My cousin Uncle Tony

Anyone brown is an uncle or aunty in Indian culture. Even when they’re not. Like my Aunty Pinky, the only (other) Asian in the village. Or the man who ran the chip shop, who I think was actually Greek. Or my Uncle Tony, who’s really my second cousin. Or was, rather.

Tony died last week in the firestorm that is the Indian COVID-19 outbreak. He was in his 50s.

It’s too young to die, of course. And Tony was younger even than his years, which he held back with exercise and hair dye. “Can you believe how young I look?” he once I asked me. I couldn’t, genuinely. He looked great.

I first met him, consciously (we may have met when I was a baby), when he was in his twenties. He’d come to visit us, from Delhi to Telford – two places only 5,000 miles apart, but in 1990 they may as well have been separated by galaxies. From telescopes, however, Western culture was coming into view – and Tony was starstruck.

He’d marry a British girl, he told us, and stay here in the UK. He loved Hollywood movies, and made us take his picture, wearing sunglasses, squeezed into my sister’s purple shell suit, popped up on a skateboard, holding a 3/4-size acoustic guitar. It was a strong look, no doubt about it – like it was put together by an algorithm or, more accurately, a tombola.

Many years later, I saw him in India. He boasted about how his waistline hadn’t changed in the twenty years I’d not seen him. But there was a different kind of heaviness to him now, weighed down perhaps by family and responsibility.

He never married a Brit and stayed in the UK. Those dreams were behind him too. In the days ahead, he showed me all the new shopping malls that had sprung up on the outskirts of New Delhi. With Western stores, skateboards, and guitars. It was like he had to prove something to me, to himself.

He never went west, but he never went south either. Young until the day he died. My cousin Uncle Tony.