Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  ‘What you have to remember,’ my father would tell me, ‘is that the whites don’t actually want you in this country. You do understand that, don’t you? Remember Enoch Powell? I was in this country when he was speaking. The reason I say to you to speak Urdu and not forget you are Pakistani is that you never know when we might have to leave. It could happen. And if it does what will you do? If the Tories say they want to throw us all out, send us back home as they say, what will you do? Do you think your friends Scott or Richard will stand up for you? Take you into their home? Of course they won’t. That’s why I still keep our house in Pakistan. Open your ears when I tell you this: Pakistan is the only country that will never deny you. It is the only country that you can always say is your home.’

  My father was always dismissive of my friends, I’m not sure he even believed it was possible to be friends with a white person. But I knew differently. Scott was my best friend and he was white. One afternoon, when I was about twelve, I was walking home from school with him and I asked him what he thought would happen if there was an accident.

  ‘What do you mean accident?’ Scott asked.

  ‘You know,’ I said, walking more slowly, noticing a small pebble on the road and pausing before booting it ten yards. ‘What do you think would happen if there was, like, a car accident and my mum and dad died. What do you think would happen to me?’

  ‘That’s a bit of a stupid question,’ Scott replied.

  ‘No, it’s not, it’s OK for you cos you have your uncle and your grandparents and all that. So if anything happened to your mum or dad you got people who would look after you. I don’t have anyone!’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s still a stupid question,’ continued Scott. ‘Because if anything happened to your parents, all that would happen is my parents would adopt you and then we would become brothers.’

  I wished me and Scott could have been actual brothers. If I could have summoned a genie who could have rubbed my brownness off, the shameful truth is that I would have been elated. As that was impossible, I settled on being invisible. That was how I felt being Pakistani during the eighties: I wanted to be invisible and anonymous so that no one could point at me and say: ‘You are different and you do not belong.’

  This country didn’t seem to accept me as one of its own, and yet where else did I have that I could call home? Not Pakistan, which had felt completely alien to me. I didn’t seem to belong anywhere. And so when England played Argentina in the World Cup quarter finals in 1986 it was not really surprising that I wanted Argentina to win. This was the infamous match in which Diego Maradona scored two goals. When the replays proved the first goal ought to have been disqualified, newspapers and television declared that Argentina had cheated and the result was a travesty. My father found the entire matter hilarious. ‘They’ve spent the past two hundred years cheating the rest of the world and now when they get a taste of their own medicine they complain!’ he would say.

  I agreed. I had not wanted England to win and the fact that the humiliation was partly because of cunning as well as skill only made their defeat sweeter as far as I was concerned.

  And as I grew older I still did not feel any loyalty towards Britain; when Norman Tebbit coined the ‘cricket test’ in April 1990 I had no qualms about failing it. It was his government after all that had been in power throughout my childhood and who had contributed to my lack of patriotism. Even before she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had spoken about this country being ‘swamped’ by immigrants, and my local MP was so right-wing that he supported the pro-apartheid government in South Africa. It was because of Margaret Thatcher and John Major that I had never felt the right to call myself British. Each year I would watch the Conservative party conferences and see the pink-faced delegates waving the Union flag and singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as if it was the last night of the Proms. It made me feel like this was not my country.

  * * *

  In 1997 Labour won the general election and Tony Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister in eighteen years. When Labour came to power the Observer newspaper had a front-page headline which read ‘Goodbye Xenophobia’, and that was how it felt.

  The people in power resembled human beings; Tony Blair had chosen a Bruce Springsteen song as one of his Desert Island Discs and he had even invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street. The ‘Cool Britannia’ New Labour ushered in was a far more welcoming concept than the land of hope and glory of the Conservatives that had left me feeling alienated.

  It was not only in politics that Britain seemed to be changing. Two years earlier when I had been living in Manchester and Britain had hosted Euro ‘96, I had noticed how many flags of St George were being flown. In the past, the English flag had filled me with fear as it contained so many deep, racist resonances, but during Euro ‘96 I found myself feeling less frightened by the flag. The television screens showed images of young Asian boys with their faces painted white and red and wearing England shirts; perhaps it was possible to be patriotic and Pakistani. Four months before the start of the 1998 World Cup championships I had been in a London nightclub and the DJ had played ‘Brimful of Asha’ by the Asian band Cornershop. All around me I could see white boys and girls singing and dancing along to this song about a Bollywood playback singer. I should have been joining them but I preferred to watch. If someone had told me fourteen years earlier, when I had been watching Indian films with my family on our rented video player, that there would be a time when Asha Bhosle would feature in a number one hit single, I would have considered them insane. It was as insane as a group of British Asians becoming pop stars. As unlikely as the thought that being Asian might be considered cool, that white people might pay to watch a film about a Pakistani family growing up in the seventies or read a book about a Bangladeshi woman or laugh at a comedy sketch where the joke was on them and not the Asians performing the skit. During the nineties I could sense Britain was changing and with that I found my own feelings evolving. I still loved America, but following my father’s death I knew it was no longer available as a place to which to run; I needed to be near my family. Pakistan was where I was from but not where I was at; that only left Britain.

  ‘The thing is,’ I told Amolak when we discussed it one afternoon while wandering through the Arndale Centre in Luton, ‘you know how I’ve always supported any other team against England? I’ve started thinking it’s not like the Australians have done anything for me, have they?’

  ‘Damn right they haven’t,’ confirmed my friend. ‘Racist fuckers. Think about what they did to the Aborgines.’

  ‘Exactly, the way I see it it’s a bit stupid to be supporting France – bunch of racist National Front-voting bastards – or Australia when it’s Britain that’s given us the chances we’ve had.’

  ‘I hear you, mate,’ replied Amolak.

  ‘I mean, you’ve got a fantastic job in the City earning a ton of money. Who gave you that job? It was an English person, yeah? And me, I’m doing all right and it’s only because a British person took a chance on me. Wasn’t anyone Pakistani.’

  ‘Hey, if it’d been up to an Asian, you know what our lot are like,’ added Amolak. ‘Climb up the ladder and then pull it up behind them as fast as they bloody can.’

  ‘Exactly, and then you think about your dad and mine, all that work they’ve done, it’s all been for this country.’

  ‘So you’re gonna support England then?’ Amolak asked me. ‘Doesn’t that stick in your throat a bit?’

  ‘So, who you gonna support?’ I asked him.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t give a fuck about football but probably Iraq because you know if they lose they ain’t gonna have any legs in the morning.’

  I saw England play Argentina on 22 June 1998 with my family. We were in my mother’s house. She was in the kitchen making popcorn and the sound and the smell of the corn popping drifted into the living room. Having spent my life wanting England to lose I now wanted them to win. I was not the only one in my family now
supporting England, Sohail was too. ‘All these people who go on about Pakistan this and that,’ Sohail told me as his two-year-old son Omar sat on his lap, ‘they haven’t spent any time there. There’s a reason why our dad left Pakistan. You know, all you can do is try and keep some of the past,’ my brother continued, ‘but in the end it’s all going to go. You do what you can but my kids aren’t growing up any differently from the white kids.’

  My father had voiced similar sentiments when he had been alive but for him the prospect that we would forget our past was a source of fear. Now my brother was accepting that raising his children in this country did imply they would not be Pakistanis, but for him it did not seem a terrible loss.

  Four years later England met Argentina again in the 2002 World Cup championships. It was the summer of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and the World Cup had begun in the same week I turned thirty-one. I took the train from London to Luton to watch the England match with my family. In the taxi on my way to my mother’s house I saw Luton was awash with flags of St George sprouting from taxis and cars, on bedroom windows and on top of hats. Maybe some of those sporting the flags were racists, but perhaps they were simply proud to call Britain their home; I no longer felt a reflexive repulsion on seeing the flag. The match against Argentina was critical and when David Beckham scored the winning penalty our house erupted with laughter and applause. Even my mother joined in with the cheering.

  When the match was over I took a bus into the town centre. I was feeling euphoric; if I had drunk alcohol I would have happily spent the afternoon getting drunk. Walking through the town centre, I ran into groups of England fans singing and cheering. In the past it might have been a frightening sight, but now I wanted to join them. As I passed a menswear store I noticed a black T-shirt with an England flag on it, the flag was modestly sized and the design understated. It was the type of T-shirt I could imagine wearing; I wanted to proclaim my pride in the England performance. Three times I walked past the store and picked up the shirt and imagined wearing it and each time something stopped me from buying it. I was worried that others might question my right to wear the flag of St George. In frustration I called a friend. ‘What are you ringing me for?’ she asked. ‘Of course you can bloody well wear that T-shirt!’ Emboldened by the conversation, I bought the T-shirt and spent the rest of the afternoon proudly walking around town with the flag of St George on my chest. That evening I met up with Amolak and Sanjay in town. Amolak was wearing an England badge and Sanjay had a plastic bowler hat in red and white on his head. When ‘Three Lions’ began playing on the jukebox the entire bar, packed with whites, blacks and Asians, sang along. I sang too, with as much passion as I could muster. The louder I sang the more confident I felt in wearing the flag of St George; it felt like it was my flag too. The search for an identity I could feel comfortable with had, I believed, reached its destination. I was wrong.

  On the morning of 7 July 2005, I was in my flat in London. I awoke and stumbled into the kitchen to make myself a coffee before going into my study and turning on my laptop to check my emails. I had set the BBC news website as my internet homepage, and the top story said that there were some severe power cuts on the London Underground that were causing chaos for morning commuters. One of the greatest pleasures of working from home was the smugness I felt on days when Underground workers went on strike or when signalling failures crippled the tube. It felt so liberating to not have to worry about how to get to work.

  Leaving my computer on, I went to my living room and turned on Sky News. They reported that the problems on the Underground were not to do with power cuts, as had been first thought, but were something far more serious. The same sick feeling I had felt four years earlier when I had heard about the attack on the twin towers returned, the same silent pleading that this would not have been perpetrated by Muslims, not again.

  When the details began to emerge, it was even worse than I had feared. Four British Muslims, three of them Pakistani, had become Britain’s first domestic suicide bombers and they had set off to London from Luton train station. The same train station that I used every time I came home to see my family, the same train station my father had dropped me at the last time I had seen him alive. The photograph that the newspapers printed that week of the four bombers with their explosive rucksacks on their backs was taken at Luton train station as they were about to board the Thameslink train to King’s Cross. I knew intimately the route the four men had taken. And, yet again, it was my hometown that was in the news for all the wrong reasons.

  What was it about Luton? When I had been growing up there the town had been something of a national joke, but recently it had been inextricably linked with Islamic radicalism. Only a few years earlier a young British Pakistani, also from Luton and also called Manzoor, had been caught fighting against the British in Afghanistan, and more recently there were regular police raids on suspected extremists in my hometown. When friends asked me whether Luton was as bad as the media portrayed, I would strongly defend its reputation. That was why I had been so pleased that with Luton Actually I could present a more positive depiction of Luton, and yet now the worst terrorist atrocity on British soil had been committed by four British Muslims who had chosen Luton to begin their journey to mass murder.

  I returned home on the first weekend after the bombing. It was a tense time. Police were patrolling the Underground and stopping and searching anyone whom they thought looked suspicious. As I boarded the train at King’s Cross I made sure I left my holdall unzipped so that anyone suspecting me could see that I only had some clothes, my iPod and my copy of the New Yorker inside. I felt I had to prove that I was not a ‘bad Muslim’.

  When I arrived at Luton train station I jumped into a taxi to take me to my mother’s home. I asked the taxi driver how things were in Luton following the bombings. ‘See, me personally, I don’t think they did it,’ the taxi driver said.

  ‘What, you mean, you don’t think it was those four Muslims?’ I asked.

  ‘No way, I reckon it was the Jews who did it to make us Muslims look bad. Same as with 9/11.’

  I would hear such claims on a depressingly regular basis. Sometimes I would try arguing back, but eventually it was easier to try to circumvent the conversation altogether. For my brother, the negative publicity around Luton was damaging for his property business. ‘Do you want to know who’s to blame? It’s these bloody Arabs and North Africans,’ he told me as we sat in his living room. ‘Algerians and Moroccans and all that lot. They’ve got war in their blood and they come into our communities and start spreading it around. Most Pakistanis just want to be left alone to live their lives.’

  It was true that the Pakistanis I knew in Luton, the ones who came to our home to drink tea and gossip with my mother couldn’t care less about international politics or foreign policy. But there were others, the ones who lurked outside the central mosque handing out leaflets, who did not feel the same. These were the Muslims who grabbed the headlines with their anger and their hatred. They were the Muslims who were the most visible. Why were they so angry and why did they hate this country so much? As someone who was also from Luton and who shared the same religion and nationality as these alienated and angry men, it sometimes felt in the days and weeks after 7/7 as if I was expected to speak for the bombers and in some way explain why they had bombed the tube. But in fact, when I heard those young British Muslims speak so contemptuously about living in this country, my reaction was one of anger, confusion and betrayal. What they felt and what they preached was not in my name.

  That Saturday afternoon I met up with Amolak to have tea at Greenfields in the Arndale Centre. ‘So, it’s your lot again then, hey?’ were his opening words. ‘It’s the same old, same old, innit. Muslims blow things up and us Sikhs get mashed up by some fucking drunken muppets who don’t know any better.’

  ‘Mate, what’s up with these people?’ I asked my friend. ‘I honestly don’t get what’s going on in their heads.’

  �
�Fuck all, that’s what’s going on,’ Amolak replied. ‘Look. Read any paper and you got some bearded fool yapping on about Iraq, but if you ask me that’s not what’s the root cause of all this shit. It’s this next lot, these teenagers. They’re fucking ungrateful bastards, that’s what. Plain and fucking simple.’

  Amolak was upset for the same reason as I was: everything that we had worked for in our lives and all that our parents had striven to build was now being threatened. When my father had come to Britain in the sixties he had come as a Pakistani and he had died as a Pakistani; he had never wanted to be British. I had grown up in this country wanting to be British but I had never really felt as if I truly belonged here. But this next generation, the teenagers and twentysomethings who had been brought up to take for granted everything that we had to fight for, they were telling us they did not want to be part of this thing called Britain. And not only did they not want to be part of it, they actively wanted to bring it down.

  ‘I tell you, mate, it’s not looking good right now,’ Amolak said gloomily. ‘I mean, let’s be honest, it is kinda taking the piss, isn’t it? How long you think the white man is going to take this shit? If it was some English geezers kicking off like this in Pakistan what do you think would happen to them? Summary fucking justice and no questions asked.’

  ‘If it was up to me you know what I would say to them,’ I told my friend, ‘I’d say, if you hate this country so much, why don’t you just fuck off to somewhere that’s Muslim enough for you. If an English person says it everyone turns round and calls him a racist but I know plenty of Asian folk who think exactly the same.’

  ‘Mate, everyone we know thinks that,’ added Amolak, ‘course they do. Fact is, it used to be the white man who made our lives shit. Now it’s the Muslims.’