I proffered a kind of apology for my tantrum as I did so, promised I would be back soon, but having once again failed to have that ‘chat’, I extended my stay in Wolverhampton by a couple more days, telling myself I could not return to London until I had resolved my mother’s situation. Then as the trouble in the capital subsided, copycat rioting broke out in Leicester, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, and, as a precautionary measure, the police advised retailers on Victoria Road to close up.
We Sikhs are meant to be good in these kinds of situations. We are by tradition warriors and soldiers, renowned for our daredevil courage. But the closest thing I had come to a fight was on a PlayStation. So I was forced to seek outside help, from the closest thing I knew to a Sikh warrior: Ranjit. He couldn’t have been more pleased to hear from me, having been continually suggesting that we hang out since my father’s death, texting me invitations that went along the lines of:
‘Kidaa. a ha ha you Salaa, nex time you in da endz, come round benchod.’
And: ‘How its going any ways chitterface – when you coming for a glassie at Singhfellows? Innit.’
Besides, I was asking for emergency self-defence advice, which was his specialist subject. His whole life, or at least a lifetime of repeatedly watching Under Siege, seemed to have been building up to these riots. By the time I arrived, the police having advised all the shops in the area to shut early, he had arranged for a vigilante group of fifteen to patrol Victoria Road to guard the two temples and surrounding businesses.
At Buy Express, he greeted me with a mournful solemnity that was more than a little reminiscent of Mr Miyagi, the karate master in The Karate Kid, and guided me in near silence through his family’s superstore, past the massive stacks of nappies and lentils and chapatti flour, the new greengrocery concession that had been built in a stand-alone extension, the butchery, the post office, the Asian cooked food stand, the chair where his father liked to sit and bark semi-coherent instructions at his long-suffering staff.
I’d not been in the shop for years and was impressed. My father always put the Dhandas’ success down to good fortune, and they had certainly lucked out in having a shop near the temple, where people would proffer gifts of groceries, and in owning a freehold property which could be expanded in every direction. But I realised now they had also proved better retailers than us: expanding heavily into Asian groceries; opening almost twenty-four hours a day; selling alcohol; setting up greengrocer’s and butcher’s sections; and, recently, developing a line in ethnic goods for the Eastern Europeans moving into the area. The post office concession was particularly inspired: half of Blakenfields cashed their giros there, only to immediately spend the money on National Lottery tickets and booze.
There was a delay in the kitchen as Ranjit’s mother and wife would not let us leave until we had partaken of a handful of pakoras, but we eventually made it into the garden, which had been paved over since I last visited, and, finally, into an outbuilding. I used to come here as a teenager with Ranjit, before he gave up cycling and pretty much everything else for marijuana. It was a garage then, containing his bikes and occasionally an actual car, in which we would sit and reconstruct entire episodes of Knight Rider. But like most things in Ranjit’s life, it had since been pimped up. A pool table had been installed at one end. The walls had been plastered and painted black, with a sixty-inch flat-screen TV hung on one side. This was plugged into an Xbox and faced a black leather sofa. As we walked through it, I also spotted a Kelly Brook calendar opened on the wrong month of the year, a silver fridge, a stash of martial arts DVDs and magazines, and, as is always the case with Ranjit, several ashtrays littered with the stubs of spliffs. He may have been thirty-six, the father of two, but this was a fourteen-year-old boy’s idea of heaven. Except, that is, for the washing machine in a corner, which, it turned out, was there at his mother’s instigation – ‘Gotta respect your elders, innit’ – and a shiny black cupboard in another.
It was this black cupboard that I was guided towards, and as we approached it I had no idea what it might contain. Some of the thousands of tight black T-shirts that Ranjit favoured for how they flattered his biceps and highlighted his tattoos? Cans of the endless protein shakes he consumed? In the end, it turned out to be something more sinister. It was an armoury. Home to a terrifying array of weapons.
‘Jesus Christ, Ranjit,’ I gasped, at the sight of some knuckledusters and a spear. ‘Is this legal?’
‘Innit,’ he smiled, stroking the blade of one of the swords. ‘It’s Jay now, seen. But bare mans call me Jizz.’
I stifled laughter. He continued. ‘When it comes to family, man, ain’t no laws, ya get me? That bredrin Guru Gobind Singh, he was the geeza who’s saying we carry kirpans. You don’t want to defend your yard? I’d rather die that watch mans abduct my gyals, innit.’
The speech sounded as practised as the MC Hammer dance moves and special Street Fighter II combo moves that I still remembered Ranjit for, and did not contain factual inaccuracies, as such. But he wasn’t a baptised Sikh. He shaved his head and smoked. Moreover, while some people had died during the riots in London, nobody had been ‘abducted’; people were attacking shops for flat-screen TVs, not women or ‘gyals’, and the police instruction to shut up shop on Victoria Road was, like my hunt for self-defence assistance, purely precautionary.
‘Dude.’ There was no way I was going to call him Jay. ‘I don’t see any kirpans here. And isn’t most of this stuff Japanese?’
A pause. ‘Chinese, Japanese, whatever, still Asian, innit.’ He pulled out a samurai sword – a curved, slender, single-edged blade with a long grip to accommodate two hands. ‘Anyways. Here’s a ting for you. This bredrin’s called a katana, innit.’ He presented it to me with a bow. ‘You may have heard of the five ks. This is number six, innit. Careful though. That shit’ll cut your hand off.’
It was heavier than it looked. I passed it back. ‘Actually, I think I’m looking for something more . . . discreet.’
‘More what?’
‘Discreet. Something smaller.’
Ranjit sucked his teeth.
‘Look at this bre’er parring me with big words.’
He scanned the armoury.
‘How ’bout this then?’ He picked out something that looked like a deformed crutch, stroking the short perpendicular handle while doing so. ‘The tonfa. You know, from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Or maybes . . .’ He pulled open a drawer which was originally designed to house underwear. ‘. . . some nunchucks? Awesome in a sword attack. As featured in Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury. Way of the Dragon. Enter the Dragon.’
‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ I interrupted.
Something flashed in Ranjit’s eyes. Clearly, this weaponry, like respecting one’s elders, and the musical output of Malkit Singh, was a subject that he considered beyond mockery. ‘Sorry.’ I noticed something on the floor, leaning against the cupboard – something stubby and mean-looking. ‘How about that? What’s that called?’
‘That?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Serious?’
I nodded.
‘My mum’s mop handle.’ He smiled broadly, as if acknowledging a secret, revealing whitened teeth while doing so, patted me manfully on my shoulder and attempted a fist bump, which I responded to with a kind of handshake. Anyone walking in would have thought we were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. As Ranjit recoiled, I noticed that he had started plucking his eyebrows since I’d last had a proper look. Everything about him, from his sideburns to his pecs, was sculpted to precision, the once-weedy kid with a monobrow gone. ‘Old school. You wanna go dark on a bredda.’ He tapped his nonce. ‘A dhanda from Dhanda.’ His surname translated as ‘stick’, and as it was also a euphemism for ‘penis’ I braced myself for what was coming next. ‘Ain’t the size what counts, innit.’ He shut the wardrobe doors and lapsed, briefly, into coherent English. ‘But you’d better ask my mum first. She goes mental if anyone messes with her shit.’
I walked
down Victoria Road, back to Bains Stores, the mop handle wrapped in a black plastic bag, with mixed feelings. On the one hand, Ranjit was a moron, and I felt I’d lowered myself by indulging him his puerile martial-arts fantasies; but on the other, I was grateful for his assistance, if not with weaponry, then at least when it came to organising a patrol that evening. The civil disobedience that was afflicting parts of the country was scary, but maybe a spot of rioting was exactly what I needed to make my mother appreciate the insanity of her plan to continue running the shop.
This discombobulation continued into the evening. Before taking my seat outside the shop, brandishing a mop handle, thinking about how exactly I would tackle my mother on the question of her future, I had finally done some research into Saffron House, the ‘old people’s home’ that Freya had mentioned and, to my mortification, discovered she was actually right. It turned out it really wasn’t an old people’s home, after all. It was a block of modern flats, in a suburb of Birmingham, where nursing support was available if necessary, and where a central social area linked the individual homes, should the residents feel like hanging out.
Looking at the website I’d been surprised by quite how much there was to like about it: the way the managers encouraged ‘culturally specific’ leisure activities such as watching Zee TV; the way they ran IT classes introducing residents to Google and Skype and online shopping. The whole thing was also run by a portly, friendly-looking turbanned bloke. Maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. I emailed an apology to Freya, promised again I would be returning home soon, that things were coming to a head in the shop, and then, as I sat clutching a stubby mop handle on a kitchen chair on the pavement outside, Mum watching B4U inside, refusing to pay heed to the fuss, saying that she had been through it all before with the Handsworth riots of 1980, when she and father had boarded up the shop for, as it turned out, no reason at all, I began to feel relaxed for the first time in weeks.
This was, of course, due in part to the fact that my mother was right: the little trouble that had been reported was in the centre of town and there was a distinct carnival atmosphere among ‘the looters’ drifting down towards the city centre, who, far from being a braying mob, seemed to be a friendly bunch, mostly just heading into town to see what was happening. I was also cheered by the fact that with all the shop owners on the road standing outside their shops – the 55-year-old West Indian grandmother-of-five next door brandishing a hammer outside her hairdressing salon, shouting ‘Get away from my shop’ at anyone who passed; and the owner of Polish Polish, babbling away (in what turned out to be Romanian) – Victoria Road suddenly felt like a community. But, more fundamentally, this was exactly what I’d wanted to do since my mother had reopened the shop. I realised that if I could stand outside Bains Stores with a mop handle in my hands, with an army of vigilante Sikh warriors passing every ten minutes, I felt safe. If things were always like this, I could even see a future for our family business.
Though I guess you should be careful what you wish for. A couple of hours into it all, with most of the other shop owners gone to bed – a little bit of me holding out for some kind of disturbance, so that I had a scare story for my mother, while at the same time prepared to strike out at anyone who did cause any kind of disturbance – a white Vauxhall Astra came roaring past the shop, performed a U-turn at the traffic lights a hundred yards away and returned, coming to a sudden halt outside the shop. It didn’t have the friendliest air: the number plate had been removed from the back of the car; there were boxes of what looked like loot on the back seats. But I only really started to worry when a window was wound down and one of the two kids in the front, his face obscured by a baseball cap and scarf, shouted, ‘Got a light?’
In my extensive experience of being mugged and assaulted as a youth in the West Midlands, almost all violent exchanges begin with this question, or the close variant, ‘Have you got the time?’ What it actually means is: ‘Please get close enough to me so that I can hold a knife to your throat, or put an arm under your chin and rifle through your pockets for valuables.’ It’s why I don’t wear a watch or carry a light. ‘No,’ I said. Looking down the street there was no sign of witnesses or help. ‘Try the garage on Dudley Road.’
He wasn’t, it turned out, keen on taking this advice. Instead, he opened the car door of the car and came towards me. In doing so, the scarf dropped enough for me to recognise him as Nick Wilson, one of Amy’s boys. Her children shared few identifying features, but you could usually identify them from the wonky Wolves logos, the misspelt declarations of love that their latest stepdad had tattooed incompetently on to their hands and limbs. This boy, who had an unsymmetrical lightning bolt tattooed on his right forearm, had been in the shop at the weekend and taken it badly when I’d asked for ID when he had tried to buy some cigarettes, despite being visibly underage. And sure enough, this was what he was after tonight.
‘You got any fags then?’
I stood up and stepped back as he got closer, leaving the mop handle on the floor but picking up the chair.
‘You’ll have to come back when we’re open, mate.’
‘I don’t have Pakis as mates,’ he replied, grabbing the legs of the chair I was now holding up towards his chest.
His claim was not actually true. When he was young and sweeter, Nick would sometimes get locked out of his home because his bad dreams annoyed his mother’s boyfriend, and one time, when Mum saw him scavenging in bins for food, she’d asked him into the house and fed him dal and roti. My father, meanwhile, generally had no time for kids but, under Mum’s influence, would occasionally let him flick through the astronomy magazines the shop stocked. But this all seemed to have been forgotten.
The driver of the car revved the engine and shouted at him: ‘Hurry up, man.’
‘Just a sec. Gotta teach this Paki a lesson.’ He turned back to me. ‘Ain’t yow heard that Wolvo is a twenty-four-hour city tonight?’
Now, I know I said that I was no warrior. And experience has also taught me that the best thing to do in these kinds of situations is to be passive. If someone grabs your bag, let it go. If some bloke accuses you of looking at his girlfriend, just apologise and say that she looked like someone you used to know. Call the police. This, after all, was a version of the advice I had been giving my mother three or four times a day. But the police weren’t going to come tonight. There was no sign of any witnesses. And maybe I have inherited the warrior gene after all. Because before I knew it, I was swinging the chair at him, aiming at his jaw, but somehow connecting with his shin.
Chaos followed. If you read martial-arts magazines, they will tell you that when fighting it is important to ‘assume a stance with your feet about one foot apart’, and to ‘conserve your energy’. I broke all these rules. The chair ended up in the road and I ran around. Instead of punching, I scratched, grappled, shouted for help and at one point inexplicably screamed, ‘Fire!’ One of the few direct punches I landed was on the top of Nick’s forehead, which, it turns out, is not the best place to punch someone. It hurt me more than it hurt him. And I was bent over in pain, clutching my shattered knuckle, bracing myself for a kick or punch, for his friend to join in too, when I heard my assailant yelp. I dared to glance up and saw him writhing on the floor, for some reason clutching his leg, and by the time I had straightened up he was being dragged into the car by his mate. Then, to the right, the sight of a figure running towards us. Ranjit. He was dressed all in black and, despite the dark, was sporting mirror-effect aviator sunglasses. The car pulled away as he reached us, but that didn’t stop Ranjit from pulling out a truncheon and smashing the rear windscreen in one smooth move.
‘You all right, bruv?’ he enquired eventually. ‘Impressive display there, Pataka.’
This was Ranjit’s old nickname for me – it meant ‘firework’ and derived from ‘Banga’, my surname. I saw fresh drops of blood on the pavement, examined my hand and realised Ranjit had cut himself as he smashed the windscreen. ‘Think I shou
ld be asking you.’
‘Oh, that ain’t nuffink.’ He pulled out a handkerchief. ‘What happened wid you?’
Dazed, I gave an account. And then asked: ‘Was that you? Who made him fall down like that?’
Ranjit beamed, took off his sunglasses, removed his rucksack, unzipped it and pulled out a glass jar. It turned out to contain what I recognised from my youth as ninja stars.
‘Shuriken,’ he elaborated, putting on a Japanese accent. ‘A traditional Japanese concealed weapon. Innit.’ I was impressed. But, as is often the case with Ranjit, this feeling didn’t last long. He leant down towards the pavement and retrieved the weapon he had fired, before lifting the jar in the direction of my nose with the words, ‘Take a sniff of that.’ I didn’t need to. I could tell from two feet away that it contained human faeces. ‘Back in the day, ninjas buried their shuriken in animal shit and shit like that so they gave enemies a tetanus infection.’ A look of nostalgia passed over his face. ‘Those was the days, blud.’ He picked up a ninja star from the pavement, put it back into the jar, and pulled out some antibacterial handwash. ‘Anyway, he won’t be feeling too good tonight, the fucking bhenchod gora pakora piece of shit.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, still clutching my hand. ‘Bhenchod gora.’
I didn’t really sleep that night, a thousand questions rattling through my mind. Should I report what had happened to the police? Had the CCTV I had installed in the shop caught the encounter? Would I be able to report it without mentioning my violence and Ranjit’s illegal weaponry?
The thought of legal repercussions was sobering. If Nick had no visible injuries I could possibly be done for common assault. With bruising it could be actual bodily harm. But even more troubling was my own behaviour. Where had my anger and violence come from? What on earth had possessed me to say ‘bhenchod gora’, a phrase roughly translating as ‘sister-fucking white man’?
Marriage Material Page 9