by Sushi Das
Dad’s nignog moments were more subtle than mine. His were in the fine print of everyday interactions. He was never given a promotion to tax inspector even though his qualifications and experience were superior to those of the Englishman who snared the job. Then there was the time he had tried to buy a house in a part of Twickenham that was even whiter than the area in which we already lived, and the real estate agent had been obstructive. These were just incidents: privately painful, ruefully remembered.
Racism, in all its overt and insidious ways, has the capacity to sear its mark on a person. It doesn’t always hurt so much when it’s actually happening to you as a child – like pulling a plaster off your knee really fast. The pain comes in adulthood, when you look back at the wound and realise it’s bigger and uglier than you thought. Delayed trauma seeps into your heart and hardens it ever so slightly. The feeling doesn’t turn into pity. That’s what other people feel. It doesn’t even become despair. It’s just a big solid lump that you carry around in your rucksack for the rest of your life. Your strength and stamina will determine how far you travel with it, how crooked your back becomes, how quirky your gait.
I hated being Indian, and for good reason. I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without it getting in the way. Walking home from school one day, Vin and I passed a couple of bikers who were standing chatting outside a motorbike shop. They were cool, with their leatherjackets and big biker boots. Their faces were kinder and softer than those of skinheads. They were like rockstars. Maybe they were rockstars. As we walked past, one of them looked at me and smiled. I returned a flirty smile just as he sniffed the air and said, ‘Phwoar, what’s that smell? Curry, isn’t it?’
I was gutted. They’d smelt curry on our clothes. How many times had we pleaded with Mum not to cook curry, again? How many times had Dad told her to at least open the kitchen window if she was going to cook curry? The smell got in his suits. He couldn’t go into the office smelling of fenugreek. How many times had we asked her for fishfingers for a change? What about sausages? Chips, maybe. Now it had come to this. We were offending people on the streets. I couldn’t take it. I was embarrassed by my curry clothes, ashamed of my parents speaking their own language in public, horrified by the gaudy colours of Indian women’s salwar kamiz. Couldn’t they wear navy blue or grey? Couldn’t we stop being so loud and un-English? Couldn’t we just blend in? Teenage anger coursed through me. I didn’t want to have anything to do with my culture, my family, my entire racial lineage. Everything I hated about my life stemmed from being Indian. If only I wasn’t brown. If only I could be white.
But the pumice stone experiment hadn’t worked and nor had the talc. All I could do was stay out of the sun to stop the situation getting any worse. All Asians like to stay out of the sun, because dark skin is the mark of a poor man who works in the fields and, presumably by extension, a person of low-class status. Even Indian people accept that being too dark is not ideal, particularly for a woman who is to be married off. Who would ever marry a blackie? (At least I wasn’t damaged in that department.) Highly desired light brown skin is frequently celebrated as a ‘wheatish complexion’ in matrimonial advertising columns in Indian magazines and newspapers, which parents scour for suitable matches for their sons and daughters. It’s not uncommon to see an ad selling ‘Slim girl from respectable family. Wheatish complexion, university education, Green card. Caste no barrier.’ (It’s the ‘Green card’ bit that always gets me. So ruthlessly pragmatic.)
Even Indian weddings include a gesture towards fairer skin. A pre-wedding ritual performed the day before the wedding ceremony involves the prospective bride being prepared for the big day by having her face and arms smeared with a creamy yellow paste usually made from gram flour (ground chickpeas) and ghee. It gets its yellow colour from turmeric and is designed to stain the skin. When it’s washed off, the bride supposedly looks fair and radiant for her wedding day.
In India a new skin-whitening cream for men called Fair and Handsome is now on the market. Bollywood’s biggest star, the already fair and handsome Shah Rukh Khan, promoted it. Enami, the company behind it, claims it can make men fairer in just four weeks. It’s interesting that the cream’s presumably scientifically proven success period coincides perfectly with one month of the Gregorian calendar. Enami claims men need a fairness cream because their skin is more often exposed to sun, pollution and stress factors than women’s. The implicit message here is that women in India already have plenty of creams aimed at making them fairer, and now it’s time for men to whiten up too.
Disturbingly, in 2012 a vagina ‘brightening wash’ was also launched, targeting women in India. It promises to make genitals ‘many shades fairer’. Needless to say, there was a huge outcry after the TV advert went to air, showing a wistful woman having a coffee with an uninterested date. Presumably she was fretting because her private parts were the wrong damn colour. But after a shower using the new product, her date is swinging her around in the air and the music changes from morose to chirpy. Now, before we go any further, try to imagine the meeting when the marketing team, which almost certainly would have included some women, met to pitch the idea: ‘As we all know, vaginas are way too brown these days . . .’ Whoever came up with the idea should be stabbed in the head.
Across Asia, a growing number of women, and men, are willing to change their ethnic features. From double eyelid surgery for people from the Far East to skin-lightening for those from the subcontinent, it’s all available because there’s a demand. Many deny they are trying to achieve a ‘Western look’, arguing instead that their radical move to make their eyes bigger or their skin fairer is in fact about looking more beautiful – a Western definition of beauty, maybe. Trust me, my ham-fisted attempts with chickpea flour and talc had nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with wanting to be Caucasian. As my sister kept telling me at the time (and still often does), ‘You’re fucked in the head.’
But skin colour is only, well, skin deep. To be fair, pardon the pun, deep down it wasn’t my brownness I objected to, but everything it stood for. It was the Indianness that annoyed me. It made me different at a time when I wanted to be like everyone else. But it was impossible to live my life without my ethnicity constantly being a reference point.
Even that most significant of female milestones, starting one’s periods, did not take place without my ethnicity entering the room and taking centrestage. I was fourteen years old. My mum hadn’t told me anything. No, nothing. Maybe her mum didn’t tell her anything either. Maybe the whole topic was too icky for her. Maybe she always meant to tell me but never got round to it. Maybe that was the Indian way. Who knows. To this day, I don’t even know the word for period in Punjabi. My knowledge of periods was the textbook version from sex education at school. I knew about menstruation because it was a sub-section of ‘the reproductive cycle of mammals’ in my science class.
So there I was, sitting in an English class at Twickenham Girls’ School studying The Tempest, when my first period arrived like an unwanted visitor. I was reading the part of Shakespeare’s Caliban and understanding very little, and the girl next to me was reading the part of Stephano and probably understanding everything. I felt a strong pain in my stomach and stopped reading. Stephano looked up, saw the pained expression on my face and asked, ‘What’s the matter? Have you started your period?’
‘Shhh, no,’ I said. ‘I’ve just got a tummy ache.’
‘I’ll tell the teacher you’ve started,’ she yelled.
‘No, I’ll tell her myself.’
When the pain became unbearable, I went to the teacher’s table and asked to be excused. I must have been the fifteenth girl to start her period that week because I wasn’t even asked what was wrong with me, I was just ordered to go straight to sick bay. I explained myself to the deputy headmistress, Mrs Gardner, a severe-looking woman who attended to me. ‘You’re lucky, the nit nurse is in the school today,’ she said. ‘Wait here.’
Great. I was bleeding
to death and the nit nurse was going to check my head for lice. Mrs Gardner left the door open and I could hear her on the telephone in the adjoining room.
‘Hello, nurse. There’s an Indian girl in sick bay who thinks she’s started her period. Would you mind seeing to her?’
An Indian girl? Why had she described me as an Indian girl? Were Indian girls’ periods different from English girls’? Why did the nit nurse need to know I was Indian? It was as if Mrs Gardner was giving the nit nurse a veiled warning, an early alert: There’s an Indian girl in sick bay. Just watch out. You know what they’re like. She’s started her period. See if she’s telling the truth. And check her head for lice while you’re at it.
I was the subject of a conversation that contained secret information: a nuance. Nuances are meant to be picked up by those listening. Mrs Gardner didn’t know I had heard her on the phone. I’d picked up the nuance, but I didn’t know what it meant. I felt instantly uncomfortable. But then, that was nothing new. My whole existence felt uncomfortable.
Happily, the nit nurse spoke to me just as she might have spoken to any other girl in the school. ‘You’re a woman now,’ she announced.
‘Do I have to go to hospital?’
‘No, you’re all right. This is going to happen to you every month.’
‘Can I go home then?’
‘No, there’s nothing wrong with you. You need to go back to your classroom.’
So that was that. I became a woman, an Indian woman, in the midst of The Tempest.
I thought I managed the period incident rather well. I didn’t get emotional about it like an Indian, for whom every action has an equal and opposite over-reaction. Indeed, I handled it with the stiff upper lip of a true Brit. I stayed calm and carried on. I learnt such skills at my junior school: Archdeacon Cambridge’s Church of England Primary School in Twickenham. I was a pupil of that fine institution from the age of five to eleven – the nignog years. I made great personal discoveries there. First and foremost, I discovered that god truly moves in mysterious ways. At school he was a bearded man suffering on a cross; at home he had an elephant’s head, sat on a pink lotus flower and was always accompanied by a small mouse.
Every Wednesday, our teacher would lead the class to the Holy Trinity Church across the road. The church was built in 1841. You could lose yourself in the stained-glass windows, and the organ was magnificent (made by Henry Willis, one of England’s most famous organ-builders). But I disliked going to the church because it was always dark and cold, and it made me feel like an intruder.
The vicar, in his black dress, would stand at the front and speak in an unnatural manner. We always brought our red hymn books with us, but before we could get to the singing stage we had to say prayers. As children we were taught to copy the vicar. Slowly and precisely he would join his hands in front of his chest and we would follow. He would take one hand and point to himself, saying, ‘I am a Christian,’ the emphasis always on the ‘I’. Then we would point to ourselves and repeat the words. This was the part that made me feel uncomfortable. I knew that I wasn’t a Christian and nor should I pretend to be. It felt wrong to point to myself and say, ‘I am a Christian.’ I feared someone might accuse me of being a fraud. Perhaps a teacher would pull me out of the pew and speak to me in the way that teachers did: ‘How dare you call yourself a Christian, young lady.’ I didn’t know brown people could be Christians too. I thought only white people were Christians. So every Wednesday when the crucial moment came, I would point to myself with the smallest, barely noticeable hand movement and mumble under my breath, ‘I am a Christian,’ as fast as possible in the hope that nobody would see me performing my fraudulent gesture.
Despite my misgivings, my yawning in the pews and my general fidgeting, I owe much to that church. Where else would I have learnt the Lord’s Prayer? I watched the teachers walk solemnly to the front of the church in single file, whereupon they would kneel and the vicar would put in their mouths something that looked like a small disc of white paper and then give them a drink from his big metal cup, always careful to clean the lip of the cup with a crisp white napkin before moving on to the next teacher. Apart from singing hymns, watching the teachers being fed paper was the best bit. Back at school, if you stood near the teacher’s desk as she explained something, there was an unusual smell on her breath. It was the smell of whatever she had drunk from the big metal cup. My parents’ breath never had that smell.
My mum and dad never asked about what I did at school. I’m not sure they even knew I went to church. They were aware we were learning about Jesus, though, and were, as far as could tell, untroubled by it. Mum said, ‘Tell me about Jesus. What is his story?’
I gave her an outrageously truncated version that went something like this: ‘He was born in a manger because there was a census and there wasn’t any room at the inn. Mary and Joseph were his mum and dad and three wise men followed a star and came with gifts. Then he got crucified on a cross, but somebody moved the rock back and he went to heaven. That’s called Ascension. Christmas isn’t really his birthday, and Father Christmas is not Jesus when he’s old.’ I didn’t mention anything about suffering. I suspect she might have related to it.
There were many times when I asked her about Hinduism, but her answers always involved characters with complicated names and scenarios with far too many twists and turns for me to keep track. Somewhere along the line Lord Krishna would be mentioned and I knew he was the god who was depicted in pictures – sometimes as an adult playing a flute and sometimes as a small child, but always with blue skin. Ganesh, the elephant god, was always mentioned with cheer in her voice, but I didn’t understand where he fitted in.
A paper calendar with pictures of a different god for every month of the year hung in Mum and Dad’s bedroom. Vishnu, the preserver; Parvati, the divine mother; Ganesh, the remover of obstacles; Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth; and so on. Many of the deities had four or more arms. I was fascinated by these pictures because they were intricate, colourful and intriguing. They meant something to my parents, but I didn’t know what. I understood the gods were to be revered. Mum, in particular, believed her destiny was very much in their hands – their many hands, as it happens.
I was surrounded by far too many gods. That’s probably why I was never able to commit myself to any one of them. I had a seminal god moment in my teens, when I developed an obsession with The Boomtown Rats – Bob Geldof in particular. The headboard on my bed was made of white plastic – like a blank white page waiting for words. For some inexplicable reason I used a permanent black marker to write three words in an arch of huge block capitals across it: GELDOF IS GOD. Dad was horrified by the blasphemy. ‘Why did you do that?’ he kept asking. I had no idea, except that I rather liked the alliteration.
‘What kind of person writes such a thing?’ he said, fuming. ‘Can’t you see how wrong it is?’ He told me to scrub it off with soap and a nailbrush. I managed to remove much of it, but there was nothing I could do about the faint outline of GELDOF IS GOD that refused to come off, offending my dad every time he walked into my room. One day, he came home with a new headboard and attached it to my bed. Then he ordered me to take down all my Boomtown Rats posters, even the one inside my wardrobe – the one that had a greasy splodge on Bob Geldof’slips.
‘Why can’t you like a pop group with female members?’ he demanded.
‘What, you want me to put up posters of ABBA?’
‘Certainly not, that group has two men in it.’
On his way out of the room, he issued one last instruction: ‘You are not to write to The Boomtown Rats fan club ever again.’ Having joined the fan club, I regularly received newsletters with pages of interviews with ‘The Rats’, dates for their forthcoming gigs (not that I was ever allowed to go to any) and coupons for Rats merchandise. Now I was robbed of even that small pleasure.
Wednesday 21 November 1979: ‘Dad has forbidden me to write any letters to The Boomtown Rats fan club. Why doesn’t Da
d understand? He really is not reasonable. It is only a sport and something I like doing. How can it ever get me into trouble? It’s not like I’m going to get pregnant just writing to the Rats. Why doesn’t he understand? Why?’
Well, he could stop me writing to The Boomtown Rats and he could make me take my posters down, but he couldn’t stop me listening to their records with the volume turned up (when he and Mum were out of the house, of course). Just as an individual needs only one good teacher to change their world, I only needed one good band. The cover of their first album is a picture of Bob Geldof trying to get out of a plastic bag. It resonated with me. But, more than that, it was the lyrics to Lookin’ After No. 1 that pulled at something within me:
I am an island
Entire of myself
And when I get old, older than today
I’ll never need anybody’s help in any way.
I loved my parents, but I had no desire to be like them:
Don’t wanna be like you.
Don’t wanna live like you.
Don’t wanna talk like you, at all.
It was the first time I had thought about being something other than an appendage of my parents. And it seemed to me that Bob Geldof, with his angry voice roaring out of the speakers, was trying to tell me, and a million other teenagers like me, something we all needed to hear:
I’m gonna be like
I’m gonna be like
I’m gonna be like ME!
Had it not been for the uproar that Geldof caused in our house, I might never have thought about god seriously. Vin would lie in bed every night saying prayers in her head for what seemed like a lifetime. I would lie in the darkness wondering who she was silently talking to, and waiting for her to finish. Eventually, I would become impatient and start the conversation with a whisper. ‘Hey, Vin.’