Listening to Bruce had ruined my love life. All those songs about love had affected my expectations. If not for Bruce, I might have grown up and settled for the love of a sensible girl. Instead, I knew my ideal girl would be someone to whom I could play ‘Born to Run’, ‘Backstreets’ and ‘Racing in the Street’ and who would get it. There wasn’t a chance I was going to find that amongst any Pakistani girls – it wasn’t that likely around English girls – and yet, in hoping for the kind of love found in the songs of Bruce Springsteen, at the age of thirty-three I found myself single and alone: a rebel without a clue.
It was about this time that Friends ended its long run on television. It may have been just a TV show, but its demise threw me into a crisis. Friends legitimised singledom, it promoted friendship over love and so long as Ross, Rachel and others were living the single life in Manhattan I felt I had permission to live the single life in London. So when Ross and Rachel and Monica and Chandler and Phoebe and Mike all found each other, it couldn’t help but force me to think about my own life and concede the most important thing was missing.
My single white friends were either spending hours on the telephone complaining about how hard it was to meet anyone or they were out speed-dating and bar-hopping. And for me the years of freedom in Manchester and London had not led to The One. What was so different, I began to wonder, about meeting a girl through speed-dating and being introduced to someone through the family? In both cases you would be meeting a stranger with a view to a possible relationship. Both situations were contrived, what made one socially acceptable and the other not?
‘You know what the trouble with you is?’ Sohail said to me one evening when I was sitting in his front room. ‘You think you are going to stay young for ever. You don’t know how quickly time goes. And when time starts going, so does your body. You need to think about who is going to be around for you when you can’t manage living on your own.’
These were questions I had been asking myself and I did not know what the answer was. My brother was the one with the supportive wife. I had my logically worked out arguments and cleverly constructed responses, but I was alone.
’You know how embarrassed Mum is,’ continued my brother. ‘She says she is scared of going down to Bury Park in case anyone asks about you and Uzma. As far as I am concerned you can do what you like but now that Dad isn’t around it’s up to me to tell you what Mum is thinking and she wants you to think about getting married.’
‘So what does she want me to do?’ I said slowly.
‘She just wants to have permission to spread the word her son is looking, that’s all,’ he replied. ‘There won’t be any pressure, she just wants you to meet some girls.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘If Mum wants to let people know about me that’s fine, but on one condition: I am not meeting any parents. If there’s a girl who you think might have potential, she has to call me or give me her number and I will talk to her one to one. I don’t want any of this parents talking to parents and the people don’t even chat crap.’
Each time I returned to Luton the phone would ring. ‘Is your mother there?’ the woman would ask in Urdu.
‘Yes, can I ask who it is?’ I would reply.
‘Yes, it is about a girl for you,’ the woman would answer.
‘In that case you can speak to me, auntie.’
‘All right, son. Tell me how tall are you?’
‘Five ten.’
‘And what is your monthly wage?’
‘Auntie, it is not polite to ask about money.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Let me get my mother.’
My mother would scurry downstairs and I would hear her answering the questions coming from the other end of the telephone. ‘Yes, of course he works . . . he is a journalist . . . Yes, thanks to Allah he does have a full head of hair . . . no, he doesn’t have a car . . . age? Sister, he is thirty-three but you know with the young people these days they do not want to get married young like we did and he spent so much time making his career . . . By all means you can come but he is very busy, he works in London, you understand . . . And about your daughter? I’m sure she is very successful . . . So you will give our number to her? Very good, sister . . . Goodbye.’
When I came back to Luton at weekends there would be a notepad next to the phone upon which would be written telephone numbers and one-word descriptions: insurance, computers, dentist. Often I had no idea of even the names of the girls. I was tempted to throw them away but the nagging possibility that the numbers might lead me to The One forced me to keep them in my back pocket.
All I knew about one girl was that she had studied at Cambridge. This seemed promising. I assumed the girl must have something to her, it was worth at least a phone call. I dialled the number. ‘Hello, this is Sarfraz, your mum gave my mum your number.’
‘Oh hi, yes, hello . . .’ said a voice on the other end.
‘I don’t know anything about you but I thought, what the hell, I might as well give you a call. If you went to Cambridge University you must be worth talking to!’
‘I see . . .’ said the girl, her voice trailing off, ‘. . . but I went to a college in Cambridge, not the university.’
I tried to mask my disappointment and we talked about what each of us did and films we liked. It was clear I had nothing in common with this girl but I didn’t want to be rude in case she was beautiful. ‘It’s a bit strange not knowing what you look like, isn’t it?’ I said to her. ‘I tell you what, why don’t I email you a pic and you can email me something too . . . Don’t worry,’ I joked. ‘I’m not gross or anything . . . but don’t expect someone fucking gorgeous either!’
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this but I really don’t approve of foul language,’ said the girl.
‘Oh right, well, I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘So, can you send me a picture?’
‘Yes, I can, but I wear a hijab so you won’t see all that much.’
‘You wear a hijab?’ I repeated.
‘Yes, didn’t my mother tell you that?’
‘No, she didn’t,’ I replied.
That was the trouble with asking parents to find girls: they did not have a clue. How had it ever occurred to them that a God-fearing, super-Muslim was going to be my ideal bride? ‘Listen, to be honest, I’m not sure there’s much point in us exchanging pics,’ I told the girl. ‘The fact is I’m just not going to be a good enough Muslim for you.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ she replied.
‘It is true. I’m really shallow, I don’t drink but I do like to have a good time and I just get the feeling we won’t have anything in common.’
‘How can you say that? We’ve only been talking for a few minutes,’ she said.
‘OK, let me ask you something,’ I said in one last-ditch attempt to salvage something from the wreckage of the phone call, ‘do you like Bruce Springsteen?’
‘Bruce Springsteen?’
‘Yeah, the singer, do you like him, have you ever heard anything by him?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t really like English music.’
As I feared, when it came to suitable girls my mother was almost comically clueless. The promised dentist would turn out to be a dietician, the biochemist would be working at Boots; everyone seemed a little too into religion; none sounded like they might actually be a laugh. Where were the sexy Pakistani girls? I wondered. Where were the passionate ones? Perhaps it was too optimistic to have hoped my mother would have had access to them. When I reported back to Amolak he was not surprised, it had been a similar experience for him meeting girls who were better on paper than in the flesh. ‘Time’s running out for us, dude,’ he’d say to me gloomily, ‘soon it’s only gonna be the divorcée market left.’
Having initially been delighted by my willingness to meet some prospective wives, my mother began to complain that I was not taking the enterprise seriously. ‘This is not some game that you can meet all these girls and
keep turning them down,’ she warned me. ‘These families have their honour, what do you think they must feel when you tell them their daughter is not good enough? Say no to one girl, fine, two or even three girls. But if you keep refusing everyone you talk to this is not good.’
It was not good for me either; I had naively hoped to find someone, a girl whom I could love with all the madness in my soul.
When I was asked to present Luton Actually I agreed but on one condition: I was not, on any account, going to talk about love and relationships. The official reason I gave was that I felt uncomfortable discussing such things in public when I had failed to discuss them in private. That was not the whole truth; I was reluctant to talk about love because I had nothing to say. In matters of the heart I was a failure, I could talk about politics and identity and religion endlessly but ask me about love and I would fall silent. The longer I remained without it the less confident I became that I would ever know what love truly was and the more I buried myself in work.
Following the broadcast of the documentary Sohail and my mother stopped harassing me about getting married. The programme had penetrated my brother’s consciousness; he no longer considered me a failure. ‘You need to concentrate on your career,’ he began urging. In the past when I had suggested to my family that the right girl for me was unlikely to come from a rural village in Pakistan they had accused me of arrogance, now my mother seemed more relaxed about me following my own path in life. I felt liberated from family expectations and more confident than I had ever been before that when the right girl did come into my life, my family would no longer stand in the way of my happiness.
My life had been a journey from fear. Ever since I was little I had been frightened of the future. When I was young I had been frightened of the future as it might have meant being alone. Now at the age of thirty-five I was no longer afraid. I did not know what the future might bring but, finally, it offered the promise of better days.
Reason to Believe
God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of
‘Brilliant Disguise’, Bruce Springsteen
I cried the first time I realised that I was a Muslim. It was Christmas 1977 and I was six years old. The most important thing in my world at the time was convincing my father to buy me an acoustic guitar so I could copy the bearded man on television who sang ‘Mull of Kintyre’. Religion meant little to me. At school assemblies I would be with all the other Pakistani boys and girls singing ‘Lord of the Dance’ and ‘Once in Royal David’s City’; my best friend Tanveer and I both had small parts in our school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. They were great songs and fabulous stories, I accepted them like I had the commemorative Silver Jubilee medallion and tangerine during that special assembly earlier in the year.
By the seventies Bury Park was already overwhelmingly Pakistani, and the halal butchers, sari centres and carpet stores did not shut down for Christmas. When men like my father went to buy their bags of chapatti flour and cans of ghee it was not the plight of Mr Callaghan that they discussed but the military coup in Pakistan which had brought General Zia to power.
At Eid my father would buy live chickens from the local farm and sacrifice them in the back yard, throwing their heads into the fireplace as my mother starting plucking them. My father did not work on Eid, but Christmas was an opportunity for him to earn double time while the whites ate turkey and watched Mike Yarwood on television. While he was working the rest of us remained bored at home.
During one Christmas week, while the rest of the family were busy, two-year-old Uzma and I watched television and that was how I came to see Jesus of Nazareth. As a six-year-old I did not appreciate the religious significance of the series; to me Jesus was just another superhero like Spider-Man, Steve Austin and the Incredible Hulk. I might not have known much about religion but I knew that superheroes did not die, which was why I burst into a flood of tears when at the end of Jesus of Nazareth Robert Powell was hung from a cross, his face bleeding from his crown of thorns. My tears made Uzma wail too. My mother came running in. ‘Why are you crying?’ she asked when we both rushed into her arms.
‘They’ve killed Jesus!’ I explained as the tears kept streaming down my face.
‘What did you say? Who killed Jesus?’ said my mother drying my eyes with her dupatta.
‘The Romans,’ I said, pointing at the screen. ‘It was on television.’
Hearing my explanation, my mother stopped drying my tears. She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘So that’s why you’re crying? Son, we are Muslims. It is the Christians who cry about Jesus.’
That made no sense to me. An innocent man had just been crucified and my mother was telling me I was not allowed to be upset. I started crying again. I wanted to be able to feel sorry for Jesus, I was not sure I wanted to be a Muslim.
When my family moved to Marsh Farm in the autumn of 1979 I was placed in a school where I was the only Muslim in the class. The boys I had been friends with at Maidenhall were starting to attend daily after-school Koran classes but I lived too far to join them. In Maidenhall my friends had names like Haroon, Ali and Tanveer, in Wauluds my new friends were called Scott, Robert and Craig. After first agreeing that I could attend assembly so long as I only mouthed the hymns and did not actually sing them, my father changed his mind and requested that I be taken out of morning assembly. Each morning while my friends were singing hymns I would be drawing with Jason, the Jehovah’s Witness, whose parents had also demanded he be exempted from the assembly.
It was during the first Christmas in Marsh Farm that I began to resent that I was Muslim. In the week before the holidays, normal lessons were suspended. Instead, our teachers asked us to bring in packets of biscuits, cans of soup and other non-perishable foods which we would then deliver to the elderly. By way of reward, once the hampers had been dispatched we were allowed to bring in toys from home for a week of officially sanctioned fun. Scott brought Ker-Plunk, Robert had a game called Buzz, which involved passing a metal loop around a wavy course, and Craig casually walked in with a pool table under his arms. I was forced to play with my friends’ toys without offering anything in return. When they asked why I did not have any of my own, I replied that toys were against my religion.
If I complained about that, my father would answer, ‘Why are you trying to copy them when you have your own religion?’ As if to remind me, above the sofa was a framed photograph of Mecca at the time of the Hajj pilgrimage. On either side of the photograph were two bronze-coloured plaques with quotations from the Koran in Arabic. My mother had told me that the quotations said that there was no God but Allah and that Mohammed was his messenger but I did not then understand their significance. Islam was like those plaques: hanging over me, significant but indecipherable. Both Sohail and Navela had read the Koran, taught by my mother at home and Uzma and I both knew our time was coming.
The Koran that my brother and sister had read had its own section in the display cabinet. It had been brought to England by my father when he had left Pakistan in the early sixties and it had remained with him throughout the decade as he moved jobs and homes. There was a rigid code of behaviour relating to the Koran: while it was in the cabinet we could not turn our back to it, point our feet in its direction or hold it without first washing our hands. Even before I had started reading it, the Koran exerted a potent power over me, continually reminding me that I was not a good Muslim. The quotations on the wall and the Koran in the cabinet gave the impression that Allah was always watching me, aware of every lapse into sinfulness. Apparently there were people who had memorised the entire Koran; there were special schools back in Pakistan where young boys would spend hours studying the text. Those who succeeded in committing the entire volume to memory were rewarded by Allah with an automatic place in Heaven. When she told me this my mother presumed this would motivate me to learn Arabic. To my young mind this offer of a guaranteed place in Heaven seemed like a free ticket to commit any and e
very sort of sin. Each time I thought this it made me realise how far I had still to go to be a good Muslim.
I began learning Arabic in the same week that The Police were number one with ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ and seven Irish prisoners began a hunger strike. Each evening I would watch the news, eat my chapattis and read The Guinness Book of Astronomy, fantasising about what it might be like to own a telescope. Then my father would ask, ‘Have you read your Arabic today?’ The television was switched off and Uzma and I would sit with my mother at the dining table. My mother would start by saying a letter of the alphabet and we would repeat it. She would then say the next letter and we would repeat that. After five letters she would say them again in sequence and we would say them back to her.
Once we had mastered the alphabet she read us stories in Urdu that we then read back to her; both Urdu and Arabic used the same alphabet so my sister and I learnt both languages simultaneously. There were differences: in Arabic there were symbols that indicated how letters would be pronounced but in Urdu we just had to guess. Then again, in Urdu I knew what the words meant; although I was pronouncing my Arabic correctly I had no idea what I was saying. ‘Don’t worry if you can’t understand the words,’ my mother would say reassuringly. ‘Allah is very pleased with anyone who reads the Koran, you will be blessed with good fortune for reading it.’ Although it was relatively straightforward to read the words from the page it was not making me feel any closer to Islam; the Arabic words I would read out loud made a pleasant sound but that was all they were: pleasant sounds.
My task was to complete the entire Koran. Every evening I would go to the bathroom and wash myself in the manner that my mother had taught me. First the hands, then my arms up to the elbows and then my face including ears and neck. Finally I would place my feet in the bathtub and splash cold water on them and my ankles. Only then would I take the Koran from the display cabinet into my parents’ bedroom, lay it flat on my mother’s pillow, put on a white cotton cap and, sitting cross-legged, start reading. I wrote the page number I had reached each night on a green piece of card. Once I had read out loud for thirty minutes I would write down the new page number and close the Koran.
Greetings from Bury Park Page 18