A Tale of Two Beans: Baked Beans and Bean Pie

Taking a bite of fresh bean pie in Brooklyn, New York City

Like many British children growing up in the halcyon decade of the 1990’s that gifted us with Pokémon, the Spice Girls, and David Beckham, Heinz Baked Beans was a staple dish on my dinner table every Fridays.

It wasn’t quite the Great Depression diet of George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men, nor the frugal World War Two economy crippled by food shortages, where Baked Beans were declared an ‘essential food item’ by the Ministry of Health.

At home, my mother had designated Friday dinners as cheese-and-onion-pasty with chips day, a carbohydrate feast of Tudor proportions accompanied with a hearty helping of beans. It was the perfect culinary marriage: the sweetness of the silky tomato sauce effortlessly seduced the tang of the cheddar cheese and soft onion of the pasty filling.

Even on school holiday visits to Bradford, my mother’s home-city, Baked Beans made a guest appearance at my grandparent’s bungalow, albeit with an undertone of Pakistani flavours. In her ingenious economy and efficiency as a mother raising nine daughters, my grandmother invented a Baked Bean curry with a base of caramelised onions fried with turmeric, green chillies, coriander powder, an egg added for good protein-measure, not forgetting a sprinling of freshly chopped coriander.

In a surge of misdirected nationalist pride, I confess thinking to myself once that Heinz was a British condiment. It turns out however that the man behind the bean(s) so to speak, was the American entrepreneur, Henry J. Heinz, who created his first product in Pittsburgh 150 years ago.

From what has metamorphosed into the staple of graduate student paupers and metropolitan city-dwellers in need of time-efficient recipes, Heinz first sold his newly patented tinned products in the UK at a branch of Fortnum and Mason’s in 1886.

However unique and inimitable his creation was to my juvenile taste-buds, Heinz’s invention was not America’s only dalliance with beans as I later learned on a visit to New York.

Abu’s Bean Pie Company in Brooklyn, New York.

In an inconspicuous looking bakery situated in Brooklyn, Abu’s Bean Pie Company is renowned for serving -you guessed it- bean pies.

Given my childhood nostalgia for beans, you can forgive this naïve Brit for imagining ‘bean pie’ as a glorious red lake of Heinz Baked Beans cradled in a crown of pastry.

Bursting with a custard-like filling of mashed navy beans, a dusting of cinnamon, milk, sugar, eggs, and surrounded by a whole-wheat crust, the bean pie is an American culinary institution, especially within the Black American community.

The pie was created by members of the Nation of Islam in the 1930’s, the black nationalist movement led by Elijah Muhammad that famously inspired Malcolm Little’s metamorphosis into the black radical, Malcolm X, though there are mixed accounts as to who exactly invented the bean pie.

In a tug-of-war between the Nation’s original founder, Wallace D Fard. Muhammad who apparently passed the recipe to Elijah Muhammad and his wife Clara, and boxing titan Muhammad Ali’s personal chef, the bean pie emerged from the Nation with a radical zeal amidst a burgeoning civil rights movement demanding racial equality and socio-political reform in the United States.

To create a cultural identity that distanced itself from the trenchant manacles of slavery, Elijah Muhammad promoted the pie as a replacement to the sweet potato pie.

As Zaheer Ali from the Brooklyn Historical Society relates, members of the Nation were encouraged to replace their surnames with ‘X’, a metaphor of their unknown African ancestors, many of them Muslim West African slaves who arrived during the antebellum period. It was a symbolic severance with the slave master’s name.

In the same vein, Elijah Muhammad encouraged Black American Muslims to also distance themselves from what he perceived as the “slave diet”. Sweet potato pie was a part of the soul-food canon inherited from slaves who left an ineffaceable finger-print on American cuisine and music, long before the nation’s inception.

In How to Eat to Live, a two-volume dietary guide for followers of the Nation, Elijah Muhammad lionised the navy bean as an elixir for prolonged life:

“…take little things such as beans. Allah (God) says that the little navy bean will make you live, just eat them. He said to me that even milk and bread would make us live. Just eat bread and milk—it is the best food. He said that a diet of navy beans would give us a life span of one hundred and forty years. Yet we cannot live ½ that length of time eating everything that the Christian table has set for us.”

Inexpensive and delicious, the pie quickly leapt onto the dinner tables and street-corners of America, and into popular culture through the hip-hop lyricism of Queen Latifah, Ice Cube and Common, even receiving a passing reference from Will Smith’s protagonist in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

As I stood in front of the counter at Abu’s bakery, a newspaper cutting from the New York Times mounted on a frame to my right caught my eye. The face of Idris Conry, the founder of the bakery, smiled at me from behind the glass, reminding me of those Nation of Islam followers dressed in crisp two-piece suits and bow ties, standing outside mosques and road-sides, clutching at boxes of bean pies in one hand and copies of the Nation’s newspaper, The Final Call in the other, as they offered sweet slices of the Nation’s capitalism with an ebullient, “Bean pie, my brother?”

A member of the Nation of Islam carries a box of bean pies and a copy of The Final Hour (Credit: American Shaba’s Bean Pies)

Inspired by a cookbook that included a recipe for apple cake cherished by Muhammad Ali, Conry began baking as a teenager to the delight of those around him, selling cheese-cake and other baked goods using his home as a storefront, before opening Abu’s bakery in 2001.

An active member of the local community, Conry and fellow members of the mosque located a few doors down from his bakery single-handedly eradicated a crack epidemic that crippled the area in 1988 by patrolling the streets during a 40-day, 24-hour community patrol to ensure crack houses remained closed in the neighbourhood.

Now identified for being home to the only bakery in Brooklyn that produces authentic navy bean pies, my stomach fluttered with expectation as Rugi Jabie, a bright-eyed employee stood behind the counter behind an Aladdin’s cave of chicken patties, sweet potato pie, navy bean pie, and carrot cake, awaiting my order.

The cinnamon crust and custard layer of the bean pie are easily discernible.

 She spoke with the relish of an oral historian, well-versed in the history of navy bean pie. “The navy bean is an American institution. It’s used in the navy, and even in our prison systems.”

Pointing to the white flesh in one of the pies that had been cut open which paled, quite literally, in comparison to the deliciously brown surface of one of the pies on the counter, she described the anatomy of the pie. “This top part is a crust made of cinnamon and other flavours that rise to the top above the custard that sets in the middle. It’s a custard-base pie, but it is filled with navy beans. Have you ever had a bean pie?” she interjected curiously. “No, I’m a bean pie virgin”, I said sheepishly. “Oh! I’ll tell you something, it’s changed people’s lives.” Something tells me she was not being hyperbolic.

Rugi Jabie stands behind the counter at Abu’s bakery, ready to serve bean pie

We continued to talk as my pie was warmed in the oven, discussing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s meteoric rise in American politics, and whether the mainstream feminist movement is intersectional in its inclusion of women of colour. It didn’t escape me that, as the pie’s radical origins dictate, my bean pie was inevitably served with an accompaniment of politics. On the house, of course.

“People eat these before working out”, Jabie said with glee as she handed a paper bag full of bean pies to a customer who has just ordered several large pies.

The said customer, Anthony, turned to me as though the phonetics of my British accent incriminated my penchant for Heinz Baked Beans, and chimed in, “The first time I had a bean pie was in the eighties. I was scared at first, because it was made of beans; I didn’t think it would be sweet. But once I tried it, I’ve been addicted to it ever since!”

He chuckled aloud when I asked if he had children and whether they enjoyed feasting on bean pie. “They love it. If I come through the door and I don’t have bean pie, I’m going to get in trouble,” he said before waving goodbye and departing with an armful of pie.

Anthony’s departure was a cue to attend to the bean pie that was sitting patiently in the palm of my hand, and so I perched myself on a stool near the shop-window with my bean pie and a steaming cup of coffee at the ready. I plunged my spoon into its depths, scraping deep into the bottom of the foil tin to ensure I salvaged some of the crust. Without hesitation, into my eager mouth it went.

It was as though a sumptuous cumulonimbus cloud of cinnamon and custard glided over my taste-buds. The biscuit-like texture of the excruciatingly thin crust offset the sweetness of the filling to perfection. This was no strange bean concoction, nor was it an attempt to dethrone Heinz Baked Beans. A heavenly cinnamon embrace enveloped me like a sweet furnace, warding off the biting sub-zero temperatures of New York.

Suddenly, the silence in the bakery was disrupted by the melodic sound of the Azaan, the Islamic call to prayer, crackling and floating along the bitterly cold Brooklyn streets from a speaker phone perched on top of the neighbouring mosque.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, cried the faceless voice. God is great, God is great.

In that moment it seemed, the navy bean pie was even greater than God himself. Jabie smiled from behind the counter, knowingly like the prophetess of navy bean pie that she was, as my facial convulsions of sheer delight communicated what she had already predicted: With one bite of the navy bean pie, my life had change irrevocably. Whether my loyalties had switched from Heinz Baked Beans to the navy bean pie, only time will tell.

Feasting In New York’s Finest Deli

Sol, a waiter at 2nd Avenue Deli.

New York is known for its skyscrapers.

There are the skyscrapers made of blue glass that glow like shards of molten lava when the sun sets; skyscrapers with grey facades and pigeon-hole windows glowing yellow, plucked out from Batman’s Gotham city; there’s Trump tower, a contemporary reincarnation of Sauron’s Barad-dûr. Then there are New York’s culinary skyscrapers, its deli sandwiches stacked high with layer after layer of pink meat. These sandwiches are of course constructed inside its infamous delis.

One deli serving some of the finest deli sandwiches in New York is the 2nd Avenue Deli, a kosher deli in midtown east Manhattan.

I take a seat on a stool at the counter adjacent to the restaurant dining area. A thin, elderly man perched on a stool next to the till wearing electric blue glasses framing his face, with a strong New Yorker accent and tufts of wispy white hair surrounding a bald patch, smiles warmly at me. “Any help you need young lady, you let me know”, he says. A gradual stream of hungry people come flooding in as I peruse the options for deli sandwiches on the menu he hands to me. Parents with prams holding infants with cheeks whipped a rosy red by the bitter cold wind walk past me to sit in the restaurant area. A business man with a sharp grey suit orders a deli sandwich to go. My ears pick up the sound of cutlery clashing against plates, the sound of Arabic, Spanish and New Yorker English clamouring in an ordered chaos of noise.

A waiter standing behind the counter in front of me with a tightly buttoned black shirt, trim black beard and twinkly blue eyes finishes drying a coffee cup and stands squarely in front of me. “What can I get you?” he says to me. I’m here for a reason and for one reason only: To try out a deli sandwich. So I ask him for a recommendation.

“What’s the best deli sandwich you have?”

“If you’re gonna go for a sandwich, go for the Pastrami”, he says without hesitation. His firm answer and steady gaze suggests to me a man who knows what’s best. In my mind I’ve already designated him the honorific of ‘God of the deli sandwiches’, so I obey and order one pastrami.

My sandwich arrives on a small white plate, a pile of pink, tender waves of meat undulating between a bed of white bread. A large green pickle with a small bowl of shredded white cabbage, a small pot of mustard and ‘Russian’ (what appears to be mayonnaise mixed with ketchup) sits on the side. In secondary school, I was given the nickname of “manhands”. Fellow classmates on competing basketball teams used to say that my abnormally large hands were what allowed me to be such a good defender. As David Cameron found out when he attempted to dissect a pizza with a knife and fork, there are some foods that are meant to be eaten only with one’s hands. A pastrami sandwich is one of them, but even with my large hands, I can’t fathom getting my fingers around the sandwich securely enough without it toppling over and making me look like a fool. So what do I do? I do a Cameron and begrudgingly reach for the knife and fork to help me slice up my first piece. It’s to save my fingers and mouth from getting dirty, at least that’s how I justify this pompous abomination to myself.

I manage to get one piece of my pastrami sandwich onto the prongs of my fork, when the smart waiter waltzes past. As I’m about to plunge the fork laden with bread and meat into my gaping mouth, he grabs the fork straight out of my hand just as I’m about to swallow the delicious morsel. He narrows his eyes at me in shock and says disapprovingly, “I’m sorry babe, but you’re not in England. Eat with your fingers, the food tastes better. I know you’re British, but this is New York.”

Somehow I knew this shameful moment was coming. I knew that eating a pastrami sandwich with a knife and fork was a deli faux-pas. I hang my head in shame, laughing uncontrollably as he says all this. Once he is assured I won’t be using a knife and fork and walks off to seat some customers who have just arrived, I grab one half of my sandwich with both my hands. Forget this dainty charade, the waiter is right. I’m going to take a bite out of this sandwich and risk looking like a kid that has just smeared their food all over their face.

My swooping, anti-cutlery waiter is Sol, Spanish for ‘sun’, not a shortened abbreviation of Solomon. “What makes a good Pastrami?”, I ask Sol after he comes back to ask how the food is. I’ve only managed to plough through half of a half of my sandwich. “When people ask the difference between pastrami and corned beef, they’re very similar and then they’re very different in many ways”, says Sol. “They’re both cured meats. Pastrami is the lower part of the brisket of a cow, so it’s closer to the belly, that makes it a little fattier than the corned beef. Now they’re both cured. Cured means that they’re boiled with spices and coriander. Pastrami goes a step up because it’s smoked. It has a black pepper coating you have to rub on it. It’s smokier, and it’s in my opinion the best pastrami in New York.”

It takes me twenty minutes or so to eat the first half of my sandwich, when I start to feel rather full. “We can pack that for you, you don’t have to finish it all here”, Sol says reassuringly as he watches me let out a sigh of defeat. The way he grabbed my fork, I’m not so sure I believe him.

I swiftly move onto dessert, a slice of babka, a brioche-like bread drizzled with chocolate sauce topped with crumbled biscuit. It is the best choice here, according to Sol. He pours me a cup of coffee as I wait for my dessert to arrive, followed by a shot of some non-dairy chocolate cream soda. “On the house”, he says, his eyes twinkling. I ask him why he grabbed my knife and fork out of my hand. He pauses for a second, and says matter-of-factly, “Because here we eat with our hands. It tastes better that way in my opinion. If I see people eating a sandwich here in the deli with a fork and knife, I won’t grab it out of their hands like I did with you, but I tend to tell them it’s ok to pick it up.” I have to agree. I shiver as I recall the moment my Naani-Jee blasted me for eating rice with the “tools of the coloniser”.

“What I’ve noticed over the years in New York is that delis are just closing down”, he tells me, his tone now somewhat dampened. He continues, “It’s an old school kind of food. People today tend to want to eat less carbs, a little healthier right? You have the health conscious who say I don’t want to have a pastrami sandwich. The deli demographic is kind of dying out. It’s more of what your grandparents eat rather than what you would eat right now.”

I ask him what kind of customers frequent the deli. Is it just Jewish customers because the meat is kosher?

“We’re kosher in the sense we do have a mashkia, we make sure that there’s no dairy in this house. All the meat that you’re eating is kosher. But this is an old school New York establishment, an old school deli for the people of New York and the people who come to visit New York.”

The founder of 2nd Avenue Deli was Abe Lebewohl, a well-respected, well-loved restauranteur who opened up the first branch in 1954. A refugee himself who came from Poland to America initially unable to speak a word of English, he went on to establish the roots of one of New York’s most reputable delis. Abe was sadly murdered in 1996 by robbers on his way to the bank when he was making a deposit. A poster offering $150,000 reward money for any information as to who was responsible is cellotaped to the store-front window.

“Abe was a man that just loved human beings in general”, Sol tells me of Lebewohl. “In the 50’s everyone in New York was very segregated. I never met him but I know Abe hired a lot of Arab, Asian and Spanish people. He was more open-minded of hiring people from different backgrounds because they were willing to work and work hard. He gave people a chance, I think that is what he was especially about. If you look around the gentleman that just passed behind you, he is from Tunisia, he’s Muslim. That man over there who has been with us for 27 years is Egyptian, he’s Catholic. We have Latin Americans who work on the counter over there. We’re all just mixed with different kinds of people. It’s a melting pot of people and religion. Borders and boundaries don’t exist here. As long as you’re a good, honest human being, we love you.”

The elderly man with the trendy electric-blue glasses pipes in about how incredulous people were when Abe said he wanted to open up the deli in a notoriously run-down area. “To him the area was like a good girl with a bad reputation, he just wanted people to give it a chance.”

“Giving people a chance is something the deli practices to this day”, Sol says. “I’ve worked in many restaurants where you need quote unquote “experience” of New York, like two years of restaurant experience. I’ve seen people come in here and say, “Look, I’m not a waiter but I would like a chance to wait tables and do this kind of work”, and the deli hires them because they see something in those people, and those people have actually worked out really well here, you know. It’s very different here. They look for more than just experience, they look for something deeper I’d like to think.”

As Sol says quite rightly, there is something deep about this place. New York delis are after all more than just a simple place to eat, they are a cultural institution. Sure enough, I feel as if someone has placed an anchor inside my stomach. But as I get the other half of my pastrami sandwich packed, say my goodbyes, and head out into the bitter winter cold, I feel as if I’m taking home much more than the remainders of a deli sandwich.

What Will Women Get From All This ‘Squawking’ About Sex Pests? Male Crocodile Tears

Behold the fat, glistening tear-drop of Peter Hitchens’ that spells the demise of male privilege. The fall of Harvey Weinsten and now the Westminster sexual harassment scandal has prompted a deluge of tears from men mourning the loss of their power. “With great power comes great responsibility”, said Uncle Ben from Spider-man. That poignant chunk of wisdom appears to have sailed straight over the heads of some men in power, who instead have abused that responsibility as a vehicle to grope women.

Pre- Harvey Weinstein, it probably never occurred to these men in power sat on their thrones built on the cloudy plumes of their egos, that they would have to think twice about staying their wandering hands. But now the question rattling the minds of every Harvey Weinstein, seedy politician and average misogynistic Joe of the world is: “To grope, or not to grope?” That is indeed the question. It’s this thought that is eating away at the minds of the likes of Daily Mail columnist Peter Hitchens, whose article published yesterday is the perfect example in which to see the unfurling of male egos at the mere thought of emboldened women owning the narrative and speaking out against their abusers. As the Arabic adage goes, ‘A woman’s voice is a revolution’, and it’s this voice, bold and resolute, that is right now the mother of all male crocodile tears and crumbling male egos.

The unfathomable leap Hitchens makes in his article from the Westinster sexual harassment scandal to the Niqab is almost as absurd as Daily Mail readers going red-faced over Nadiya Hussain celebrating Christmas: It’s just downright bonkers. Apparently, if you’re a modern liberal calling out sexual harassment, you have something in common with a ‘militant Islamist’ who wants to gender segregate and cover the entire planet with a Niqab (face veil). On the one hand Hitchens’ ‘old fashioned’ and ‘prudish Victorian’ sensibilities are incensed by the seediness that has gripped gender relations in our country, a direct result of the big bogey-woman that is equality and the F-word that is feminism. On the other, he lambasts the ‘Islamic world’ (as if Islam functioned on an entirely different planet), a world where the merry mixing of the sexes without black shrouds, physical contact and (God forbid) handshakes, is not permitted. He laments the demise of the ‘old code’ of the Victorian world where women were made to wear excruciating corsets, every Mrs Bennet was eagerly seeking a suitable arranged marriage for her daughters, and romantic sophistry in public went as far as talking about the weather as a kind of sexual innuendo or exchanging longing, smouldering glances with your intended in-between synchronised dances. That society was sexual repression incarnate. Brits weren’t exactly blasting the Victorian equivalent of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’ on the streets. If you’re struggling to visualise all this, you need only watch a Jane Austen period drama to get a sense of what I’m saying.

The sheer irony is that it’s inflammatory views like Hitchens’ that are on par with that of this phantom ‘militant Islamist’ (a multi-syllabic word which sounds more like it is supposed to confuse and stoke fear than it sheds light on the situation). Like many, Hitchens has jumped onto the very modish bandwagon of misogyny combined with big, bad Islamophobia. There’s nothing quite like killing two squawking birds with one stone now, is there? His joking suggestion that the Niqab is a panacea to the plague of sexual assaults that have been a reality of women’s lives since time immemorial, sounds like the plot-line to a far-right dystopian novel which involves a Muslim Freddie Kruger as the anti-protagonist and terrified men fleeing into the night. Why throw women under the bus when you can throw visibly Muslim women who wear the Niqab under the victim-blaming bus as well? Hitchens need only speak to an actual rape victim or a visibly Muslim woman who has also been subject to sexual assault to know it’s not clothing that draws in a perpetrator, it’s the perpetrator. Period. Of course this will be a shock to his prudish Victorian ways, but there’s no time like the present to break that Islamophobia fortified, misogynistic echo-chamber. As for the image, how Orientalist – I mean original. Never mind it’s a stock-image that looks more like a screenshot from a makeup tutorial promoting a cosmetic brand to get the smoky, kohl-lined eyes of Angelina Jolie. It’s the same tiresome conveyor belt of click-bait stereotypes and images used to feed the hungry masses who internalise these narrow conceptions of Muslim women and project them onto living, breathing human beings.

With so much mansplaining from men advising how and if women should speak out about sexual assault, to quote Nigel Farage’s favourite adjective, what exactly is the ‘proper’ way for women to make it obvious that we don’t give consent to a man’s roving hands drawn into the sanctuary of our bodies? If we were to shout “YOUR GROPING HAND SHALL NOT PASS!” with the baritone gusto of Gandalf the Grey, or better yet clobber the fool square in the face, (the mantra ‘fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ comes to mind), I’ll wager we would get accused of being bullish and manly faster than you can say ‘Margaret Thatcher’. In short, there is no easy way to avoid treading on frail male egos erected on a foundation of making women feel inferior. So stampede we must.

Hitchens is not alone in his diatribe against the growing number of women who are becoming emboldened to speak out. Telegraph columnist Charles Moore, who by-and-by is “praying women share power with men, not crush us”, is male privilege incarnate. I can imagine his hands clasped tightly, a glistening halo circling above his head as he fervently prays an army of Boudicca’s and Amazonian warriors don’t crush the patriarchy with their iron fist of egalitarian justice. I hope he never comes across Beyoncé’s ‘Who Run The World Girls’. He might just have a cardiac arrest envisaging the matriarchal world she created in that music video.

Now a revolution is afoot, led by the women who bravely came forward, the Tamara Burkes and the Rose McGowans of the world, not forgetting the many, many women who haven’t come forward. In the title of his article, Hitchens asks ‘What will women gain from all this ‘squawking’ about sex pests?’ Well Peter, for one thing, accountability. For too long men have lived with impunity, assaulting women as they see fit for little than a fleeting gain of sadistic pleasure on their part, and a life-time of trauma inflicted on their victims. Speaking out won’t stop sex assaults to be sure, but if the shocking number of women coming forward signals the death-rattle of the toxic culture of victim-blaming that has silenced women for so long, I for one will happily lend myself to the cause. You say the future generations will laugh at us as we lose ourselves in the kerfuffle. I say they will glower with pride as they look back at how hard we fought to create a world where no means no, and your actions have consequences, no matter your status in the world.

Remembering Babajee

The entrance to the old people’s residential home on Goldhawk Road in west London is like a fish-tank. Large glass panes separated by plastic rims painted a duck-egg blue like those graph lines in school maths books, face visitors waiting to be buzzed into the human aquarium. The soft blue is a soothing colour, the colour of retirement. There’s a poster of Sadiq Khan and Andy Slaughter firmly clasping hands, grinning that promising politicians smile from on top of the notice board next to the elevator. They peer out at visitors, the goldfish, the small fish, waiting to be let in. A smell hangs in the corridor, neither foul nor pleasant. It’s the smell of old age and cooking, a hint of fried onions, that sits on the threadbare carpet like a layer of dust. This olfactory memory of the place has been there from when I used to visit as a child over twenty years ago.

A residential home sounds like an odd place for a young woman of twenty-something to visit. But it had become tradition for my entire family and I to make a mini-pilgrimage there to pay our respects to one of its oldest residents, Muhammad Zarin, or Babajee (Grandfather) as he was affectionately known by all.

At a grand ninety-four years old, Babajee was a formidable man over six foot tall, with a booming voice and a well-groomed white philosopher’s beard. With his traditional Pakol hat encircling his shaven head, and a crisp, magnolia coloured shalwar kameez, he had the air of a proud Pashtun King who commanded authority, the gentle kind, from on top of the cream leather sofa he sat on in his living room. He would sit with his hands crossed over his walking stick in the manner of a man who knew his place in the world, his swollen feet laid out in front of him as part of his daily ritual since he stopped walking. It was his luminous faith in Allah and his Yoda-like wisdom that were one of the many reasons why young people like me gravitated towards his stationary orbit.

Like many elders, Babajee had a gift for telling stories forever imbibed with a moral lesson for the wayward young ones to learn from. He was a tall man who told tall tales, all of them true. When he was twenty-four years old, India was torn in two like a child’s play-thing in 1947. Back then he worked as a train conductor for the Pakistan Railway which to this day, is used by tens of millions of passengers who pass through it’s tin-can interiors, human cargo crammed inside rusty carriages packed like sardines. This particular story stuck in my mind not just because he had vivid recollections of travelling through Burma without travel documents, through pre-partition India where Hindu, Sikh and Muslim lived side by side; it was the way he laughed at how the English often mistook him for a white man.

His granddaughter, Sabah, told me once how ‘gassed’ he got when you asked him how good looking he was back in the day. To prove her point, she bellowed into his ear in Pashto one day, “BABAJEE, WERE’NT YOU REALLY GOOD LOOKING WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG?”

With a small twinkle in his eye, he replied very matter-of-factly, “Bacchae, zu DEERA khkolle wam!”
“Child, I was REALLY beautiful!”

You could still hear the remnants of his youth in the raspy boom of his voice and in the way his eyes lit up when he spoke with conviction, which was almost all the time. It was easy to see the young Muhammad Zarin in the green and blue hues of his pupils who emerged out of hiding every-time he spoke of the past until the pearly white of his cataracts, brought with it a vast cloud of old age over the surface of his small eyes, and with it the realisation that here was indeed an old man.

Babajee lived to see many things. He saw six of his newborn children die, his wife and his closest friends pass away. He raised one daughter, sending her to university in 1960s Pakistan at a time when this was completely unheard of. A man in his twilight years, he spent his days surrounded by shoals of young people. Sometimes I wonder if those years were ones of solitude since he was the last of his generation, a generation at dusk.

Education to Babajee was absolutely zurree, important, and he never let us forget it. After dropping out of school in Pakistan at the age of thirteen, his father brought him two cows to keep as a punishment. Curfew wasn’t an adequate disciplining technique.
“If you’re not going to school, then you can keep these cows for the rest of your life”, he said to his son. But the life of a cattle-herder wasn’t for Babajee. He ended up joining the Pakistani army, conning them into enlisting him despite the fact he was partially blind in his left eye after he accidentally stabbed himself when he was playing with knives as a child. He ended up operating canons, with the hands I often noticed were dotted with age spots, markers of a life lived under the sun of the motherland. In the end he almost got crushed by a tank he was operating after his foot got trapped until his chappal, the very same weapon that has been used to beat generations of south Asian children, miraculously tore, sending him sprawling onto the ground, saving his life.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat in Babajee’s flat wringing my hands, hunched over with bad posture, the result of years of rocking back and forth on chairs at school despite exasperated sighs from teachers warning me I’d turn into a hunch-back. In those moments life weighed heavy on my mind, but Babajee had a way only elders know how, of driving away the darkness. He didn’t have a Freudian chair or a psychology degree to dissect my problems. Just that hoarse, booming voice, which chased away hardships in a dialect of Pashto I often struggled to understand. One piece of advice he gave me always comes to my mind whenever I think of him:

“Bacchae! Chi spee ghaapi, tu walle ghappe?”

“Child! If a dog barks, why bark back?”

He would screw his eyes shut with emphasis as he talked, as if it would drill the message in deeper, the way my mother kneads dough with her knuckles for chappattis. It always makes me smile, when elders speak in riddles, verbally dancing between what’s obviously being said, and what they really mean. What Babajee was saying to me that day was to pick my battles. As the recklessness of my young adult years slowly begin to subside, it’s only now I’m beginning to see the wisdom in his words, but then Babajee always knew that it would take time.

My earliest memory of Babajee was from when I was six years old. I was on my way out from Shepherd’s Bush mosque clutching at my grandmother’s hand as the green man on the traffic light beckoned us to cross towards Damas Gate, the most famous Arab super-market in west London. And there he was, Babajee, this giant of a man. It always surprised me how young my grandmother was compared to Babajee; she looked like a child next to him. I thought my grandmother was old, but Babajee, he was like the mountain, always there, looking very much the same with each passing year.

He turned to me eventually, asked after my mum and how I was doing at school. Then he reached into a pocket inside his gilet, and handed me a small paper bag which to my delight, contained a few glistening sugar-coated boiled sweets inside. You’d think Babajee had a corner-shop hidden in his jacket, a Marry Poppins invention of endless pockets with bags of sweets at the ready for dewey-eyed six-year-olds. There was a certain level of fear I used to feel in the presence of elders. But Babajee only ever emanated a gentleness like the soft flicker of a flame. Whenever I think back to my childhood, that small, seemingly inconsequential memory always comes in front of me. Babajee became the lighthouse of my childhood, all because of a few penny sweets.

The elders in my community say that when a good person dies, the world grieves for that person. Even the skies weep. ‘Pathetic fallacy’ we used to call it in English lessons, when the weather mirrors the mood of a character. It was one of those pompous words I used with relish, thinking it would rake in extra marks during exams. It’s easy to dismiss some of these sayings as old maid’s tales. But on the day of Babajee’s funeral, the rain fell as if a monsoon had swept into the island. There was a perpetual gloom clouding the skies and the faces of all those who were there to say goodbye, the kind that comes suddenly and goes just as quick when death comes knocking. The rain had metastasised with our grief.

The emerald green cloth embroidered with the shahada, the declaration of faith, was draped over Babajee’s coffin, a custom of some Muslim funerals. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his messenger” it declared sombrely. Many found themselves praying the funeral prayer at Shepherds Bush mosque for another departed soul they didn’t know, just another old man whose time had come. But to the young men and women like me who were utterly privileged to have known him, Babajee was a grandfather to the grandfatherless, a father to the fatherless, a voice of reason steadying the masts of our adolescent ships. He was the wise elder we were starving for. There was no one more true, more just. If Babajee said you messed up, then boy you had messed up. His steady moral compass guided those of us caught in the storms of our young, reckless lives.

A century is a long time to be on this earth. But it always felt as though Babajee had lived many lives. He had lived through the good times, the bad, through war, through elation, and through sorrow. All of this was marked on the age spots, the wrinkles, and the scars that sat on his skin and on his face.

There are two kinds of ‘coming of age’. The first, when you go from adolescence into adulthood. The second, when young adults step into the footprints left behind by their elders. It’s a terrifying thing, to ascend into this real adulthood. Not the kind defined by the number of years or the silvery hairs that spring out with each passing year on our scalps, or the kind sat in the fault-lines of age and experience that have now started to erupt on my forehead, but the kind where you now have to navigate through life alone, a rootless tree without the gentle guidance of elders who have passed on. In life, Babajee taught us many lessons. But with his passing, he perhaps taught us the hardest lesson of all: That he couldn’t protect us under his shade forever.

In the ninety-four years that he walked this earth, Muhammad Zarin, was a post-man, a soldier, a shop owner, a restaurant owner, a railway conductor, a radio telegrapher, a familiar face at the local mosque. But to the legions of young and old who loved him deeply, even after spending only an hour in conversation with him, he was simply Babajee. He was the grandfather of us all who sheltered us under his vast canopy. In Persian, ‘Zarin’ means gold. We knew it then when he was alive and we know it now in the wake of his death, that Babajee was our mountain of gold, if only for a short while.

There’s a beautiful saying in my mother tongue I learned from Babajee, which he used whenever we said goodbye:

“Pa makha di ranaa!” which roughly translates as, “May you have light on your face.”

In death, he has gone where none can follow. But in life, he cast a light so bright on the lives of all who met him, we can only hope and pray that someday, we will meet again.

May you forever have light on your face, Babajee.

 

 

Me, Myself, and Halwa Puri

It’s 10:30 in the morning, and I’m standing inside Sweet Centre, the first Asian restaurant to open in Bradford in 1964.

I’ve had enough of bland Weetabix breakfasts laced with honey drizzled from a plastic bottle that looks more appetising than the Weetabix itself. I want some real food, some greasy Desi kaana to oil up my throbbing joints aching from vitamin d deficiency. So I’ve decided to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, abide by the hedonistic mantra of YOLO (you only live once), and give a calorific, flavoursome Desi breakfast a go.

The Sweet Centre is located in the infamous Lumb Lane. By day, the road is an artery for cars and buses driving into the city centre. The ghost of Drummond Mills which used to stand across the road behind metal gates guarded by a security guard with a moustache that bristled like a toothbrush, hovers like dust from the debris. The faintest smell of charred concrete and paint still lingers after the raging fire that brought it down. The only shadow the mills casts now is from the chimney which escaped unscathed, a giant overturned cigar standing alone on a flat desert expanse of brown coloured soil speckled with neat mountains of rubble. By night, the red light district kicks its nocturnal sleeping habits and readies itself for the men who come scavenging with an appetite for more than just food.

The astronomical choices available on the menu, typical of any south Asian restaurant, splurge out infinitely like a never-ending Bollywood script. Thankfully, there are only a handful of things to choose from for breakfast:

Seekh kebabs. Samosas. Channa. Pakoras.

But what Sweet Centre serves up best for breakfast is halwa-puri. Halwa is a sweet dish made from carrots or semolina cooked with a copious amount of butter and sugar. The puri served with it is basically a deep fried roti. If you want to be really unorthodox, you can order a side dish of channa, a chickpea curry, to give it that savoury kick (and some protein) to balance out the grease and sugar.

There’s more than just the smell of fried samosas wafting through the air right now. The taste of cardamom and pistachio swirling in large hundis, steel drums filled with pink Kashmiri chai, is almost palpable on my tongue, taking me back to summer holidays in my grandparent’s home in Girlington where my grandmother used to boil milk in the mornings for breakfast.

On visits to Bradford from London as a child, I always heard about Sweet Centre’s halwa-puri from the elders in my family, only ever managing to gobble a few precious bites on special occasions like Eid. For me, halwa-puri has almost a mythological status as the Kohi-noor of south Asian breakfasts. But considering how legendary the halwa-puri is here, the small font on the menu is a modest tribute to its popularity. There are no huge shiny pictures manspreading themselves over the menu, declaring the superiority of halwa-puri over the samosas photoshopped to look like magnificent fried pyramids. The modesty of the halwa-puri is endearing.

It doesn’t take long before the heavy odour of fried food simmering away in steel pans filled with oil starts to sit on my shalwar kameez. My choice of traditional clothing was intentional. Instead of pre-emptively unbuttoning my jeans, the rubber in my shalwar allows room for my stomach to expand three times over. My mouth involuntarily opens like a goldfish to take in the taste of familiarity, the taste of nostalgia. Everything is sparkling with the glossy veneer of a Coca Cola advertisement.

There are two queues: One for takeaways, one for customers eating in. Luckily for me, I’m standing in the eat-in queue with only one person ahead of me. The takeaway cue trails all the way to the back of the restaurant. Regulars nod their heads at each other in acknowledgement, muttering “Theek hai?” Everyone appears to be half asleep, but there is a discernible gleam in their eyes as they, like me, wait expectantly to order their food. You see, the halwa-puri is served in a frighteningly short time window between 8am-12pm. I say frighteningly short because, well, Asian Standard Timing (AST.) We couldn’t make it on time anywhere if our lives depended on it, that is, unless we’re talking about halwa-puri.

“Next please!”

I’m up. I suddenly feel like Charlie when he discovers the golden ticket wrapped around a bar of Wonka’s chocolate, except my Willy Wonka is an Asian man with a six-inch beard, a bogey-green polo top, and small square glasses which give him the air of a businessman. I order one portion of halwa-puri and channa, enough to feed two. All for a bargain buy of £5.00.

A young guy working in the back wraps seekh kebabs, samosas and pakoras in grease-proof paper with lightning speed. His hands move fluidly, wrap on, wrap off, Miyagi-style. He hands me my breakfast in plastic bowls placed on a matching plastic tray printed with those common floral designs you see on china, the kind of fancy cutlery my grandmother stores away for guests. I order a cup of Kashmiri chai, “without sugar!” I tell him emphatically. “How can you have Kashmiri chai without sugar?” he says in awe. It’s penance for eating breakfast loaded with butter, oil, and sugar. Every little less sugar helps, I think…

The architecture of halwa-puri is minimalistic.

Here, there’s no Michelin star presentation, no pretense in the food. The devil is not in the detail, it’s in the time taken to knead and set the dough for the puri, the time taken to boil and drain fresh chickpeas for the channa curry and for the semolina of the halwa to soak in the yellow of melting butter, all prepared from 5am in the morning.

The puri, a vehicle for the channa and halwa, is round but not flat unlike normal roti. It starts off thin in the centre, thickening slightly on the edges in slight bulges because it has been hand stretched. I eagerly tear a piece off. It doesn’t look like it’s dripping with oil, but just the slightest touch of the puri, and my hands are shimmering like a belly-dancer.

An elderly Bengali man sat in front of me, channeling his inner Jinnah-Nehru with the karakul hat on his head embroidered with magnolia coloured vines and flowers, expertly rips a piece of puri, spoons channa on top of it, and pops it into his mouth with the concise movements of a conductor. Unlike this seasoned old-timer, I have the manual dexterity of a four-year old. I’m momentarily tempted to surrender using my fingers and use a knife and fork instead. But no. “They’re colonial instruments seeking to civilise your fingers” my naani-jee once scolded me about using knives and forks. Eating with my fingers is the proper way to do it, so I toss my spoon aside. There’s a decolonial culinary and cutlery rebellion going down today. Puri in hand, I jump straight into the channa, fingers first.

My fingers wade in the murkiness, skinny-dip in the warm ocean of brown, trying to land some of the chickpeas and cumin seeds bobbing on the surface. Captain Ahab went hunting for Moby Dick. I’m hunting me some chickpeas. I manage to catch two, and the skin off some potato. I shovel some of the halwa on top, and in it goes inside my mouth.

The subtle taste of masaala and chilli washes over my tongue. The channa is not sinfully bland, so much so it’s worthy of a Goodness Gravious Me sketch. It’s perfectly seasoned, a balance struck only by recipes that have been tried and tested for decades. Fearful for our stomach linings, my health-conscious mother brought my siblings and I up on a diet of the occasional, mildly spiced curry. So the mild spice agrees with my Pakistani stomach, diluted by the British sensibilities of my mother.

The sweet butteriness of the halwa is almost sinful. It beautifully balances the savoury flavour of the channa. I’ve never been one to have sweet and savoury at the same time. But all of a sudden my senses are tingling, my tastebuds are roaring like raucious football hooligans in approval at the soft texture of the halwa and the perfect marriage between spice and sugar. Suddenly there’s a High School Musical erupting in my tastebuds. They’re soaring, they’re flying. My fillings and cavities of course, are not.

It’s time for some chai to dislodge the grease accumulating in my throat. I take one sip and place the cup down; it needs sugar. I capitulate, stir a little in, and as my eyes follow the train of ground pistachios floating in a boat of milky froth, swirling round and round, ripples begin to erupt on the surface of my chai, a result of the Tyrannosaur footfall of customers leaving the restaurant considerably heavier than when they first arrived. I can already feel a double chin emerging under my hijab, peeping out like one half of a builder’s bum. I might have to forgo eating for an entire week.

Illuminated under the summer sunlight, I can almost imagine the flowers on the Bengali uncle’s karakul hat blooming with satisfaction as he feasts on his halwa-puri, a serene look set on his face as his taste-buds are flooded with the flavours of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The golden, messianic glow of my puri reminds me that if ever there was a culinary Jannah (heaven), this must be it, right here, right now. It’s Sunday breakfast hedonism at its very finest.

Stranger Things Have Happened on the Pianos of St Pancras

I’m on a train to London, and the train guard is making his announcements in a trusty broad Yorkshire accent.

It’s the usual rehearsed script of where the train is due to stop, the estimated time of arrival, the shameless promotion of overly priced food and beverages before informing parents, lovers and friends saying goodbye to loved ones that unless they want to be charged an arm and a leg for an unintentional trip to London, could they kindly get off the damn train before the automatic doors slide shut, thank you very much.

He pauses for what feels like a few seconds, and proceeds to advise passengers not to hesitate to report anything suspicious.

“Remember, see it, say it, sorted.”

There is a noticeable change in his diction as he emphasises the last few words, the formulaic drone in his voice giving way to a grim seriousness.

On hearing this I feel myself squirming incriminatingly in my seat like a misbehaving child sent head-hanging and red-faced to the headmistress’ office. Nobody has said a word to me, nobody has cut me with a rueful side glance to suggest they aren’t happy with my being there. But today I am overly cautious of the fact that the hijab on my head might bring unwanted attention. I should have worn a turban, but in the mad rush to the train station, an overfilled Ted Baker shopping bag weighing me down in one hand, cracked iPhone in the other, the hijab I flung over my head went from being wrapped acceptably in my trademark Iranian Elvis Presley style, to a monstrous rag with tufts of static hair pointing out front like a mohican. People might take me for an anarchic, hijabi punk-rocker or worse, a Tina Turner impersonator with a hijab. So you can imagine why I am feeling slightly paranoid.

Two hours later, the train pulls into Kings Cross. I still have a few hours before I need to head off to watch a play in the evening. I don’t want to leave without playing on one of the pianos inside St Pancras station next door, a small rite of passage whenever I pass through. My heart is set on one particular piano, a black, sleek beauty gifted by Elton John. It’s like the holy piano of all public pianos, and it’s never not being played. But for once, there’s nobody on it. With nothing between us, I rush towards it to claim my prize. Out of nowhere a woman brushes past, her arms thrust purposefully back and forth, eyes magnified like those pestilent bottle-flies by the oversized Jackie O sunglasses she wears shutting out the sun blazing outside and the world with it, a Mulberry bag looped elegantly around her arm. She wrinkles her nose at me as if she just touched a leper. She’s bad and bougie. Fortunately for her and for my bruised ego, my musical bae is waiting, and nothing can dent this sunny disposition of mine.

So there I am, poking and prodding at the keys of the piano like a fool out of a Morecombe and Wise sketch. Commuters headed from Paris to Nottingham, pull their hand luggage behind them with wheels whirring and spinning over the smooth floor, shooting past on either side of me as I play. I feel like the prophet Moses parting travellers and commuters with the celestial power of my music, but the few bum notes I hit are a humbling reminder I am no bloody Alicia Keys. The tannoid sounds again, this time in the station:

“The threat level has been raised to critical. If you see anything suspicious, please do not hesitate to inform a member of staff or contact the police. Remember, see it, say it, sorted.”

The country’s terror threat has been raised to the highest possible level, but the way the faceless man on the tannoid says it, is in such a matter-of-fact way, you’d think he were an employee at a supermarket announcing a spillage on an aisle after a screaming child smashes a jar of baby food that splatters on the floor like a Jackson Pollack painting, in protest at being refused sweets before dinner. They don’t say “Keep calm and carry on” for nothing; such is the British way. But there creeps that gnawing sense of vulnerability again. Big Brother might be watching…

At this point a woman with long, flowing braids and a green hat perched on her head stops to listen to me play. After a minute or so, she asks if she can film me.

“Feel free, but just to warn you my fingers have a habit of freezing up when the camera is on.”

“I’ll just pretend I’m not here” she says, sitting on the metal railing snaking around the glass elevator the piano is placed in front of.

I’m not being modest. My fingers freeze and the notes stop melding together as I become conscious of her watching me play. After a few minutes, I give up and insist she has a go. She sits on the stool and plays a few songs, all her own compositions which she modestly says are a combination of chords she mixed together. I’m not one who gets emotional very easily, but all of a sudden I’m having to swallow a lump in my throat. Her face is radiating so much joy, so much soul as her fingers dance gracefully over the keys. As she slides off the stool to let on two guys watching on the side, we sit down and talk for a while.

Her name is Sophia, and she is visiting from Chicago. She’s been pining to play the piano for a few weeks since coming to the UK, but couldn’t find one until today. Anyone who loves to play will know that feeling of piano withdrawal which sets in when you haven’t played for a while. We talk about her stay in London so far, about our shared love for theatre and period dramas. The subject of period dramas opens up a whole discussion about how Colin Firth made the best Darcy (apologies to anyone who is camp Macfadyen), and how period dramas are so translatable to south-Asian family politics.

We pause for a moment to glance over at the two guys who went on to play earlier; they’re now playing a duet. Observing how friendly we are with each other, all four of us exchange confused glances.

“Do you guys know each other?”
“No we just met. Do you know each other?”
“No, we just met too!”

That’s when the St Pancras piano gang of two suddenly becomes a gang of four.

Our other fellow piano lovers are Luis and Tawanda. From John Legend, Ludovico Einaudi, Adele, to Alicia Keys, they drop song after song for the next hour. Luis casually flicks his hair to the side, his skateboard tucked under the piano as he plays a song we all recognise with lightning speed. Then Tawanda gets on and blows us away with his cover of John Legend’s ‘All Of Me.’ The sun is blazing, Tawanda and Luis are jamming away, Sophia is now singing like a songbird, and I’m stood here awkwardly squawking the odd words, swaying like a palm tree. I’m not sure what the armed policemen briskly walking up and down in their high visibility jackets make of us, but we’re the most unlikely band going. Here we are, an American, a Zimbabwean, a Londoner, and a hybrid Londoner-Bradfordian, four complete strangers united by our love for music.

What happened to those legendary stone-faced London commuters who don’t stop for anything, I don’t know. All of a sudden, strangers are approaching us, thanking us for playing such beautiful music. I’ve spent a lot of time at St Pancras, but today it feels like there has been some kind of unburdening, almost a heavy sigh of relief as people stop by longer than usual to soak in the sound of the music. Even as sirens howl like wolves in this city, I’m so thankful for the small moments of beauty that float up unexpectedly out of the sand storm enveloping us right now.

Here’s to random encounters. Here’s to strangers who light up your horizon as they come streaking into your life for a moment like flaming comets. And here’s to the day when I’ll finally be able to wrap my hijab like a YouTube blogger.

On the Manchester Attacks, Katie Hopkins, and Moving Forward

My connection with Manchester happened purely by accident.

I initially started out my undergraduate degree in London. But after a family crisis sent my family and I into a domestic violence refuge, push came to shove and we were eventually forced to relocate to my mother’s home town of Bradford. My university degree, something I had spent so long planning towards, almost went down in flames because no university would take a last-minute transfer. But the University of Manchester tossed me a life-line when I needed it most.

At first, Manchester and I didn’t start out on the best of terms. I almost had a dramatic meltdown on my first day of university after I got lost and couldn’t find my way to Manchester Victoria train station. But for the following three years that I was there, it became a home away from home. It was a smaller version of London with the hustle and bustle of a concrete jungle, and Mancunians imbued with that generous northern spirit we southerners sometimes lack (and envy) at the helm of the city.

On the one hand, I’m grieving for Manchester, a city where I’ve embarrassingly danced the night away, escaped the demands of adult life for a few hours in concerts at Manchester Arena and other venues, just as the victims did last night. I’m grieving for the families who won’t hold their loved ones again, for the people being treated in hospital, and for those who will carry the memories of what happened last night for the rest of their lives. I’m grieving over the fact that as unfathomable as it might be, there are people in this world who can somehow justify detonating a bomb of shrapnel and nails in a crowd of concert-goers who never expected they wouldn’t return home.

On the other, I’m worried sick about the retaliation that some communities will face off the back of this attack. I’m worried someone will scream at visibly Muslim women as they walk down the street, that they need to go back to “f*cking ISIS” because of the cloth on their head as I’ve experienced before. I’m worried about the brown or black kids, the Muslim kids going to school who will mark this day as their premature coming of age because their classmates thought they were related to the big bad terrorist, just because of their name or the amount of melanin in their skin. I’m worried that the kind of corrosive words spouted by the likes of Katie Hopkins will become more palatable to fellow Brits, tired of the fact she hides behind the Union Jack as if she has more claim to this country than I do because whiteness is a barometer for Britishness. I’m worried that despite feeling in absolute turmoil, despite feeling an unbounded rage at what has happened, I’ll have to paint a smile on my face when I see people glance at me uncomfortably, just to show that underneath the folds of cloth on my head, I am not a threat. I feel exhausted, and I know the sickness I’ve been feeling all day today isn’t just anemia dragging me down. It’s a weight that has been dragging down everyone across the country today.

How can we possibly understand the logic of someone who justifies killing innocent people, no less children? There is no making sense of thoughts and ideologies woven out of chaos, no matter how much politicians, pundits and the like theorise and pontificate. The least we can do, whatever our faith, whatever our alliances, is to channel our grief and rage into something good, something useful. The worst thing we could do now is to turn on each other.

I hate that it takes for events like these to mobilise people into action when we’re collectively reeling from the heavy blow of what happened last night. Our country is already hurtling down a rabbit hole of political and social chaos as it is. But if we aren’t calm and measured in our responses, if we don’t show love and solidarity to those who have suffered directly or indirectly and to those who will need it in the coming weeks, then the impact of yesterday’s attacks will be generational.

On my way home from a vigil for Manchester at Bradford Cathedral earlier, I walked past a gravestone specialist shop in Manningham. “IN LOVING MEMORY”, the sign read in rusted gold capital letters. It made me wonder, when we die, what impact, what legacy will we leave? Big or small, we all have a part to play in shaping this world of ours. Whether we choose to use our hands or our words as a hammer for good or bad, is entirely up to us.

Watching the candles burn in the cathedral, and whispering hurried prayers in the darkness of my room, something Dylan Thomas wrote popped into my mind:

‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

From the doctors, the taxi drivers, the police, fire and ambulance workers, the hotel and restaurant owners, the homeless man who held a dying woman in his arms, the concerned people who opened the doors to their homes, to the Mancunians who ousted the EDL from the streets of Manchester, each and everyone of these people have shown that as hard as it is to focus on the positives tonight, there is hope. There is unity and resilience. There are forces of good at work. Don’t you dare forget that.

If You Can Survive Exam Season, You Can Survive A Post-Trump World

I was a pint-sized fourteen year old when I took my GCSE mock exams in Fulham Cross Secondary School for girls. I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I’d never live past sweet sixteen. It’s a dramatic thought given school is supposed to educate rather than inculcate thoughts of death, but hardly surprising given my age and the heightened hysteria exams stress induced, particularly in an all-girls school. I was convinced I would leave the black metal gates in a pine box, my dreams and aspirations cryogenically frozen into the unique candidate number and illegible scrawl on my exam paper. Writing this more than ten years on is almost like speaking “beyond the grave”.

 

In those days, the worst of secondary school problems were about acne; buying into the latest trends of McKenzie hoodies and Nike bags; how hanging glass dummies around your neck was the biggest fashion faux-pas of the decade; and formulating ways we could dupe our parents into endorsing soft porn by purchasing stationary with the Playboy bunny logo. There were no Kardashians then to dictate to the obliging masses what to wear – only disapproving high-school girls who would shred you to pieces with one dagger as they scanned you from head to toe. Everyone just wanted to “fit in” to the human jigsaw puzzle that would become disfigured the moment we left our sequestered little school bubble. So you can imagine how it was that exam stress was the final straw that broke the teenage camel’s back.

 

Exams were always held in the gym. It was in these four walls, the centre of our scholastic universe, where dreams were made and broken, and where generations of students ruefully froze their butts off during the winter. The first day of exams was always the worst. Completing day-to-day activities was lost to us students. The ability to form an orderly cue for example, which comes innate to any Brit, became impossible as we huddled outside the gym like a group of Emperor penguins braving the arctic winds, shuffling sheepishly side to side as we counted down the seconds until the gates of school purgatory would burst open.

 

After manoeuvring her way through zombie-faced students, the deputy head stood in front of us with her arms crossed, her lips pursed, and a steely look in her eyes: “You are the worst year we’ve ever had!” she said. There was no kissing of the teeth from the bolder students, the ultimate teenage sign of disapproval, and there was no high-pitched screeches of “Later!”, a euphemism for “What the hell are you talking about?”, amongst other less pleasant things. Whether it was because we’d heard it so many times before or because the year group had spent half the night snoring on top of their CGP revision guides, with its dry jokes nestled at the bottom of the pages that only knocked us out even more, no one responded. There was just an eerie silence. Even the hardiest, most anarchic Fulham Cross gal was grim-faced and mute.

 

The clock struck twelve and the year elevens, the big fish of the school, came streaming out with the morbid expression of someone who had just walked out of a funeral. One girl’s eyes were puffed up and swollen red as if she had had an allergic reaction to the exams. She was flanked on both sides by friends who rubbed her back and nodded like those Churchill dogs with less enthusiasm and more sympathy, as she wailed tearfully about how hard the biology exam was that she had just sat. I found myself secretly wishing I had learned those duas, prayers my mum told me to recite before starting an exam. It used to be a classroom joke that a funeral was taking place in the old graveyard adjacent to the school, prompting gullible school girls to look out of the window in search of the hearse. There was a funeral that day except this time, it was our own. Didn’t I say teenagers were Class A melodramatics?

 

Eventually, it was time for my year group, the year tens, to enter the gym, where the handle of the clock was God, the exam invigilator was the devil in plain clothes, and our wooden desks were our salvation from sinking like the Titanic into the laminated flooring – Jack be damned of course. The small desks we were designated, personalised with our names typed onto a sticker on the top left hand corner, were placed at regular intervals in the gym. Like pieces of driftwood floating in a sea of oestrogen, we clung on for dear life as our fate was determined by the knowledge spilling out from our over-saturated brains, and whether our glutes could withstand the numbing sensation of sitting on planks of hard plastic for a few gruelling hours.

 

As the invigilator laid down the rules of what we could and couldn’t do, I ran my hand under the side of the desk. An expression of disgust crumpled my face as my finger came into contact with dry chewing gum, smooth and fossilised, waiting to surprise the unfortunate fingertip that brushed over its surface. You could trace letters scratched frantically onto the surface of these desks with the sharp tip of a compass, by generations of students who etched an eloquent obituary to their youth years before. “Gemma woz ere 2004”. Teenage vernacular was always short and to the point. The ghosts of students from the past descended on us, whispering of exam elation, despair, and complete boredom, sending shivers down our spines. Other girls etched the names of their boyfriends, past and present, their love immortalised in a cursive heart which enveloped both their initials. I remember fleetingly contemplating whether to etch Aragorn’s name into the desk, but was torn by my admiration for Legolas’ golden locks. My loyalty to fictional lovers back then was fickle. “You may now begin.” Suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of pages turning and nervous scribbling as two hundred pens simultaneously came into contact with paper.

 

The first page of the exam would set the tone for whether you would succeed or fail. The eyes of the girl sat on my right bulged because she didn’t revise the content needed to answer the first question. Exam suicide. Another student repressed a squeal of joy because two months of burying her head in a book and sacrificing her social life had finally paid off. One of the school teachers masquerading as an invigilator frantically walked past his star student several times, wondering why she sat staring at the first question for five minutes with a blank expression on her face. His fears were subdued eventually when he saw a smile ripple across her face as she experienced a Eureka! moment, scuttling off happily with the gait of an Irish leprechaun, assured the ink spilling from her pen would not let him down.

 

I have boxes stuffed full of old exercise books and exam papers written by the old Aina, the Aina with the illegible scrawl a teacher once said rather curtly, that she had to use a magnifying glass to read. Her assassination of my handwriting still piques my pride to this day. I look for the foolish teenager I used to be in the pages of my schoolbooks or the comments teachers left behind. But like wisps of smoke floating from a candle as you snuff them out, cutting across the room like threads of spider webs shot into the dark, she has vanished. Similar to the girls who scribbled the names of their lovers or their own names into the exam desks, I also wrote my obituary to my youth long ago, I just didn’t know it then. At least now, standing on the altitude of adulthood looking down on a world where a human Oompa-Loompa has become the most powerful leader of the free world, it has finally dawned on me that exam stress was nothing compared to the trials and tribulations that were to follow.

Meet the Headmaster of the School for Afghan Refugee Girls

Meet the man known as “Ustadh” or teacher, the headmaster of the primary school for Afghan refugee girls I visited in KPK.

 

Originally from Kabul, he has spent the last 20 years in Pakistan as a teacher.

 

Not only does he lead the school. He is also an elder of the Ahmedzai, a tribe of Pashtuns. In a community gathering of elders known as “shura”, his word has a lot of sway. Immunisation and polio vaccination for instance is point of distrust for some Pashtun communities for numerous reasons. Some local scholars have issued fatwas claiming it isn’t permissible for Muslims. The belief that polio vaccinations are a guise to sterilise children is a conspiracy theory which persists there just as it does here in the UK. Ustadh uses his influence to negotiate with other community elders and encourage them to protect their children.

 

Whilst there was much to be hopeful about, the future of some of the refugee children is not. I asked the headmaster what hope he sees for the future. He said, “There is nothing beyond primary school for these children. They don’t have citizenship in Pakistan, and there aren’t systems in place to educate them at a higher level. They can’t dream about being a doctor or an engineer.”

“Even A Smile Is Considered Charity”

Laal, a young Afghan girl l met at the primary school for Afghan refugee girls, suffers from epilepsy. In Pashto, there are no equivalent words for medical jargon and terms like epilepsy, so her mother described it in terms of shaking, or the “illness of the brain” as she called it.

 

“She collapses on the street, into the gutter sometimes. She has no control over herself, it’s so humiliating. Isn’t there something you can do?”

 

I asked about whether she had seen a doctor. One of the health workers accompanying me told me how some private medical practitioners in Pakistan are like modern day equivalents of the Sheriff of Nottingham. They suck the poor dry of what little money they have because they know they can. Even 20 rupees (about 18p in British currency) is a large sum of money. There was nothing I could do. Hell, if I were armed with a medical degree, I would try.

 

I told her mother how bubbly and energetic she was despite her illness, and she only beamed as mothers do when you compliment their child, asking me if I wanted to take Laal’s photo. Laal of course was only too happy to pose for me.

 

There I was, frantically trying to think of some way I could give to them. But true to the prophetic narration, when the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) stated that even a smile is considered charity, it was Laal that gave me something with her smile.