by Anita Rani
All of us are trying to figure out where and how we fit. What values do we want to live by? How do we define ourselves? How do we make sure the next generation don’t lose their identity? How do you adjust to your new environment, yet keep rooted to the old one?
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The last time I heard the word ‘Paki’, it completely knocked me for six. It was only a few years ago. I was in a work situation, having a light-hearted social drink with colleagues, so-called educated, well-travelled, liberal TV types, until someone decided to drop the P bomb. Right to my face. It could have played out in so many different ways, but what followed was the worst-case scenario. I’d not heard anyone say this word out loud for years, not since I was a kid, or maybe since watching a rerun of Only Fools and Horses – the episode where they casually talk about going to the ‘Paki shop.’ I was caught off guard, I was transported back to the school yard, but this time it was worse. In the school yard I would have been humiliated but, more than likely, said something back to defend myself. In this present-day work situation, as a full-grown adult in my forties, all I did was laugh it off awkwardly. Why did I do that? I remember feeling pathetic, crushed. Where was my voice when I needed it? I hated myself. I should have chucked a drink in the person’s stupid face, kicked him in the balls, or simply told him that there is no context, none whatsoever, where it’s OK to say that to me. But all I did was shrink into a mouse. Me, gobshite Rani, tell em straight and tell em good, defender of the meek. I always stand up for other people whenever I hear anything vaguely racist going down. I’ve turned into an anti-racist superhero and jumped in with a furrowed brow and a loud northern NOOOOOO on many an occasion!
Where was my superhero self when I needed her? It exposed the true power dynamic of my work situation. Those around me felt they could say it to me and get away with it and, for whatever reason, I did not stand up for myself. I felt humiliated and wanted to get away as fast as possible. There were other people there, who were white, and they said nothing. No one else stood up for me. If ever you want to know what it feels like to be made to feel like an outsider, try imagining that. I believed that in my world, where people knew me and were close to me, they saw me for who I am – the same as them. I believed this, I naïvely lived in my blinkered little world. I might as well have believed in unicorns and magic fairies. My world was a cocoon and I was safe, but this was one almighty bubble-bursting moment. No, you are not and never will be one of us. It messed with my mind so much it was the spark I needed to start figuring out what the hell had happened to me.
I’ve been in a tailspin for a couple of years, wondering who on earth I am. Why, as a woman in my forties, I’m affected by things so much, so emotionally, and feel as though I’m losing my power as the years go on. It’s as though far from becoming more confident as I grow, I’m becoming more fragile. Is this what happens in middle age? Because if it does, I wish I’d been warned. I’m choosing to see it as a blessing, an opening of my eyes and my soul to my inner world and the world around me. It makes me ask myself, how do I want to live? How does the right sort of girl react, in any kind of situation, good or bad?
I certainly don’t want to feel crushed by things that are out of my control. I want to finally relax and enjoy my life to the fullest and believe that I have earned my right to be at the table and take charge of myself, the only thing I really have any charge over. I so welcome the open discussion around race and identity that is finally happening more publicly, and privately. People of colour are finding the courage to speak their truth, but sadly there is always a backlash and it’s exhausting. Recently (in January 2021 – that recent), I filmed a piece about a Black girl’s hiking group for Countryfile and the BBC received complaints about it.
What was offensive? Why did people take it so personally that two women of colour were having a chat about their experience of walking in the countryside? The outraged reaction says so much and it’s so disappointing and disheartening to say the least. I feel let down by my country when this happens, and it is happening more and more. But acknowledging the truth about my home, in a strange sort of way, is making me whole. I’ve ditched the blinkers and taken my fingers out of my ears, and it’s made me more powerful. The right sort of girl isn’t crushed, she grows and rises and bosses it! There’s work to be done. There’s work to be done by all of us. I don’t want any child to feel shame or any less valued because of who they are – why would we want to live in a society that does that to a child? That’s not the Britain I want. I can say this to you and mean it in this moment. However, it does make me wonder, do I ever truly see myself as an equal? Or am I always just a little bit grateful to be here?
How do I decolonise my mind? By remembering who the hell I am.3
2 My dad’s Punjabi was pretty atrocious when Mum married him. In the 45 years they’ve been married it’s much improved but, sometimes, even I have to correct Dad’s words. (Dad’s been correcting Mum’s English for over 40 years and she’s tried to correct his Punjabi for the same length of time.)
3 I’ve still never worn a saree to any Western event. It’s a secret dream to rock up to the Baftas one day floating along the red carpet in Sabyasachi couture.
Own Your Womanhood
The first rule about puberty as an Asian girl is, you do not talk about puberty. The second rule of puberty as an Asian girl is, you DO NOT talk about puberty!
It’s a secret code of conduct. How you come to know this is also a secret. It’s never explicitly expressed because, well, that would involve speaking about puberty. So how do you know you’re to stay schtum and not talk about it? It’s hints, behaviours and reactions you notice throughout your life. It’s widened eyes if you happen to be wearing something a little too revealing. It’s being told you can’t play with the boys. It’s judgemental comments you overhear about other young women. It’s never being treated the same as the boys. It’s the burden, trepidation and fear you sense around you, the vibe you get from everyone so you innately understand: to be a little girl is a shame, but manageable.
But to be a woman, well, no one wants to deal with that. So keep it to yourself.
Aaah, fuck it. I’ve never particularly liked rules and it’s high time someone spoke about it, if only to save the next generation from more unnecessary shame, shaving off their teenage moustaches (a terrible idea) and a drawer full of ruined, blood-stained knickers. Blood is a bitch to get out, no matter how much Imperial Leather soap you scrub into them secretly in the bathroom . . . Trust me. Being a teenager is hard enough to navigate but having to do it alone, feeling isolated and full of shame and fear – I don’t want any of you to have to suffer that.
By the time I was 12, I had already been indoctrinated enough by an endemically misogynistic culture that I was fully aware that anything to do with becoming a woman is a disaster and going through any kind of change was not to be celebrated or spoken about, ever. You deal with it all on your own, fumble and feel your way through getting your terrifying period: SHUSH, getting your first crush: NOT ALLOWED, growing boobs: NEVER draw attention to them. Filling out around your hips (for some reason, fatness is good), growing hair (growing hair every bloody where, but not any old hair, thick black stubborn hair, all over your face kind of hair and everyone can see your moustache hair), secreting new odours (mmm, that made it sound delicious) and, of course, teenage zits.
However, beauty is a must. Girls should always be pretty and clear-skinned. Beauty is the one topic Indian women can discuss openly and freely without fear of being shamed. We can look pretty but must stay quiet. Not just Asian women either, every culture in the world celebrates the beauty of women – young women, to be more precise. There’s a global multi-billion dollar industry built around it, around the belief that to remain young or at least to look young on the outside is all that matters and must be achieved at all costs. And cost it does. Especially when your look doesn’t match what the culture around you has decided is beautiful. I was never going to look lik
e Michelle Pfeiffer or Julia Roberts, or Barbie, so believing I was beautiful was always going to be complex. But we’ll get to that. Let’s start with the bloody mess of getting my period.
My mum didn’t have the talk with me, she didn’t even take me to buy sanitary towels. She just acknowledged that it had started and that was it. Nothing more was ever really said. I hid a pair of blood-stained knickers in a drawer once, because the sneaky monthly visit can catch you unawares and, when you’re a kid trying to come up with an idea of how to deal with a bloody leak, sometimes hiding them in a drawer seems like a good plan. Mum found them and got really cross with me and told me if I did it again, she’d tell my dad. What would Dad have done about it? What a weird thing to think about. My dad is a very good problem solver and could definitely figure out how to remove a stain if he wanted to, but I’m not sure this is a situation he would have wanted to be part of. So, why did Mum say it? Dad was scary when I was a kid and Mum often used him as a threat to keep Kul and me in line. This was a different scenario, however, this wasn’t about him telling me off. This was the double whammy: a shovel of shame and a shovel of humiliation mixed together and shoved into my teenage face. Could it have been handled differently? Possibly. It makes me so sad to think about that day. I was scared, filled with guilt and shame, and totally confused.
But you know, it’s not Mum’s fault, I don’t blame her – well, I don’t blame her entirely. It’s just history repeating itself! No one had had the chat with my mum either, or her three sisters, nor did the sisters ever talk to each other about it. They didn’t use disposable sanitary towels growing up, they used reusable homemade pads, much better for the environment (and now they are alternatives to plastic sanitary products, but back then, I imagine it all being a faff and not very practical as you’ve got a massive thick towel wedged between your legs). When Mum started her period, she thought she’d hurt herself and had no idea what was happening. Naniji told Mum off, got cross with her for eating too much tamarind (apparently tamarind brings on your period) and said now her period had started, she wouldn’t grow any more.4 Mum went to bed for a few days and cried and cried because she thought her growth spurt had ended.
I think back to that day, pant-gate, and I can still see the anger on my mum’s face and I thought, she’s angry because I’m a girl, she’s angry because she has to deal with this, she’s angry because shame and guilt is all she has been made to feel about being a woman and that’s all she knows to pass on to me. She’s angry because she has a daughter. She was possibly also angry because I’d destroyed a perfectly good pair of pants and she realised that her daughter is the sort of idiot who thinks hiding a bloodied pair of kecks in the clean underwear drawer is a good plan.
Puberty for my school friends, it seemed, was an entirely different experience to mine. From where I was standing, as a 12-year-old, they were having the one off the TV adverts, running and laughing and jumping and playing basketball and singing ‘Wwwaaaa, BODYFORM, Bodyform for yooouuuuuu’. For them, entering womanhood was a badge of honour. A celebration. Girls at school were huddled around in little groups discussing the changes their bodies were going through. Most had had some kind of talk with their mothers and now they were exchanging notes – imagine that. I was already so laden with shame and disgust I couldn’t even join their conversations. How is a child of 12 so aware of shame and guilt? They were far too risqué for me. I’d float around on the edge of the group catching bits of their chat. Training bras, tampons, boys they fancied, boys their mums fancied. This was all too much for my sheltered ears. I didn’t want to grow up, it was already too difficult to navigate. It was hard enough being a little girl, the last thing on earth I wanted was to become a woman.
In the Asian community, everything is relative. My experience may seem Victorian to some of you but at least I didn’t have God shoved in my face as well. At the Gurdwara one Sunday, where I hung out with other Punjabi kids, my friend whispered in my ear in a secret, conspiratorial way that she’d heard that if we were on our period we weren’t allowed to do any Sewa. Sewa is selfless service, a fundamental tenet of the Sikh faith. It can be performed in a number of ways to help the community at large but in the Gurdwara, it’s helping out in any way you can: cooking langar, the food that will feed the congregation, washing up, serving food, clearing away the tables and chairs. It was the bit I loved the best, apart from playing table tennis in the kids’ room, as it made me feel useful and I loved to help out. Being a Little Miss Fidget and a kid, I hadn’t quite got my head around the meditation and prayer aspect of temple yet, which involved sitting cross-legged in the prayer hall for at least two hours. Not when I could be playing with my mates downstairs and exchanging notes on period laws.
‘WHAT? Not allowed to do sewa?’ I’d never heard this before.
‘Because we are dirty,’ she continued to whisper in my ear.
WHAT?
‘We can sour the food.’
WHAAAAAT?
I may have been too shame-filled and shy to talk about boobies and bras with my brazen, white school friends but in the temple context, in my Indian world, where my parents were relatively liberal, this was some next level control. I could sniff out a swindle and this one stunk to the gods. ‘Well, I think it’s utter bakwaas.’
‘I’m not going to help today, God sees everything.’ My friend was worried by my rejection of the idea.
‘Yeah, well, if God sees everything, She knows you’re on your period and She put your period there in the first place. I don’t think God’s really that bothered. I’ll test it out, I’m off to serve the yoghurt, that’s sour anyway.’
I’d always helped out in the temple and nothing was going to stop me, plus my mum hadn’t told me this piece of lore so I had a free pass. (I probably wasn’t told because that would mean having to talk about puberty.)
There are so many socio-cultural taboos and myths around menstruation in the Asian community and all it achieves is an additional problem for us to have to worry about. It adds to the state of our mental health and sadly means we are not equipped with the clear knowledge about menstruation and our bodies’ wonderful reproductive system as we enter womanhood. Another form of control by people who don’t even have periods, so what do they feckin know about it anyway? It’s bad enough that women and young girls around the world lose working hours and education through period poverty, including here in the UK, without being made to feel we are dirty and that it’s some kind of curse. The female body is amazing and girls should be told this. We should feel no shame around talking about our periods just because some people find it awkward.
I had no idea about cycles or dates or period pains or changes in mood or, crucially, to always carry sanitary products with me just in case. Which meant I was often caught out and it never ended well.
Case in point. I was invited to go on a week-long camping trip in a proper caravan park in the Yorkshire Dales with Katie and her family. Finally, I was going to experience an actual family holiday. Indian families don’t do holidays, or at least mine didn’t. Holidays involved taking time off and spending quality time together, neither of which was high on my parents’ list of priorities.
Asian family holidays involved staying with other family, usually to attend a wedding, that would last the length of an average British holiday. There is no Punjabi translation for ‘overstaying your welcome’. Being a relative, or vaguely acquainted, means you can turn up and stay for as long as you like. That’s right, just knock on the door and expect to be welcomed in at a minute’s notice. We’d schlep off to India or America, London or Birmingham (the benefit of having a global family network) for weeks at a time. Immerse ourselves in and properly soak up another world and culture, laugh, argue, cry, cook, cook, cook, eat and come home. Now, I can see the beauty and benefits of these epic trips abroad but, back when I was 12, all I wanted to do was go on a proper (white) family camping trip to the South of France to snog Dutch boys like my mates, or at least look at Dut
ch boys (I was not yet thinking about snogging). My family holidays always involved tons of relatives, making it a collective experience. There was no way I was ever going to have the chance to explore on my own or experience what it was like to hang out with boys, maybe even have a holiday crush. Not with masis and masers and mammas and mamis all cramping my style.
That’s why I loved staying over with my school friends. There were no relatives! It felt like going on a mini break and experiencing something completely different. I loved the normality of their lives. I loved eating their meat and two veg dinners at a table and making conversation that didn’t end up in fighting. My parents loved my middle-class school friends and their lovely families and, unlike my Indian friends, I was allowed to have sleepovers. It would have been heartless to send me to a predominantly white private school and not allow me to socialise with any of my friends. But I knew loads of Asian girls whose lives were just that. School and home and nothing else. The only friends they had out of school were family. My childhood was filled with sleeping in playrooms and taking dogs called Marmaduke for walks.
