The Middle, At the Start

In a classic case of procrastination, I shared a flurry of Instagram stories, rather than start the real story I came here to write.

“Where to start?” I asked.
“With your birth lol”, replied my cousin.

So, I was born in Wolverhampton in 1982 – on time, after a short labour, and with a minimal amount of fuss, I’m told. If I could have rinsed myself off and gathered up my belongings, I would have.

Mum took herself to hospital in a taxi, as my dad couldn’t get the time off work. (Even though he worked for himself.) But they came back together, to the shop and home they ran in Shropshire – with, at the time, only the fifth brown face in that little market town, swaddled in white, screaming at the thought.

This place where I spent my first night on earth, above a corner shop, would be my home for the rest of the 1980s. It withstood the eggs thrown at its windows and the fires started in its bins when my parents arrived, brown faces one and two.

But by the time we left in 1990, we left a town and a decade more accepting of us. There were more brown faces – in the school, on the high street, on TV even.

Do you know them? some would ask. Was I related to the other brown boy in school?

“Of course not,” I’d reply, confidently. Imagine how that confidence waned when I saw him later at an Indian wedding. On our side.

But, for the most part, the racists were wrong, and only sporadically revealed themselves in sharp outbursts.

The micro-aggressions, however, were dull and constant – from both sides: the small-town mentality of a small town, and the small-town mentality of a global diaspora.

Both contributed to this feeling of double-otherness: too brown-looking to be British, too white-sounding to be Indian.

So, that’s where this story starts. Somewhere in the middle.