen for who he was. And I know the post-mortem report says it was a heart attack that sent him plummeting on to the shop floor that evening, that he died of ‘natural causes’, with people of South Asian origin being statistically susceptible to heart disease, a certain proportion being afflicted by a particular gene mutation which almost guarantees heart problems. But not everything can be explained by demographics and generalities.

  1 – HAIRDRESSERS’ JOURNAL

  WOLVERHAMPTON STOOD IN the county of Staffordshire in the 1960s, not in the West Midlands. It was a town, rather than a city. And Victoria Road, cutting from the centre of Wolvo, or Wolves, into what was then open countryside, was more commonly known as ‘Wog Row’ by locals, owing to an experiment in mass immigration which, while it had not yet led to Asian men being feared and ridiculed as paedophiles, had nevertheless resulted in white residents forming associations to exclude black and Asian syndicates from buying houses in certain areas, and election leaflets openly drawing ‘links’ between the arrival of immigrants and cases of leprosy.

  Mr Bains had, in short, been proved wrong about the appetite of Wulfrunians for racial tolerance. He had also slowly accepted that running a grocer’s as Mr Walker had done, using paper and string for wrapping things, selling bacon and even biscuits in terms of weight, was a mistake. The format was outdated. The fact was Walker had sold up at just the right time, with several nearby light engineering factories closing down and the abolition of resale price maintenance, which had protected margins.

  Though these calamities would pale into insignificance with the emergence of illness – the initial symptoms so slight that not even Mr Bains noticed them. His young wife in India, who penned long letters begging for money and protesting about having been abandoned with two young daughters among a hostile extended family in Delhi, began to complain that the handwriting in his short responses was getting smaller and smaller – to the point of illegibility. He became so softly spoken that he had to routinely repeat what he had said, a process that led to him castigating his 39-year-old assistant for being hard of hearing.

  Bill Hinton, whom Bains had inherited with the shop along with a large quantity of unsellable Wellington boots, and the idea of flogging butter and flour under his own label, did not take the criticism well. Which was quite something, given that he was routinely stealing from his boss. The sweets that he chomped upon all day, which Mr Bains had assumed were treatment for some kind of gastric disorder, were actually a symptom of his dishonesty. He was under-ringing, routinely charging customers the full price for products, registering a lower price on the till, each empty sweet wrapper representing a unit of cash. The overall contents of his pockets served as a physical reminder of how much money to remove from the till when his boss wasn’t looking.

  The revelation, when it came, was almost as devastating for Bains as the diagnosis, and when he reported Hinton’s thieving to the police, and they
let him off without even a warning, he sank into a depression. He was not a young man any more, had squandered all the money he had made during three years of foundry work, and now, just as his body began packing up, having missed out on his daughters’ childhoods, he had nothing to show for it.

  Little did he know, as he complained to Patwant Dhanda, a local foundry worker and activist, who had turned up in his shop and offered to raise the issue with the relevant police commissioner on behalf of the Indian Workers’ Association, that his luck was about to change. Accounts vary about what happened, but at some point during this meeting, as Dhanda snacked on horseradishes plucked from the shop’s indoor wire rack without suggestion of payment, and as he attempted to bond with Bains over their common experience of Partition, Bains took on this impetuous 25-year-old man, who was less than half his age and twice his size, as his assistant. And together, they transformed the shop into a newsagent.

  The basic idea was that doing so would give them reason to open longer hours, and they did, serving many of the area’s immigrant workers as late as 11 p.m., opening every day, resolutely ignoring the garage owner next door, who was fond of remarking, ‘The Lord made the Earth in six days, you won’t make a fortune in seven.’ They also thought that stocking a wide range of publications, everything from Birds to Penthouse, would expand the range of their customers, and they installed a hatch into the front of the shop to attract passing factory workers, so they could pick up their papers on the way to work. At the same time they fitted an outdoor wood rack for fruit and vegetables, delivered groceries when necessary, changed everything short of succumbing to modern notions of self-service (Bains believed in the personal touch) or promotion (there was no sign out front, his thinking being that it would be called the ‘ration-wallah’ by his compatriots, or the ‘Paki shop’ by non-compatriots, whatever the frontispiece declared).