Once Were Radicals (10 page)

Mum knew that the only way she could get a job was to go to the local office of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). She was afraid to go there, but on her second visit she met this
gori
with long hair tied in a pigtail and wearing a sari.

Maureen was a follower of the Brahma Kumari sect. She was married to a Malaysian Chinese man who was also a devotee. Maureen was trying to learn Hindi, and Mum offered to teach her. In return, Maureen set Mum up in a job at a local pharmaceutical factory. Mum was so stoked about getting the job that she declared Maureen her sister. So from then on, we had a
gori
aunty named Maureen.

Aunty Maureen became my first real
gori
Muslim aunty. Again, my simplistic understanding led me to think that women who wore saris were Muslim. Yet Maureen was a strange Muslim. She never ate any meat, while all our other South Asian friends (including those who were Hindu) did. Also, she was married to a man from a strange place called
Malaysia. I'd never heard of this country. What made me even more confused was that her husband was Chinese. Didn't Chinese come from China?

We used to visit Maureen quite regularly, and would participate in some of the social activities of the Brahma Kumaris. Mum taught Maureen Hindi the way she taught us—by forcing all of us to sit and watch wretched Indian and Pakistani movies. Mum also taught Maureen some special vegetarian recipes and how to sew Indian clothes.

Around this time, I suffered a dislocated shoulder bone in the playground. I was tackled by a few small boys and pushed onto a concreted footpath. My shoulder caused me enormous pain. One day, we were visiting Maureen and I complained about the pain I was in. Maureen had a friend over, an Iranian ex-Muslim lady who suggested I could overcome my pain by a special prayer called transcendental meditation (TM) which involved removing all thoughts from your mind and silently letting your mind wander. I wasn't quite sure what she meant by this. I thought it might involve worshipping things or even some kind of strange magic, and expressed my reservations in these terms. ‘Don't be is-stoopid,' Mum reassured me. So I was taken by this Iranian lady into a separate room and taught TM. This was my first major experience of a religion I recognised as being different to mine. It almost felt like I was testing a different God to see if he could do things Allah couldn't.

I tried following the instructions of Aunty Maureen's friend, clearing my mind of other thoughts and allowing it to wander. My mind certainly wandered. It kept wandering back to the same place—the soreness in my arm! It was such a simple test. All I was asking the TM God to do was
to make the pain in my arm bearable. But the TM God couldn't reduce the pain. Of course I took this as proof that Islam was a better religion than theirs. Then again, my own recitation of special Arabic prayers and verses from the Koran didn't help too much either.

Mum has always been a very devout Muslim, though her understanding of Islam is heavily influenced by her Indian upbringing. Mum places a lot of emphasis on the importance of avoiding alcohol, but she rarely wore anything resembling a hijab or other head covering when she went out anywhere.

Mum was extremely particular about her
nemaaz
. However, her employers at the pharmaceutical factory did not provide any facilities for her to perform her prayers in privacy. She therefore used to perform her prayers behind her car in the factory car park.

Mum used to complain about a co-worker who was of Turkish background, who would poke fun at Mum for saying her prayers. The co-worker also started teasing Mum when she found out that Mum avoided drinking alcohol altogether.

On one particular occasion, Mum came home late in a state of deep distress. Her co-workers had offered to take her to dinner. It was her birthday, and Mum was taken to a local club known as the ‘El-Rancho'. There, some of her co-workers grabbed hold of her hands while another held her neck to force her face upwards. The Turkish co-worker then tried to pour beer down Mum's throat. Mum shook her head violently and immediately spat the beer out and
into the face of her Turkish co-worker, who subsequently lodged a complaint against Mum with her management at work. Mum was later counselled by her managers.

Mum felt an enormous injustice had been done to her. For the first time in all her years in Australia, she felt like she had been discriminated against on the basis of her religion. She felt this to be a gross insult to her religious sentiments. What made things worse was that the injustice was done by someone from a Muslim background.

For me, this was another source of youthful disillusionment. How could a Muslim do this to another Muslim? Didn't this Turkish woman know how sinful it was to drink alcohol? Didn't she understand that she would get loads and loads of
gunna
written on her scroll of deeds by the angel sitting on her left shoulder? But perhaps Turks were not real Muslims. They'd built their own special Turkish mosques where my uncles said only Turkish people were allowed to perform their
nemaaz
. It seemed a no-brainer to a seven-year-old brain like mine that South Asians were better Muslims than Turks.

Bullying was still a part of my school life, where the law of the jungle seemed to rule. In one incident, a boy from a local Pakistani family was pushed and bashed by classmates on his way home from school. One of the kicks hit him in the head and proved fatal. It had our close-knit South Asian community distressed and terrified.

As far as my dad was concerned, the lesson of all this was clear. The only way to deal with bullies was to use my superior size and weight to my advantage. Each time I came
home after copping a beating at school, Dad and I would have the same conversation.

‘I see you have been hit again.'

‘Yes, that's what caused the black eye.'

‘Did you hit them back?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘It's against the school rules to hit people.'

‘Yes, but they hit you. Isn't that against the school rules?'

‘But they always get away with it.'

‘They get away with it because you don't hit back! I am disappointed with you.'

I once broke some bones during a rather violent game of British Bulldog 123. This game involved running from one ‘base' (in this case, the wall of the art room building) to the other base (a footpath at the other end of the playground). A certain number of boys were selected to stand between bases, their job being to tackle anyone who wasn't touching at least part of a base. The poor tacklee had to be pinned down to the ground as the tackler counted loudly to three. If the count was successfully concluded without the tacklee regaining their feet and running off, the tacklee joined the ranks of the tackler. The last man standing at a base was the winner.

BB123 was one of my favourite games, as it was one of the few sports I always seemed to win. True, my victories related more to being the tallest and chubbiest boy in the class than actual skill, but I took it as credit nonetheless. The principal banned the game for being too violent, but we disagreed. Admittedly, we didn't allow girls to play. I'm
not sure if we imposed that rule for occupational health and safety reasons or if it was just young boys honing our patriarchal skills.

There were a number of obvious flaws in this game. Firstly, our tackling exercises often accidentally involved other children who weren't part of the game. Those of us who regularly played British Bulldog regarded ourselves as the playground elite, and we frequently used our elite status to knock down anyone in our path. It was the kind of behaviour I found handy in later years during factional games in the Young Liberals.

A second problem with the game was that larger boys tended to have a slight advantage over the others. It was one I took maximum relish in. It was my chance to get revenge on all those bullies. I'd stick my fist out as I ran between bases scaring them away. Sometimes I was able to defeat three or four of them at once. Being the fatso had its advantages.

During one game, I had almost reached the footpath base when a coalition of three or four much smaller boys tackled me. Actually, I'd have to confess it was more likely me who had tackled them. Thankfully, I had made it safely onto the footpath, but the combined pressure of dragging the boys along with me and landing heavily led to my breaking a bone at the top of my left arm.

At first I didn't realise what had happened. I was quite friendly with these boys, who were also on the receiving end of bullying. Then suddenly I was in excruciating pain, and was carried away by these same boys to the sick bay near the principal's office.

An hour later, I was still in pain, screaming out: ‘I think I'm dying!' At this point, the principal decided my drama-queen antics were getting on her nerves and she called my father. She also insisted I was not to tell Dad exactly how I was injured. I promised I wouldn't tell him.

Within five minutes, Dad arrived in his Mini. He had cut short his class and demanded immediate answers. The conversation went something like this:

‘How did this happen to you, son?'

‘I can't remember.'

‘How is that possible? It only happened an hour ago.'

‘I can't say.'

‘But I'm your dad. Why can't you tell me?'

‘The principal ordered me not to tell you exactly how it happened.'

Dad looked towards the now horrified face of the principal before returning to look at me. He had reached his own conclusions about what happened, and he wasn't impressed.

‘They punched you again, didn't they? How many times do I have to tell you? When they fight you, you must fight back! You are bigger and smarter than them! I'm so disappointed in you. What sort of weakling son do I have?'

The sort of weakling son who managed to almost fend off four kids in a game of British Bulldog 123, I thought to myself.

Dad started arguing with the principal about the lack of supervision. The principal, in turn, started arguing that fighting bullying with more bullying wasn't the way to go.

‘Mr Yusuf, you must believe me. Teaching Irfan to bully the bullies is not the way to handle this problem,' the principal lectured this senior lecturer.

‘Well, you people should be supervising the playground properly! Now let me ask Irfan how many kids punched him and who was supervising.'

I could see their argument was becoming more heated, but I was more concerned with the intense pain in my left arm. This was no time for civil war between two major sources of authority in my young life, which now seemed like it was almost certainly going to be cut short. I did the only logical thing: I started crying out special Arabic prayers and verses from the Koran that Mum had taught me to say when one approaches death or is in the presence of someone dying.

‘Irfan, tell me how many boys did this to you,' Dad demanded in great alarm.

‘
Ya sin!
' I cried out in pain. ‘
Wal qur'anil hakim. Innaka laminal mursalin. Aala siratim-mustaqim …
'

By now the principal was convinced it wasn't just a bone or two of mine that had cracked.

‘Irfan, what's wrong? Why are you talking this gibberish?'

‘Miss, this isn't gibberish. It's
Ya Sin
. From the Koran. Mum taught it to me.'

‘Your mum taught you to sin?'

Matters became more confused when I blurted out the names of the boys. They were the same friendly boys who had dragged me on their shoulders to the sick bay. They were called out of their class and marched to the principal's office. They must have wondered what was happening
when they saw me writhing in pain and reciting incoherent prayers. My dad took one look at these small, somewhat scrawny kids and became livid.

‘Irfan, are you telling me a boy of your size couldn't beat these little boys in a fight?'

Faced with Dad's abandonment of his fact-finding mission I pretended to faint. Dad and the four boys carried me to his Mini, and I was driven to the local hospital for some X-rays. It turned out I had broken the top round part of the bone of my left arm. My arm was placed in a sling and I was prescribed some rather nasty-tasting painkillers which I couldn't easily swallow.