Worlds Apart (7 page)

He could see the desperation on my face. He went quiet for a moment then asked me to wait there and disappeared through one of the doors.

I stood still and gathered my thoughts, not quite
believing I was here. Only yesterday I was feeling ecstatic about Mum letting me go to Bristol. A part of me waited for the doubt to kick in, but it didn’t. This was where I wanted to be and I wasn’t leaving until I gave it my best shot.

The man suddenly came out of a different door and waved me in. I followed him inside where three tutors were sat having a drink. They were probably in the middle of enjoying their end-of-year get-together and I was disturbing them, I thought guiltily.

Quickly, I opened my portfolio and ran through my work. (I had a two o’clock train to catch, which would get me back in time to open the shop.) The interview was mainly made up of questions on why I’d come here today. I told them the truth: from the moment that I’d heard Saint Martins being mentioned just twenty-four hours ago in my college canteen, to getting on the train this morning and being here. They flicked through my pieces of work then said I would get a letter from them in the morning.

I nodded my head, my only concern now being catching the train back to Manchester.

That night I tossed and turned in bed at the day’s events, then rose early and hovered around the front door of the house, waiting for the postman. Yesterday’s events felt surreal now. Only the letter would tell me if it had really happened.

The post eventually fell on the mat.

I stared at the white envelope addressed to me with a Central Saint Martins stamp on the front.

I opened it and smiled uncontrollably as I read the words: Accepted at the college this September.

I
LEFT HOME
with two carrier bags and a set of tasbih prayer beads. Perhaps it was out of habit or the ritual I was brought up with from my mosque days, but somehow my day didn’t feel right without repeating a line from the Koran over each of the hundred beads and saying a prayer.

Waking up for the first time in the Tooting Broadway halls of residence felt strange. I’d never been away from home before, not even on sleepovers as a kid. I couldn’t hear my mum calling from the kitchen; I didn’t have to think about cutting the salad before the shop opened, or cooking Dad’s dinner.

Judging from the corridor noise of students on their way to college, I knew I had overslept.

I decided to wear a pink flowery top, velvet jacket, and maroon lipstick, with a range of bright eyeshadow colours making my eyes look like butterflies on my first day of college. Most of my clothes were bright and silky with bold flowers. I still wore my gold bangles that weighed heavy, made marks on my wrist and jingled all the time. I also wore a gold necklace with red and green stones and dangly Indian-style earrings.

The first thing that struck me as I walked down Tooting High Street was the number of Afro-Caribbeans. I’d never seen so many in my life.

The train station was crowded by my standards, and after talking to the ticket officer I bought a weekly travel pass and headed down the escalator for the train.

People on the train didn’t speak and the whole carriage was silent – very strange. I sat next to a woman and started talking. She looked down at her bags, making sure they were still there, and then got off at the next stop. How weird, I thought, thinking back to my bus journeys in Manchester where everyone talked. Never mind, once they see me on the train a few times we will get chatting. For some reason, I assumed I would see the same people on the train in the same carriage the next day, as I did on the bus in Manchester.

When I arrived at college I got another surprise: the students didn’t look at all as I expected. Less
conventional than Manchester, they didn’t seem to wear high-street fashion. Instead, they wore weird clothes, listened to strange music, and a lot of them smoked. Girls looked unfeminine with their scruffy jeans and baggy jumpers, and wearing no make-up, not even eyeliner. I wondered what they thought of me in my conventional jeans and flat, comfortable shoes.

Living at the halls became an issue. I longed to cook chapattis and hot curry, which the kitchen didn’t facilitate. Students would get drunk, be sick, then spend their weekend in bed. Perhaps they took this freedom and independence for granted, but to me it was a waste of life.

Now I didn’t have the kebab shop in the evenings and weekends, I was going mad with boredom. I tried to find a job in a fashionable clothes shop in Covent Garden but they didn’t seem impressed with my kebab shop CV. Working in another kebab shop would be like taking a step back.

I moved out of the halls after the first term into a bedsit in Wood Green. It was a dreary place, but felt more like living in society than the isolated student hub of the halls. I couldn’t stand being surrounded by students any more. I wanted to meet different people. I felt removed from life.

The fear of being financially deprived always played
at the back of my mind. I remember the jumble-sale clothes Mum made me wear to school, and sometimes having to leave home in the morning without breakfast because there was no food in the fridge. Thankfully, in those days the government supplied milk for kids at schools. Secondary school was worse, when my parents started up their businesses. I had to wear the same uniform every year, while others, whose parents didn’t work, received government allowances for new ones each year. I remember once being laughed at by a girl because I had a big hole in my shoe – my parents couldn’t afford new ones.

In the first year of college, we were left to experiment freely on art projects to bring out our individual styles. Mine was bright colours. It didn’t matter what the brief was or materials supplied, I just went for bright colours. The teachers concluded it was because of my background, no matter how much I insisted it was my personal style.

A few months in, I learnt how prestigious the art college was and how many famous people had previously attended. Most of the students in my year either had parents who were big in the art world or came from wealthy overseas families. I tried not to let it get to me, but it was difficult to connect with people who had no idea what it was like to live on a budget
in a bedsit and not be able to discuss art careers with their family.

However, the teachers seemed to notice. Andrew, the head of our year, was a handsome, softly spoken man who reminded me of my dad in his younger years. He told me I had a disadvantaged background compared to most students and if I wanted to stay ahead, I would have to learn the new Apple computer programmes that had just come in. It was a new technology and everyone was in the same boat. The college had just set up a computer room with a handful of these new computers. As expected, they were in high demand and difficult to get on.

Andrew suggested I talk to Robert, the man with the amazing curling moustache, who I had met at my interview, to see if I could get onto the computer classes he ran outside college hours. Finally, I had found something to replace the kebab shop. I missed being busy. I would leave the bedsit at 6 a.m. to attend the early-bird classes, then stay behind after college and go in at the weekends.

It also brought me closer to the teachers, who drew me into interesting debates, the biggest one being about religion. All my life I had thought Jesus was Muslim because he is mentioned in the Koran, until one day Andrew told me he was Jewish. It left me stunned for
days. Does this mean Islam accepts the Jewish religion? I asked myself. If so, why do we have separate books, and why wasn’t any of this explained to me at the mosque? I remembered the religious wars between Muslims, Christians and Jews, when I was growing up: the poisonous enmity between Catholics and Protestants during the IRA bombings; the Sunnis’ and Shiites’ seven-year war in Iran and Iraq. I wanted to find out about these other religions and began with the Brompton Oratory Church. It was magical. I discovered that names mentioned in the Bible, like Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, were also in the Koran. The best part was, when I bought an English translation of the Koran, half the stories were the same as those in the Bible. I began to wonder, who copied who?

The experience set me off on a journey visiting synagogues, Hindu temples, Buddhist retreats and even a couple of cult groups to get a handle on how religion became so powerful that it made people kill one another. I never got the answer, but throughout this journey I recited my prayers from the Koran. Islam was my faith and always would be, though I now had to accept Jesus was not Muslim, I also didn’t believe he was Jewish or Christian, but perhaps a mixture of all three.

Towards the end of the year, Robert offered me a place on the summer computing course. I hesitated, as
I had a limited grant, which meant that I couldn’t afford to stay in London during the holidays. It had been playing on my mind for some time and I had done another round of shop interviews but hadn’t got anywhere.

I was taken aback when Andrew offered me his home to stay in because he was off to France.

The house was situated in south London on a leafy street. I arrived with a carrier bag of clothes. Andrew handed me a set of keys and showed me around. I left the bag in the main bedroom, where he’d laid clean sheets on the bed, then followed him downstairs, all the time looking out for his wife. We sat at the kitchen table having a cup of tea, running through how the heating and water worked, when I heard the front door close. It’s her, I thought, imagining Andrew’s wife to be a pretty blonde, perhaps French.

A man entered and touched Andrew affectionately on the shoulder. My mind went to their bed upstairs, the one I would be sleeping in, and I began to panic. ‘You’re gay!’ I screamed inside. I wanted to find an excuse to leave but couldn’t think of one. Then I stopped myself, suddenly feeling ashamed. Neither Andrew nor his partner was judging me for being Pakistani like most of the people I grew up with had. Instead, Andrew had welcomed me with open arms and had kindly offered me his home. He didn’t have to do this, nor did he have to
mentor me the way he had. I thought back to Mark’s partner and how insulted he had looked at my hostility. I had no right to judge what people did in their personal lives. I smiled at the man, then shook his hand and planted a big kiss on his cheek.

Towards the end of the summer break, I called up loads of design houses for work experience and finally got a place at a magazine publisher based in the city. The work was rewarding and the art director allowed me to use the computers, which had the latest graphic programs installed, so I could learn how to use them.

The offices had a 24-hour security guard, who the art director introduced me to. She said I could go into the offices in the evenings and at weekends to use her computer to practise. Later she commissioned me to do a computer illustration for one of the magazines and I was paid a whopping £40. What was more satisfying than the money, though, was seeing my name in print. By the end of the summer, I had learnt three new programmes and had been offered regular illustration work for a magazine. I moved back to my bedsit just before college began again. I now had money in the bank and felt like I was finally settling into the city.

My visits home continued. Hajji was also doing my job now, serving at the front of the shop. He didn’t look pleased about it and totally blanked me when I’d go in
and say hello. The last time we’d worked together before I left, I had supervised him putting an order together, which included a tandoori chicken he forgot to take out of the microwave, so the customer went home with an empty box … of course, I got the blame.

My sister was now happily married and had moved away, so it was just me at home with Mum and Dad. I tried to contact Shazia a few times to tell her I was back, but each time her mother-in-law answered and said she was ‘busy’. It was annoying, but at the same time, I felt relieved. My life had changed so much I wasn’t sure we would have much to talk about any more.

Mum continued to pursue me on the marriage front. It was draining. I wasn’t going to get married. There were two ways I could approach this: either I kept fighting this losing battle, or, for the sake of sanity, I could go along with it and stretch the process out with excuses.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, flicking through the TV channels. ‘We could try to get you married to someone here.’ It was said like she was doing me a favour. ‘A woman is not happy without a man in her life,’ she offered wisely. ‘Without a husband she is not a woman.’

Perhaps marriage is something people do to keep loneliness at bay, I wanted to say; a distraction in their lives.

Mum was never good at silences. She reached for her handbag and brought out a wad of papers. At first, I thought it was paperwork for the shop and felt a trickle of relief that the conversation had moved on.

‘I spoke to a marriage bureau and they gave me these forms to fill out,’ she said, holding them out to me.

I took the papers, which looked like a job application, and flicked through. It mentioned caste.

‘What caste are we, Mum?’

‘Ah.’ Mum switched the television off and sat up. ‘It’s best we put my family caste down as it’s higher than your father’s.’

I was surprised Mum had been allowed to marry into a lower caste. Then I thought of Dad’s credentials: army man, educated and invited to England by the British government for his service in India.

I scanned through the rest of the form, and then a cheeky thought crossed my mind.

‘Most of it is general information about me,’ I said, ticking the boxes referring to me as divorced, with three children, aged forty-six. I handed it back and waited for the guilt to kick in – but nothing happened. Instead, I felt satisfied that I had implemented the first stage of my plan to string this process out as much as possible.

T
he second year at college was more structured, but with less handholding. We were left to do our own projects and only came together for briefings or to show our work. The studios were empty most of the day but I would go in to keep my routine. I hardly saw the teachers, but one day as I was sat in the deserted studio the head teacher spotted me and came over. He was a very quiet man with grey hair and round glasses. He looked like Harry Potter but forty years on.

‘Adi,’ he said, walking towards me. ‘Is it Adi or Abi?’

I didn’t take offence as a lot of people got my name wrong; Adi, Abi … I’d even been called ‘Asda’ once.

‘I got a call from a local publisher who is looking for someone to do their show cards,’ he announced.

I didn’t know what show cards were but agreed to go and see them about the job. The office was open plan with lots of people talking on the phone or on computers. It had a big, posh reception area, security guards and cameras. It was all very daunting but I tried not to show my nerves.

There wasn’t much of an interview. They asked my name and who had sent me and then showed me the job and told me what I’d be paid. There wasn’t much to making up show cards apart from sticking book jackets onto boards to be shipped off to bookshops to promote a new book.

The job was taking up most of my time outside college, though I did squeeze in the odd illustration for the magazine.

Soon after, my boss moved to a different publisher and offered me more work there. I couldn’t turn it down, not after waiting so long to fill up my time.

My daily routine expanded to working at one publisher in the morning until 8.30 a.m., spending the rest of the day at college, and then working evenings at the other publisher’s until midnight.

Towards the end of my second year, I began to wonder how I was going to spend my second summer in London. The work routine was set around my college time and I needed something to fill in the gaps during the holidays. I was sat in the computer room mulling it over when I overheard a postgrad student talk about a job they had just got with a design house in Soho. I called them up and got an interview. They thought I was also postgraduate and told me the pay was £12 an hour. My jaw dropped at the thought of earning almost £100 a day… that was how much my dad got a week. I finished the summer job with a list of contacts that I used to get freelance work during my final year, and by the time I left college I had set myself up as a self-employed designer.