by Anita Rani
I said let there be (out-of-tune) tunes.
I had a small Yamaha keyboard that I could never play. I’d sing along to any tune on the radio, attempting harmonies as though I was a lost member of the band, and I would pretend to play the keyboard at the same time. I now have an upright piano in my home that I can’t play. But still, in my mind, one day I will be a concert pianist.
I said let there be mood lighting.
There was a simple pendant light in the middle of the room with a small sky blue tasselled light shade. To create a dimmer ambience, I draped my polyester dressing gown over it. It dimmed the light, yes, but also looked like someone had hung themselves in my room, so I lifted the bottom and wrapped it around the rest of the light. Then I went downstairs for dinner. I returned a couple of hours later to the smell of burning polyester in my room. That day, I could have destroyed my own kingdom. And burnt down the entire house. So, I eventually said, let there be health and safety checks.
Let there be a dance floor.
In this room, this tiny space, I’d dance. I’d dance my own freeform choreography, fiercely, fantastically and like a fool. In this room I was anyone I wanted to be, and I was frequently Kate Bush. I’m still frequently Kate Bush.
Let there be comfort.
I had a raised single bed, with drawers under one side, a small cupboard on the other and a pull-out desk in the middle. The desk could come all the way out, which meant I could crawl underneath, a den within a den, when I needed to hide away from myself, and make myself really small.
Let there be pain relief.
Sometimes, things got a little too much in my house. It was a hotbed of arguing, the disagreements deafening. I was a teenager, so had a ton of emotions and no idea how to deal with them, anger and sadness that comes with growing up, feeling confined with no power to change anything. So, sometimes, I would meticulously unscrew the blade out of my pencil sharpener and use it to cut myself – a small phase of self-harm. It’s strange to write down, it’s even stranger to think about, because it’s so buried away in my past and not something I spend any time thinking about or dwelling on. But it happened. It’s important for me to tell you because I found being a teenager really hard. Really, really tough. Overwhelmingly difficult, sometimes. I thought I was tough enough to take on everything and conquer the world, but I was also in a lot of anguish and feeling a lot of pain and felt terribly lonely most of the time. So much of my life was out of my control. I had no influence on the things going on around me and it seemed that every adult I knew was unhappy, stressed or angry.
Stepping into school, I’d switch into school mode. At school, I never, ever, thought about my home life. School was an escape of sorts and I was a master at compartmentalising my life. Still am. I’m super skilled at switching off emotions. But here’s a little thing I’ve learned about emotions – apparently, you can’t switch them off. They just morph into something else, another emotion, and then somehow these undealt with emotions can just turn around and bite you on your ass at some point down the line. Your own emotions turn on you! And when there’s so many bubbling away, so much confusion about what the hell is going on around you, so you feel totally trapped, well, then it’s a war. Then something will implode. And I did. The only time I felt I gained some control over my life and felt some kind of release, felt something, was in those moments when I’d sit in my room and cut myself and watch the blood slowly appear from under my skin. I found it both terrifying and satisfying. I felt alive and present and, in those moments, thought about nothing else. Nothing. I just focused on the pain and the blood and it was a sweet relief from the rest of my life. The sharp pain would bring me sharply into that moment and that moment only. And it was my secret. Mum once saw my forearm covered in scabs and scratches but neither of us said anything. I didn’t want her to say anything. I didn’t want anyone to know. It was just for me. I just wanted to get away, find quiet, find peace, find a life for myself.
Writing this feels so exposing, even now. As raw as those wounds. I’m giving something about myself away, something important. But it feels equally important to share. I was confident and I was always busy doing lots of things and I had a fantastic mask. It wasn’t even a fake mask, it was legit, something I was able to slip on so skilfully, I wasn’t even conscious I was doing it. Everyone around me was unhappy. Everyone was angry. Everyone had expectations. Parents, school, friends. On top of that, it’s a part of my personality that I feel like I have to take care of everyone else, too.
* * *
Even though cutting myself was a release, it also made me feel great shame. I still feel that shame, telling you. It is hard. But it’s also vital not to feel shame around talking about mental health. Mental health wasn’t a term I was aware of for so long, and yet mental suffering is rife in my family, and more widely in the South Asian community. I hate the thought of other young people going through pain and mental anguish on their own. There is support out there. You can reach out for it and get help. You don’t need to struggle on your own. If you feel your family won’t understand, or won’t want to hear it, find someone caring to speak to. You can’t keep emotions bottled up. Those feelings will fester and the stench will be unbearable. If you want to live a whole life, at some point you have to unearth your feelings and face them down. Overcome that fear and take your power back.
Just like so many things in my life right now, I’m having to re-examine so much of what I took for granted. Morrissey is just another piece of the wider system that I thought was one thing and turned out to be something else. Turns out Morrissey would never be able to see the universal in my story. He’d probably find everything about my story offensive. Bloody typical. My most formative years, and the music I invested so much time in and gave such meaning to, were never for me in the first place. I spent years devoted to this man and his music. When friends at school moved on, recognising there was more to life than sitting in a room listening to Strangeways Here We Come, when pretty much every Asian person I knew took the piss out of me for loving The Smiths, I didn’t care. How could I give up on music that had such powerful meaning for me? That I loved? It’s somehow grotesquely fitting that I find Morrissey’s political views abhorrent and ridiculous. Not to mention illogical. Showing support for a far-right party and he doesn’t even live in the UK, plus he’s from a family of migrants!
What a massive let down. I totally picked the wrong saviour in my teens. In a way, though, he did me a favour by making me open my eyes to the reality of the world as an adult too: ‘Anita, some people don’t like the look of you and that’s it. You make them nervous about their own existence and place in the world.’ I have to recognise the reality of the world around me. Don’t get complacent, question everything, don’t rely on anything, especially not what you thought you knew. But it’s difficult when so much of the world is dominated by white men and so many of them make music I love! They run the shop, don’t they?
However, there are so many other powerful voices, so much important art, that says something meaningful, that connects with my experience, that I can find comfort in and these artists needs elevation, they need the spotlight shone on them. They must be celebrated. We need more of them, get to hear from them. Thankfully, my thirst for culture, art and finding meaning continued and there was so much more waiting for me beyond Morrissey. Also, luckily, I’d been well trained in non-attachment from an early age too.
Give Yourself a Break
So, I never had a boyfriend. At least, that’s the story my parents got. Until now.
When it comes to matters of the heart or sexuality, Asian kids of my generation are often screwed. And I don’t mean the fun kind! No boyfriends or girlfriends allowed. Ever. But marriage is a MUST. So how the heck do we learn about relationships?
The problem pages of Just Seventeen were pure porn to my sheltered Indian eyes and the only brown couples I saw on telly were on The Bill and usually involved a domestic abuse storyline. The only place I e
xperienced any kind of romance was Bollywood. Every Saturday night, we’d rent a (usually dodgy) VHS copy of an Indian movie. Bollywood is the name the West has given to the all-singing, all-dancing genre of Hindi cinema. It’s mega. They churn out more than double the number of movies as Hollywood every year and it has a global following wherever the South Asian diaspora is, but also in China, Russia, Peru, Nigeria, the Middle East. The storylines and slapstick comedy have universal appeal. Every film is a love story, where boy meets girl, they can’t be together because of the SHAME it will bring, but after a healthy splattering of incongruous song and dance numbers with at least seven costume changes, mothers whose only purpose is to cry and put up with a casual bit of domestic violence (slapping women is the only way they’ll learn, right?), spoiler alert: true love always wins out and/or someone dies. At least, that’s the Bollywood I grew up with.
I have a love-hate relationship with Bollywood. The films of my youth were over the top, farcical melodramas. Most of the stories revolved around male characters and women were inserted to look pretty (and nothing like the average woman on the streets of India). These films were designed to be pure escapism. A three-and-a-half-hour marathon of a movie, where you suspend your disbelief and overlook any continuity mishaps. The song and dance numbers are inserted willy-nilly and often have no relevance to the story. The storylines are Shakespearian in scale and they are filmed in impossibly beautiful locations (the Swiss Alps were a favourite spot in the early eighties). Mum LOVES these movies.
‘Come on, Mum, that was just ridiculous. AS IF a man can jump off a seven-storey building then jump back onto the roof, backwards.’
Mum’s standard response: ‘Well, your silly dishoom dishoom English films are the same. Tom Cruise and James Bond, they never die. Plus, my Hindi films always have a moral, a life lesson, they are teaching us something.’
Yes, Indians love a morality tale.
As fanciful, daft and sometimes annoying as these movies were, I also loved them. In these movies, Indian women were beautiful. OK, they had no voice or agency but, my God, they were beautiful! Yes, I would secretly imagine myself as a trapped princess in a Rajasthani fort draped in silks and jewels, dancing from one palatial room to another, like the Goddess Waheeda Rehman in my favourite film from 1965, Guide, or wistfully staring out of a jali window across the desert. Dreaming of life beyond – maybe by jumping out of the window, landing on a horse and galloping away into the sunset, off to a music festival in the desert, with both Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. I’d play a DJ set and dance till dawn . . .8 It’s my Bollywood movie fantasy, so anything can happen.
What Bollywood provides the sexually repressed and culturally prudish is wholesome romance with dash of wet saree to keep the boys happy. It was entertainment you could watch with the entire family without having to reach for the remote, with nothing filthy happening that might give young impressionable minds any ideas, like kissing. For Asian parents, the unabashed romance of Bollywood films was a harmless outlet for teen desire and, more importantly, a way to prevent them from acting on those feelings. My parents didn’t need to invest in any kind of restraints for me though. I’d come up with all kinds of genius solutions to my boy-less predicament. First, I really didn’t notice boys until I was about 15/16. I also recognised, or at least I thought I knew, convinced myself even, that boys didn’t really fancy me. Having a boyfriend behind my parents’ backs seemed too exhausting to organise, all the subterfuge and secrecy, plus the soul-destroying games you need to play to be noticed by boys. Which to me looked like they involved not saying much, giggling a lot and showing flesh. I was highly opinionated, and laughed if something was funny, but only if I thought it was funny. I preferred to keep most of my body covered up, draped in layers and layers of floating, oversized tie-dye dresses, with my dad’s shirts thrown over the top for extra bag lady effect. (I even wore my dad’s trousers to a club once, the crotch was down to my knees. It was the early nineties, but I’m not sure anyone else was rocking their dad’s trousers back then.) I’d made the decision early on that I was going to be wearing the trousers in my life. Nope, boys were definitely not going to fancy me. I don’t think I wanted them to either. What are you supposed to do with that kind of attention?
Growing up, there were many contradictions and complications to my romantic life. I definitely fancied boys, I absolutely fantasised about having a boyfriend, but there was no way on earth I was going to have a relationship in real life. Being friends with the lads was a much more comfortable space for me to inhabit. I wanted to be their equal, I wanted to be treated the same as them. I didn’t want to be patronised, or patted on the head or the bum, or have to wear pretty frocks to go out on dates. My interpretation of young relationships was girls giving away their power just to make the lads feel good about themselves. I found the whole idea of teenage romance exhausting, painful and humiliating.
I went to an all-girls school, so for a long time the only boys I came into contact with were the kids on my street, family friends and the boys at my temple. There were a couple of boys at the temple who tried to profess their love for me when I was a teenager, brave souls they were, approaching the girl who clearly didn’t give a toss. Even if I had fancied them, what would we have done? Had dates every Sunday at the Gurdwara? Touched socks under the table while eating langar? There were boys all the girls at the temple fancied, older, with gorgeous floppy hair, and they hardly ever came unless it was a special occasion. They seemed to have lives – and that’s really what I wanted to have, that freedom to choose.
It was with my best mate at the temple, Harpreet, that I’d spend hours dreaming up fake romances, discussing bhangra, RnB and the predicaments of being a brown girl. Conversations I could never really have with my best mates at school. She understood the Asian girl code and our parents never knew what we discussed, ever. They also never knew that we stole miniature bottles of booze from her dad’s corner shop, to secretly drink in her bedroom . . .
If my mum got a whiff of me even giving an Indian boy a second look, she’d think it was the signal to start planning my wedding. Boys were off the agenda, at least in the real world. I lived my love life in my head instead. I created elaborate make-believe scenarios with the boys of my dreams. Keanu Reeves and I were going to somehow meet and we’d ride off into the sunset on a Harley-Davidson, or maybe even jump into his time travelling phone booth. Bill and Ted for life! This may still happen, right? Or I was going on tour around America with Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Mike Patton from Faith No More, or River Phoenix. I even went through a brief Rahul Roy phase based on his one successful film, Aashiqui. I wasn’t fussy. Boys at this stage were just my escape mechanism to the life I actually wanted to live. Like being on tour in the States, on stage, performing, making money, being my own person. I really didn’t want to set up home with anyone. Marriage and babies were not part of my exit strategy to liberation. Becoming a rock star was my route out, or acting in movies, or being on stage, travelling somewhere, anywhere, free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with no one to answer to. The closest I’d got to rock star status was singing a solo of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ in the choir at York Minster.9 Rock’n’roll!
My first experience of a boy liking me was on a school trip to France, in the second year of senior school. I was part of a cool gang back then, possibly the coolest. They were sporty, healthy and wealthy. These girls were probably the most mature and self-assured 12- and 13-year-olds you’ll ever meet. They all looked so confident and stylish in their clothes from Dash and Benetton and then there’d be me in jeans too long for me, tucked into my high-top trainers (no brand), a pink jumper, black hooded anorak made by my parents, a long messy plait and a fixed brace straightening my teeth. It would only be a year before these girls would drop me from their crew. Ditched in a cruel double geography after lunch. I walked in just before class and they hadn’t saved me a space, and that was it. Why this heartless dumping? Well, they
’d got into boys, and boys were into them, and I was cramping their style. This would be my first real taste of rejection. Luckily for me though, the oddball outsider girls were always open to taking new recruits. With this crew, I didn’t need to worry about boys for a few years. This new crew of misfits were the coolest girls in the world.
But, retournons au Français. A group of local lads on mopeds had discovered there was a group from an English girls’ school residing in their small town. Perfect Vicky somehow got chatting to the lads and next thing you know, eight girls were dangling out of a ground-floor window, talking to four boys on mopeds. Vicky was well into the leader of their pack, Giles, pronounced Geeel, and he seemed to be well into her. This scenario goes to prove that feelings can cross language barriers, or at least straight-up teenage lust can. The shortest, youngest-looking French lad (he looked about ten) to my surprise said he had a crush on me. ME. WHAT?
I was pushed to the front of the window. Er, bonjour, comment t’appelles-tu? I had basic French, enough to be able order a pastry, the important stuff. He spoke no English, so I led the conversation. As he opened his mouth to speak, a sunbeam struck metal, sorting out his teeth too. Je m’appelle Thomas. End of conversation. What you really want to hear is how we kissed and our braces got stuck together, right? Nope, no chance. This really was the first time a boy my age had smiled at me. It was kind of thrilling but utterly terrifying.
Back home, France and Thomas were a lovely, fun-filled, sweet memory. Until I got some news that made the blood drain from my entire body and was going to DESTROY MY LIFE. Vicky had stayed in touch with Geeeel and Thomas wanted to contact me. What the hell for? I mean, seriously, dude, was I the first girl you’d ever met with a brace? Vicky said she’d given Geeeel my address to pass on to Thomas.
YOU DID WHAT?!
NO NO NO NO.
I have Indian parents. I do not want to be receiving mail from boys in France. This was a disaster on a grand scale for my teenage self. Every day, I’d try and intercept the mail, which was impossible because I had no idea when the mail came and I spent all day in school. Then one day I was home alone with Dad and he showed me an envelope and asked me what it was. The blood drained out of me, my legs turned to complete jelly. Vicky had properly stitched me up. I opened it. His handwriting was atrocious and the only English words he’d learnt for the purpose of the letter were: