None of our parents had any idea where we were. Brick Lane was a whole twenty minutes walk from our homes and not somewhere we normally came by ourselves.
My memories of the lane up to that day involved ones holding my father’s hand as we made our way from one Bangladeshi-owned shop to another, greeting sasa (uncle) after sasa – it seemed every Bangladeshi man in east London knew my father the Dakhtarshaab (Doctor).
I particularly loved popping into the Bangladeshi grocers where my father would take great pride in showing me the exotic foods from ‘back home’. He’d teach me how you knew if a mango was just ripe, and point out what fish in the freezer may have once swam in the Kushiyara river near our village. My favourites were the huge round stubbly kathals (jackfruits). They were always piled outside the shops like yellowie-green boulders, surrounded by sasas bent over inspecting them. My father and I would join them, using our thumbs to press firmly on the thick skin. Too hard and it wasn’t ripe, too soft and it might be spoiled. My little hands could never really tell as it hurt to push down on the tiny little stumps, which left little reddened pockmarks all over my thumb. We both loved their sweet, fruity aroma – “it smells like kathal season back home”, my father would say, smiling.
Smells were a defining part of my childhood. Where I grew up, we instantly knew it was lunch time just by the waft of deliciously smelling curries. In fact, we could even work out who was eating what that day.
“Mmmm, smells like you’ve got tengha maas (tangy fish curry) for lunch Zahed! let me come round!”
Maybe that’s what they didn’t like about us? The smell.
“You smelly paki!” was an oft-repeated slur.
Is that what made them so angry?
What exactly had we done to make them hate us so much? I wondered as we stood there watching the lane I knew so well, filled with men wearing skin-tight jeans, large shiny black boots and bomber jackets. Their angry red faces mounted on thick, tattooed necks, some, making the odd salute. They resembled the soldiers I’d seen on the grainy videos Mr Crump the history teacher used to show us.
Many had shaven heads. They were the ‘skinheads’ in my nightmares, where I imagined being stabbed by one with a HIV infected needle attached to the end of a brolly – a recurring dream since the day I first overhead my father describing this latest weapon to Ghoni sasa.
The air was filled with strange chants I didn’t understand. The parade of white men were kept from the angry onlookers by a line of police. Occasionally one of them would glance sideways in disgust, his glare met with a violent outburst from ‘our’ side.
I didn’t know what a fascist or a Nazi was. In fact, I barely understood racism at that age. But as I walked home that day with my friends past the abandoned old Victorian hospital behind Whitechapel station, which looked scarier than usual, I finally understood why our parents always took us ‘back home’.
I think we all did.
That was probably the day I also first began to wonder If I knew where my real home was.
By Tharik Hussain