‘What's the matter?’
‘I’ve just had my weekly meeting with Frank in LE. You know the usual, busy show this week. We want a little teaser for this, trailer for that, graphics for a game show segment we want to do with a celebrity guest.’
‘Sooo nothing difficult. He hasn’t asked for a ten foot statue of a gorilla this week?’
‘Yeh, but it was weird.’
‘How weird.’
‘You know,’ I pointed to my clothes.
His eyebrows vanished behind his floppy fringe, ‘cause this is such an old story that all men had hair resting on their shoulders and a great big fringe that fell over one side of the face. That old you say. Well, old enough for me to tell you about it and laugh.
‘He didn’t say anything untowards, I hope?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘Riiiight. I can tell you’re struggling to tell me what happened, let’s go and get a cup of coffee.’
He walked toward me. All six feet two inches tall, wound up like a spring. His shoulders hunched up to his ears, his ultramarine eyes simmering.
We walked side by side along the narrow corridor towards the canteen.
The place was busy, but not too frantic. I glanced at the clock, half an hour before lunch break when the studios stop and every one descends on the canteen for a well deserved rest from the morning's work.
He pointed to a table. I didn’t look odd here. Women in Victorian costumes, a tall, obese man dressed in green leggings and matching leotard, his companion in a silver jumpsuit with plastic tubes attached to his head. A group of young girls made up to look like elfs filed in with a stern woman in a royal blue trouser suit.
He placed the milky coffee in front of me and nudged the sugar bowl towards me.
I stirred the sugar slowly. How am I going to explain this?
When Alex had told Frank I was his new assistant, the first question he’d asked was.
‘Do you know the English alphabet?’
My jaw had tightened, and I’d clenched my hands into a fist. How many times did I hear that, or something similar. Do you know of place names in Europe? Are you allowed to work late? Does your husband mind? Like he had a say in what I do or when I get home.
Alex cleared his throat.
‘Yeh, the meeting, so we had our usual conversation, and then it was my turn for Frank to tell me what he wanted, and he started to explain everything to me in sloooow moootion. I mean reeeally slowly. Gesticulating with his arms and he asked me to repeat what he’d said. I was writing up my notes, and it didn’t even register. The whole room went quiet, and he repeated it louder, and that’s when I thought, shit it’s my saree. He thinks I don’t understand English because of this.’ I pointed at myself again. ‘God, I hate it. I really do. Why is it so difficult to see me as a British Indian? I mean I don’t even have an accent.’
I thought I’d write about an incident that actually happened to me, an anecdotal retelling. I’ve taken liberties obviously, changed names. But it was real, and it made me feel like an alien, like I’d suddenly grown another head, or my mask had slipped and revealed my true likeness. What annoys me is that it’s still happening. Come on people, just because someone wears clothes they identify with, whether it's a saree, salwar kameez, dhoti, sarong, lungi, kitenge, dashiki, kimono, kilt, doesn’t mean they can’t speak English or understand you. Would you ask a Scotsman, ‘Do you speak English?’
It's just a piece of clothing to identify with my heritage, and my skin is a layer that protects my vital organs. The combination of both doesn’t make me any different from you.
My identity is both British and Indian because I think of myself as British. I belong to that group who were happy in East Africa, living a peaceful, prosperous life until East Africa decided it too wanted independence from the British. And then we were looked upon as Britishers. We worked in the civil service; we managed the business; we spoke the Queen’s English; many of us came to study in England and went back to help the country of our birth. So we thought let's go to the motherland, the land of Queen Elizabeth and job security. Post-war Britain was asking for doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers and all the other jobs needed in manufacturing.
Indian because I follow the culture, the family values, the religion from that part of the world. Because members of my family were born in India, some before India’s partition.
So some days you see me and I’m dressed just like everyone else and at other times, I dress in a saree, one of my favourite outfits to wear when I go to the temple, or on a hot summer’s day, or a dinner. Or just for the heck of it. And that day was just for the heck of it. Or I was going out straight from work.
So take a look at the photos of me and my dual identity. The first is a collection of photos from the UK Asian Film Festival, which ran as a hybrid festival from the 26th of May until the 6th of June this year. I dressed in a saree for every event. I like wearing them so much; it makes me feel elegant and we haven’t been out and about for ages to actually wear one. My love of sarees stems from the fancy dress competition at the summer fetes in Coventry, where I grew up. I usually dressed up as Indian Princess, in a saree that my mum would wrap around me, laden with Indian jewellery. And often I would get a prize or an honourable mention. I loved the feeling of being seen as someone special, someone different.
The second set of photos is of me with friends, running workshops or taking part in panel discussions when I'm usually dressed in my work wear. If you pop over to my YouTube channel, I’m mostly in western clothes, but there is a reading dressed in my chaniya choli with abla work, a nod to my Gujarati heritage.
I was speaking with Natasha from South Asian Writers, who went into a secondary school this week to talk about India’s partition and South Asian contribution. None of the children knew of this important part of British history, which is a shame. When I was younger, we still had maps on the wall of the empire to tell me and other pupils why the classroom had black, brown children in it. I’m really excited about The Partition Education Group and South Asian Heritage Month raising this important piece of our history.
It’s important to emphasize that people of colour are in Britain because many of us consider the UK as our motherland, many countries around the world belonged to the British Empire and if Frank, who'd grown up knowing of the empire, can behave like that. So can all the generations after him.
We should teach British Empire in the National Curriculum, so every brown kid feels they belong. I am sensing a change, a worldwide change. BLM has helped, but there’s still a long way to go. Watch out for information on the South Asian Heritage Month events calendar running from July 17 - Aug 17, where there will be opportunities to tell your stories for a project I am working on, not just about empire and partition but about the twice migrants, who held Citizenship of United Kingdom and Colonies, these were the people who were Commonwealth Citizens as mentioned in the British Nationality Act 1948. But the ‘60s and ‘70s brought on changes and policy makers restricted non-white New Commonwealth Citizens, therefore so many East African Asian arrived in the early ‘70s. Changes to the law meant that they didn’t have an automatic right to come back and forth from East Africa, to study, to shop or just to holiday, and they had to make a choice.
Self publishing
I’m waiting for my standalone inspired by Jane Eyre to come back from my lovely editor Shaylin Gandhi
I’ve already come up with book cover designs, which should be easy. I started my career as a Graphic Designer, but it’s hard. Do I style my covers like everyone else's, a wash of the same images and similar typefaces or do I do something different. The trouble is I want to always go for something different. Something that stands out and then I get feedback.
Your covers don’t tell me what is inside the book.
Not sure I like the illustrations, the typeface.
Why don’t you find an illustrator?
Why haven’t you used a couple?
Can you add a brighter colour?
So watch out for my new covers for My Heart Sings Your Song and Where Have We Come, out soon. As for the standalone, I was going to use a lovely cover designed by Mita Gohel, but I’m working on something that will be different, but fits with new book cover trends.
And then it’s onto the formatting process, book interior design, conversion for ebook platforms and print ready file.
I’m publishing exclusively through KDP as an ebook and wider with D2D three months later, and this time I’ll publish both the ebook and paperback at the same time. Not sure about the marketing, still learning the ropes on that one. Sometimes I wish that I could just concentrate on my writing and nothing else. But it is a learning process and the fact that I own the complete process is very satisfying.
Sign up to my newsletter for when it will be published and also an exclusive scene from Where Have We Come that I will send to you as a pdf.