We were the only ones on the industrial estate.
I heard and spoke Gujarati all day. We dipped theplas in a gajjar pickle and ate them rolled up. Mum and I shared two or three cans of diet Coke. Kaki banged the desk every time she made a mistake. She was, Mum had once remarked, a typical Bombay-ite. Everything was fast and loud and dramatic and full of heart.
I helped to pack orders, count out reams of paper, pack them, tick them off on the order sheet, gee up my uncles with tales of my school and generally feel like an adult. I did this willingly at first. I understood my responsibility, my burden. I was the only one of Dad and kaka’s kids who got to go to private school. There was no more money for anyone else. The business wasn’t doing that well. So I had the responsibility of earning my place and also earning my keep by working to help pay for the fees. I was the eldest. It was important to them all that I went. I remember the rapper Heems saying: ‘You don’t come here to assimilate. That’s kind of thrusted upon you. And it goes hand-in-hand. If you want to make more money, you might have to assimilate.’ No one felt that harder than my dad. It was with this in mind that they focused on my education, sending me to a private school, because private schools churned out future leaders, future business tycoons and future lawyers. They afforded opportunity. Most importantly, your dada thought, they looped you into the old boys’ network he knew existed. By going to private school, I would be making connections that could pay off in my adult life. The irony was that for all this opportunity private school afforded me, it turned me towards the arts.
The warehouse was stacked with boxes. Everywhere there were boxes. Stacked high. Different sizes rising up like a Jenga of terror. We had enough stock for a warehouse twice the size, but orders for a company half the size. There was no adherence to any health and safety. The fire exit was blocked by a stack of flattened boxes we kept in case we ever needed them. And besides, the overgrown tree on the other side of the fire exit probably would have stopped the door from opening fully anyway.
Piles of boxes ran up high, nearly touching the ceiling. Piles of boxes spilled into the office till they became a permanent fixture and Dad and kaka stopped taking meetings on site, because the office ended up being more storage space.
When your dada had walked your mum, your fai and me around the space just before we moved in, he was incredibly proud of the suite of three offices. The plan was for him to sit in the back, the executive corner office, he called it. There was a desk and a phone and a glass display case where he could show off his business accolades. There was a small circular table with four chairs around it for meetings. Now the executive corner office was where we ate lunch and Mum and kaki counted and folded sheets of paper, because it was the only flat surface you could find.
We had taken on a new contract that involved presenting the paper to shops in their own point of sale branding. It meant hours and hours of counting off three individual sheets of paper and using tools made from old cardboard packing boxes, folding the sheets until they fitted in small see-through bags, before stapling on the header advertising the shop, price and what exactly the paper was. My mum and your nani sat in that small office, surrounded by boxes, inhaling glitter by the fistful, counting off sheets and gossiping about family members, while Dad, relegated to the middle office, which was supposed to be where all the operations were managed, sat on the archaic computer, printing off remittance advice, invoices and payment reminders.
Your bapujis and I were stationed in the main warehouse, listening to Sunrise Radio (fun-rise radio, number one-rise radio, it’s Sunrise Radio), all dressed in hoodies or fleeces, packing boxes, joking with each other, teasing each other mercilessly. They drank beer, I drank Mum’s diet Coke. We made fun of each other’s appearance, the way we said certain Hindi words, each other’s foibles. We told bad jokes. Made fun of each other’s bad jokes. We were equal here. They weren’t my uncles. We were warehouse grunts doing the heavy lifting.
I stole moments to myself in amidst all the chaos. When your bapujis would retire to the offices to help out, or to drive boxes around various homeworkers to carry on the assembly line when we had big orders, the warehouse was mine.
While I packed orders, I entered my own make-believe world. I stood at the front, near the shutters. The warehouse wasn’t big but it was chaotically packed, which afforded me pockets of invisibility. I stood with the broomhandle microphone stand, singing my made-up songs, jerking my body around like I was Michael Jackson. Or if Sunrise Radio was on, I was Prabhu Deva, apparently a teacher of Jackson, as he pulsated and jerked his body around in Urvashi Urvashi.
Some days, I was in a detective show. I was deep undercover, working as a warehouse worker in a family business. The family was using gift-wrapping paper to smuggle drugs around the country. I was investigating but I was in too deep because I’d made friends with the family and realized that while they were engaged in severely criminal activities, actually they had hearts of gold, and were just trying to make ends meet. They were just middle men and it was the top boss blackmailing them into moving his products I had to investigate. But in order to protect this family that took me in as its own, I kept my identity a secret. I didn’t want them to know I was a rat and they had vouched for me. It’d be curtains for them and their family business. I kept a secret radio on the mezzanine floor of the warehouse, stashed amongst the boxes of dead stock.
Even then, the teenage undercover cop-me would have been played by Bradley Cooper. Shout-acting his way through puberty.
When I was alone in the warehouse, I’d imagine the sensors were on, meaning I couldn’t touch the ground, and I had to get from the front, near the shutters, to the stairs up to the mezzanine to radio the sarge without alerting anyone to my presence. This meant jumping from pallet to pallet, using stacks of boxes to balance on, creeping, clutching on to high shelves as I shimmied along the bottom one, and at the last jump, hanging on to the metal joist holding up the makeshift mezzanine floor and having it support my weight for a vital few seconds as I swung safely onto the stairs. I don’t know why the stairs didn’t have sensors like the rest of the place, but that didn’t matter. I made this move again and again and again, every Saturday, every Sunday, for years and years.
The warehouse was magic like that.
It meant everything to our families.
My uncle bought the Daily Star and the Daily Mail every single day, and holed up in the toilet for hours at a time, reading both, getting his daily dose of boobs and racism. I avoided the Mail but would flick through the Star as I approached my teenage years, because this was the easiest pre-internet way to access boobs. Every single day, it would dangle the carrot of a celebrity naked, followed by the star’s ‘fury at faked photographs’. He kept stacks of both papers by his desk in the front office. If I was doing my homework, which was expected of me, to split my time between my education and paying for my education, I’d sit at my uncle’s desk, my books open, the boobs were mine.
Sorry, I was becoming a teenager. I had my gross moments.
When no one was looking, I’d flick through as many Daily Stars as I could, flushing with embarrassment at the first sighting of breast, and closing the paper, getting my head in my books guiltily.
As I got older, those papers would be the battleground for endless arguments with my uncle about racism and feminism.
Soon, I’d stop coming to the warehouse altogether.
The warehouse meant everything for our family. You’d know a big important order was due to be shipped when my grandparents were brought in to help with counting sheets.
The cans of beer would then be done in secret, because your dada and bapuji were desperate for their father to think they were taking the business seriously.
Years later, when I had finished university and could see the world moving on from small companies, I begged Dad and my uncle to consider a website. They traded on word of mouth and reliability alone. I told them this was the way of the old world.
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sp; ‘But you can’t touch the papers,’ Dad told me. ‘You have to be able to touch the papers.’
‘My contacts all love me,’ my uncle told me from behind a Daily Mail. The headline screamed at immigrants. I couldn’t get past the incongruousness of the moment.
I speculated that maybe having our surname in the name of the company put people off. Maybe having an ethnic name was a problem.
My uncle put his paper down, riled.
‘That is our name, beta,’ he told me. ‘It was our name before the company, and it will be our name after the company. The name is like a quality stamp.’
Years later, I regret the interaction. And what I was suggesting they do, pander to white fear about immigrants. My dad and uncle, while they may not have been able to move with the speed business was moving, they kept their integrity. Years later, and I’m staring at a quote from Uzo Aduba, an actor in Orange is the New Black. She says: ‘I went home and asked my mother if I could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”’
I don’t know the point at which I stopped going to the warehouse unless I was asked by Dad. Mum asked all the time, but if Dad had to ask, you know it meant they needed help. Otherwise I was free to be at home by myself, on the proviso that I was studying hard, and looking after your fais.
We mostly fought for supremacy of the remote control. The one thing we could settle on was re-watching episodes of The New Adventures of Superman and Friends, both of which we’d recorded in the preceding forty-eight hours, and watched when they were broadcast.
My sister’s TV sessions meant cartoons and mine meant films. We’d sit in on each other’s sessions and that’s when the study books would come out. We’d keep them open in front of us, our eyes glued to the screen, hoping to learn by osmosis.
Meanwhile, the warehouse carried on, season by season, without us. Mum and Dad went every day, even on days Mum worked at the Citizens Advice Bureau, she began and ended work there. Dad dropped me at school at 7.45 a.m. and was at the warehouse till 7 p.m. every weekday; and Saturday and Sunday, they took it easier, 10–6.
Each time I went back to the warehouse, I could see it decaying around me and I could see my mum’s disappointment in what they thought was my squandering of my schooling.
‘Why are we spending all this money for you? We don’t have money like all your school friends. We are spending everything we have on you. We are in debt because of you. You have to earn it back,’ she said to me, day in day out, on the car ride home. The days I felt guiltiest I offered my help at the warehouse.
The school gave me the opportunity my parents were so desperate for our entire family to have, and with opportunity and access, I chose the opposite of what they wanted.
With the semblance of every opportunity laid out before me, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Mostly, because I wanted to write Spider-Man tie-in novels. When I told my mum and dad that this was my dream, not taking on the family business like they sorely hoped, desperate for me to wrestle the company from my dad’s tired shoulders, not law, like they sorely hoped would be the compromise I would arrive at when they realized I was terrible at maths and business strategy, but good at languages and arguing, they sat me down and gave me the well-worn immigrant speech.
‘You want to go into a competitive industry like writing, you have to realize that it is run by mediocre white men,’ Dad told me. ‘You have to work twice as hard as the mediocre white man, write twice as good to even get half the opportunities they do.’
‘Surely it’s the same in business.’
‘That is why we work three times as hard,’ he told me, sipping on a whisky and soda, staring at the chrome Technics hi-fi he was so proud of as it played CD compilations of Bollywood songs we knew inside out. ‘Look at the books world. Do you see anyone who looks like us? Now look at business. Some things belong to us. Other things do not.’
You need to know that these things were said, Ganga. We pass these words down from generation to generation because they carry more wealth than anything else we could give you. My mum told me. And I’m telling you, my brown baby: you can ultimately do what you want. Just give it your all. Work twice as hard. I hope that as you get older, you’ll only have to work as hard as everyone else. I long for that future. It constantly feels kicked into the long-grass. The fallacy of a meritocracy in Britain. A country run by chums giving jobs to their chums who then give their chums peerages for saving their chums money on tax. I hope you live to see a world where you work at an appropriate amount to have the same opportunities. It won’t be in my lifetime though, Ganga.
By the time I hit my late twenties, I had outgrown my weekly trips to the warehouse. Mum and Dad had abandoned working on weekends and the business was in a slow managed decline. Everything became about paying off, rather than accruing, debt.
‘A small business cannot survive in this climate,’ he told me. ‘The shops, they will only deal with the big companies now,’ he insisted.
I asked again why they didn’t have a website. They needed a website.
‘It is paper,’ Mum told me, echoing Dad from nearly a decade ago. ‘You need to be able to feel it, look at it, touch it, see it in the flesh.’
‘Either way,’ I told them. ‘You need a website. One that people can order through.’
Whether it was their inability to keep up with technology, or whether it was the squeezing of small businesses as high streets closed ranks and cut costs, or whether it was the damn ethnic name, they eventually, months after it was too late, folded the business.
My last trip to the warehouse was with a choke held back in my throat the entire hour I was there. The warehouse had worn my family down: your dada and his need for a responsibility-free job; moustache bapuji and the only job he had ever had, the company he started from the back of the lorry he bought for cheap with pocket money; tall bapuji and the lost weekends he could have spent golfing, scrapbooking, socializing, watching football; me with the guilt that I should have been a lawyer in order to pay back the sacrifice an entire family made to send me to private school (not any of your fais, there was no money left, just me, the first-born, the one with the most potential). And my mother and the inhalation of glue and glitter that had scarred her lungs irreparably. How hard she worked and how that hard work ultimately destroyed her and took her away from me.
I walked along the slim corridors of boxes and looked around. It seemed smaller than I remembered. I picked up the broom I would disappear with behind boxes at the front of the warehouse to pretend it was a mic stand and I was Michael Jackson, every urgent limb in my body taut and controlled as it shimmied and danced seamlessly.
I walked up the stairs to the mezzanine floor where I pretended to stash the radio to get in touch with my superiors and update them on the drug gang.
I ate thepla out of foil, dipping it into carrots swimming in chilli oil.
I sat at my uncle’s desk and marvelled at the decades’ worth of Daily Mails, Daily Stars and Daily Expresses folded up and stacked around him. Was any of this archive of racism and misogyny eBayable?
I looked up at the wall planner on his desk, pinned to the partition wall. It was from 1993. Time had frozen here. At the point we were a gang.
I recognized my handwriting immediately. Out of boredom, I had written my and my sister’s birthdays on the wallpaper and drawn three Star Trek Federation insignias around the border. I smiled.
We had lived here and we had done our best. Whatever we did, it was enough. My family was beaten down, and not prepared for what would come in the next few years – illness, chronic unemployment, death. But we had existed, here. And made our name. We left the sign up on the door as we exited the warehouse for the last time. It was Sunday and there was no one else around. We let the warehouse remain Shukla Packaging.
We needed people to know we were here.
As we drove away, I remembered, once on a cross-country run with my school, we ran along the canal. I was quite a way behind but as we passed the back of an industrial estate, I noticed an alleyway that led into the courtyard where your dada’s warehouse was. Smiling, I ran towards the front door, opening it and frightening your bapuji, who had been asleep with his feet on the desk and head tilted back.
‘Hi,’ I shouted, breathlessly.
Your dada walked in from the warehouse into the office where I stood, muddy and panting.
‘Beta,’ he told me. ‘This is a place of business.’
That is who your dada was. There were things that were his responsibility and there were things ‘your mum did’. One visit, I was preparing lunch, your mum was resting and you were grouching because of a full nappy. I asked your dada to change your nappy so you’d quieten and let your mum sleep. He was standing behind me in the kitchen, thrusting you out to me while I basted a joint of lamb. There was bubbling oil and the aroma of roasting cinnamoned meat and your milky shit all creating an unholy alliance in my nose.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Can you change her nappy please? She’s gonna wake up . . .’ I pointed upstairs to remind him of your mum’s precious nap.
‘I don’t know how to,’ your dada said, grinning. Shrugging. Almost proud. ‘I have never changed a nappy.’
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Okay, baste the meat, re-cover it and put it back in the oven . . .’
Brown Baby Page 17
