‘Why did you leave India, Dad?’ I asked, more in hope than expectation.
‘To better myself. For a better life for you,’ he replied.
‘But you didn’t even know you were going to have a family when you left.’
‘We didn’t ask so many questions in those days, son.’ He sipped his tea. ‘Life was much easier then. Why are you asking all these questions?’
‘It’s difficult to explain, Dad. I feel like something is missing in my life. A reason for being.’ I looked at him.
‘If you think something is missing, then you should try and find it.’ He finished his tea and looked straight at me. ‘Son … ’
I leaned in. I could sense from the pregnancy of the pause that he was about to offer some insight, some revelation.
‘Did you sign those documents?’
I should explain that my dad runs a property business and is forever sending me documents to sign. Property businesses are built not of bricks and mortar but on documents, battalions, legions, armies of papers, all officially sanctioned and in my dad’s case, invariably requiring my signature. I never seem to manage to sign them correctly or at the right time. As I searched high and low for this latest clutch, I realised that they weren’t the only thing missing. I was thirty-seven years old, the same age my father was when I was born, and I had no idea who I was. My father left the country of his birth and travelled halfway around the planet to set up a new life. What had I done with my life? Maybe the hippies were onto something. Perhaps it was time to start looking for myself, to start making sense of my upbringing, to make sense of me.
‘Dad, I’ve got a plan. I’m going to India.’
‘Good.’ He was always happy when I travelled. ‘Work or pleasure?’
‘I’m going to travel to India to find myself.’ I felt triumphant. It was clear what I had to do.
‘Find yourself?’ he asked. ‘Where did you lose yourself?’ He laughed, heartily and happily.
It was time to go home.
Wherever home might be.
What You Need To Know About My Dad:
I knew that my father would want me to make the journey. He had always been obsessed with travel, his feet never stopped itching. This desire to travel was perhaps foreshadowed in his first job. When he was twenty-four he left Ferozepure, the town of his birth in Punjab, to become a customs officer in Delhi. It was 1959, ten years before I was born. He had trained for a short while in Amritsar, the spiritual capital of the Sikh religion. For a young, single man the bright lights of the big city couldn’t have been more different from the almost medieval squalor of Ferozepure. In Delhi he spent five years living the quintessential bachelor life with his best friend, a man we have come to know as Kapoor Uncle. But Delhi was not the real destination; it was but a stop on the way. America beckoned my father. Her silky whispers travelled halfway across the world to entice him. His plan was to come to London, make some money, research opportunities in America and then take himself over there, to a brave new world.
One absolutely charming thing about my father is that if you ask him where he intended to settle in the States, he has absolutely no idea. His thesis was simple: he was going there to make money; it was thought at that time (and borne out) that there was more money to be made in America than anywhere else, that dreams came true, and my father had dreams. He was so brave to travel halfway across the world not knowing where he’d end up and with no one there to help him.
My father met my mother shortly before they got married. When I say ‘shortly’ I mean about twenty minutes or so before the ceremony itself. That was the beauty of the arranged marriage. My mother was part of the East African diaspora. My grandfather had worked on the railways in India and had been taken over to Nairobi by the British to build more railways. That’s what the British gave their colonies: railways and paperwork. My mum, her two sisters and her brother were brought up as Kenyan Indians. My maternal grandmother died when she was very young; my mother was raised by her elder sister, Malkit, my Massi.
My father is six foot two, my mother is five foot two: that is the least of their differences. They are testament to the success of the arranged marriage system. On paper they have very little in common, no shared interests – she was working-class immigrant Indian, my father was lower middle class from the heart of the Punjab – yet somehow, forty or so years later, they are still very much together. My dad never laughs as much as when my mum is telling a story. His eyes fill with tears and he coughs and splutters with joy.
Soon after their marriage, midway through the swinging sixties, my parents made their way to London, where my mum had family. We lived with my Malkit Massi. I say we, although neither my elder brother Raj, myself nor Sanjeev were around. My mother fell pregnant with Raj in 1965, which is what stopped my father’s plans for his stateside domination. Raj was born shortly after England lifted the World Cup and I followed three years later. The following year Sanjeev popped out and my mother found herself in a house full of men.
This is where the story becomes interesting. I believe that if we had stayed in London and become another of those Hounslow Indian families, we would have all led fairly unremarkable lives. But my father had discovered Scotland after a stint training to be a teacher in Dundee, which gave him a plan B for when he’d had enough of my mum’s family, which he most certainly had by 1972. We piled into our spearmint green Vauxhall Viva and drove the eight hours to Glasgow. I remember with vivid clarity driving down the Great Western Road for the very first time. It was predictably wet but the night was twinkling.
That was my father’s story. So it was no surprise that he liked the idea of his son travelling around India. I wanted to travel the country on my own and discover it for myself, starting at the southernmost tip and travelling north via some prominent and pertinent places. I would cook in each city, town or village and discover a little of India and hopefully a lot of myself. I would complete my journey in Ferozepure at my grandfather’s house, the place of my father’s birth.
My father seemed equally excited about my journey. Having travelled extensively round India, he spoke unpunctuated about all the possible places I could go, all the sights I might see, all the people I might meet. He regaled me with stories of Ladakh, villages on the Pakistan border he once visited as a child, a house he had seen in a magazine once, set on a clifftop near Bombay.
‘Dad, calm down,’ I said. ‘It’s still very much in the early stages.’
‘You have to go to Kashmir. You have to.’ He was insistent. ‘I have a friend in Simla, he will be more than happy to look after you. And Manore Uncle will sort your flights and trains.’ He was planning my entire trip in his head.
‘You seem happy that I’m going,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
He was happy.
Very happy. As if he was going himself.
And maybe he was.
What You Need To Know About My Mum:
My mother is an amazing cook. I have rarely tasted Punjabi food better than that lovingly prepared by my mum. So good is my mother’s food that I have stopped cooking Indian food myself, knowing that I will never come close to her standard. My lamb curry will never have that melt-in-the-mouth consistency, the sauce will never be as well spiced and rich, my potatoes never as floury and soft. My daal will be bereft of that buttery richness, that earthy appeal that warms you from inside. My parathas will never be as flaky and delicious and comforting.
Not only did she cook, clean and prepare four men (my father and her three sons) for the world, she also worked. And how she worked. Our wee newspaper shop on Sinclair Drive in the Southside of Glasgow was like a jail for my mother. While she counted down the days of her sentence, my brothers and I learnt Latin and literature,