Most times we visited Munir there would be some conversation and then he would put on an Amitabh Bachchan film and everyone would be happy. This particular afternoon he decided to play an old black-and-white film from the forties which my parents appreciated but which bored me senseless. I slipped out of the living room and wandered into the sitting room. Here was a large wooden table on which were soldering irons, screwdrivers and electrical wires. In one corner of the room were two large cardboard boxes. Inside each box was a stack of old issues of the Sun. I pulled the top one out and studied the headlines before turning the page. Staring back at me was a young woman with long curly dark hair, wearing a dazzling smile and almost nothing else. I stared intently at the photograph trying to soak up its potency as speedily as I could in case anyone stumbled in and caught me. No one came. Another newspaper, and another girl with another smile and another pair of breasts. Two boxes filled with newspapers. My mind could not calculate how many naked girls the boxes contained but I had to see every single one. I knew this was risky, any second now someone could walk through the door and catch me, but something inside me compelled me to methodically and systematically go through every single issue of the Sun. By the time I had almost finished with the second box my heart was beating so fast I thought it would punch its way out of my chest. ‘Where did you go?’ I turned round to see Navela. ‘What are you doing?’
I could feel the blood rushing into my face. ‘Nothing, nothing,’ I stammered, ‘just been reading the newspaper.’
My sister looked puzzled. ‘Reading the newspaper? Let me see.’ She lifted the flaps of the cardboard box and peered inside. ‘But these are old! What are you reading them for?’ I offered no explanation. ‘Look, the others were asking about you. That film is almost over and Munir says he has an Amitabh film you’ve not seen.’ Heart pumping, I hurried back into the other room.
My parents never learned the truth of what I was doing while they were watching their classic movie just as they did not know why I was so pleased when the Freemans catalogue arrived in our home. As soon as it came through the letterbox I would dash upstairs into my bedroom, close the door and sit tightly on the other side so I would know instantly if anyone tried to come into my room. The two sections I studied most intently were the underwear pages and the shower sections. I would forensically study the photographs, trying to discern the merest hint of a nipple behind the soapy suds. Sometimes I used a magnifying glass.
I remained on a diet of catalogue models until I discovered Amateur Photography, which could be found at the Purley Centre library. The library was on the way to school and almost every afternoon I would stop by there on my way home, usually to read the newspaper or borrow a Dr Who novel. Once I had discovered Amateur Photography the magazine became part of my library ritual. I would sit by the reference section where the old issues were stored and methodically skip past the articles about lenses and wildlife photography until I reached the colour photographs of nude models. Every issue had them, and I made sure I saw every issue.
Scott lived not far from me. During lunchtime the pair of us would run out of the school gates and race each other home. My mother would already have my chapattis and curry on the table and once I had wolfed them down I would hurry out of the front door and race towards Scott’s home. We would spend the rest of the lunch break playing cricket, or sometimes tennis, out on the street. One afternoon while I was gently lobbing the cricket ball towards him I mentioned my visits to the Purley Centre library. ‘They have this magazine there,’ I told him, trying to be casual. ‘It’s meant to be about photography.’
‘Yeah, the ones with the girls showing their boobs?’ asked Scott breezily.
‘You know about it?’ I asked, stunned into pausing with my bowling action.
‘Yeah, Robert told me about them,’ he replied airily. ‘They only show tits. Just tits?’
‘Well, yeah,’ I said, rather put out that he wasn’t as impressed as I thought he would be.
‘That’s nothing.’
I said nothing.
‘Hey, Saf,’ Scott said, ‘you know the woods near your place?’
By our house there was a small wood through which a path led to Limbury Mead and the newsagent’s where we bought our papers. ‘Richard told me that he was out there one time and he found an old porn mag!’
‘No!’ I felt gutted that I had not been told this before.
‘You don’t believe me? I can show you if you like?’
We still had half an hour before we had to be at school. Seeing the look on my face, Scott dropped his bat and the two of us raced to the wood and began rummaging in the grass. Twisting between the branches and obscured in the grass were pages from Mayfair and Escort that some kind-hearted reader had discarded on the bushes. It was never the whole magazine, just random sheets of creased shiny paper that we would carefully pick out from the branches and unfold so that the delectable cover girl was displayed in all her naked glory. Each time I found a new page a surge of electric pleasure would pass through me.
While I spent my afternoons poring over discarded porn magazines or browsing the videos on the top shelf of the video store in the Purley Centre, I spent my evenings reading the Koran. My mother had taught me that Allah saw and knew everything. This meant that He had seen me in the library, in the woods and in the video store. I vowed to read the Koran more often and hoped that my teenage curiosity did not make me a bad Muslim. Was I going to suffer in Hell because I had lingered too long on the underwear models in the catalogue?
Watching television with my family was a minefield. I lived in constant fear that someone on screen might kiss another character or, even worse, jump into bed with them. The safest television was news and current affairs, which my father was addicted to, and tame British situation comedies like George and Mildred and Terry and June where there was little danger of seeing anything offensive. It was rare to be able to watch an entire episode of anything else without there being a scene that would have me squirming with embarrassment. If two characters were kissing we would all at first pretend it was not happening, I would start flicking through whatever book I might have had with me, my father would spontaneously start a conversation. The longer and more intense the kiss, the more discomforting it was for my family; my father would start grumbling and my mother would be murmuring about how whites were lacking in all shame.
It was only late at night that I could watch television more freely and even then it would not be long before my mother would call out to ask what I was doing downstairs. I would say I was watching the snooker but in fact would be viewing some impenetrable foreign film on Channel 4 in the hope it might include some nudity. During the eighties Channel 4 broadcast a series of ‘red triangle’ films; the red triangle was intended to inform viewers the films would have sexual content. I was surely not the only teenage boy who struggled manfully with obscure films like Themroc in the hope that at some point I was going to see a bare breast or two.
When I saw Tarzan the Ape Man I was convinced Bo Derek was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her eyes, smile, delicate bone structure – not to mention her body – all seemed to my fourteen-year-old eyes to be the epitome of perfection. Why I thought Bo Derek would in any way be interested in hearing from a skinny teenage Pakistani boy from Luton I’m not certain but I wrote her a letter outlining just how much I liked her. She didn’t write back.
While I was writing to American film stars and poring over old issues of Amateur Photography my friends at school had real girlfriends. This was never a realistic option for me. I knew my parents expected me to have an arranged marriage and anyway none of the girls at school fancied me. This was one of the cruellest consequences of being an Asian at a predominantly white school. When I was at high school, a fanciable Asian was an oxymoron. I had to make do with unrequited crushes on girls. The only relationships I had back then were in my head; I would fantasise about Colette, a pint-sized Bardot with dirty-blonde hair and bee-stung lips
. I would construct elaborate fantasies in which we would be thrown together by fate. I imagined our next-door neighbours selling their house and Colette’s parents buying it. Every morning we would walk to school together and we would get closer and closer until she would finally realise just how deep my feelings were for her. Naturally the next-door neighbours remained resolutely where they were and I remained invisible and asexual to Colette and all the other girls in my school. I was the funny one who did well in tests; I wasn’t someone who was allowed to have sexual desires. If any such feelings were revealed it was bound to cause mirth and mayhem in school with jokes about kisses smelling of curry. Some girls enjoyed teasing me in class by calling my name and when I turned to face them they would smile seductively at me. It only took a few seconds before I would divert my eyes, my head hot with embarrassment. Once one of the girls knew she could produce such a delicious display of humiliation she would pass this knowledge to the others and soon enough half a dozen girls would be calling my name intent on attracting my attention.
As frustrating as it was to be ignored by girls at my high school it was also something of a relief because if a girl had fancied me I would have been able to do nothing about it. Falling in love would have been deeply inconvenient as it would have involved my parents disowning me and throwing me out of their home. I didn’t know what love felt like but according to the songs I was listening to when I was fourteen, it was overpowering, and its power overwhelming. When you fell in love it seemed you no longer had control over your emotions and you became a slave to your desires. This scared me. The most frightening description of love was in the Pet Shop Boys’ song ‘Love Comes Quickly’. The way they described it was almost as if you had control over falling in love; walk down a street or turn a corner and bam! that was it, you were in love.
That’s all well and good, I remember thinking, but what happens if the girl you love doesn’t love you back or doesn’t even know you exist? What happens if love comes quickly and you can’t do anything about it?
My father treated the concept of love with a withering mixture of contempt and pity. ‘What is love, anyway?’ he would ask. ‘Love is childish, anyone can fall in love, a ten-year-old can say they are in love but can you trust a ten-year-old to stay with the same person for forty years? That is what is wrong with the white people: they put their faith in the heart rather than the head.’ There was an uncomfortable disparity between the world view of my parents and the universe of my friends. The films I watched and the music I listened to were filled with the magic and wonder of romantic love and yet at home it was continually being made clear to me that I would never know what love was. Love was futile and foolish, marriage was sensible, solid and stable. Naive individuals fell in love, good sons got married.
I was in my third year at high school the first time I attended a wedding. It was held, as all Pakistani weddings in Luton were during the eighties, in a recreation centre that was hired for the day. Pakistani social life revolved around attending weddings and once we were living in Marsh Farm it was the one time when I was in the company of a large number of other Pakistanis. My family would hire a taxi to drive us to the venue, making sure we had not eaten beforehand. We would all have dressed specially for the occasion, my mother wearing a dozen gold bangles on each wrist, my sisters in new outfits and me in my imitation Farah trousers and shoes with tiny tassles. In the main hall traditional Pakistani wedding songs would blast from speakers, there would be rows of tables and chairs and on the tables were gigantic pots with steaming hot pilau rice, chicken curry, tandoori chapattis and other dishes that we would scoop on to paper plates and eat with plastic cutlery.
Seated together at the front of the hall would be the new husband and wife, the man wearing an elaborate golden turban and ornate kurta pyjama while his bride would be obscured under layers of garish make-up and mountains of gold jewellery. What I remember most vividly was the looks on the faces of the bride and groom. They always looked miserable. I later learnt that it was the custom that the girl should not appear to be enjoying herself. At the time, however, whenever I looked at the married couple I would feel a stabbing fear: was this to be my fate too? Everyone stuffing their faces with free food while two strangers looked into each other’s eyes and wondered what on earth they had agreed to?
The most important duty for Pakistani parents was to successfully marry off their children, they did not believe themselves to be good parents until they had fulfilled this responsibility so, for them, this was their happiest day. It was inevitable that sometime during the afternoon someone would nudge my father or mother and say, ‘and when will it be time for your younger one?’ It was a joke and my parents would treat it as such but it turned my blood cold. It reminded me that some day I would be expected to marry a stranger.
My father began openly discussing my marriage when I was fifteen. He would be reading the newspaper or watching television and all it took was a reference to divorce for him to start in on me. On Christmas Day 1986 the whole family were watching EastEnders. Den had only just presented Angie with divorce papers. ‘You know why she is getting divorced?’ Dad asked me. ‘It is because these whites don’t believe in marriage, for them it is just a game. There is no commitment any more. Get bored of one person, just find another. That’s their style. Have you seen the figures? One marriage in three ends in divorce.’
‘Maybe it’s a good thing?’ I said suddenly.
‘A good thing!’ my father said, sounding shocked. ‘How can it be a good thing?’
‘Well, maybe their relationship is over,’ I said slowly, ‘and being married does not make them happy . . .’
‘Being happy?’ retorted my father. ‘You think that’s what marriage is about? Marriage is about commitment and family and having someone to look after you when you get old. Being happy! Look at me and your mum. If it was about ‘‘being happy’’ do you think I would have worked like a donkey to bring your mother and you children to England when I could have married someone from here? The problem with people from here is that all they think about is being happy for now. That’s why they have girlfriends and boyfriends, all that rubbish. They get married at sixteen, move out of their parents’ home and then two years later they are divorced. All because they wanted to ‘‘be happy’’.’
‘Yes but not everyone gets divorced at that age . . .’ I protested.
‘You don’t have to believe me, just look at the statistics! Have you ever heard of anyone from Pakistan getting divorced? It’s impossible. We have more respect and we know that when you get married it is for the long term. When English people get married all they are thinking about is themselves but when Pakistanis get married they are thinking of their families and they are thinking of honour.’
Honour: the shame of letting down people who I did not know or care about. The terror that my behaviour might reflect badly on my family consumed my father. I could not believe that other people spent their time thinking about me or the rest of my family, and if they did that simply made them tragically sad, so either way I could not care less about what they, these unidentified others, thought of what I did. Nonetheless my parents appeared to live their lives in perpetual fear about what ‘the community’ might think.
In the same way as I was brought up to believe love and marriage were entirely distinct, I was also raised to understand that parental approval was conditional. When he talked about marriage my father framed it as a choice. ‘It’s up to you,’ he would say. ‘You can marry anyone you like; do what your friends will do and have girlfriends and live with them. This is England, I cannot make you do anything you do not want to do. But I can tell you what I want you to do: find some respectable girl from back home, someone who is a good Muslim, who will look after you and your mother and who you know will be there for you in good times and bad. Now of course, if you were to take the first choice, if you wanted to be like your English friends, there would be consequences. I will not tolerate anyone bringing this na
me into disrepute. So if you want to do your own thing, that is fine, but you cannot expect to live under this roof. You will be like your English friends: on your own.’
‘I never said I wanted to be like them,’ I would mumble in protest, the prospect of being booted out of my bedroom filling me with alarm.
‘You don’t need to say anything: I know the films and television you watch, the music you listen to. But you must remember: you are not like them, you have your own culture and your traditions. Look at Benazir Bhutto: she was the daughter of a prime minister, educated at Oxford and yet she had an arranged marriage. Do you think you are better than her?’
My father often cited the example of Benazir Bhutto since she was a hugely successful and well-known woman. ‘No, I’ve never said anything about not wanting an arranged marriage.’
‘So tell me what your intentions are? How old are you now? Fifteen? You need to start thinking about the future and what you want to do. If you want to go down the honourable route, these things take time. The best girls are snapped up quickly. I need to know that you are serious.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that it feels too soon. I don’t think I am ready for marriage.’
‘Marriage is not something you are ready for, son, it is something that you say yes to and then you become ready for it. Education, work, these things will happen anyway but marriage you have to plan for.’
‘Can I think about it?’
‘You can think about it, there is no hurry but remember: I will not have anyone in my family bringing dishonour to my name.’
After these conversations I would not be able to sleep. I would toss and turn in my bed, plotting ways that I could avoid further discussions. Sometimes Navela would come to my room when she saw my bedroom light was still on. ‘What’s the matter?’ she’d ask. She was much closer to being married than I was, my father had even visited Pakistan seeking potential husbands for her and yet she did not seem panic-stricken by the prospect. ‘I know it’s a bit strange but you’re not the only one who it’s going to happen to,’ she would tell me. ‘It’s just the way it is. It happens to everyone.’ Navela would then recite a verse from the Koran, and after she had finished, she would blow gently on my face and sweep her hand across my face. ‘That will help you sleep,’ she would say. ‘Do you want to try sleeping with the lights out?’
Greetings from Bury Park Page 16