From India with Love, page 5
Humiliation and anger are such physical emotions—it took years before I could recall that incident without feeling a hot rush of blood to my cheeks. Yet even so, I told myself that this feeling was of my own making. I could choose not to be so sensitive. If I let it bother me, it was my own problem. I just needed to shrug, smile and laugh it off, as Mum had said. I thought being able to respond like this was a classically Australian trait: the wonderful ability to readily laugh at yourself. I reminded myself of this over and over.
But for all my resentment at being treated differently because I was brown, I was quite happy to try to pass myself off as black, specifically black American. I no longer worshipped all things from the land of canned cheese, but in my mind, African-American culture was the height of cool. This view was shared by Damian during our teenage years. He led the way, of course, dressing like the black rappers he idolised, while I got my hair braided into tiny plaits, which raised me in the ‘cool’ stakes at school. Being mistaken for a black American would have been a compliment akin to being perceived as blonde and blue-eyed. That’s how I saw it then.
Going outside Australia when I was fourteen broadened my perspective. Mum found the Australian heat unbearable and often spoke longingly of England. When I reached year nine, she and Dad came up with a grand plan to take us overseas to visit some of Mum’s relatives whom she hadn’t seen since she left Britain more than three decades earlier. My parents were always planning their next great scheme, whether it was setting up a hobby farm, adding another bloody garden bed (that we kids would inevitably have to weed!) to the grounds at Forest Grove, or something more ambitious, like moving the family to the United Kingdom for six months. Rani and Melissa had both moved out of home by this point, but that still left six children, including a toddler. There was (and still is) something crazy, brave and irrepressible about Mum and Dad.
I couldn’t wait! How exciting. Never would I have thought we’d be able to fly overseas and actually live abroad. Money was always tight when I was growing up. But somehow Mum and Dad managed to do a lot with very little. They organised a ‘home swap’, entering our house’s availability on an online database of people all around the world who were offering their homes. The best one for us ended up being a place on the border of Wales, hours and hours away from seaside Hythe in Kent where Mum had grown up and where her relatives still lived. Mum, Damian, Dominic, Gabriela, Joseph and I left at the end of the school year in 1999 (Dad and Catherine would follow a few weeks later). The flights, no doubt the cheapest available, went to London via Indonesia and Frankfurt, and we were a ragged, harried bunch when we arrived. I’m not sure how we made it to Heathrow in one piece, but Mum was wise to invest in two Game Boys for us to share on the plane trip over.
It can’t have been easy for Mum without Dad for those first few weeks, but by the time Dad and Catherine arrived and Melissa joined us from London, we spent a fun Christmas in a very picturesque country farmhouse, complete with an old Aga stove, in Herefordshire. Hedges lined the road to two huge wooden gates that swung open to a driveway so steep we had to empty the car before tackling the hill. It was terrifying to deal with ice and snow but it all added to the excitement of being so far away from Australia—although weirdly, because of our literary diet of Enid Blyton, the place felt very familiar, almost like coming home. Great big paddocks of scrub were swapped for fields of vivid green, crisscrossed by the hedges I’d read about all my life. The farm no longer had animals, but scattered around the grounds were moss-covered barns and an old stone well.
In the New Year we moved to Dymchurch, closer to Aunty Paddy and Mum’s cousins Aecila and her husband David. Here we were just metres from one of the pebble beaches that we’d never quite been able to believe existed when Mum told us about them.
The trip to England was my first taste of the wider world beyond rural New South Wales, and I loved it. The school I went to was co-ed, which was a huge change for me. The kids were different too. In fact, everything was unusual: the accents, the things they did at lunchtime (walked the school perimeter in laps), the curriculum. I wasn’t there long enough to make any friendships that lasted beyond our stay, but I felt accepted and liked, and England felt like the sort of country where anyone could fit in.
I got a job babysitting two young children who were neighbours of Aecila and David’s in Hythe. The children’s parents came home well after the last bus had ambled out of the seaside town, so I would stay over with my relatives. The hours and nights away from my family gave me my first opportunity to expand my sense of self. The money I earned gave me my first taste of independence. I would have been happy to keep living there, but soon the six months was up and we had to return to Bathurst. Back at school I yearned to go back to England and never stopped dreaming of returning.
Roughly coinciding with our return to Australia, I got on the hormonal teen rollercoaster and didn’t get off it for a few years. After a brief reprieve from my parents’ strict rules about where and with whom we could go out, rules which were easy to enforce living out of town in Bathurst but more difficult in Dymchurch, being stuck back in Forest Grove was a complete downer. I had a fairly torrid relationship with my parents for a while, as a lot of people do at that age. According to them, I was rude, moody, uncommunicative, secretive, lazy and selfish. According to me, they were way too controlling and repressive—I wasn’t allowed to go to parties or sleepovers, and they were still trying to exert control over what I watched, listened to and wore. I sank into a self-absorbed funk of loneliness, for which I blamed my parents. I felt trapped and yearned to be my own person again.
We lived too far outside town for me to walk to the shops as I’d done in Dymchurch, and I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike in to see friends—the distance was too far and unsafe for a young girl. There was no public transport, so I had almost zero social life outside of school. This was the era before smartphones and instant messaging, and I felt completely isolated. I had one friend whose parents were nearly as strict as mine. During lunch we would glumly sympathise with each other over the fact that yet another party had come and gone without us.
It felt like my only luxury was having my own bedroom, albeit the smallest in the house. It was my retreat, my sanctuary, and I spent most of my time at home in what was dubbed ‘the Cave’ by the rest of the family, listening to rage-filled rock music and sarcastic Alanis Morissette, reading Sylvia Plath and Annie Proulx and writing mournful poems about my non-existent love life. (I’d moved on from Sweet Valley High to literary fiction and especially loved Jane Austen.) When I ran out of other things to do, I studied.
I was desperate for more independence, and when we returned from England I, with the help of Dad, hunted down my first job. I was already interested in journalism, so where else would I go but to the newsagency in town? Dad would pick up his morning paper every day on the way to work and the owners, Geoff and Virginia, happily trained me up in all things from selling lottery and scratchie tickets to crafting balloon arrangements. After a while I left there to join my school friend Jane at Big W, where the longer opening hours allowed me to earn more money.
Walking through the toy aisles one day, I suddenly realised how few dolls there were with non-white skin. Why not I wondered? It wasn’t as though Australia wasn’t filled with women from all over the world—especially Asia. Where were the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese looking dolls. For the first time I asked myself, what if I did have an issue growing up as a brown girl in a white world? When I was still a pre-schooler, Mum had bought me a brown-skinned Cabbage Patch doll with black curly hair, but I realised now that I had never seen another doll that looked like me, or indeed barely anything other than the blue-eyed blonde Barbie standard. Happily, the world has progressed since then. On a recent trip to India one store’s major display feature was an Indian Barbie. I laughed and nearly brought one home for Mum. When I was a child, she would have loved nothing more than to make a dark haired contribution to my collection of blonde, blue-eyed Barbies.
I’d been interested in journalism since the early years of primary school. Apparently in year four I took it upon myself to explain to my teacher all about then opposition leader John Hewson’s bungle when it came to detailing the prospective goods and services tax. (No wonder I didn’t have more friends if all I wanted to talk about was tax policy!) That’s not to say I was obsessed with politics at that age. It was a family ritual to sit down together to watch the 6 p.m. local news and then A Current Affair (back when Ray Martin hosted the program) before the Sydney news came on, and in the mornings we woke up to Tracy Grimshaw and Steve Liebmann on Today, so we all felt quite well informed about things.
I was more interested in the media generally and even fantasised about presenting the travel show Getaway. Then when I was twelve it was my job to carry the big black crate full of old editions of the local paper, the Western Advocate, down the driveway to leave out for the recycling collection. Reading the top page as I walked along one day, my eye was caught by a story about a young woman who was studying at the local university. The degree was a Bachelor of Arts in Communications—Broadcast Journalism. I didn’t need a pen to write it down, it was instantly seared into my memory. That’s what I’d do—that journalism degree. Throughout high school my ambition never wavered, and I left school determined to pursue that course. But first I wanted to see a little of the world.
Mum’s English birth entitled her biological children (but, unfairly, not Rani, Damian or me!) to a right of abode visa to live and work in England, and Melissa leapt at the opportunity. She was a Princess Diana tragic and was extremely affected by her death (as we all were). Resolved to visit Althorp, Diana’s childhood home and now the site of her grave, she set off to London in August 1998. She ended up getting a job as a teacher, and would remain in London for five years in all. She urged me to come over when I left school, and even generously offered to put the cost of my airfare on her credit card until I could pay it off.
I was trying to save, and by year twelve, as well as studying for my Higher School Certificate, I was already juggling two regular jobs (Big W and Muffin Break) plus the odd bit of babysitting for neighbours. Then a new Indian restaurant opened up in Bathurst. Despite having spent my life trying to distance myself from any connection with India, I went there seeking a job. Maybe looking the part would give me an edge over the other applicants, I thought, and if exploiting my supposed ‘Indian-ness’ would help me get to London sooner, so be it. Sure enough, I landed the job, but the few hours a week I was there set back my relationship with India even further.
The job itself was fine, but the smell of the Indian food seemed to cling to me permanently. It wasn’t the first time I’d worked with food—I’d moonlighted in a bakery and donned a ridiculous-looking Muffin Break uniform for a short time to sell toasted sandwiches and warmed muffins—but nothing prepared me for this experience. I would go home at the end of every shift stinking of curry. My hair, which fell to the small of my back, smelled the strongest, but I felt as though the odour had sunk into every pore. Shivering, I would strip down to my underwear outside the house, throw my uniform on the washing line to air it out and then sprint straight to the shower. But no amount of soap and shampoo would remove the smell. I can recall the distinctive odour of butter chicken mixed with Schwarzkopf hair wax even now, and it still nauseates me.
I kept my aversion to Indian food quiet, and the restaurant owners, knowing nothing of it, generously gave me takeaways to bring home. I tried a bit here and there, but the only thing I took to was the innocuous mango lassi. Mum liked Indian food, however, and my school friend Averil loved the leftover curries. Passing on the freebies was really the only upside.
I put up with the job for the last three or four months of year twelve, and then four days after graduation, at the end of 2001, I was out of there. Out of the restaurant, out of school, out of the family home, out of Bathurst, out of Australia. Given my horridness as a teenager, I think Mum and Dad were probably relieved to see me go. Our relationship got better and better once I left home and I could finally do what I wanted to do. At seventeen years and eight months, four months away from legal adulthood, I touched down in London for a year of freedom and exploration.
After all that hard work I should have saved more than I had, but I’d also enjoyed finally being able to buy the things I wanted. Poor Melissa was aghast when I arrived to live with her with just a hundred pounds in my pocket. Luckily, I’ve never had any trouble finding a job. Initially I temped in a business park in north-west London for a family company that made pita bread and baklava. It was a very boring job—inputting data from customer orders into a computer, in a tiny office of just a few people. The owners were a traditional and very strict Orthodox Christian family. They made my mum and dad look like heathens!
There were many signs the place wasn’t for me. On a rare occasion when we all went out as an office group, an older girl, a daughter of the family who owned the company, asked if I liked one of the guys she’d introduced me to that night. ‘Sure,’ I said. I was very inexperienced in these things: I’d never had a boyfriend, and although I’d formed a few crushes on boys back in Bathurst, they were never reciprocated. It made for great poems! But the conversation took a turn that scared the heck out of me. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you think you could marry him then?’ Whoa. If I didn’t physically take a step back and put up both palms to ward her off, I sure did mentally.
In the end, the place was far too conservative for a very loud young Australian who’d suddenly been handed her freedom. I was called in one day and advised to look for another job. I didn’t mind. I was keen to make friends and I hadn’t found any there.
Within weeks I had found my groove. I landed right in the middle of an excellent gang of warm-hearted Londoners, Linda, Marcel, Joanne, Eddie and Tania, Judith, Sarah and Anju, who took me under their collective wing. Anju’s father and uncle owned the business, the unambiguously named VDC—Video Duplicating Company—which turned out videos, CDs and DVDs. They were an Indian family but that never really registered with me. It was completely different to be around them, for starters, they never asked me the dreaded ‘where are you from?’. They could so clearly see that I was Australian and not Indian that my ‘heritage’ was never brought up.
My initial role there was a temp job answering phones. Aussies tend to have a good reputation in England as hard workers and I certainly did my best to add to it. The company kept calling me back in for work, and after a few weeks I landed a permanent role. My job was to look after a group of clients and ensure their CD manufacturing orders progressed on time. This rarely happened, for a range of reasons: equipment would fail, other orders would be prioritised and so on. But my clients were a good bunch who valued communication and organisation over tight delivery deadlines. It was the ideal job for me, suiting my extroversion and anally-retentive organisational skills perfectly. But it was the group of friends I made there, people I still call friends more than a decade on, that really made England a home for me.
They were all older than me, in their twenties and thirties, but the age difference didn’t matter. I preferred hanging out with people I could look up to, learn from and respect. They, in turn, liked to take care of their ‘Chicken Tikka’, as they affectionately nicknamed me. The subject of India must have come up and somewhere along the line I must have told them I didn’t care for Indian food, but the moniker was good-natured and, funnily enough, didn’t bother me in the least. VDC was a stopgap for most of us. Marce wanted to be an actor. Linda was a free spirit who was always planning her next adventure, going from scuba diving in Mauritius to some other equally exotic jaunt.
Just like the first time I’d been to England, no one I met ever asked if I was Indian. Because of my accent, everyone knew I was Australian, and that was where they left my identity. I loved the cultural maturity of London. There was so much diversity, so many different British accents belonging to people whose families had come from an amazing range of countries, that a brown-skinned loudmouthed Aussie was the last thing that would appear out of the ordinary.
My first stint in England had begun my process of growing up; now I really spread my wings and started to find my own way. Apart from all the regular things eighteen-year-olds do, like getting their bag stolen at a club in Soho, trying their first cigarette (bumming a puff and exhaling quickly), navigating the night bus home because they stayed out later than the last train and couldn’t afford a cab, and getting blind drunk at the pub then pretending to their sister that the reason they’re ill is because they ate a bad pizza as opposed to too many Bacardis, I learned above all things the importance of enjoying my own company.
I lived from pay cheque to monthly pay cheque, and often by the end of the third week had little money left to do anything. At times I had to risk fare evasion fines on the Tube because I couldn’t afford the monthly travel card. But London is a city where you can do a lot with nothing. I took myself off to visit the Imperial War Museum, where all my modern history lessons came alive. I went to galleries and looked around shopping centres and saw the sights. I didn’t need money to absorb this city.
If I could have I would have stayed in London forever. But I was wearing out my welcome with Melissa, who had put up with her eighteen-going-on-thirty-year-old sister living on the couch in her one-bedroom flat for a year. On top of that, my two-year working visa said I could only work for half that time. So home I must go to pursue my dream of journalism.
When it was time for me to leave, the wonderful VDC crew showered me with gifts, including a photo album full of treasured memories of our riotous nights out and a notebook filled with handwritten inscriptions urging me on to my goal. I wept a good deal on the plane home. Quietly, of course, the way I’d been raised, not making a fuss. I didn’t want to leave behind my wonderful new friends, or Melissa, or the excitement and endless options in London. I dreaded returning to boring old Bathurst. But I knew what I wanted. I was going to be a journalist. And as I told everyone at VDC, I wanted to be one of the best in my field when I got back to Australia. And if that meant returning to my hometown, so be it. I had a goal to reach and a task to achieve. But as it happened, the Communications course at Bathurst’s Charles Sturt University was widely regarded as the best in Australia.
