1 Relation

Apparently the human race has become so voraciously creative lately that publishers and agents are barely able to read a fraction of the manuscripts they're inundated with every year. The poor lambs are exhausted and overwhelmed. So, to save them from further suffering, I submit my scribblings to direct to you, dear friends. If you choose to read them, I hope you will enjoy them, but if you don't, surf on, and I hope you find something that you do enjoy. Here's Chapter 1 of 'Kundalini Awake' - if you fancy reading it, but have trouble printing it out, let me know and I'll email it to you. And I'll post another chapter or two (some of them are pitifully short) every week or so:


Chapter 1 - Relation

Loud and bosomy, reeking of cinnamon and musk, laden with sugary, yellow laddoos, Aunty Seema had burst in on their demure English lives like a tropical tornado. She had insisted on visiting on the way back from seeing her son who was - as she repeated to anyone who'd listen - "Studying In Amreeca! Youngest student in his class! Cleverest boy in school!".

Mother had spent the entire week with her lips pinched thin with disapproval and embarrassment. She arranged for Kamala to stay with her friend, Hannah saying there wasn't room in the house, the spare room was too damp and "she" would have to sleep in Kamala's room. Kamala was outraged. She yelled at Mother that she couldn't believe she was going to make her miss the first chance she had ever had of meeting one of her Indian relatives.

But the truth was, what she couldn't believe was that Mother, who had been by her side every moment of her life, hers and hers alone, was going to push her out of her home to make way for a ghost from some other life. Mother would be sucked away from her, when she got back from Hannah's, Aunty Seema would have gobbled her mother up and Kamala would be alone, alone for ever. Mother had told her tersely to stop making a ridiculous fuss and go and pack her pyjamas. As compensation she agreed to take Kamala with her to the airport to meet Aunty Seema's plane.

Aunty Seema wouldn't look like Mother, would she? Even though they were sisters, Mother was "English" and Aunty Seema was Indian. Kamala had glimpsed Asian women while driving through markets in Birmingham, or on Channel 4 plays. The Asian women - despite the fact that they had different skin and clothes, had the same look as everyone around them, like they were walking around with shutters in their eyes, with a wall around them bearing a big sign saying No Entry. They mostly wore salwar kameez, baggy knee-length shirts and baggy trousers, teamed with cardigans apparently picked to clash as wildly as possible. As it turned out, Aunty Seema was nothing like that.

At the airport, they waited for what seemed like hours watching streams of people coming out of a pair of big automatic doors. Behind the doors was a people-factory with shelves and shelves of heads of different shapes, wigs of different colours and textures, bodies of different sizes; metal arms with claw-like hands picking them off the shelf zing, zing, zing, and sticking them together and then, when they were finished they would squeeze them into a skin picked out of a wardrobe full of empty skins hanging up on coat hangers – all different shades of pink and brown and beige, and then there would be a wardrobe of clothes...and all different suitcases, and bags and boxes and then pop! Out they would come through the doors, and the factory man – who was god – had a game that no two people could be the same, he had to make every single one different...

"Dont' be ridiculous, Kamala," Mother snapped. "Behind the doors is a corridor leading to the baggage hall."

"I know that" muttered Kamala, but not quite loud enough for Mother to hear... in Mother's present prickly mood, she didn't dare. She was jabbering because she was frightened. She was frightened of this imminent visitor changing her life, stealing her mother, she was frightened of the soldiers everywhere and their guns, and the tanks outside (though mother said they were there to protect us so it was silly to be frightened of them. Protect us from what? Thought Kamala. Something even more scary than them?). There was noise and movement everywhere, flickering words streaming endlessly across screens, electronic voices warning sternly about mysterious parcels being destroyed and their owners arrested, music blaring from the shops and cafes, a cacophony of bleeps, boings and kerchings from gambling machines... but most troubling of all for Kamala was the emotion.

Where the wave of newly-made, all-completely-different people coming through the doors crashed against the shore of readymade people waiting for them – including Kamala and Mother - there was a coastline, an interface, of emotion; creaking, aching, echoing, crackling all around her. Nobody else seemed to be bothered by it, but it tore right into Kamala... a storm of high intensity radiation. There would be a moment or two before each traveller's eyes located their reception committee. Then suddenly they would see the waving hands, hear their name shouted and their "I'm in public amongst strangers" masks would crack open and the real them (or another mask...?) would break out... some only cracked a little tiny bit, some burst open like a dam.

A little kid sprinted across the concourse to its daddy – breaking away from the shore, unable to wait - and he swept it up in his arms and it clung and clung and there were tears and snot everywhere and no-one cared or wiped it away. Lovers would start laughing and reaching out for each other long before the barrier let them touch, their eyes staying locked all through the long walk to the gap and when they finally reached it they would pounce and devour each other with mouths and hands and eyes like starving people devouring their first meal in weeks.
Punjabi grandmothers would grab their achingly embarrassed, bomber jacket clad teenage sons towering over them and kiss and kiss whatever parts of them they could reach. Huge West Indian families dripping with gold and silken acrylics, their hair shining brilliantine bright would break into shrill ululations of happiness, throwing their hands up in the air, hips jiggling with surges of pure happiness, as their sister-uncle-daughter-friend burst through the door, throwing down their bags and joining in the dance, joyously oblivious of the irritable build-up behind them.

Kamala squeezed her eyes shut and pushed her palms against her ears, but she couldn't shut it out. Even those who made no outward show of their feelings, crackled with joy, relief, tension... as they gently touched each other on the arm, or took a bag to carry from the other. Her skin felt prickly with it, her throat swelled with it, the back of her neck was clammy and her eyes were welling up...

She felt her mother stiffen and she opened her eyes. A group of figures swathed in black from head to toe were swaying towards her – surely Aunty Seema wasn't one of them?! Then the group of Muslim ladies had parted, like reeds being thrust aside to let a buffalo charge through.
It may seem rude to compare Aunty Seema (it had to be her...) to a charging buffalo, but it was undeniably apt. She was an eight foot giantess, floating magically towards them, the lower half of her monstrous, gorgeous body composed of cardboard-boxes scrawled with thick black writing and tied with layers of string, boxes of fruit, sprouting straw, cloth bundles simply tied in a fat knot at the top. And at the peak of the mountain Aunty Seema's face beaming out of a storm of black-and-henna-red hair, her 1,000 watt light-house beacon grin, her teeth edged with red as though she really had been devouring human bodies, her shiny red blouse loudly embroidered in gold, the vast bosom erupting from the top of it shaking dangerously as she laughed and laughed and madly waved, yards of thick, gold bangles chinking on vast arms built for hugging.

It was only when it broke free of the mob of black robed women that Kamala realised she was riding on one of those neat little airport cars (Kamala thought it really unfair that usually only sour-faced old ladies were allowed to ride on them, never kids who would really appreciate them...). Kamala gripped Mother's hand a little tighter and leant in closer to her body as the apparition bore down on them. It was too much. The tide of emotions around the concourse seemed to have frozen in surprise. Kamala could even feel Mother pulling back slightly, away from the oncoming mountain-strosity. But with a click of determination, almost audible to Kamala, she nerved herself and stepped smartly forward. "Hello, Didi." she said in a business-like but slightly strained voice.

Then suddenly Kamala was enfolded in flesh and slippery cloth, drowning in hair and love and musky perfume. Aunty Seema was kissing her face, pinching her cheeks... For a moment, Kamala felt completely panicked. She didn't know how to cope with all this love all at once. A demur peck on the forehead at bedtime was the most intimate Mother ever got. Mother never quite said so but Kamala knew that anything more was considered rather tasteless and "common". So she stood there stiff as a fence post and let the love wash round her, and she felt a little judder as it dislodged her steady roots a little. It felt.... nice.

The airport porter who had been driving Aunty Seema's chariot – and who no-one had noticed there before – drove the luggage behind them as they made for the car. After he had squeezed it all in, Aunty Seema gently touched the tips of her fingers to her ruby red lips and then brushed his cheek with them and purred like an overfed lioness "Thank you, darleeeng!". His cheeks went as scarlet as her bodice and he backed away stammering "M-my pleasure, madam, absolute pleasure, p-pleasure!" Aunty Seema wiggled her fingers at him as he disappeared back into the bowels of the airport, then she threw back her head and howled with laughter, her bodice straining alarmingly "So little it takes to give “p-pleasure” to these gora bhais, na, sweetie?!" Kamala was laughing too, though she had no idea what Aunty Seema was talking about, it's just that her laugh was so full of joy and fun it was impossible not to laugh with her. But suddenly Mother shouted (Shouted! In a public place.)

"Shut up, Didi! I will not have that kind of filth talked in front of my daughter. She's nine years old for Christ's sake! If you ever speak like that again, I will drive you straight back to the airport and you can wait for however many hours it takes before the next plane to Mumbai." Mother’s voice was half strangled with almost-tears. Every muscle of her body tense, fists clenched by her side.

Kamala had never – ever – heard Mother talk or look like that. Mother was always Under Control. Now what would happen? Would Aunty Seema shout back and announce that she needn't worry, she knew when she wasn't welcome and she was leaving right away anyway? That's what would happen on East Enders. But all Aunty Seema did was to look at Mother with her big brown eyes. Her laugh disappeared, and she touched Mother on the shoulder. And even though Mother shrugged her hand away, she just said, very quietly. "I'm sorry, Meera." It seemed to Kamala like a very big sorry, the crime of ’talking that kind of filth’ in front of a kid must be a very, very serious one.

“How the hell did you find me? I could have been dead as far as all of you were concerned…”

They were all safely strapped into the car (strapping Aunty Seema in hadn‘t been easy - but they‘d managed it by pushing the seat back as far as it would go).

“The post card you sent, sweetie. How else would we have known?”

“What post card? I never sent you a postcard. I never wanted to see any of you ever again.”

Aunty Seema plunged her hand deep into the scarlet and cinnamon ravine of her chest and drew something out. Kamala, desperate not to miss out on this clearly momentous object, leant forward and shot her hand out from the back seat to grab it at the same moment that Mother did. Aunty Seema didn’t let go, so now the three of them were gripping it. The ancient post card, still moulded to the shape of Aunty Seema’s breast, felt soft and still warm from her musky skin. In thin, faded blue ink, they read:

‘Meera (Mary) Steel’ and an address. The address Kamala had lived at all her life. Nothing else, no message, nothing.

“Where did you get this?” Mother whispered. “Who sent it?”

“Wasn't it you, my darling?” Said Aunty Seema. “It came a few years ago. We didn’t understand, but we assumed it was a message from you to say that you were alright. I wanted to write, but Ma said, no… I think she felt bad…”

“I didn’t send it.” Mother snapped, "Some bloody busybody..." She rammed the car into gear and the angry roar of the engine drowned out all possible conversation.

At midnight that night Hannah's mother phoned and said that Kamala had a high temperature and Mother had better come and collect her. So Aunty Seema slept in the spare room after all (which wasn't remotely damp, though Mother made a great show of opening the windows and leaving the electric heater on) and Kamala returned to her guard-post beside Mother. She looked at Kamala as though she suspected she had got ill on purpose. Kamala suspected it herself - she didn't like the burning, sick feeling of the fever, but, if it got her back to Mother, it had to be done. If Kamala lost Mother, she would be lost herself. She would be all alone. She might as well be dead.

But she soon realised she needn't have worried. Mother was like a fortress which didn't open the tiniest chink to the storm of Aunty Seema's presence. She wouldn't eat the goodies Aunty Seema had brought, while Kamala, though she'd never tasted anything like them, wolfed them down. There was something about the rich, sweet oiliness, the warm spices, the feeling that everything had been steeped for eternity in their flavours – they felt like family food. Comfort food. The heat and sweetness they generated triggered something melting at the pit of Kamala's stomach, as if the sun had broken through the icy clouds there. Mother's elegant salads and delicate creations in choux pastry seemed pale and insipid in comparison. Kamala had felt embarrassed by her mother's rudeness, but it was water off a duck's back to Aunty Seema, who just rocked with laughter when Mother turned up her nose.

"Never mind, Kamala Baby will eat it all up, na, beti?" She told her that 'beti' meant daughter, and even though she was really Aunty Seema's niece, she was also in a sense, her daughter – that all older females were 'didi', 'maashi' or 'ma' - elder sister, aunty or mother - to all children in India, just as adult men were fathers and uncles, old men and women grand parents, bigger children brothers and sisters... Everybody was one big family. An enormous family which, Kamala thought with amazement, was hers! She who had only ever had Mother and occasionally a visit to her prickly English aunt and uncle.

And the stories she told! There were even stories about mother as a little girl with two long plaits - like the one about her keeping a pet squirrel down the front of her choli, the little cotton bodice she wore. Kamala couldn't quite believe in this version of Mother – the leap of imagination was too great - but it was fun to hear.

“So what did you grow on your farm?” Kamala asked wide eyes ready to absorb every morsel of information. Aunty Seema looked puzzled.

“Farm…?”

“Mother said the family were farmers” Kamala had a vague picture in her mind of Aunty Seema sitting on a red tractor wearing a straw hat, wellies sticking out from under her silk skirts, surrounded by fluffy sheep. But Aunty Seema was spluttering with laughter, silken shoulders shaking, jewellery jangling.

“Oh - I suppose we planted rather a lot of carrots, my darling! But let's not talk about that…” and she went on to another wild anecdote. Sometimes they were sad stories, about poor orphaned children who Kamala's grandmother (My grandmother! marvelled Kamala) had taken in, or strange stories about the shy, mysterious people in the forest on the hill above the house and the magical things people said they could do.

The only time Kamala saw Aunty Seema look angry was when she talked about these forest people and how the other people treated them, how they took away their land, and wouldn't let them go to school and then cheated them in the market because they couldn't do sums. Kamala didn't like those stories, she much preferred the ones about Aunty Seema and Mother and the scrapes they got into.

Aunty Seema only told these stories when Mother wasn't around. When she was around, Mother was on edge all the time, as if terrified of what Aunty Seema might say. Kamala couldn't imagine why. Aunty Seema was so nice, everybody liked her. The milkman, who they had never actually seen before, now knocked on the door and delivered the milk personally everyday. He and Aunty Seema (in a vast nightie covered in green-and-pink parrot and creeper designs) seemed to find the cream at the top of the milk very funny and dipped their fingers into it and licked it off, and the milkman went all red and giggly.

Mr Khan who ran the corner shop liked her too. Aunty Seema went there every day to buy The Sun (which Mother would later pick up with the very tips of her fingers and put into the bin as if it was a dead mouse). Kamala went with her sometimes. Aunty Seema would put on an enormous old anorak sort of thing (which she said a friend of hers had climbed Mount Everest in) and sashay down the street - she reminded Kamala of an elephant she'd seen at the zoo, massive, round, graceful and dignified. Mr Khan would rush to open the door for her and there would be lots of laughing and rolling of eyes and waggling of eyebrows. Aunty Seema would lean her massive elbows on the tiers of Wine Gums and Mars Bars and – as Kamala watched with gaping eyes and gawping mouth- she and Mr Khan would sing duets from the latest Bollywood movie, accompanied by the furious banging of pots and doors by the invisible Mrs Khan in the back room.

Elderly Mr Glennie next door, who'd always been a nice enough neighbour, but – like all their neighbours - kept himself to himself, suddenly started popping his head over the garden fence and handing Aunty Seema little parcels of muddy home-grown vegetables and wilting bunches of wild flowers "to give you a little taste of the real England" he would mutter through his moustache. Aunty Seema's laughter would erupt like temple bells up into the rook-laden branches of the oak tree above them and she would tell him that she found England "...veeeeery tasty, Mr Glennie, sweetie!" while he chuckled and twisted his cap in his hands like an embarrassed teenager.

On the last night of the visit, Mother had gone to an - apparently unavoidable - lecture and dinner in Birmingham. Aunty Seema asked Kamala to come and sleep in her room. They stayed up till after midnight talking about the intricate politics of Kamala's group of school friends, about Mother's childhood, about the far away orchards and rivers and fields of her family's home... Then Aunty Seema had taken Kamala's face between her big, soft hands, smooth and cool as silk, and gazed into her eyes.

"Beti, you are a good girl. You come to India one day and see your Aunty Seema, hanh? You have the spirit in you – very strong, I can see. Good girl!"

"Mother might not let me - she doesn't like India. Aunty Seema, why doesn't Mother like India? Why is she so cross about it? Is it really just because my grandmother wanted her to marry that man?"

"Marry? Nobody wanted your mummy to marry anyone! No, she... I don't know. I can't really talk about it, beti. It's not for me to say. When your mummy wants to tell you why, she will tell you."

Kamala saw that Aunty Seema's eyes were starting to fill with tears, but she quickly closed them and placing one of her hands on top of Kamala's head had started to murmur a prayer. It was as soothing and sweet as it was incomprehensible, like the babbling of water over stones. And Kamala felt as though a light was starting to shine inside her, she felt weightless, dizzy. Aunty Seema opened her eyes, and a look of shock came into them.
She pushed Kamala down towards her with a bump (Kamala wondered for a moment if she really had been weightless) and hugged and hugged her. The next morning, when Kamala woke in Aunty Seema's bed – she was gone – and the house seemed deathly quiet. On the bedside was a tiny golden image of two serpents twined together in a figure of eight, with a little ring attached to the top of their heads. Kamala put it on the silver chain she'd been given by Mother at her confirmation, tucked it under her shirt and never mentioned it to anyone - especially not to Mother.

A terrible, cold mood gripped Mother in the days that followed the visit. If Kamala mentioned Aunty Seema, Mother snapped at her and changed the subject. When Kamala thought about Aunty Seema, she felt like she had when her only pet - a hamster called Mr Smith - had died. She didn't know why it should upset her so much, she'd only met her a week ago... but Aunty Seema's presence had crowbarred a hole in her calm, ordered universe, letting a wilder, brighter, richer universe flood in, a universe Kamala's straitened little soul was sucked towards. And now the hole was slammed shut again. She didn't want it to be snatched away, she wanted more, she wanted to be part of it, she wanted to be surrounded by crowds of Aunty Seemas all cuddling her and feeding her sweets and telling her amazing stories about gods and demons and ghosts and waifs, uncles and aunties.

Then one morning, about two weeks after Aunty Seema had left, Mother was trying to untangle Kamala's long, black hair with a sharp comb, tempers were frayed thin, the school bus would be here any minute... Kamala was trying to wriggle away from the tugging comb and Mother lost her temper and slapped her on the back of her head – something she'd never done before, no matter how difficult things had got. "I hate you!" Kamala had screamed in her shock and surprise "I hate you, I wish I lived in India with Aunty Seema!" Mother, who would normally have firmly but calmly put a stop to such nonsense with a terse word, stared at Kamala. Slowly she laid down the comb and walked out of the room.

Kamala was aghast. Mother never walked away. She was always in control. She ran down the corridor to Mother's bedroom. It was locked. She knocked and knocked and wept that she was sorry, she didn't mean it, that she loved Mother, she didn't want to go to India, she promised she would never go there. Never ever ever. There was silence from Mother's room. Kamala pressed her head against the wood and thought she could hear crying. But that couldn't be. Mother never cried. In the end, she'd given up and gone to school (she had to take the public bus and arrived half way through the first lesson).

When she got home everything was back to normal. And also, would never be normal again. Kamala swore to herself that she would never hurt Mother again. She would never even think or talk about India. She would forget that Aunty Seema had ever existed. Mother and daughter never spoke of her again. But at night, under the duvet, Kamala would touch the golden serpents at her throat and remember Aunty Seema, her laugh, her smell, her stories and then, sometimes, as she was drifting into sleep would feel the same light glowing inside her, would start to feel she was losing contact with her Englishness, her bed, her body.