The Wife

The Wife in Daljit Nagra's "Singh Song!" remains unnamed, never directly addressed, and does not speak to the poem's other characters — yet she radiates with more vitality than anyone else on the page. She exists almost entirely through Mr. Singh's breathless reports of her activities upstairs: lounging with a copy of Erotica or Cosmopolitan, painting her nails "a new colour," and keeping a photograph of her own face as her computer screensaver. This last detail is quietly radical — a woman who finds herself worth looking at, who has made her own image the first thing she sees when she opens her laptop. Nagra constructs her from these small, precise observations, resulting in a portrait of someone entirely comfortable in her own skin, indifferent to performing duty, and thoroughly at home in contemporary British consumer culture. She serves as the poem's centre of gravity, even though she never descends to the shop floor.

The Wife does not undergo a conventional arc — she is fully formed when the poem begins — but she is progressively revealed as Mr. Singh's emotional and erotic reason for being. His motivation is to return to her; her motivation, as far as we can discern, is simply to live freely. She consumes "all di chocolate" from the display and blames it on a "tummy ache," mocks the portrait of Singhji, and spends her days in pleasurable self-indulgence. These are active choices. Each act quietly rejects the role of dutiful, self-effacing daughter-in-law that the cultural setting might demand. Her motivation, derived from negative space — from what she refuses to do — preserves her own identity within a domestic structure that could easily have engulfed it.

The most resonant moment involving the Wife occurs at the poem's close, when the couple share the darkened shop at midnight, eating "saffron-coloured rice" and gazing out at the moon together. This night-time scene transforms everything that came before: Mr. Singh's neglected customers, his father's barely suppressed displeasure, the long and grinding shop hours. The Wife's broken English — "ven I return…" — appears here and is woven into the poem's final lyric image. It is the only time her voice reaches us directly, and Nagra utilizes it as a kind of duet with Singh's own phonetically rendered speech, suggesting a shared linguistic world that belongs to neither inherited tradition nor mainstream English. Earlier, her mocking of Singhji's portrait ("effing and blinding") is a sharp comic moment that doubles as a declaration: she will not show reverence for patriarchal authority merely because it hangs on a wall.

With Mr. Singh, the Wife is the destination he is always striving to reach. Every illicit dash upstairs signifies a small act of devotion, and their midnight intimacy — the rice, the moon, the shop to themselves — serves as the poem's emotional climax. She does not need to perform any actions to earn this devotion; her mere presence suffices. The power dynamic between them is notably balanced, even slightly tilted in her favour: he abandons his post for her, not the reverse.

With Singhji, her relationship is characterized by low-level, comic subversion. Mocking the father-in-law's portrait signals her refusal to accept the hierarchy the portrait is meant to enforce. She occupies the upstairs — the private, feminised domestic space — and chooses not to reflect his values. The tension remains persistent but never confrontational.

With the customers, her opposition is structural rather than personal. The customers navigate a world of complaint, transaction, and disappointment; she inhabits a realm of pleasure and self-possession. Their grumbling about Mr. Singh's absences highlights how thoroughly she has reordered his priorities.