The Centre(68)

“I’m sorry. It’s just, ‘Do you know who I am?’ Doesn’t that make you no better than them?”

“Not like that. What I’m saying is, if … if people treat you like you’re not worthy, you need to rise above them.” He made a fist, bringing it down on the table for emphasis, as if crushing a tiny, little man. “You need to show them who you are. It’s the only way.”

“The only way?”

“I was shocked by the bad treatment. Appalled.” His accent turned more British as he spoke. “Really, how dare they? And some of these people were just off the streets, you know? Lower-class types.”

I winced, but said nothing.

“Of course, those chaps at Oxford never treated me differently. They wouldn’t dream of it. But I hid from them the way I was treated elsewhere. Except, oh god, I remember once, when I was walking with Eric down the high street, someone was passing us. Ruffian type.”

“Oh god, Arjun. Stop. What does that even mean?”

“Oh, you have a problem with that word, do you? Listen to this. He spat on the ground in front of us and then he said ‘bloody p*ki,’ just like that, under his breath—”

“The p-word.”

“Huh?”

“I would prefer it if you called it the p-word.”

“P-word, don’t be ridiculous. He called me that. If it’s allowed from his mouth, we can certainly say it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Okay, regardless, he called me a p*ki, and I wanted to say to him, you fucking imbecile, I’m not even Pakistani!”

“That’s a fucked-up thing to say.”

“I … oh … Anisa. You know I don’t see you that way.”

“What way?”

“Well, as a Pakistani, or anything like that.”

“I am Pakistani.”

“It’s all the same to me, darling. You’re one of us.”

Indians did this to me all the time, this weird colonial swallowing up, this “we’re all the same,” which inevitably became “partition should never have happened,” which then turned into a full-on mourning for their completely fictitious long-lost perfect India of yesterday. They saw Pakistan, the entire country, as some kind of travesty, a broken-off piece of themselves that had turned rotten and sour once severed from its root. It was annoying as fuck, but whatever, I let it go.

“Anyway, what happened then, after he said that?”

Arjun paused and took another sip, “Well, so Eric and I were walking, and the man said ‘the p-word,’ and we both heard it … but we pretended we didn’t. I saw Eric’s ears turn red like a tomato, but we kept walking. The truth is, the fact that the man had said it was less humiliating than the fact that Eric had heard it. That man made Eric see me that way—see my color.”

“You think Eric didn’t already know you were brown?”

“Not brown like that. You wouldn’t understand. Things are different now. Eric was different with me after that. For a while, he treated me differently. And I had to prove myself all over again.”

“That must have been painful.”

“It was what it was, but I wasn’t going to just surrender. I was my father’s son, after all. Ah, it’s been so long since I thought about all this.” He exhaled deeply and continued. “But something else happened too. Something much worse. Not something I enjoy looking back on. There was this pub, you see, around the corner from where I lived. Gora pub. The King’s Head. And I would go there, by myself, every Thursday. Just sit there and have a pint. Sometimes I would buy everyone a round. I wanted to show them that we could all be friends, that we were not so different.”

“Oh god, is this some kind of pro-assimilation story?”

“Huh? No, just listen. So I went one Thursday, then the next, and then the next. People got friendly. It felt good. I felt like I was overcoming something. They even bought me a round sometimes.”

“Uh-huh. And then?”

“And then one day, there was a big cricket match on. India versus England.”

“Oh no.”

“Well, I told myself, That’s fine. You’ve got friends there now. And anyway, if they ask you who you support, just say England.”

“That’s horrible that you’d have to say that.”

“No, Anisa. That’s not horrible. What’s horrible is it didn’t work.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to get into it. I’ll just say, there was hospital involved.”

“Oh god.”

“That’s not even the worst part. What happened to me … it spilled out into the street. And afterward, I was just lying there, bloody nose, like a bum on the pavement. And then someone came up to me. A man. He gave me some water. Lifted me up by the arms and said he would take me to the hospital.”

“Thank god.”

“I remember his arms pulling me up. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ I was saying. And then I opened my eyes and saw his face.” Arjun paused. “It was the Bangladeshi man who ran the curry house across the street.”

“And?”

“Oh god. It was the most humiliating experience of my life. At the hospital, I told him, ‘Go away, go now, my friends are coming.’”