My Daughter, My Mother by Annie Murray Page A

down beside her.
    ‘Look, Ma-ji – it’s a nice day. Why don’t you come outside with Priya and me? We can go to the park, walk round the lake. We could talk . . .’
    There was no reply. Meena turned her head away with a slight gesture of recoil from her and fixed her eyes on the dancing wedding guests. Her silence went on.
    Sooky went to the park anyway. I might just as well have gone to the toddler group, she thought, as she strapped Priya into the buggy, hurt and let down after those moments of hope that Mom might be softening towards her.
    Why did she ask me to stay, when all she wants to do is ignore me again? She’d even dressed in her yellow suit again, not jeans and a T-shirt. She was trying to be a dutiful Punjabi.
    It was sunny and warm outside. She turned out of their street of tall, gabled Edwardian houses, past her old school and then down towards the park. The streets were quiet and it was a pleasant walk. But Sooky could not feel peaceful, even when the green space of the park opened out in front of her. All the old doubts came back.
    The first time she had seen Jagdesh, her prospective husband, she had thought he looked all right. Well, all right-ish. He and his parents had come over from Derby and they had gone through the rituals of tea and snacks and introductions. She had waited on them and been stared at and commented on. Jagdesh had been polite, though Sooky had been sure she could detect a smirk on his face, as if he thought himself superior to everyone there. He was clean-shaven, quite trendy in a smart suit. He worked with computers, or something like that. She hadn’t taken too much notice because she wasn’t really interested in that sort of thing. She was keener on people, dreamed of training as a social worker.
    The parents had talked amicably enough.
    ‘Sukhdeep is a good student,’ her father had told Jaz’s parents. ‘She’s a good girl.’
    Her mother, of course, laid it on about how she could cook, which was the truth. Mom had taught her well.
    She and Jaz had a few minutes to talk alone.
    ‘What d’you like to do in your spare time?’ she’d asked him.
    ‘Oh, you know. Films, music, that sort of thing.’ Obviously neither the drinking and being insulting nor the inclination to be sexual with small children was laid out in his CV.
    ‘You’d like Derby,’ he’d told her assuredly. ‘It’s better than Birmingham – smaller and not so ugly.’
    She hadn’t liked or disliked him. She had been seventeen: Mom and Dad had started looking for someone for her. Now she wondered why she hadn’t expected more, demanded more. They wouldn’t have forced her. Jaz was only the second man who came; there could have been more. It was almost as if she’d known it was inevitable and just wanted to get it over. She realized later that Jaz, who was then twenty-two, had felt the same.
    ‘You marry as strangers,’ Mom had counselled her. She seemed in her element, the wise older woman who had been through it all, passing on her knowledge to her daughter. ‘But you are not strangers for long. You live together, work together, have children. You look after him properly, do cooking, cleaning, bedroom things – he will respect you.’
    After she’d met Jaz she’d crept upstairs to where Harpreet was waiting. Harpreet had been twelve then, and so shy that she’d begged to be let off the family meeting, but she was fit to burst with curiosity. She grabbed Sooky’s hand and yanked her into the room.
    ‘So, what was he like? What did you say ?’
    ‘He’s all right. I said yes.’
    She hadn’t felt anything much. It had been a bit like going to the dentist for a filling. It just had to be done. And at that time the wedding itself seemed quite far off.
    She’d missed Harpreet terribly once she had moved in with Jagdesh’s parents. He had no sisters, just two brothers, one already married and living elsewhere, the other a year older than Sooky, but silent and unsociable. Jaz’s mom