Henry

While our mothers were taking tea beneath the oak trees overlooking the cricket pitch, we, that being my gang and I, would wait, pout-faced and aggressive, below the iron grate of Henry’s tuck shop window with our pocket money savings thrust out to stuff our mouths with niggerballs and cold Sparletta. Henry regarded us with disdain. Dressed up in our smocked-gingham-tulle-billowing party outfits, made and forced on us by mothers devoted to the fashions of Your Family magazines, we would glower at him as our mouths blackened around the edges in our sweet-sucking frenzy. His hands moved between sweet rack and cash tin, to the Niknaks and back again, and Henry would deliver his lecture on “the problem with little girls.” Knowing that to endure his preaching meant access to sweets, we tugged on our hemlines to mask our grazed knees and muddied sandals and grimaced through his contempt for our behaviour. Eventually, with the first team matches over, our mothers dragged our older brothers toward home to clean the grass stains off their pants. We followed, scooting our neon BMX bicycles away from Henry as he roared behind us, noticing the Chelsea bun which we had conspired to steal. We spotted Henry on the beachfront once, teaching his son to fish for shad on the shoreline, golf peak pulled low over his eyes so he would not be distracted by the pigeons and joggers and setting day around him. I cried as he spoke with my parents. The day had grown too long for a seven-year-old loaded with ice cream and a real-life meeting with Harry, my oversized dog hero from Harry’s House, the programme that introduced me to traffic rules and respect for my elders. Henry handed me a niggerball and wagged a finger in my face. It was in the years long after trips to the tuck shop, when I understood what it meant for a little white girl to demand a niggerball from an Indian man, that we learnt of Henry’s death. My brother, sister and I were taken to Henry’s home and as my father spoke with his brothers on the lawn, we were silenced by women who smothered us in their reams of sari material and fleshy arms and lashings of lavender oil. They shovelled food into us and fussed over my sister’s natural curl and green eyes. I recall sitting on a car tyre cut into a swing, mouth loaded with breyani and cream soda, as I watched my mother hold onto Henry’s wife while she wept over his coffin in the centre of their sitting room.