Screaming.
Eventually, always, I ended up screaming in terror for a good minute or so until the small worries of life crept back in.
‘You might be dead one day, buddy,’ they’d say. ‘But you’ve still got us to deal with.’ I was never more grateful for Monday morning homework hand-in than in those moments.
My poor concerned Ba asked me every time what was wrong, and I always sulked the question off. How could she empathise or understand? She was full of the comforting conviction of faith, so much so that she dedicated half of every morning to the shrine in her bedroom – bringing a flame from downstairs in a tiny golden cup and placing it before her equally tiny idols of the Gods, of which there a multitude. I only recognised the bronze Hanuman that I had picked up myself from a ramshackle market stall in Ahmedabad. I was told that I could choose the God I wanted to be the one who would look after me and I went for Hanuman, the mercurial monkey king from my Ramayana story book. He spends his time wrestling, arguing with mountains and burning down cities with his tail for japes. That’s the guy I want watching my back. When I pointed him out, the merchant nodded, applied some badly-painted plastic eyes to the metal, and handed him over. I found it really funny to see this boss-eyed monkey man sitting on my ba’s immaculate shrine but it was clear to me from this practised routine, during which you must not disturb her, that it all meant a lot to her. Any solutions to my screaming were going to come from this faith, this dedication and I didn’t trust them.
None of this anxiety was helped by the family events I was now trusted to come to. Typical of immigrants from poor countries, my extended family was huge on both sides, which meant an endless stream of weddings and funerals, at which I knew no one and cared very little. The weddings were traditionally Indian: flowers, saris, bad dancing, carefully portioned food served into specially made plastic trays with dividers that helpfully kept your khichdi and puri dry and separate from the dhey. The funerals, on the other hand, had a stronger English infusion. Black suits, churches and solemnity. The weddings were boring but at least you could run around and have fun with the other kids. No such luck at the funerals. All there was to do was absorb the sadness and hope that if you fell over, someone might take you home early.
I eventually tamed my existential dread by doing what I continue to do with all deadlines to this day: I pushed it back. I can’t remember what triggered it but one day I just told myself ‘It’s OK, I’ll find religion when I’m twenty-one’, and with that I was satisfied that All Would Be Well One Day. It was a Pascalian pragmatism that held for a couple of years until, ever so gradually, the obvious issue reared its head.
Exactly which religion would I be finding?
Being raised in a Hindu family but going to an explicitly Christian school (where I played Joseph in the nativity play, yet somehow lost out on Mowgli in The Jungle Book to a ginger kid called Charlie) in a nominally Christian country meant a strong dissonance not just in tolerance of spices and film lengths but also in end-of-life theories. With Hinduism there wasn’t even an Abrahamic link like there was between Judaism, Islam and Christianity that would allow you to do a reasoned ‘well, when you think about it, it’s all from the same place, the same people, what do the differences really matter?’ number on it.
People I loved, people I trusted, people I thought were cool, all backed wildly different beliefs about what happened after death and how to live the life that came before it. My grandmothers had a fervent Hindu faith, but adding together everyone else around me it was clear there were so many others available to offer a contradiction: my Sikh friends with their little swords and turbans; the proud owners of the Punjabi kebab house I’d visit with my dad on Commercial Street with Islamic art on their walls; my Chinese teacher at primary school who taught me all about which numbers were lucky and which weren’t in her culture; even a Jehovah’s Witness who turned up at our door once and made a good go of explaining how she was one of the chosen few. There seemed to be as many ways to live as there were to be dead. They couldn’t all be right, even if I wanted them to be, which led me to what felt like the only logical conclusion: they’re all wrong. Dread had morphed into pragmatism, which now gave way to a wary, sometimes sneering atheism shared by my sister and dad – the cynical school run trio – that carried me through secondary education and informed my choice of friends.
It wasn’t until university and my encounters with the Christian Union there that I found anything matching my grandmothers for intensity of belief. These weren’t the half-hearted C of E types I knew from home, or traditional old ladies for whom religion went a long way to standing in for the education denied to them. These CU types were confident, smart and nice – so bloody nice. It’s hard to be snarky about people who hand out free cheese toasties with a smile and no expectations. I became good friends with a few of them and started to see how their faith helped guide their lives. It gave them patience, hope, a mission, all things I was desperately lacking in. I was still cynical about religion but I could see the appeal; when compared to a first-year student body loaded with horny drunks, it was hard not to think that the world would actually be better off with more people like them – community-minded and doing regular Good Deeds – than people like me.
To show my appreciation, I made posters about how their hall rep was ‘a really fucking great guy!’, which wasn’t appreciated. Eventually I started going to their meet-up groups, along with my Belgian Goth flatmate, Michael. He was there to give them a hard time, I was there to listen.
As it happens, God did finally find me during second year, two years before my self-imposed deadline, but it wasn’t the Christian Union that got me in the end, despite their best efforts. I was lucky enough to have all four grandparents around for my childhood; however, the counterweight of that luck was knowing you were going to see them all die one day and you wondered which would go first. It wasn’t the one I was expecting. It turned out to be one of my grandmothers, my mother’s mother, my biji ba (a name, along with biji dada, that I think of with much affection, but which basically means ‘other grandma’ and ‘other grandad’ – useful in distinguishing between them but somewhat suggestive of a bit of a hierarchy). She was both the youngest and the most devout. One of the last things she said from her hospital bed was, ‘I’m coming back as a bird.’
Hearing this, I wanted to reply, ‘That’s stupid, you’re here, be here, don’t be talking about being somewhere else, something else.’
I didn’t, of course. I couldn’t crush her like my grandfather had done to me. She wasn’t six like I was but sixty-six which, to my mind, was still far too young for this to happen. She was the first person that I really knew to go and I found that first death is the evil mirror universe version of first love – life-changing, raw, an experience that will superficially come again but will never be felt in the same way.
My childhood was spent between the homes of both sides of my family, and if the photo of Mum in my dad’s house was a subtle memento mori, the funeral home opposite my mum’s parents’ estate was an altogether more overt one, somewhere they were probably going to end up if the place stayed in business long enough, and so it proved. They had Biji Ba in the back room of that funeral home (isn’t it strange they’re called homes?), her concrete-grey, stern face – an expression she’d never worn in life – contrasted with the bright sari she’d been draped in. The colour amongst the grey felt a fitting tribute to her time in this country. Before I left, I decided I really, really needed to knock on her forehead. Was she in there? In the void? A bird? There was, of course, no reply.
The funeral and the events around it I went into with a detached clarity. Living within two religious traditions had robbed me of any belief in the holy or spiritual but it allowed me a greater appreciation for why those traditions are important. They hold us when we need it. Traditions are just nonsense that binds, and whilst the nonsense might take on a different hue, the binding is universal.
My grief linger
ed and, in the time it was with me, it felt possible to believe that maybe, just maybe, my grandma was a bird. I tortured my sceptical brain around the science of it – we’re all just atoms to be rearranged, right? – and it felt that there must be something to this world that I was missing. I wanted to believe that the sacrifices my family had made to create a life for me, that took them so far from their home, would be validated somehow by a merciful god. It had to be. Had to. So I asked my newly widowed biji dada for a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which he gladly provided. In doing so, he told me of his own journey from non-belief to belief over his years moving through the last outposts of Empire and ending up in his ex-council house in Battersea. Is it harder to have faith when you’re in another land, I wondered? Or, in a search for meaning and purity in a place that can often resent you, does your faith harden in reaction?
For my part, I started to push against my evangelical friends who I had previously got on so well with. What did they think had happened to Biji Ba? To my mum? What did they think would happen to me, this heathen in their midst?
During a night I’m not particularly proud of, I pushed one of them so hard that she confessed that, yes, they thought my mum and grandma were in hell and that I was going to end up there too … but she prayed that I wouldn’t. I was being a prick. She was my friend. She was in tears. She clearly found it agony to say it. But she did say it, and I told her to go fuck herself. It was ugly, and proved an uglier time still for Exeter evangelicals in general as their group found themselves in disputes with other Christian societies as well as the secularism of the uni itself. An increasingly rancorous chain of events that culminated in them attempting to sue the student union74.
Meanwhile, I dived into the Bhagavad Gita and was thrilled to find more poetic, adult versions of the storybooks I had as a kid. I spoke to priests. Read forums. Did I know Hinduism isn’t a religion but more a pagan-style collection of beliefs? No, I did not. Did I realise you could worship Jesus and still be a Hindu? No way. This was great. It all tied up! Hinduism was older than everything else, it was flexible, if there was one that was going to be right across the millennia it had to be this one – the faith I needed had been staring me in the face ever since birth. I was brown Luke Skywalker. I was a Hindu, like my mother before me. Of course. Of course! Peace and purpose were around the corner.
This religious ecstasy lasted, all in all, about a couple of months before withering away.
Nowadays, having for the most part accepted I’m just a chimp with airs, with no mighty sky chimp looking out for me, I think less about what happens to the souls of me and my loved ones after and more about what will be done with our actual bodies, which we at least have some control over.
At the time of writing this essay, I still have three grandparents left. Fingers crossed this figure doesn’t shift too significantly before publication, but it will one day and how they choose to be mourned says as much about their journey as their actions in life. Three generations of my family have been born on three different continents: most of my grandparents in India, both parents in Kenya, me in England along with my sister and cousins. Asia. Africa. Europe. Every continent we’ve been through has left a mark on us. I’m half-amused, half-annoyed that the little Gujarati I speak is infused with Swahili words and dialect, a coded language fully available only to those who have made that particular journey. Broadly useless to me, but in itself a wonderful reminder of how far they’ve come in every sense. We are happy to change and adapt even something so fundamentally important to us as language in order to start sinking into our new homes. In death, though, so far they’ve all returned to the ‘motherland’ and had their ashes spread over the Ganges. There’s a religious element to that of course but, in choosing this way to be laid to rest, it suggests to me that this diaspora, these brave wanderers, always yearned for home no matter how successful they were at integrating abroad.
What about me then? After all, I’m racking up the days myself and when I dwell on the numbers they warp into curious, morbid trivia. This year, for example, I turn thirty and so soon my mum – that picture on the wall – will become, in a way, the youngest member of our family. If my sister and I live until we’re eighty, it will have been a whole hundred years from my family arriving in the UK to someone born here dying here. And, I imagine, we’ll also wind up getting our ashes spread here or somewhere nearby. We aren’t religious. There’s no spiritual connection to some ‘homeland’ for us. Will that be the final moment of integration? When we’ve not just been born, lived and died in this country, but are interred somewhere in its soil as well? When there’s, to rephrase an old poem, some corner of an English field that is forever foreign.
For my part, I hope in death I create another branch to my family’s story. If I die where I am now, I don’t believe I’ll reincarnate, I don’t think I’m going to heaven or hell or the void, but at least I will already be home.
74 ‘Christian group to take university to court’, The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/education/2007/jul/27/highereducation.uk2
The Ungrateful Country
Musa Okwonga
So here’s my experience of growing up in Britain; it was always a case of making sure that I was grateful. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad attitude to have; after all, my parents were brought to the UK as refugees, fleeing the hyper-violent regime of Idi Amin, and so there was no question that they had been given a second chance at life. At the time of their departure, Amin was busily wiping out anyone who might represent a future threat to his rule, and my parents – then attendees of two of the best schools in Uganda – were firmly within his target demographic. And so they came to West Drayton, and a few years later I turned up: the eldest son of two doctors, with an eagerness to please their adopted country.
I didn’t notice that eagerness until I was 11, when I was given a bursary to attend Sunningdale, a boys’ prep school. Until that point, I hadn’t given much thought to my skin colour, since everywhere I’d studied before had been racially diverse: now, though, I was one of two black pupils out of 130. What’s more, my new peers and their families weren’t like the white people I had met before, whose lives were reassuringly everyday, and who generally only owned the one home. My new classmates seemed to have the most glamorous of existences. Many of them lived abroad. Their holidays were spent skiing and shooting. One had a butler. The richest ones were always the most shabbily dressed: if a boy had holes in his sweater, he was more likely than not to be descended from some emperor.
Following the overthrow of Idi Amin in 1981, my father returned to Uganda to help build what he believed would be a better country. He became the military physician for Major General Oyite-Ojok, the commander who defeated Amin, and he died with him. On December 3rd, 1983, their helicopter crashed – or, most likely, was shot down – in a moment that was seen as the turning-point in the struggle for control of the country. My mother, widowed, was left to raise four young children alone; and with her attention divided between us and endless shifts as a local GP, I learned that the last thing she needed was additional problems from me. No: what she needed was for me to be smart, dutiful and responsible. So I turned up at Sunningdale School, black and from a miraculously solvent single-parent home, amongst the sons of white millionaires.
I became an unofficial ambassador for black people. There were so few of us in the boarding-school world that I felt driven every week to prove that we could be just as good as our white counterparts. Returning home for my holidays, I saw the implications of a world where people were judged by their skin alone. My cousins and I were starting to be stop-searched by police, on one occasion merely for waiting by a bus stop. ‘Loitering’ became a code word for ‘being dark-skinned in broad daylight’. And here I was, at school with boys whose parents had the potential to change things for people who looked like me; with boys who, one day, might be running the country themselves. I approached my studies with a furious sense of mission: believing that, if I made a good impres
sion here, I could help to erode some of our society’s firmest prejudices.
Maybe, in attending Sunningdale, I felt as much of an immigrant as my parents had in their schooldays. My mother had gone to Gayaza High School, in Kampala. As one of its few pupils from the northern part of the country, she had been mocked by her classmates, who said that members of her tribe were rumoured to have monkey tails. Perhaps, like my parents landing in the UK, I was in an alien landscape, grateful for the opportunity I had been given. It didn’t help that, never having been taught Latin, Greek, French or Tudor history, I was immediately bottom of almost every single class. I only remain thankful for being good at English, which allowed me to reassure those around me that I wasn’t academically useless, and for being decent at football, which among most boys that age was a pretty immediate path to social acceptance.
After two years at Sunningdale, I found myself at Eton College. This, I told myself quietly, was The Big Time. I had watched a documentary about it on Channel 4, Class of 91, and was captivated. Here, I thought, was a place an outsider had to go to prove himself. Some of the world’s greatest leaders had been here, and now their sons were presumably going there too. If I was to achieve anything in life, I had to acquit myself against them, and excel. As Frank Sinatra once sang of New York, if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere.
I took to my studies with such a spectacular seriousness that, for a couple of years, I carried my work around school in a briefcase. That must have looked excessively formal, even by the standards of a school where we wore wedding clothes to class. Desperate to make the best of an education that so few people, let alone black ones, would ever experience, I got involved in every school activity I could. If there was an arts magazine anywhere in sight, I wanted to edit it; if there was a school society I liked the look of, I wanted to run it. I enjoyed my work, but I didn’t much enjoy my social life. Whenever I went back home, I discovered that I was considered too posh to hang out with most of the locals there; and during the school holidays I rarely saw my classmates, since most of them seemed to have prohibitively expensive tastes. Moreover, there had been the warning that an Old Etonian, one of my mother’s patients, had asked her to pass on to me when I was just about to start my first term there. ‘Tell him he will never be one of them,’ he said. I scoffed at that advice then, but with each passing term I was less and less sure.
The Good Immigrant Page 21