B005OWFTDW EBOK (31 page)

Sophie was one of the girls who lived in my residence hall. She had a face full of freckles and a mop of chestnut hair that fell in ringlets around her face. She also had a fearsome dope habit. Sophie was pale-skinned and she hid from direct sunlight by wearing long shapeless jumpers, obscuring her face behind fat clouds of cannabis smoke. She was only nineteen, but she seemed so much more experienced than I was; her bloodshot eyes and Charles Bukowski novels hinted at a world-weariness I found incredibly alluring. The most appealing thing about Sophie was that she didn’t drink. I discovered this early in the first term when I was sitting in a pub with some other students, all of whom were guzzling lager. Sophie was drinking orange juice. ‘How come you’re not drinking?’ I asked. ‘It just doesn’t agree with me,’ she said. It was then that I knew she was the girl for me. ‘It doesn’t agree with me either,’ I said with delight. Our shared disagreement with alcohol was, I hoped, a sign for Sophie that we had so much else in common.

During those first few months I spent many hours in Sophie’s bedroom. She would be huddled under the blanket, an ethnic tapestry on the wall and the Velvet Underground on her cassette player. I would sit on the edge of the bed, staring at her through plumes of smoke, secretly wondering what sort of boy was allowed to get into bed with her. The answer to that question, I later found out, was a boy called Robert, who had multiple piercings, a bristle of a haircut and Sophie’s dope habit. In evenings at the pub I would sit with Sophie and Robert, chatting away amiably, and then at the end of the evening I would return to my room and listen to my Tracy Chapman CD while Sophie and Robert retired to her room to have noisy sex. Robert wasn’t the only boy I heard Sophie having sex with; as the weeks of that first term dragged on, other boys – some with smaller tattoos, some with more piercings – would wind their way back to Sophie’s room and I would have to increase the volume on my CD player and hope that Tracy’s plaintive voice would drown out the ecstatic cries from down the corridor. In the end, it wasn’t Sophie’s prodigious promiscuity that convinced me we did not have a future; it was the time I saw her splayed on the floor of the communal kitchen, passed out in a puddle of lager. My love for Sophie was, it turned out, as short-lived as her tryst with teetotalism.

Not drinking was disastrous for my love life because most sexual encounters seemed to demand that both parties were sufficiently inebriated to fall into bed with each other. While I was languishing in a two-decade-long dry spell, my friend Tariq was having much better luck. Tariq was tall, with long flowing hair and soulful brown eyes. He was a British Pakistani like me but he came from money – his father owned restaurants in Birmingham – and he treated Islam more as a buffet than a set menu. The only time he stopped drinking was for Ramadan. Tariq was an astonishingly successful ladies’ man and his technique for sleeping with girls was ruthlessly simple: he pretended to care. It did not matter if it was apartheid, animal rights, student loans or Palestine; there wasn’t a fashionable cause that Tariq did not lustily support. ‘These white girls will fuck a Paki and tell themselves they’re doing it for political reasons,’ he would laugh. ‘And if you throw in a mention of the Raj they’ll do it on the first night.’ Tariq recruited his girls carefully – he’d spend lunchtimes at tedious student union meetings, casting his languid gaze in search of the prettiest girl in the room, and he would then make it his business to win her attention by delivering an impassioned speech which invariably included a quote from Khalil Gibran or Gandhi. I would look at the rapt expressions on the faces of the white girls and I could practically hear their knickers sliding to their ankles. It was more than a decade after we had both left university when I ran into him again, in Birmingham outside a cricket ground amid a sea of Pakistan supporters. His hair was shorn and his face appeared heavier; his eyes had lost their old humour. He told me that despite all his university frolics there was no Verity or Lily in his life; my old friend had returned to Birmingham and married a Pakistani solicitor with whom he had three children. ‘I had my fun, mate,’ he told me. ‘It was time to grow up.’ He explained that he had been seeing a white girl for whom he had begun to develop something that threatened to turn into love, but he had been unwilling to go any further. ‘Take my advice – have your fun with the white girls and then marry someone from back home,’ he said to me. ‘You know what you’re getting from them.’

I
n the years since graduating I’d had a modest succession of relationships and at least some of the modesty was through choice. I avoided any white girl who had ‘a thing for Asian men’ as I might someone with a violently communicable disease. When friends tried to set me up with single Asian girls I would berate them. ‘Stop trying to put me in a box,’ I would say. ‘Is my colour all you see about me?’ They soon stopped suggesting any friends at all. With every girl I dated, I did so believing we shared something in common: there was the girl who liked the same music as I did, the girl who worked for the same employer, the girl who lived in the same part of London. In the end, every relationship died, in part because of how I was raised. Since leaving home at eighteen I had become, outwardly at least, a thoroughly integrated British Pakistani whose friends and work colleagues were overwhelmingly white. And yet when it came to love and marriage I could not discard the advice of parents who had raised me to believe that the only thing a man and woman need to have in common for marriage is a shared race and religion. I could dismiss it intellectually, but intuitively it made sense. How could I really be true to myself with someone who did not understand the maddening peculiarities that came with being a British Pakistani Muslim? I also did not want to end up with a white girl because I worried about the look of sadness on my mother’s face when she realized that her new daughter-in-law would not be able to speak to her in Urdu. I fretted about the identity confusion inherent in having mixed-race children. There was another, even less well-thought-out, reason for why I ultimately knew I would not marry a white girl: I did not want to be a cliché. I loved nothing more than to luxuriate in moral superiority. I was not going to sell out my tribe. I was not some self-hating Asian who believed that validation had to have fair skin and blonde hair. There was something disgustingly needy, I felt, about all those bourgeois Asians who ended up marrying white women. That would not be happening to me – I was old school. I was also single.

Trying to find a British Pakistani woman with whom I had something in common was never going to be easy. My father had died from a heart attack three days before my twenty-fourth birthday and my mother was ill-qualified to find Miss Right. I would not have trusted her to pick out a sweater, much less a wife. Call it a sixth sense, but something told me that my mother was keen to see me married. There were the tiny clues: the floods of tears and hysterical wailing that greeted me whenever I returned home; the refusal to leave the house because ‘How can I explain why I have failed as a mother?’; the strange phone calls that came at all hours which my mother would answer by giving cryptic responses such as ‘Thirty-five’, ‘He has a flat in London’ and ‘Yes, he still has his own hair’. These phone conversations led nowhere and, in the face of my mother’s subtle suggestions, I began to delve into matrimonial websites.

T
he Internet was where many other single Asians were retreating in their search for someone with whom they had something in common. I clicked on one of the more popular sites, registered and uploaded a photograph. Once logged in, I began to trawl for a potential bride. In my everyday life I knew hardly any other Pakistanis, but online I was deluged with choices. Each entry was accompanied by a postage-stamp-sized photograph and a brief paragraph in which the woman invariably mentioned how hard it was to reduce her personality to a few sentences before revealing that, in fact, a few sentences were more than ample to describe her job in local government and her fondness for R&B. There were suggested ways to filter possible candidates on the basis of star sign, monthly salary, profession and even skin tone, but not being a superficial vulgarian with a fondness for astrology meant this was no help at all. The website, I concluded, was offering a
twenty-first-century
method of finding partners that my parents would approve. I began to fantasize about a website where, alongside members’ photographs, one could upload photographs of book, music and film collections, where one could search for someone based on a shared love of eighties power ballads and late-period Philip Roth.

But, sadly, the websites did not offer such search functions. Instead they threw up interminable pages of women who all wanted to tell prospective partners that they enjoyed the same dreary list of interests – travelling, keep-fit and socializing – while reassuring them that they were as happy curled up with a good book. Everyone seemed to want someone who was ambitious, did not take himself too seriously and did not play games. I signed off from the website and began actively to try to meet other British Pakistanis. I accepted invitations to book events and parties in search of an eligible woman. By now most of my friends were married or in serious relationships; it felt like time was running out.

I
went on a succession of dates.

One woman was an observant Muslim who was disgusted by my lax attitude towards fasting and prayer. Another was appalled by how traditional I was in not drinking. ‘So let me get this right,’ she said, circling the rim of her wine glass with her index finger. ‘You’ve never tasted alcohol in your life?’

‘That’s right,’ I told her. She looked at me like I was a living example of a species long believed extinct. ‘So do you like old Indian films?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

‘I did when I was young, but who watches that shit any more?’ she said, lighting a cigarette, ‘I mean, all the best cinema is coming out of Korea right now.’

She was a beautiful girl with a heart-shaped face and indecently full lips, but every time she opened her mouth she became less attractive. ‘I don’t have anything in common with you,’ I remember thinking. ‘All we share is a skin colour.’ The things that connected me to my heritage – my mother tongue, eighties Indian films, Asian food, a working-class preoccupation with money – failed to find resonance in this girl or in any of the other Pakistani girls I met. I wanted to believe I had more in common with them than I did, perhaps because I wanted to believe I was more Pakistani than I was.

By this stage, my family was engulfed in a fog of gloom. ‘Some people never get married,’ my mother said, staring out of the window with a look of disappointment.

‘I
want
to get married,’ I told her. ‘But it’s not easy meeting the right girl, someone I have something in common with.’ My failure to find anyone who was British Pakistani was leading me finally to countenance what had always been impossible. ‘Maybe she doesn’t need to be Pakistani,’ I said to my mum, releasing the kite to see if it would catch the wind or be ripped to shreds.

‘You’re getting old,’ she said. ‘You don’t have time to waste. You need to get on the last train before it leaves without you.’

I
t was a warm Sunday afternoon in the first weekend of June and the train was about to leave. I leapt out of the taxi and ran, the wheels of my rollercase rattling along the platform. The whistle screamed and I boarded the train as it slowly pulled out of Hereford station. I turned to find the nearest spare seat in the carriage and that was when I first noticed her. She had wild green eyes and
golden-blonde
hair and she was reading a copy of
Mary Barton
. I was returning to London from the Hay-on-Wye book festival and, from the fabric bag at her side, I knew she too had been at the festival. ‘She is beautiful and she likes books,’ I remember thinking. I stared intently at the front page of my newspaper and pretended to read it while all the time stealing glances at the girl and thinking, ‘Who gets to be with someone as beautiful as you?’ She was not just out of my league – she looked like she had descended from another universe.

In any other situation I never would have had the confidence to talk to her, but somehow that day I stumbled upon a hidden stash of courage. I still don’t know where I found my voice that afternoon and, given the way it all turned out, I cannot help but speculate how tragically different my life would have been had I failed to strike up a conversation. That day the wind was behind me; something was saying to me that this was one of those times when the universe hands you a gift and all you need is the confidence to take it.

I looked at her again. I took a deep breath, forced my mouth into a smile and said, ‘Hello.’ She looked up from her book, smiled and said, ‘Hello.’ We started talking and I learned the following about her: that she lived in London; that she had a buttery smile that spread easily across her face; that she was learning Hindi, having spent time in India; that she was funny and smart and entertaining; that she was single.

The train rumbled towards London and I knew that if I let this opportunity pass I would spend years wallowing in regrets. ‘I’d like to see you again,’ I said, with a boldness that surprised me. ‘Here’s my number, I won’t take yours – that way it’s up to you if we meet again.’

I told myself that I was not really dating her. Yes, we had met the following Saturday and, true, we had gone to see films and concerts and had meals in those first few weeks, but she could not be my girlfriend – because she was white and any relationship with a white girl was always going to be doomed. Except that when I was with her the fear of being a cliché evaporated in the heat of lived intimacy. ‘Why do you preclude the possibility that I could make you happy?’ she asked me one afternoon after I had spent some time bemoaning how much I hated being single. We were sitting in a park in east London, watching a band we both loved. ‘We don’t really do happy in my culture,’ I told her. ‘We try to find reasons to be miserable.’ It was true, but it was not an answer. I had grown up being told that white girls only brought misery and so being with a white girl was unimaginable. Yet now I was with someone who was making me happier than I had ever been and the only thing unimaginable was not being with her.