Once Were Radicals (5 page)

I was taught to refer to my South Asian elders as ‘uncle' and ‘aunty' out of respect. My parents' siblings were given special Urdu labels of respect (I didn't actually learn these labels until I landed in Pakistan in 1976).

The middle-class Indians I grew up with in Sydney had a unique approach to religion. In some ways Indians are happy to show off the external trappings of their faith. It's common, for instance, to see Indian men outwardly observing and expressing their faith in what Westerners would regard as over-the-top and loud. My Sikh uncles almost all sported turbans and beards and my Muslim uncles often wore ceremonial skullcaps even when they were not praying, especially if they were getting old. However, we never regarded such outward expressions of religious difference (at least among men) as signs of religious fanaticism. It was all quite normal.

Apart from ceremonial headgear, Indian uncles wore Western clothes. In the seventies that usually consisted of flared pants and ties wide enough to cover half their chests. Uncles who doubled as medical doctors often wore—you guessed it—safari suits. My South Asian aunties wore traditional Indian dress—saris or
shalwar kameez
(baggy trousers with a shirt long enough to fall to the thighs or knees). Women and girls who wore Western dress were regarded as loose (or ‘modern') and uncultured. We always presumed that Indian aunts who wore Western-style skirts were probably from Christian communities who had
adopted European ways. Still, many of my Indian Christian aunties would wear traditional Indian dress.

Indeed, we never distinguished between Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Parsee, Jew, Christian or Jain. What we all cared more about was the culture and language we shared.

I had a friend at the age of five, Pankaj, whose father died suddenly overseas. Pankaj's family were Indian of Hindu faith and we attended the funeral in the traditional way. I, with my mum, went to his house dressed in ceremonial white. Mum helped organise the ceremonial prayers and comforted Pankaj's grieving mother. Mum also helped cook for the event and lit the ceremonial incense sticks. Some prayers were said in a language I didn't quite understand.

A few years later, another close family friend of Pakistani Muslim heritage also passed away. As before, I attended his house wearing ceremonial white, Mum cooked for the event and lit the ceremonial incense sticks, and prayers were said in a foreign language.

There wasn't much variation in how we expressed our faith on important occasions. That's not to say there weren't religious divisions: my Hindu, Muslim and Sikh uncles made sure I knew of the communal bloodbath that claimed over one million lives during the 1947 Partition.

One image featured prominently in the harrowing stories they told me—trains arriving at Lahore and Amritsar railway stations filled the air with the stench of death, carriages turned coffins of innocent Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs massacred by religious militants. The irony is that these two cities are hardly 40 kilometres apart and, before
Partition, had thriving Muslim and Sikh communities that shared a common language and culture and whose faiths were very similar.

But were all Partition massacres always initiated by militants? Or did they represent the responses of otherwise innocent people manipulated by militants spreading rumours? Or by survivors of massacres who saw family members butchered and raped and burned alive before their eyes?

Who knows. My uncles certainly had no idea who started all the madness. But they did want me to know that it happened. And that members of all communities suffered.

Because my parents wanted to make sure I could speak their mother tongue, we weren't allowed to speak English at home or in the presence of our Indian and Pakistani aunties and uncles. It was instilled in us that to speak English in their company was rude, especially if you could speak even a tiny amount of Hindi or Urdu. This again reinforced in me the notion that what really mattered was language, not religion.

One of my Sikh uncles (let's call him Dr Singh) loved telling jokes. South Asians tell Sikh jokes in the same way as English speakers tell Irish jokes. Sikhs were laughed at for being a little slow but they were known to be earnest and sincere. And in real life, they were ever prepared to take the piss out of themselves. And as always, the best Sikh jokes were told by Sikhs.

Politically correct Westerners tend to pronounce the word Sikh as ‘seek'. South Asians aren't as sensitive, as I discovered one day when I was at Dr Singh's place with my parents for dinner. I was five years old and had the flu. We'd just arrived when Dr Singh spoke to me in Hindlish and offered me a glass of coke.

‘Irfan, how bout gil-lass coke?'

‘No thank you, Uncle.'

‘Vy not, Irfan?'

‘Because I'm sick, Uncle.'

‘No, yoo not. Yoo Muslim!'

My dad, who also loved joking around, found this most amusing. ‘Boom boom! That was a good joke, Dr Singh,' he declared. He still uses that line to this day when his grandsons fall ill.

I was quite confused and thought they were laughing at me, and like any full-blooded mummy's boy, I started crying. After we got home, my parents explained what the joke was about. They told me that Sikhs were somehow different to us Muslims. Their religious men grow beards and wear turbans like religious Muslim men, and their women wear the same loose clothes as my mum. They even worship the same God, speak the same language and eat the same food. Their religious songs sound like our Sufi
qawwali
songs.

In fact, Guru Nanak (the founder of the Sikh faith and regarded by many Indian Muslims as a Sufi saint) performed the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca at least once. And in terms of popular stereotypes, Sikhs were even more Islamic than we were. After all, they carry daggers (albeit ceremonial ones, but still rather sharp), while we don't. But
according to my parents, Sikhs and Muslims were different. For a five-year-old it was a case of ‘Go figure'!

My Sikh uncle and all our other South Asian family friends would make a special pilgrimage once a month. As always, it was a truly ecumenical affair, though the object of our worship was more associated with our worldly (or should that be culinary?) desires.

The place of pilgrimage was in a faraway place at the end of Sydney's famous Bondi beach. We used to travel for at least an hour in my mother's Volkswagen from our East Ryde home to buy our supply of basmati rice, various kinds of
masala
(spices) and
achar
(pickles).

The store was owned by an Indian family who rarely spoke Urdu or Hindi unless they were addressed in Urdu. The man wore an embroidered skullcap, and his wife would sometimes cover her head with a small scarf. She used to give my siblings and I free ice cream and would greet us with
khudahafiz
(a traditional Indo-Pakistani greeting which meant ‘may God keep you under His protection').

I assumed that Mr and Mrs Moses, who ran the spice store, were Muslims, just like us. They had to be Muslims—they had relatively dark skin like us, they apparently never sold or ate pork, they could speak Urdu/Hindi and they sold and ate spicy food. They even greeted us with
khudahafiz
, which I always thought was a Muslim greeting. It wasn't until years later that Mum explained to me that our spice vendors were in fact Jewish.

I was brought up in the electorate of a man who was to become Australia's most conservative prime minister, John
Howard. The 1970s was a time when Christian sectarianism was still strong in ‘white' Australia and Catholic school children were bullied for being the wrong … um … who knows? The bullies certainly didn't.

My first school was the local Ryde East Public School where I copped plenty of bullying. Mostly it was due to the colour of my skin. Kids can be very cruel, and one kid in particular insisted on pushing me around and labelling me ‘nigger' and ‘boong'. He also used to tease my mum, who would pick me up each day in her Volkswagen Beetle. Mum's insistence on wearing saris meant that everyone poked fun at just how different we looked.

One day, I was walking home from school when I was approached by a white-skinned Anglo-Australian boy wearing a different school uniform to mine: he wore a blue shirt with a yellow cross embroidered on the shirt pocket, and his school bag had the words ‘Spiritus Sanctus' sewn into them. I knew that he lived up the road from me, so when he asked if he could walk home with me, I said yes.

As we got on our way, the bullies from my class approach ed me. Normally, these boys would push me around, trip me over, kick and punch me or run off with my school bag. But on this occasion, they completely avoided me and started picking on my new-found friend. I couldn't understand this—white boys picking on other white boys? I always assumed you only got picked on if you were different. What was so different about my friend?

I asked the bullies about this the next day.

‘Why are you bullying him? He's just like you,' I said. ‘It's not as if his mum wears a sari and drives a daggy car.'

‘He's not like us. He's a fucking Catholic!' was the response.

That afternoon, I ran home and told my mum this amazing revelation.

‘Mum, I discovered there are these people who have white skin and look Australian but still get teased and bashed up just like me.'

Annoyed at my atrocious Urdu, Mum replied in Hindlish. ‘That very is-stranj. Vy dhey hit him?'

‘The boys at school say it's because they are Catholic.'

From that moment onwards, as an act of solidarity with fellow oppressed foreigners, Mum decided to befriend every Catholic in the street. Suddenly our social circle expanded from just Indians to include Catholics of various ethnic backgrounds. Imagine my shock when I learned that even Indians and Pakistanis could be Catholic!

Notwithstanding our new multicultural circle, Mum and Dad still believed the most important thing was that my siblings and I kept my parents' culture alive. That certainly didn't mean burning effigies or posters of the Pope. Even if that probably would have pleased the school bullies.

As a child, being Muslim meant any number of things. It meant I had brown skin, spoke the same language as Bollywood movies and learned to read a revered holy book with a strange script read from right to left. The fact that I didn't understand what the book actually said wasn't terribly important. The main thing was that I could recognise which combination of letters made what sounds.

Mum told me that Muslims believed in a man called ‘Hazrat Muhammad'. He was from Arabia, she said, but I wasn't sure where this place was (I may have assumed it was somewhere near India or Pakistan). I never knew much about Hazrat Muhammad except that he was sent by God to teach people how to behave with proper manners towards other people. It sounded like the sort of thing my teachers did. I presumed Hazrat Muhammad was like a school teacher who threatened his followers with the cane if they misbehaved.

Hazrat Muhammad also taught people how to worship God. We referred to God using various names, including ‘Allah', ‘Khudah' and ‘Parvar Digaar'. Some of my aunties called God ‘Bhagvaan' or ‘Raam'. I rarely heard the word ‘God' used, though Mum sometimes spoke about how we should ‘pirray to the God five time a day'.