After leaving England I was left with a certain kind of nostalgia for the salad days of my youth there, so to speak. After talking with relatives and friends I started to think about the differences between what I experienced in the UK as a child and the experiences of the first generation who arrived there back in the '50s and '60s. This set off my literary production and most of what I write about revolves around this difference of experience.
I still believe that the UK is a country with such great potential and promise. Having lived in a city where Jamaicans, Punjabis and Ugandans and countless other nationalities were neighbours in often overcrowded terrace houses, I feel grateful that I was born amongst this multiplicity of experience because it has definitely coloured the way I see and write the world I live in today. --Jennifer Takhar
Colonel Alexander Gardner
Bourne and Shepherd, 1864
A twisted body fell through our front door
It was my blood-brother.
Some ancient, untaught knowledge within me whispered his fate
And the sinister secret stabbed at my tongue
I could issue no sound
His will snapped noisily into a thousand pieces
And my sibling became a whispy memory
Shredded muscles and nerves clung wildly to each other
his body heaved up and screamed open
He collapsed, rag-man on
Walking-stick, on crutches, on the muddy merciless street
An agile mongrel ran perfect circles around,
the twitching, shaking, human form
Sniffing its fluttering eyelids,
Involuntary grimace,
crab-hands, open-close palms,
The animal nose-nudged the face and then pulled back.
Partial neural shutdown.
Defeated by his indolent playmate, he sprinted off at an elegant pace
no doubt on a night-scavenging spree.
Two-eyes now stare unblinking at my disbelieving, shameful face.
Neatly-folded into his mobile chair
Transparent antennae sprout from twig-limbs
Trickling liquid waste, drop by murky drop
I avert a no-hope gaze
then return it to the human-chair,
my brother squeezed tightly into a seat
harnassed, prodded, penetrated
inanima
His neurones have been reconfigured
by internal, once-faithful, chemical allies.
A mutiny within sunk his vessel.
Satellite Deshi
Some may say Sikhs are manacled to their faith
Not I
My kara is my ambulant coat-of-arms
You could say I was truly blue-blooded.
Bunga Dastar : The Akali turban .
Cotton over a wicker frame, the steel mounts overlaid with gold Panjab, probably Lahore
mid-19th century
Newspaperwalla
Rose Agarbathi revives phantom-visions of my past belonging.
The memories fight to linger,
Coil around and embrace the sweet-wrappers, condensed milk and cordial bottles,
but are flushed out by the brusque northern gust,
coaxed in by a reluctant customer.
Arthritic, translucent hands slip an ancient two pence coin on my counter
Mumbling petty prejudice
Lamenting Britain’s long lost glory.
I trade the rusty currency for a box of matches and bolt my cornershop door.
The bitter wind howls behind the glass panes.
Living too long in cold climes has erased the Baisakhi sun from my earthern-skin.
Military-trained was I,
Well-groomed, well-heeled, well-read,
Gravely injured too
But not in mortal battles.
I am landless, my Sita was abducted
Pillaged, threshed made sterile
My clan has sprung-up in alien land
And foreign we have in turn become
A malady, a scourge
Like germs, seething vermin the pale-wrinkled-propaganda reads
I must burn more incense.
A Sikh
Captain W.W. Hooper and Surgeon G. Western
1860-70
Zip Factory
Clock-in, tea-break, foreman,
Clock-out, tea-break, kids and husband
Then respite
after much needed guru gyan .
I wrap it up
It is my daily gift,
gold-braided red rumal
at the yawn of dawn
and in the monochrome, fifties-film night
Reminiscent red, ritual red, shenai-red
Dream scapes recall wild-eyed buffalo at feeding time
Two thin, jasmin-oil plaits on rickety, brown legs, placing rotis in a metal trough
The majhan would crush me between their hairy, ungrateful, black-bibi hips
Shadow-girl
hot tiffin in hand
fell head first on decayed, gap-toothed, beaten, brick road
A crusty, black knee slowly wept dusty blood
I would be punished for running
Too carefree
Bibi said
"Shavinder!
Could you be more careful!
That zip is worth ten pence!
I can have your kind replaced any time! "
Sweaty, white jowls hurl colour-coded abuse
"Your hands are bleeding again, ya’daft woman! "
The zip had cut through my calloused epidermis
My fingers wept oily, crimson, unctuous
The foreman docked my wages
the factory line went hazy,
For a moment my iron-man machine resembled the village water pump
Drip-Drop
Tick-tock
I managed to fight the deluge
Of clear, liquid shame.
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