That’s what England felt like. Wrenched from the comfort of our rock, our heads were suddenly turned inside out. Of course, our two years in London were undoubtedly most necessary, for this period provided us with the time and space we needed to properly say our good-byes to Mummy and the Napean Sea Road before moving on with life. Mehtab correctly calls it our Period of Mourning. And Southall—not India but also not yet Europe—I suspect was the ideal holding tank as we became acclimatized to our new circumstances. But such is the benefit of hindsight. At the time it seemed as if we had wandered into hell. We were lost. Maybe even a little mad.
* * *
It was Uncle Sami, my mother’s youngest brother, who picked us up at Heathrow Airport. I sat in the van’s backseat, sandwiched between Auntie and my newly discovered cousin, Aziza. My London-born cousin was my age, but did not look at me, or talk, just put on Walkman earphones and beat her thigh to crashing dance music as she looked out the window.
“Southall very good neighborhood,” Uncle Sami yelled from the front. “All the Indian shops, right at your fingertips. Best Asian shopping in all England. And I’ve found you a house, just around the corner from us. Very big. Six rooms. Needs a bit of work. But not to worry. Landlord said he would have everything tip-top.”
Aziza was unlike any of the girls I had known in Bombay. There was nothing simpering or coquettish about her, and I stole glances at her from the corner of my eye. She wore, under her leather jacket, sexy things, ripped lace and a black leotard. She sent off heat, too, a powerful mix of teenage body odor and patchouli oil, and made us all jump to attention every time she cracked her gum like pistol shots.
“Just two more roundabouts,” Uncle Sami said, as we once again screeched around a traffic circle on the Hayes Road. And as we leaned around the corner, I felt my cousin’s hot knee push back against my thigh, and instantly a cricket bat was poking up through my pants. But my hawkeyed auntie seemed to read my thoughts, for she had a face on like a mouthful of lemons, and she leaned against me on the other side.
“Better Sami had stayed in India,” she spat in my ear. “That girl. So young and already a dirty toilet seat.”
“Shush, Auntie.”
“Don’t shush me! You stay away from her. You hear? She only make trouble.”
Southall was the unofficial headquarters of Britain’s Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi community, a flatland in the armpit of Heathrow Airport, its Broadway High Street a glittering string of Bombay jewelers, Calcutta cash-and-carries, and Balti curry houses. It was terribly disorienting, this familiar noise under the gray skies of England. A sprawl of semidetached houses split into flats crowded the surrounding residential streets, and you could always tell who were the latest arrivals from Mother India by the dingy sheets hung across the leaky windows. And at night the sulfuric orbs of Southall’s streetlamps glowed eerily through the evening fog, a permanent wetness that moved in from the marshes of Heathrow Airport, heavy with the smells of curry and diesel.
When we arrived, a few streets of Southall were also in the throes of gentrification, worked over by ambitious second-generation immigrants. Papa called them the “Anglo Peacocks,” and their renovated white stucco houses rather looked as if they had been pumped up on steroids, massive extensions front and back rippling with mock-Tudor windows, satellite dishes, and glass conservatories. A secondhand Jag or Range Rover often straddled these crescent driveways.
Mummy’s relatives had lived in Southall for thirty years, and they secured for us a large stucco house, just two streets over from the Broadway High Street. The house belonged to a Pakistani general, a bolt-hole the absentee landlord rented out while awaiting the day he might have to flee his country in a hurry. The house—which we quickly nicknamed the General’s Hole—desperately wanted to be one of the grander Anglo Peacock homes, but failed to live up to its own ambition. It was squat and ugly, narrow in the front, but stretching back almost an entire block to a small garden where a rusted barbecue and a broken fence finished off the property. A sickly chestnut tree stood on the buckled street in front, and when we moved in, there was litter out front and litter out back. And I recall that the house was always filtered through gloomy light, hunkering as it was in the shadows of a local water tower, the rooms inside covered in tatty linoleum or threadbare rugs. Bits of glass-and-chrome furniture and wobbly lamps did little to cheer the place up.
That house was never home and I forever associate it with the constant din of a prison: the clanking radiators, the alarming shuddering of pipes throughout the house whenever a tap was turned on, the constant creaking and cracking of floorboards and glass. And every room soaked in a chilly damp.
Papa was obsessed with finding a new business he could build in England, only to abandon the idea a few weeks later when another bit of foolishness caught his attention. He imagined himself an import-exporter of firecrackers and party favors; then a wholesaler of copper kitchenware made in Uttar Pradesh; this was followed by an enthusiasm to sell frozen bhelpuri to the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain.
Papa’s final entrepreneurial brainstorm, however, came to him as he was sitting in the bath with Auntie’s shower cap clapped over his head, his torso, like a hirsute iceberg, thrusting up from the milky-white water. A mug of his favorite tea spiked with garam masala stood at his elbow and his face was running with sweat.
“We must do research, Hassan. Research.”
I sat perched on the laundry hamper, watching Papa as he feverishly washed his feet.
“On what, Papa?”
“On what? On new business. . . . Mehtab! Come here! Come. The back.”
Mehtab came in from the bedroom and sat dutifully on the rim of the bath as Papa leaned forward and looked over his shoulder. “The left,” he said. “Under the shoulder blade. No. No. Yaar. That one.”
Papa was cursed, ever since he was a teenager, with an unattractive rash of blackheads, pimples, and boils across the broad expanse of his hairy back, and while Mummy was alive, the duty of popping the worst offenders fell on her.
“Squeeze,” he yelled at Mehtab. “Squeeze.”
Papa scrunched up his face, Mehtab pinching the boil hard between her painted nails, the two of them yelping with surprise when the offending item suddenly exploded.
Papa craned his head around to get a look at the proffered tissue.
“Lots come out, yaar?”
“But what business, Papa?”
“I am thinking sauces. Hot sauces.”
From that moment on, the talk was of Madras sauces and nothing else. “Watch how I do this, Hassan,” Papa exclaimed over the Broadway High Street’s traffic. “Before you start business, always find out about competition. Nah? Market research.”
The Shahee Supermarket was the prince of all Southall’s shops. Owned by a wealthy Hindu family from East Africa, it took up the entire ground floor of a 1970s office tower at the end of the Broadway High Street. Sometimes the store dropped a half floor down into the basement, to frozen mint peas and chapatis, and sometimes it rose three steps to a reinforced platform that displayed nothing but five-kilo bags of broken basmati. Every inch of the shop was taken with floor-to-ceiling shelves of tins and sacks and boxes of what have you, and it was here displaced Indians like us bought aromatic reminiscences of home. Bags of butter beans and bottles of Thums Up; tins of coconut cream and pomegranate syrup; and colorful packets of sandalwood incense for our “pleasure and prayer.”
“And what’s this?” Papa demanded, pointing at a jar.
“Patak’s Madras Curry Paste, sir.”
“And this?”