A Pair of Jeans and other stories (10 page)

As obedient sons, they honoured their father’s wish and duly visited the village of their father’s ancestral home and bought a plot of land. Thereafter his sister and brother made annual journeys to the village, to offer a feast and
hatham
prayers for their parents souls.

Samir perched himself on the low wall circling the plot with his parents’ graves. The tranquillity around him had him thinking about his own burial place. Of course it would be Manchester’s Southern Cemetery. He could not imagine his children traipsing back to Pakistan to visit his grave in a land that was foreign to them. He now understood why his father was insistent on keeping a place for his wife. Remembering his Sabiya, he bowed his head. The loneliness crushed. He ached to have her back. Two years ago they were both here, sitting at the same spot.

He watched a herd of milk buffaloes being shepherded back to the village. Feeling a tiny bite, he looked down at a line of ants running down the brickwork. Laden with small scraps of leaves, the ants were zigzagging around his feet. He moved his foot away and glanced over his shoulders at the brick making quarry and kiln, spotting a group of peasant men pushing trolleys stacked with bricks. Two women were carrying small baskets loaded with baked bricks on their heads. Feeling sorry for them and the hard work that the women had to do in order to feed their families, Samir was reminded of the second mission that had brought him to this village – his wife’s charitable work. He had to visit the widow.

He turned to look back at the graves, taking his fill, etching the picture in his head. Was this going to be his final farewell? Standing over his mother’s grave, soft sobs shook his large body. It was a strange world. To be buried continents away from one’s own parents. Why was he crying? For his parents who had died decades ago or for his beloved Sabiya?

“Life is a cycle!” He mused. He was in his seventies but still demurred from being called “old.” God only knew where the rest of his ancestors were buried – most probably in India, before the partition. People were born and slid through the cycle of life and then disappeared, with some leaving no trace.

“Samir, stop thinking like this – it’s morbid!”

He raised his hands to say a final fervent prayer over his parents’ mounds.

His host family had gone to a lot of trouble in their offer of hospitality. The women had begun scurrying around the courtyard the moment he arrived. A hen had been snatched from the chicken coop in the far end of the courtyard and quickly dispatched to the cooking pot. The rice for the lamb biryani had been soaked. The pink custard powder was energetically whisked in a bowl. Not content with the home cooking for their special “velati” guest from “London,” the host had enlisted the help of the village cook. A fabulous chef, it was widely said that people always licked their fingers after eating his tasty chicken shorba.

The women had happily obliged. Mina, the daughter-in-law was seven months pregnant, expecting her first child, and hated squatting on the floor whilst cooking on a pedestal stove. As well as that, she had to maintain her modesty; it was quite challenging, keeping herself well draped in front of the male guest. Her pregnancy was causing her a lot of embarrassment. She was “huge,” everyone kept telling her.

With a last lingering glance at his parents’ graves, Samir followed the path to the village central square with its old majestic looking Minar tree where his driver was waiting. His brother had kindly loaned both their driver and the car for his use whilst he used his motorcycle. Ahead of him he saw a young man pulling a suitcase and dragging something else.

Bemused, Samir stared wide-eyed, temporarily transported to another time and place. He still kept his bedroll canvas bag in his garage in England, never having had the heart to throw it away. It was a memento, a part of his life. Too many memories were caught up with it. The frayed brown leather suitcase, stuffed with all his important documents, including his British nationality, was still kept under his bed.

There are special moments etched on peoples’ minds; for Samir it was the one of him dragging a big bedroll and a large suitcase from Victoria coach station through the streets of London: deeply mortifying to this day. Why his arm and fingers did not fall off still amazed him. Tired, hungry and harassed, he and his friend stumbled thankfully into a Victorian house with a Bed and Breakfast sign; two Pakistani migrants from up north wanting to try their fortunes down south in London.

It was actually his friend’s breezy confidence, smart use of English, cocky winsome smile and flirtatious winks that had successfully got them a room late at night, winning over the elegant old lady with her purple rinse. The purple hair colour of many older women in those early days fascinated him. Why did they like such a strange colour?

Samir shuddered, tasting the raw fear he had felt then as they desperately sought a place for the night. “What if we don’t find a room, where will we go and what will we do?” He had silently agonised, panicking at the darkness falling around them. It was his friend’s optimism and high spirits that had saved him from making a fool of himself. There was a moment he was ready to squat on the pavement and shed bitter tears, bewailing his stupidity in leaving a warm room and a cosy bed in Blackburn.

Sharing a double bed with his friend capped the humiliation of that day further. His friend had joked at their sleeping quarters and went soundly to sleep. Samir had sidled to the edge of the bed, shivering in the thin, coarse blanket making his face itch, afraid to pull it over himself and of waking his friend. In the end, he had got up and pulled out his own five inch thick Pakistani quilt from the bed roll.

His love affair with the English capital was both doomed and short-lived – it was not for him – too anonymous. He knew no-one and felt shy and uncomfortable wherever he went – stumbling and stammering over the carefully chosen English words and phrases he had mastered to buy bus tickets, packets of Benson and Hedges or order something to eat. Intimidated by the huge buildings and mad evening traffic, he smiled when he saw brown faces, mainly of Sikhs and Indians. He did not come across many Pakistanis.

After taking some souvenir photographs with an expensive camera he had brought from Pakistan, posing in his smart suit in front of one of the Trafalgar Square lions and outside the Queen’s Buckingham Palace gates with the guards, Samir had happily fled. He wished his friend well with his love of London. Years later, when he came across him he laughed aloud. His friend had become a true Londoner, down to the cockney accent.

For Samir, London was simply too much, making his life a misery and stripping away his self-esteem. Lacking his friend’s confidence, easy going manner and ability to make new friends, Samir missed the cosy comfort of a small town like Blackburn. After two weeks he had escaped, happily dragging his bed roll and his brown leather suitcase with him.

He went to another friend, who welcomed him with open arms, letting him join two other tenants in his two-bedroom terraced house. Apart from the kitchen all three rooms were used. Even the front room had a single bed hogging the area near the window and the open coal fire. That was the owner’s room. The kitchen, with its big coal fire warming the room, was the hub of their communal life, where they took turns cooking meals, smoking and chatting, lounging on hard wooden chairs around a small kitchen wooden table. Three of them had young families in Pakistan.

Samir stayed put, intent on earning money to support his family back home by doing overtime and long shifts.
Keema lobia
became his favourite dish. He became a good cook, very proud of his culinary skills. His first chapatti painstakingly rolled with a long empty sterilised milk bottle was a good try. His three fellow home mates praised him heartily, rewarding him with the teasing words, “Your cooking is better than our wives back home!”

His landlord found him a job in the cotton textile mill, after he was pressured to turn down a job in a special nursing home in Darwen.

“You will be working with mentally ill people, are you mad? You’ll become mad yourself!” His fellow tenants had cruelly scoffed, frightening him into scurrying into the reception room and leaving a hurried note to say no to the job before he had even started.

In the Darwen textile mill, the huge dark machines intimidated him; but he quickly mastered the skill of working with and around them. It was dull and demeaning work. With his good education behind him, he often heard himself dryly echoing “If Abba sees me doing this, he’ll have a fit!” His father had forked out a lot of money for the fees for a top college and expected him to do a “clean” respectable office job, not working in some “grotty” mill as his youngest son once termed it years later.

The pay packet however, had kept him smiling. The thrill of counting the bank notes through the little top corner, and feeling the angles of the six and three penny bits through the brown paper, and the occasional half-crowns– small sums but mighty big pleasures they provided then.

In those frugal days, they felt duty bound to keep each other in check; the talk then was always about “going back home.” They were not here to waste money on luxuries or on themselves. Exceptions were only made for gifts for their children. Samir had not only his wife and one daughter to support, but also his father to appease, who had never forgiven him for leaving home and doing menial jobs in mills in “
Velat
.”

The only thing that could win over his father would be the building of a new house, to illustrate his economic well-being and to support his younger brother‘s family. Three years later, having had enough of textile mills and with his family having joined him, he escaped to the big city of Manchester and started his own manufacturing business. It was a time when knitwear manufacturing was a booming industry in the Northwest and Ardwick had become a manufacturing area. Many Pakistani migrants entered this trade. Samir too purchased an old factory for his knitwear business. It was also a time of social and communal uncertainty. Enoch Powell had done his bit; frightening the host community with his racist speech citing “the rivers of blood” and leaving the migrants in fear of being thrown out of the country. When the Ugandan refugees started to arrive in the early nineteen seventies, after their expulsion by Idi Amin, his friends were very dismal about their own fate in the UK, fearing that they too would be thrown out. For some, the mission or the next urgent goal was to build houses back home to return to if things really got bad in England.

Unlike his friends, Samir had faith in the British justice system and its fairness. He never for one moment believed that something similar could happen in Britain. Unlike some of his friends his savings went not into a
khoti
or a villa in Lahore, but in gradually working his way up to a better standard of living for his family, progressing from a terraced house to a detached house in a good area. He concentrated on his children, their education and careers. And the decades simply slipped away, melting away his youth and gradually severing the links with his homeland. His retirement was forced on him; he did not welcome it.

Samir smiled at the young man with the suitcase and turned into the village lane to pay a special call. In the widow’s home there was panic as the youngest of the three girls whispered to the others that a man from
Velat
was standing outside their door. When their mother spotted the foreign visitor she nearly fainted, but recovered soon enough. Bursting into sobs she stared at the husband of their benefactor, muttering behind the fold of her long shawl, and gushing the welcome greeting: “
Bismillah! Bismillah
!”

She owed a lot to this man’s wife.

Her three teenage daughters had rushed ahead into their
bethak
, to make the room presentable. The crocheted-edged table cloth was quickly straightened and dusted, the mirrored beaded cushions on the leather settee hurriedly plumped up and the pair of knitting needles and women’s magazine snatched and shoved under the table.

Red-faced and brimming with pleasure, the widow led their very “special” guest into their humble living room, with the walls lined with their best china propped on wooden sills. It was a quaint sight for him, reminding him of the old days when his father would take him to tour some village for a “taste of the other life and warm hospitality of the rural people.”

Samir did not know what to say; both touched and embarrassed by their humility and behaviour.

“Please don’t bring any refreshments, Cola or Miranda bottles or such – I have a bad stomach,” he glibly lied, saving them the bother and cost of purchasing the bottles from the local village shop. “I just wanted to see how you all are – and how your daughters are doing – I know my wife always visited you – as she did with the other homes she sponsored.…” He stopped, eyes filling up, his Sabiya in front of him.

The widow again burst into loud sobs. “We are so sorry about your wife’s death, she was such a wonderful soul and so good to us! We miss her so much, and she phoned us every month – calling us to the butcher’s house to chat with us… always checking that we had enough money for my daughter’s expenses and enough grain!”

“Yes – she was a good soul! And we all miss her!” Samir lowered his head to hide his tear-swollen eyes. The widow touched by his grief, stared in wonder, mouth open, showing her row of uneven top teeth and two missing lower molars. She quickly closed her mouth in embarrassment when he looked up.

Samir looked at the girls shyly staring at him, and could not stop the outburst. His sobbing caused the girls’ eyes to fill up. They were used to crying from an early age. Their mother had become a crying machine and often they ended up aping her. Today they found the sight of this older man from England, crying over his wife, very poignant. He was thinking, “My wife has made a difference to these wretched girls’ lives!”

Sobering, he wiped his cheeks clean with a tissue proffered shyly by the eldest daughter. As if reading his mind, the widow reminded him, “Your wife got my oldest daughter married, she helped us with the dowry… here is that daughter… she’s visiting us at the moment.” Then her gaze switched to her other daughters. “Who will now finance these girls’ weddings?” Poverty had forced her into straight talking, to unabashedly appeal to the good nature of well off people like him.