‘It’s very good,’ Preetam said. ‘Manjeet told me about it at the market the other day.’
Manjeet waved away the praise bashfully. Sheena handed Nikki three pages of dense scribbles. ‘The Viewing,’ Nikki read out. ‘The flat, dark mole on Sonya’s … uh … thing,’ she squinted.
‘Sunita,’ Manjeet corrected. ‘Sunita’s chin.’
‘Sorry. ’ Nikki pointed to the Gurmukhi letters as if her touch could untangle them. ‘The flat, dark mole on Sunita’s chin looked like shorts. As a cat, she was brittle …’ This wasn’t right. She looked up at the women helplessly.
‘Hai,’ Preetam said, stricken. ‘What are you doing to her story?’
‘I’m struggling to read it.’
‘Give her a break. We can’t expect her to be able to read Gurmukhi well. She’s not from India,’ said Sheena.
‘I can speak better than write,’ Nikki admitted.
‘Your Punjabi grammar is all wrong,’ Preetam sniffed. ‘The other day you were saying D for Dog and then you translated Dog to the feminine kutti instead of kutta. It was insulting. You kept repeating it too – kutti, kutti.’
‘It was like you were calling all of us bitches,’ Sheena said in English.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nikki said. ‘Sheena, can you read your own writing?’
Sheena looked at the pages and shrugged. ‘I had to be very quick.’
Manjeet raised her hand timidly. ‘I think I have it memorized from repeating it all those nights.’
‘Go ahead then,’ Nikki said.
Manjeet drew in a breath and straightened her shoulders.
The Viewing
The flat, dark mole on Sunita’s chin looked like a stain. As a child, she was brought to a local fortune-teller who predicted that the mole would be a burden. ‘A big mole is like an additional eye,’ the fortune-teller said. ‘She will have a wild imagination and she will be too critical of everything.’
The fortune-teller was correct. Sunita was often lost in daydreams and she was very quick to judge people. When Sunita came of age, her mother Dalpreet thought she might greaten her chances for marriage if she could choose between two eligible husbands. She arranged for the first family, the Dhaliwals, to see Sunita on Tuesday. The second family, the Randhawas, would see Sunita on Wednesday. However, at the last minute, the Dhaliwals’ train was delayed and they could only be there on Wednesday as well. Sunita’s mother panicked. She could not refuse them. It would also be impolite to reschedule with the other family.
Sunita was aware of the conflict because she had overheard her mother confiding in a trustworthy neighbour. ‘If my daughter were more desirable, perhaps I would have some bargaining power. But Sunita is no catch with that hideous mole. I have to keep these families unaware of each other somehow. I have no choice.’
Although her mother’s words stung, Sunita knew she had a point. The mole was very ugly. It made her the target of insults from cruel children at school and it distracted potential suitors from her fine features. Sunita spent all of her pocket money on expensive creams to make the mole fade but they didn’t work. Her only hope was to marry a man with enough money to pay for an operation to remove it altogether. For this reason, Sunita was eager to meet multiple suitors. But rather than resigning her fate to the hands of the families, she came up with an idea.
‘Mother,’ she said. ‘Let’s host both families at the same time, but keep them separate. The Randhawas can sit in our living room and the Dhaliwals can be in the kitchen. While you’re entertaining one family, I’ll be pouring tea for the other. Then we’ll switch places.’
It was a harebrained scheme, but it might work. They were landowners with a spacious home. The tables in their kitchen and living room were equal in their capacity to host guests. Dalpreet agreed because she could not come up with a better solution. She was becoming increasingly desperate to marry off her daughter. It was said that a woman without a husband was like a bow without an arrow. Dalpreet agreed with this saying but she also believed that a man without a wife was even more problematic. Look at their neighbour. He was greying and still single. Some people called him Professor because he spent all his time reading books but Sunita’s mother thought he was a madman. One afternoon, while Sunita was clipping the washing to the clothesline, Dalpreet caught him watching her from the window upstairs. Once Sunita became somebody’s wife, surely he would consider it indecent to stare like that?
The day arrived. Dalpreet woke Sunita with firm instructions to conceal her mole with an expensive powder that matched her sandy skin tone. ‘What difference does it make?’ Sunita briefly wondered. ‘He’ll have to see me as I am eventually.’ But she made the mole disappear nonetheless.
From her bedroom window, Sunita saw the Dhaliwals enter her house. She caught a glimpse of their son. He had broad shoulders and a thin beard but then she heard him speak. His voice was so high-pitched, it could be mistaken for his mother’s. As Sunita prepared the tea, she heard the Randhawas entering the front door. She walked out into the living room with a tray of sweets and sneaked a glance at the boy. His eyes were a kind, greyish-brown but his scrawny shoulders jutted painfully through his shirt. He wasn’t the manly suitor she had hoped for. Sunita headed back to the kitchen, leaving the Randhawas with polite apologies.
‘What do you think?’ her mother asked her as they passed each other in the corridor. ‘Which one is your choice?’
Sunita felt sorry for her mother. A simple viewing would not reveal what she wanted to know most about these men. She was so busy running between both families that she hadn’t had time to think of what it would be like to press her naked flesh against theirs. In Sunita’s fantasies, the viewings were entirely different. The men would stand before her, their chests bare and the bulging muscles between their legs exposed. She would give them opportunities to impress her – to put their warm mouths against hers; to titillate her with firm, expert fingers. This was what she imagined doing every night with the neighbour – the Professor. She knew he watched her and this made her want him even more.
‘They’re both fine,’ Sunita said to her mother.
‘Fine?’ Dalpreet asked. ‘What does that mean? Which one do you like better?’