Soon the light began to fade and I still hadn’t had a turn. I wasn’t wanted or needed there. Instead I stood, lonely and left out, like a spare part waiting to be collected on the way home. I learned my lesson that day. If I wasn’t invited, it was because my four brothers didn’t want their little sister joining in. My place was to be pretty, the shining trophy of the family. It was no use trying to be one of the boys. I was the little girl with the ribbons in her hair, and that’s all I was good for.
Chapter 2
Living on Sikh Street
Our end-of-terrace house, a little red brick building on a corner, looked identical to the others in the street apart from the corner wall, which was crumbling in places, giving the neighbours a full view of our messy back garden.
Dad was always trying to lay paths or fix things up in the garden, but I liked the fact that there was no solid wall because it gave me direct access to the house of my friend Suki, who lived on the other side of the road.
From the outside our house may have been the same as the rest in the street but the family inside was different. We were Muslims living peacefully alongside our neighbours and friends, all of whom happened to be Sikhs. I wouldn’t have even considered the difference if my older brother Habib hadn’t pointed it out to me.
‘Muslims and Sikhs hate each other,’ he insisted one afternoon.
‘Why?’ I asked. Suki was a Sikh and we didn’t hate one another. She and her family were lovely.
‘It’s tradition. It’s to do with land,’ Habib said, not really explaining. ‘It’s how it’s always been.’
I shook my head. It didn’t make any sense to me. ‘Well, I think it’s silly.’
But Habib wasn’t listening. He’d already turned away. I didn’t understand what he had against Sikhs. I liked to call our road Sikh Street because I went to school with Sikhs, our neighbours were Sikhs and my best friend was a Sikh. It didn’t matter that we were Muslims. All I cared about was which dolls Suki and I would play with later that day.
Unlike our house, Suki’s was a newly built four-bedroom detached house with its own garage. The garage door was white, just like the walls inside the house. Compared with the hustle and bustle and general chaos of my own home, Suki’s felt like heaven. It was clean and clear inside, with hardly any furniture. I was used to a cluttered house full of storage boxes from the shop, but Suki’s had what seemed to me like acres of space.
There was a garage built on the side of the house but the family didn’t keep a car in there. Instead, they’d turned it into a special prayer room, which you reached through a door just off the kitchen. Suki’s mother had covered the entire floor of the prayer room with white sheets. We’d sneak in there and I’d gaze at the musical instruments that rested at the bottom of the room by the window. There was only one window that overlooked the back garden, so it was nice and private. A huge picture hung on a wall. Suki said it was their God, but that didn’t bother me, even though I was a Muslim. Suki’s family were deeply religious but they were also very kind. They didn’t worry about me being Muslim. It didn’t seem to matter to them.
All of Suki’s family played the instruments in the prayer room. Suki was learning the tabla, which was a small drum. My eyes lit up whenever it was time for her to practise. Her mum noticed and decided to teach me too. The whole family allowed me to bang the drums and pluck at the strings of the sitar, even though I couldn’t do it properly and just made a din. I always loved being in their prayer room.
Unlike mine, Suki’s family didn’t eat meat, not even eggs, so I was fascinated by their food. Her mother would cook up dishes using lentils and other pulses, which didn’t look very nice but tasted delicious. She spiced the food in a similar way to us, but unlike my mum, who tended to take shortcuts, she made all her own food from scratch, including pakoras and samosas.
Once when I was invited for tea Suki’s mum was running late and didn’t have time to cook. When she called us in to eat I was amazed to see plates of piping hot orange food, which looked like nothing I’d ever seen before.
‘What is it?’ I asked Suki, prodding with my fork at a round object coated in a thick gooey orangey-red sauce.
‘What, you’ve never had this before?’ Suki gasped.
I shook my head. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. My mum didn’t cook Western food.
‘Mum,’ Suki called to her mother, who was still busy in the kitchen. ‘It’s Nabila – she’s never had beans on toast before!’
I could hear Suki’s mum chuckling to herself in the kitchen and I felt silly.
‘Try some,’ Suki urged, scooping a forkful off her own plate before cramming it into her mouth. ‘Hmmm, it’s lovely.’
Reluctantly, I let the orange food slide into my mouth.
‘Hmmm, it’s lovely,’ I agreed, copying Suki. I shut my eyes and allowed the creamy beans to slide down the back of my throat and found they were, in fact, very good.
At that moment, Suki’s mother walked in. ‘Everything okay?’
‘It’s delicious!’ I said, licking the tomato sauce from my lips. ‘Can I have beans on toast every time I come here?’
Suki’s mother laughed and disappeared back to the kitchen.
After that, I loved going to Suki’s house for tea and I’d always ask for beans on toast.
Back at home, Mum had endless pots of meat curry on the boil. There were always scraps of meat from the butchers’ shop that needed to be used up. She made a legendary chicken curry, with lots of fresh coriander, and she would also cook curried lamb and goat. She was a pretty good cook.
My favourite dish was a gorgeous rice pudding, which I called ‘Mum’s rainbow rice’. I’d sit and watch as she mixed cooked rice, raisins, sultanas and coconut, before adding droplets of food colouring, using every colour you could think of. As she dripped them in one by one, the colours would bleed and be absorbed into each particle of rice, but before they became too blurred Mum would grab the bowl and flip it, mixing the rice in on itself. The colours would soak in and create what I called ‘rainbow rice’.
At six years old, Suki was a year older than me, but our lives were almost identical, apart from our religions. Like me, she was the only girl in a family of four brothers, but, unlike mine, hers were dashing and exciting. They never cut their hair. Instead they wore it in a bun under a dark fabric turban. I’d never see her brothers brush or comb their hair and I was always tempted to peek under their turbans to see if theirs was as long as mine. Their hair was sacred to them and I understood that because I’d never had mine cut either. I sometimes wondered if I should put my hair up under a hat or something so I could be just like my friends.
Despite her evening classes, Mum still couldn’t read or write very much English, but our Sikh neighbours took her under their wing and helped her. To our horror, they taught her how to knit and crochet, which meant we got even more hand-made clothes. Soon my brothers were moaning about all the outfits she was churning out at an alarming rate. They hated the fact that she made them all dress the same. Now, when they walked down the street everyone could tell they were brothers. There was no getting away from it. The stiff, brown home-made shorts were horrid, but the itchy pullovers were even worse.
‘I hate these clothes! We look stupid,’ Saeed moaned to me in the garden one day. I covered my mouth to stifle a laugh. I’d been wearing Mum’s creations all my life and, although my dresses were beautiful, they could sometimes be a bit garish. Now it was someone else’s turn to suffer.
My mum was happy to have Sikh friends and during the six years we lived in Sikh Street she became great friends with Suki’s mum, but at the same time she made it clear to me that I would never be allowed to marry a Sikh. In her eyes that would be wrong. It would cross too many barriers.