The Taste of Metal.
Book One
‘Cruelty, yes: it was in the nature of Indian family life. The clan that gave protection and identity and saved people from the void was itself a little state, and it could be a hard place, full of politics, full of hatreds and changing alliances and moral denunciations. It was the kind of family life I had known for much of my childhood....................................’
Naipaul, V.S. India: A Million Mutinies Now.
1. The Taste of Metal
Each night as I lay on my bed, I asked myself where the darkness came from. Its presence in the room reminded me of those black paintings I often saw on calendars and postcards. Those morbid works which hung on museum walls, seen on classroom trips, that depicted the void.
I had been told so little of the unseen realms where the grotesque and disembodied spirits reside.
I imagined that this darkness could tip itself over, and like paint from a can, seep into the core of my being. I understood it to be something of the external world. I was sure I contained the light and that by focusing inwards, I could remove the fear of being enveloped within its nightly grip. I watched shadows dancing through the curtains. It was like looking into the lens of one of my toy kaleidoscopes. Hours passed by as I saw fragmented patterns of moving leaves. These silhouette-like shapes performed strange gestures that endlessly folded and unfolded, creating shadow plays on the bedroom wall, so unnatural against the light of the moon and stars. I felt frightened, yet I summoned what courage I could muster to get up, and after turning on the light, began my nightly routine of checking under the bed and inside the wardrobe for horrible monsters, demons, and bogeymen. Satisfied I was alone, I would turn off the light and sink back into bed with a sigh of relief, pulling the razai up tight over me.
One day, while we were in the back room of our house, I asked my father what the darkness was. He said it existed because we lived in the time of Kalyug.
I shook my head. “I do not understand what that means.”
“Come closer,” he said and motioned for me to sit down on the chair.
I watched him go over to the sink in the corner of the room. He took the white turban off the table and placed it on his head, then he scrubbed his hands and dried them carefully on the leaf-green towel hanging on the hook beside the sink. When he had finished, he took down a small book he kept in the top cupboard. He unwrapped the dark blue velvet cloth that covered the sacred Sikh scriptures and began to read.
“The dark age of Kalyug is the knife; kings have become butchers, righteousness has sprouted wings and flown away. In this night of falsehood, the moon of Truth is nowhere to be seen. I have searched in vain, O Nanak, in this darkness, I cannot find the path.' (Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji)
I found the words hard to understand. “What dark age are they talking about?”
“The Sikh scriptures speak of the yuga cycles of time. They tell us the darkness lies within each of us, puttr, but we must not be scared because God’s light is always there to guide us. The Kalyug is known as the age of iron. That is why we feel so heavy and weighted down. We no longer see God within ourselves; we live in the wilderness.”
Puzzled, I looked into my father's face. I knew he was trying to explain something important, and I tried with all my might, but I could not understand his words. He told me not to be scared because he would always be there to protect me.
A few weeks later, once again I found myself lying in my bed screaming out into the charcoal darkness.
I was having one of my recurring nightmares. A grotesque, grey monster, taller than the houses but not as tall as the trees, was chasing me into the night. It gained ground, and I reached the top of the hill only to see an immense crater there. I was about to fall in, and terror gripped me. Nobody would ever find me; I would be lost forever in the clutches of some disfigured demon in some bottomless pit. I was unable to move; I was paralysed from the neck down, my jaws clamped together, and I could not make a sound. My panic grew. When I finally opened my eyes, the room was still, and beads of sweat had formed cold layers along the contours of my stiff body. I was terrified and confused, stuck in the land of lucid dreams, the strange landscapes of my mind.
It was wintertime, and the room felt cold. I pulled the heavy razai down from my neck onto my chest, where the fabric lay limp and lifeless. The cold air pressed itself against my face, and I breathed it in deeply. We did not have central heating, so we used those old-style gas heaters during the day, but at night they were always turned off.
My mother came into my bedroom and softly called out to me, "Uth ja.”
She bent down and switched on the bedside lamp. My first thought as I caught a glimpse of her pushing back her thick flowing black hair was that she looked tired. Her light blue cotton nighty had small white embroidered flowers flung all over it and a little pink bow on the front. Hitching it up and removing her slippers, she got onto the bed and sat crossed-legged beside me. She adjusted her nightdress, reached over, gently pulled me onto her lap, and rocked me back and forth as she patted my arm to the rhythm of her movements.
Her face was soft, radiating an aura of warmth and an absolute maternal knowing. I felt the reassurance of my mother's unconditional love permeate my being as she cushioned my body with hers. In her presence, I felt secure. To put me back to sleep, she softly sung a nursery rhyme from her childhood in the distant land of the Punjab, in Northern India.
“Saunja,” she said. Go back to sleep.
My eyes closed. I had escaped from the monster, which had disappeared into the folds of my mind. My mother was the anchor that kept me from being lost in the shadow-play of my inner realms. I lay back in my bed again, safe. I was four years old.
My nightmares and waking fevers were a regular occurrence in the household. Those childhood years were punctuated with seizures, choking fits, and short stays in the hospital. My eldest sister, Gurinder, would be tasked to call for an ambulance. There was no telephone in the house, so she would use the phone belonging to our neighbours, a West Indian family who lived next door to us and whom over the years we had come to know. The youngest daughter, Kyshona, a year older than me was like a sister. I would be taken to Seacroft or St James' Hospital and sometimes to Leeds General Infirmary. My mother accompanied me with one of my older sisters, Gurinder, Amrit or Surinder. My father, assigned his own task, would go to work.
At the hospital, a host of doctors in white coats and nurses in an assortment of coloured uniforms would gather around, prodding me, asking questions, telling me to say ahhhhh, while putting shiny instruments into my mouth. The cold, hard taste of metal against my tongue lingered for years.
The nurses were particularly kind when they produced the needles to draw blood, adding, "This is not going to hurt.” But at times, it hurt badly as sharp points pierced my skin. My body ached, and I cried out.
My mother, always there, sat with me, reassuring me that I would never have to go through my anxiety alone. When I felt I could not cope, she reminded me she had carried me in her womb for nine months, and it was her duty to nurture me. She gave everything to me every day, and I felt complete. I underwent many blood tests, x-rays, scans, and once when I had a lumbar puncture, my back ached for weeks. As a result, I developed an aversion to doctors, hospitals, needles, and the smell of strong sterile disinfectant. Yet I relied on them all, so helplessly, to provide interventions for my physical body and its safety. The memories of what I had endured imprinted themselves indelibly on my mind, testaments to my frailty.
It is strange how memory works. What we choose to remember and what becomes lost over time. I must have been about five or six, there was one nurse in particular, called Rose. I still remember her name, but her face has now vanished from my mind. She tended to me at Seacroft on several occasions. I remember one time Gurinder came to pick me up in a taxi as no one in the house could drive. We stepped outside the ward, and Rose called to us. She was just coming back from her lunch hour and handed my sister a plain white carrier bag. Then she bent down and hugged me.
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “Inside are some sweets for you.”
I nodded, and a feeling of warmth washed over me. I was surrounded by people who were always thoughtful. The nurses who took care of me were nice; I never forgot their kindness because it added a layer of good feeling to my otherwise unpleasant experiences.
When we got home, Gurinder spilt the contents of the bag onto the table and handed me my sweets. Rose had bought wine gums and dolly mixtures, which she knew were amongst my favourites.
Gurinder got on well with Rose from the moment they met, and it turned out they shared the same taste in music. They often exchanged posters and the latest Beatles, David Bowie, and Stevie Wonder albums.
Gurinder’s record player was rectangular in shape, long and narrow with a lid you could prop up and was covered with Formica that imitated dark brown wood. It reminded me of a coffin. She would play her records on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons, but on Sundays, my father would play the Sikh prayer Japji Sahib Ji, each line spoken in Punjabi and then translated into English. He turned the volume up, and we had no choice but to listen to it.
“Ik Onkar, there is but one God. Sat Nam, his name is the truth. Kartha Purkh, he is the doer of everything.”
One day, Gurinder brought out some long rolls of paper that Rose had given her. She smoothed one of them out, and with strips of sellotape, attached a six-foot Elvis Presley poster to the wallpaper in the front room. Dressed in black, wearing a black and white striped t-shirt, Elvis was playing his guitar and was swinging his hips to the Jailhouse Rock. I thought my parents would be horrified at this intrusion of western culture into the house and to the tape spoiling the 1970s wallpaper. To my surprise, they left the poster up. All cultural objections were dropped, it seemed, when Elvis swung his hips.
The wallpaper consisted of a dark green background with large black and white circular patterns. My father painted the skirting in the whole house sky blue, which we got sick of. Every summer during the school holidays, we would help repaint the woodwork. We asked him to get a different colour paint, but he said his focus was to save money for the future, to pay for marriages and tickets back home to the Punjab, not for pots of paint. He added that life required us to live on what resources were available and that he did not have money to waste on frivolities.
Although we lived in Leeds, West Yorkshire, the decor was reminiscent of houses back in India where nothing ever matched. A cacophony of shapes and colours, dark browns with lime greens, pastel pinks and shiny golds, all thrown together, now considered to be so fashionable, retro, and urban chic here in the West, and which worked so well in India. However, in the transition from India to Britain, the effect was lost due to differences in the quality of light.
One time when I was six, I came home after three weeks in Seacroft hospital. I was lying on the sofa in the back room with my favourite light-yellow blanket around my legs. I had just finished drinking the sund my mother had prepared for me. It was an old-style brown concoction made by women in the Punjab, consisting of dried ginger and gur dissolved in hot ghee, and was guaranteed to help with any ailment, including—or so she assured me—colds, fevers and headaches. She said it was even given to pregnant women to boost their immune systems. I was not convinced. It tasted foul, but she still made me drink it.
“It will do you some good,” my mother would say. “Stop pulling faces and just drink it.” It smelt foul because of all the dried ginger it contained, and it was brown, thick, and salty. In the back room where I usually lay, there was a sink in the corner, and when she had gone downstairs, I would pour half of it down the drain. I did this a couple of times when she made it, but luckily I never got caught; otherwise, there would have been hell to pay. When she came back into the room, she would place her hand on my forehead to check my temperature, and handing me a hot water bottle, would tell me, “Puttr, lie down and get some rest.”
My mother always took great care of me. In winter, she lit the gas fire to warm up the room. My father had converted one of the cellars downstairs into a kitchen, but it was cold, so I got to eat upstairs when I was ill. I would sit up, and she would place the tray with sabhji and roti on my knees. She would call my three older sisters when my father came in from work at around six o'clock in the evening. Amrit would come down after her prayers. Gurinder would be in her room painting her nails, and saying they would break, she always refused to wash the dishes after we had eaten. Surinder would be doing her own thing, whatever that was; when she tired of bullying me, she liked looking at herself in the mirror and trying on makeup, which we were not actually allowed to wear.
“Khana bangaya,” my mother would shout. The food is ready. “Come downstairs and eat before it gets cold.”
That was my mother; she took care of us all. The bond I had with her was ever so strong. To me, she represented the archetype of the divine feminine, always attentive to my needs. I benefited immeasurably from the care she gave me. Did I choose her? Or was she given to me through the forces of karma? A recognition for past good deeds in a former life, perhaps? I did not know. She grounded me, gave me my foundation and sense of belonging. She brought light, structure, and order to me and gave me knowledge of my own individual essence.
My mother was blunt, a characteristic of people from the Punjab. She was sharp, earthy, intuitive, full of wisdom and unspoken mysteries. At times, when she became annoyed with my sisters or me when we asked too many questions or answered back or refused to go with her on Sundays to the Gudwara in Chapeltown, she would hurl at us a phrase designed to hit home. “Sakhi ne banthi.” A stepmother will never be like a real mother to you. We would admonish her, insisting that we loved and appreciated her. We asked why she said such strange things. However, they turned out to be quite true, as you will soon see.
I remember, in the evenings, the times Gurinder came in after work. On one particular summer’s evening, she came in through the back door. She was wearing her favourite blue dress with a quilted square over the bust and a belt that tied at the back. She wore a pair of brown wedge shoes, fashionable at the time. Her hair was wavy like mine, but it never grew longer than her shoulders. Like my mother, she rarely wore much make-up or jewellery.
“Hello, how are you?” she asked as she came in.
"Fine." I had just finished my homework and was sitting at the table with a cup of tea in my hand and a biscuit in the other. I have always loved drinking tea.
She smiled. “I have a surprise for you. Today I had my feet up on the desk at work because there was not much to do. I was so bored I spent most of the afternoon reading my book."
After college, where she studied typing, Gurinder had secured a job at the Inland Revenue Service. She loved shopping, buying new clothes, shoes, bags, and the latest pop records. She also bought books, mostly populist in nature. Danielle Steele, Barbara Cartland, V.C. Andrews, and Jeffery Archer. Sometimes after work, she went into the old-fashioned sweet shops in town and perused the assortment of large jars filled with so many different flavours, colours, shapes, and designs.
She sat down on the chair opposite me and casually threw her denim bag onto the table. She told me she had gone shopping during her lunch hour.
Opening up her bag, she brought out a Tupperware box she used for her sandwiches. It was still full of crumbs and a slice of yellowing cucumber. Then followed a novel by Danielle Steele, The Promise, a love story. I preferred reading fairy tales. You do get romance in them, but it is not the wet lips variety with all that eye-gazing, cooing, and endless pouting!
“I bought you some sweets,” she smiled as she handed them over to me. “I know you like these.” She usually selected the same sweets, wine gums and pear drops. Occasionally she bought me mint humbugs.
“Thank you.” I had a very sweet tooth. I put my hand out, and she pressed a small white paper bag into my palm. She smiled at me as I put a pear drop into my mouth. I offered her one, and she shook her head. I began to savour the sweet juicy flavour.
Then she brought out another item, a small shiny red box. She turned it over to reveal a picture of a beautiful wood full of trees and long grass. In the centre stood the well-known image of a witch’s house made of cakes, pastries, and sweets, with smoke coming out of the chimney. The title in gold read Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Collected Works.
“I thought you might like this."
The set of twelve books was so beautifully designed. It was my first-ever box set, and I laughed, overjoyed with my gift. I loved reading, and over time, thanks to her, I accumulated many editions of these tales. Each book contained exquisite illustrations painted delicately in pen and ink with watercolours.
“Thank you so much; it is beautiful. I love the books you bring me," I said.
She got up and walked towards the door to go upstairs. As she opened it, she turned her head towards me and smiled. “I know you do.”
All my books were precious to me, and I felt so much joy to have such a beautiful, special set. I treasured my time reading them and looking at the pictures.
Gurinder was very generous and showed me many acts of kindness throughout my childhood. She would organise birthday parties, bake cakes and make jelly, buy cards and blow up balloons. On these occasions, she brought me dolls, which I enjoyed playing with, and colouring books with felt tip pens, sharpeners, and pencil crayons. However, I sensed from the beginning that something was lacking. There was a coolness between all my sisters. It was in stark contrast to the physical warmth and connection I experienced with my mother. I put it down to the age difference of about ten years, which meant we had different views, interests, and life experiences. We rarely laughed, hugged, or showed much affection, which often created a deep sadness within me. Somehow, even then, I sensed that it was only through challenges, division, and separation that we came to know one another.
Then there was my second sister, Amrit. She was the polar opposite of Gurinder. An introvert and still in high school, she was more interested in pursuing a spiritual path than in family life or a career. She spent most of her time reading her prayers from a small book or gutka that was covered in purple fabric with a white floral print. She pleaded with my father to be allowed to take the Sikh religious vows of amrit, to be baptised as a khalsa. He was absolutely against the idea, though I never understood why. However, my mother and my massi, had advocated on her behalf, and Amrit eventually went to the local Gudwara and took her vows to live a religious life within the household. She always dressed with austerity, though she took the same amount of time in the bathroom getting ready as Gurinder did.
She was fond of telling dirty jokes, and one time I pointed out to her, “It does not quite synchronise with your spiritual persona.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, glaring at me. “Who asked you?”
“Nobody asked,” I said. “I am just saying you always tell dirty jokes and talk about the boys you fancy at school. It does not sound very religious."
She refused to engage and turned her head—I thought because she felt she had a monopoly on spirituality in the house. At the age of ten, I had no idea of the contradictions that action encompassed. My family would turn away when they wished to conceal the truth, hide their deeds or the discrepancies in their true personalities. Yet I saw everything as black and white and failed to see the complexities. Her daily attire consisted of a white cotton kurta pyjama, a white turban, and a dark blue or bright yellow sash, which was supposed to hold a kirpan. However, according to British law, citizens were forbidden to carry a six-inch knife, even if it was for religious reasons, so the holder remained empty. Surprisingly, the very strict headmistress gave Amrit permission to wear her kurta pyjama instead of the prescribed school uniform of a grey skirt and pink shirt. We moved in a pluralist society, after all.
Amrit took very little interest in what went on in the house. She spent most of her time doing her part, her prayers, and going to a local Satsang two streets away, run by a lady known as Bibiji. Amrit liked doing kirtan and playing the vaja. She was the only one in the family who kept all the five Ks and wore a mala bracelet so she could do simran and chant waheguru. For some reason, my father also resented this.
“I thought that was why we reincarnated as Sikhs?” I asked him. “To find God and live according to the moral codes set out in the scriptures to become jiwan mukti, liberated from the cycles of death and rebirth. So why are you so against her choices?”
My father looked at me for a while. I felt sure he was about to speak, but he remained silent. Then he shook his head at me and said, “How many times have I told you not to ask so many questions.”
As soon as she entered the house, Amrit’s eyes, like searchlights, would seek out the clock. She blocked out everything else, rarely getting involved in pleasantries. I would watch her daily ritual as she hurriedly stuffed the back door keys into her bag. When I greeted her, her impatience always showed as she moved towards the inner door leading to the stairs and her room, which was in the attic.
“I am going to do my part,” she would say and disappear, closing the door behind her.
We often went out together as a family. We would go to Roundhay Park in the summers for picnics by the lake. When the fair was in town, we went on the rides, the bumper cars and helter-skelter. We ate candy floss, ice cream, and hot dogs with fried onions and ketchup. We would go to Headingley cinema with a Sikh family, friends of my parents, to watch Bollywood movies. In the intervals, we ate vegetable curry and achar wrapped up in rotis, cooked by my mother just before we left home, and we drank hot tea from thermos flasks and ate ladoos. We visited other family, friends, and relatives. Those were good times with lots of play, food, and laughter.
I had a happy childhood. I loved those days playing with my toys, languishing on the sofa, drinking tea while reading my books and crunching my sweets. The fairy stories provided me with enough adventure to feed my vivid imagination and escape the mundaneness of family life. I relished having my books around me; they helped me forget about the hospitals, the unpleasant smells, tastes, and feelings. I let my imagination run wild and lost myself in narratives of magic and enchantments. I wandered around strange forests and dark woods filled with dwarves and wicked stepmothers, callous sisters, and dysfunctional parents. They all seemed so twisted, steeped in sorcery and witchcraft.
My favourite tale was Hansel and Gretel. I often pondered what kind of father would take his own children deep into the woods and leave them outside the witch’s house to be boiled in the cauldron and cannibalised. And what was the wicked stepmother’s role in the narrative? She just stood by; it seemed she had even reserved a front seat to watch the drama. With her humanity now gone, she allowed the cruelty to unfold.
One afternoon when Gurinder came downstairs, I asked her why the people in the stories were so horrible to each other. “They are cruel to those children, who are so young, just leaving them outside with no food or shelter, as if they had never known or cared for them."
She was not really interested and looked at me blankly. “I have never really thought about it.” She was content to buy me the books, but like most adults, she never paused to ask why these stories were passed down to each generation or what they could mean.
There were certain phrases my eldest sister peppered into my childhood years, like, “Children should be seen and not heard.” She was also fond of saying, “Make yourself useful,” whenever she asked me to do anything. I noted how she used the fairy tale narratives to play out the ideas instilled by my parents, where children were passive and obeyed without question. It was as if I were a cardboard character with no thoughts or feelings of my own. Her words sounded like something the wicked witch or the jealous queen would say. “Scrub the floors and wash everyone’s clothes, Cinderella,” or “After you have done all my chores, don’t worry if you are tired, Gretel, because I am going to eat you anyway,” and “Run this errand, little Red Riding Hood, never mind that there is a big bad wolf out there, waiting, or that you feel unprotected, vulnerable and scared of being devoured.”
I found what Gurinder said quite offensive, so one day, I confronted her. “Children are not your slaves, you know, to be bossed around and treated badly, only there to do everyone’s bidding. Surely they have a right to be heard? Maybe they just want to play with their toys and sit in the sunshine. They are human beings with feelings.”
She looked at me, yet said nothing, and throughout the years, so unaware of their import, carried on unconsciously repeating those age-old mantras, which meant I was forced to listen to them over and over. These limiting patterns were embedded deep within her psyche—so deeply that she was unaware of their presence. The beliefs passed down through the stories we were told and the questions we were never allowed to ask.
