by Sushi Das
So Dad would fetch the newspaper and check the time of that day’s moonrise. ‘The moon rose several hours ago,’ he’d say reassuringly. ‘It has definitely risen, it’s just hiding behind a cloud. Come, it is time to pray and eat.’ And finally Mum would succumb and start her Kurwa Chauth prayer.
This evening the sky was not cloudy. It was cool in the garden and there was a smell of winter in the air. A crescent moon was visible as it moved through its phase from new moon to full moon. It was bright enough to see and everyone was excited because tonight we would not be eating late. We stood in the garden waiting for Mum, arms crossed tight to stay warm, including Dad, because this part of the ritual couldn’t be performed without him being nearby.
Mum stepped into the garden with her head covered, holding her tray. She had made a small diva lamp using half a coconut shell and a wick made of cotton wool dipped in oil, and it was burning with a bright flame on the tray. She muttered prayers as she held up the tray, offering it to the moon. Vin and I looked at each other, Dad looked at his feet. Then, placing the tray on the ground, Mum took the silver jug and poured a little water into her cupped hand before sprinkling it towards the moon and mumbling words that Vin, Raja and I didn’t recognise, let alone understand. And because this water contained the silver coins and the grains of rice from the females of the house, we knew that what had been only tap water this morning was now holy water. I wondered if our English neighbours were peeping through their windows to see what our family was up to in the garden. Mum repeated the water-throwing ritual seven times. She was praying to the gods to guard her husband against an untimely demise and for him to be bestowed with a long life.
Eventually, she took a sieve that she had brought into the garden with her, held it up to the moon and closed her eyes. When she reopened them, she was looking at the moon through the sieve. It showed respect. It’s inauspicious to view such a powerful symbol directly. Then she turned to face her husband and closed her eyes. When she reopened them, he was standing before her and she looked at him through the sieve. Placing the sieve on the ground, she reached to touch his feet, the tips of her fingers caressing the toes of his shoes. It was the most arresting gesture of respect – enough to take your breath away. One human bending down to touch another’s feet. Somewhere in a garden in south-west London, a famished woman dressed in her loveliest sari had demonstrated her devotion through sacrifice and was bending down to afford the greatest respect in the world to the man with whom she had her most sacred bond.
My father placed his hand softly on my mother’s head before taking her gently by the shoulders and bringing her level with him. They embraced each other for the tiniest of moments. Perhaps not even a moment, perhaps the smallest fraction of time in all the universe. And in that fleeting, ethereal slice of time, we saw between our parents a flicker of affection that burst our hearts. My father took the confectionery from the tray and placed it in my mother’s mouth, and with that small intimate gesture, he, at last, broke her sacrificial fast.
That evening, after we had all feasted and everyone had retired to their rooms, I lay awake in bed wondering whether I would have to keep a fast for the man I married. My parents would probably want me married off by twenty-one – in only three years. I didn’t have much time. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself starving in a sari, but the picture wouldn’t materialise in my head. I had never even bent down and touched my parents’ feet in respect – how could I touch some strange husband’s feet? When Mum touched Dad’s feet it was moving because, from an offspring’s point of view, it’s uplifting to see a gesture of sweetness between one’s parents. But when I tried to imagine myself doing it to a man, I couldn’t because a feeling of debasement got in the way. The Kurwa Chauth was an undeniably beautiful ritual motivated by the positive force of devotion, yet I felt it catapulted women into the past and tethered them to a mode of thinking that was out of step with the modern world. The ceremony poleaxed me: I was simultaneously moved and offended by it.
‘Hey, Vin,’ I whispered into the darkness.
‘What?’
‘When you get married, are you going to keep the Kurwa Chauth fast for your husband?’
‘Dunno. Maybe.’
‘You mean you might?’ There was a note of alarm in my voice and Vin heard it.
‘It’s no big deal. You only have to stop eating for a day. You’re not going to die.’
‘That’s not the point. I mean, would you actually starve for a guy? You know, to show him how devoted you are and all that?’
‘Depends if he’s good-looking or not,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not going to do it because you’re a bloody feminist or something. Anyway, you can’t spend your whole life burning your bra, especially if you don’t wear one!’ I could hear her slapping the bed with her hand, laughing.
‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when they marry you off to some nerd with oily hair and a side-parting,’ I said, rolling my eyes in the dark.
‘You’re the oldest,’ she shot back. ‘You’re the one who’s going to get married first. Let me know how it goes with the nerdy oil guy.’
She never took important things seriously. She didn’t over-think, unlike me. I could think myself into madness. As little girls we had been one person, but now, as teenagers, I felt we were moving on different tracks. Still parallel, but different tracks. She had discovered Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, while I embraced David Bowie and Frank Zappa. She felt comfortable in the mainstream. I sought out the subversive. Long after she’d fallen asleep and I could hear her regular breathing, I was still awake, eyes wide open, lying on my back like a pharaoh, trying to imagine myself looking at a nerd through a sieve. But all I could picture was him pushing his tongue into my mouth as he tried to force himself on me.
My private annual panic following the Kurwa Chauth ceremony was as much a ritual as the ceremony itself. In fact, it was the Kurwa Chauth shortly after my fourteenth birthday that induced the wildest panic. I recall it well because that was the year I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went downstairs to steal the photos.
I misspent my youth trying to make myself white. It was a futile exercise but one that I pursued with great vigour from girlhood to mid-teens – the logic being that, as a white girl, I would become the new, improved version of myself.
In the bath, maybe around the age of twelve, I scrubbed my arms and legs with a pumice stone, convinced that if I rubbed hard enough, white skin would emerge from underneath. It was a failed experiment. I merely inflicted red sores on my limbs. Thank god I didn’t scrub my face with it. After a day or so, the redness disappeared and a thin, brown patchy scab formed on my shins and forearms. Maybe I had simply scrubbed too hard – through the brownness, and right through the whiteness too. I tried scrubbing more gently next time. Nope. Still brown.
Talcum powder was another pointless venture. There’s only so much of it you can put on your face without resembling someone who’s just finished a shift in an asbestos factory. There were skin-bleaching creams in the chemist shops, but I didn’t bother with them. They were for blemish removal, really. I needed something hardcore that could disguise racial heritage. I once asked a hairdresser to bleach my black hair blonde in the hope that it would make me look white. She refused on the grounds that it would ‘fuck’ my hair. Somehow, Dad knew what I was up to. ‘You can be as English as you like,’ he said. ‘You can eat English food, you can wear English clothes. But every time you look in the mirror, you will be reminded that you are not English. You are Indian.’
If the skin-colour spectrum goes from Negroid black to Nordic white, then I suppose I’d have to say I’m at the paler end of the brown shades. But that’s no consolation because when you’re the only Indian kid in a class of white children, being more toffee than liquorice is no help at all. We’re talking 1970s Britain here. Racial prejudice was all the rage and multiculturalism as a political idea was still taking shape. People’
s skin colour was very much a live topic – discussed, analysed and dissected in the mainstream media. TV sitcoms such as It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language challenged ideas of racial prejudice but also reinforced stereotypes. We watched these programmes with Mum and Dad; we even laughed at the funny bits. But no one said, ‘Hey, enough with this race thing.’ We just accepted things as they were. It was as if the British didn’t know any better.
Certainly, at primary school they didn’t. A girl in my class asked me, ‘In India, did you live in a mud hut?’ I had no recollection of ever living in India, let alone in a mud hut. The playground was a dangerous place. White kids would corner you and chant, to the sound of an old English police car siren, ‘Nig-nog, nig-nog.’ So how do you handle that when you’re six or seven or eight years old? You’re outnumbered. Your back is literally up against a wall. The teachers are on playground duty. They see what’s happening, but they don’t intervene. You can’t be a sissy about it and let half the class see you cry. You’re brown, the only brown kid in the class and one of a handful in the whole school. It’s beginning to dawn on you. You thought you were like all the other kids, except once in a while, when you were wearing short sleeves, you saw your brown arm next to their white arm. And that’s when you saw it. Really saw it. That’s when you felt like a nignog. And when you feel like a nignog, you are a nignog. So how are you going to deal with it?
‘Nig-nog, nig-nog.’
Come on, deal with it.
‘Nig-nog, nig-nog.’
What are you supposed to do? I’ll tell you what you do: you close your eyes tight. You put your hands up and cover your face. Then you stay like that. ‘Nig-nog, nig-nog’. Their voices are close up in your ears. It’s like their mouths are in your head. Eventually it stops. Just trails off. It’s over. It’s time to go back into class now. You got through it. You got through morning playtime. You hope no one tells you off for being the centre of a commotion. Hope it rains after lunch. Hope afternoon playtime never comes. But it will. You know it will.
It was a time of skinheads and Paki-bashing. Shaved heads, tight jeans, cherry Docs and broken teeth. All of it scared me. Wogs were supposed to ‘go home’, like the graffiti said. But we weren’t doing what the graffiti was telling us to do. And that made its authors angry. We were in their country and they didn’t want us there. Once I was spat at by a boy racing past on his BMX bike. His gob landed on my shoulder. I was with my mum in a park. I’m not sure how old I was but I was definitely not taller than her. Or perhaps I was taller but remember myself as shorter because the humiliation shrank me. I shouted ‘fuck off’ and stuck two fingers up at his back as he rode off. My mum added her tuppence worth – ‘Bastard bloody!’ – and handed me a tissue from her handbag. He didn’t turn to look over his shoulder, he just pedalled away with his bum lifted slightly off the saddle till he became a smaller and smaller dot in the distance. Then there was just me and my mum left standing in the park shouting swearwords into the air. A genuine bonding moment because it was the first time we’d ever sworn in front of each other.
Even in the 1960s when Dad migrated, there were rumblings about ‘coloured people’. The rumblings built up a murderous momentum after 1968 – after 20 April 1968, to be precise, when Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered his inflammatory ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Enoch Powell – now there’s a name that petrified my parents. He wanted to stop immigration from the Commonwealth and send back all the ‘coloured people’ who had already arrived. He even spoke out against proposed anti-discrimination legislation. He warned that the ‘black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ in fifteen or twenty years, and he talked of immigrants as an ‘alien element’. He told the story of a poor old white woman who was hounded because she didn’t want to rent her house to black people, and how black kids, ‘wide-grinning piccaninnies’, abused her by calling her a ‘racialist’.
If racists were shy about coming forward, the speech gave their voices confidence and volume. He lent legitimacy to poisonous racist thoughts, warning that unbridled immigration would lead to segregation and violence. He was every immigrant’s nightmare because he represented the worst thing that could happen to them: forced repatriation. ‘Study hard,’ Dad said. ‘They can send you back to India but they won’t be able to take your education away from you.’
Kids at school openly told racist jokes. It gave racism validity in the playground.
‘What do you call something transparent that lies in the gutter?’
‘What?’
‘A Paki with the shit kicked out of him.’
It didn’t matter if you were from India or Pakistan. To these schoolyard comedians we were all brown. So we were all Pakis. Most of the jokes were brutal, but some were peculiarly funny.
‘Why do Indian women have a dot on their forehead?’
‘Why?’
(The answer was always delivered with the joke-teller viciously stabbing the air in front of him with his finger.) ‘Because the immigration people at Heathrow are always saying, “No! You can’t fucking come into our country.”’
There was also a lot of talk about ‘second-class citizens’. Where did I hear those words? On the TV news? From the Indian grown-ups who occasionally visited our house? At school? I don’t know. Second-class citizens: the words ignited indignation which was at once extinguished by low self-esteem. I never asked Dad what they meant. I wasn’t even across the basics of who we were, let alone anywhere near understanding what was happening around us, so I asked him different things instead.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘If we’re Indian, why don’t you wear a turban?’
‘Because we’re not Sikh.’
‘What are we then?’
‘We’re Hindu.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Sikhs and Hindus have different religions, but both are Indian.’ His answer made as much sense as it needed to at the time. I never ran out of questions and he never ran out of answers. Right into my mid-teens I truly believed he knew everything there was to know in the world.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are we rich or poor?’
‘We’re neither rich nor poor.’
‘Does that mean we’re middle class?’
‘No. I think we are probably working class.’
‘How can we be working class when you said we’re not poor?’
‘In upper-class families, neither the mother nor the father need go to work. In middle-class families, only one of them has to go to work. In working-class families, both of them have to go to work. Your mother and I both have to work.’
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you a communist?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you hate America then?’
‘I don’t hate America.’
‘Did you used to be a communist when you were a boy?’
‘No. I was never a commune-ist.’ That’s how he pronounced it. First the commune bit with an emphasis on the mune, then ist stuck on the end. Commune-ist – as if to emphasis the communal part of communist.
‘So, do you like America?’
‘Yes. America is a country like any other country.’
‘So, if you like America, does that mean we’re capitalist?’
I didn’t even know the difference between communism and capitalism. I just thought everyone had to be one or the other and I wanted to know which one we had chosen.
‘Dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘What is the footsie?’
‘You mean the FTSE. The Financial Times Stock Exchange Index?’
‘No, the footsie they always talk about at the end of the news.’
‘You’re too young to understand. I’ll explain it when you’re older.’
I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I asked that particular question. Perhaps around twelve. It’s the only question I re
member him not answering.
The thing I never asked him about was racism. I didn’t need to. It was the default setting. I never told my parents what was happening at school either. When circumstances conspire to make you feel inferior, you believe you are. My teenager’s instinctive drive to vehemently denounce social injustice had not kicked in yet. I just accepted things the way they were. Mum and Dad’s generation accepted things because they were always aware of their migrant status and they didn’t want to rock the boat.
Dad says the English only ‘awakened’ to the type of immigration that made them feel uncomfortable when Asians started arriving in large numbers. ‘The English were used to black people [migrants from Jamaica, the West Indies and West Africa] because they came first. They were doing menial jobs such as street-cleaning so the English didn’t have much contact with them. I think they saw them as doing jobs they were fit to do,’ he says.
‘When the Asians came, they went into manufacturing jobs and office work. This is where English people came into contact with them more frequently. Compared with other Indians, I was in a far better position. I came from New Delhi so I was used to living in a big city and I was familiar with dealing with Westerners. When I came to Britain, it never occurred to me that I was a foreigner. I never treated them differently.
‘The biggest hurdle was the colour of your skin. Because either you yourself were feeling an inferiority complex in some sense, or they [the British] might have felt superior. Instead of getting to know each other, there was suspicion. And, therefore, the person who was in the weaker position was more . . .’ He finished his answer there, but I understood what he meant.
The experience of racism diminishes your confidence. It makes you smaller. I’d had my nignog moments; he’d had his own version. We didn’t talk about it at the time because we were living our lives. We weren’t doing a sociological analysis of our experiences. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I asked him for his insights.