“Dhruv was totally casual about it. ‘What’s the problem?’ he would say. ‘We’ll just open the door.’ Several times I used to tell him, ‘You tell your mother everything; why don’t you tell her the sexual positions you’ve tried with me?’ I used to make fun of him about it.”
During her speech a man has come to our table and, without a word, sat down next to her. She has taken no notice of this man, so I assume she was expecting him, but I am slightly taken aback at the lack of reaction on anyone’s part. Sukhvinder has not touched her phone since we made the decision to come to this café, so she cannot have informed him where she was. And yet he has found her and sat down beside her without any remark. I enjoy the aloofness they both display to locational issues. I have no idea who the man might be. He must be someone she knows well, since she continues to talk about intimate things in front of him.
“Dhruv’s family were not Sikhs. They were Hindu Brahmins from West Punjab, and they surrounded themselves with priests and astrologers. After about four months of our marriage my mother-in-law started to tell Dhruv that her priest thought I was an evil force and things were going to go wrong. I was the reason his business was failing and all of that.
“She began to tell him I was doing black magic. I just laughed because I don’t even believe in all that. But they started all these rituals to protect their home. There would constantly be weird things in the doorway when I arrived to stop the evil coming in, and since I came from a Sikh family, I had no idea what they were, so I would pick them up and throw them away, which only made them believe it more. My mother-in-law was terrified about bad stuff coming in from outside. She never ever left the house except to buy vegetables from a street vendor, and when she went out she had three pairs of shoes and she would change from one into the next and then into the next, to make sure there was no contact between the inside and the outside.
“One day she went through my things and she found this amulet that I’d been given by a Muslim friend. It was some Islamic symbol and I liked it, I found it interesting, you know? She took it away and showed it to her priest and he said, ‘This is where all your problems are coming from.’ And they did rituals to purify the amulet. And she told everyone in the house and they all started avoiding me. The entire family would look down on me. They were a Partition family and this was like Partition. And I was Pakistan. What hurt me was not that everyone else believed these crazy things but that Dhruv did. He couldn’t question anything his mother said.
“I really did not want to fail at my marriage and I tried everything I could. I thought I could change everything and make everyone happy. My mother-in-law had been mourning ever since her husband died fifteen years before. You won’t believe it: when I moved into that house I realised that in the entire house there was not one photograph of Dhruv’s father. Which made me feel they had not yet accepted that he was no longer in their lives, and I thought that was why they were so insane. So one day we were out shopping and I bought a beautiful frame, and I got a photograph blown up and I put it in the drawing room. When she saw it, she was hysterical. ‘Get rid of that!’ she screamed. I said, ‘Look it’s a beautiful frame and it’s a beautiful picture of him. I thought it would make you happy.’ And she screamed at Dhruv, ‘This girl just wants to make sure I am crying all the time.’
“She used to sleep with her property papers under her ass because she thought I wanted to steal them. I don’t like to say such things but secretly I was like, ‘Have you seen the property my family has? I already have houses of my own. This house will be divided between five grandchildren. Do you think I care about stealing one-fifth of your shitty house from you?’ But I thought that since she cared so much about money, I could maybe make her happy with money. So I opened a savings account and every month I used to deposit 5–10,000 rupees [$100–200] depending on what I had. I gave her the ATM card and said, ‘You don’t need to go to Dhruv whenever you need money. This is yours. I’m a part of the family too.’ But I guess I was never part of the family. The entire month she’d be sulking, being completely bitchy — and just when the day came that I had to transfer the money, she was suddenly extremely sweet to me. It was visible you know, that sweet thing, sickening sweet. But I had no issues with it. I thought, ‘If this is what buys peace in the house, you can keep my entire salary.’
“As things got worse, I used to say to my mother-in-law and my husband quite frequently: ‘What exactly do you want me to do, how do you want me to behave? Give me a list, A-Z, and I’ll stick to it? Because whatever I do makes you unhappy, but when I stop doing it, you’re still unhappy.’ I told her after a year, ‘Every week I sat down with you and asked you what you wanted me to do, and every week there was a definite thing. And I actually made a note of each and every thing you wanted me to do. But each week it completely clashed with what you’d said the week before. It was as if you just wanted me to fail.’
“Dhruv had a younger brother who was a loudmouth. He was very rude to his mother, and he would hit her when they had arguments. All that really shook me because after the first time I saw him do that I thought, if he doesn’t respect his own mother, he’ll kill me tomorrow. It totally shook me. He kept on kicking her and boxing her, and I wrapped myself around her so she didn’t get hurt because she had acute arthritis. But in her head her sons were perfect, and the following morning she called up one of her relatives and said, ‘Sukhvinder was trying to hit me.’ So I was like, You bitch! She could never ever see that her sons were doing something wrong, and if they did bad things, she forgot about them straight away.
“I couldn’t understand this, and I always made the mistake of being brutally honest. If my husband and his mother were having an argument about something, Dhruv would bring me in and ask me, ‘Which one of us is right, which one of us is wrong?’ Now, if you ask me that sort of a question, I expect you’re prepared for the answer. So I would say, ‘I think she was wrong here and you were wrong here and—’, and it would make both of them furious. They would both forget about the fact that they were fighting, and they would eat me alive. He would be like, ‘How can you say that about my mother?’ And she would say, ‘How can you say that about my son?’
“Anyway, there came a time when I got home really late from work. There’s one time in the year when we show our products at a trade exhibition, and I have to work all hours. So I came back from the exhibition really late and I really wanted to go to the toilet. So I came back and I completely forgot about the slipper changing thing, I just ran to the toilet. She made a huge fuss and said all sorts of weird things to me. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely forgot. I only wanted to go to the toilet.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are up to something.’ So I said, ‘Forget it. You’re not making any sense.’ And I went to take a shower.
“While I was in the shower I heard all this shouting between the mother and the son. When I came out Dhruv said, ‘You should not argue with Mummy.’ I explained the situation to him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you slapped her.’ I was like, ‘I slapped your mother?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he said, ‘Well you didn’t slap her. You were about to slap her.’ And I was like, ‘If you think after a year and a half of marriage that I am capable of that, then God bless you.’ And I went into the kitchen to start cooking.