Anita and Me (WJEC Eduqas GCSE English Literature): Exam Questions

‘You’re so lovely. You know, I never think of you as, you know, foreign. You’re just like one of us.’

My mother would smile and graciously accept this as a compliment. And yet afterwards, in front of the Aunties, she would reduce them to tears of laughter by gently poking fun at the habits of her English friends. It was only much later on that I realised in the thirteen years we lived there, during which every weekend was taken up with visiting Indian families or being invaded by them, only once had any of our neighbours been invited in further than the step of our back door.

The Aunties all had individual names and distinct personalities, but fell into the role of Greek chorus to mama’s epic solo role in my life. Although none of them, nor their husbands, the uncles, were actually related to me by blood, Auntie and Uncle were the natural respectful terms given to them, to any Asian person old enough to boss me around. This was an endless source of confusion to our English neighbours, who would watch tight-lipped as mama and papa’s friends would phut-phut into the communal dirt yard and heave themselves and their several kids out of their hatchbacks, unfurling shimmering saris and clinking with jewellery, holding up their embroidered hemlines from the dirt floor. As I dutifully kissed every powdered or stubbly cheek with a ‘Namaste Auntie, Namaste Uncle’ and led them towards our back door, I could see our neighbours shift uncomfortably, contemplating the apparent size of my family and the fact we had somehow managed to bring every one of them over here.

I did once overhear them discussing me in guilty whispers in the kitchen whilst I was putting my bike away in the shed, my T-shirt stuck to my back in Friesian patches and my healing leg tingling with renewed hope. ‘… used to be such a happy child!’ I froze at papa’s urgent tone, carefully leaning my bike against the wall and deadening its slowly turning spokes. ‘She is happy, Shyam!’ mama hissed back. ‘You still expect her to jump onto your lap and pull on your nose hairs? She’s not a little girl anymore, of course she’s going to get a bit more serious about things, and so she should! We should put the house on the market now …’ ‘Let her pass the exam first!’ papa said, his voice getting louder. ‘She will pass it, no problem. She’s my daughter,’ mama replied. I could hear the grin in her voice. There was a brief pause, some movement and a sigh, I realised with amazement that they had just kissed. Was it like Sam and Anita kissed, mouths clamped together, tongues drilling each other’s cavities? Was it this that endured through fifteen years of marriage and welded people together?

‘But the accident,’ papa said finally. ‘It definitely affected her. And that boy she was sweet on, she’s never mentioned him since. Do you think …’ ‘Oh don’t be silly, Shyam! She’s much too young to be bothering about such things. She doesn’t even know what a boyfriend is.’ Papa’s silence told me how much better he knew me than mama, at this point.

Ah, my darling parents, how much they had tried to cushion me from anything unpleasant or unusual, never guessing that this would only make me seek out the thrill of the dark and dramatic, afraid of what I might be missing, defiant that I would know and experience much more than them. And now I was reaping the karma of all those lies and longings; I had lost a Nanima, a soul mate and temporarily, a leg – enough excitement for a lifetime already. If mama and papa knew the whole picture, they might have called it punishment. But this was the oddest thing, this is what l realised, standing in the yard, a sweaty eavesdropper holding my breath, that at this moment, I was content. I had absorbed Nanima’s absence and Robert’s departure like rain on parched earth, drew it in deep and drank from it. I now knew I was not a bad girl, a mixed-up girl, a girl with no name or no place.

I followed Anita around like a shadow for the rest of the afternoon, keeping a respectful distance behind her, letting her know I was there without going too close to the dark mood that hung around her like a forcefield. By now I was used to Anita’s tempers and knew how to ride them as skilfully as Uncle Hugo rode the unbroken ponies in my favourite Saturday morning programme, White Horses. I knew if I got too close to her during one of her wordless seething tempers, I would be sucked into it like a speck into a cyclone. Her fury was so powerful it was almost tangible, drew the energy and will from me until the world reversed like a negative and I found myself inside her head, looking out of her eyes and feeling an awful murderous hatred. But if I retreated too far she would sense my fear and detachment and turn on me, accusing me of betrayal.

Now I understood what had made Sherrie and Fat Sally do their merry dance of repulsion and attraction around Anita, for like the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, the good and the horrid in her were equally irresistible. I used her thin rigid back as a compass, pursuing her through the crowd as she passed from stall to stall, watching her finger the knitted baby bootees, tinker with vases and dried flower arrangements, rifle through stacks of old magazines until she finally nicked a couple of lemon curd tarts off a cake stall which we ate in quick hurried gulps.

Mama rarely raised her voice but when she did get angry, she looked like one of the ornamental statues I had seen on my Auntie Shaila’s shrine. The goddess she resembled most when in a strop, the one that both terrified and fascinated me, was Kali, a black-faced snarling woman with alarming canines and six waving arms. Every hand contained a bloody weapon and she wore a bracelet of skulls around her powerful naked thighs. And her eyes, sooty O’s of disbelief and also amusement that someone insignificant had dared to step on her shadow.

Mama could look like that at me sometimes, when she had caught me tearing carefully sewn ribbons off my dresses, cutting up earthworms in our back yard with her favourite vegetable knife, and most usually, when I was lying. The size of lie never made a difference to her reaction; it could have been one of my harmless fabrications (telling a group of visiting kids in the park that I was a Punjabi princess and owned an elephant called Jason King), or one of my major whoppers – telling my teacher I hadn’t completed my homework because of an obscure religious festival involving fire eating ... She was always furious at the pointlessness of it all; stealing was understandable if distressing, violence antisocial yet sometimes unavoidable, but lying? ‘Why do you do this, Meena?’ she would wail, wringing her hands unconvincingly, a parody of a Hindi movie mama. ‘You are only four/seven/nine ... Isn’t your life exciting enough without all these stories?’

Well naturally the answer was no, but I did not want to make mama feel that this was her fault. Besides, I enjoyed her anger, the snapping eyes, the shrieking voice, the glimpse of monster beneath the mother; it was one of the times I felt we understood each other perfectly.

Of course, no one else outside our small family ever saw this dark side of mama; to everyone else, she was the epitome of grace, dignity and unthreatening charm. She attracted admirers effortlessly, maybe because her soft round face, large limpid eyes and fragile, feminine frame brought out their protective instincts. Tragedy, amusement and bewilderment would wash across her face like sea changes, flowing to suit the story of whoever she was listening to, giving them the illusion that they could control the tides. She was as constant as the moon and just as remote, so the admiration of the villagers was always tempered with a deferential respect, as if in the company of minor royalty.

Papa was jingling his loose change in his jacket pocket and I knew he wanted to make his way over to the skittle stall. Papa loved gambling; I had watched him playing rummy with my Uncles, everyone sitting cross-legged in a huge circle on our carpet, their coins and tumblers of whisky at their knees, throwing down cards with whoops of triumph or dismay. Or I had followed him into penny arcades during shopping trips, when he would slip away whilst mama was taking too long over a purchase, and would watch him feed the one-arm bandits carefully, holding his breath as the tumbling oranges and lemons spun to a halt as if expecting a jackpot win every time. Whilst papa thought of himself as a rakish risk taker, I could see how hard it was for him to gamble without guilt by the way he reluctantly handed over notes for change at the penny arcade booths, or how hesitantly he would place his bets on the carpet whilst my more flamboyant Uncles would be flinging shillings and sometimes notes onto the floor with optimistic battle cries.

Actually, papa won quite often. Uncle Amman was always saying that ‘Lakshmi mata must be sitting on your right hand, Shyam saab,’ as papa raked yet another heap of winnings into his lap. But for papa, every win was tainted by the memory of all those other times he had gambled and lost; this little war of sacrifice and gain plagued him every time, and I wondered why a man who had risked so much by setting foot in a foreign country with five pounds in his pocket and no friends to call on, could not simply throw caution to the wind and just let go. Later on, when mama had begun to treat me like a grown-up and had released nuggets of information about her and papa’s experiences in India that would have given me nightmares as a child, this battle between desire and duty made perfect sense

Of course, papa courted chance like an old friend; as a seventeen-year-old in a refugee camp who owned only what he wore, he could afford to decide anything on the flip of a coin because, at that point in his life, there was nothing left to lose and any gain, even the smallest anna, would be a victory. However, papa was not a recreational gambler, a rich man playing with his wealth for whom poverty was an unimaginable and distant maybe; he had lived, breathed and smelled it, and the prospect of returning there due to a miscalculated bet must have haunted him. It sat on his shoulder whilst he fed change into a Lucky Waterfall machine, shook its head and tutted every time he picked up his hand of cards and scanned the diamonds and hearts. And whilst his peculiar brand of fiery caution often irritated me, it was only because I had not yet realised how he, and everyone else of his generation, had taken enough risks already to last a lifetime.