The Right Sort of Girl

by Anita Rani

  Even though I was gasping to start my own life, I didn’t have the time to focus on what I needed to do. I had to grow up pretty fast and I lost interest in schoolwork. I’d leave things to the last minute. I thought my brain would retain information I’d understood in class. I’m not really sure what happened to me during my A-levels. I guess when your home life is a bit topsy-turvy, kids react in different ways. I was reading novels, listening to music, watching films and TV, sneaking out to the pub, anything but studying history textbooks. It’s strange that I have very little recollection of those two years. Just the odd fuzzy memory. I remember falling asleep in a double history tutorial, probably because I hardly had any sleep that night. Maybe I’d stayed up watching telly with Dad, maybe I’d got sucked into late-night radio in my room, maybe because Mum and Dad had had a barney in the night. My forehead was on the desk when the teacher, who was sitting directly in front of me, actually very kindly, considering, woke me up. I remember wanting to study French but the teacher talked me out of it, even though I was a natural at languages. In hindsight, she probably didn’t want me in her lessons. Some teachers really didn’t like me.

  I can never forget A-level results day. I opened the envelope and . . . B, B, C, D. A flippin’ D. FOR DISASTER! I was destroyed. Looking at them now, I guess they are not that bad. Especially for someone who didn’t study. But back then, I might as well have got four ‘U’s. My school was geared towards academic success. And I’d ballsed it. My crew of misfits, my brilliantly clever best mates, every one of them got straight As. Jo was off to Cambridge, Robyn to Oxford, Al to Goldsmiths, Rach to Manchester. They’d done what was required of them. They hadn’t missed the point of A-levels. They’d got their heads down and studied hard and were now reaping the rewards of getting onto the courses they wanted. Idiot, here, felt like a right idiot. I went home and I cried. I cried and I cried, and I never cried back then.

  * * *

  The next few days were a blur of ringing round unis to see if I could get in anywhere through clearing. It was a disappointing, dark and miserable few days. My entire life had been gearing up for university. This was going to be my lift off moment and I’d messed it up. I was annoyed with myself for not working harder, I was annoyed with myself for not proving the tutor wrong. I was annoyed with myself for now being annoyed. I was humiliated.

  I had four days of walking around under a dark grey fog, then a letter arrived from Leeds University. ‘We know you didn’t get the grades, HOWEVER, we would like to offer you a place on the course based on your interview.’ I could not believe my luck. This doesn’t happen, does it? How bloody jammy was that? I’m the jammiest git on earth. I’m the jammiest jamfaced jamhead in jamland. I obviously talked a good game, mixed with a bit of charm and my authentic love for TV, all skills required to be a top presenter as it happens. I’d bagged my place. And guess what? I was the only brown lass on the course.

  There’s so much pressure on Asian kids to succeed academically and I felt a huge amount of shame after messing up my exams. I’d failed my parents and failed myself and I even felt I’d failed my super smart friends. The truth is, I was struggling and had probably been struggling for a while, but no one noticed. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I still don’t. Probably because I don’t want to burden anyone with my problems. My school wasn’t set up for any child other than those who came from middle-class backgrounds with parents who had time – time to invest in what their kids were up to. I don’t think my school ever knew anything about my home life. No teacher ever asked me about going to the factory, or losing the factory, or how or where I was doing my homework, or what time I’d gone to bed, seeing as I was falling asleep in class. There was no emotional or pastoral care whatsoever. Only my English teacher showed some concern because I was one of her best students and my work was slipping. I think my parents believed that this is what their money was going towards, a school that kept an eye on our education because they were too busy just trying to survive, working their behinds off.

  Home life was chaotic. My parents worked all hours and we worked too. I didn’t have a set bedtime, a nightly routine, so applying myself and doing my homework was not always an option. But what I learned from this little bumpy episode of my life was resilience and tenacity. This was the launchpad that showed me I had to work and work hard. I had a gift, I talked a good game and this had opened a door for me. Finally, I wasn’t in school anymore and I was off to redefine myself. This time I was going to work harder than anyone else . . . and have some fun while I was at it.

  Freedom is Complicated

  ‘You can cut your hair when you’re 18, after your A-levels.’

  It was a promise Mum had made. The exams were over. I’d got my place at uni. My bum-length hair I’d had my entire life, my lovely Indian locks I’d had a love-hate relationship with, were finally being sacrificed. I was off to be whoever the hell I wanted to be. To discover who the hell I could be. My long plait was not coming with me, it was weighing me down.

  ‘You’ve lost your beauty,’ I was told by an aunty after the chop, but I didn’t mind her bonkers comment. Being complimented on my ‘beauty’ was not top of my agenda. I had an entire brain to expand! Also, our worth is not determined by the length of our hair. Long-haired girls are seen as dutiful as well as beautiful. Short-haired girls are seen as spirited, independent, rebellious. Yes, to all three of those. Plus, when I say I chopped it, it was still down to my shoulders! But my beauty had gone, apparently. On with the rebellion!

  Leeds is only 10 miles away from Bradford so moving away from home involved a negotiation. I wasn’t backing down from this one and I won my case. Damn, maybe I was suited to studying law after all. For Asian parents, letting their kids leave home, particularly their daughters, is a major deal: ‘You are giving her too much freedom.’ My mother would even repeat it to me when she was particularly cross: ‘No other Indian mother would give her daughter so much freedom.’ Everyone has a right to freedom. Unless you’re a Punjabi daughter. Then you can only have as much ‘freedom’ as you’re allowed by your family. You are not free. You are controlled. It is not your privilege to choose any aspect of your life. You do not have self-determination. You will do what your parents think you should. ‘We your parents will decide, and then your husband will decide, and that is your life.’ Sounds like a right shit set up to me.

  It’s not this extreme for everyone and certainly wasn’t for me, but I felt this was the weight around my neck. And let’s face it, my parents were trying their hardest with me, but I was doing my best to resist. This was the subtext of my entire existence. Freedom is precisely what I wanted and, as a human being, freedom is my right. There’s so much attachment to the families we are born into, so many complicated layers that keep us bound to them. But if you take a step back, you can see that you are free. Just walk away and choose the life you want. It will be hard, but you can do it. And if they love you, they’ll come round. The problem with Punjabi families is you don’t know what variety you are going to get. The variety that won’t speak to you ever again or the variety that will physically abuse you, to keep you in line. Both possibilities exist. As do the more reasonable varieties, I must add, but it really doesn’t make it any easier.

  My entire life was spent in the pursuit of making my own choices, good or bad. I wanted to experience life and to discover who I am, and this was all going to happen away from home. My parents were so excited for me, particularly Dad. This must have been just what he wanted for himself. The opportunity to study and find out who you are. To live and experience growing into an independent person. Dad loved calling me ‘the student’ and his new line about me from then on about anything I did was ‘typical student’.

  Bring home washing – typical student.

  Look a bit scruffy – typical student.

  Get out of bed – typical student.

  Eat – typical student.

  Breathe – typical student.

  Mum wa
s just delighted because she was convinced I would finally meet some ‘Asian friends’ and, in turn, discover her elusive dream son-in-law.

  Freshers’ Week is the craziest week in an undergraduate’s life, with every university society throwing open their doors, with parties and cheap booze and hormones flying all over the city. In 1996, students head out in hunting packs of at least 25, all dressed identically: boys in an array of Ben Sherman shirts, hands in pockets, trying to walk with their manliest stride, all chanting ‘lager lager lager lager’; girls in baby doll dresses, with pencil-thin eyebrows, all chanting ‘lager lager lager lager’.

  Nothing about it appealed to me. It scared the life out of me. So I went to precisely zero events, not one party, not one club. With my mother’s voice ringing in my ears, I did go off to find other brown faces. I did try out an Asian society bash, but, oh no, this place was not for me! I was underdressed for starters, I didn’t have any Prada or Hugo Boss or high heels. These kids knew how to dress, I was just lowering the tone. A couple of lads who’d never met me before kept referring to me as ‘sister’, which I found really peculiar. Just ask me my name! I’d never been in a room full of this many Asian kids who I wasn’t related to. It felt like being at a bad wedding. It just wasn’t my vibe. I felt like a total outsider in this room. Sure, we had things in common because of our ethnicity, but I’d come to uni to broaden my horizons. Not to find a husband. Plus, this wasn’t my world – for starters, where were the white folks?!

  I retreated back to the sanctuary of my student flat and watched drunk students stumble past my kitchen window. I was much happier being in, talking and listening to music and getting smashed in my own space, than going out to get smashed in a meat market . . . I saw the spotty lads my housemates would bring home after a night out. You’re alright, thanks. I was not about to put myself in a place where the object is to get off your head and then get off with a bloke. I already knew what rejection felt like in the teenage game of who’s the hot one, so I opted out.

  Brilliantly, due to a very slow social life back in Bradford, I felt zero FOMO. Thankfully, it didn’t take me long to find a bunch of boring bastards who were just as happy staying in like me. The crew I befriended were all outsider oddballs too: the Italian/Scottish girl from Turin with her espresso machine and love for Metallica. At 24, the ‘mature’ student from Ireland who introduced me to Guinness. The Belgian who would sprinkle dried rosemary on his Safeway economy burgers, like a gourmet chef. And the half Belgian DJ from Hull, with the best record collection I’d ever seen in my life. For us, a top night out was always in the kitchen. We’d congregate to listen to music and cook. Cook-offs were our favourite pastime. We’d watch crowds of students file past the window on their way out to down sambuca and have sick-flavoured snogs, while we’d discuss how much seasoning our tomato sauce required.

  It was in these kitchen sessions my palette began to expand: I discovered proper cheese for the first time. Cheese and red wine. Cheap red wine. The cheapest head-pounding plonk available. Two-bottles-for-a-fiver cheap. And cheese. Proper English cheese. Like Stilton. I’d never eaten Stilton in my life. Why would I have? The only cheese we ever had at home was Kraft cheese slices. A stinking-ripe Stilton would NEVER find its way into my mother’s shopping basket, or really any Asian shopping basket I know. Asians generally don’t get stinky cheese. This was a baptism by mould. We drank and we ate and the more cheap plonk we drank, the more cheese we ate. It got to the point where I was gouging out just the blue veins, the really salty, crusty funky bits, like a wild, cheese-crazed animal: rookie error. In the morning, I woke up with the most shocking and unusual taste in my mouth. My tongue was still fizzing and sticking to the roof of it. I wasn’t really sure if I could still feel my tongue, so I had to keep sticking it out like a yawning puppy, to make sure I hadn’t killed my taste sensors. The air in my room that morning would have killed anyone entering. I was at uni for an education and I was getting one.

  I introduced my gaggle of gourmands to my world, too. Of course, Mum had packed me off with little jam jars full of the essential spices and two large metal cooking pots, one big enough to feed a small army and the other big enough to make rice for the whole of my campus, plus a small pressure cooker, which terrified me. Pressure cookers always terrified me, you never know when they are about to blow. I started simple. A crowd-pleaser: chicken curry. I’d begin the process, chopping my onions, as my other housemates were getting tanked up on bottles of Diamond White cider. I’d watch in amazement, learning the ways of the teenage mating rituals all from a distance. I just couldn’t bring myself to join them.

  It was usually me and the DJ from Hull who would end up staying awake, chatting longer than the others. This guy was cool and kind and bloody interesting. A teenage boy who knew about records and books and films and theatre and was happy to sit and chat about music into the night. It didn’t take long before I stumbled into a very innocent relationship with the guy who was essentially my best mate. (Don’t tell my mum and dad. Inappropriate boyfriend number one.) Of course, this relationship was a complete secret and a constant source of inner conflict for me, because I knew I’d never be able to tell my parents. Although they were never going to find out.

  * * *

  I was considering leaving out any of the bits of my life that involved dating white boys. There would be quite a few blank pages. Don’t panic, Mum, not LOADS, but a few. There was always the slight issue that any white boyfriends fundamentally didn’t understand a huge part of my identity, one I had a conflicting relationship with myself, but which was me nonetheless. ‘Why can’t you just tell your parents about us? Can I come round for dinner?’ The reasons why they couldn’t were subtle and complex, but none of my boyfriends were sophisticated enough in thought to understand that other cultures roll a bit differently to theirs.

  Wanting romance and exploring your sexuality is part of being human. Our ancestors, who were busy writing the Kama Sutra and getting busy, knew all about this. For me, though, normal dating, the kind all my non-Asian mates were doing, had me in a pit of guilt, all the bloody time. Seriously, constantly. I can make light of it now looking back but, my God, even writing it down is both terrifying and liberating. Asian kids don’t talk about relationships, ever, not my generation at least. I was in a permanent state of turmoil, always afraid that I was letting my parents down. The guilt, fear and anxiety followed me everywhere.

  I knew I wasn’t allowed to do it. To date anyone, really, but definitely not someone who wasn’t Indian. Our strict Asian parents made it all the more tempting by banning it, so it’s their fault, really. All that repression, what did you think was going to happen? Some of us were never going to toe the party line. But the inner conflict does mess you up somewhat. Here I was, finally with some freedom. But that freedom was always going to be complicated. All the control and manipulation I’d experienced growing up, ‘What will other people think?’, ‘This is not how girls behave’, ‘You are lucky you have such a lenient mother’, to list a few of the classic one-liners, had only gone and flippin’ worked. I was guilt- and anxiety-ridden. Crippled by it. How on earth was I going to be the right sort of girl at uni? The one I was expected to be, or the one I wanted to be.

  So, boys are not my forte. I was forging ahead with my education, trying to make (kind of) astute decisions to progress myself in the right direction. When it came to lads, however, I had no critical faculties whatsoever, often dating the first bloke who would show any interest in me. Was this because I had zero confidence in myself and zero belief in my attraction to the opposite sex? Was it because I was so grateful for the attention? Was it because brown kids were not desired, not openly anyway? Was it because I’d never been taught that you are allowed to have standards and think about the qualities you want in a person? Was it because everyone else seemed to be hooking up so I thought it was the thing to do? Was it because I was just an average young woman, making plenty of dating mistakes, going through a process of
trial and error as everyone else did? Or was it because my only criteria for a man, the edict that had been ringing in my ears since the beginning of time, was that he HAS to be Indian?

  Did my mum feel she had to go on about this all the time because my world was so lacking in colour? ‘Hmm, not many Indians here,’ was her comment on dropping me off at Leeds. My mum loved all my friends, she loved that my world was middle class, but she also feared that my world was a bit too white.

  Find Your Sound

  Most of the DJ’s student bedroom was taken up by two Technics turntables and speakers. A classic student bedroom of the late nineties. Tuition fees were not introduced for another two years, but in 1996 we were the first year to be offered student loans which, for me, stacked up to 12 grand’s worth of debt. A lot of money, but compared to what students owe now, it seems like pennies. It was obvious the day the first student loans kerchinged into student bank accounts, as that was the day ludicrously large Hi-Fi systems and speakers were seen being shoved into tiny student bedrooms.