Song Of Time (12 page)

He nodded encouragingly. “I’m glad you’re seeing the logic of the argument. There are so many out there who don’t…” Even those, his look said, who weren’t girls. And I’d read the papers. I knew what the weekends when he went off to Bradford or Luton or Derby—these so-called peaceful protests and warning marches—were really about. I’d breathed the smell of riot gas on Birmingham nights just like everyone else. I’d seen the mosques, temples and churches gutted by arson or suicide. I’d watched war spread out from Kashmir on the news and seen the atrocities in what Kapil probably imagined was our homeland. Still, it was hard not to find this newly brisk and decisive Kapil appealing.

Losing Dad was different to losing Leo, and I missed him in smaller, more ordinary ways. There was the tea he used to bring up to me in bed at weekends, and the charts of Things To Do he kept in the kitchen, which Leo and I, and often Mum as well, would often change in silly ways. There was stubble he left dotting the upstairs sink after he’d shaved, and the sight of his briefcase sitting in the hall on weekdays.

I succumbed to grief like a bout of illness. My face swelled. I couldn’t eat without vomiting. I felt perpetually tired. Even music, listening, playing, the very thought of any kind of melody, became horrid to me.

Somehow, Mum managed for us both. Somehow, she carried on. She got herself up each morning, and got me up as well. Dealing with Dad’s estate, she discovered he’d already secretly ordered most things in secret anticipation of this death—even going as far as putting Post-It notes on some of the more obscure accounts and insurance policies to help her through them—but she got through that, as well. She even resumed teaching. I didn’t know how she managed it all; I still don’t. I remember her speaking to me as I sat with knees hunched in a blurry corner of my bed. Dry-eyed, her forehead dotted red from a visit to the mandir, she said to me that life wasn’t always about doing or saying the things you actually felt.

“Sometimes, Roushana, you just have to get on with it and bloody well
pretend
.”

“And what’s
that
worth?”

“Nothing’s worth anything.” She took a breath and gave a slow blink. “I’ve learned that now…The past’s gone, darling. The hopes and the theories mean nothing. All we’ve got left is the future.”

Mum never did crack. She never did give in. Sometimes, I would hear her moving around downstairs at night, or I would find her staring at some everyday object which had triggered some memory of Leo or Dad, but she always looked up at my approach, re-composed her face and drew me to her. Mum was a lesson to me in that time of aftermath. You had to move on, or give up: there were no other choices. I even found that if I picked up my violin, raised the bow and made my weakened fingers move across the strings, notes still filled the air. It was the way of the world. Cause and effect. Similarly, if you moved the muscles of your mouth in vaguely the right way, a smile still sometimes came.

With a poorish set of GCSE results, I moved school to the Sixth Form College in Edgbaston, not far from the fine houses of the Calthorpe Estate which, for all I knew, Blythe Munro’s parents still inhabited. Socially and economically, though, the school belonged to the inner city. My Asian features were much less of a rarity here, although the Sheik girls hung out with the Sheiks and the Hindus with the Hindus and the Muslims with the Muslims. Then there were the Africans and the Afro-Caribbeans, and the New Radicals and the Poles and the Burmese and the Kurds, as well as the whites, who were historically divided between Catholic and Protestant. I, too, found a group I could hang out with, although the one I chose was that of the non-belongers, the Goths and the head-bangers and the self-harmers and the gays who, because of their varying glamours and stigmas, were generally left well alone.

Clustering outside in our separate groups on pavements windy with traffic as cars and lorries rumbled by in the cheap lanes and the sleek new independent machines swished along the premiums beyond, images and messages billowed from the handhelds to which our generation were welded. Synthesised glances, digitised murmurs, virtual pheromones and ai-written essays were exchanged. Drugs as well. Cigarettes, being illegal by then, were also popular. But the marijuana which Leo had favoured was now regarded as worthy and medicinal, and had been replaced by tabs and viruses, aerosols and patches—there was even a brief craze for suppositories. Not that I imbibed any of these more than was necessary to keep up some sort of face, and that the pressure was ever that great. It was okay to be square, and for every streetwise kid there were two or three neo-conservatives in tweed or burkas. Generally, though, there was still little trouble between these different species of youthful humanity, even in those difficult times.

I remember the long, drab corridors and the long, drab lessons of that era. I remember the burning ache for the hour to end. Knowing that anyone who gave off the whiff of over-achievement was certain to be sneered at, I kept my music studies as separate as I could from my school life. How readily we accepted those anthills of education in those days! The idea that you should force-feed young people random information which they were required to regurgitate, and then call it an education, still somehow prevailed.

I would often cheat the school’s security systems and go out and explore the city. I didn’t have the necessary permits to enter Blythe’s Calthorpe Estate, but I sometimes wandered its edges and breathed the green whiff of its golf courses and sprinkler systems. I vowed that I would get in there one day, or somewhere like it, but on my own terms. In Birmingham, summers of monsoon had been replaced by those of drought, and the city shimmered and growled with traffic as reefs of concrete grew outside public buildings to forestall the risk of bombings. It was often unbearably hot, with tinny skies, clottings of dust, random plagues of insects, the scares of new diseases. Somewhat cooler was the dark interior of the Oratory Church, with its Roman Catholic scents of incense and old ladies, its door bangings and coughings, which lay next door to my college. I liked to sit in the back pews and try to outstare the dimly gilded saints with their tawdry flames and sundry piercings. Christ presided over it all, arms raised as if to take flight, an avatar of suffering.

Amid Dad’s files and Post-Its, Mum discovered that he’d insured his life for a sizeable amount. The insurance companies were folding by then under the strain of storm damage and the pensions of centenarians. Arguing that Dad had already known of his genetic weakness, they disputed the claim, but, in this as in every other battle, Mum never flinched or gave up. Eventually, they had to relent.

When the cheque came though, she announced that she would be going to visit the Ashar’s family village in India.
My village
, as she was already starting to call it. She wanted me to come as well, but I’d been patronised and prodded by enough aunts here in Birmingham and I refused, and we agreed for the sake of appearances that Nan and Gran would look after me in the full knowledge that I’d be happier on my own. When she returned after three weeks, she seemed to have regained the knack of smiling, even if that smile was different. She grabbed and hugged me at the airport in a newly vigorous way. She almost pinched my cheek. Mum was pale from an enteric infection, but had lost the worst of her grief, and with it what remained of her English reserve.

Although frugal in most areas, she now took on Dad’s love of gadgetry, and insisted that I don a wired VR suit and experience the virtual India she’d recorded for me.

“Roushana, I can’t believe you’ve never tried one of these things.”

Lying black and intricate and spewing wire on the carpet of our lounge, the outfit looked like an eviscerated alien. I lifted one of the arms dubiously. Like most people, I associated these things with the porn industry. “It doesn’t seem very hygienic…”

“Of course it is—they’re entirely self-cleaning.”

“You’re saying someone
else
has used this?”

“For goodness sake, Roushana, it was only me.”

Stripping, I pulled the suit on. Stars, presumably stray scraps or static or data, flickered out from the blackness, then I was suddenly
there
.

Children with faces much like mine clamoured around Mum as she emerged from her taxi. Motorbikes phutted. Smiling aunts made namaste. The warm, virtual, air clotted my nostrils with scents too rich to be unravelled as she sat and ate balls of rice under the spine-fringed shade of bel trees, whilst the rapid conversations of the women were transformed into glowing subtitles for the benefit of my resolutely English ears. India by then was in crisis: war was spreading from Kashmir, there were endless elections, and tens of millions of refugees were pouring into Bihar from the floods in Bangladesh. Still, life went on, and Mum’s village, which lay about fifty miles from the noise and high-rise Ahmedabad, was a greenly pretty place of rivers, farms and fields. Still, and Mum being Mum, she’d also recorded other scenes for me. After all, this was India, and the adivasi, the tribal people who most Indians still regarded as barely human, lived in a dreadful shanty town just a few kilometres downwind. Then there were the low-caste dalits, the so-called untouchables. Howling clouds of flies, too real to be unreal, crawled over my skin…

“I just wanted you to understand, Roushana,” Mum said as the near-intolerable smells and sights faded from my senses and she tidied away the wires with the slow grace I was beginning to associate with Indian women.

“Understand
what
? That this is what you get if you allow a country to run itself on religious prejudice?”

She shook her head, smiled her different smile at me, and gave me a long-suffering look which I’ve seen many times since. It’s there in the faces of Madonnas in Renaissance paintings, and Indian pativratas, and it says that that life is short, and God is gracious, that achievement is nothing, and that pain in this world is to be expected, and endured.

In return for that first of her many trips to what we were starting to call “Mum’s India”, we went again the next summer to “Roushana’s Cornwall”. Even then, we couldn’t find the cottage we’d first stayed at—to go there without Dad would probably have been too painful, in any case—so we settled instead for a flat overlooking the shore and fish and chip shops of the small resort of Portreath. This was surfing territory, then. Even though it was midsummer, the waves of that season were vast as the Atlantic currents were doused by fresh water from the melting icecaps of Greenland. Walking the cliffs and wide beaches, I became fascinated by the antics of the cloud-skimmers and body surfers.

In the mornings, incredible mists would cloak the wide arc of shore. Then came the first breakthrough of sunlight as you struggled into the glossy spills of the liquid-like, frictionless fabrics which transformed your flesh into something which could ride the waves. I learned the language of the sea, which was far stranger than Gujarati. Learned, as well, the easy companionship of the shore.

In the evenings, there were bonfires, plastic jugs of cider, wafts of chemical escape. And there would often be music: strummed guitars, voices drifting in song against the smoky thunder of the waves. I was too precious to risk exposing my violin, but sometimes someone would bring along a disposable keyboard, and I’d take it over, surprising them by what I could play.
Hey, you’re not bad…
I remember returning one morning and finding last night’s keyboard flung over the rocks as a Daliesque offering, and still faintly playing.

As the night deepened, couples would pair off and head into the darkness of the dunes. Sometimes, a conversation between me and some boy would lengthen, and a hand would be laid across my back or brush against my breasts, but I always shifted away. Still, I knew that this sex-thing, as I thought of it, wasn’t to be avoided. When I returned to my last year at sixth form college, and whilst the major part of me was preparing for my entry examinations at the Royal College of Music, the rest devoted some time to considering my choices.

Most of the lads I knew had either ceased to be virgins, or self-importantly claimed their celibacy, but I now began to regard them all with a more critical eye. By then, Mum always wore traditional dress, and I was generally assumed to be entirely Indian in my background, which left a theoretical gene pool of other Hindu, Indian lads, although I dismissed that idea right away. Next thing, Gran Ashar would be clucking about how word had reached her that I was sweet on someone, and wasn’t it time we all went and had tea with their family? Was I really that calculating, passionless, cynical? The idea of having sex itself certainly held little appeal for me. I even toyed with the idea that I was perhaps a lesbian, but I felt no greater frisson at the thought, and less still at the prospect of the reality, so I decided it would have to be a male. I knew with an equally cold-eyed certainty that I was moderately attractive, or at least could make myself seem so, although my manner in recent years had earned me a reputation as being cold, a tease or, worse still,
frigid
. It didn’t really occur to me that I could just go out with someone and see how we got on, and then try someone else. This was like a recital, a concert performance. It had to be right first time, or not at all.

My plans finally settled on a lad named Caspian who sat at the desk opposite mine in Geography lessons, where we occasionally exchanged mock yawns. Caspian, with his other-worldly, princely name, didn’t belong to any of the obvious groups. He was good at tennis, he was bright, as well, and I also knew from his previous girlfriend—and this was important to me—that he had some sexual experience.

A bomb scare at school in the winter of the Mahashivrati atrocities meant that we went home early, and I kept beside Caspian as we swarmed out past the impotently bleeping metal detectors. It had been snowing, and the city roads were thick with brown slush as we walked together. Caspian loved books of the old variety with binding and pages, and we took a bus together down towards dusty second hand emporiums which still continued to trade around the university. He talked of first editions and put his arm around me as we walked from shop to shop through the frosty twilight. When we finally stopped to kiss under the streetlamps as the snow began to fall again, I felt both greedy and empty.