Hanif Kureishi - Something to Tell You

The strike, which began soon after the documentary was broadcast, was led by a tiny Bengali woman. This brave, defiant figure had become a hero to other women, to the Left as a whole. She had everything going for her: race, gender, class, size. The numbers on the picket line were increasing every day. The factory wasn’t far from London and was near a tube station. Actors from the RSC and the movies were supporting the picket before the workers went into work in the morning. A Labour minister had visited. The dispute was becoming a cause célèbre.

There were a few West Indian workers, but mainly the employees were Asian: a mixture of Kenyan Indian, Pakistani and Bengali; older women, students and some men, overseen by white managers. Ajita told me that, contrary to popular opinion, the workers were not peasants but were educated and politicised. They wanted to start a union, but Ajita’s father wouldn’t negotiate with a union. The workers were Asian like him; he understood their family life, their religion, their food. He didn’t see why they needed a white-led union pressurising him. He didn’t pay well, but he didn’t pay worse than anyone else.

Ajita’s father had become furious and defensive. He’d fired several of the socialist jihadis and refused to reinstate them. Accused of attempting to bring the Third World to England, he replied that this was racism. According to Ajita, he was being picked on. “Do you think I’m the only exploiter in this country?” he’d say. Britain wouldn’t yield to him; he couldn’t get his way. But there was nowhere else for him to go. All his money was in the factory. Not that he was unsupported: Conservative politicians talked of “anarchy” and the “rule of law.”

The afternoon after she cried in the pub we drove back to the suburbs. Ajita went home to study. Instead of joining her, I went to my house to read in my bedroom and listen to music. I went to bed around nine. Being a student, I wasn’t used to getting up early: usually I caught the train to London after the rush hour, around ten.

But early the next morning, without telling Ajita, and while Mum and Miriam were still asleep, I went to the factory. Or, rather, to the demo.

Coming out of the tube station, the first thing I saw was a large banner saying, ONLY SLAVES CANNOT WITHDRAW THEIR LABOUR. By eight o’clock the gathering at the gates was considerable. There must have been three hundred people, and they were noisy, almost riotously angry. The crowd seemed to be composed of sacked Asian workers from the factory, students from different radical groups and scores of other sympathisers, along with photographers and journalists. All of these people were surrounded by what looked like legions of police.

The besieged factory, as far as I could see from the gate, was made up of two long, low buildings, which looked as though they’d been constructed from cardboard and asbestos. When I talked to the workers, they complained that, amongst other things, the place was too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.

I heard about the heavy stacks of cloth, for cutting, which the workers had to move around. The sewing machines were unsafe; the needles broke constantly, scoring the fingers of the employees. Bits of fabric seemed to fly through the air; everyone had blocked noses; no one breathed properly. There was an accident on the premises at least once a month. The workers were allowed only two weeks’ holiday a year, but not in the summer, when there was more work to do. The washrooms and toilets were filthy; women were paid less than men; pregnant women were sacked; one woman said the white bosses forced the female workers to have sex with them.

The crowd increased in size and noise. I noticed that the protesters were carrying stones, bricks and lumps of wood. Then, suddenly, the bus carrying the scabs was coming through, its windows covered in chicken wire. I was amazed to see it race recklessly through the crowd as a hail of missiles rained down on it. Using their truncheons, the police tried to shove us back, but people broke through to spit and thump at the bus.

Right behind the bus was an expensive car, and I noticed Ajita’s father driving.

I recognised him because I’d seen him one time at the house, when he returned suddenly “to find some papers” but really, it seemed to me, to watch a boxing match on TV. Looking at Ajita’s face that day, as he opened the door and strode into the room where we were sitting with our feet up on the glass-topped coffee table, eating Smith’s crisps and grooving to the Fatback Band, I realised she was scared of him. This wasn’t just nerves; I thought she might faint.

Luckily, Mustaq was at home, sitting in a corner peeping at me over the cover of Young Americans as usual, and Ajita was able, as planned, to introduce me as his friend. If only that had been enough. To show how consanguineous we really were, I had to spend the afternoon in Mustaq’s bedroom. Ajita had often asked me to “speak to” her brother, about whom she was worried. Their father was too “distracted” to pay him much attention. He lacked fatherly guidance and example; he was girlish and knew nothing about football.

That day the kid was delighted to have me to himself. Did he make the most of it! He took my picture, before presenting his “special” things: a train set, his Peanuts annual, his Snoopy stickers, a voodoo doll he’d carved himself from driftwood, complete with pins and numbers scrawled on it in black marker pen, his drum kit and acoustic guitar. There was also an ancient packet of condoms, a flick-knife and a picture of a female cousin in a bikini at the seaside.

Then he asked me to wrestle with him.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Why would I agree to that? I thought it would shut him up. The blood drained from my head when slowly he began to remove all his clothes, apart from his pants.

I wasn’t into the wrestling thing, particularly when I saw how up for it he was, jiggling and jogging on his toes and smacking one meaty fist into the palm of his other hand-bam, bam, bam! Although he had a lot of loose blubber on him, it didn’t stop him looking like a tough, kicky little fucker.

He came at me like a bear, his teeth exposed, his arms out, and he embraced me straightaway and held me. He threw me off the bed, picked me up and tossed me around the room, eventually sitting on me, tickling me and kissing my cheeks. When I tried to get up, he forced his hands down the front of my trousers. I couldn’t shout out for fear of his father banging through the door with a shotgun. On top of me, Mustaq was wiggling his hips and coming on like a teenage trannie or vamp; he wanted to suck me off with his father and sister a few yards away.

It was a relief when he jumped across to the piano and started singing one of his own songs, called, apparently, “Everyone Has Their Heart Torn Apart, Sometime.”

“Listen, listen,” he said. “Tell me what you think!”

“Great, great song, man,” I said. “I like the ‘sometime.’”

“You really think so?”

“You should record it, man, and send it in somewhere.”

In my haste to get away, I stumbled over the edge of the bed and, being forced for a moment to look under it, noticed a sea of half-eaten chocolate bars, bright sweet wrappers, and rotting Easter eggs.

I just about got out of there intact, cursing his whole family.

“Come back soon,” Mustaq whispered.

“Nice time?” said Ajita, smiling. “I’m so happy you two really get on!”

I was so in love with her. The rest of the family I could have done away with.

I didn’t tell Ajita what her brother had attempted with me, but next time I took some books and magazines, mainly “outlaw” American stuff that I thought he wouldn’t have known about, Rechy, Himes, Algren, even Burroughs, all of which I handed over on condition he didn’t fondle me. “Fathers like boys who read,” I told him. “They think books are only a good thing. They have no idea how dangerous they can be.”