Greetings from Bury Park Read online

  I was not there to see my father collapsing or crying. By the time I reached Luton and Dunstable Hospital he was already in intensive care. In the room were my mother, Uzma and Sohail. My older sister Navela, who was married and had a small baby boy, was also there. It must have been serious for her to make the visit as we hardly ever saw her since she moved out of home. The little boy was crying in his mother’s arms. The television flickered silently in the corner of the room. I looked at the wan faces of my family. No one said anything to me. My brother’s eyes were bloodshot. Uzma looked defeated. My mother looked as if she had reached the far shores of disbelief. Each of them looked up at me with an expression that implied that my hell was only just beginning.

  It was hard to tell if he was in pain. Lying on a hospital bed with tubes invading his nose and mouth, he did not look peaceful. His breathing was loud and mechanical. Blinking machines surrounded him. He was hooked up to a drip. Were there any flickers of life? None that I could discern. Nurses drifted past. I tried to engage one in conversation. Her manner was bright but the words were bleak. My mother joined me at the bedside. ‘Take a good look at your father. Look at what he has become.’

  I looked at my father but I was not seeing him. The man I knew was proud, strong, intelligent, ambitious; he could tell you the price of oil and gold when the stock market closed, he was someone whose life was a relentless quest to achieve and know and gain and become. My father was all about becoming. And he was always smart and cared obsessively about the image that was projected of himself and his family to the outside world. So who was this man lying in a forced sleep on this hospital bed? It was my father, but stripped of all the qualities and characteristics that made him the man I loved and feared. When his brain was deprived of oxygen, everything that made my father what he was slipped away. Everything that he knew, believed in, cared about, fought for and against was erased. The spirit of my father had vacated the hospital ward. We just had the sleeping flesh.

  For seven days we took turns to sleep in the relatives’ room of the hospital. Friends came and offered their prayers. Sadiq came with water from Mecca that he poured into a silver bowl that had verses from the Koran engraved on it. My mother dipped her fingers in the water and rubbed it on my father’s lips as she recited some lines from the Koran. In the villages where our families came from entire families were reading the Koran day and night, hoping that Allah would reward them by giving my father his life back. Men my father had helped came and offered their prayers and best wishes. These were the men whom my father had helped with mortgages, passport applications or forms to try and bring their wives into the country. They all said the same thing: that my mother would get her husband back. Allah was merciful and kind and generous and he would listen. ‘I swear on my children’s lives,’ said my mother one night, ‘that I will go to Mecca and lie down in front of the Kaaba and give my own thanks to Allah if He will just give me my children’s father back.’

  ‘Sister, don’t worry. Allah listens to everything. He is listening now.’

  When we went home we watched the news. At the same time that my father was fighting for his life so was Christopher Reeve. He had fallen off a horse the day before my father’s heart attack. The news networks were running footage of Reeve when he was Superman.

  The last day of May was a Wednesday. My father had been in a coma since Sunday night. That day the Manchester Evening News published my interview with Elizabeth Wurtzel. They sent me a copy of the paper that same day. I opened it and saw the full-page feature with my name in print for the first time. It was the first thing I had done in my career that my father might have been proud of if he had seen it; but he was sleeping. Unaware.

  The doctors warned us the chances of him waking from the coma were negligible, it was only the machines that were helping him breathe but the risks of infection that came with weakness meant his time was limited. Each morning my mother would use swabs of wet cotton buds to moisten his lips, she would rub Nivea intensive lotion on to his face and brush his teeth. But with his condition deteriorating we had been advised to say our goodbyes. My mother instructed each of her children to separately say our farewells. ‘Go to your father and ask for his forgiveness,’ she said. ‘Ask him to forgive you for all your mistakes.’

  I did not know what to say. It felt embarrassing speaking to someone who probably could not hear what I was saying. ‘Daddy, I don’t know if you can hear me,’ I whispered, ‘but I want to say I am sorry if I ever let you down.’ My father remained silent and still. I reached out and gently held his hand. ‘I know that I haven’t done everything you wanted me to do and that I have sometimes embarrassed and ashamed you but I want you to know that I really . . . I really . . .’ Even alone in a room with my father slipping from life, I found it hard to say the word, it was not a word we ever used in our family. ‘I really care about you and I promise I will try my best to make you proud of me.’ I was still holding his hand when the rest of the family joined me. It was then that the tears started falling.

  ‘Let them out, son,’ said my mother, ‘let the tears out.’ I squeezed hard on my father’s soft, still hand, looked into his face and saw my own. The next day I had my dreadlocks cut off.

  My father never awoke from his coma. On 6 June 1995 Mohammed Manzoor died. The next day I helped carry the open coffin out of the hearse, along the path of our back garden and into our house. We laid it gently on the carpet of the living room. According to Muslim tradition the women of the family were not allowed to attend the funeral. This would be the last glimpse that my mother would have of my father. ‘Why have you left me? Why have you left me alone?’ wailed my mother while her friends held her close and quietly said prayers to Allah. ‘You should have taken me with you! Why have you left me alone?’

  Navela and Uzma sat with my mother, tears streaming down their faces. I gazed into my father’s face, his skin a sick yellow. Later that afternoon Sohail and I lowered his coffin into the ground and covered it with soil. Two days later I turned twenty-four.

  His clothes were still hanging in the wardrobe in his bedroom. The blue shirts with their white collars, the charcoal-grey trousers and the ties from British Home Stores. Old issues of the Financial Times. His spectacles case. The gold-plated tie pin and tie that Uzma had bought him for his birthday eight weeks earlier, the first birthday present she had ever bought for him. Everything in its place as if my father was coming home any moment. As if the last few days had been just a cruel nightmare from which I would soon awake. I slept on the floor in the living room with my mother who was too traumatised to sleep in her bedroom. During the night I found myself waking with a jolt and I’d walk softly to where my mother was sleeping. She would be lying on a duvet spread on the living room carpet. I would lean close towards her and ensure I could hear her breathing. Each night I watched her and waited in fear that her breathing might stop in the middle of the night.

  Three months after my father died I returned to Manchester. On the walls of my bedroom were the same posters of Woody Allen and Winona Ryder, the same Fender Stratocaster I had been trying to master, the same piles of cassettes and compact discs that I had left behind. The months immediately after my father’s death were filled with confusion and pain. It hurt leaving Luton after only three months since I knew how painful my departure would be for my mother and the rest of the family. But I was leaving to start a master’s course in documentary making, which might, I hoped, lead to a job in the media. I had to try and see if it led somewhere, I reasoned, otherwise the only other option was a job in Luton. My mother and brother had been supportive of my decision to start the course. ‘Go, try to succeed. I will keep things going here,’ Sohail had said to me. ‘We will all work harder to give you the chance to make it.’

  I was pleased to be given that opportunity but I couldn’t escape the guilt I felt at leaving the others to their pain.

  On the train going back to Manchester an old couple sat opposite me. They were both in their la
te seventies, I guessed, and they took great care with their appearance. The man wore a tweed fedora and had a neat moustache, the woman had straight white hair, a powdered face and wore pink lipstick. Thoughts kept spinning around my head like: why are these two allowed to grow old together while my parents were not? Why was it that just at the moment that life was meant to be getting easier for Mum and Dad, just when they were planning on going to Hajj together and starting to take some time for themselves, that should be the moment when death claimed my father?

  In Bruce Springsteen’s album Darkness on the Edge of Town there is a song called ‘Candy’s Room’. Springsteen sings: ‘In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.’ I don’t recall ever being particularly moved by that line before but after my father died that one line felt like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. The first time those words came to me was in the early hours of the morning. I was in my room in Manchester and I got out of bed and wrote it out in block letters on a piece of blank paper. I fixed it to my bedroom wall so that it was in my direct line of sight when I was in bed. I stared at those words as if they might hold the secret to the universe.

  ‘In the darkness there’ll be hidden worlds that shine.’ I cannot be certain what Bruce Springsteen meant with those words but what they mean to me is this: there is pain right now but it will lead to rewards that can only be found by going through the pain. It was not the promise of better days which made those words so powerful; it was the suggestion that there was a purpose to it, that the only way to know the better days ahead was to endure the present anguish. Since my father had died, anguish was all I and my family had known and it seemed a meaningless torment. But it was those words from Springsteen that I had scrawled in black felt-tip pen and pinned to my wall that comforted me by implying that the pain was not in vain.

  One afternoon twenty years ago while I was rifling through my father’s suits looking for loose change that I could borrow I found a diary. Flicking through the pages, I came across the usual scribbled notes referring to stocks and shares. On one page my father had written two dates. Below them he had written ‘death of beloved mother and father’. He never spoke about his parents but reading that offered a tiny insight into my father as a man and a sentimental one at that. In his bedside drawer he kept a tattered black fan with a painted red dragon. This fan had been bought by my father’s father when he had served in the army, fighting for the British against the Japanese in the Second World War. Sons never get over losing their fathers.

  In a corner of Stockwood cemetery reserved for Luton’s deceased Muslims a simple black marble gravestone marks where Mohammed Manzoor lies buried. The block beside him is reserved for my mother. It’s more than ten years now since Mohammed Manzoor died and I feel that I know him better now than I did when he was alive. The hidden world which his departure illuminated was the realisation that I was more like him than I had ever conceded. My anger mutated my father into a heartless brute who was incapable of love. Any memories that contradicted this were buried or obliterated; resenting my father was the fuel that drove my ambition, but it also drove me away from him. I was not interested in seeing things from his point of view, I hadn’t reflected on why he felt the things he did. I did not want to know. When I had the chance to ask my father questions, I chose not to. But by not being able to direct those questions to him I was forced to confront them on my own. As my own adult life has progressed, my admiration for my father has grown. I wish I had asked more questions when he was alive, I wish I had tried to humanise him when I had the chance. I wish in vain; it was only when he died that the desire for answers arose.

  My greatest regret is that he did not live to see how his gamble to come to this country played out. He died in the same week that my very first article was published; any success I have had came when he was not around to savour it. The one person whose approval means most to me is unable to grant it. Where once it was resentment which inspired me, now it is the hope that in my own life I can do his memory proud. These days I am a willing prisoner of my father’s house.

  The Ties That Bind

  Everybody’s got a hunger, a hunger they can’t resist

  There’s so much that you want, you deserve much more than this

  But if dreams came true, oh, wouldn’t that be nice

  ‘Prove it all Night’, Bruce Springsteen

  I owe my life to two strokes of incredible luck: I was not born female and I was not the oldest son. I was almost three years old when I arrived in Britain. My brother Sohail and my sister Navela were old enough to remember life in Pakistan. My younger sister Uzma was born in Luton and I remembered nothing else.

  When my family arrived in Britain to join our father, he was a stranger to his children. He worked shifts, sometimes leaving in the early evening to go to work and returning early the next day. While he worked I stayed at home with my mother, and Sohail and Navela were enrolled at the local junior school. They lasted only a few days because neither my brother nor my sister could speak much English – the only words they knew were: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak English.’ My brother and sister were transferred to a special school for three months where they were taught English before rejoining Maidenhall Junior School.

  There were other adjustments to be made. We had not known who our neighbours were until my brother was caught urinating out of his bedroom window in the middle of the night. When my brother had lived in Pakistan there had not been an indoor lavatory, if he needed to urinate he just had to wander out into the sugar cane fields, so now, when the call of nature came, he preferred to answer it by sliding open the bedroom window and pissing on to the street. It was only the persistent complaints from the neighbour which persuaded him from continuing to drench the pavement.

  Those early years in Bury Park were hard times. The National Front were winning local elections; the three-day week was keeping my father at home. My mother kept candles under the sink in case of power cuts. Everything we bought was from second-hand stores or jumble sales and they were bought with Green Shield stamps. I would sleep in my parents’ bed, Navela slept on the second-hand sofa in the living room. Sohail slept on two dining-table chairs that were placed opposite each other and tied together with two of my mother’s old dupattas. Later, my father was given an old hospital trolley bed by his friend Sadiq; it had wheels and was so narrow that at night my mother had to tuck Sohail’s blankets in tight under the thin mattress so he would not fall out during the night.

  On the evening of 12 September 1975 my mother was sewing until the small hours of the morning. The next day she gave birth to my sister Uzma. When we brought Uzma back to the house there was no crib so she would lie on clothes that were laid out on the floor of the living room. ‘It will flatten the back of her head,’ my mother would tell Navela, ‘like we did with your brother.’ For the first six months of my life I had slept with my head resting on rice bags as it was believed a flat head was more attractive than a curve. Navela liked to put make-up on baby Uzma and draw eyebrows on her face as if she were a little doll.

  The television carried news about IRA bombs in Guildford and Birmingham; the men at Vauxhall joked with my father that these days being Irish was even worse than being a Paki. My mother cleaned the house, made dresses in the living room and chapattis in the kitchen. We had no central heating; when it was cold we would turn on the three-bar electric heaters. In the evenings we would sit by them and watch The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and The Rockford Files while trying to stay warm from the orange glow of the bars. But this was an expensive way to stay warm so my father encouraged us to find other ways to heat the home. There was a fireplace in the dining room and during the winter when the house would become particularly cold my mother would ask Sohail to break up some of the cheap, second-hand furniture and throw it into the fire.

  There was little money but my brother and I still found ways to entertain ourselves. We played marbles in the hallway and in the evenings we’d test each other
on the capital cities of different countries, using an old atlas that was covered in bottle-green cloth. In the summer of 1976 Sohail made a cricket bat from a plank of wood. Using an old hacksaw, he had sawn along two L-shaped lines to make a handle, which he wrapped with one of my mother’s old dupattas. We’d spend the summer afternoons playing cricket in our concrete back garden while our mother would put out a plate of melon seeds to dry in the sun. When it was too hot to play Sohail would take one of our bed sheets and hang it over the clothes line in the garden. The two of us would crouch under the makeshift tent drinking water filled with ice cubes.

  The nearest high school to our home in Bury Park was called Beech Hill; it was where Navela and Sohail would have gone after leaving Maidenhall but my father was adamant that he did not want his children attending an all-Asian school. ‘I don’t want my children to grow up uneducated,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t want them turning into criminals.’ He was convinced the best way to ensure this was for us to be educated with white children. This was not the same as being friends with whites, which he believed to be both unlikely and possibly dangerous. Navela suggested Lealands High School in Sundon Park which was three miles and two bus rides away but new and overwhelmingly white. Sohail was allowed to attend but my father refused to let Navela go. ‘It’s different for girls,’ he would say. ‘I don’t want you mixing with boys.’ For three months my father and sister argued, and during that time, Navela did not attend high school because the school insisted she comply with a uniform that required her to wear a skirt. My father was adamant that no daughter of his would be seen wearing such revealing clothes. Eventually the school allowed my sister to wear trousers. She was the first girl at Lealands to be given permission to not wear a skirt.