Radical (4 page)

But as wonderful as this oral storytelling tradition can be, it doesn't necessarily encourage children to read themselves; even today reading in Pakistan is not as widespread as it should be. How expressive a child could be if parents were to combine these two methods, the old and the new. I believe that it was precisely this combination within myself that gave me passion during the most difficult times.

One book that particularly tested my mother's liberalism, and my own changing views as a teenager, was Salman Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses.
When this was published in 1988, it caused a huge furor among many Muslims around the world. Its depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, upon whom be peace, was deemed blasphemous, and the author was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his now infamous fatwa. True to her fiercely independent spirit, Abi bought the book and read it to make up her own mind.

By then, my belief that she was dangerously on the wrong side needed no more confirmation. Abi's response had been a classically liberal one: “Let him write his book. If you don't like it, go and write your own book against him.” That is Abi through and through.

My father was affectionately known to all as Mo. From an early age he grew up with a lot of responsibility. Both his father and elder brother died when he was young, which left him as head of the family before he was married. In the old days in Pakistan, when a man died, his wife would often return to her parents' family. The absence of a welfare state left only blood relatives as the safety net. But my father wanted to do things differently. He asked
Tai Ammi
, his brother's widow, to stay with him so that they could bring up his two orphaned nieces, Nargis and Farrah, as his own daughters. This ensured that
Tai Ammi
did not have to remarry again merely for convenience. Over forty years later,
Tai Ammi
remains a widow out of love for her late husband.

My father started out working for Pakistan's navy and trained as an electrical engineer. Unfortunately he contracted tuberculosis and was honorably discharged on medical grounds. The navy paid for his treatment and wanted him to return to work. However, he didn't respond to conventional treatment and the navy lost hope. My father then went to see a
hakeem
—an herbalist trained in ancient natural remedies—and he provided a number of powders. Curiously, these worked where modern medicine failed, and I suppose I owe my life to an obscure herbalist who has probably long died somewhere in the Land of the Five Rivers.

My father resumed life as an electrical engineer: he laid a lot of the electrical foundations in what is now the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. He laid down political foundations too, and it is this proud defiant streak in him that has rubbed off on me. He had been doing some work for the Dawood Group—a powerful industrial group in Pakistan. The company was immensely powerful politically, and unions were prohibited. At this time Pakistani workers, heady with Soviet socialism, became aware of their organizing power. Upset with working conditions and knowing that employers would never concede rights unless forced to, my father set up the first trade union in his industry.

Dawood's response was to try to shut them down. My father and his fledgling organization were taken to court. This was real David and Goliath stuff, and my father's eventual victory was a huge coup at the time. Dawood was forced to allow the trade union to operate.

My father married Abi in an arranged marriage when he was thirty-four and Abi just eighteen. He moved to the UK and used his experience as an engineer to get a job with the Oasis Oil Company in Libya, where he worked until his retirement, and where we were to visit him later on.

Because of this, I had an awareness of Gaddafi's tyranny long before it became common knowledge. My first memory of trouble in Libya harks back to the late eighties. I asked my father why the name of his company had changed from Oasis to
Waha.
My father explained that Colonel Gaddafi had nationalized the company and kicked out all Westerners in revenge for American airstrikes that had killed his son.

“But why are you still there, then?” I naively asked.

“Because Libyans like Pakistanis,” he assured me.

I didn't understand this. As an ex-pat he was very well paid for the time, and we eventually moved into a large six-bedroom house as a result. Why didn't Gaddafi consider him British? What I didn't know then was that in 1974 Gaddafi had gone to Lahore and publicly supported Pakistan's right to pursue nuclear weapons. In turn, Pakistan named Lahore's main sports stadium after Gaddafi. I had no idea how this pursuit of nuclear weapons would go on one day to affect my own life so profoundly.

My father went in for the whole oil look. This was the era of
Dallas
with J.R. and Bobby Ewing. We all loved to watch
Dallas
; in fact, I still catch myself sometimes humming its catchy theme song. Typical of charming, worldly-wise Pakistani men of his day, my father didn't shy away from flaunting his style. He'd wear a Stetson, cowboy boots, a big belt buckle with his name embossed into the leather at the back, and an expensive diamond-encrusted gold watch; these days you'd call that
bling.
Like any child growing up, I didn't rate my father's fashion sense, but I did inherit his love for cultivating an individual style.

My father's job gave me something of a polarized childhood. He would alternate between spending a month in Libya, and then having three to four weeks at home. When he was away, Abi would be in charge, and her more liberal outlook would prevail. When my father was back, we lived under stricter, more traditional house rules. This created conflict between my parents—a clash of backgrounds, really, as well as a generational difference. My father was socially liberal but with traditional family values. Abi was fiercely independent and free-spirited, always the first to dance at weddings and the last to sit down.

Though work was the focus of my father's life, politics was the way in which he socialized with friends at home. This was a typically Pakistani and typically Muslim way of going about things. His stance toward the pressing questions of his day was essentially a “plague on both your houses”; he was very much anti-colonial, but having lived and worked under Gaddafi, he was also anti Arab dictators. Importantly, and unlike many of the “old” European left, he wasn't pro Arab tyrants just because they stood up to Western imperialism. He was well aware of Gaddafi's record of torture long before it became public knowledge in the West. He knew of the hatred that everyday Libyans bore their leader.

It's hard not to look at
Nana Abu,
Abi, and my father without thinking that something from each of them has rubbed off on me. Although they are very different characters, what unites them is the way they have gone against the grain:
Nana Abu
leaving a newly independent Pakistan for Southend to pursue a dream; Abi's liberal views challenging those of her community; my father taking on a leading corporation to set up the company's first trade union. Apart from all the other traits that I have been lucky enough to inherit from them, it is this instinct to rattle the status quo that strikes me as their most significant influence.

CHAPTER TWO

This Game's Not for Pakis

I first encountered and became properly aware of racism at around eight years old. I was having lunch at my primary school, Earl's Hall, and as usual I was lining up with my tray to get my food from the dinner lady. This particular day, it was sausages on the menu. Now, I knew I wasn't meant to have sausages. I wasn't quite sure why, but I was aware that my father didn't want me to eat them. When my brother Osman and I had started at the school, Dad realized that the food served there might be a problem. So to avoid it becoming an issue he'd said to us, “Eat anything you want, even if it is not halal. The main thing is, keep from eating pork. So no sausages.”

The dinner lady put my lunch down on my plate.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Sausages,” she said.

“I'm sorry,” I said politely, handing the plate back. “I'm not allowed to eat them.” At this stage I was still very much a timid little boy.

“What do you mean, you're not allowed to eat them?” the dinner lady snapped back.

“I'm . . . I'm not allowed to eat them,” I repeated nervously, but stood my ground. “My dad told me I wasn't allowed sausages.”

“Why on earth not?”

“I don't know,” I replied, quivering. “All I know is that I'm not allowed to eat them.”

At this point, I remember being very scared, not just as a small child standing up to an adult, but also over why I wasn't allowed to eat the sausages. I didn't really know what they were, but my dad had been so insistent that I thought I might have some reaction if I ate them. I could feel everyone in the canteen looking at me.

“Stop being so
fussy!
” the dinner lady shouted, shoving the plate back at me, so I had to take it. “This is your lunch, and you're going to eat it.”

The dinner lady came out from behind the counter to where I was sitting and insisted that I ate them in front of her. Now I was crying. I felt the eyes of everyone staring, as if I was some sort of freak. I didn't know what to do.

“What a fussy little boy,” she snapped again. “You
will
eat your sausages.”

With fear rising up like a lump inside my throat, caught between parental and school authority, I addressed the immediate threat and put a piece of sausage in my mouth. At which point, fear took its revenge and pushed out the offending morsel, along with everything else in my stomach. I vomited all over my plate. As I continued to cry, the dinner lady's stance changed.

“Oh goodness me,” she said. “You're
allergic
to sausages. That's why you can't eat them.”

I shook my head, tried to tell her otherwise, but she was convinced. “You should have said,” she continued. “You should have said you have an allergy.” And she escorted me off to the medical office, where despite my protestations I spent the rest of the afternoon lying down until Abi came to pick me up after school.

Things have changed in the last twenty or thirty years. I don't think the dinner lady was being deliberately racist: I suspect her attitude was well-meaning in an “eat your vegetables” way, but there was a lazy cultural ignorance behind it that said much about attitudes of the time. It did not even cross her mind that there might be a religious reason behind my refusal to eat pork.

Earl's Hall was almost universally white: the only other non-white child I remember was a Sikh called Satnam. For the first few years I was there, I was generally happy. There was an annual art competition at school, and I won first prize for several years consecutively. I remember a picture I did when I was eleven, which I copied from a photograph of a boy on a drum barrel, writing and sticking his tongue out. My picture was then printed in sepia for a school exhibition, and it made me hugely proud. I acted in the school plays, including one about refugees during the Second World War. I even had a little girlfriend named Sarah. We mostly just held hands, and I think I kissed her once on the cheek. I would go to her parents' house, and her family was always incredibly hospitable. Later on, on our first day of secondary school, I would leave Sarah, telling her “there are too many new girls here to choose from.” I was eleven. She cried and I felt pangs of guilt, believing her lovely parents would hate me.

Maybe because I had managed to make many friends, I became too “prominent” for some kids. My mother's attempts to integrate us into British culture all felt quite natural until that point. I even joined the Cub Scouts and really enjoyed it. But when I was about ten or eleven, the atmosphere at Earl's Hall suddenly changed. Almost overnight, the color of my skin defined me to friends who had previously seen only a happy, sociable boy. When a child sees the world, he doesn't see his own face, only everything else around him. It's often all too easy for children to imagine that others don't see their faces either. The mid-eighties permanently changed this for me. Concern about AIDS had risen sharply in the public imagination. For all the government education films about the disease, its rise led to all sorts of rumors and accusations in the playground about its origins. One day, a big lad called Tony, who had been a good friend for years, suddenly turned on me.

“AIDS is your fault,” he told me. “It's people like you that caused the disease.”

At the time, there were stories going around saying how the disease originated in Africa. Not that I was African, but I wasn't white, and as far as this boy's knowledge went, that was close enough. For the first time since the incident with the dinner lady, I felt like all eyes were on me. The kids had started whispering about me behind my back. Children were scared to touch me.

“You lot have sex with monkeys,” he continued. “That's how AIDS started.”

The accusations would have been laughable, had it not been for the anger in his eyes.

“That's rubbish,” I said.

“It's true,” the boy sneered. “My dad told me.”

I tried to reason with him: this was a boy who'd been my friend, whom I'd been playing with normally just the day before. But he wasn't having any of it. “My dad told me I am not allowed to speak to you any more. Now get lost, bugger off, and don't talk to me again.”

Not long after, my friend Patrick was playing football
*
at lunch break, and I went over to join in.

“Can I play?” I asked. What usually happened is that you'd turn up wanting to take part, and those already playing would assign you to one or other team, depending on which was short of players. On this occasion everyone was ignoring me. So I went over to Patrick and asked him what was going on. He suddenly turned around and punched me hard in the stomach. I doubled over in agony, unable to breathe. The inability to draw breath totally petrified me, as I had never experienced such a sensation before.

“This game's not for Pakis!” he shouted. “Don't ask to play again.” He wandered off back to his team, leaving me confused and gasping for breath, as I used the railings to support myself from falling to the ground. Once I caught my breath again, I looked up and saw that I was truly standing alone. My friends were all playing football. It was this feeling of being completely alone, rather than the pain, that hurt the most. As I fought back the tears with all my willpower, I resolved there and then that when I grew up I would never stand alone.

It was this incident more than anything else that destroyed my childhood innocence. Standing in a playground with secret tears rolling down my cheeks, I decided that the world is like an obstacle course, to climb and sit on top of. A child is often judged in the playground by how well he can play, and a social pecking order based on the game quickly arises. After that incident I never took part in football again. The kids at primary school wouldn't let me. By the time I got to secondary school I was embarrassed that I couldn't play; the rejection rang in my ears and I didn't even try to join in. I would have to work doubly hard to climb that obstacle course without the advantage of playing football.

My parents' response was to turn the other cheek. There was a feeling among previous generations that they did not have a right to fight back, because they were visitors, immigrants.

“So what if they call you a Paki?” they'd tell me. “Just say you are a Paki and you are proud of it, and walk away.” Now, that's confusing advice for a child. Children have a very strong sense of right and wrong at that age: here was something that was manifestly unfair, yet I was being told to accept it. Even though the names and accusations were unacceptable, was I really expected just to take the abuse and walk away?

The fact that my skin color hadn't been an issue for those early years of schooling says everything about where racism originates: it is a cultural issue, a societal and familial problem that children soak up as they become more aware of the world. But while my generation began by following the stance of their parents, there was one very noticeable difference that separated those coming of age in the late eighties from earlier times: the level of violence that we faced.

What had changed, particularly in places like Southend, was the rise of the skinhead revival culture. Some skinheads adopted an exclusively white, aggressively racist line. By the mid-eighties, these violently racist skinheads were the ones who had taken over, and they dominated the football clubs.

In Southend the shin-high Doc Marten boots of the skinheads stomped with authority. Their green bomber jackets acted as their visible insignia, a uniform for hate, which was truly on the march. The casual racism of my primary school years had suddenly gained a sharper and more sinister edge. Those children began to believe that football was “no game for Pakis.” The compromise choice of earlier generations was no longer available to us; turning the other cheek was no longer an option. It was either time to retreat within the community, to keep off the streets and cower out of sight, or it was time to stand in the path of these thugs, with dignity and honor.