Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  ‘It’s not just about the cash though, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s what you get to do with it. It’s like with my dad, he’s totally obsessed with money but hates spending it! He loves chasing it but wouldn’t know what to do with it if he had it. You get me?’

  ’Yeah, that’s Asian dads for you though, isn’t it,’ replied Amolak, leaning back. ‘My dad works like a bastard but does he spend any money? Does he, fuck! It’s Poundstretcher all the way.’

  When I had lived in Luton I had collected live concert tapes of Bruce Springsteen shows; on one of those tapes Springsteen told the audience that ‘it’s easy to let the best of yourself slip away’. Graduating from university in the summer of 1992 and floundering while friends began graduate trainee schemes, I thought about those words. What not letting the best of yourself slip away meant. After graduating I applied to an accountancy firm and found myself at the final interview stage. Ahead of the interview the company invited me to an open evening, a chance to meet other employees in a relaxed environment. The dress code for the evening was ‘casual and relaxed’. That evening I took the bus from west Didsbury into Manchester city centre dressed in my western-style denim shirt and jeans. When I arrived at the open evening I looked around and saw that every single man was wearing a suit, apart from me. I walked around for thirty minutes trying not to be self conscious and discussed tax law and corporate accountancy with the other applicants. Inside me a voice was screaming that this was everything I did not want from my life. Look around you, I said to myself, is this what you want to become? The truth was that if I had been offered and taken that job I knew it would have left me unsatisfied; it would have meant that I had let the best of myself slip away.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to leave Manchester after I graduated. What I was going to do with my life was still a mystery but while I pondered the big question I signed up with some temping agencies and was offered work as a directory enquiries operator and then sorting mail for the British Council. I found I had a knack for being fired; I didn’t care about the work I was doing and I wasn’t a good enough liar to convince my employers I respected them. When I was not working, there was no money. I was living in a rented house in south Manchester, and when times were truly desperate I would call my brother. However bad my relations were with my father, I could at least count on Sohail who without any fuss would send me cash in the post once or twice a month. Without his help I might have been forced to consider a return to Luton but thanks to my brother I was always able to pay my rent and have money for food, even if it was only a few pounds for the week. Some weeks my daily diet was nothing except a pint of full-fat milk and a Mars bar. Meanwhile, Amolak had graduated and landed an amazing job at a leading investment bank almost immediately. He would be earning more money than either of us could imagine and still I had no clue where my life was going. When I returned home at the weekends my father would ask what I was doing for work and when I told him he would reply with silence.

  I worked in Manchester for almost three years; the work was menial, the pay pitiful, the prospects lousy and yet I had never been happier. When I had money it was mine to spend as I wished; I spent it on attending concerts and buying records. In the evenings I was out clubbing every other night and my dreadlocks ensured I was more desirable to girls than I had ever been before. Manchester was the place to be in the early nineties and I was right in the centre of it all. Because I did not drink, music and dancing were how I lost myself; while the out-of-towners took coaches into Manchester to visit the Hacienda, my friends and I would be at 42nd Street, Discoteque Royale, the Ritz with its bouncing dance floor and, our favourite, the Brickhouse. Every night it was another club. Sometimes I was with friends, other times I’d go on my own but I’d always see familiar faces singing along to the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Blur. I had virtually no money and each time I went back to Luton I was reminded of how bad relations between my family and me were, but for the rest of the time I did not think about it. I was only twenty-three and I assumed that somehow things would work themselves out. Meanwhile I had great friends, girls were throwing themselves at me and I was living in the hippest city in the world. Work and the future could wait.

  While my father had been alive I had always known a safety net existed; I knew that even if I did not have a career I would always have a home and something to eat. When he died I felt the safety net that had protected me throughout my life fall from under me. I was shaken out of my complacency. Once I had been naive enough to imagine that if you went through school and college and university, somehow you fell into a career. It was startling to realise that if you did nothing about it then nothing happened; that you did not get something simply because it was deserved.

  On the same day that he suffered the heart attack that was to kill him, my father was painting the house he was buying for my younger sister. He worked all day, came home and had a heart attack. Having become more committed to Islam he told my mother he wanted to visit Mecca and talked about seeing India. The plan was to do it later, but for my father it was always later: work today, save the money, forgo what makes you happy now and at some point in the future you can do what you please. That point never came for my father; at the age when he was almost ready to start living his life as he wanted and not for his children, his life was taken away. If his death taught me anything it was to value the life we have. The trouble with waiting till later is sometimes it’s too late.

  It had always been my dream to have a job that was creative but the only Asians I had heard about who were even vaguely doing what I wanted were Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. Years later I grew to respect and admire both writers but neither penetrated my teenage consciousness. I was not into mainstream pop culture and these were literary writers, both Asian but from a very different background to mine and so for someone like myself who was not born into wealth and did not have a mixed-race heritage there were no role models. I didn’t know if the things I wanted for my life were possible for someone like me.

  Ahead of the interview for a master’s degree in documentary production I contacted someone who had already completed the course for advice about what to say. Her name was Charlotte and we met in a bar called The Nose in west Didsbury. It was local to where I lived and had been somewhere I went almost every night; returning there in the aftermath of my father’s death was unnerving: everything looked precisely as it had before and yet my world had been comprehensively devastated.

  Charlotte had completed the course earlier in the summer and was now searching for work as a television researcher. She told me I had done very well to be considered for an interview since the course was highly competitive; those offered a place had an excellent chance of employment in the media since the course enjoyed a good reputation. She asked why I wanted to do the course and I explained how much I had wanted to work in a job that was interesting, how much television had meant to me when I was younger and how I had always been fascinated by politics. And then I told her about my father. The words tumbled from my mouth. This poor girl who knew nothing about me and had agreed out of simple generosity to meet me had to listen as I poured out my heart. I told Charlotte how my father’s death had robbed me of any sense of security and protection and how my family were in danger of disintegrating. I told her how guilty I felt about returning to Manchester while the others were still suffering in Luton and I told her how my brother and mother had encouraged me to apply for the course and promised they would look after the household. Charlotte looked rather embarrassed by my candour. I asked her if she thought I had what it took to be accepted. ‘Oh, you’ll get it, no doubt about it,’ she said to me. I asked her what made her so sure. ‘Well, just listening to you right now,’ she replied, ‘seems to me you don’t have any choice – you can’t afford not to get it.’

  I got into the course which started three months after my father’s death. It was the autumn of the O.J. Simpson trial which I followed after my lectures in the history of
documentary film making. In the spring of 1996 as the course was reaching its conclusion I saw an advertisement in the Guardian for graduate trainees at ITN. Whilst I had been studying for my master’s I had also been working unpaid in the newsroom at Granada for one day a week. Working in a newsroom seemed the best of all possible worlds: it was not as unstable as the freelance hell of trying to get into documentaries, it would be a staff position that paid regularly and it was journalism – something that had always been an obsession of my father and mine. I applied for one of the four jobs alongside five thousand other applicants. I did not apply for anything else. I decided I stood more chance if I applied only for the jobs I truly wanted. That way I would not have to lie to the interviewer or myself.

  The first interview was with a senior ITN editor called Robin Elias and the head of human resources. Robin, a grey-haired man with friendly eyes and a militarily clipped moustache, asked the questions while the head of human resources scribbled notes. I left the interview unsure how well I had performed, but then a few weeks later a letter arrived informing me I was being invited for a second and final interview. This was, I realised, the most important interview of my life. Getting this job would completely change my life; more importantly, if I did not get the job I had no plan B.

  That evening I met up with Amolak for a drink in the town centre; he was wearing a suit, his hair tied into a ponytail, and he was full of confidence. ‘Don’t you worry about it, mate, the job is yours,’ said Amolak. ‘Think about it, you got the knowledge, you got the ethnic thing going, plus you’re a cocky bastard. It’s gonna be fucking wicked, ain’t it? Mr Bank sahib and Mr Journalist sahib! Who’d have thought two fools from Luton would get this far?’

  ‘God, I hope I get this, mate,’ I told him. ‘Things are so bloody rough at home: Mum crying every day, my brother’s trying to take over from Dad, his wife’s got a baby on the way. Jesus, I need something good to happen in my life, mate . . . I really do.’

  ‘You got to have faith, dude,’ said Amolak. ‘Your family has been through shit but you guys are stronger than you think. Trust me.’

  The morning of my final interview I woke early, ironed my white shirt and the black suit I had bought from Top Man especially for the interview. My mother asked me if I wanted chapattis but I was too nervous to eat. Before I left the house I asked my mother for her blessing. I hadn’t asked her for anything like that since I was eight years old, unable to sleep and needing my mother to read me some verses from the Koran to ease me into slumber.

  ‘Go, go with Allah’s blessing,’ said my mother, stroking the top of my head. ‘Remember, son, everything that happens is Allah’s will, He is very powerful, when you walk with Allah there is nothing that is out of reach. Go, son.’

  The letter informing me that I had got the job arrived in the week before the first anniversary of my father’s death. The family had been dreading the anniversary, it would mark twelve months of pain. We had all been fearing for our mother who was still not coping well and since my father’s death our family had been aching for some good news, for something positive that would make life feel less grim. That was why the job was so critical because finally there was something I could say to my mother that would make her happy.

  I rang Amolak to let him know the good news. He wanted to know when I was due to start work. I told him my first day in my brand-new job was 23 September. Bruce Springsteen’s birthday.

  I returned to Maidenhall Primary School for the first time in almost thirty years in the winter of 2006. The headmaster of the school had contacted me some months earlier to tell me that the school had recently been modernised. The headmaster wanted to know if I would be interested in officially opening the newly renovated Maidenhall Primary School. I called my mother to tell her about the conversation; after I had explained the gist of what the headmaster had told me I asked her if she understood the significance of what it meant to officially open the school. ‘You do know what I mean, don’t you?’ I asked her in Urdu. ‘It’s a really big thing – to be asked to open the school I attended?’

  ‘Yes, son, I understand,’ she replied.

  I attended the opening with Uzma and my mother. They sat at the front of the main hall which was filled with more than six hundred pupils, parents and teachers. I sat on the platform alongside the mayor of Luton and the chairman of the school governors. As the children began singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’, the chairman, a middle-aged Asian man, asked me how my father was.

  ‘How do you know my father?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone knows your father,’ the man replied. ‘He is very active in the community but I have not seen him for a few years now.’

  I explained that my father had died eleven years earlier.

  The headmaster made his speech about the brand-new facilities at Maidenhall Primary School. The headmaster introduced me as their special guest and I stood up and gave a short speech about how this was my first school, the one my mother had taken me to in the summer of 1978 when she walked with me on our way back to our Bury Park home. My mother and sister listened as I told the parents and children that the only reason I was standing in front of them was because of the hard work of my mother and father and how the children in the hall now had so much more available to them than my generation. ‘You can do anything you want in this world,’ I urged them. ‘You just need to work hard and dare to want more from life.’

  With the speech over the headmaster invited me to cut the ribbon and officially open the school. They had prepared a special brass plaque on which my name had been engraved. I cut the ribbon, the schoolchildren cheered and I could see my mother smiling broadly.

  In the end, the only thing parents want from their children is for them to do them proud. I knew my mother was proud but it was impossible not to think about the man who was not there to see the journey reach full circle. I know it would have made my father hugely proud to have seen me open my old school but he would have been equally proud, I think, of how the rest of the family had transformed their lives in the years since his passing. My mother had warned us that when a parent dies it can be the catalyst for family meltdown; in our family the loss of our father galvanised us, brought us closer together and drove us to work harder to make something of our lives. It was his labour, determination, desire and work which had made it all possible. We were the beneficiaries of his dream to ensure his children did not, like him, have to work in the factory.

  Better Days

  I’m just a scared and lonely rider but I gotta find out how it feels

  I want to know if love is wild, girl I want to know if love is real

  ‘Born to Run’, Bruce Springsteen

  Everything I knew about marriage I learnt from my parents. When my mother arrived in Britain in the spring of 1974 she had been married to my father for fourteen years but they had never lived alone together. After eleven years apart, my parents can’t have been much more than strangers to each other. Those years apart shaped their years together; whatever feelings my parents had for each other were not expressed in tactile terms. I never once saw my parents hold hands or each other; even on the day my mother first arrived in Britain my father acknowledged her with only with a nod. They did not use each other’s first names when speaking to each other and if my mother wanted to refer to my father when speaking to someone else she would call him ‘the father of Sarfraz’. In other couples this might have been explained away as the inevitable evolution of a relationship, the lack of demonstrative affection merely the result of overfamiliarity. But my parents never had the opportunity and, perhaps, the inclination to become physically comfortable around each other. When I was growing up I assumed that was what all marriages were like: arrangements, businesslike affairs. Love had very little to do with any of it.

  There is no photograph of my parents on their wedding day. This used to puzzle me when I was a young boy. Weddings were meant to be the most important day of one’s life but there was no v
isual record of my parents’ wedding day. And yet there were photographs of my mother and father taken separately, there were even a few photographs of my brother and sister when they were small children. When I was a child my parents rarely talked about their wedding day, to this day I do not know the actual date they were married.

  Every Thursday our local newspaper the Luton Herald would fall through the letterbox and after I had studied the property section and scanned the television listings I always made a point of examining the weddings page which would be filled with small photographs of smiling couples. I would particularly be on the lookout for photographs where one of the couple was not white; occasionally there would be black men and white women but I never saw an Asian man with a white bride.

  When I was eleven years old it was girls that really interested me but in my family such curiosity had to be explored in secret. When I went to school Scott, Craig and the others would be talking about having seen films called Porkys and Risky Business. Someone would claim they saw their dad’s blue movie and I would laugh along while secretly wondering whether a blue movie was a film that made you cry and if so why my friend William was so pleased to have seen it.

  During the early eighties, before my family had its own video recorder, my father would rent a machine from the ABC store in Bury Park. On the weekends that we had the player in our home my father would bring home three or four Bollywood films which we would watch over the course of the weekend. Among my father’s friends there was one man called Munir who worked with my father at Vauxhall while his wife assembled circuit boards at home. He was a small very dark man with a pockmarked face and greasy hair whom we always enjoyed visiting as he had his own video player.

  One Sunday afternoon we had taken a taxi into Bury Park to visit Munir and were sitting on his chocolate-brown, fake velvet sofa drinking tea, into which was stirred two teaspoons of ghee. Nearby was a table with a mosaic of the Taj Mahal. On one of the walls in the living room hung a large prayer mat, on another were two plaques upon which were written in ornate Arabic some quotations from the Koran. The third wall had a large photograph of a scene from the Hajj.