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  Maulabux’s two other friends are Ghulam Hussain, a heavy-set professor, and Sabir, a banker turned sociologist. Professor Hussain is the eldest of the four men; he wears a crisply starched shalwar kameez and carries a set of pens in his breast pocket. ‘One fellow in our community, his son – born in 1986 – had an FIR [police First Information Report] cut against him for dacoit activities when he was three years old. In 1989.’

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ Maulabux begins. ‘A friend studying at Karachi University was asked by some classmates how on earth he had made it into the university, coming as he did from Lyari and being a blackie. And he replied, “First I got off my slave ship, then I got on a camel, then I came to the big city …” and they believed him! It’s like people who stop us on the roads in Lyari and ask how to get to Lyari. “You’re here,” I tell them and they don’t believe me because we’re standing on wide roads, people are out shopping, there are grocers selling fruit on the streets. They expect only horror from us.’

  Maulabux is a born storyteller; he laughs and jokes his way through the most disturbing tales, even when he speaks of racism and a policy of exclusion that confines us to a private garden on a day when we ought to be on the streets enjoying a festival.

  ‘People see us, black with ghungaroo baal, curly corkscrew hair, and they hear we are from places like Lyari or Mangho Pir – out of eighteen districts in this city we are only in four! It’s not like we’ve overrun the place – and they feel like a zulm, an injury, has been done to them, like they’re insulted by us.’

  One of the Prophet Muhammad’s earliest companions was a freed slave named Bilal, afforded the respectful honorific Hazrat on his death. Professor Hussain sees this religious heritage as a duty upon Muslims to ignore caste, creed and race. ‘In front of Allah,’ he intones, ‘we all say the same kalma, the same prayers – there’s no difference between dark or light, rich or poor.’

  ‘There is no room for us to progress,’ Maulabux continues, changing tack. ‘Maybe we get postings here and there, but that’s just for show. Where is the way up? People say, “Oh, these kalas, they’re everywhere in sports – in boxing, in football.” Yes, we are! Lekin, jidd-o-jehad hai. But it’s a struggle. Pakistan has only ever won one gold medal in anything’ – at this everyone laughs; knowing nothing of our sporting history, I’m impressed we have any medals at all – ‘in boxing. And it was a Sheedi who won it. But people still pretend we don’t exist. Watch people’s eyes when they think you’re an African foreigner in their country. Their eyes widen. You can see the yellows, the pinks and the white corners of their eyes.’

  Habib interjects, ‘You know, in Sheedi communities you see the young idolizing Muhammad Ali, the Brazilian football team, the West Indies cricket team. These are our role models.’ ‘Bob Marley too,’ adds Maulabux nodding seriously. ‘Oh, and we were very, very upset when Michael Jackson died.’ Professor Hussain solemnly bows his head as he remembers the king of pop, a reference that is pointedly ignored by the others.

  They tell me that the only time there was hope among the Sheedi was in the 1970s. Lyari, the largest of the four Sheedi districts, was spruced up. Hospitals, schools, sports stadiums were built and scholarships encouraged. ‘All our local heroes made their names then,’ Maulabux says. ‘Abbass, a famous traditional dancer, Asghar Baloch, a sports champ, the poet Noon Meem Danish [whose first name translates simply into the letters N and M], Malang Charlie and Zahoor Azad, two other great dancers. Azad didn’t think he’d ever get out of Karachi and see Mirpur Khas, let alone the rest of the world. He was sent to the United States on cultural tours.’

  But all that changed. In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq overthrew the democratically elected government and ruled for the next ten years with an authoritarian Islamist creed, one that didn’t look kindly upon male dancers, or dancers of any sort. Karachi’s Sheedi community was at the forefront of resistance to the dictator and paid for their protests and campaigns with jail sentences and public torture. Hundreds were arrested, Maulabux and his comrades included, for defying martial law regulations and censorship, and speaking and acting against the government, whether by supporting lawyers’ movements, political rallies or student uprisings. Maulabux tells me how he and several other men put up posters of Nelson Mandela, at the height of South Africa’s apartheid, in Karachi’s central Regal chowk, or roundabout. ‘People here were shocked that this man of colour was fighting the whites in South Africa, they had no idea it was possible. Imagine, forgetting so quickly the lessons of partition …’

  What about Obama? I ask Maulabux. Will his posters be put up on roundabouts? He looks sideways at me, a tug forming at the corner of his lips. ‘That’s politics. He’s American, they’re killing our people. White, black, it makes no difference in the White House.’

  Habib, the police officer, isn’t bothered about Obama or Mandela or about the state that consigns the Sheedi to the periphery, simultaneously fighting them through police violence and ignoring them by depriving them of a stake in their country. ‘At the end of the day,’ he says, ‘we Sheedi are a community. If one person is in trouble, he has twenty people around him. That’s what we are, what we do. We take care of each other.’

  GRANTA

  WHITE GIRLS

  Sarfraz Manzoor

  Her name was Bo and she was the first girl I ever loved. I was ten years old, a shy skinny brown boy with a mop of black curls, and Bo wasn’t just out of my league – she had descended from another universe. Bo was tall and beautiful, with sparkling white teeth and golden hair that swung in braids when she ran. I loved her but knew she would never be mine. She did not live in Luton, for a start, she was somewhat older than me, she was married and – the highest hurdle – she was white. Even at the age of ten I knew that while I could possibly have persuaded her to leave her husband, swap Los Angeles for Luton and consider being with a younger man, I could not make Bo brown. The futility of my adoration did nothing to dampen my feelings. ‘I love you, Bo,’ I would whisper as I gently caressed her photograph. The boys at school all loved Bo too, but I was the only one who took the trouble to write to her. One afternoon I strode into my local library and pulled out an edition of Who’s Who from which I located a Los Angeles address. That evening, while my family was downstairs watching television, I composed my first-ever love letter. ‘Dear Bo,’ I wrote, ‘I am writing to you because we both have something in common: I am ten years old, and you were in a film called 10.’ There was no response. I was hurt at first, but I persuaded myself that it was for the best. We had always been doomed, Bo and I.

  I was the son of working-class Pakistani parents, and they assumed I would have an arranged marriage with a fellow Pakistani Muslim. To them, white people were to be tolerated – but socializing was discouraged and forming relationships with white girls was unthinkable. I suspect my parents knew the scale of the challenge. Their favoured tactic to encourage me to stay away from the Caucasian menace was to relate stories, supposedly drawn from real life, which featured Pakistanis they had known who had drifted into relationships with white girls. The location of the stories could vary but the narrative was suspiciously similar in every tale. The story would begin with a gullible Pakistani boy who thought he knew better than his parents. This brazen lad would somehow be introduced to a white girl. In my parents’ retelling of these stories, the girls never had names and they seemed more like villains in a Grimm fairy tale than recognizable human beings. This nameless white girl would lure the poor Pakistani boy with her base charms until the fellow was helplessly under her spell. She would then proceed to fall pregnant, or bleed him dry of his money, or introduce him to hard drugs. ‘And do you know what happened after that?’ my mother would ask, her voice trembling and her eyes widening at the horror she was set to reveal. I would shake my head nervously, suspecting that whatever she was about to relate was unlikely to involve a happy and successful marriage. Sure enough, my mother would explain how the foolish Pakistani son had ended up becoming a
heroin addict, or had been forced to sell several of his internal organs to repay his girlfriend’s debts, or had moved to Hitchin and become a taxi driver. These stories all finished with the same tragic coda. ‘And, you know, his parents …’ my mother would whisper darkly, her eyes reddening, ‘… they never speak about him – he is dead to them.’ I was raised on these miserable parables and so learned early on the barely veiled moral: if you find a white girl, you will lose your parents.

  The consequence of my parents’ warnings was that I radiated extreme unease whenever I was around the white girls at my school, even as I was helplessly drawn towards them. The first was Julie. She wasn’t in my class and I was too shy to talk to her, so I simply tried to be around her as much as possible. A bit player in someone else’s romantic comedy. At home I would idle away hours in happy daydreams about Julie, but even then she was not my girlfriend; she would be my neighbour or my adopted sister. I imagined that Julie’s parents would end up buying the house next door to us or that they would be tragically killed and that my father would somehow adopt Julie so that she would be my sort of sister.

  I was already a teenager around this time and lurking in the distance, like a shark’s fin slicing through the ocean’s surface, was the threat of an arranged marriage. Both my older brother and sister had married in Pakistan and it was thought inevitable that I would be married off to a Pakistani girl, someone with whom I shared a common religion, ethnic origin and possibly some of the same family members. Before this day came my parents believed it was their responsibility to ensure I was safely protected from temptation. My father discharged this responsibility admirably by driving his family around in a sunflower-yellow Vauxhall Viva while encouraging me to retain the soft fuzz above my upper lip at a time when everyone else had started shaving. I remained single throughout my time at home.

  I finally left home at the age of eighteen to study at Manchester University. In my first week I attended the Freshers’ Fair, where I was given a welcome pack. I opened it later that afternoon when I was back in my room and inspected its contents. There was a guide to the various societies that were available to join, a handy map with all the university buildings and some other sheets of paper. I reached deeper into the pack to make sure I had not missed anything and found myself holding what looked like a soft lozenge. I looked closer and realized that it was not a sweet – it was a condom. I had heard of such things but never held one. It seemed an act of malicious cruelty to include the condoms – it turned out there were three – in the welcome pack. ‘Dear God, please let me get a chance to use them,’ I muttered as I unpeeled it and noted that it looked like a deflated balloon.

  Sophie was one of the girls who lived in my residence hall. She had a face full of freckles and a mop of chestnut hair that fell in ringlets around her face. She also had a fearsome dope habit. Sophie was pale-skinned and she hid from direct sunlight by wearing long shapeless jumpers, obscuring her face behind fat clouds of cannabis smoke. She was only nineteen, but she seemed so much more experienced than I was; her bloodshot eyes and Charles Bukowski novels hinted at a world-weariness I found incredibly alluring. The most appealing thing about Sophie was that she didn’t drink. I discovered this early in the first term when I was sitting in a pub with some other students, all of whom were guzzling lager. Sophie was drinking orange juice. ‘How come you’re not drinking?’ I asked. ‘It just doesn’t agree with me,’ she said. It was then that I knew she was the girl for me. ‘It doesn’t agree with me either,’ I said with delight. Our shared disagreement with alcohol was, I hoped, a sign for Sophie that we had so much else in common.

  During those first few months I spent many hours in Sophie’s bedroom. She would be huddled under the blanket, an ethnic tapestry on the wall and the Velvet Underground on her cassette player. I would sit on the edge of the bed, staring at her through plumes of smoke, secretly wondering what sort of boy was allowed to get into bed with her. The answer to that question, I later found out, was a boy called Robert, who had multiple piercings, a bristle of a haircut and Sophie’s dope habit. In evenings at the pub I would sit with Sophie and Robert, chatting away amiably, and then at the end of the evening I would return to my room and listen to my Tracy Chapman CD while Sophie and Robert retired to her room to have noisy sex. Robert wasn’t the only boy I heard Sophie having sex with; as the weeks of that first term dragged on, other boys – some with smaller tattoos, some with more piercings – would wind their way back to Sophie’s room and I would have to increase the volume on my CD player and hope that Tracy’s plaintive voice would drown out the ecstatic cries from down the corridor. In the end, it wasn’t Sophie’s prodigious promiscuity that convinced me we did not have a future; it was the time I saw her splayed on the floor of the communal kitchen, passed out in a puddle of lager. My love for Sophie was, it turned out, as short-lived as her tryst with teetotalism.

  Not drinking was disastrous for my love life because most sexual encounters seemed to demand that both parties were sufficiently inebriated to fall into bed with each other. While I was languishing in a two-decade-long dry spell, my friend Tariq was having much better luck. Tariq was tall, with long flowing hair and soulful brown eyes. He was a British Pakistani like me but he came from money – his father owned restaurants in Birmingham – and he treated Islam more as a buffet than a set menu. The only time he stopped drinking was for Ramadan. Tariq was an astonishingly successful ladies’ man and his technique for sleeping with girls was ruthlessly simple: he pretended to care. It did not matter if it was apartheid, animal rights, student loans or Palestine; there wasn’t a fashionable cause that Tariq did not lustily support. ‘These white girls will fuck a Paki and tell themselves they’re doing it for political reasons,’ he would laugh. ‘And if you throw in a mention of the Raj they’ll do it on the first night.’ Tariq recruited his girls carefully – he’d spend lunchtimes at tedious student union meetings, casting his languid gaze in search of the prettiest girl in the room, and he would then make it his business to win her attention by delivering an impassioned speech which invariably included a quote from Khalil Gibran or Gandhi. I would look at the rapt expressions on the faces of the white girls and I could practically hear their knickers sliding to their ankles. It was more than a decade after we had both left university when I ran into him again, in Birmingham outside a cricket ground amid a sea of Pakistan supporters. His hair was shorn and his face appeared heavier; his eyes had lost their old humour. He told me that despite all his university frolics there was no Verity or Lily in his life; my old friend had returned to Birmingham and married a Pakistani solicitor with whom he had three children. ‘I had my fun, mate,’ he told me. ‘It was time to grow up.’ He explained that he had been seeing a white girl for whom he had begun to develop something that threatened to turn into love, but he had been unwilling to go any further. ‘Take my advice – have your fun with the white girls and then marry someone from back home,’ he said to me. ‘You know what you’re getting from them.’

  In the years since graduating I’d had a modest succession of relationships and at least some of the modesty was through choice. I avoided any white girl who had ‘a thing for Asian men’ as I might someone with a violently communicable disease. When friends tried to set me up with single Asian girls I would berate them. ‘Stop trying to put me in a box,’ I would say. ‘Is my colour all you see about me?’ They soon stopped suggesting any friends at all. With every girl I dated, I did so believing we shared something in common: there was the girl who liked the same music as I did, the girl who worked for the same employer, the girl who lived in the same part of London. In the end, every relationship died, in part because of how I was raised. Since leaving home at eighteen I had become, outwardly at least, a thoroughly integrated British Pakistani whose friends and work colleagues were overwhelmingly white. And yet when it came to love and marriage I could not discard the advice of parents who had raised me to believe that the only thing a man and woman need to have in common f
or marriage is a shared race and religion. I could dismiss it intellectually, but intuitively it made sense. How could I really be true to myself with someone who did not understand the maddening peculiarities that came with being a British Pakistani Muslim? I also did not want to end up with a white girl because I worried about the look of sadness on my mother’s face when she realized that her new daughter-in-law would not be able to speak to her in Urdu. I fretted about the identity confusion inherent in having mixed-race children. There was another, even less well-thought-out, reason for why I ultimately knew I would not marry a white girl: I did not want to be a cliché. I loved nothing more than to luxuriate in moral superiority. I was not going to sell out my tribe. I was not some self-hating Asian who believed that validation had to have fair skin and blonde hair. There was something disgustingly needy, I felt, about all those bourgeois Asians who ended up marrying white women. That would not be happening to me – I was old school. I was also single.

  Trying to find a British Pakistani woman with whom I had something in common was never going to be easy. My father had died from a heart attack three days before my twenty-fourth birthday and my mother was ill-qualified to find Miss Right. I would not have trusted her to pick out a sweater, much less a wife. Call it a sixth sense, but something told me that my mother was keen to see me married. There were the tiny clues: the floods of tears and hysterical wailing that greeted me whenever I returned home; the refusal to leave the house because ‘How can I explain why I have failed as a mother?’; the strange phone calls that came at all hours which my mother would answer by giving cryptic responses such as ‘Thirty-five’, ‘He has a flat in London’ and ‘Yes, he still has his own hair’. These phone conversations led nowhere and, in the face of my mother’s subtle suggestions, I began to delve into matrimonial websites.