by Humza Arshad
You know, I don’t think my parents ever worked as hard as me. Sure, they grew up in rural Pakistan and had to walk a hundred miles to get water every day, but they never did SATs or had to unload a dishwasher. Life for modern kids is stressful.
I was just laying out the last of the forks when I heard a noise from behind me.
‘BEHOLD!’ came a booming, exaggerated voice, like some Bollywood villain.
I turned round to see a potbellied figure dressed in dazzling white from head to toe.
‘Damn, Dad! What are you wearing?’ I asked, squinting at the sight of him.
‘My old cricket whites,’ he said, clearly excited. ‘They still fit perfectly!’
‘Perfectly’ was a bit of a stretch. They were tight like cling film and bulging at the seams. Little bits of Dad-coloured flesh could be seen forcing their way out between the buttons and over the belt.
‘You ain’t gonna wear that out of the house, are you?’ I asked him.
‘Of course I am!’ he snapped. ‘I have to look the part when I teach you and your boyfriends to play cricket tomorrow!’
‘Tomorrow?’ I yelled, even more worried about how quickly this was all happening than I was about Dad’s confusion over the word ‘boyfriends’.
‘That’s right!’ he said, grinning like a madman. ‘At exactly fifteen hundred hours tomorrow, your father will once again make cricketing history.’
Before I could reply, Dad hurled a plastic bag full of clothes at me.
‘And remember your kit, or you will play in your knickers!’
CHAPTER FIVE
Coach Khan
‘Right!’ shouted my dad, rubbing the cricket ball against a red patch on his tight white trousers. ‘Today is the day everything changes! Today is the day you stop being babies and you become men!’
‘I’m a girl,’ replied Roberta Glott, the best girl on the cricket team – but my dad just ignored her.
I knew this would suck, but with my dad you can never tell quite how bad it’s gonna be. It turns out he was just getting started.
‘You,’ he said, pointing a finger at Jamal Jones, ‘what is your name?’
‘Jamal,’ replied Jamal.
‘Good. Who is the greatest cricketer in history, Jamal?’
‘Brian Lara,’ said Jamal, sounding confident.
‘Wrong. The answer is me,’ said my dad with a big smile, before turning to Imran Yusuf. ‘You, moustache, what was the best cricket match ever played?’
‘Uh … India versus Pakistan, 1986?’ replied Imran.
‘Ha, no! It was Manora Beach, 1974. My cousins Rabi, Ali and Jad versus the men from the tyre factory. I scored 310 runs, humiliating the staff at Siddiki Tyres for generations to come!’
The team began to mutter to one another about what was going on here. I put my head in my hands and prayed for it all to end.
‘You, Humza!’ he shouted, pointing the bat at me. ‘What is the secret to great cricket?’
‘What? I don’t know! I don’t even know why I’m here!’ I replied.
‘Shut up, boy. Answer the question! What is the secret to great cricket?’
While I might not have known anything about cricket, I did know my dad. I realized exactly what he was going for. I sighed.
‘… A great coach,’ I said, sounding as miserable as I felt.
‘YES! A great coach is the secret to great cricket. With a great coach you can achieve anything! And you kids have the greatest coach that Pakistan, and therefore the world, has ever known!’
The team looked at each other, confused.
‘It seems obvious to me that only one of you has the potential to be a suitable captain for this team. My son, Humza!’
‘What?’ I shouted.
‘No way!’ said a voice from behind.
‘He can’t be captain!’ came another.
‘We’ve got a captain,’ said a third.
‘Quiet now!’ shouted my father. ‘I am the coach, so I will pick the captain.’
‘But, Mr Khan, I’m already captain,’ said Jamal. ‘I’ve been captain for two years. I play every day! I even play for county juniors – and I’m a year too young.’
‘You play for county team?’ said my dad, looking interested. ‘Then you will ask them for a place for my Humza.’
‘I don’t think they’re looking for someone like Humza right now,’ replied Jamal.
‘Once he captains this team to a win at the All Schools Tournament, then we will see!’
Oh, man … if babysitting Grandpa had turned out better than I thought, this had turned out a hundred times worse. I just wanted to disappear. To change school. To move to Australia. Anything to not be here right now. The whole team was looking at me like this was my fault. I’d be lucky to make it through a week like this, let alone a whole season.
We started with batting practice. But this wasn’t normal batting practice. See, Dad had put his own weird little twist on everything. Of course he had. So, instead of hitting normal balls, we’d be hitting grapes. Yup, grapes.
‘If you can master hitting a tiny little grape, then you will never miss a great big cricket ball!’ he declared, popping a grape in his mouth.
He then spent the next half hour throwing grapes at us while we attempted to hit them.
‘This is stupid,’ said Jamal, walking back to the group after he’d been up to bat grapes at my dad. ‘I can already hit a cricket ball. I don’t need to hit grapes.’
‘Tell me about it, man,’ I said, doing my best to laugh it off. ‘Who practises with grapes, right?’
Jamal just stared at me like I was something a dog had thrown up. The rest of the team did the same.
‘Am I right, guys? Grapes? What’s that about?’ I said, my voice starting to crack a little.
‘He’s your dad,’ replied Jamal. ‘Fix it.’
They all turned their backs on me and began muttering among themselves.
Cricket – what a great way to make new friends! I couldn’t wait for this to be over. At least practice couldn’t get any stupider than grapes.
Could it?
After grape practice, it was time to improve our stamina. And what better way to train than digging holes? Yup, Dad had brought a spade for everyone and set us the task of digging holes in the school field.
‘When I was your age,’ he yelled, ‘I dug three dozen holes a day. Once I dug a hole so deep there was no gravity at the bottom!’
‘What?’ said Asif Amir. ‘What’s he on about?’
‘Just don’t listen to it,’ I replied. ‘I think he might have a condition. He just can’t stop making this stuff up.’
‘Digging holes is why I have such strong arms!’ continued Dad. ‘Even to this day I can lift an adult cow.’
‘He has literally never done that,’ I whispered to Asif.
‘Now, do not stop digging until your hole is at least your own height!’ shouted my dad.
‘Aw, what?’ said Yusuf Shah, who’d just gone through a freaky growth spurt and was already nearly six feet tall. ‘I can’t dig no six-foot hole!’
‘Not with that attitude!’ replied my dad, and he threw a grape at him.
An hour later we were all standing in holes two feet deep, having hit an impenetrable layer of rock.
‘Dad, man!’ I called from my hole. ‘You’d need dynamite to get through this. Can we stop?’
‘Yeah, Mr Khan,’ said Jamal. ‘Can’t we play some cricket now? Or just go home?’
‘Ha!’ laughed my dad. ‘You cannot do either of those things. You are not ready.’
‘I’m definitely ready to go home,’ I said.
‘Shut up, boy!’ said my dad. ‘It is time for catching practice.’
At which point he turned on a hose attached to one wall of the school and began to spray us with water.
‘Aargh! What you doing, man?’ I shouted at him, desperately trying to get out of the way.
The rest of the team were yelling too. ‘Turn it off!’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘This is abuse!’
But Dad just shouted over them. ‘When I was your age,’ he yelled, ‘I could pick out a raindrop from a mile up in the sky and catch it before it touched the ground!’
‘No you couldn’t!’ shouted one of the boys from behind me, but Dad ignored him.
‘When I spray the hose at you,’ continued Dad, ‘select a droplet, keep your eye on it and snatch it from the sky. Once you can master this technique, you will be able to catch any ball you set your sights on.’
I don’t think anyone even bothered trying this one. They all just ran about like headless chickens, trying to avoid getting sprayed by the old lunatic. We were all drenched to the bone within five minutes. It continued for another half hour …
Finally, when that ordeal was over, we were allowed to go home. The team marched towards the gates in silence. All you could hear was the squelching of our shoes.
‘Uh, good practice, team …’ I said with an awkward smile.
Every single one of them stared at me with hate in their eyes.
‘Ah, come on, guys!’ I said. ‘It ain’t my fault. I don’t want to be here just as much as you don’t want me here. And think about it – you only have to see him three times a week. I have to live with him!’
‘This is on you, Humza,’ said Jamal, prodding me in the chest. ‘Either you get rid of him, or we get rid of you.’
‘From the team?’ I said, hopefully.
‘From the planet,’ he growled.
They walked off, leaving me alone at the school gates. For a moment, all I could hear was the water dripping from my clothes and the fading squelch of their shoes. Then, from round the corner, there came a screech of tyres as Dad pulled up in our car. He looked me up and down briefly, then shook his head.
‘You are too wet to get in the car,’ he announced. ‘You will walk home.’
And with that he drove off.
It was now official. I hated cricket.
The next day at school I tried to keep my head down. We had assembly first thing, and I spotted Jamal Jones and some other kids from the team sitting together on the far side of the hall. I didn’t even want to meet their eyes. I just stared at the coin in my hand as I practised Grandpa’s magic trick. I was working on ‘palming it’. That’s what you call the bit where you hide the coin from your audience without them knowing. They think it’s in one hand, but you’ve already got it in the other. It’s the bit that takes the most practice to make it look natural.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Umer, who was sitting on the bench beside me.
‘I can’t tell you – it’s a secret,’ I replied. ‘In fact, it’s best you don’t even look.’
‘Oh,’ said Umer, and he turned to stare at his feet. ‘So, um … how was cricket practice?’
‘I don’t wanna talk about it,’ I muttered.
‘Oh … right,’ replied Umer.
He sat twiddling his thumbs as he searched for something else to talk about.
‘Um … I had chips for dinner,’ he eventually offered.
I looked up at him.
‘That’s a great story, Umer. You mind if I tell people that story and pretend it’s mine?’
‘Sure,’ he said with a big smile.
Man, I envied Umer sometimes. Not even sarcasm could touch him. I guess my bad mood was mine to keep.
The assembly hall was just starting to sound like a monkey riot, when there came a shout from the stage.
‘QUIETEN DOWN!’ roared the headmaster. The effect was impressive. Three hundred kids immediately swallowed their chat, plunging the room into total silence.
‘Now,’ continued the head, ‘as some of you will know already, Mrs Popperkettle, who normally plays the piano for us during assembly, is off school with a potentially fatal case of diarrhoea.’
‘YAY!’ came a cheer from the kids.
‘QUIET!’ roared Mr Offalbox. ‘Now, we’ve been lucky enough to receive an offer of help from Mrs Masood, who will be taking Mrs Popperkettle’s place, to lead us in our morning songs.’
The headmaster gestured to one side of the stage as a colourfully dressed woman stomped into view carrying an enormous sitar over her shoulder.
‘Hi-hi-hiii!’ shrieked Mrs Masood as she dumped the big wooden instrument on the stage beside the head.
She scanned the crowd for a moment, then called out, ‘Hello, my little poppadom!’ to a blushing Year Three girl in the middle of the room.
The girl gave her an awkward wave in return.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Offalbox, beaming at her from the stage. ‘Your niece Sumeera is a student here. Won’t it be nice to have your auntie play for us?’
Sumeera nodded and stared at her feet. You got the impression she’d heard her auntie play before. I was already dreading it. The sitar Mrs Masood was carrying looked kind of like a big, bulbous guitar with a long neck. It had so many strings you couldn’t count them. From what I knew, you had to be pretty talented to play one. It didn’t take long to confirm that Mrs Masood was not.
The next half hour was genuinely weird. It was like a Spotify playlist that literally no one ever would select: an insane mix of Beatles songs, Christian hymns and Bollywood hits, played by a cheerful fifty-year-old Asian woman on an instrument she had no right owning, let alone performing with. At first, kids tried to sing along with the songs they vaguely recognized. But towards the end everyone just sat in confused silence. Even the headmaster looked like he was trying to remember why he’d accepted the offer.
There was scattered applause when she finished. Mr Offalbox looked relieved as he took his place back at the centre of the stage.
‘Right …’ he began, sounding quieter than normal, ‘let’s give a big thank-you to Mrs Masood for her … um … music.’
‘Thaaaankkk yyooouu,’ came the unenthusiastic response from the room.
‘Now, before we wrap up,’ said Mr Offalbox, ‘I want to remind you that there are still places available for the annual school talent show. We really want to get together the best show possible and avoid a repeat of last year’s audience walk-outs.’
‘What do you think, Humza?’ whispered Umer. ‘Maybe we could perform the track?’
‘At a kids’ talent show?’ I replied. ‘No way! Talent shows are for sell-outs, man! Sure, I could definitely win it, but then they’d make me work with Simon Cowell and do a Christmas single. I need my artistic freedom.’
‘Oh, right,’ replied Umer. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Course you hadn’t. That’s why I’m the brains of this operation and you’re the guy who holds my bag while I’m on the toilet.’
‘It’s nice to be useful,’ said Umer with a small smile.
As the day went on, it became clear that it wasn’t just Mrs Popperkettle who was missing. Staff were dropping like flies all over the place. Mr Parks, Miss Ofori, dinner ladies Betty and Moira, even Nurse Sue. All of them were off with some illness or accident. We didn’t even know what had happened to most of them; though we did hear Mr Parks had been bitten by an escaped bear. That’s right, you heard me, a bear! Who gets bitten by a bear in this day and age? The whole thing was just weird. A few teachers not showing up because they’re sick or depressed or hung-over, that’s to be expected. But this was crazy. I’d never seen so many teachers off at once. And, while that would normally be something to celebrate, there was a disturbing pattern emerging.
Umer was the first to notice it – which was surprising, as normally he’s slower than a one-legged tortoise.
‘See that woman over there?’ he said, pointing to a familiar-looking Asian woman in a bright pink dress.
‘Who, that marshmallow-looking one?’ I replied.
‘Uh-huh. That’s Abdullah’s Auntie Fatima.’
‘Oh yeah. I thought I recognized her. She once made me wash my mouth out with soap after I accidentally swore at their parrot three hundred times.’
‘And over there, talking to the hea
dmaster, do you see that woman in the green?’
I looked over to where he was pointing and saw Mr Offalbox talking to another Asian lady in a colourful dress.
‘Oh yeah, Mrs Hameed. I’ve been to their restaurant for Eid.’
‘Right, and did you know her nephew Ahmed was in Year Two?’ added Umer.
‘Course not. I don’t talk to Year Twos. What you getting at, man?’
‘Well,’ Umer continued, ‘it’s just that all the staff who are off this week seem to have been replaced by local people. And not just normal people … local aunties.’
I had a look about. Straight away I spotted one through the window on the second floor, cleaning one of the whiteboards. Then I noticed another in the canteen, sorting cutlery. And coming through the gate, weighed down by bags of groceries, were two more auntie-looking Asian women. All of them were dressed in colourful shalwar kameez dresses. All were round and cuddly. And all of them were related to some kid or other at the school.
‘Huh!’ I replied. ‘There are an awful lot of aunties here today. Normally they only gather in these kinds of numbers for a wedding or an open buffet.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Umer. ‘There’s something a bit creepy about it.’
‘Well, you know what Asian aunties are like – they love inserting themselves in other people’s business. I once had one come to a dentist appointment with me just to watch. Who goes to someone else’s dentist appointment? Aunties are weird.’
‘Yeah, I guess they’re just trying to help out with the staff shortage,’ added Umer. ‘But it’s still strange. I mean … they’re everywhere you look.’
We sat quietly and took it all in. Pakistani aunties, Indian aunties, Sri Lankan aunties, Bangladeshi aunties, maybe more … It was definitely a disturbing number of aunties for a single location. One auntie can be unsettling enough, but a dozen together? That was a herd. A herd of aunties can skeletonize a cow in under a minute. Or maybe that was piranhas … Either way, the point still stands. With this many aunties about, you’d better watch your back …
After break we had an art lesson with Auntie Uzma. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the best art lesson ever. I mean, I love art anyway; after music with Mr T, it’s probably my favourite lesson of the week. I normally spend all my time drawing secret agents from the PIA shooting each other with laser guns. That’s the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, by the way. My dad tried to say that PIA stood for Pakistan International Airlines, but whatever – they probably stole it from me. Anyway, my version’s much cooler. They go on missions, save the world, fight bad guys. They’re like James Bond but brown.
