Sexual: no one ‘dated’ in Park Village, and marrying someone not of the same caste and religion was taboo.
Political: party politics always cropped up as a topic of dinner party debate in London, whereas everyone blindly voted Labour in Park Village, because they were ‘for the Asians’, while the Tories, it was accepted, were for deportation.
Superstititious: reason and rationality ruled in London, but in Park Village my life was governed by a million and one spooky rules and rites imported from India.
Journalistic: no one had newspapers delivered or watched the news in Park Village, and often we would only find out about major events such as the invasion of the Falklands days after they had happened, but in London I sometimes knew about things before they happened.
Racial.
The final point needs emphasis. You see, while almost everyone I dealt with in London was white, and while I sometimes forgot I was Asian – I had become, as the insult goes, a coconut – almost everyone in my former Wolverhampton life was Asian. The doctor, the dentist, the shopkeepers were Asian. Three-quarters of my class at primary school were Indian and even the few white kids exploded in laughter when the teacher used the word ‘bond’ in class, because it meant ‘bum’ in various Indian languages. The only white adults we had contact with were teachers, Mrs Burgess, who looked after the corner shop at the end of our street, and the bachelor who lived next door and rarely spoke to us. My grandfather, a giant oak tree of a man, would waddle down for tea from four doors away a couple of times a week, and regularly hold forth on the topic of ‘the goras’, talking about them as if they were a distant African tribe. They were a clever people who conquered our homeland, he would say. They had made many advances in technology, he would say. But they also had bad habits: they treated their dogs like children, and their elders like dogs; they charged their own children rent; and, unlike us, they didn’t wash their bums with water after going to the toilet. Until my sister Puli, in her late teens, stunned us by developing a close friendship with an English girl, and was allowed, on a couple of occasions, to bring her home, I don’t recall ever seeing a white person in the house. The mere sight of a non-Indian at the front door would send us into a panic: Dad opening the door and calling for Mum without even saying hello; Mum running to the door and saying, ‘One minute … one minute …’ to the bewildered stranger, before shouting up for Puli (who did all the translating in the house); three of us following Puli down the stairs to see what was up. The entire family would end up on the doorstep, gawping at the stunned white visitor as he tried to explain via Puli that he worked for British Gas and was visiting to read the meter.
To go from this to actually dating an English girl, to go from being singled out as the perfect Sikh child – my brother and father didn’t have long hair, but Mum found God before she had me and decided to raise me as a religious experiment – to being the one member of the family who wasn’t doing the expected thing, was difficult to confront. It wasn’t something I could get my head around or wanted to get my head around.
I’ve tried to think of an appropriate analogy to describe this relationship with my past, and in the end decided it was a little like my relationship with my household insurance policy. I knew I had childhood memories, like I knew I had a household insurance policy. I didn’t entirely trust my childhood memories, in the way I didn’t entirely trust my household insurance policy. And I had no more desire to sit down and rake over my memories than I wanted to sit down and read the small print of my household insurance policy. However, five years after the discovery I made in my parents’ suitcase, events finally forced me to return to those old memories, and …
… I remembered sitting with my brother on the floor of the front room in our terraced house in Prosser Street, Park Village, in 1980 or 1981. I’m four or five, and Rajah is seven or eight, and we’re bent over the brown radio cassette player – or was it black? – that Mum has told us never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to touch. Rajah has taken the end of the cord and plugged it into a wobbly wall socket, another thing that Mum has told us never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to touch, and the contraption instantly bursts into life, blaring out Mum’s morning prayers. Somehow Rajah manages to find the volume knob before we’re busted and for a few moments we just sit there, recovering from the panic, watching the two spools behind the clear plastic casing pass brown tape to each other, alternately slowing down and speeding up. Tentatively, Rajah starts tinkering with the buttons and dials again, turning the volume up slightly, and flicking the function switch from TAPE to TUNER, which suddenly bathes the radio dial in a soft orange glow and causes the speaker to emit a quiet burr. He turns another dial, which turns the burr into a hiss and then a chatter, and then, finally, there’s the sound of something … musical. I can’t tell whether the voice belongs to a man or a woman. Or whether the singer is black or white. Or what the singer is singing about. All I know for sure is that it sounds nothing like the ragis who sing Mum’s prayers, and that I like it. I like it very much. My first pop song. But what track was it? I’d like to think it was something irrefutably cool like ‘Rock With You’ by Michael Jackson. But I have a horrible feeling it was ‘This Ole House’ by Shakin’ Stevens.
… I remembered the view from the lip of a balcony. It’s earlier, around 1979 maybe. The balcony must be on the top of something high – a building, a tower? – and someone is holding me up so I can get a good look, as Mum points and says: ‘Look – can you see it? Over there – our home.’ I follow her arm, with its bangles and gold bracelets, until I reach the tips of her polished nails. But while I can see houses and roads and bikes, I can’t see our house. Puli juts forward and takes over the task of jabbing in the air. ‘Look, THERE,’ she squeaks. ‘THERE.’ Again, I follow her arm, the plastic bangles, the red thread around her wrist, until I reach the tips of her chewed nails. But still, nothing I recognize. Dogs, trees, fields. But no sign of our terraced house. My blank expression soon has everyone jabbing in the air: Bindi, Rajah, Puli, Mum, all pointing frantically. Somebody – it must be Dad – lifts me higher now, so I’ve got a clearer view. ‘Look, there,’ they chorus. ‘There! Over THERE!’ I’m desperate to see the house. Even at this age, there is an eagerness to please. But I can’t see anything I recognize. No sign of the railway track that runs at the back of the garden, of the washing hanging from the lines, of Pussy. Why couldn’t I see the house? Could it have been because we were not, as I thought, in Wolverhampton, but in India? Were we actually at the top of the tower in the middle of my father’s village? I’m not sure.
… I remembered, clearly, Mum giving me some money and telling me to buy myself a packet of crisps – and while I’m at it, could I get her something? She gives me a piece of plastic wrapping, ripped off from the something she wants me to get, and tells me to show it to the woman behind the counter at the corner shop. The shopkeeper will work out what to give me, she says. I scamper off to Mrs Burgess’s, push open the door, which sets off a bell, and stand before the crisp rack, which I refer to as the ‘crips’ rack, for five, maybe ten minutes, trying to work out what to go for. Cheese and Onion Walkers Crips are my favourite, but Monster Munch last longer. Salt and Vinegar Golden Wonder Crips are pretty tasty, but then it’s tempting to go for two packets of 5 pence onion rings on grounds of sheer volume. In the end I plump for Hula Hoops – I will put one hoop on the end of each finger and polish them off one by one – and join the queue of three white women (this being the only place where you see goras shopping), passing the time trying to read the letters on the plastic wrapping Mum has given me. Maths is my best subject, but I’m not bad at reading, and can make out a few of the words, even though they are quite long. I mouth the letters and sounds syllable by syllable under my breath, and when my turn comes to pay, I hand over the Hula Hoops to Mrs Burgess, and instead of showing the wrapping as instructed, shout: ‘Could I also have a packet of SANTY … SANITY … SANTRY TOWELS, please?’ Interpreting subsequent he
sitation as deafness, I shout the request out louder, above the coughing and shuffling in the queue behind me. ‘COULD I HAVE A PACKET OF SANTRY TOWELS AS WELL, PLEASE?’ Mrs Burgess pouts like a goldfish.
… I remembered the family settling down at bedtime. I’m not sure of the year. And we’re not settling down for bed at home: we are gathered in the gurdwara on the Cannock Road, a few minutes away. And it’s not just my immediate family settling down for bed. Everyone from my uncle’s house four doors down is there too: Baba and Bibi (my father’s parents), Chacha and Chachi and their two daughters. It’s cosy and exciting: it’s not often we’re all in the same room. Chacha will pop over to fix things and do DIY, and Baba and Bibi will come over for a meal and a chat every few days, and I might get to play with my cousins occasionally in the back yard, but we are usually only ever all together on weddings or birthdays or Diwali. Thick duvets have been laid out across the floor, to act as mattresses. The adult men – my uncle and father and grandfather – are lying on one side of the room, out of sight behind a tiled pillar. And the women and children are lying on the other. I’m tucked between Puli and Mum, with my feet pointing away from the shrine at the end of the room, because it’s disrespectful to point your feet at the Holy Book. There are coloured lights skirting around the room. Pictures of saints and gurus in various states of torture and martyrdom on the walls. And the central heating is on full blast, though the overhead fans are still whirring – some Indian habits die hard – making the Christmas decorations that remain in the rafters all year round dance. Lifting my head I see my grandmother, thin and sprightly, tiptoeing back to her space between the bodies, carrying a mixture of misri and almonds in one hand and a mug of something – boiled milk? – in the other. Why are we here? Maybe for an akhand path: an uninterrupted reading of the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. Sometimes when someone in the family paid to have a reading, the whole family would spend the weekend in the temple. But there’s an associated memory of chained gates and boarded-up windows. A priest standing guard at a door with a sword at his side. Mum saying, ‘Don’t worry.’ There were race riots in Birmingham in 1981. Did the tension spread to Wolverhampton? Could we have gone to the temple for safety?
… My most detailed early memory is of the family at breakfast time. It’s 1979, I’m three years old, and like all breakfast times during my youth it begins with Mum combing my hair, a ritual for which I have to sit down on the second-hand, floral-patterned settee, and lean forward, like I’m presenting myself for execution. She starts by unravelling the preceding day’s topknot: removing the hanky, uncoiling the bun and unravelling the plait, before smothering the black curtain between us with jasmine oil. She then takes one of the large plastic combs scattered around the living room – its teeth permanently clogged with long black hairs – and runs it mercilessly through the knots and tangles. The first tug makes me yelp. The second makes me whimper. By the third, the pain is subsiding, but it would be a mistake to relax, for the agony of my hair being pulled out from its roots will soon be replaced by the twinge of a ponytail being tied too tightly on the top of my head, and then, just as I’m recovering, there’ll be the torture of breakfast: a saucer of dalia, porridge cooked in the Punjabi style, thick with milk, saturated with sugar, an almost human skin formed over the top.
I’m not interested in dalia. I’m interested in watching cartoons on the black and white telly that sits on the shelf opposite the settee. I’m interested in bouncing up and down on the settee. And I’m interested in watching my three elder siblings get ready for school. And as Puli and Bindi and Rajah file down the stairs that run straight into the living room, I abandon my plate of gloop to watch them, over the back of the settee, in awe, my mouth open. Never one to miss an opportunity to overfeed, Mum breaks off from wiping the table clean to scoop a teaspoon of dalia into my mouth. To help it down, she gives me some tea in a glass, which, being brewed in the Punjabi style (thick with milk, saturated with sugar, an almost human skin formed over the top), just tastes like a liquid version of the dalia. Coughing and spluttering, but managing to swallow the concoction somehow, I clamp my mouth shut, escape Mum’s clutches, and return to watching my siblings.
They’re all there now, milling. Rajah, already the best-looking boy in Park Village, who has my mother in a permanent frenzy of chilli-twirling, is carrying a leather schoolbag which I think is cool. Puli, in a skirt that has an extension sewn on to the hem for the two inches she has grown in the past year, is sporting a bright red badge on her hand-knitted cardigan, which I think is even cooler. Meanwhile, Bindi – thin and sniffly as she is in all my memories, wearing a uniform that she has, most likely, slept in, to give her an extra ten minutes in bed – is talking to Puli in English, which I think is the coolest thing in the world, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe.
This is why, I think, the memory is unusually vivid. It’s the only time I remember not being able to understand English, wanting to speak it, if only to be part of my siblings’ club. If I could speak English, I think (in Punjabi, presumably), I would speak it all the time. And as my siblings say goodbye to Mum – hugs all round – I pretend I can.
‘Herdy gerdy werdy,’ I burble at Rajah, adding the little English I know. ‘What’s up doc? Beep beep!’
Preoccupied with checking the contents of his schoolbag, Rajah doesn’t respond.
‘Herdy bwhoop werchy? What’s up beep?’
My reward for these linguistic gymnastics is merely another spoonful of dalia. The longer it lies on the plate, the gloopier and more disgusting it gets. If you leave it as long as I have, it develops the texture of jelly. Creamy milky disgusting jelly. But my subsequent mewling is at least enough to coax Puli into coming over and giving me the attention I crave. She picks me up under my fat arms and holds me above her, where I stretch out and pretend to be a plane: a game that renders me as wobbly as the dalia in my stomach.
Things look different from up here. I can see the radio cassette player, kept deliberately out of my sight and reach, next to the TV on the shelf. I can see my brother’s Matchbox lorry, kept deliberately out of my sight and reach, next to the TV on the shelf. And I can see the top of my mother’s sewing-machine, with its adventure playground of tension dials, spool holders, bobbin winds, clutch wheels and reverse levers. I’m enjoying the change of perspective, but Mum barks at Puli, telling her to put me down. She’ll be late for school, she says. She’ll make me sick throwing me around in the middle of breakfast, she says. But if there’s anything that’s going to make me sick, it’s the dalia that Puli plonks me back in front of. By the time I look up again, she is scrabbling out of the room with Bindi and Rajah.
‘Bye bye, Puli,’ I say, showing off my other bit of English.
‘Oi,’ Mum interjects. ‘Puli pehnji – she’s older than you. Have some respect.’
‘Bye bye, Bindi.’
‘Oi, Bindi pehnji …’
‘Bye bye, Rajah.’
‘Oi, pahji!’
Not being good at goodbyes – I will never be good at them – I burst into tears again, my gaping mouth again proving a perfect target for my mother’s dalia-laden teaspoon. I cough and splutter and shriek to such a degree that Mum eventually gives up, takes the end of her chuni, wraps it around her index finger and uses it to clean the corners of my mouth, rubbing and rubbing until it stings. Ignoring the sobbing, she takes her bottle of Oil of Ulay, glugs a dollop on to the tips of her fingers and smothers my face in it until it is swimming in grease.
‘What’s the rush?’ A chuck under the chin. ‘There’s plenty of time to learn Angrezi. You’ll be going to school next year.’
The remark intensifies my weeping. I hate the way Mum force-feeds me, cleans my mouth, sticks a dishcloth in my ear to get rid of the wax, only gets me Sugar Puffs and Lucozade when I’m ill, or pretending to be ill, doesn’t let me play with the sewing-machine she sits at all day. But I love having her to myself, sharing her only with the bundles of cloth delivered once a wee
k by the man with the van and the gold watch. The idea of not being here all day is heartbreaking. On reflection, I think I’d rather not learn English. On reflection, I think I’ll weep at the kind of pitch children normally reserve for the death of a kitten.
Dad comes into the room as I wail and, at Mum’s bidding, picks me up. He is dressed in a suit and tie. He smells of shaving foam and Brylcreem. And, with me on his arm, he moves to the hexagonal brass-framed mirror above the mantelpiece, takes a small black comb out of his blazer pocket and begins perfecting the quiff that is already perfect, sculpting the parting that is already straighter than the rows of vegetables in the garden.
In one of those sudden mood changes that young children specialize in, I spontaneously forget what I’m crying about and become suddenly engrossed in watching Dad’s reflection. His eyes are bloodshot. And there is a dark stain in the middle of his forehead. When he leans, I catch my own reflection, and spot I’m wearing red plasticky shoes, red socks, a black hanky on my topknot, and …
Whoa!
My mother appears to have dressed me in a … SMOCK.
A tartan smock!*
I’m still trying to take this in as Dad puts me back on the settee and completes his home-leaving ritual. He glances at the electric wall clock, its wires feeding directly into the socket to save the cost of a plug, and then back at his watch, fastened upside down on his left wrist. He switches his gaze back and forth five or six times. Then he puts his hand into his trouser pocket and pulls out his keys and puts them back. He does this five or six times too. And then, as he moves towards the front room, and the front door, I ask him, through snot and dalia, sitting in my tartan smock, where he’s going.
‘You going to work, Dedi?’
‘—’
The Boy with the Topknot Page 4
