Our family tree is puny, barren in large part. The roots don’t go down deep enough to produce a plenteous crop of ancestral stories or fruity relatives. The few memories hanging on are losing colour and juice, soon will wither and fall away.
The human urge to trace long, biological bloodlines is strong. But our far past was swept away by careless fate impetuously carrying off my folk across the seas, away, away to new beginnings. They took little and left behind even less. Like many other East African Asians whose forbears left India in the nineteenth century, I search endlessly for (and sometimes find) the remains of those days. Few maps mark routes of journeys undertaken by these migrants; hardly any books capture their spirit or tell the story. Then Africa disgorged us too, and here we are, people in motion, now in the West, the next stopover. There is no place on earth we can historically and unequivocally claim to be ours, and so we have become adept wayfarers who settle but cautiously, ready to move on if the winds change.
Ayar Ata, a Kurdish refugee in London, writes an ode to capture the global drifter’s attachment to bits and pieces – portable, potent reminders of loss and gain too:
'Under my bed there it was my seemingly little suitcase
inside it my few precious belongings.
A present from my Grand mum, an evenly shaped
light blue stone with white spots spread all over it, a familiar
piece of early morning sky with stars twinkling in the palm of my hand
A photo of my mother smiling at me in despair
waving and wondering
A broken watch with frozen hands.' [1]
I carry around with me unfashionable bags holding too many things I don’t need but might, just in case: extracts of the Koran in Arabic and English, an old photograph of my university in Uganda, a hanky used to mop up tears when I married Colin, a pill box and rosary that belonged to my mother, hospital notes, job references – an exile’s survival kit.
In my sunny, hi-tech kitchen, one small cupboard keeps cooking utensils I brought over from Kampala in 1972, the year we Asians were cast out of Uganda by the sadistic black nationalist Idi Amin. I had arrived in Britain a few months before his expulsion orders and was never to return to my old homeland. Into a storeroom back home went a box with my precious vinyl collection – Cliff and Elvis, Chuck Berry, the Supremes, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Helen Shapiro (where did she go?), Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Jimmy Ruffin, the Beatles, Jim Reeves, Millie, Sandie Shaw, Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Hindi song discs by Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Talat Mehmood and Mukesh, and poorly recorded Congolese jigs which always incited my buttocks to quiver. Also placed in storage (never reclaimed) were my precious books. Almost all my photos, wrapped tenderly, catalogued then arranged in a small, red suitcase, were entrusted to a friend who then had to join the exodus. No time then to think of photos.
Why I transported old pots and pans to England I cannot explain. I try but am unable to throw them away. There is a wooden contraption meant for grating hairy, brown-shelled coconuts. The device has not been used on these shores and is mummified with paper and layers of oil to keep it from cracking and rusting. Two slabs of wood are cleverly put together to make a folding stool. A flat, oval, rusting metal blade sticks out in front, like the head of a tortoise.
The coconut was broken, its sweet, cloudy juice drained into a glass which always went to the favourite child in the extended family, always a boy, always overweight and a bloody nuisance. Then the kitchen servants sat astride the grater as if on a saddle, except it was so low their knees come up almost to their shoulders. With both hands they rolled the half sphere over the blade with a zigzag edge. Sometimes, they slashed their hands and harsh employers abused them for what they thought was native idiocy. Or for contaminating the white flesh with their inferior blood. Boiling water was added to the grated coconut, and the mixture was then poured into a straw basket shaped like a long sausage to be squeezed. Imagine the agony. The burning, pitchy hands added a sweetness you can never reproduce.
Then there is a Formica chapatti patlo, a round block with small legs, previously made of grainy wood to roll out various Indian breads. The new model (1970) was made by Mr Desai, a compulsive modernizer who went from house to house in a tweedy, dank-smelling suit to demonstrate the easy-clean properties of this very latest ‘British’ material. My mother bought an FP, as they were known, then had to pay for it in pitifully small weekly sums. I use it often. One day in 1988 it helped me capture the heart of my Englishman, four months after my Ugandan Asian husband flew the nest, taking his best clothes and irreplaceable, lived recollections of the old land and of England as it was when we had come.
A brass device came too. Shaped like a mug, it has a circulating handle at the top and plates you insert and secure at the bottom. Made by M. S. Chava, whose name is burnt into the brass, it was used to make savoury Indian snacks. The ‘mug’ was stuffed with a spicy, thick gram-flour mix then held over boiling vats of oil, the handle turned by a fearless hand. Thin or thick threads looking like wet noodles fell in and were flash-fried. Almira, a neighbour in Kampala, used to make bright yellow spiral towers of thin sev and thick gathia which would then sit on newspapers, seeping oil until they were cold and dry enough to store. Though a matchless cook, Almira slowly wasted away. Brought over from India to marry into the family next door, she was palely beautiful and inconsolably sad. Her in-laws beat her often because she didn’t try to look happier than she felt.
Some eccentric items I carried over were made by a crooning artisan who called himself Mr Harry Belafonte the Third. The singer has left his song in his handiwork. My rimmed aluminium bowl shaped like a scarecrow’s hat capers merrily when you put it on a flat surface, and a huge stainless-steel karai – an Indian wok – bops on the cooker as the heat warms it. On the coldest days of winter, torpidity appears to enter these metals; the rocking slows down.
Abdullah, a fat and agile man who could bend right down and walk on all fours, made the colander I brought over, with a handle nearly a foot long. It was noisily hammered out on the street one afternoon. My mum had sent me and my cousin, Alnoor, with exact, memorized instructions for the dexterous metal-beater, who knew her and knew too that she wouldn’t pay him if he didn’t make her his best. This was in 1958, when food at home was still cooked on a Primus stove. The walls of our small kitchen were black, and my clean school uniforms often caught the soot if I forgot to be careful.
In 1978, on the 207 bus going up Uxbridge Road from Shepherd’s Bush to Ealing, my mother was told to get off by a conductor because she smelled like a ‘curry pot’. She replied (without budging), ‘Sir not to mind. You must come and taste it one day, my curry. You people love it, isn’t it?’ She was stinking, having gone out in the same cardi she wore when cooking. ‘But our food is not like those Bengalis and Gujaratis, or English. It smells so nice, these people don’t know us African Indians,’ she said indignantly when telling us what happened. There you have it, our confusing identity carried on her sleeve.
I am often invited by true-born bigots to fuck off back where I came from. Where would that be then? Kampala, where I was born? Or Karachi, where my father hailed from but left forever at seventeen to come to his beloved England? Or Porbandar in the Gujarat in India, whence my maternal grandfather was dispatched as a small boy? Or Dar-es-Salaam in what was Tanganyika, where my mother was born and raised? And do my blue-eyed English husband and our gorgeous hybrid daughter have to leave too? What about my English-rose daughter-in-law and son, a proud Briton whose skin is dark caramel?
Samuel Pepys lamented that ‘the absurd nature of the Englishman who could not forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looked strange.’[2] As the British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips has observed, ‘The mongrel nation that is Britain is struggling to find a way to stare into the mirror and accept the ebb and flow of history that has produced this fortuitously diverse condition and its concomitant pain.’[3]
In Britain the locals still enquire, politely, ‘Where are you from? How come you speak such good English?’ The questions – ‘well meant’ – are upsetting. Spectral fears flicker and flare then subside. What if we are deported out of here too, just as we were from our old homeland? (Should I take my kitchen utensils on to the next place?)
We are trying our very best, you know, striving to be good, to impress. We have blossomed and made places bloom. In the Midlands alone, East African Asians have created more than thirty thousand jobs and regenerated dying localities. We are in the millionaires’ lists, top of educational-achievement tables, increasingly influential in mainstream political parties eager for cash and cachet. But we still cannot really belong and have to clutch at throwbacks and fantasy connections just as we did in Africa.
To my son and daughter, I am from a sad place in Africa where there are big beasts, safari jeeps and spectacular views, but too much butchery and poverty for their refined Western sensibilities. They feel detached from my complicated upbringing, and when I insist on reminding them of it they switch off or rebuke me sharply. I speak four non-European languages and tried to pass them on with no success. In her last years, when my mother found it harder to communicate in English, my children never got to know what she said and how she really felt. Perhaps they are apprehensive that to accept their cluttered heritage is to thin down their entitlement to be truly, purely, deeply British.
They are gluttons for East African Asian foods though. Favourites are fried mogo (cassava) and kuku paka, a coconut-chicken dish originally from Zanzibar. When my daughter was a toddler, I made her what I had been fed as a child: ‘red rice’ – boiled basmati mixed with tomato puree, garlic and butter – which she loves to this day. My adult son makes his own version of chilli and sour cream to eat with what we call fish cutlets – the old English fishcake recipe only ‘fixed and much better’, as my mother used to put it. The next generation does pick up this baton at least. While they eat I reminisce, linking the dishes to times and places, so that when I am gone, my voice will echo in their heads to remind them who they are.
Perhaps the lack of a homeland is a deliverance, an emancipation from the bounds of zealous, unseemly nationalism. Although there are times of immense dislocation and sadness, I now understand that our nomadic history has made us into enthusiastic, incorrigible cosmopolitans, winners in a globalized world. Our food bears testimony to this dynamic existence – creative, sometimes impertinent and playful blends of Indian, Pakistani, Arab, African, Chinese and English, now Italian and American too, forever in flux.
Food is intrinsically connected to economics, politics, communication, knowledge, marriage, trade and the movements of peoples. Once upon a time, East African Asian food expressed both desperate nostalgia and hardship. Happiness then was eating a mango (two if you earned more than barely enough working in factories, hospitals or for British Rail) or adding an aubergine to spicy potato and making dhal less watery.
Then came the small savings which built up to bigger piles. East African Asian corner shops became sustainable; more imports were flown over faster. Families began to dress in their best and venture out to cafés selling Indian snacks. Food in the home grew varied and more luxuries were added, the same cycle our ancestors in East Africa went through from deprivation to abundance. But yet the future is unpredictable. Racist political parties are becoming popular again. The suitcase is half packed. Just in case.
[1] From a collection of postcards printed for the Poet Tree Project, London Borough of Newham
[2] In his diary 22nd November 1663
[3] In a speech Phillips made at a conference in Paris, 2004
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
An edited extract from The Settler’s Cookbook: A Memoir of Love Migration and Food, published 2009 by Portobello Books
Reproduced with kind permission
