Greetings from Bury Park Read online

  I had always been close to Uzma; my relationship with my brother was much less secure. The scare of our mother’s stroke had made me think about Sohail and me, and how sad it was that even in such a small family tension and jealousies kept us apart. When I was a young boy I would hear my parents’ friends advise them not to educate their children because once they had an education they would no longer have anything to say. That, I knew, was how my brother and mother felt about me. It was particularly ironic that I was working in a career where the ability to communicate effectively was critical and yet I was failing completely to communicate with my own family; I was writing articles about the impact of my father’s life on my identity as a British Muslim and my own mother was hardly speaking to me. To the outside world I might have been a success but as a son and a brother I was an abject failure: selfish, uncommunicative and a disappointment.

  In the autumn of 2004 I was contacted by a BBC documentary director who wanted me to present a television programme about my hometown. The director, who was called Riete, wanted to include my family in the programme but when I discussed this with Sohail he was very resistant. My mother was in Pakistan at the time, we had sent her to Lahore for the winter to escape the cold. Riete was adamant that the programme needed the participation of my brother and sister but Sohail wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Why do you want to make a programme about the family?’ he asked me. ‘Who is going to be interested?’

  I told him that the BBC was interested.

  ‘Well, if you want to be making this kind of thing that’s fine for you, but I am a very private man. I don’t like other people knowing my business.’

  Although he kept insisting there was no possibility he would be involved with the documentary, Sohail did agree to meet Riete to discuss the programme. She drove from London and visited our home where she had dinner with my brother and the rest of the family. Being incredibly persuasive and charming, Riete managed to change Sohail’s mind and he agreed he would take part in the programme.

  Luton Actually was broadcast in the spring of 2005; amongst other things it transformed my relationship with my family. The day after it was broadcast Sohail was in a grocery store in Bury Park when a man approached him to ask if he was the person he had seen on television the previous evening. My brother smiled and confirmed that he was. Later that afternoon his bank manager called, and then his carpenter. When he took the children to Wardown Park he noticed how the parents of other children would be pointing at him and turning to explain to the others who he was. This continued for weeks, strangers approaching my brother to tell him how much they loved the programme and what a decent and honourable older brother he was. My brother would call me in London to tell me the latest story of who had contacted him following the broadcast of the documentary. Usually the only time my brother contacted me was to admonish me or lecture me, now he would call to ask about what else I had coming up and even to suggest future programmes. It was something of a shock to have my brother sounding enthusiastic about my work. ‘You know, at the estate agent’s two people came up to me to say they’d seen the programme,’ he would say. ‘The whole town saw it, I think. Hey, maybe we should set up business together and make documentaries!’

  One evening a few months after the documentary aired I was sitting in Sohail’s living room. ‘You know it’s taken me a while,’ my brother said, ‘but I now see that I have been slagging you off, saying you were lazy and good for nothing and that I was the one who had all the right answers. It’s only now, after all this time, that I realise that it was you that had got it sussed and I was the fool. All my life I have been working like a dog and what do I have to show for it? High blood pressure, diabetes, panic attacks. Meanwhile you’ve been out having fun, enjoying life and seeing the world and there isn’t a thing wrong with you!’

  I listened as I played with his daughter Romessa. ‘But you always said that you didn’t like travelling,’ I said.

  ‘I said that but I think the truth is that how can you know you don’t like something if you have not tried it? I think I was just afraid of doing anything different. And you know what happened the one time I went to America. That was hard, to have your friend die in your arms like that. It put me off travelling or going anywhere, but how do I know that if I go to Italy or Spain or China I won’t like it? I have spent almost my whole life in this town and I have just realised that if I don’t get my life in order I am going to die in Luton and not have seen or done anything!’

  In all the years that I had known him I had never heard my brother speak like this. ‘I mean, you go to Glastonbury every year. Maybe I should go to Glastonbury and listen to Coldplay and all this music that you like. Maybe I should be listening to Bruce Springsteen. Maybe Bruce could teach me a thing or two!’

  The next time I was in my brother’s home I noticed that next to his CD player in the living room was a brand-new copy of Born in the USA.

  What I had always found so infuriating about Sohail was, despite having spent thirty years in Britain, how Pakistani he was; his friends were all Pakistani and he remained resolutely unintegrated. Despite having been educated here his values were thoroughly traditional. My brother did not have any crisis of identity, he was not torn between two cultures. He was a Pakistani: that was why he had bought two houses next to each other so that he could live next door to our mother; it was why he liked to visit Pakistan once a year and catch up with the relatives. In the past I had been guilty of judging my brother’s lifestyle as unadventurous when in fact the truth was that the only reason I could be the archetypal younger son because he was the archetypal older brother: I owed him my life. When I was young I felt guilty about feeling resentful of my father since I knew the struggles he had endured. These days I appreciate how much I owe not only to my father but to the rest of my family. Navela, Sohail, Uzma and I have all followed the lives determined by gender and our place in the family, each of us living our own separate lives, but drawn together by the ties that bind.

  Blood Brothers

  Now we went walking in the rain talking about the pain from the world we hid

  Now there ain’t nobody, nowhere, nohow gonna ever understand me the way you did

  ‘Bobby Jean’, Bruce Springsteen

  I did not know it then, in that first week at sixth-form college during the autumn of 1987, that my life would be changed for ever by the boy sitting on his own in the upper common room with his eyes closed and his head rocking to the music he was hearing on headphones stretched over his maroon turban. He wore a faded denim jacket with its collar up and his clenched fists were beating out a silent rhythm on an invisible drum kit. He had the hairiest face of any sixteen-year-old I had ever seen.

  The first time I saw him it was lunchtime. The college radio station was blasting out ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and I was in the common room with Kate, whom I had met whilst working during the summer at a sandwich-making factory. The boy was tugging at his headphones, trying to free them from the bandages of his turban, when he spotted my friend. ‘Hey, Kate, how’s it going?’ he said before offering me his hand and saying simply, ‘Hey, mate, how’s it going? I’m Amolak – my mates call me Roops.’

  My new college was predominantly Asian, but before then I had virtually no Asian friends. I saw the sons of my father’s friends occasionally but Lea Manor High School was almost entirely white and when I was around Asians I tended to feel a bit of a fraud. I had always felt grateful I was not Sikh; being Asian was hard enough without a religion that insisted believers wear enormous bandages on their head and forsake cutting facial hair. Within seconds of meeting Amolak it was obvious that while he might have looked like Chewbacca in jeans, he had the confident air of someone completely oblivious to how ridiculous he looked.

  ‘Hey, I’m Sarfraz. So what you listening to then?’ I asked him, noticing the dog tag around his neck and the metal stars and stripes badge on his jacket.

  Amolak stopped fiddling with his headphones. ‘What am I listening
to?’ he said slowly, as if it was the most inane enquiry ever made. ‘I’m listening to the truth, my friend. I am listening to wisdom. I am listening to philosophy. I am listening to The Man, The Boss.’

  By the time I was sixteen I considered myself to be reasonably knowledgeable about pop music; about Bruce Springsteen I knew this much: he had sung ‘Born in the USA’ and Asian boys from Luton had no business listening to his music. These two pieces of information provided me with all the ammunition I needed. ‘What the hell are you doing listening to Bruce Springsteen for?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t he just a millionaire who goes around dressed in lumberjack shirts pretending to care about the working class?’

  ’Don’t start arguing with Roops,’ said Kate, laughing. ‘You’re not going to win.’

  As someone who loved arguments so much that I looked forward to when Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking, no further encouragement was needed. ‘But seriously though,’ I continued, ‘doesn’t Bruce Springsteen make, like, rock music?’

  Amolak bristled.

  ‘And anyway,’ I carried on, enjoying his reaction, ‘he’s really old, isn’t he? In his thirties! What you listening to middle-aged music for?’

  Amolak stood up. ‘Listen, my friend,’ he said deliberately as if he was repeating a speech he had made many times before, ‘Bruce Springsteen is a direct connection to everything that is meaningful and significant in life. And anyway what the fuck do you listen to then? That fool Rick Astley? Bros? Let me tell you something right now: Bruce pisses on all them twats.’

  I was passionate about music but Amolak was evangelical; he seemed so secure in his conviction that I began to regret having ridiculed Bruce Springsteen whose music I hardly knew.

  ‘Hey, we’re just chatting,’ I told him. ‘To be honest, I don’t really know much about Springsteen, I’ve heard ‘‘Born in the USA’’ and that’s about it.’

  ‘You know what you need to do? You need to stop chatting your rubbish and open those big ears of yours,’ said Amolak.

  ‘OK, you got a tape I can hear?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ll make you one,’ said Amolak as he fished out his headphones and began slipping them under his turban once more. The conversation was evidently over.

  ‘How do you know him?’ I asked Kate as we left Amolak to his music.

  ‘Oh, we’ve been friends for ages. We went to Maidenhall together and then we were at Challney as well. He’s definitely a bit of a character,’ she giggled.

  ‘You’re telling me! I thought he was going to punch me when I said that thing about Bruce.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s a bit mad when it comes to Springsteen, practically worships the man. ‘It’s like religion to him and when he starts he just doesn’t shut up!’

  ‘It’ll be cool if he does give me a tape, be good to see what he’s on about.’

  A few days later during morning assembly I felt a tap on my back. ‘Here you go, geezer, here are the tapes you wanted.’

  ‘Cheers – by the way I saw the video for his new song.’

  ‘What? ‘‘Brilliant Disguise’’? You dog!’

  I had seen the video on breakfast television that morning and it felt good to have the better of my new friend. ‘It was all right,’ I said airily.

  ‘So what’s it like?’ asked Amolak. ‘Raas man, I can’t believe you’ve heard it before me!’

  I smiled and asked him what was on the cassette tapes.

  ‘Only the greatest music ever recorded, my friend,’ Amolak replied. ‘You woke up a boy and tonight you will go to sleep a man.’

  * * *

  The evening after college followed the usual sequence: I came home and ate in silence in the living room while my father read the newspaper. When my parents went upstairs to bed I watched television with Uzma before the regular call came to go upstairs and massage my father’s feet. It was not until after eleven that I was finally able to fall into bed, slip one of Amolak’s cassettes into my Sharp twin-tape machine and slide the headphone jack into the socket. The bedroom was dark as I placed the headphones on my ears and reached for the play button.

  The first thing that struck me was his voice; I had been expecting music and singing but Bruce Springsteen was not singing, he was just talking with an acoustic guitar playing in the background. ‘When I was growing up,’ he was saying, ‘me and my dad would go at it all the time, over almost anything.’ I was confused. This was not a song, it was a spoken word introduction to a song; it was a man recalling his childhood and his relationship with his father. As I listened to Bruce Springsteen I realised this was like nothing I had heard before. I had taken to having a white sheet of paper on the wall next to my bed where I could write the details of any song that I liked while listening to the radio. There were hundreds of songs on that list, but in all my years of listening to music there was nothing to compare to this. The pop singers I knew sang about dancing on the ceiling and total eclipses of the heart, not their troubled relationships with their fathers.

  A piercing harmonica announced the start of the first song. ‘I come from down in the valley,’ it began, ‘where, mister, when you’re young, they bring you up to do just like your daddy done.’ From those opening words I wanted to know what happened next. I lay on my bed in the darkness and listened to the story unfold, it was a motion picture told in words and music. As each song unfurled I kept asking myself how I had lived for sixteen years without this music, without even the knowledge that it existed. Listening to the cassette made me realise that everything that I had fed my ears before then was nothing more than the plastic posing of irrelevant fools. Having stumbled in the dark for so long, on that September night I was blinded by the light. Everything significant that I did or achieved in my life in the years that followed had its roots in the emotions I experienced that evening. That night Bruce Springsteen changed my life.

  The following afternoon after college I was walking towards the bus stop on my way home when I spotted Amolak.

  ‘Hey, Amolak, I listened to the tapes you gave me.’

  Even though all his other friends called him Roops I insisted on calling my new friend by his actual name; I found nicknames irritating.

  ‘Yeah? So what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s like nothing I have ever heard before.’

  ‘See, I told you! The Boss rules!’

  We were walking towards the main road, just two of hundreds of students finished for the day but I didn’t want to go home. There was so much more to know. ‘So listen, is there any chance you could get me some more stuff?’ When I asked him my voice was low and conspiratorial and layered in shame; I did not like to admit that I had been so completely wrong when I had been cheerfully knocking Springsteen earlier in the week, and I felt like an addict trying to score some stuff from a dealer.

  ‘Yeah, I can record some copies of the albums for you, no worries. But you got to read the lyrics. It’s the words that make him The Boss.’

  During the next few weeks I had a crash course in Bruce Springsteen. Amolak taped some of his albums for me and I borrowed others from the college library. In between classes I would sit and read the photocopied lyrics from the album before I spoke to Amolak. For my friend, so long a lone disciple, I was a project, someone with whom he could share his passion. We spent our lunchtimes discussing Springsteen.

  ‘So what did you think of that tape I made you the other night? Darkness on the Edge of Town.’

  ‘Only heard it about five or six times so still trying to get it into my head. That first song I don’t really get.’

  ‘What? ‘‘Badlands’’? You’re joking, right? That’s one of his classics!’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s hard to make out the words and I don’t have the lyrics for it yet but I tell you what, I love ‘‘The Promised Land’’, that’s fucking amazing. That bit where he sings, ‘‘I’ve done my best to live the right way . . .’’’

  ‘‘‘I get up every morning,’’’ continued Amolak,
‘ ‘‘and go to work each day, but your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold . . .’’’

  Neither of us were singing the words but there was a rhythmic punch to our delivery, each word sliding into the other. Around us Asian girls glided past, some in traditional shalwaar kameez but most in western dress, their eyes meeting ours briefly before continuing their conversation. Amolak nodded at them in acknowledgement without missing the beat of the verse. By now we were both walking faster, oblivious to the students and the posters on the walls advertising the coming student elections, immersed in the lyrics of the song: ‘take a knife and cut this pain from my heart . . .’ And now ‘The dogs on Main Street howl ‘cause they understand, If I could take one moment into my hands, Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man, And I believe in a promised land.’

  Every Sunday evening my father would drive me to Amolak’s house in Bury Park. When Amolak spoke to my parents he would speak to them in Punjabi, which immediately endeared him to them as it meant he was respectful enough of his elders not to speak to them in English.