Daily Times

My first humiliation took place at Woolworths.

It was 1970s London. And, back then, my world was full of strawberry aero chocolate bars and Enid Blyton tales of boarding school frolics and devilish insubordination.  All washed down with lashings of ginger pop. In other words, my world was overwhelmingly white.

Except that my Pakistani father and I were the only ‘coloureds’ on the street. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of hiding behind my mother’s legs as three little girls from the top of our road, who couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than my pre-school self, knocked on our front door. Still on their bicycles, they asked if I wanted to go out and play. As I shook my head rather vigorously with my eyes tightly shut, I heard one of them ask my mother a question that I would have put to myself, had I known how to articulate it: why was I a different colour to her? Had I poured brown paint on myself?

To my childhood self they appeared utterly grown-up and glamorous: all blonde swishing hair and blue eyes smudged with eyeliner. In short, they looked nothing like me. And then I caught them exchanging knowing smiles with my mother. Of course, she could interact with them. She looked like them

This memory resurfaced after my Woolworths humiliation.  It was Christmas time. And it happened on the top floor of the department store. Right next to Santa’s grotto. And perhaps it was because I was an only child with an active imagination — I found nothing amiss about being confronted with a small spaceship adorned with tinsel. My mother and my seven or eight-year-old self were the only adventure travellers in the queue. Until, that is, two salesgirls clambered aboard to make up the numbers. They couldn’t have been older than mid-teens. But to my childhood self they appeared utterly grown-up and glamorous: all blonde swishing hair and blue eyes smudged with eyeliner. In short, they looked nothing like me. And then I caught them exchanging knowing smiles with my mother. Of course, she could interact with them. She looked like them. Or at least she could have been mistaken for their mother. Theirs not mine. Yet even worse was the feeling I couldn’t quite shake off: that my very presence rendered her different in their eyes.

Yet I was only aware of my impending indignity once the reindeerless motorised sleigh had landed. Right next to Santa’s grotto. My mother was firmly to blame. Smiling quietly she had listened to question after question about where we might possibly land, knowing the answer all along. Yet the betrayal came not from that — but from allowing my imagination run away with me in full earshot of the salesgirls. What must they have thought? What must they have thought about someone like me?

Another, earlier, memory of London. Walking between my parents, one hand in each of theirs, under a covered walkway in a non-descript town centre. The rush of the evening work crowd beginning to take shape. My father saying something about going on ahead to run a last minute errand, asking me if I wanted to accompany him. Me saying no, only to change my mind at the last minute, letting loose of my mother’s hand; running off to play catch-up. The shouts calling me back. My not paying any heed. And then seeing a black gentleman, possibly around the same age as my father, crouch down with arms outstretched preparing to grab hold of me. My mother’s voice behind me, reassuring. Her thanking him as he began to stand, and turning to me to tell me that I was lucky he was a nice man or anything might have happened. And my not understanding what she meant. Forming a question I knew not how to whisper: how could he not be nice? He was not white.

Even at that age, at the time of the Thatcher era of skinheads and putting Britain first, I had started to view white men with suspicion. Not necessarily because of what they might do to me but a sense of the danger they could pose to my father. It’s strange thinking about all this now. Stranger still is when I hear from women of colour that I couldn’t possibly understand their experience. Since only a brown person would. This, too, from women who have grown up looking like everyone else and only become sharply aware of the visual aesthetics of race when they find themselves cast in the role of minority skin. We talk so easily about the appropriation of culture. Yet what about that of identity? What do we call it when the bi-racial voice is silenced time and again by accusations of ‘white passing’ and privilege by those whose only experience is a mono-racial one?

I know what I call it. But I’d rather not say.

The writer is the Deputy Managing Editor, Daily Times. She can be reached at mirandahusain@me.com and tweets @humeiwei

Published in Daily Times, July 5^th , 2017.