Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  ‘Those thieving English bastards,’ my father would mutter as we watched the news from the South Atlantic. ‘So arrogant. Those islands; what have they got to do with England? They are thousands of miles away from this country, they are next to Argentina, but Thatcher tells us they are hers! The arrogance of these people!’

  My father cared little about Argentina, for him the Falklands conflict was just another example of the British acting like they owned the world. Any incident, sporting or political, where the English were the losers delighted him. ‘Do you know how excited they got when one of their boxers fought Ali,’ my father asked us one evening, laughing at the memory. ‘Cooper. He was going to beat Muhammad Ali they said! By the time Ali had finished with him, their man Cooper was ready to convert to Islam!’ We all laughed at the silly Englishman who thought he could beat the Muslim.

  ‘You know what the trouble with this country is?’ he would say. ‘It was built on theft. Have you heard of the Koh-i-noor diamond? One of the most beautiful and biggest diamonds in history. And you know where it comes from? Lahore. But it was stolen by Queen Victoria for her crown. That’s what these people do. They take everything from other countries and claim it as theirs and then tell the world they are better than everyone else. And whenever anyone rises up against them they always seem shocked. Like we should have been grateful that they were stealing our country! And now this general says he wants his islands back and they are shocked again. I tell you I hope he gives Thatcher a good beating. I would love that.’

  For us the Falklands War was David and Goliath in the South Atlantic and it was blindingly obvious that we should support the Argentines. Not everyone at my school agreed. One afternoon the teacher was showing us where the Falklands were on the map. After she had pointed them out I put my hand up. ‘Miss, you know how the Falklands are eight thousand miles away? Don’t the Argentines have a right to say that they belong to them?’

  Mrs Abbott was not impressed. ‘The thing is, Sarfraz,’ she said slowly as if I had learning difficulties, ‘countries are not meant to invade other countries. That is wrong, and that is why we are at war with Argentina.’

  Mrs Abbott wasn’t really a geography teacher. She actually taught PE and she would teach geography in tracksuit bottoms and top. I suspected she did not know much more about the subject than I did. ‘But Britain invaded countries all over the world, how come that was right?’

  ‘This is geography, not history. If you want answers to that you should talk to Mr Morrison at your next history lesson. We need to move on.’

  At the end of the lesson I was surrounded by pupils. ‘Do you really support the Argies then?’ asked Stephen. Any fears that I was about to be given a hard time abated when I saw his expression. He was not angry, just confused and, perhaps, slightly impressed at my rebellion.

  ‘I just think that Argentina has more right on the islands than Britain does.’

  ‘So you want the Argies to win then?’ It was Michael. He had never spoken to me before then and although he was shorter than me and had a cherubic, deceptively innocent face I was frightened by him. Michael was a dangerous combination – a quick-witted bully – and he could tell that I was nervous in his presence.

  ‘I don’t want the Argies to win,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s just I don’t understand why it’s worth trying to hold on to something that doesn’t really belong to this country.’

  Michael’s cheeks were reddening. I could tell my argument hadn’t won him over. ‘It’s what my dad told me anyway,’ I added weakly.

  ‘Yeah, well, your dad is a Paki just like you, ain’t he? And my dad says you can’t trust the lot of you.’

  Another reason why I wanted Argentina to win the football was because Ossie Ardiles and Ricardo Villa played for them and they also played for Spurs who were my team. I also wanted them to win because I felt sorry they had lost the Falklands War; the World Cup had started the day after the Argentines had surrendered.

  Why did I not want England to win? My father had taught me there were two choices: I could be British or Pakistani. I did not feel British, I did not even know what it meant. But the trouble was that I did not feel wholly Pakistani either. It wasn’t much fun being Pakistani during the eighties. There were no sexy Pakistanis I could fancy, no creative Pakistanis I could admire, no successful Pakistanis I could respect. On television Pakistanis, and Asians in general, were almost invisible. When a programme did feature Asian characters – such as Mind Your Language or It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – we overlooked its offensiveness since we were so grateful to see someone who looked like us on television.

  In the summer of 1983 my parents went to Pakistan. It was the first time for my mother since arriving nine years earlier and my father had not been since 1973. My parents loaded their luggage with old clothes for the relatives: shirts and sweaters that were too small for me and jackets I had outgrown. Most of the luggage that was packed was to be given away.

  My parents returned from Pakistan with a cricket set, complete with full-size stumps, batting pads, gloves and cricket bat. They also bought me a tracksuit top and jogging bottoms. Both had sporting stripes running down the side and the number 9 on the chest and the hips. The next time I was playing cricket with my friends I made sure to wear my new sports kit. As I emerged from the front door of my house and began jogging towards the field, I noticed everyone laughing. ‘What are you wearing your pyjamas for?’ asked Scott.

  I looked down at my clothes. They were made of light cotton but I was sure he was mistaken. ‘No, these are sports clothes.’

  Richard, Robert, Craig and the others continued shrieking with laughter.

  ‘You idiot, you’re wearing pyjamas!’ said Richard.

  I was sure they were wrong but the truth was I had no idea what pyjamas looked like. ‘No, you’re wrong,’ I told the others. ‘This is a Pakistani-style tracksuit.’

  The visit to Pakistan gave my father new ammunition in his battle to rescue me from becoming too well-adjusted. ‘You should have seen those boys,’ he would say to me. ‘So obedient and hard-working! Every night I would go to bed and my bedclothes would be freshly washed and ironed. In the morning, breakfast was on the table.’ My sister and I would listen glumly. ‘I tell you the truth. My heart wanted to give one of those boys a chance to come to this country. All they need is that chance. They have no chance in Pakistan but with their attitude they could do very well here.’ The threat now was not only that we would be sent to Pakistan but someone else would take our place.

  Almost as soon as they returned from Lahore my parents began planning on taking the entire family there. Such visits were expensive and it was another two years before we had saved up the money. I would come home from school and notice new luggage in the living room, huge brown suitcases with large straps and buckles piled one on top of the other. Navela and my parents were excited by the prospect but Uzma and I were deeply sceptical. In the evenings my ten-year-old sister would sit with me in my bedroom and we would try to construct coping strategies for the weeks ahead. ‘They won’t even know who I am,’ she would complain. ‘They’ll probably think I’m really weird because I’m not like them.’

  ‘It’s going to be a nightmare,’ I agreed. ‘We just have to remember it’s only for three weeks, I mean, think about some of Dad’s mates – they send their kids over for three months!’ We would both shudder at the very idea.

  Two weeks before we were due to fly I bought a pack of ten blank cassettes and asked Navela to fill the cassettes with recordings of the Steve Wright in the Afternoon radio show. Each afternoon I would race upstairs to ensure that she had taped the programme. The show would stretch out over two cassettes, which I would neatly label. I was careful not to listen to them. By the time that we were due to fly I had more than a week’s worth of unheard Steve Wright shows. It might have seemed a bizarre project but just in the same way that we all had to have injections to inoculate ourselves against TB and malaria the cassette tapes were my way
of protecting myself from feeling completely alienated and alone in a strange place far away from home.

  The small dark-skinned man who came to meet us at Lahore airport looked familiar. He came charging towards us with a large toothy grin as we emerged from the arrivals hall. It was only when he hugged my father that I noticed how they shared the same hair, lips and jawline. ‘And where is Sarfraz? Is this Sarfraz? Son, come here and give your uncle a hug,’ the short man said to me, lunging in my direction. I didn’t know how to respond, and so I stood motionless and let the man who was my uncle hug me. Soon we were racing out of the airport and squeezing into his Honda, two large suitcases strapped to the roof and six people packed inside. Even as the car started to move it was surrounded by beggars. One had no legs and was crawling on the dusty floor, there was a tiny birdlike woman with missing teeth, wearing a tattered dupatta on her head and holding a baby in one arm and extending the other into my face. ‘Please sister, please brother. I am very poor, you are rich,’ she moaned. ‘Allah rewards those who think of others.’ Outstretched hands were thrust in our faces. ‘Please, we have only just arrived,’ said my mother patiently.

  ‘Don’t pay any attention to them. Get out of our way,’ said my uncle crossly. ‘Rude bastards. Never seen anything like this before, have you?’ My uncle had got that right.

  On day one our uncle took us to his house where we sat on a simple cane bed, drank cold lassi and handed out clothes to his children. Despite the sweltering heat, my father always dressed in a pale-grey suit, white shirt with silver cufflinks and tie. At the time I thought he dressed that way because of his natural fastidiousness, but now I think it was his way of reminding himself – and those around him – that he had moved on. From his leather wallet he would produce wads of notes that he would hand to the children as we left each home. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ my aunts and uncles would say. ‘Allah will thank you. Allah never forgets those who remember those in need. He rewards them twicefold. That is why I say to you, don’t do it for us, do it because Allah will reward you.’

  After the first week in Pakistan I wanted nothing but to return home to the security of the familiar. During the day I would meet my relatives who would embarrass me with their friendliness. ‘Sarfraz bhai, you are our English uncle,’ they would say. ‘Tell me, are you going to marry a Pakistani girl or a ghori?’

  I would start to blush, and my mother would say, ‘He is going to marry a Pakistani of course!’ to which my cousins would reply, ‘Sarfraz, if you do marry a ghori just make sure she is pretty, no point in marrying English if she’s ugly, is there!’

  When I look back on that first trip to Pakistan I remember it very negatively but there were some good times. It was fun spending time with my cousins and other relatives and visiting the late-night bazaars in Lahore; even taking the dusty train from Lahore to Karachi and risking death by eating the samosas from the men selling them at each station was an experience. Each evening I would go to bed and listen to my cassettes of Steve Wright and will the days forward. At the time I thought this meant I wasn’t having a good time but, more likely, it was because I was fourteen years old and homesick. I had never left Luton for this long before. Pakistan wasn’t terrible but it was unfamiliar and alien.

  For my mother, it was home. I had never seen her happier; she was relaxed, smiling and seemed freer than in Luton. Back in Britain she hardly left the house, and when she did she was usually accompanied by my father. In Pakistan she would leave at nine or ten in the evening to visit the bazaar with a group of other women. When other women struck up conversations and asked where she was from she would start by saying Faisalabad before slyly adding, ‘But these days we live in England,’ and this would promote a sharp intake of breath and wonderment.

  Before he had left Britain my father had printed two hundred business cards which proclaimed: ‘Mohammed Manzoor, Investment Consultant’, even though he worked in Vauxhall and there were few villagers interested in investing in the stock market. Now in Pakistan, he looked out of place, not only in the way he dressed but in his stance and his expression. He complained about the heat, the noise and the corruption – every official we dealt with demanded a bribe. When the rickshaw rattled along the mud track, my father complained about the quality of roads. Most of all, my father complained about the people. ‘These people, they are so lazy,’ he would say to my mother as he examined his wallet to check how much money remained. ‘They sit in their shacks thinking it’s everyone else’s responsibility to give them a living! No one wants to work hard, no one wants to take a chance.’

  When we returned back to Luton my father continued with his critique. ‘It’s not one or two people, it’s the whole race,’ he would say. ‘The whole race is corrupt, lazy, just wants someone else to do everything. They will steal from their own family if it means more food for them.’

  It was astonishing to hear my own father speak like that but perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised. My father was different from the men and women back in Pakistan: he had got out. In some ways my father was more English than he was Pakistani. He was like an Asian reincarnation of a traditional Victorian father: emotionally repressed; a strong belief in discipline and authority; faith in the value of hard work and education, and a disdain for excessive emoting. The English might have been a nation of thieves but they were successful thieves, and more than anything my father respected success.

  I came home a few shades darker and a few pounds lighter. I had been apprehensive about visiting Pakistan but I had also secretly hoped that in the instant I landed in Pakistan I might feel a sense of home. No such emotions were forthcoming; all the relatives I had met had referred to me as English: the door towards feeling Pakistani had slammed in my face.

  On the way to Lea Manor there was a subway where a gang of skinheads would hang out. They looked like glue sniffers and I knew they were trouble: a Sikh boy called Rupinder who was one year below me at school had told me of how the boys had spat at him as he tried to walk through the underpass. After he told me this story I was always nervous about seeing the skinheads and changed my route to school. Not all racists were so easily identifiable. When I asked someone, for example, where the nearest bus stop was and the lad pointed me in the wrong direction, I would know he was a racist: racists loved giving bad directions.

  At Lea Manor there were very few Asian pupils and only one Asian teacher. His name was Mr Judge and he taught maths. Mr Judge was a short, plump, middle-aged man who wore a large turban, thick glasses and dressed in a brown suit, usually over a patterned sweater. Mr Judge’s maths lessons were anarchic; each time he turned his back towards us there would be a flurry of conkers hurled towards him. He tried vainly to discipline us, but his thick Asian accent meant no one took him seriously. Those of us who obeyed Mr Judge did so as much out of sympathy as respect. Whenever he tried to discipline anyone he would start spluttering, ‘Hey, what you doing? Hey, you listen to me!’ Most of the class would fall about laughing at him.

  ‘I will inform your parents about your unacceptable behaviour!’ he once shouted to Jason Fairclough.

  ‘Yeah, well, my dad hates Pakis!’ fired back Jason.

  Mr Judge walked up to Jason. ‘What did you say? Repeat what you said!’

  ‘You touch me,’ said Jason, ‘and my dad will beat the shit out of you!’

  ‘Get out of my class! I will not tolerate this! Get out now!’

  Such scenes were repeated weekly, and each time someone threw a conker which was aimed at his turban but which bounced off his suit or each time one of the girls innocently asked him: ‘Sir, why do you smell?’ I felt a stab of sympathy for poor Mr Judge. To be humiliated so regularly by teenagers when all he was trying to do was introduce us to algebra.

  As we all filed out of the room at the end of our maths lesson I would see him tidying up his papers and rubbing the equations from the blackboard in advance of another class and, most likely, another gruelling hour and I used to wonder what it must h
ave been like to be Mr Judge. But it wasn’t only pupils who could be hurtful. In woodwork, if I got my measurements wrong, the teacher would say, ‘I said five centimetres not five chapattis.’

  Another teacher, who I was convinced was racist, began one lesson with a discussion about how words could be abbreviated. ‘So, for example, you, Sarfraz,’ he said, turning to me. I immediately began to feel the tingle of unwanted attention. ‘Now, you are Pakistani, are you not?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘So if someone was to call you a Paki, and the term is a common shorthand for Pakistani, then it would be true to say you are a Paki, would it not?’

  I could hear tittering in the class.

  ‘Yes, but no, sir . . . it’s not just a shorter word, is it, sir . . .’ I said, trying to make my point.

  ‘All I’m saying, Sarfraz, is that technically, and only technically, mind, you are a Paki . . . would you agree?’

  I looked straight at him. The more smug he looked, the more I hated him. ‘Yes sir,’ I replied finally.

  It is not easy to convey the impact of such incidents. They were happening at the same time as I was reading newspaper stories about racist attacks on homes and children. One story which affected me very deeply was the killing of Ahmed Ullah, an Asian schoolboy stabbed to death in Manchester by a white boy, Darren Coulborn, who later confessed that he had ‘killed a Paki’. Ahmed was about my age. Everything he ever was and everything he would ever be had been stolen from him by someone who hated him simply because of the colour of his skin. This was the world outside my home, a world where people like me were hated for things we could not change.