Or, to put it another way, their goal at school was the grade E1 – zero effort, maximum achievement. And while this went against the immigrant family’s need to repeatedly recount their story of struggle, and against my people’s inability to self-deprecate (even when referring to himself as a buffoon, the Punjabi will come across as boastful), for some reason I found this goal more inspiring than the aim of getting A1s.
Not that my father was impressed.
‘What this?’ he asked, glaring at a string of C2s, C1s, and once even a D1 (English).
‘English. I was top of the class.’
‘D?’
‘I know, but I came top.’
‘It says here, “It is a shame he feels a need to disrupt class.”’ What have you been doing?’
Well, among other things, I had orchestrated a game which involved my classmates asking our teacher the meaning of any word of four syllables or more, and I had participated in something called ‘The Wailing Wall’, whereby ten of us stood in the corridor before lessons wailing at the top of our voices, to replicate The Wailing Wall in Israel. But I wasn’t going to tell Dad that.
‘You wanted me to do well, to be noticed, and now you still complain.’
I genuinely thought my father would have preferred me getting an A4. That was Bains Stores all over. Maximum effort, minimal achievement. And he descended into one of his habitual silences after this report. But by then I didn’t care. I was taller than him, was supplying some of the girls at the school opposite with fags, and was dating the Indian daughter of a local factory owner who went there. Though when I say ‘dating’, I actually mean ‘sitting and holding hands in the Central Library, out of view of everyone’. Nevertheless, this boosted my credibility further, and when Nelson started including me in conversations about girls, and asked, ‘So does your papa sell porn mags?’, I was struck by an idea which would increase my influence further.
Filching porn mags was never going to be as easy as fags. For the right person Dad would put the mag inside a newspaper, but if he saw anyone lingering, or anyone underage trying to sneak a peak, he would shout, ‘This is not a library!’ and have them out of the shop in seconds. Ranjit had been on at me to get him some porn for years and I didn’t dare countenance the possibility. As for my mother, she dreaded having anything to do with the magazines, complaining that she thought some men got a sexual kick out of being served by an auntie. Between them my parents watched the mags like hawks, would spot a sold or missing copy instantly, and getting one would require the nous and diligence and planning of a bank job.
This, as it happens, was exactly the manner in which I devised my plan. It involved Matt, who was mooching around like an abandoned lover and eager to regain my friendship. The basic idea was this: he would pop into the shop while I was at the counter, take a porn mag, rush to the nearby library, photocopy a few of the juiciest pages, and then be back within the hour, putting the mag back in position before anyone had noticed its absence.
The way I saw it, Matt was trustworthy and motivated by the offer of friendship, if not by his fee of ten pence a photocopy. I would sell the photocopies only to people I knew – for fifty pence a shot. My parents were hopelessly addicted to Neighbours and Home and Away and almost never came into the shop during that hour. However, unbeknownst to me, Matt Metcalfe, a boy who I thought was more interested in coding than pictures of dumpy middle-aged women exposing their labia awkwardly to camera, was making extra copies of Men Only for his own sordid gratification. His mother discovered his stash of murky black-and-white porn, he confessed, she informed the school, and I was suspended for a week.
I try, in general, not to recall the incident because the whole thing was so mortifying, but when I do, the main thing I remember is my father’s terrible silence. I didn’t hear him utter a word as the headmaster discussed my case with him in private. He said nothing in the van as he took me home, on a Thursday lunchtime. In fact, his first utterance on the subject didn’t come for a full eight hours after he had received a phone call about it. I was standing in the dining room, with my head bowed, when his first words came. They weren’t extensive.
‘So then?’
I waited for an extrapolation. But none came. It wasn’t words that my father used as weapons, but the silences between them.
Eventually, I spoke. It was a surprise to discover that I had a great deal to say. I told him about the cigarettes. I told him about Warren Nelson. I revealed my profit margins, the games I had bought. I told him about the brands of cigarettes my classmates preferred, the pass code for my combination lock for my briefcase, and speculated at length upon the notion of effortless superiority, citing the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney as probably the original example, his feats including improvising a poem in French on his deathbed (which he had set to music and which was sung back to him by a minstrel while he died).
I did this not from guilt, or from a desire to confess, but because anything was better than acknowledging the sexual element of my crime. However, when I stopped, hoping for my father to launch into a bitter speech about duty, about how much money of his was being wasted in the time I was suspended from school, he didn’t play ball.
‘So, thief and pervert.’
I could have died.
My mother interrupted: ‘Have you been smoking?’
‘No!’
‘Are you taking drugs?’
‘What? God, Mum, no.’
‘Are you going around with white girls?’
This came out of nowhere. Until this I didn’t even realise that such a thing would be forbidden. My parents were liberal. They had fallen in love, for God’s sake. My father wore a turban but was a borderline atheist, and I had never been pressured to have long hair. Mum produced a prayer book out of nowhere.
‘Put your hand on this and swear that you have never smoked or taken drugs or have a girlfriend.’
This was insane. But I was grateful, in a way, for the distraction and intending to indulge her when my father grabbed the prayer book.
‘Stop this nonsense,’ he barked. ‘If you hadn’t spoilt him so much, if you weren’t so obsessed with mumbo-jumbo, he wouldn’t have turned out like this.’ My mother wept. ‘As for you,’ he said to me, ‘you disgust me. I’m ashamed that you are my son. Ashamed.’
With that he sent me upstairs, without food, which I think was intended as much a punishment on my mother as me.
I don’t think my relationship with my father ever fully recovered from the awkwardness of the episode. Though my mother was more forgiving. She smuggled a tray of food into my room that night, some chapattis with yellow dal, and watched me eat as she explained my father’s reasoning.
‘Your dad says you have a choice,’ she said as she stroked my hair. I normally hated it when she petted me, but this time I didn’t withdraw. ‘You can stay on at Tettenhall or go to Ranjit’s school. If you stay, the condition is that you get nothing less than an A1 or B1 in any subject. And you have to do the sciences for A level. Have a think about it, putt. And you mustn’t hate your father. Everything he does, he does for you. Everything.’
I thought about it, and decided to stay.
18 – BLACK COUNTRY BUGLE
THE THING I recall most vividly about that Sunday is the brightness. I had been spending so much time indoors, whether it was with Mum in hospital, or working at my computer in the shop, that I had missed the start of summer. But travelling to Wolverhampton after my first Saturday evening in London in many months, it was impossible not to notice the sunshine. It redeemed everything it shone upon, even the post-industrial sprawl of the Black Country visible from the train window, making me appreciate, for the first time, what W. H. Auden may have meant when he wrote, ‘Dearer than Scafell Pike my heart has stamped on/ The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton.’
Though this cheerfulness didn’t survive the return to Bains Stores. The counter unmanned, my aunt was eating a salad alone in the living room, while my mother ate
sabzi, separately, in the kitchen. Of course, this is how shopkeeping families often dine: the need to serve customers means you rarely sit down together, and consequently have little sense of yourselves as a social unit. But the tension was palpable and, sure enough, it turned out that the sisters had had yet another argument, the culprit sitting innocently at my aunt’s feet.
‘Jessie has been a very naughty boy, haven’t you, Jessie,’ whispered my aunt at the dog. ‘Very naughty waughty.’ She hung a lettuce leaf before his mouth and he snuffled it up. She looked up at me and provided an explanation. ‘Weed in your mother’s bedroom.’ There was a hint of humour in her voice – the dog could do no wrong in her eyes – but I failed to see the funny side. Jessie had in recent weeks literally become Mum’s pet hate. She hated him for the way he smelled, how he barked at customers and how he tried to copulate with everything, even if it was a hundred times his own size. Massi defended the beast passionately in return, and the whole thing had made me appreciate why dog ownership might be so low among Indians. The essential appeal of dogs seems to be that they are relentlessly loyal and proffer extremes of emotion: they are either very pleased that you are taking them for a walk, or hugely disappointed that you are not. But given the neediness and emotional hysteria of the average Asian extended family, that’s the last thing we need. ‘Don’t worry about your mum,’ added my aunt. ‘She will calm down. It’s just the drugs. They make her testy. Anyway, want some lunch?’
I didn’t. I had had a sandwich on the train, and had also arranged to meet Ranjit in Singhfellows, to talk about my aunt’s hope of applying for an alcohol licence, three weeks after she had suggested me doing so. The delay had been mostly my fault – Ranjit not being someone you want to deal with when you’re feeling vulnerable. Also, I had wanted to clear the idea of meeting Ranjit with Freya first: with our counselling at a sensitive stage, I didn’t want to do anything to rock the boat. But, needless to say, on the day itself our failure to meet on time was down to Ranjit.
The wait gave me more time than I needed to take in the atmosphere. The air was thick with the stench of the previous evening’s burps and fried chicken, and the bright sunshine that wasn’t absorbed by the unswept black wooden floorboards served only to highlight the boxes of rat poison that had been laid since I last visited. There was a smattering of half-pissed male wedding guests standing around the bar, skiving from various religious ceremonies down the road. Meanwhile, the jukebox regaled punters with a tale in which a Jat had got drunk after drinking a bottle of whisky, and, with a machete on his shoulder, was going around threatening anyone who passed.
I had, to kill time, grabbed a bunch of newspapers on the way out from the shop, but they also had the effect of killing the remainder of my morale. The nationals seemed packed with stories about Asian men being prosecuted for various sex crimes, in England and in India, while the local rag painted a depressing picture of the economy. It used to be said the paper’s motto was ‘If it don’t bleed, it don’t lead’. The news editors enjoyed nothing more than a grisly motorway pile-up or murder. But the obsession with guts and gore had seemingly been replaced with a morbid obsession with the decline of Wolverhampton retail. ‘Riot-hit city businesses are still paying the price,’ proclaimed one headline. ‘Wolverhampton’s struggling high street named among the worst in the country yet again for empty shops,’ added another.
The stories made me wonder if there was any point meeting Ranjit: even with an alcohol licence, Bains Stores seemed doomed. What hope could there ever have been for a business set up in a part of Britain called the Black Country, and in an area of the Black Country known as ‘Blakenfields’, a name that in itself alludes to the ominous Old English for ‘dark’? And then, because there was nothing else to do, I started watching the Bollywood movie which was unravelling melodramatically on a flat-screen TV opposite me.
Watching these films was the one thing, besides the walks, that my aunt, my mother and I had found that we could do together. Though while my mother watched them for sincere enjoyment – she actually liked the lip-synching, the mindless dancing of lovers around trees – my aunt and I took more ironic delight in following the tales of star-crossed lovers and conniving villains enduring convenient coincidences and crashing dramatic reversals of fortune.
The worse they were, the happier we were, and in this respect, this one, called No Smoking, looked like a classic. My Hindi was ropey, and it was hard to catch everything with the bhangra blasting out nearby, but the character development seemed worthy of an episode of The Gummi Bears. The actors would have struggled to convey the concept of pain if smacked with a cricket bat, and the plot was insane, involving as it did a chain-smoker who checks into an ‘alternative’ rehab clinic to get over his addiction to fags and is subjected to a series of increasingly bizarre punishments whenever he gives in to his vice.
With nothing else to do, I texted the basic details of the plot to my aunt, who seemed in need of cheering up.
Text: ‘Punishment one: having someone you love almost killed after they are locked in a room containing all the cigarette smoke you have smoked in your life.’
Text: ‘Punishment two: the severing of a finger.’
Text: ‘Punishment three: death of a loved one.’
She texted back, ‘Have these people never heard of Nicorette patches?’
I laughed. Then I texted Ranjit, asking where the hell he was – he was nearly a hour late. He eventually responded, calling me a ‘dickless khota’, blaming his delay on the wedding ceremony he was attending and claiming he was just around the corner (‘Linkage soon’). Preparing to wait yet further, I went for a wee.
They say you can learn a lot about a drinking establishment from its bathroom facilities, and Singhfellows is a classic illustration, what with the mess, the lack of bacterial hand wash, and the ‘humorous’ sign on the urinal cistern labelled ‘beer recycler’. That lunchtime the bathroom was in a particularly dire state, the smashed-in toilet doors not fully closing or opening, the blue pull towel unreplaced seemingly in weeks. Just getting to the urinal required negotiating an ocean of fag ends and piss.
Then, having made it to the steel trough, there was something even more off-putting: the sudden appearance of Ranjit, in wedding guest regalia. He was dressed in a tailored suit made for him on Jermyn Street – not for reasons of taste or style, but because he could never get anything off-the-peg to fit over his outsized biceps and triceps. He had smothered himself in about a litre of CK One, which had the advantage, at least, of momentarily masking the ambient stench of urine and damp. But on entering he did the worst thing any man can do in a public toilet: he stood at the urinal right next to me, when there were several empty ones further away. Then, having started peeing, he did the second worst thing any man can do in a public loo: he looked directly at me and tried to start a conversation.
‘So whaa gwarn, Arjy-Phaji?’ I could tell that he was stoned and possibly a bit pissed. ‘What’s you wanna chats about then?’
How typical of Ranjit. You arrange to have a serious conversation, and he arrives, ninety minutes late, pissed, at a urinal. He continued despite my visible discomfort and inability to pee.
‘Why so shook? Scared by what I might see? Or by what I might not see, innit?’ He snorted with laughter. Waved his penis in my direction.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Ranjit.’ I zipped up.
‘D’aint have a problem getting your dhanda out for those two gundies in Brum. Hope you wore a hat.’
This was also typical Ranjit: he would find the thing you least wanted to talk about and bang on about it mercilessly. Crimson with embarrassment, I turned into the toilet cubicle behind us. Ranjit continued talking, shouting out, as I held the door shut behind me with my right heel.
‘Saw your auntie here again, man, other night,’ he slurred. ‘With that waste dog. She’s everywhere I go, man. I’m in the car park and she’s there in her van. I’m on road and she’s bunning a fag outside your shop. I come
here to escape aunties and there she is.’
I sighed. Ranjit had joined my mother’s campaign to stop her visiting Singhfellows, adopting her hatred of the dog in doing so, his objections coming mainly in the form of late-night texts.
Text: ‘Why is your auntie in my local, bruv? People go there to cotch, ya get me?’
Text: ‘Have a word with your auntie, man. It’s embarrassing.’
Text: ‘Serious, bruv, get your massi and her waste dog to go cotch somewhere else, innit.’
As it happens, I had brought up the subject with my aunt two days earlier, over the phone. I was spending a day freelancing at an office in Soho and she listened patiently, but it was obvious from the tone of her response that she had no intention of acquiescing, as she had with the fags. Instead, she explained that she disliked Singhfellows, for most of the reasons I did, and had no active desire to go there. But Mum didn’t allow alcohol in the house, she didn’t drink and drive, and sometimes, after eleven-hour days in the shop, Mum being difficult, having given up fags after decades of smoking, she needed to escape for a drink. Take the edge off things. Be alone. Singhfellows was simply the nearest option.
‘Besides,’ she continued, in a tone she normally reserved for sales reps visiting the shop. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Arjan, but I’m quite old now, and I can remember when that place was a working man’s club and had a colour bar. In 1968, a day after that speech, I remember that its 4,000 members voted unanimously to keep coloured immigrants out of the club “under any pretext, either as members, visitors, or visiting artists”. Unanimously. Four thousand people. Apparently, one member, just one member, proposed a debate on the possibility of at least allowing coloured artists into the club, by which I presume they meant a black stripper or something, but even this was too much. They couldn’t find a single seconder. Not one.’ She broke off to serve a customer. ‘My eyes.’ She groaned, explained a customer had turned up in his boxers. ‘You wouldn’t even walk around your house like that. And Doritos before 9 a.m. For breakfast. The people round here.’ The sound of the till being shut. ‘What was I saying? Oh yes. Of course, it’s wonderful that kind of racism is a thing of the past, that this place is run by Indians now, but what was the point of the fight, that struggle, if we just replace one form of bigotry with another? If we go from banning blacks to banning women? So if it’s all very well with you, and your mum, and his highness, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, I will continue to go there occasionally.’
Marriage Material Page 28