by Anita Rani
Every so often, Dad’s adventurous spirit would extend to his workforce and they’d organise factory outings to the seaside. The summer of ’86, Dad hired a big old coach to take all the women who sewed in the factory AND even a couple of the women who sewed from home on a day trip to . . . RHYL! Women who really were not allowed to leave their front door without a male family member – the furthest they’d ever been was a trip to Manningham Park, not even into the town centre – yet somehow their families had enough trust and respect for my young parents to let them join us on the adventure to the Welsh seaside. My mum is incredibly persuasive. All the women were invited, plus they were told they could bring other family members too, mothers, cousins, aunts, sisters-in-law and of course their young children. The only rule my mum had set was that no men were allowed. The only two men on the trip, apart from the bus driver, were my dad and my younger brother. Watch out, Wales!
They all piled onto the bus. Jageero Aunty, Ram Payari Aunty, Azra Aunty, Parveen Aunty, Satto Aunty, Shameem Aunty, Shakeela Aunty, Sarbjit Aunty. Mum had bought boxes of food for everyone to share on the coach. Samosas, bananas, plums, packets of crisps. Buying in boxes is not strange – there are certain things that can only be bought in big boxes in large quantities. Lychees, cherries, onions (they come in giant sacks) and mangoes. One mango wouldn’t even touch the sides. And samosas, if you’re going on a coach trip! It was a sweltering day in June and the air on the coach was fizzing with excitement and a mild aroma of puke. It didn’t take long for the heady mix of freedom, a bumpy coach and the samosa-banana combination to take its first victim. Sarbjit Aunty vommed into a Morrisons plastic bag. Asian women are always able to produce a Morrisons carrier bag at any moment. Producing carrier bags and singing folk songs are their fortés. The soundtrack of voices, of varying standards and pitches, singing Punjabi boliyan as loud as they could accompanied us all the way to Wales.
When we arrived, the only instruction was to be back at the coach by 5pm. Other than that, Dad said they should go and enjoy themselves. On that glorious sunny day in June on the beach in Rhyl, amongst the children building sandcastles and the women sunbathing in bikinis, a group of women, never before seen in this part of the world, approached the sea for the very first time. Daring each other to touch it, the sea beckoning them towards it, so they approached. Teasing each other, giggling like girls, playing like children. Their worries left in a house in Bradford. They rolled up their shalwaars, aware that they were revealing the bottom half of their calves and ankles, enjoying the feeling of danger and freedom and safety in numbers. Like a symbolic ritual, they stepped into the Irish Sea, looking out to the horizon for the first time in their lives, feeling peace and joy, letting the waves wash away the sadness, letting the breeze carry away their pain.
And then Shameem Aunty slipped. Now, there was a full-on wet shalwaar kameez situation. But with no husbands, brothers, uncles or cousins around, the women just howled with laughter. They thanked Mum and Dad and said, ‘Today, you’ve shown us a new country.’ I have such deep respect for these women. The lynchpins of their families, struggling in a land that’s not their own, sometimes with husbands who have no respect for them. Some of them quiet, some of them vocal, but all of them warriors, selfless warriors and the most powerful forces I know. Time and time again, they take a battering from life and, every time, they rise. They should be treated with the respect and admiration they deserve. We, their children and grandchildren, should recognise their greatness and daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters should see that we are born of these warriors, and we owe it to them to own our narrative.
* * *
I’m connected to these women. I feel them. It’s their courage and strength I admire the most. This generation of women, the first who landed in Britain, had to straddle so many worlds and leave their own behind. Nothing in their lives was easy and they worked so hard to ensure a better life for their children. They are the hardest workers I know. Looking after everyone, but I’m not sure anyone ever looked after them. Maybe they didn’t need looking after. But they were certainly never understood. These were not pampered women, they were not treated like princesses, not even with any respect, by anyone, not inside their homes or outside.
I never felt close to my gran, she wasn’t easy to get close to, and she’d had a sticky relationship with my mum, so I would feel disloyal if I was too close. Even when she died, I didn’t know how to feel. But it’s Gran that keeps coming back to me while writing this, my grandma, Dhan Kaur. Her life was hard. It was hard before she married my violent grandad, it was much harder afterwards. Her life was always a struggle. Today, I really miss my gran. I wish I’d understood her. Today, I’d give her a hug, whether she’d want to or not, I’d squeeze her and nuzzle into her and smell her oiled hair and take pictures of her tattoos and ask her what they mean. I’d stare at her elongated earlobes, weighed down by a lifetime, I’d touch her soft skin once again and I’d ask her for one of her M&S cardies. But most importantly, I’d ask her to tell me about her life. The girl she was, the woman she had to become.
None of these women had easy lives, none of them had any choice in their lives. They all had to be the right sort of girl, wife, mother, sister. On some level, being like them is what I’ve been fighting against my entire life. I don’t want to be answerable to anyone, I want complete power to make my own choices, I don’t want to have that weary look of complete helplessness which is often what I saw when I looked at them. Struggle and exhaustion and loneliness. But these women were anything but weak, these women are my heroes. These women struggled so that I could have a voice. I honour all these women, I see their struggle and the system that bound them, strangled them. But each one has a story and her secrets. Each one had desire and dreams. To them, I bear silent witness. It’s easy to look to the loudest voice and believe that they have the power, because they make most of the noise. In my family it was the men. The men may have had the power, but it’s the women, the incredible Asian mothers, I have learnt, that have the strength, and their strength was, and is, love. I learnt all this from secretly listening to their conversations, from walking around the sewing room floor in the factory, from observing their faces and reactions and from feeling their love towards me.
The factory defined us. It was our world. We all revolved around the business. There was no work/life balance, a luxury not afforded to my folks or anyone of their generation. Or Kul and me. A template was being set for my own work ethic and what I wanted and didn’t want for my own life.
Be Your Own Superhero When You Can
‘Bloody Pakis.’
They shouted at the kids playing on the cobbled street outside their home. The kids had put bricks on top of her bright red mini metro, her pride and joy, and she wasn’t happy about it. The kids just laughed and flicked the vs. These two teenage girls were beautiful, one with back-combed hair pinned into a messy bun on top of her head, the other with long silky hair, cut neatly just below her shoulders. They were both in high-waisted stonewashed denim trousers, cinched in at the waist with a belt and Choose Life Wham! T-shirt tucked into the jeans.
I observed their sass, ballsiness and casual racism towards the kids with admiration and confusion. They are my aunts. My buas, my dad’s little sisters. We were all Pakis to the outside world, but within the Asian community in the eighties, there were Pakis and then there were Pakis.
By now Mum, Dad, me and Kul had moved to the suburbs, but my grandparents still lived in inner-city Bradford which, by the late eighties and early nineties, was full of Asian families, mainly from Pakistan. Even though Asian communities lived side by side, we are communities within communities within communities. Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. And there were strong divisions and some animosity between them. Crazy, considering we were all one country not two generations earlier. How quickly we all bought into our borders.
Snobbery within the Asian community is hugely connected to the five Cs: Country, Class, Caste, individual f
amily Culture and the dreaded Community. Indians have a tendency to be both snooty and judgey, and there’s so much prejudice. The Punjabi word pind means village and a pindu is a villager. If you’re called a pindu, you are basically being cussed as a villager – the term is used jovially but also in a derogatory way, suggesting you are backwards, straight from a field, not worldly wise, not educated, uncouth. Indians, especially Punjabis, are a tribe of pindus who aspire to be more sophisticated town folk and we are upwardly mobile. Sadly, this doesn’t always mean more educated, it just means making money. Class and caste and cultural snobbery are alive and bhangra-ing in Asian communities.
Mum is from a middle-class family in India. My maternal grandfather was educated and in the Indian army, and they lived all over India depending on where Nanaji was posted. Mum and her sisters went to army schools and were friends with children from every state of that vast subcontinent. My mum, because she’s bright, clever, open-hearted and the most social person I know, can consequently speak around seven Indian languages. Dad’s family are classic Punjabi economic migrants. There is a difference between the Punjabi my parents speak: ‘Your dad’s family still speak village Punjabi, rough Punjabi, whereas ours is more refined,’ Mum has explained to me my entire life. ‘They don’t use the polite form of the language.’ To not use the polite form when speaking to other people is rough and ready and shocked the shit out of my mum when she landed in Blighty. She’d left a lovely life in India to move to the more ‘advanced’ UK, but had travelled backwards to rural Punjab, a life she hadn’t even witnessed in India. Britain, for Mum, seemed full of Pindus.2
We Indians are a right bunch of snobs. Everyone is looking down on someone. We delight in patronisingly letting other Indians know that ‘we don’t really speak any language other than English’ and we love nothing more than people thinking we are any race other than Indian. But then we don’t know our history. How can we feel pride when we have been sold the myopic Western narrative of Empire? How can we feel pride when we’ve been made to feel ashamed? How were we ever meant to feel pride when we believed we had nothing to be proud of?
On the other hand, I was accused of being a coconut all the time as a child because of my perceived proximity to whiteness, the way I spoke, my taste, my white mates. To some, I’d ditched my Indianness, which was far from the truth. It’s tragic. If we as a community cannot be proud of our heritage and identity it leaves us in a sorry, lost state.
Those kids shouted back to my aunts: ‘Paki slags,’ I hate the word Paki. I hate it. I hate the way it makes me feel, the memories it conjures up, the divisive nature of it. I hate that Asians have used it themselves sometimes as a joke, sometimes with spite. WE ARE ALL BROWN. It’s never funny. It’s humiliating and demeaning. In Bradford, in the eighties, racist slurs were chucked around like tennis balls at Wimbledon. All with the same motive, to smack the other person in the face. And if they were slung your way, you just batted them back. Usually with ‘I’m Indian’, like that made a difference, or by just ignoring them. Someone might feel the urge to bellow it across the street at you. A boy in a club might shout it in your face if you din’t want to dance. Your eight-year-old mates, who you play with you every day, might sometimes let it slip out.
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.’ Bollocks. Words can wind you. They can cripple you, knock the air right out of you. Render you gasping and confused. They can make you seethe, they can destroy your sense of self, your confidence.
Somehow, as a kid, the word didn’t have the same impact. It was heard with such frequency that it was more of a constant hard punch in the arm, reminding you of what you were. That word was so common when I was young, sometimes random strangers would feel the urge and the need to shout it out at you across the street. And you’d just carry on walking. So as a kid, it didn’t really hurt that much, it just reminded me that I was different and that people are racist. I might have been tough because my parents shielded me, or because I didn’t fully understand the implications of the word. The implication being that my country had a problem with my existence, that my country doesn’t want me here, that it is ‘tolerating’ me as best it can.
One method to try and avoid the name calling was to not draw too much attention to my Indianness. As a kid, my relationship with Indian clothes was complicated. I loved wearing them but only in Indian situations. I never, ever wore them at any other time. The only person who wore Indian clothes all the time was my granny. I mainly wore them on a Sunday, for trips to the Gurdwara, and always when going to a wedding. As soon as I was home, I’d get changed. I was very aware that my Indian clothes didn’t fit the rest of my world. One particular Sunday when I was 11, an ice cream van pulled up the minute we got home from the Gurdwara. I was in a dilemma. I couldn’t resist a screwball on a Sunday, with the red sauce and two bubblies, but I was still in my little Indian suit. I refused to go out, but Mum and Dad convinced me I looked lovely and to just go.
It was a warm day and the queue was long. All the kids on the street were in it, the kids I played with regularly. I lined up with my pound coin in hand, feeling a little self-conscious but the excitement of the ice cream overriding it. One of the girls looked me up and down and in front of everyone said:
‘We didn’t know you were one of those.’
I was mortified, humiliated and ashamed. The veil had slipped and she saw something I didn’t want her to see. She thought I was ‘one of those’. What did she mean? I knew exactly what she meant. I was ashamed because my identity was intricately curated. I made sure that who I was and how I was seen was kept compartmentalised based on the situation I was in, just so something like this wouldn’t happen. Indian situation equals Indian clothes, anything else equalled my ‘normal’ clothes. I had many guises and disguises and, in this situation, I got it mixed up. This lot were never meant to see me like this because I’d already predicted the reaction. People may deny that Britain is racist but a lot of us have a very different lived experience.
I was ashamed but also confused. The clothes I was wearing were me, they were a part of me, and this small thing, my outfit, made her put me into a different category to before. I love my Indian clothes. I like the way they make me feel, I adore the freedom and femininity, I love feeling Indian. It’s a simple way for me to connect with my heritage, when I’m already one step removed by being born in Britain. Asian clothes are elegant and graceful and women in shalwar kameez and sarees look beautiful. But this lass who humiliated me would never know that. To her, Asians probably come in two varieties: those who wore Western clothes and the lot who didn’t. The idea that you might do both would never have crossed her mind. She exposed her ignorance and thinly veiled prejudice. If you dress like me, you’re alright with me . . . just about. The rules of engagement for battling through life in Britain were already being laid down.
This lass was lucky, because if I’d wanted to, I could have taken her down. I was a kickass karate kid! While all my friends at school had pink tutus and learnt to plié and point, I was learning to jab, block, roundhouse and sweep. It kept Kul and I focused, fit and agile, and there was a great deal of discipline involved. We loved being karate kids. I was pretty tough and they’d have me train with the adult men, the little boys in my age group couldn’t handle me. I’d won trophies and competitions and I was pretty handy with my arms and legs . . . It also taught us discipline and self-control, and fundamentally teaches you that you should never have to start an actual fight. So, I walked home and ate my screwball, and I’d like to tell you I never thought about the incident again, but that’s just not true.
Being made to feel other happened at school, too. My classmate, Sarah, decided she wanted to tell a joke in the fifth form common room to a small group of 15-year-olds. It was a racist joke and to add insult to injury, it wasn’t funny. They’re never funny. She looked at me and said matter of factly, ‘But you’re different.’ Ha! I heard that a few times. Like that made it OK. Like I
was getting a free pass, some kind of badge of honour. All you want is to be accepted. But the ‘you’re different’ line never washed. It’s not true. It’s a tactic, and it is divisive, setting you apart from others like you. It means you’re a palatable brown, it means, ‘I’m a racist, just not towards you’. Which, by the way, still makes you a racist. It was complicated, though. My parents were paying for me to fit in. But it was made very clear that I was to keep my ethnicity at home. I was ‘different’ because I didn’t make Sarah feel uncomfortable with my Asian-ness. My ethnicity was not in her face, I had dialled it down to zero, but I couldn’t do anything about my skin colour. That giveaway. My classmates only saw what I knew would be acceptable to see. But walking down the street with my family, in Indian clothes, I became ‘one of those’. Sarah was right, I was different. I prided myself on being different. Only not how she perceived it. Turns out, Sarah was the racist joke!
Once, I popped into my neighbours’ house, as I did all the time – my neighbours who I loved, who I grew up with. The entire family was in the sitting room watching a VHS of their favourite comedian, Roy Chubby Brown. He’s a working-class hero up north and my neighbour’s kid insisted I sat and watched the genius at work. I was too young to get it properly but when his racist jokes started flying, it sure as hell made me feel awkward. I felt like an outsider on every level. Where the hell did I fit in?
Back in the eighties and nineties, the buzzword was ASSIMILATION. No one really thought about integration. And my parents did everything right. They were textbook immigrants:
Immigrant (definition): Immigrants to this land come to work hard for a better life for their children and then their children, who are now British and pay a fuckload of taxes into the system.
My parents worked their asses off, bought into the system, believed this land was fair and full of opportunity. They didn’t moan or complain even when they encountered racism, they had the heartbreaking capacity to shrug it off. They moved to the suburbs, didn’t wear ‘ethnic’ clothes unless it was a special occasion, sent their children to private school to make sure we spoke ‘proper English’ (or, as Mum proudly says, ‘the Queen’s English’), to make sure we moved in white circles and had English references. They thought this was what was required to make sure their kids had all the opportunities they didn’t. It worked, to an extent. That is, until you get into the workplace and realise the glass ceiling is real and it’s triple-glazed. And no matter whether you’ve done everything they expected you to do, whatever they told you was the right way to go about keeping your brownness to yourself and assimilating, ultimately you are still going to stand out as other, as different. They can’t see beyond that. My parents thought they’d armed me with everything I’d need to succeed in Britain. A perfect balance between my Britishness and my Indianness. But they had missed out the most important lesson: how to deal with the harsh reality that, for me, merit alone will never be enough. Hard work, even working three times as hard, will never be enough. That I’ll spend a lot of time justifying why I’m capable of doing anything because people won’t see me how I see me.
