by Anita Rani
With her many languages, love of people, powers of persuasion and boundless energy, Mum was in her element and this job really was the making of her. Then through a very nurturing and encouraging Indian consultant at the hospital, she was given the opportunity to work on a twinning project with a hospital in India, specialising in boys with haemophilia. This hospital has become Mum’s life’s work – she goes every year and tirelessly continues to raise money for them. With her natural gift of the gab and lovely radio voice, Mum also got a show at a new Asian Radio station that had just opened in Bradford. After hearing they were looking for presenters, she turned up and knocked on the door. She’s utterly fearless.
Dad is both charming and has great chat and tried his hand at a variety of different sales jobs and was always coming up with business ideas. They were doing whatever they could, whatever it took, to keep us afloat. And what about the two sets of school fees they had to pay every term? They could have taken us out of those schools but for my mum, this was NOT an option. They’d worked hard to get us into those schools, me and Kul had studied hard to be there, too. Getting us the best education, as they saw it, and the best start in life was the whole point of their existence. Every single penny they earned went to our schools and I will never forget that. I think Dad’s always been a bit bitter that everything he ever earned went towards me and my brother. He’s definitely kept a tally! Whatever your opinions may be about private education, this for my parents was their way of giving us a boost in Britain: by infiltrating the system middle-class white folk used to get ahead too.
Mum, my Rottweiler of a mother, my warrior queen, went to see both my headmistress and Kul’s headmaster and explained the family situation during the worst of it. Dad was very withdrawn and hurting at this stage and it took him a while to get back out there. He was even too proud to sign on. Mum was prepared to do whatever it took to keep us in school. I’m pretty certain Mrs Warrington at Bradford Girls Grammar School and Dr Smith at Bradford Boys had never had a meeting like it, and had certainly never met a woman quite like my mother. I know my mum has the capacity to go full Bollywood melodrama at the drop of a hat – and both schools came to an agreement with her so we stayed where we were. The money they were saving for our future, the cash they had saved in the bank and some of Mum’s wedding gold all went towards paying for the rest of our education. Mum was never one for spending, we were her only priority. We are constantly told by her to never be afraid of dealing with a situation, never presume you are defeated before you’ve even put up a fight. Even if you fail, at least you gave it a go. Failure teaches us the greatest lessons.
Dad’s life eventually changed after an offer by an old friend. Remember Kamala Aunty, who used to sew for my folks? Their hard work had paid off, right royally. Their small shop had grown into the third largest independent retailer of electrical goods in the country! They offered Dad a job as general manager. They are more my dad’s family than his actual family. It must have been a devastating, earth-shattering, dark period of fear and panic for him, feeling lost and with no control. Imagine a potion of humiliation, depression and shame, with huge amounts of anger and pain thrown in for good measure. And sadness, so much sadness. It had gone, everything they’d worked so hard for. It all sank. They had to let everybody go. It wasn’t until the factory closed and my parents hit rock bottom that I truly witnessed the power of who they are and the metal they are made of. Where do humans get their incredible capacity to survive at all costs? Our ability to thrive in the darkest of situations? I’m in awe of my parents. My God, they’ve worked hard.
* * *
The thing about all the jobs I’ve ever had, whether they paid me or not, is I couldn’t do anything half-arsed. If I was going to do it, I gave it my all. What I absorbed from my parents is their abundance of energy and general zest for life. I’ve watched them graft and never moan. I didn’t understand the concept of a lie-in or that you might have a day to loll around and do nothing. As a consequence, I find it very difficult to do nothing now, but I’m trying to go easier on myself. I think we all need to do that for ourselves, from time to time.
I’m consequently also terrified of parenthood. I’m terrified I’d mess my child up, that they too would find life a heavy burden at times, and a relationship with me too complex. But then I wonder what that must feel like, to know that you could risk your life and give up everything to make sure your child survives and has the chance to thrive. That love. My parents could have been so much more, done so much more. Mum wanted to act, and Dad wanted to join the RAF and become a pilot. Neither had the option to pursue their dreams. They got married and that was it. They were duty-bound. Very quickly, me and my bro turned up and then their priority was us.
Asian kids are brought up with a sense of duty to their parents. Whether you like them or not, even if they weren’t particularly good at being parents, you still have to do what’s right and look after them until the day they die. I have always had this sense of duty in me, compounded by witnessing everything my parents did for me growing up. I feel a deep sense of guilt that they suffered so much for us, that I couldn’t help when I was a kid, that I couldn’t make things better for them. Children who watch their parents suffer often feel misplaced guilt. (I don’t know this because I have done years of therapy, I know this because I heard it on a radio phone-in.) I know my parents feel immense guilt that they didn’t give us the stable and calm childhood they know we should have had. I made them leave Bradford three years ago. I found them a beautiful house near me with a gorgeous garden. They call it their dream house and it’s the least I can do for them. Now is their time to relax and enjoy their life. Maybe have a lie-in or two, if they want.
People often ask where I get my drive from. It’s pretty simple: I get it from them. My childhood was tough, tougher than I allow myself to remember. Being foreign and working class in Britain always means a tough life, especially when there’s no peace at home. I got frustrated writing about this period of my childhood and couldn’t understand why the words, the stories, the memories weren’t flooding back. I’d blocked them, like I did at the time, too. This was the period in my life when I turned inwards and created my own world. I started living somewhere else, in my bedroom, and in my mind. Planning my escape.
Every Woman Deserves a Room of Their Own
Knock before you come in!
Welcome to my bedroom. Welcome to my domain.
My bedroom was my world. After the factory closed, this is where I retreated and disappeared to. I created a place of sanctuary for myself, a place of discovery. I’d spend hours doing all the important things a teenager does: listening to music, watching my TV and reading the NME. It’s where I would dream, create worlds in my head, escape to wherever I wanted. A whole life happened, past, present, future, in this little box room at the front of the house. (Unbeknown to me, it was preparing me for life in lockdown, 30 years later!)
The door would close behind me and this was all my space. Up until the age of 11, I shared a bedroom with my brother. Once I was into double figures I decided I wanted out, becoming Little Miss Independent. My days of watching Thundercats and playing Decathlon on the Commodore 64 were over. I picked up my copies of Smash Hits magazine and my two teddy bears and relocated. I was so proud. This felt important, a significant literal move in my life. A step towards my eternal search for independence and freedom. My own space. No one else to share it with. Just mine, all mine. Maybe this was about having some kind of control in a life I felt I had no control in. I could have had it sooner, but my mum’s brother had visited from India and stayed with us for a year, AN ENTIRE YEAR. It’s very common in Asian families for relatives to come and stay for indefinite periods of time. Now he was back in India and I claimed the room as my own. My territory. No one was allowed in without knocking. When I say no one, I mean one person: my little bro, Kul. Mum and Dad did what they wanted. There was no respecting of privacy – another basic tenet of Asian parenting.
My teenage bedroom was NOTHING like this! I finally had my own domain and I hooked this space up in my own haphazard, makeshift way. The décor changed over the next 10 years of course, but importantly, my parents allowed me to do what I wanted with it. New Kids on the Block posters turned into New Model Army signs, wallpaper became wall graffiti (I went through a period that involved writing all over the walls). The baby blue colour scheme became black: black ceiling, weird black wallpaper, black radiator, plus candles dripping wax down empty bottles of Black Tower lined the windowsill. There were piles of files, piles of books, copies of Smash Hits became copies of the NME, a small shrine to Kurt Cobain, an exhausted school uniform slung over a chair, socks and stripey tights clung to my black radiator. I’d regularly smoke the joint out with sandalwood, patchouli or rose-scented agarbatti, much to my father’s annoyance. He hates the smell of josticks. Regardless, Mum lit them religiously every morning before her daily prayer meditation and every time my bedroom door opened, a plume of jostick smoke would waft out. There was a permanent fog in my room. I had a Body Shop lip balm that I got as a present, a bottle of Body Shop dewberry body spray and a black eyeliner, and that was the extent of my make-up. (I didn’t even own a lipstick until I got my first proper presenting gig on Channel 5, aged 24!)
I never had a wardrobe. Just an open-plan shelving unit in front of my bed, where I hung a few clothes and folded a few jumpers. I didn’t have tons of clothes, but I loved what I had. My baggy shirts, baggy hoodies and baggy jeans were staples, basically anything that resembled a big bag! I began shopping at the army surplus store, like all the fashionistas. I was desperate for a pair of Dr. Marten boots but they were too expensive, so Mum, who really could not fathom what the hell was going on with her daughter, Mum who wanted me in pink dresses, Mum who would lightly try and encourage me to put on some lipstick (to which I would just scowl and ask why I’d want to make my lips shiny), Mum who spent years wishing I’d get a handbag with a complimentary pair of heels, took me age 14 to the tiny army surplus store at the top of Leeds Road to buy me a pair of big black boots. They cost £35, I remember, because I was so grateful they were being bought for me. My dad called them my bovver boots. I put yellow laces in them and loved them and lived in them.
My room had personality, it was daring and original, and I was forever being told to tidy it. The main bone of contention was the clothes. They had a habit of sliding down from the open-plan shelves and crawling all over the rest of the room, along with schoolbooks and files, my uniform and stripey tights. Once, I came home to a completely empty bedroom. Everything gone. ‘I’ve been robbed!’ No, I hadn’t. Dad had shoved everything, every single thing in my room, into black bin liners and put them in the garden. Anything I needed for the next day I had to go out and get. Homework, uniform, clothes, my one lip balm. It was his way of getting me to tidy up. It worked for that day, Dad’s twisted sense of humour. At least he had just put my stuff in the garden – Mum would take my things to give away to charity, without even consulting me. I guess it was a good lesson in non-attachment. I’ve subsequently been very good at getting rid of things: clothes, diaries, boyfriends. There was no space for hoarding, attachment or sentimentality in my house.
My cultural education happened in my bedroom. Friends at school had generations of white, British culture to inherit, passed along through various members of the family. Stuff everyone just seemed to know, like The Beatles’ back catalogue, going to the theatre or watching ballet, being surrounded by books and learning about literature and poetry. The things my parents were passing on to me were generations of cooking knowledge, ancient Indian wisdom and stories, a love of Indian music, fluency in Punjabi and Hindi, an ingrained work ethic and a love for travel and adventure. All great and fully appreciated by the time I’m 40, but at 14, in nineties Britain, they were redundant. How was any of that stuff going to help me in any social situation that didn’t involve impressing aunties? How on earth, if you don’t have people around you to feed it to you, do you get the knowledge you need to blag your way through polite British society? First, you thirst for it and then you search for it and then, you learn, fast. You soak it up from wherever you can. My TV and my radio were two vital access points for me into other worlds.
A lot of things changed for me when I turned 13. Big, tectonic plate shifting. I was officially becoming a teenager, Mum and Dad were closing the factory and I’d been ditched by the cool girls at school. They grew up and I didn’t. They were the most mature young girls you’d ever met and at 13, they’d discovered boys. I was a long way off and I think I cramped their style. So, I was out. But before they dumped my ass, they did give me a parting gift that changed my life. One of my friends, Anne, had taken a cassette from her elder brother and brought it with her on a school trip to France. New music? I definitely wanted to hear it. It was a home-made Smiths’ compilation, with The Queen Is Dead on side A and a collection of other Smiths’ and Morrissey songs on side B. I borrowed the tape to listen to it on the coach on my Sony Walkman cassette player, complete with foam orange headphones. My tiny, underdeveloped pop brain exploded. What was this incredible sound I was listening to? British music that gave me the same feeling of melancholy and comfort as the ghazals of my childhood! Music that seemed to soothe, that took me away from the world around me and seemed to understand my teenage pain and frustration. I could drift into another world, carried along by Johnny Marr’s chord variations and lyrics that soon became lodged in my brain, after hundreds and hundreds of listens.
I loved The Smiths. I thought they were singing for me. The misfit, the alien, the lonely outsider in their room. I thought they were mine for life. I was entering phase two of becoming my teenage self. My miserable teenage self. Music had always been of great importance to me. Waking up at the age of two in my parents’ car to start singing along to ‘Gapuchi Gapuchi Gum Gum’, a classic song from the heyday of Bollywood in the late seventies. Rallying other toddlers to learn my very basic dance routine to ‘Let’s Get Physical’ by Olivia Newton-John in the playground at nursery. Listening to songs on the radio and remembering the lyrics and the melodies off by heart. Always performing in my mind, creating a dance routine to Nik Kershaw ‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’ and Starship’s ‘We Built This City’. Standing right in front of the TV, nose pressed to the screen, when Top of the Pops was on, so it felt as though I was almost in the studio when I danced along, dreaming of pop stardom.
The moment I pressed play on that Smiths’ tape may well have been the precise moment my latent moody, angry, serious, intense, ‘deep’, annoying teenage gene was activated. I’d gone from a relatively happy, tree-climbing, bouncing kid and metamorphosed into moody, spotty, confused teenager. New Kids on the Block were dead to me! No more fantasies of running away with the boyband. Now I wanted real music, music that made me feel something – that made me feel grown-up. I wanted music that transported me somewhere safe and magical, both alien and familiar at the same time. The only cassettes I had were compilations of songs I’d recorded off the radio, usually the top 40 countdown on a Sunday night on Radio 1. This was my only way of gathering music back then at 13, with not a penny to my name and no pocket money. (Asian parents don’t do pocket money.)
I was a little brown lass listening to The Smiths and if there were any others in Bradford like me in the early nineties, I hadn’t come across them. I connected with Morrissey’s lyrics, as a lonely Asian outsider, a misfit who felt I didn’t belong anywhere. The Smiths eased my teenage pain, I felt they understood my experience. In their music and his lyrics, I thought I found someone I could relat
e to. I found the universal in Morrissey’s experience of growing up in a migrant Irish Catholic working-class Northern family.
It’s all coming together now! I had music made for me, I had a new teenage attitude, I had my own space. The creation and expansion of my world took place in my tiny room. I was the master of this literal dark universe.
I said let there be light.
In my room was my old, ugly box TV, way too big for the room, with no remote control and a bent metal hanger as an aerial. It would always need a jiggle around to try and get a clear signal, the colour was never right the entire time I had it, but it was good enough for me to stay up and watch late-night Channel 4. There was never any issue with me having a television in my room – it was seen as an essential in our house.
I said let there be communication.
The only phone we had in the house was in the landing at the bottom of the stairs and this just wasn’t going to do. Not for my private conversations. I connected a cheap telephone with a very long wire to the main phone, then ran the cable up the stairs, round the hall and all the way into my room. My lair was beginning to take shape . . .
I said let there be sound.
The all-important combination radio, cassette and record player that stayed with me from 11 right through to my first year at uni. I played my first ever vinyl on this piece of technology, a gift from an aunty as I never had money to buy my own, Sister Sledge – ‘Frankie’. It’s a classic and I still know all the words and, of course, my self-choreographed dance routine.