Greetings from Bury Park Read online

  Sohail was working during the weekends at a grocery store on Dunstable Road which was minutes from our home. The money went to my father, but he bought Sohail a Meccano set and a pair of Dr Martens boots. For the first week he had them my brother would go to sleep with his boots by his bedside, unable to believe they were really his. At school my brother was captain of the rugby, athletics and cricket teams. His sporting prowess was his ticket towards approval and acceptance from the whites; the trophies he was winning the school made him a popular pupil and anyone knew that if they dared call him a paki they would be given a thorough beating. Meanwhile Navela was being picked on at school. The other girls taunted her, made fun of her hairy legs and told her that she smelled. And the truth was that to them she did smell; we only bathed once a week. Navela wanted to tell our parents about being bullied, but there was enough tension at home already. What good would it do to give them more to worry about?

  At home the pressure from my father on my mother to be more productive at dressmaking was relentless. Sohail and I helped where we could but it was Navela who would come home, help with the cooking and cleaning and then work until one in the morning on the sewing machine. When my father worked the evening shift, the tension would ease; we had bought a record player and Navela would play ‘You’re the One That I Want’ and ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’. She wished she could have gone to the cinema to see Grease. My sister adored pop music; it was because of Navela that I had seen Queen singing ‘We Are the Champions’ on Top of the Pops, because of her that the Eurovision Song Contest was essential viewing in our home.

  Sohail would spend his evenings playing sport for the school teams, but Navela had too much to do at home. My sister had little time for her studies and her schoolwork suffered, which mattered only to her: my father had already forbidden her from going to college. ‘I need you to work at home; how can this house manage without all of us working together?’ Navela left school on 17 May 1980; two weeks later she was working at a textile factory just across the road from the college of higher education.

  Navela loved fairy tales. After work she would go to the library and borrow collections of fairy tales which she would pass on to me when she had read them. On Saturdays Navela would try to teach me calligraphy. Beauty mattered to my sister.

  When we moved to Marsh Farm, my father, mother and older sister were all working but we still never seemed to have any money. ‘Where is the money going?’ Navela would ask my father. ‘I work at Eastex and you get the money, I work at home and you get the money. Mum works and you get the money but there never seems to be any money! Where does it go?’

  The rest of us would never have dared to speak like this to my father but Navela felt she had earned the right to be disrespectful. She was the oldest child, she brought in money but it was also her temperament; Navela was as fiery as a green chilli. I was at once appalled and filled with admiration by Navela’s utter fearlessness. Even today, it is still more difficult to be a strong-willed independent Asian girl than boy; harder still for Navela in 1980. ‘Listen to your daughter talk!’ my father would respond, his words dripping scorn. ‘She thinks she knows all the answers! Look at my clothes, are they new? The money you are making puts food on our table, it is making sure this house you wanted is warm at night. You won’t understand these things until you have your own family and your home. Running a house costs money!’

  ‘But we never do anything to our house, Daddy,’ Navela would fire back. ‘We’ve never redecorated; the wallpaper is the same as when we moved in and the carpet is worn out. We can’t be spending all our money on food. And your clothes are brand new: new cufflinks, new ties, new suits. The only time I ever buy clothes is for Eid – the rest of the time I make them myself and so does Mum and Uzma.’

  ‘You want to talk about clothes? Don’t you know how shameful it is for your mother and me seeing you dressed in your jeans going to work? Have you any idea what our friends are saying about you, about us?’ There was nothing wrong with jeans on boys but my parents believed that girls shouldn’t wear such things. Particularly not tight jeans, and especially not on their daughter. What made it worse was that Navela favoured wearing jeans that were crimson and skintight. ‘Your daughter, she has no shame,’ my father would say to my mother. ‘Look at the way she walks when she is wearing those clothes, as if she wants people to look at her. What am I expected to say if anyone sees her?’

  ‘What’s wrong with what I am wearing?’ Navela would respond. ‘I am not showing any flesh and I paid for these with my own money.’

  ‘This isn’t about money, it’s about honour!’

  ‘But what’s wrong with jeans?’

  If the argument persisted I would go to my bedroom and listen to Radio Luxembourg or try and read but I would be unable to drown out the sound of my father and sister arguing.

  Navela wasn’t allowed to leave the house in the evenings so instead would keep Uzma awake for hours by trying on clothes and asking her to take her photograph in different outfits. Uzma could not understand why Navela would spend so much time dressing up in clothes, applying lipstick and eyeliner and foundation when she was not going anywhere.

  While Navela was working at the textile factory Sohail was at sixth-form college. An old friend of my father called Sufi had been giving my brother driving lessons. Sufi worked with my father at Vauxhall but his family lived up north, so he was free at the weekends to teach Sohail how to drive his Datsun Sunny. My brother passed his driving test on the third attempt and was soon scouring the pages of the Luton Herald for a cheap second-hand car. He eventually found a gold Vauxhall Viva which my father bought for seventy pounds. Dressed in his stonewashed denim jacket and jeans, his face bristling with stubble and wearing mirrored sunglasses, Sohail would take the Viva for aimless drives into town with the windows down and bhangra bursting from the speakers. At the weekends he would lovingly repair the bodywork, filling dents with gauze and letting me help with vacuuming. When he replaced the old car stereo he gave the old one to me. My friend Ben explained how I could wire speakers up to it and have my own music system in the bedroom I shared with my brother.

  Sohail no longer played sports for the college but he went weight training three times a week; he also bought bodybuilding magazines and the walls of our bedroom were plastered with images of past Mr Universes. The men all had the same expression of concentrated serenity, the arms would be either outstretched like a Greek god or posed to display the bulging biceps. Sohail read books on body building; we knew Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was a body builder. When he caught me looking at the magazines Sohail would insist that I felt his biceps. ‘Can you feel that? Does it feel hard?’ he would ask proudly. ‘Don’t you wish you had muscles like that?’

  I loathed being thin. At junior school I was convinced a tapeworm was getting to my food before me; it was the only explanation for why I remained rake thin no matter how much I ate. The photographs of body builders on the bedroom wall did nothing for my self-esteem. My father believed the best cure for low self-esteem was public ridicule. This meant that whenever anyone came to visit there was an inevitable moment when they would ask how the children were. It was particularly pointed when Shuja came to visit because my father had known him since childhood and the longer my father had known someone the freer he felt to humiliate his children in their presence. Although he was the same age as my father, Shuja seemed older; his eyes were deep set and he looked like he was wearing eyeliner, but in fact it was charcoal. The henna in his hair had turned it orange. ‘Manzoor sahib, is your son eating correctly? He looks painfully thin. Not like his brother at all.’

  ‘Yes, he is very thin. We tell him to eat more but nothing seems to work. Son, pull your shirtsleeves up. Let him see your arms. Do you see how thin they are? Practically sticks.’

  ‘You are so right! He is all bone!’ Shuja exclaimed. ‘Son, you should eat more meat. You want to grow up to be a strong lion of a man, don’t you?’

  I w
ould not answer, I would just run back to my room. I wished I could have been more like my brother who could walk around with only a shirt. I would secretly do press-ups and sit-ups in my bedroom, borrow my brother’s Bullworker, load my bag with more books than I needed to make it heavier on the walk to school. It made no difference.

  My father believed that all my physical deficiencies could be cured by drinking a glass of milk a day. The two fixed rituals of my teenage years were reading the Koran and drinking a glass of milk; one for spiritual nourishment and the other for physical well being. I always drank the milk slightly warm at the end of the day. After seeing Rocky I became convinced that I needed to drink milk mixed with raw eggs but the first and only time I tried it I retched and hurled into the kitchen sink.

  The bedroom I shared with my brother became mine in the autumn of 1984 when Sohail left to study in Nottingham. The photographs of the body builders were replaced by film posters from the local video store and a map of the world. I missed my brother when he was away; when he came home it was always in brand-new cars that he had hired for the weekend. In the glove compartment there would be albums on cassette: Can’t Slow Down, Thriller and Lost in Music.

  To be popular at my high school it was essential to wear the right clothes. The cool students wore Diadora trainers, Farah trousers, Pringle sweaters and sportswear emblazoned with Lacoste. I would doodle the logos of Sergio Tacchini and Fila in the back of my exercise books, but most of my clothes came from the discount stores in Bury Park. When Sohail came back to Luton he would secretly take me shopping in the Arndale Centre and, with his own money, buy me clothes that my father never would. He bought me a pair of dazzling white Hi-Tec Capitol trainers and a navy-blue Lyle & Scott sweater. During holidays we would visit Sohail in Nottingham; with his redundancy money my father had bought the house where he lived and the whole family would travel to see him and spend the weekend painting and cleaning the house to prepare it for the new set of students. Sometimes I went to see my brother on my own; on those visits he would take me to see Robocop and Fatal Attraction.

  While Sohail was enjoying university life, Navela was still living at home. She could not forgive my father for not letting her pursue her education. While my father insisted it was because of finances, Navela was convinced it was simply because she was female. If a daughter went to university she was out of sight, out of her parents’ control and liable to descend into a moral cesspit of depravity. It was bad enough that a son could venture there but for a daughter to be lost in sin was unimaginable. What angered my sister most was that the opportunities being given to my brother and later to me were made possible because of her efforts.

  Navela was a huge influence on my life. It was because of her that I started listening to the radio. She turned me on to Steve Wright, a DJ whose afternoon show provided the soundtrack to my eighties childhood. I became such a fan that when I was at school I would ask Navela to record the entire three-hour programme on to three blank cassette tapes. In the evenings when the rest of the family were sleeping I would turn on my cassette player and hide it under my blankets. I would then switch off the lights, tuck myself under the covers and go to sleep with Steve Wright in the Afternoon in my headphones.

  When Uzma and I returned from school we were expected to help Navela and our mother with their sewing. We would help with the collars and the belts; the collars were inside out so Uzma would poke them out with a knitting needle, being careful not to pierce the fabric. The belts had to be pulled inside out. Uzma and I would have races to see who could do twenty belts the quickest. When a dress was finished, a tag with the number 67 – our house number – would be attached so that the man who came to collect it would know it was made by our family.

  When Navela was not working on dresses with my mother she would design them for other people. She had a book of sketches she would show to prospective clients; once she had made a dress she would make sure to be photographed in it herself before handing it over. One of my mother’s friends had a daughter who went to the London School of Fashion; despite being a fashion student this girl would ask Navela to design her own clothes.

  My father knew something about what it was like to not see one’s potential fulfilled, and yet while he encouraged me to study hard I never heard him say anything similar to my older sister. The idea that Navela could have utilised her love of fashion in ways other than making dresses for pennies at home never occurred to him. His biggest priority was trying to find a husband for her; when they argued and he was feeling particularly bitter, my father would complain that my sister had given him a huge headache. ‘Who is going to want to marry you? Do you realise what a burden you are on me, having to find someone willing to accept a girl who talks back?’

  Three times during the eighties my father took my sister to Pakistan to find her a husband. Navela insisted that any husband of hers had to be older and taller than she was. On the third visit she met someone who fulfilled her requirements and in early 1991 the family, except me and Sohail, travelled to Pakistan for my sister’s wedding.

  When Navela returned, she and her new husband moved into our home. I met him for the first time when I returned from Manchester one weekend. It was strange to think that this fair-skinned man with a thin moustache and his shirt tucked inside his chinos was now part of our family, and had replaced my father as the most important man in my sister’s life. When we talked our conversation was stilted and punctuated with uncomfortable pauses. I asked him what he did and he told me it was something to do with biochemistry. He asked me about Manchester and I told him it was better than Luton. I asked him what he made of life in Britain. He pulled a face as if chewing a piece of mango pickle. ‘Life is very hard,’ he complained. ‘People here work like dogs for their money.’

  Bloody cheek, I thought to myself. There are millions desperate to come to England and now you’re here, you’re complaining. ‘Life is hard here but you do have the chance to have a better life than in Pakistan,’ I reminded him.

  He shook his head. ‘There is poverty in Pakistan, of course there is, but the rich live very well there. Servants, imported goods. A lifestyle you cannot imagine.’

  I had thought my brother-in-law would thank the stars we had taken him away from Pakistan, but instead he appeared to be in shock at the realisation that in Britain the good life required hard work. That was one of the problems with arranged marriages and importing husbands and wives from Pakistan: they thought marriage was a free ticket to an easy life.

  My sister had always been the most outspoken of all of us and now, emboldened by her husband, she began to refuse to pass her earnings on to our father. ‘I have spent my life working for you,’ she said. ‘Now I want you to pay me back all the money I have given to the family.’ All our lives my father had been the undisputed authority figure in our family; nothing happened without his consent and his was the final word. Suddenly it no longer mattered how loudly my father shouted, his daughter no longer felt compelled to obey. ‘I want what is mine, what is rightfully mine and what I have earned,’ my sister demanded.

  ’What rubbish are you talking?’ my father would retort. ‘Where have you learnt this talk of your money and my money? The money I was making at Vauxhall – did I ever say that was just for my needs?’

  But this was no longer enough for my sister. ‘Who made the greatest sacrifices, Daddy? Who? It wasn’t your son, was it – he got to go to university. It was me, Daddy. I was the one who didn’t get the chances. Now it’s my turn – now I want my share.’

  My father would listen with anger and bewilderment: where did his daughter learn such impudence? ‘The greatest mistake I ever made was bringing you people to this country,’ he would shout so loud the whole house would hear. ‘I thought I knew what I was doing, but may Allah forgive me for what I have done. If someone had told me that after all my efforts my children would speak like this to me I swear I would have left you back in Pakistan.’

  After five months of f
ierce arguments Navela and her husband moved out of our home.

  Afterwards we would see Navela at the Purley Centre market or walk past her in the street. She would say hello but make little effort to visit our home. Having spent so much of her life living in accordance with our father’s wishes and desires Navela seemed now to be deliberately maintaining a distance. My parents were too stubborn to visit her. ‘If your daughter wants to see us she knows where we are,’ my father would say, but I was not so proud. During weekends and afternoons I would stop by at her place, play with her young son and drink tea in her living room.

  * * *

  In 1988 Sohail returned from Nottingham. When his friends asked my father what Sohail was doing he would tell them he was looking for work and that times were hard. He did not want to reveal that Sohail had graduated with a poor degree and was working at a pizza restaurant. Back in Luton, my brother drifted from job to job. He worked as a waiter, in a factory that made hospital beds, and on the construction of the British Library, where many years later I would write this book. My father and brother barely spoke; Sohail would return home late after work smelling of cigarettes and eat the chapattis my mother left for him in the kitchen. He would be out of the house before my parents were downstairs in the morning.

  After Sohail’s poor results at university, my father would throw my brother’s situation at me. ‘Is that what will happen to you if you go to university?’ he would ask. ‘Will you shame the family like he has?’