Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  ‘No, leave them as they are,’ I would reply, crawling under my blanket.

  * * *

  The two things everyone knew about Muslims was that we did not drink and we had arranged marriages. Throughout my teenage years I was relentlessly quizzed on both topics, and the biggest question of them all was would I really be having an arranged marriage? I didn’t know the answer to that, and I didn’t know if it would even be up to me so eventually I settled on an answer: ‘I think my parents would like me to have one,’ I would say, ‘and I think it would really be so much easier if I did, but I don’t know whether I will or not and if I met someone I really liked I would probably just go for it.’

  One evening I was at Scott’s house. We had just played on his Astro Wars and were about to play a few frames of snooker. I had given my stock response to his mother but she still wanted to know more. ‘Do you think it would matter if the girl you fell in love with was white?’ She asked the question innocently enough but it was an explosive enquiry.

  ‘Well, I think that would be a bit of a problem,’ I said with massive understatement.

  My father never explicitly said anything against dating or marrying a white girl but all his talk about bringing shame to the family, not letting the family down, not blackening the name of the family amounted to him saying ‘keep your hands off white girls’. This was, at the time, a distressingly simple task.

  ‘Well, I know you’ve explained it all before but it still sounds very peculiar to me,’ said Scott’s mother.

  You and me both, I said to myself.

  ‘Leave it out, Mum!’ interjected Scott. ‘He’s not going to have an arranged marriage. Saf’s English like me – he’s not going to marry someone he doesn’t know!’

  He was right of course. Even when I gave my stock answer I knew I was lying through my teeth. Everything about an arranged marriage felt wrong.

  The immediate future involved Navela whom my parents were becoming increasingly keen to see married. My father went with my sister to Pakistan in search of a potential husband. Navela had spent the first ten years of her life in Pakistan but it still shocked me that she was so unconcerned about marrying someone she didn’t know. ‘Just so long as he’s not shorter than me,’ was her main stipulation.

  I had slightly higher expectations. I wanted a girl who was like Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club or Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, I wanted someone who would make me feel like Lionel Ritchie felt when he sang ‘Hello’ or to whom I could play Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Together in Electric Dreams’. Instead the song which most resonated with me, which accurately described the state of my heart, was Foreigner’s ‘I Want to Know What Love is’.

  For all the years that I had been listening to and loving pop music I had been aware that it was a chaste obsession; it was a love affair without the sex. I hadn’t been in love, hadn’t met anyone who felt about me anything close to what those pop songs were about. The girls at my school had been fanciable but they had hardly noticed I existed.

  It was not until I started a summer job making sandwiches where I met Laila that all my suppressed yearnings found their focus. We began work on the same day. There were other Asian girls in our group but I could not stop looking at Laila, at her huge eyes, long straight black hair streaked with red highlights, her floaty black gypsy skirt which hung about her ankles. When she told me later that she wrote short stories and poems and wanted to be a writer I asked her, ‘Is there any point in you even going to college when you gonna have to marry someone from a village in Pakistan?’

  ‘Like hell I am!’ she shot back. ‘I’m getting the fuck out of this shit-hole town first chance I get. You think I’m sticking around to study in Luton with its bloody college of higher bloody education? God Almighty!’ She laughed. Laila had the filthiest laugh I had ever heard. It was a laugh you’d expect to come from a saucy barmaid, a big bold bawdy laugh which was all the more shocking coming from a sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl.

  Laila became the reason I came to work. In my evenings, those hours when I was not speaking to her, I would hold imaginary conversations with her. Nothing in my life so far had prepared me for the churning stomach, the leaping bounds of my heart when I knew I would see her soon at work, nor the gloom that filled me on the weekends.

  One weekend my family were due to go to Nottingham to see my brother. There were few times in my life when my home was mine alone and so I made my excuses. I began hatching a plan: why not take advantage of my family’s absence and invite Laila home? We could maybe watch a video of one of those films that she had been telling me I needed to watch – Billy Liar or A Matter of Life and Death.

  ‘Where do you live again?’ she asked when I brought the topic up as I was delivering more sliced loaves to her to spread on to the moving platform.

  ‘Marsh Farm,’ I replied.

  ‘And when are they going?’

  ‘Saturday. Go on, it’ll be really fun. Just for a few hours.’

  ‘But we talk all the time anyway.’

  ‘I know we do but I want you to see my house. I can even show you where Lea Manor is.’

  ‘Sounds great.’

  ‘OK, we don’t have to see Lea Manor but honestly don’t you think it could be fun? We can hang out.’

  She didn’t say anything. It felt like I was asking her out which of course I was.

  ‘Yeah, OK’ she said finally. ‘I’ll give you my phone number at lunchtime.’

  I wanted to offer her mine, but there was no way that a girl could call me. The subsequent questions and shouting from my parents made that a non-starter. But Laila’s parents were, I assumed, far more liberal and understanding.

  ‘Hello, is Laila there?’ I had finally summoned the courage to call the number.

  ‘Who is speaking, please?’ The man had a rough accent; I had imagined her father to be an educated, soft-spoken man.

  ‘I’m a friend of Laila’s. She is meant to be coming to my house.’

  ‘Who is speaking? Laila coming to your house?’

  ‘Yes, my name is Sarfraz. I work with Laila. She was meant to be coming round to see me today.’ I was repeating myself because I did not know what else to say. This was not what I had been expecting.

  ‘Your name Sarfraz? Laila not here. Goodbye.’

  The phone went dead.

  I saw Laila the following week. ‘What the hell happened to you? I thought we were meant to be meeting up.’

  ‘Yeah, and that’s what would have happened if you hadn’t blathered on to my dad!’ Laila snapped. ‘What were you thinking telling my dad I was going to see you?’

  ‘I thought he would have known,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Think about it, Sherlock. Me telling Dad that I was going to see a boy at his house would have gone down like a bucket of cold sick. Honestly!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I offered.

  ‘Yeah, well, kiss goodbye to me ever coming to your house. Kiss goodbye to me being allowed out of the fucking front door this decade! You know what, in a way you did me a favour. Because you reminded me just how much I hate my stinking life and this stinking town and my stinking family! I wish I could just tell them all to leave me the fuck alone so I could just vanish out on my own. That’s what I want.’

  That was the last time I ever saw Laila. I found out later that her father had demanded she leave the job in the sandwich factory.

  I had known her for only three weeks but Laila changed what I expected from my life. I had always suspected there was more than the kind of marriage my parents and everyone they knew had. I had crushes in the past but I had a deeper connection with Laila. So long as there were girls like her in the world it seemed insanity to accept my parents’ demands that I marry someone from the villages of Pakistan.

  I left Luton for Manchester and hoped that during my time at university I might meet a girl who would rescue me from having to contemplate an arranged marriage. I now had the freedom I had craved and I could be as deba
uched as I wished. However, even though I had put two hundred miles between me and my hometown, I could not so easily put my past behind me. Lacking in confidence, shy around pretty girls, hating my body and convinced no girl could see me as anything more than a friend, I was a troubled undergraduate. It was not until I decided to have dreadlocks that my self-esteem improved. As much fun as it was, the girls I met were always white, which meant that although I liked them it seemed unlikely they could be the one. I needed to meet a girl who was a Pakistani Muslim, someone my parents would approve of. But I rarely met another Asian. All my friends, male and female, were white. I sometimes wondered if perhaps the price of having gone to school and grown up with whites was that it was only going to be white girls to whom I would be attracted and who would like me. The only Asian girl I had liked was Laila and I had managed to ruin her summer, if not her life.

  While I remained in Manchester I was protected from having to hear the complaints of my parents that I was becoming an embarrassment. All the other Pakistanis of my age had accepted their parents’ wishes; my parents wanted to know how long I would continue to deny them their right to see me married. Each time they bowled the question I batted it away. ‘None of my friends are married,’ I would say. ‘All your friends are white,’ my father would reply. ‘Is that who you want to compare yourself to?’ I endured the lectures and returned to Manchester and the lifestyle I was not yet willing to relinquish. At the Brickhouse, dancing to the Stone Roses and chatting up pretty young girls, the world my parents represented seemed very distant.

  After my father died Navela came to our home and urged my mother to marry off both me and my sister. We hardly saw her, but she felt it was her duty as the eldest to set us straight. Now we were without a father we were not as attractive a proposition to any family looking for a match. The longer we left it the more desperate our plight would become. Uzma was nineteen and I was twenty-four. ‘You don’t want to be the last one left on the shelf,’ Navela warned. ‘What father is going to give you his daughter if he thinks our family won’t be able to look after her?’

  ‘But what about the girl!’ I would shout back in irritation. ‘What about the actual girl? Why does it have to be about money and status, why can’t it just be about two people liking each other?’

  Navela looked blankly back at me. I had hoped my sister and brother would have a more enlightened view, they seemed loath to offer me the freedom they had not enjoyed.

  When I was twenty-five and had landed my job at ITN, I knew that yet another excuse had gone. So I did what I always did when the pressure became too much: I ran away. I moved to London so my family could not continually hound me about marriage. My career began to take off, but the only news that would have pleased my mother was an announcement of marriage. However well I did at work it was impossible for me to feel successful because each time I returned home I was left feeling like I had failed my family. It made for an intensely schizophrenic life.

  ‘Don’t make a mistake you will regret later, son,’ my mother would say to me. ‘One day you will realise that we were right all along but by then it will be too late. I just want to know you will be all right.’

  ‘But I am all right, Mum,’ I would tell her. ‘Life is good! I am doing well. You don’t have to worry about me.’

  But she would worry. ‘Who cooks for you?’ she would ask and when I replied that I cooked for myself she would shake her head sadly. ‘You need someone to take care of you,’ she would urge. ‘Do you not get bored of being on your own?’

  ‘But I’m not on my own! I have lots of friends.’

  ‘Aren’t there any nice girls in your workplace?’

  ‘No Pakistani girls,’ I’d reply.

  The wedding invitations continued to arrive at our home but I refused to attend. My appearance would only provoke embarrassment for my mother.

  ‘I can’t even walk to Bury Park now,’ she would claim as she soaked scraps of old chapattis in water before feeding them to the birds. ‘Everyone wants to know what is wrong with Mr Manzoor’s children. Some even tell me that I am blind, they say you must have a girl in London. And how can I tell them they are wrong? How do I know I am not being made a fool? Aren’t parents always the last to know? You could be drinking, you could be with some ghori you are hiding from us. That is what they tell me and I smile at them and say, not my son, but what do I know? Son, you don’t talk to me any more. I am just your dumb illiterate mother, the one who gave birth to you, and now when I want to talk to you you say not a word. Not a word. And so I yak away like an idiot to myself. That is my kismet.’

  It hurt me to hear her but I did not know what the compromise was, what I was meant to say that would make her feel better without me sacrificing my hard-won freedom.

  Among the Asians at my sixth form college, some had married after their exams, others waited until after graduating from university; by the time I was thirty there was only Amolak and I who were still single. Neither of us wanted to sacrifice what we had achieved to marry a stranger. Amolak’s parents were even more direct with him than my family were, they would insist he meet prospective brides who would arrive from Leicester, Leeds and Bedford with hopeful parents keen for their daughter to marry a wealthy banker. His strategy was to behave as if he was the most arrogant and obnoxious person on the planet. It would take no more than ten minutes before the girl would be led out of the house by her horrified parents while Amolak’s father tried to apologise for his son’s behaviour. When his father tried to reprimand him my friend would tell him he was not yet ready to think about marriage and when he was he would let him know. ‘I’m just not ready to give up my Saturday nights out with the boys,’ Amolak would tell me. ‘You know as well as I do that as soon as you got that fucking ring on your finger that’s it, say goodbye to the good times and hello B and fucking Q. I ain’t ready for that shit.’ Amolak claimed he was already resigned to his first marriage failing. ‘The way I see it there’s only so long the two of us can stop the inevitable. So basically, if you assume in a couple of years you’ll get married, that will go to pot when the fact that you’ve got nothing in common starts becoming an issue. So by then you’re in your mid- to late-thirties, you’re a free agent and you’ve still got time to find The One.’

  ‘So you’re telling me you’ve factored in your first marriage breaking up?’ I asked him.

  ‘It stands to reason: the first one will be for my parents and the second one will be for me.’

  Both of us knew what we wanted – a girl who would understand us – but the chances of such a girl existing and also being the correct race and religion seemed negligible.

  When I had heard ‘Born to Run’ it had seemed the most romantic song I had ever heard; the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life with was someone to whom I could say the lines that Bruce sings to Wendy in that song: ‘we’ll live with the sadness and I will love you with all the madness in my soul.’ I was not going to be able to say that to some girl from a Pakistani village whom my parents had imported into the country.

  Each time a Springsteen tour came round we told each other we were obliged to see as many shows as possible because who knew when the next time might be and whether we would be able to attend. We disregarded the countless number of married couples we met at concerts, that was not going to be our fate. ‘Enjoy it while we can, mate,’ Amolak would say as we boarded the plane or the Eurostar, heading to yet another concert. ‘It ain’t gonna be going on for ever. Next time the man comes round who knows where we’ll be.’

  As long as there was another Bruce Springsteen concert I could put aside the big questions about what I was doing with my life. So long as there was Bruce to love I could try to forget that there was no one to love me. And yet as the number of concerts I attended continued to rise, the gnawing sense that I was letting myself down remained. Listening to Springsteen had never been about the cold accumulation of concert tickets; if I measured my devotion only in how far I travelled or how ma
ny concerts I attended, how did that make me any different from a fan of Barry Manilow? The true fans of Bruce Springsteen were those who had absorbed the wisdom in his songs, who saw him not only as a musician but as a role model, someone who had married a woman he loved and did a job he enjoyed surrounded by some of his best friends. Neither Amolak nor I had love in our lives, we only had friendship and fear. Once it had been the fear of an arranged marriage, but by the time we were in our early thirties that fear had been replaced by another: the fear of being alone.

  Since the death of my father my brother had become head of the family; with that status came the task of discussing marriage. The most frustrating thing about listening to my brother was that as much as I disagreed with some of what he said, I had no practical alternatives. If he had been in an unhappy marriage I could argue that I was unwilling to repeat the same mistakes he had made. The truth, however, was that his marriage was astoundingly successful. In the years that Nazia had been in Luton she had learned perfect English, had passed her driving test, was an equal partner in the family property business and had also had two gorgeous children. She was not the stereotyped, subservient Pakistani village girl; in fact, I had more fun talking to her than with my own family. Driving around town in their people carrier, dressed in jeans and stylish tops, my sister-in-law was a strong argument in favour of arranged marriage. It was not surprising my brother believed marrying his wife had been the best decision he had ever made; it probably was. And yet as happy as I was for him I was still certain I did not want an old-style arranged marriage. Why? I blamed Bruce Springsteen.