Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  It all sounded so simple. Unfortunately what Andy had not taken into account was that, having spent a year at university, I was unprepared for the cold reality of waking at the crack of dawn. Bleary-eyed, my head feeling like it was being pummelled by a wrecking ball, I would stand under a cold shower (the best way to start the day, we were advised) and wonder what on earth I had done to deserve such punishment. When it was time to leave the flat I found that my satchel weighed so much it felt like I was carrying the dismembered body parts of a particularly corpulent sumo wrestler. And then there was the heat. Yuba City during the summer of 1990 was scorchingly, head-poundingly hot. With a weighty bag over my shoulder it was unbearable.

  On my first day knocking doors I was so unconfident with my delivery that no one invited me into their home. On the second day exactly the same happened, but I found myself spending an extended lunch break inside the air-conditioned rooms of a Taco Bell. By the third day I managed to persuade one woman to let me into her home but didn’t manage to sell her anything. By now my American dream was beginning to fade fast. During the sales conference we had been taught that there was no room for negative thinking. If I had spent my day slogging and sweating from one no-sale to another the correct way to describe the day to my colleagues when I returned to the apartment was, ‘Hey! I had a great day today! I learnt a lot!’ I learnt a hell of a lot during my first two weeks.

  Miserable as it was not to be selling any books, what made it partially better was having a chance to meet some normal Americans. Having adjusted myself to the prospect of not selling any books ever, I decided I would try to enjoy myself by talking to interesting people instead. After knocking on door after door I found myself talking to a middle-aged woman who told me all about the time she was living in San Francisco during the summer of love. ‘So you were a real-life hippie?’ I asked her, my eyes filled with wonderment. I met a born-again Christian who invited me into his house and who made me iced tea while he prayed to Jesus to come and save this sinner, Steve. I knocked on another door and was met by a young brunette who invited me into her home. She told me her name was Zoë, she had brown curly hair, a face full of freckles and wore an MC Hammer T-shirt. I started with my preplanned script but stopped when I noticed her smile. Zoë told me she wasn’t going to buy any books from me and, although this was the moment when I should have bid her goodbye and moved on, there was something in her open smile which kept me in her front room. ‘Is that your Porsche outside?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yeah, my folks bought it for me for my birthday,’ she told me.

  ‘That’s so cool,’ I said enviously. ‘It’s bloody hard work slogging it out on the streets.’

  ‘So what do you think of Yuba City?’ she asked me. ‘Bit different from England, huh?’

  I told her I had not really seen much of Yuba City, all I had seen was the front doors of houses.

  ‘You’ve not been to the park?’ I told her I hadn’t. ‘Well, listen, if you wanna take a break from work I could always take you for a drive to the park.’

  I was not experienced enough with American girls to know whether ‘taking a drive to the park’ was a euphemism for something else but this seemed as good a time as any to find out. Abandoning my selling strategy for the day, I clambered inside Zoë’s scarlet Porsche. Three hours later, after a lovely afternoon sat in the park and a comprehensive drive around Yuba City, Zoë dropped me back at my apartment. I told the others I had learnt a lot that day.

  One afternoon I was knocking on doors and an Asian woman answered. I started my spiel and I could tell from the warm smile on her face she recognised me as a fellow Asian. ‘Do you speak Urdu?’ she asked me.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I replied in Urdu.

  Then her husband appeared at the door. ‘This young man is from England but he is Pakistani,’ the woman told the man.

  ‘Well, in that case come in, come in,’ said the man, waving me into his house. I sat in their living room pleased to be out of the scorching heat.

  ‘So where are you from?’ asked the man.

  ‘England,’ I replied.

  ‘No, I mean where are you really from?’

  ‘Oh, Pakistan,’ I said, correcting myself.

  ‘Son, you misunderstand me. What I mean to ask is what village are you from?’

  It never ceased to amuse me that whenever my father met another Pakistani one of the first questions he would ask was what village the man was from, as if the answer should mean anything now that both of them were five thousand miles from Pakistan. I had presumed this was merely small town backwardness but here I was in the United States of America, in California no less, thousands of miles from Luton and this man had asked me what village in Pakistan I was from. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘I think it’s near Lahore, I haven’t been back for ages.’

  ‘I bet you must be missing your mother’s food,’ the woman said kindly.

  ‘I have to admit I am. It’s been months since I’ve had a proper Pakistani meal . . .’

  ‘Say no more – you can be our guest for lunch!’

  That afternoon I sat with the couple and ate chapattis with mango pickle and yoghurt with slices of orange and mango. It was not quite like my mother’s home-made yoghurt but it was closer than anything else I had enjoyed for months. As I was eating it struck me that for all my frustration about being Asian there were some unquestionably good things about it: perhaps my father had been right when he had talked about a shared sense of community, it was just that I needed to travel to the United States to witness it first-hand.

  We spent so much time out on the streets that the only time I saw Amolak was in the evening when I was so exhausted I hardly had the energy to speak. I did notice how it didn’t matter how early I returned home, Amolak was already there and when I asked him how his day had been it seemed to consist mostly of long lunches and hours spent writing letters back home. Early one afternoon I went back to change out of my sweaty T-shirt and found Amolak in the apartment. ‘Hey, what the hell you doing here?’ I asked him.

  ’I can’t do this, mate,’ Amolak told me sadly. ‘Believe me I’ve tried, but I’m just so bloody homesick. I just miss my family too much.’

  ‘Jesus, I didn’t realise things were that bad,’ I said, throwing my bag of sample books on to the sofa and sitting down next to my friend. ‘So what do you want to do? You can’t just leave now, it’s only July and we’re meant to be here until early September.’

  Amolak looked at me with an expression that suggested guilt and relief. ‘I’ve already rung Southwestern and, I’m really sorry, but they’ve agreed to let me go back early. I’m leaving at the end of this week.’

  I had hardly thought about my family the whole time I had been there but the difference was that I had already left home. Amolak was still living with his family. ‘You’re sure about this?’ I said. ‘Think about it, mate: your parents will still be there in September. Why don’t you just stick it out here, you’ll regret it later.’

  But there was no convincing him, he had loved the time in New York but the effort of rising at six in the morning to try and sell books to uninterested homeowners in small-town California was beyond him. One July morning I shook him by the hand, gave him a hug and watched as his Greyhound bus vanished into the distance.

  Saying goodbye to Amolak was the saddest day of that American summer and though there were happy times ahead it was not the same without my best friend. My favourite memory of Yuba City occurred in the week following Amolak’s departure. It was another sweltering day and I had spent the morning standing in front of garden sprinklers to stay cool. Every door I had knocked on was slammed back in my face. I was hungry, hot and depressed. And I was missing my friend. I was standing outside a front door feeling thoroughly sorry for myself when I spotted a middle-aged woman waving at me from across the street. I had talked to her earlier that day. Although she had not bought anything she had been a great listener as I had poured my heart out to her about how much I was
missing Amolak and how strange it felt to be so far from home. ‘Hey, I have something for you,’ she said as I wandered towards her. In her hands were a few boiled sweets. ‘I saw you looking all down and I thought I’d give you some candy. You know, to keep your attitude sweet.’

  I took the sweets and thanked her. As miserable as I was, I couldn’t stop smiling. That this complete stranger should care enough about me to want to cheer me up was so heartwarming; it reminded me what I loved about America and Americans. And in a small way that woman helped remind me just how lucky I was.

  With renewed motivation I set about knocking on more doors. Most people did not want to buy, but with enough persistence the sales began to come. With every week my sales tally increased, as did my commission. At the end of the summer I drove from California to Virginia with Kenny who was studying at Virginia Tech. While driving through Arizona I persuaded Kenny to take a detour and head to Flagstaff. He took a photograph of me standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon, smiling in a way not too dissimilar from that of a girl on a slide I had seen many years earlier. For two weeks I was Kenny’s roommate at college, attending a few lectures, playing volleyball with his friends and hanging out with them in the evening.

  There was a pizza joint in the town called Backstreets; all the employees wore fire-engine red T-shirts with the name emblazoned on the front. Since the restaurant shared its name with one of my most favourite Springsteen songs I managed to get a part-time job there just to get the T-shirt. One day, while Kenny was in classes I wandered into a local museum. I fell into conversation with a girl there and she asked me about my plans for the rest of my time in the United States. I told her that I only had a few weeks remaining but I was intending on returning to New York. ‘Hey, you should stay with my brother,’ she said. ‘He’s called Jason Snyder and he lives in Greenwich Village. You’ll love him.’ She wrote down his phone number and address.

  After saying goodbye to Kenny I took a Greyhound bus to New York City which arrived late in the evening. I jumped into a taxi and headed towards West 11th Street. As the taxi drew up outside the apartment, a man pulled the window of his apartment up and asked, ‘Hey, are you Saf?’ Jason, the girl’s brother, turned out to be a lovely guy. During my week staying with him, my last week in the United States, I spent the days visiting galleries and the nights in bars. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA, we wandered around Washington Square Park where I paid a dollar to hear a busker play ‘Glory Days’. I walked past stores that offered piercings ‘with or without pain’ and T-shirts that said ‘Welcome to New York: now learn English’. After a week sleeping on the couch in Jason’s apartment I flew back to England. It was the first week of September 1990.

  I kept returning to the United States. In my final year at university I took out a student loan and used it to fly to Los Angeles for two weeks. I dared not tell my family I had done anything quite so reckless; they suspected nothing although the next time I returned to Luton they did ask me how it was that I had developed such a deep suntan in the middle of January. Once I started working I thought nothing of flying to the United States three or four times a year. I would take off on my own and spend a week in Seattle, a long weekend in New York City, traverse the country by Amtrak to see America by rail. Each time Bruce Springsteen toured it was another excuse to go; I saw him in Pittsburgh on one tour and New Jersey, New York and Washington on another.

  With each visit the less special travelling to the United States became; going to the country I had fantasised about for so long had become almost routine. It was never as viscerally thrilling, never as filled with wonderment and awe as it was during that first summer back when I was still a teenager. I never quite got the same sheer delight as during that first week exploring New York City with Amolak. My favourite memory is from that very first week. It was 21 June 1990, the longest day. I had read that Nelson Mandela was in New York and that there was to be a ticker-tape parade in his honour. Having decided we wanted to see the parade, we left the YMCA early in the morning and began walking downtown. The sun was beating hard, I had my shirt tied around my waist and Amolak was wearing sunglasses and his bandanna. The parade was in full swing by lunchtime, hawkers were selling commemorative T-shirts for five dollars each and medallions engraved with an image of Mandela for a buck apiece. Music was blaring from floats, ticker tape rained down from the sky and the streets were a throng of sweaty bodies.

  ‘We got no chance of seeing him like this,’ I shouted to Amolak above the din of the music.

  ‘I know, this is a fucking nightmare.’

  ‘Hey, I got an idea,’ I said suddenly. ‘Just follow me.’

  I squeezed my way past some tourists. ‘So, here’s my idea,’ I said. ‘Instead of being with all these clowns on the street why not see the whole damn thing from high up?’

  Amolak smiled.

  It took more than an hour of walking in the sweltering heat before we reached our destination. ‘Fuck me, they’re tall bastards, aren’t they?’ said Amolak in wonder. ‘There’s no fucking way you’re going to miss either of these fuckers.’

  We walked through the magisterial entrance of the building, past the globe sculpture and lined up with the others to buy tickets to reach the top. The lift hurtled skywards like something from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. The doors opened and we walked out and on to the roof of the east tower of the World Trade Center. Amolak suffered from mild vertigo and started saying he wanted to leave as soon as we had arrived. ‘Mate, you got to look down,’ I said, peering at the maze of streets and slashes of traffic. The rest of the group from the lift were over on one side of the roof, we joined them and looked down. Down below was the ticker-tape parade looking like a tiny snowstorm in a corner of the city. ‘We got the best view in New York,’ I told Amolak. From the top of the towers it was as if the entire world was within sight, not just the five boroughs of New York. Up to then, the tallest building I had ever visited was the fourteen-storey block of flats outside Wauluds Junior School; to be standing on the top of the tallest building in New York three days after landing in America was truly magical. I wanted to call everyone I knew and ask them if they could guess where I was. I was in the country I had always wanted to see, the city I had always wanted to visit and I was on top of the world.

  Amolak took photographs of the city below while I slowly walked along the edge of the barriers trying to absorb the reality of where I was. I was in the country of Superman and Mr T, Rocky and Michael Knight, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. I did not yet know what the summer had in store but my mind was not on the months ahead but on the time past. I was thinking about Mary in the geography class and Craig giving me The Breakfast Club, I was thinking of the number of times I had heard ‘Incident on 57th Street’ and ‘New York City Serenade’, I was thinking that I was in a country where no one cared if I was Pakistani or Muslim. Standing in the baking heat on the longest day on the tallest building in New York, I was thinking that I had finally reached the promised land.

  Factory

  Some folks are born into a good life, other folks get it anyway anyhow

  ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’, Bruce Springsteen

  My father began on the Vauxhall car production line in January 1971 – five months before I was born – and remained at the factory for fifteen years. I remember him leaving for work in the mornings, my mother filling his blue tiffin can with spicy dahl, folded chapattis and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. We would not see him again until the evening when he would return home, tired and irritable. He’d eat in silence with the rest of the family with the black-and-white television on in the background. None of us knew exactly what he did at the factory, it didn’t matter. He worked for the money, there was no satisfaction or pleasure in it; it was the price to be paid to ensure the family were clothed and fed. We did not know anyone who enjoyed their work and so it followed that I was raised to expect my eventual destiny to be a job I hated but which paid reasonably well.


  The best way to ensure a well-paid job was to study hard and excel in education. The Pakistani parents who toiled in factories, drove taxis, assembled circuit boards and made dresses were solidly working class, but they had great ambitions for their children. When I was seven my mother would take me to Maidenhall Junior School, a few minutes’ walk from my home. Maidenhall was in the heart of Bury Park and the children at my school were, like me, the sons and daughters of working-class immigrants. At the time, my mother had only two sets of clothes and the other Pakistani mothers would make barbed comments, saying: ‘Sister, you must like that top a lot, don’t you?’ As they walked along Newark Road towards their terraced homes the conversations between the mothers would be full of confident predictions about the glittering careers their little boys would be following.

  My best friend was Tanveer. Tanveer’s father was so keen that his son have the best start in life that he insisted on speaking to him – and me – in English. This always made me feel uncomfortable as I had been taught to speak to my elders in Urdu, so when his father spoke to me in English I would nevertheless respond in Urdu.

  Tanveer’s mother was younger than her husband and also younger than my mother. She was a short, plump woman who favoured red lipstick and green eyeshadow, and her conversation would be an endless stream of praise for the wonder that was her darling son and the incredible success for which he was destined. Tanveer knew he was going to grow up to be a doctor, everyone in Bury Park knew: his mother told anyone who would listen that her little boy was going to be studying medicine.