Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  What most maddened me about the attention given to these Muslim extremists was the feeling that my claim on this country, my right to call myself British, was being wrenched from me. And yet I was never convinced that there really was a clash of civilisations between Muslims and the rest of the world; the clash was between people of all religions – those who were moderate and reasonable – and extremists. How did one person become a moderate and another extremist? The most common explanation was that the policies of the British and American governments has helped radicalise a generation of young British Muslims. But if that was true, why were there not Pakistani Americans exploding bombs on the New York subway?

  Some weeks later I sat with my family as we ate in the living room of my mother’s home. It was rare for our family to discuss politics, but since the London bombings there had been a sombre atmosphere in Luton, and it had infected our house. Even Nazia who had a resolutely sunny disposition was quiet; none of us knew where all of this was heading.

  ‘What do they want? These people who did this?’ asked my mother as she tore off a piece of chapatti and dipped it into saag aloo. ‘Those poor parents,’ she continued. ‘You give your life to your children and they do this! What must they be going through?’

  My mother saw the human tragedy rather than the political context; she was imagining the shame and disappointment the mothers of those boys must have felt, and she empathised with them. As I tried to imagine those parents’ emotions it made me reflect on how I had been raised. My mother and father took great pride in being Pakistani, but I was brought up in a largely white environment. Had my parents never left Bury Park, and forced me to attend mosque after school each night, there is no question that I would have turned out a very different person. I doubt I would have ever grown up to become an extremist; those of us who grew up in the eighties were still struggling to be accepted as British – we didn’t have the luxury of being able to reject the term. When Navela started high school she had to fight to have the right to wear trousers, today Muslim students have the legal right to wear the hijab. There were no faith schools for my parents’ generation to send their children to, and so we managed, and muddled our way through the state system.

  If my father had still been alive he would have had no sympathy for today’s young British Muslims. How would he, someone who had chosen to leave his homeland to come to this country, have reacted to seeing the next generation so brazenly hostile to every principle he believed in? I can only imagine his response: ‘These boys today,’ I imagine him saying, ‘these stupid young boys, they don’t know how lucky they are! Islam! They say they’re doing it for Islam?’ And I can see the faces of other men, my father’s old friends from the past, nodding their heads with sadness.

  ‘They take it all for granted,’ my father would have said, ‘they don’t know how hard it was for us – us men, we know because we lived it, didn’t we? And if we had known when we worked those double shifts in the factories . . . trying to make something in this world . . . and for whom? For our children. And if we had known that they would spit in the face of our labour and our dreams, bring shame to the community, blacken the name of Pakistan . . . and all for what? And they say they’re Muslims, and they say it’s about politics.’

  ‘Politics is what you talk about before you have families, isn’t that right Manzoor sahib?’ one of the others might say. ‘Before children and responsibilities, and making a life for your family.’ And I can imagine the men drinking their steaming tea in silence, wondering to themselves where they had gone wrong.

  When I was young I used to fantasise about renouncing my British passport and moving to the United States. I was fascinated by the idea of the American Dream, the suggestion that everyone had an equal chance to make something of their lives and to be considered equally American. Bruce Springsteen seemed to be the very embodiment of that dream: someone who had been born to a working-class immigrant family and who had, through his talent and tenacity, reached the very peak of his profession. Bruce Springsteen changed my life because in his music I saw the promise of hope and escape and self-improvement, but where once I longed to escape to the United States, these days I’m convinced my father did the right thing coming to Britain.

  It has taken me three decades to realise that there is only one country which is truly mine. The life my father had built, the family he raised and the life I have fashioned are all due to living in Britain. Every opportunity, every job and every chance to pursue my dreams has been offered by this country, not by America, and not by Pakistan. My father used to tell me he regretted coming to Britain, but in truth it was the greatest gift he gave his children. I was born in Pakistan but made in England; it is Britain which is my land of hope and dreams.

  afterword: the promise

  ‘Well I won big once... yeah, but I paid the cost

  Inside I felt like I was carrying the broken spirits

  Of all the other ones who lost’

  In 2008 I was thirty-six years old. Greetings from Bury Park had been published the previous year; I had a writing contract with the Guardian and was regularly on radio and television. It was a life that could have been considered envious but in fact I was deeply unhappy. I had recently come out of a long-term relationship and the prospect of trying to find someone new filled me with despair. It was in this despondent state that I headed to the Hay Book Festival towards the end of May. I left in far better spirits than I had arrived; the festival had proved stimulating and gratifyingly distracting. On the final day, I was given a ride to Hereford to take the train home. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon and I remember running along the platform towards the London train with my luggage, leaping into the nearest carriage and sitting down on the nearest seat.

  It was then that I saw her. Sitting opposite me was the most stunning woman I had ever seen. She had blonde hair and green eyes and she was reading a book: Mary Barton. She was, truth be told, way out of my league. For the first hour or so, I was dutifully mute in the face of such knee-trembling beauty. I never usually had this luck and I didn’t know what to do with it. I am not the sort who chats to strangers and yet something told me that if I didn’t at least talk to this woman I would regret it forever. The question was, what could be the ice-breaker? What words could persuade her to put down her book and actually talk to me? It was then I noticed it: a Hay Festival tote bag. I had an opening line. Somehow, I summoned the courage. I asked her if she had been at Hay. She smiled and replied that she had. I said I had too and there it was, I was having an actual conversation with the woman (whose name, it turned out, was Bridget) of whom for the past hour and a half I had been in silent awe. We talked about books and about life and family and just about everything. As the train rumbled towards Paddington I felt the clock ticking towards the inevitable end, and knew I did not want that end to come. When it comes to love and dating I make a great fifth impression – I was never going to win her over in one afternoon. But I wanted another chance so I summoned all my courage, took a deep breath and told her I wanted to see her again. I didn’t want to be a weirdo asking for a random woman’s number so I took a risk; I told her she could have my number but I would not take hers, meaning we would only ever talk again if she initiated it.

  It was two days before she texted me. We agreed to meet for a date at Tate Modern the following Saturday. That first date took place on 07 June 2008, two days before my birthday. Two years, two months and two weeks later Bridget and I got married.

  Bruce Springsteen changed my life when I was sixteen years old. Twenty years later my life was changed again by Bridget. Growing up Bruce Springsteen’s music and words felt full of promise: the promise of a better life than the one I was living as a teenage boy in Luton. The prospect of a life where I had a job I hated or only tolerated felt a betrayal of that promise as did the prospect of spending my life with someone who I did not, in the words from ‘Born to Run’, love with ‘all the madness in my soul.’ By the time that Greetin
gs from Bury Park was published one part of the promise contained in Springsteen’s music had been fulfilled – I was doing a job I loved – but the second and arguably more important part remained unfulfilled until I met Bridget. The dream that Springsteen revealed to me only started to fully come true when she entered my life. It changed my future and it made me reassess my past.

  There was another promise I heard in Springsteen’s music: the promise of America. The America Springsteen sang about was not only geographic. Yes, it was a country of highways, deserts and rivers but it was also a land of hopes, dreams and ideals. That was why it was possible for a sixteen-year-old British Pakistani boy in the 1980s to imagine America truly as a promised land, a place where no one knew much about Muslims. In the years since Greetings from Bury Park was first published, the promise of America was fulfilled with the election of Barack Obama and then comprehensively trashed with the arrival of Donald Trump. The anti-Muslim climate that Trump has encouraged in the United States is sadly only one detail of a larger story of growing scepticism and hostility towards Muslims across the world. In these dispiriting times it might be helpful to recall that there was a time not that long ago when it did not feel fanciful for a Pakistani boy from Luton to love America wholeheartedly and have his life transformed by a rock star whose most famous album stated his birthright to call himself American. My story is set in the past but sadly it remains urgently timely.

  I wrote Greetings from Bury Park as a way of thanking Bruce Springsteen for what his music had given me. I also wanted to write it because when I was growing up I never saw lives like mine depicted on screen or on the page. The book was my way of declaring that stories like mine – Pakistani, Muslim, working class – also deserved attention. I wanted to show that it was possible to write a memoir featuring a Muslim that did not describe a journey towards religious extremism or depict the heartbreak of a forced marriage. Mostly though, I wrote it to process my grief at the death of my father and to honour and preserve my parents’ story as much as to tell my own. I was in my early thirties when I was writing, and was aching to know more about my late father. He was not around to hear my questions or supply any answers and this book was, in effect, my way of having a conversation with him and to try, through words and stories, to bring him back to life. That felt a worthwhile mission then but from today’s vantage point it feels even more essential. The pioneer generation that my father belonged to is dying out. My friend Amolak’s parents have both died in the last few years. My mother is, at the time of writing, eighty-five years old, physically frail and forgetful.

  One of the unexpected consequences of marriage and parenthood has been that it has made me even more grateful to have had the opportunity to have written this book. My wife and two children will never meet my father. For my daughter Laila, who is currently seven, that absence already feels strange. One time when she was three, she was playing on a beach. She was drawing a circle in the sand.

  ‘What you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m making you a daddy,’ she replied.

  ‘You are doing what?’

  ‘Everyone should have a daddy,’ she said, as she made two dots to represent eyes. ‘Mummy has a daddy, you’re my daddy but you don’t have a daddy, so I’m making you one.’ There are days, even now, when the sadness of the fact that my father never got to meet his grandchildren becomes overwhelming. But that sadness is alleviated by the knowledge that when they are old and curious enough, they can turn to this book and by reading it, versions of their father and grandfather will be revealed to them. What my own father was not able to pass on to me, I am trying to pass on to Laila and Ezra.

  When I was writing Greetings from Bury Park I could never have dreamed that Bridget, Laila and Ezra were to come into my life in the following decade. The dream I did have – and it was an impossible one – was that the book might one day be adapted into a feature film. It did not seem likely, as the book is non-linear and covers more than three decades, and I could not see what a film of it would look like, so I did not pursue it. But the dream refused to die.

  In the winter of 2012 I had a routine meeting with the then-editor of the Guardian who informed me that due to financial belt-tightening my contract with the paper would not be renewed. I was stunned. Laila had only recently turned one and suddenly any sense of financial stability of security had been pulled from under my feet. I was floored. That day, once I had collected her from the childminder, my head swirled with fear and panic as we headed home. I opened the door of the flat, sat on the sofa and burst into tears. I was terrified of what the future would look like. I felt incredibly vulnerable. That evening I shared the news and my fears with Bridget. Her advice was that I should take this shattering news as an opportunity; that I should reawaken the dream of writing a screenplay based on my book, create a fictional story that remained emotionally honest and true. So that was what I set out to do. Blinded by the Light is not a biopic but the things that most mattered to me in the book are in the film. The father, mother and son in the film are pretty much my father, mother and me from the book. The film is about my past but I wrote it as if my future depended on it.

  In writing Greetings from Bury Park I wanted to write about the world I came from and wanted to leave. What I know now that I perhaps did not when the book was first published is that those people and places you felt you had left long behind never truly leave you. They continue to shape us even as we travel through life from being someone’s son to someone’s husband and father. My late father’s generation feared that their lives and sacrifices and stories would be forgotten as their children rushed to define themselves in opposition to their parents. There is a line towards the end of the film where the father says to his son, ‘Go ahead and write your story but don’t forget ours.’ This book was my attempt to tell my story and at the same time to preserve my parents’ journey. It was my way to carry the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost and in so doing, honour what I heard when I first heard Bruce Springsteen: both the hope and the promise.

  December 2018, London

  a note on the author

  Sarfraz Manzoor is a writer and broadcaster. He writes for the Guardian and has also written for the Observer, Prospect, New Statesman, Uncut, the Daily Mail, and Marie Claire. He has written and presented documentaries for BBC 2, Channel 4, Radio 2 and Radio 4, and he is a regular presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live. Prior to his broadcasting career, Sarfraz Manzoor was a deputy commissioning editor at Channel 4, and before that he spent five years as a journalist for Channel 4 News. He lives in London.

  BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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  BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in Great Britain 2007

  This edition published 2019

  Copyright © Sarfraz Manzoor, 2007, 2019

  Sarfraz Manzoor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  Song lyrics from ‘My Father’s House’, ‘Independence Day’, ‘Candy’s Room’, ‘Prove it all Night’, ‘Bobby Jean’, ‘The River’, ‘The Promised Land’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Hungry Heart’, ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’, ‘Born to Run’, ‘The Ties that Bind’ and ‘Brilliant Disguise’ by Bruce Springsteen © Bruce Springsteen (ASCAP). Published by Bruce Springsteen Music/Zomba Music Publishers Ltd. Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: eBook: 978-1-5266-1520-6

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