or villages. She chooses villages, knowing where the roads will lead: the cottage outside Robertsbridge where they spent their first weekend together, the antique market at Rye where they chose her engagement ring, the church overlooking Lewes Common where they married. All the significant points in their relationship have taken place in her part of the country. There was never any validity to spending time in Leicestershire.
Up there, in the Midlands, they are all aware of what is happening, how sons are lost after marriage, cruelly appropriated into the wife’s family; the opposite of what occurred to their subcontinental forebears. It is the price paid for marrying English girls, in spite of their vehement protestations to the contrary. But it is a phenomenon not simply restricted to skin tone. Amal’s other friends, white-skinned and robbed of voice, are also in the same boat: pussy-whipped. Life is good so long as the missus is happy.
He has lost count of the key events that he has missed: the wedding of a second cousin which clashed with the opportunity for a free long-weekend in Milan, the puja at his auntie’s new house to banish spirits being cancelled out because Liz and Sam needed help looking for a new car. It is a long list of incompletes.
It is not that Claud lacks interest in his family – the euphemism for culture, because to call it culture would be to admit there are more than cute gaps between the sexes causing difficulties in their marriage – she keeps a better calendar of events than he does. She reads books about Empire, Partition and fundamentalism, drags him to every shitty Bollywood film that plays at the multi-screen, and calls his mother independently at least once a week. The problem lies in their absence, them not being available the way other people’s children are; those who made the decision to stay in around Leicester. Ma and Puppa feel robbed of the opportunity to arrive at their son’s house unannounced, to use spare keys to fiddle and poke around whilst they are at work, and to summarily summon one or the other during the onset of perceived indigestions and illnesses.
There is no cooking daal and roti and leaving them in Tupperware boxes in the fridge, no unofficial, covert fertility blessings they can perform using only a bell and a stick of incense, then hurriedly airing the house before their departure. All they know is that their son and his wife are never around, becoming harder to reach, and that after three years of marriage there is still no grandchild.
Neither subject can be brought up, and they have to rely on jibes from other distant relatives to do the job they do not have the stomach for. They feel too far away from their son to rock the boat. They are at the age where they only want to end phone conversations on a happy note, unsure of what the night will bring. And so they keep their tone as light as they can without breaking into hysteria, leaving Amal to read the neuroses behind every piece of weather observation and gossip.
‘It’s been cold, hasn’t it,’ typically conveys everything.
He knows they were never disappointed in him marrying Claud. A man must pick the woman he wants. There is no alternative in this decade. Raise your children. Let them go. Choose your moments.
Liz and Sam have seen them twice since they announced the news. His parents have not had the privilege of blessing the stomach, instead made to toast over the speakerphone due to a clashing working weekend, followed by their annual trip to Kolkata. The foremost guilt he feels is that they have been denied the sight of her, of the two of them, glowing with iron-rich supplements, and uncensored optimism. Some of the squealing down the phone expressed that, but not their hope. He still feels ashamed that he did not do enough to accommodate their seeing it. Taken a bloody day off. Gone out of his way. But there was plenty of time, went the rationale, close to a year of congratulations and microscopic study to come from the immediate family.
‘Let’s stretch it out a bit, the victory lap,’ Claud suggested at the time, not worried about holding back until amnio results and first scans, just wary of the weight of attention, and the likely threat of intrusion. She saw a similar display of the diplomatic back and forth that preceded their wedding, the collection of cells, its rooting inside her, acting as a reminder that family obligations were inescapable. His family, inexorable.
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