Anita and Me. Meera Syal

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Epigraph

      I do not have many memories of my very early childhood, apart from the obvious ones, of course. You know, my windswept, bewildered parents in their dusty Indian village garb standing in the open doorway of a 747, blinking back tears of gratitude and heartbreak as the fog cleared to reveal the sign they had been waiting for, dreaming of, the sign planted in tarmac and emblazoned in triumphant hues of red, blue and white, the sign that said simply, WELCOME TO BRITAIN.

      And then there’s the early years of struggle and disillusion, living in a shabby boarding house room with another newly arrived immigrant family, Polish, I think would be quite romantic; my father arriving back from his sweatshop at dawn to take his place in the bed being vacated by Havel who would be off to do his shift on the McDouglas Biscuits assembly line, my father sweeping away crushed garibaldi crumbs from the communal pillow before sliding gratefully into oblivious sleep, my mother awake at his side, counting the kicks from the daughter inside her who would condemn her, marry her to England forever.

      I slept in a drawer, probably, swaddled in back copies of the Daily Mirror. My mother only found out about Kennedy’s assassination two weeks after the event, when she read the reversed newsprint headlined on my damp backside. She didn’t follow the news, no telly, no radio, no inclination, being a simple Punjabi girl suffering from culture shock, marooned and misplaced in Wolverhampton.

      Of course, this is the alternative history I trot out in job interview situations or, once or twice, to impress middleclass white boys who come sniffing round, excited by the thought of wearing a colonial maiden as a trinket on their arm. My earliest memory, in fact, is of the first time I understood the punchline to a joke. I was watching some kind of Royal Variety television show on ice – I remember that because it was a balmy summer evening and I wondered how they had managed to keep the floor so cold. A man in a lime green jumpsuit raised a gun and took aim at a fat female ballerina who was gliding towards him like some vast, magnificent galleon, pink tulle emanating in a cloud from around her strong marbled thighs like ectoplasm. The man raised the gun, fired once, twice, and the ballerina fell dramatically to the floor to hilarity and applause.

      ‘Oh my dearie,’said the man. ‘I think I shot her in the tutu.’

      My mother said I laughed so much that I threw up and at one point, called in Mrs Worrall from next door who put her teeth in and solemnly declared that I’d probably ‘had a turn.’ But I’ve always been a sucker for a good double entendre; the gap between what is said and what is thought, what is stated and what is implied, is a place in which I have always found myself. I’m really not a liar, I just learned very early on that those of us deprived of history sometimes need to turn to mythology to feel complete, to belong.