Her London Bed

HER LONDON BED

I found a packet of contraceptives underneath my daughter's bed last
week. It's not what a mother wants. We were just visiting Kamla in London. Uma, my husband, had business and we hadn't seen her in so long. She never comes back nowadays, not like before when every holiday, every half term would see her home.

Nowadays, she scarcely ever comes home. Always there is some project or
some art trip to Europe, we don't always approve, but you know what it is
like:

- But Papa, I'll be the only girl in the whole Art History class who
hasn't seen Michelangelo's David.

She has her Papa wrapped round her little finger, that one. It's a good
thing for her, that Papa has never seen Michelangelo's David, or that ruse may
not have been quite so successful:

- Two thousand pounds, to be seeing butt naked Italian marble men? I
do not think so. If you want to see that sort of thing, then we go
see Khajuraho temples in India, much cheaper; and Indian, and therefore
beti, better.

So now we come to see her, rather than visa versa, but still it is
good. We are a close family, not one of those stereotypical Indian ones where there is no communication and only shouting and ranting. My husband and I, we
are educated people, we read books, we understand about the importance of
talking, and such things. We love our daughter very much.

We chose to send Kamla to school here in England, and we understand
that means she will learn acquire some Western veneer. We understand that we
have to let go a little, even that she must make some of her own mistakes, that we can't protect her from every little thing.

This we are prepared for, even though it is not easy, and even though
the little things sometimes have hidden behind them big issues. But still, we do
not fight when she turns up at hotel to greet us in a little top that stops being
a top too soon:

- So happy to see you!
- Yes, but I think perhaps we are seeing a bit too much of you?
- Papa! It's just like a sari blouse, and you never complain when I wear those.

There was a brooding moment there, but Uma, who even I, after 25 years,
cannot contradict, was too happy to argue, and so we had a good dinner,
hardly any fighting at all.

The next day Uma is at a business meeting, so it is just us girls. We have a happy day of shopping - she had taken me to the Selfridges' cosmetic department for a
make-up makeover. Sometimes it is nice to pretend to be like the big sister she
doesn't have, and we laughed as we tried on different shades, she always urging me to "experiment" with brighter lip-gloss and more dramatic rouge:

- This is not an experiment your father will like, beti.
- Oh, Mummy, you don't know men.
- And you do my daughter? How you learn to raise an eyebrow at
your mother, ha?
- From my mother, Mother.

She always calls me "Mother" when she is cross. But the thankfully the
sudden storm passed from her brow, till I, fearful of an explosion (for Kamla
has her father's humours) submitted to thick layers of foundation and rouge
being cemented on my face, the better to keep contained fires that lurk
underneath my daughter's, equally layered, visage.

Later she had to go for a study project - so I was left alone, in the
flat we rent for her. She calls it "home", which upset me the first time I heard it, at
the end of a brief holiday visit, in the car on the way to the airport:

- . when I get back home
- What did you say?
- college starts on Tuesday, and before that I have to go and buy all
new materials, and there is only one more weekend of the sales and..
- Kamla - you said "home".
- Ya?
- Kamla, please be very clear. You are not going home, you are
leaving home. Understand. England is not home, you are not living there, you
are only going there for your studies only. Do not be confused. Home is
here, Malaysia, home.
- Mummy, I didn't mean anything. Of course this is home. This is our
home, family home. But that is home also. English home, no contradiction.
Both ways, I am going home.

And that, apparently for the daughter-who-will-brook-no-contradiction
was the end of that, but that time, Uma and I were even quieter on the way back
from the airport in our empty car.

Today, then, here I was. Alone for the first time, a guest in my
daughters other home. This flat, her home away from home, I sat in her other, English,
bedroom, on her other, English, bed.

Uncertainly inspecting the results of the make-up makeover in her mirror, I began to doubt. It seems all a bit much, a bit young, undignified.
Suddenly what was pragmatically necessary at Selfridges, now in the room of my
20-year-old daughter didn't seem so sensible. So I am looking in her bedside
table for tissue to clean the stuff off my face, and then I find them.

Just there, bold as brass, in between the cotton buds and the
moisturiser. This innocent slim blue box, I would never have noticed it if not for the
fact that I was looking for tissue, I thought it might have been a box of face wipes,
so I picked it up and opened it without reading label. And then I am holding this
rolled up thing, not clicking what it is, and I read the box:

Condoms with extra spermicidal lubricant. For Protection with
Sensitivity.

Oh. Oh. Oh. I sit down quite quickly. A bit too quickly, as it happens,
I miss the bed. Ow ow ow. And now my backside is hurting, and my head is spinning
and I am angry with my little girl and scared for her all at once.

Extra. Extra. Spermicidal Lubricant. For Protection. With
Sensitivity.

What does this mean? Has she bought them as a joke? As a girl joke with
her all her girl friends, loitering outside the pharmacy, giggling, daring each
other to go in? Is that it, are they here just to shock me, just to prepare me, is
it a science experiment or sex ed at school? Are they someone else's, perhaps she
has friends who do not have nice flats, and she lets them use her flat? I get off
the bed at that thought, and the blood rushes out of my head, clearing it.

Or is there a boy?

But she has not even mentioned a boy. Not once. Oh, she has mentioned
lots of boys, all sorts of names every time we see her there is Michael, and
Indu and David (I think) and Kay (who is gay) and Peter who is a Rastafarian
whose father is a Catholic Priest (I didn't understand that one, truly these are
confusing times).
But never a specific boy; never anyone special. When we comment that
there are so many friends, she always looks confused, then angry: "They are my
friends.
Friends are so important, you know, especially when far away from home,
they become like family, like somebody to talk to."

Talk, hah? But if talk, then why are they these, these things on her
bedside table?

Love like this is for marriage, and we have told her that, we have
warned her about user-boys and we have tried to give her values. Our values, old,
strong, Asian values. Love, making love is for marriage, and she is too young
for marriage, she is the first to say that.

So? but if she is already? then?. Oh what am I to say to her? Do I tell
Uma? No.
It would kill her father if he knew. She is my daughter, but she is his
baby.

He would bring her back at once, bang, a descent of fury and the final
curtain all at once. No more Art School, no more flat in London, no more trips to
Florence, no more Michelangelo, no more crop tops. No more English friends. No
more home away from home; just home to KL in a blink, KL, Kamla, at home
with us.

No more KLIA trips where dry mouths and wet eyes vie for control, just
one home.

What if she doesn't listen. What if she chooses him?

We were living in an apartment when she was born. A nice enough place,
but small, and all too many stairs; the house now is better. But she grew
up in a flat, and when she was a toddler, whenever we got back to the apartment, Uma would carry her up the two flights of stairs.

Then one day Uma decided that she was old enough to climb up for
herself. He carried her from the car, to the bottom of the first flight, as per
usual, and then without any warning, plonked her down:

- OK, baby, this time you climb yourself.
- No. Carry.
- No, today you walk yourself. You are a big girl now.
- No, Papa carry.
- No, Papa won't carry. If you won't walk, Papa will leave.
- Then leave.

So he left her, three years old, there in the car park. I didn't want
to of course, but Uma had decided that this was a moral lesson. "The lesson of the
staircase, and your own two feet", honestly, so up we went (up to the first
landing where we sat and waited), and we left my three-year-old baby in the car park.
And, for 10 minutes, nothing. We could hear her walking up and down, and playing
with her Poppet toy, and then after a while, she started to call for us. Uma
waited till she was shouting, and a little bit of worry had come into her voice,
and then he reappeared.

- Papa is here, darling, come. Walk up the stairs.
- No, carry.
- No walk.
- Then leave.

For two hours I watched them, my mad husband who could not be wrong,
who would win at any cost, and the daughter whose infant form held the only
will greater than his own - a will he had created. Each time we left her,
her cries became louder, she screamed, and stamped and cried, tears of pure rage
and anger, till my heart was broken, and my nails were gone. And each time
he went back to her and said: Enough, walk, it was the same:

- No. Carry.

Until she was blue from screaming, until she was purple, purple and
flat on her back, screaming to the heavens at the injustice, until her cries broke
him, and he went, and he carried her, and in silence we walked up the two flights
of stairs, with her snugly and smugly, but exhausted, in his arms.

The next night, without a word, she ran out of the car and up the
stairs all by herself, and has every day since.

Would he win this time? Then leave. She would do it; she is that brave,
and that proud and that stupid. It would become a matter of principle, a fight
to the death - and he would lose. For even if our economic dominion forced her home
- even then I can hear the slamming doors, I can see the silent tears. She
would shut us out, and contrive to be much further away even when she was near. There would be no more talking late at night, there would be no more joking at
Papa's expense, no more daughter-mother days in Selfridges.

Neither outcome satisfactory. So what to do?

I wanted to see these things that were causing all this turmoil in my
head, and which could simply by their presence on my daughters-bed-side-table
destroy the carefully crafted happiness, the jealously guarded equilibrium of our
family.

After all, I had never seen one, why should I? I was 20 and, naturally
a virgin when I married Uma (a love marriage, by the way, though not in the way
that youngsters mean today), and no need between then and Kamla, and then,
no need again - I mean I knew what they were - but I had never ever seen
one out of its wrapping.

So I opened one, and just held it for a second, flat on the palm of my
hand. It didn't feel very erotic or very dangerous. It felt? like nothing. I
thought I might be missing the point, so I held it to my face, up against my cheek,
where it was cool, maybe a little tingle then. I smelt it, nothing, like new washing
up gloves.

I think then I realised I was being silly, and put it back in the box,
and, by then I was not angry anymore, but still worried. I thought of Kamla, twenty as
I was when I married her father, and of her boy - of this boy of whom she has
never spoken, but with whom she shares this room, this bed with and for whom
she keeps these things.

But at least she is using protection. At least she won't get pregnant;
at least she still has choices. Unbidden the thought came, from a different part of
my brain it seemed. I do not want my daughter needing contraceptives for
protection. Our protection is all she needs, our protection from this world of condoms
and sex before marriage, of user-boys, far away parents and hard choices.

But then I imagined him, tall and strong and handsome, and (you will
forgive an old woman's hopes) when I imagined him, I imagined him Indian. And
Hindu, and from a good family. (Though chances are he is English, a "free thinker"
and Homeless. Or, God help us, Peter the Rastafarian. Please, no.); but for
now I imagined him Indian and beautiful, and I prayed he was kind to her, and
that she loved him, but not too much just yet, and I prayed that he wouldn't
hurt her. At least she has someone here with her to take care of her. Let him take
care of her, with protection and extra sensitivity. I prayed to our Gods who seemed
very far away from Oxford Street, that they would protect my baby.

And in that moment of prayer I knew what to do - or rather what not to
do, for the wisdom I got from my prayer was the knowledge of a mother's place,
in this ever changing world.

A mother's place is to make calm, to make peace, and to preserve it. It
is not for the mother to expose, to provoke an argument, to destroy; not for the
mother to break. It is for the mother to heal, to maintain. The mother provides
the balance.

I built this fine balance between a headstrong daughter and a
pig-stubborn father, who love each other very much, but are too much the same to
co-exist unchecked. I built the bridge between Kuala Lumpur and London, and now,
what, am I to bring it all crashing down?

No, Kamla, when she decides the time is right, will have no difficulty
in bringing the whole thing crashing down herself. That is as it should be. That is
what children do. That is their destiny and our tragedy.

And so I put them away, these protective plastics, back between the
buds and the moisturiser. Then I found some cotton wool, and some make-up
remover, and I cleared the mascara, which somehow had smudged, and was running all over my made over face.

And so when she got back to the flat, so happy, so happy - I wondered
if she had been with him, but I didn't ask - as I didn't say anything about the
condoms, or about love, or about my fears. But when she asked me why I was so
quiet, then, then, I reached out and held her, and hugged her, there in her London
home, on her London bed, tight and forever.

Her London Bed
Arvind Ethan David ? 2001-2