used in mixed company, and some young women expressed themselves as boldly as the men.
As a child of Indian peasantry, I was a new entrant to the working class; in Marxist terms, I had taken a revolutionary step from the land to a cash nexus. I eagerly awaited my weekly pay envelope, my only source of sustenance. I think I was the youngest and most inexperienced worker at Cosmic, and that was probably the reason for everyone’s generosity toward me; even the lab staff stopped by to chat whenever they were on the shop floor. The lab staff spoke slowly and clearly, so I could easily converse with them. The shop floor workers spoke more quickly, and their earthy colloquiality was often Greek to me, but they were equally caring in their own way. Every time I needed a new sack of solid wax for my work area, someone was always there to help, and I often joined in on the Friday pub crawls.
Robert Symes, the personnel officer who had hired me at Cosmic, walked the shop floor a couple of times a day, talking to workers. The company had started a monthly newsletter shortly after I began working there, and Robert asked me to contribute something. I put together a hodgepodge of words about India, stealing an idea here and a word there, and a few days later Robert stood with me for a few minutes on the shop floor talking about his life at university. Before he went back to his office, he asked if I would like to join him sometime for a drink.
After that, Robert and I went pubbing every two to three weeks, visiting a different country pub each time. Robert would pick me up in his beige, two-door Italian Fiat. Our conversations ranged from English literature, about which I knew very little, to the politics and economy of Britain, India and the rest of the world. Robert and I differed on many things, and we argued our positions. My limited vocabulary encumbered our conversation, but he would correct me, suggesting words and expressions for what he thought I was trying to say. I looked forward to those pub outings with Robert, and he became a tutor of sorts.
A few months into my time at Cosmic, some of the office and lab staff, including Robert, planned a pleasure trip to Wales, and I was invited to go along. We set off in a rented multi-passenger van in the morning, arriving at our destination just as the sun set. Along the way, people played music, and the conversation traversed the mundaneness and profundity of the world. The Beatles were the craze at the time, though I could not make out all the words to any of their songs.
We put up at a bed and breakfast for three nights near the base of the Snowdon Summit, one of the highest peaks in the United Kingdom. The first day we climbed a steep mountain; I sat down halfway up and waited for the others to return. That evening we had reservations at a restaurant popular among the locals. It was walking distance from our lodgings, and since I was a bit late getting ready, I made my way alone, dressed in a suit and tie under my long coat. The doorman would not allow me in, despite my explanation that I was joining friends already in the restaurant. “We have no friends of yours here” was his reply. Stubbornly, I stuck my head into the restaurant and spotted Brian, the tall, curly-haired head of the Cosmic lab. I yelled out for him, and I was let in. That was my first experience with overt exclusion, and it rattled my soul.
The next morning we drove to the base of the Snowdon Summit and walked up rather than taking the train. The view from the top was astounding; we could see for miles, a new experience for a boy from the prairie of India. The Shivalik range of the outer Himalayas could occasionally be glimpsed from the plains of Punjab, but I had never seen the mountains up close. Now I was atop one. Spreading my arms, I made several 360-degree turns, for those few seconds feeling as though I was flying high above the world. I lost my balance, falling and rolling down to the railway tracks. I was lucky. Had I fallen off in the other direction, I would have plunged several thousand feet to a certain death.
AROUND THIS TIME, the Vietnam War was intensifying. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. had increased to four hundred thousand the number of its troops in Vietnam, and the dreaded napalm bombs were falling from the skies. There was huge anti-war sentiment throughout the Western world, which drew my sympathies, and I started hanging out with the Labour party activists in Bedford. Christopher Soames, a son-in-law of Winston Churchill, had been a conservative MP for Bedford since 1950, but he was defeated by Brian Parkyn of the Labour party in March of 1966. Along with some friends, I had volunteered in Parkyn’s campaign.
Dismayed that the Indians in Bedfordshire were by and large not civically active, Dev and I called a meeting of all the young men we knew. We met at Dev’s home, and there we founded the Young Indians Association ( YIA ) of Bedford. One of the group’s first public functions was to commemorate the anniversary of Bhagat Singh’s hanging by the British thirty-five years earlier for carrying on a violent campaign against British rule in India. I made the introductory remarks and managed the stage, and it was a proud day. But I soon realized it was easy to celebrate what we already knew; it was much more difficult to think about the problems Indian immigrants faced in our new societies. The YIA became a vehicle for representing our concerns and challenges to Bedford’s civic administrators. We also got immigrant youth involved in sports. Some YIA activists veered left over the years, and others started paying more attention to matters of faith and business, but the organization continued into the 1980s.
County and public libraries were the holy temples of my weekends. I checked out a book or two every Saturday after a couple of hours of reviewing the London Times , the Guardian , the Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor in the library’s reading room. Books in hand, I would meet up with Biraji to help him carry the week’s groceries. At home, the books and BBC Radio 1 were my constant companions. I also stayed out late with friends, talking about our lives and the world. My options continued to seem severely limited, not just because I was penniless but because my English was still so poor. Hanging out and talking felt better than my lonely, desperate wanderings.
I was still seeking a job that would allow me a day release to attend college, and I ended up as a laboratory assistant for a science teacher named Mr. Tyler at the then Elstow Abbey Secondary School, a half-hour walk from St. Leonard’s Avenue. Mr. Tyler was keen to teach me what I needed to learn to do the job, and I took a course on operating a sixteen-millimetre projector in the evenings. I was soon responsible for setting up films on various subjects for the students. The fish in my care in the school’s fish tank did not fare as well; they died of too much food at the hands of someone afraid of scarcity.
The teachers at Elstow were kind and eager to teach a young immigrant the skills necessary to get on in the world. I was invited to their get-togethers on weekends, and the students too were anxious to make me feel included. The female students at Elstow had a cooking class that prepared a delicious lunch once a week, and I was often invited to share it. The school’s young chemistry teacher, William Jefferies, was interested in politics and history. He took Dev, our friend Jeet and me to London to see the Parliament Buildings and 10 Downing Street. The London bobby, a permanent fixture in front of the prime minister’s residence, obligingly moved over so we could snap a picture.
I had applied to several universities on the off chance one would grant me admission as a mature student, and only the University of Keele at Newcastle-under-Lyme, which offered a four-year degree in politics and law, showed interest and invited me for an interview. The interview, with the dean and two others, lasted an hour. Initially our conversation focussed on British politics, including constitutional conventions dating back to the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter” of liberties England had introduced in 1215. I felt I answered their questions fairly well, but then they narrowed in on further specifics of British history, which in truth I had not studied at all.
Following the interview, the university offered me provisional admission for the following year if I passed the British history O level in the interim. I had huge doubts about being able to fulfill this requirement, and I spent every available minute studying history, reading nothing else for the next two to three months. A new teacher at Elstow even gave me his history notes from high school, and I studied those, too. In the end, though, I still could not distinguish one Queen Elizabeth or one King George from another. I decided not to sit for the history O level
