I’d needed for my British college application, and now I was hoping he could provide some advice. I was questioning where my life was heading and why I had come to England. Pushkar had been to college in India. He might help me find some answers.
It was early evening, cold and getting darker. As I waited for the bus to Nottingham, anxiety engulfed me. (I’d experienced the same feeling on Indian winter evenings, and many years later I self-diagnosed my condition as seasonal affective disorder.) Seeing me waiting alone on this dark and dingy evening, a motorcyclist stopped and, hearing my destination, offered to drop me directly at Pushkar’s in Nottingham, since he was going that way. I accepted the ride, but the resulting wind chill made the miserable cold much worse. My hands and ears felt ready to fall off. But as we passed through Nottinghamshire, I remembered that Sherwood Forest had been the hideout of the legendary Robin Hood, known for plundering the rich to give to the poor. The Englishmen who came later colonized, plundered and divided India. I thanked the biker when we reached my destination, and he waited until Pushkar’s door opened.
Pushkar, in his forties and balding, had an endearing smile. He welcomed me in and turned on a heater, and the warmth gradually brought my limbs back from the dead. I thanked him for the draft he had sent me and told him of my dilemma. His advice was to find a way of going to college as I worked. Being a bus driver and active in the trade union movement, he supported the Wilson government. We talked late into the night.
The Britain of the sixties was a class-conscious and rigidly stratified society. There were working-class areas in most cities, as well as posh enclaves where the rich lived. In between lived the middle class and a small number of nouveau riche who mimicked the aristocracy, hungering for entry into their ranks. Indians, like the other visible minorities, were on the outside looking in. I was an alien in every sense of the word in Britain, an interloper. But giving up and running back to Daddy just wasn’t an option.
And truth be told, I, too, was trying to rise. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was an economic immigrant, in that it was the very affluence of the West that had attracted me here. Our poverty had not pushed me out of India; though poor, we still had more than most. I had succumbed to the greed for more: an ambition to be pursued elsewhere. Economic immigration is about opting out of one’s own society. It is about not wanting to face the pain in your native country, about choosing to flee to greener pastures.
On the bus back to Derby, I found a seat beside an older white woman who slid over to make room for me, smiling. She worked as a packer in a nearby plant, she told me — the kind of person sociologists said was likely to be incorrigibly racist. She got off the bus near her work, and a middle-aged black man got on. I smiled and moved over, but he hesitated for a moment before taking the seat. He was an educated man, originally from Kenya, and we made small talk. I was curious about his hesitation in sitting next to me, and gingerly I asked. His answer was shocking. In his experience, he said, Indians were more racist than whites.
My eighteen-year-old self was taken completely aback. I had never before thought of Indians as racist. I had not yet fully understood my ancient heritage. Now I know too well that racism, colourism and casteism all have a long history in India, predating the arrival of the British. Colourism and racism arrived with the Aryan assault on India around 2500 BCE , and the Aryans married caste to colour to produce the despicable social hierarchy that still bedevils Indian society. Many in the Indian diaspora continue to perpetuate colour, caste, racial and religious divisions.
WORKING FOR BRITISH RAIL allowed me free travel, and Blackpool was one of the places l visited with colleagues from work. I had never seen the ocean, except in books or on holiday posters, and I was struck by its wondrous beauty. The rays of the early afternoon sun seemed to be dancing on the waves. It was an experience as unforgettable as seeing a beautiful woman’s naked body for the first time and hearing her soul speak to yours. I wondered about the ocean’s depth, about the beauty below the surface deep in the core, in the bowels of the earth.
Some in our group had brought swimming shorts and towels. I just took off my socks and shoes, rolled up my pants and stood knee deep in the water. There were plenty of people on the beach. By the standards of my rural Indian roots, many of them were almost nude. I felt the sting of shame as my eyes fell upon female body after female body. In all of my years, I had never seen a grown-up female woman who wasn’t fully dressed. It was a shock for an eighteen-year-old immigrant from the villages of India to be in Britain in 1965.
Life in Derby also allowed a few pleasures. There was a weekly Indian movie shown at one of the local cinemas. Almost every Indian in the area came out to see it, dressed in their Sunday best. But apart from the weekly movie and pubbing, there was little else to do in Derby besides work. I felt stalled, and my earlier restlessness returned.
14
IN GRADE SEVEN I had complained to Chachaji about my eyesight being poor, but he laughed it off, teasing that I only wanted to wear glasses in order to look smart. When I insisted, he took me to his friend, Verinder’s father Dr. Lekh Raj Sharma — a qualified denturist. I stood in front of Dr. Sharma, who held open each of my eyes in turn, looked into them and pronounced my vision twenty / twenty. I dared not disagree. Now, in Derby, I had my eyes tested by an ophthalmologist — who verified that I needed glasses. My eyesight improved and stabilized thereafter for many years.
For some time I had been thinking about taking classes at the Derby Technical College. Due to the hours required for my job at British Rail, however, part-time or evening courses were out of the question. Some employers allowed their employees one paid day off a week to study at an approved institution. I knew that wouldn’t be possible in my case, since my studies would not relate to my work. Still, I reasoned, even a day release without pay would be worthwhile if it meant I could attend school. Before I could register for classes, however, a formal letter was required from British Rail authorizing the arrangement. Despite the efforts of my foremen, no such letter was forthcoming.
I was determined to go to school, so I decided to return to Bedford to try my chances there. Chacha Chain Singh advised me against it; in Bedford I would not make the kind of money I was making in Derby, he said. Education did not matter much in relation to making money, argued others in the Derby community. Some even claimed that spending years at college or university would make it impossible for me to compete with those of my contemporaries who stayed out in the “real world,” amassing wealth.
This was an “immigrant syndrome,” as I saw it: poverty and scarcity led to an obsession with economic security to the exclusion of all other pursuits. Nonetheless, on the train to Bedford, anxiety overwhelmed my heart. My bundled quilt still hid within its embrace all my worldly goods, but I had tied it much more tightly this time so it would fit through the door of the train. I found a compartment with only an older white man sitting in it. He was reading the day’s London Times , but a few minutes into the journey he put his paper aside to ask where I was heading.
From my accent, the man could tell I had not been in England for long. He was a sociology teacher at a college in the Midlands, he told me, and he was researching the integration of immigrants into British society. How was I finding the new country? he inquired. Did I miss India?
Of course I missed India, the place that had nurtured me and was the only home I’d known until six months before. Everything in England was new, and I felt I was under scrutiny all the time. The hardest part of it was not understanding the nuances of the language — not being able to understand, for example, whether someone calling you “blue blood” was a put-down or a good-natured joke. The unease was less about the amount of money I carried in my pocket than about whether I could converse with people with ease as an equal.
The sociologist sensed tensions building up in the country with the influx of new people, he said, and I could see he was genuinely concerned about race relations. The television comedy Till Death Do Us Part had begun airing on BBC One, portraying the working-class life in a realistic way. The main character, Alf Garnett, had become a cultural icon, despite his being a racist and a reactionary. Millions of people watched the show.
When I got off at the Bedford station, I looked for a cab to no avail. So, Indian peasant style, bundle on my head, I walked home. When