Rags to Bollywood

Excerpts from the book

Over the years, I had come to realise that there are a lot of gullible people out there who sheepishly follow these mystical pundits like they are some kind of demi-Gods. I could appreciate that there were certainly a handful who were genuine and were able to sprinkle their magic into your life, whether this was the feel good placebo factor, the X factor or just having more attuned chakra’s then the average person is anyone’s guess. (The chakra, referred to the third eye on your forehead, rather like a spiritual Cyclops). Then there were the money spinning stage coach robbers, the one’s who would ask you to close your eyes so that you could indulge in that transcendent and meditative state. This would then enable them to rifle through your belongings, nicking your ‘green’ and quickly checking out your personal details so that they could then mystically drop them into conversation when they began their ‘spiritual reading.’

I was astounded. What fricking pills was this god damn swami consuming? The guy had written war and peace I thought at the time. He was wasting his talents skulking in the wilderness of India. This dude should have been signed up for his own live chat show with his adept artistic talents shining through in such carefully constructed prose.

They were a different breed entirely, unscrupulous and utterly amoral, and I would often wonder if they had in fact been swapped at birth in a secret hospital somewhere with their real mothers being jackals.

Auntie Myleene was a sadist of Nazi Germany ilk and possessed as much charisma and magnetism as a dead fish. She would have been chief commander in the Gestapo such was her ruthless streak I tell you. I still have the scars to prove that she was definitely a degree holder in accurate striking - when she swung, she scored.
She was like the Babe Ruth of newspaper swatting, a national pastime where budding housewives would attempt to crush the fragile skulls of young orphaned adolescents for not tidying up the mess in their bedrooms.

`You need to be taught a lesson, and my boy this is the only way you will learn,` he snarled back at me. He was more than braced to deal me an indiscriminate and savage bite and his obvious venom and evident disdain was bursting out of every facial aperture.

My ever burgeoning fear merely adding to his lustre, and at that moment I succumbed to the anguishing tenet that he would remain as evil, unchanged and unrepentant for as long as the blood of the Devil coursed through his veins.
With that, he lowered the blade down past the incriminating stain that had now appeared in the crotch of my lightly coloured jeans and flicked it a few times slashing up at my chest in his drunken stupor. I knew that I would be extremely fortunate to survive this encounter without some form of physical abuse, as had been the case for the past few years, well as far back as I could remember. I saw the serrated tip of the butcher’s knife inching its way menacingly towards my eyes, the fierce and brutal realisation that my destiny was being played out before me. I closed my eyes, today was a good day to die. At least now, I would be emancipated from a life of hate and torment.
My executioner sized me up, to him I was a waste of skin and sinew, the shit off his shoe and a worm he was just itching to dispirit and crush. Why did he despise me so much? The pallor of death carved on my face did nothing to assuage his determined bullying and forthcoming onslaught of violence. The quivering lip was merely fuel for his burning fire of evil and did nothing to slake his intentions of eviscerating me without compunction or passion.

Terry smacked of the type of reprehensible creature who would take with one hand and not bother giving back with the other, the unkempt, wretched and selfish slime ball who would wash their hands before they went for a dump and not after, proving that they cared only for themselves and not a shit about anyone else. He was a dog!
Suddenly I woke with a startle and there was the moment of magic, the epiphany in my life. I saw the figure of a tall man, devilishly handsome, oozing gravitas and a magical aura. At first his face was covered in a magical white mist and as the mist slowly cleared the ghostly figure revealed himself to me…it was my dad. He was so real I could actually smell him. I looked on in amazement. He stood there looking down at me as I lay there rubbing my eyes.

Dalj had even shown me the light bulb screwing dance, the whisky bottle on the head jive and not forgetting the hoi hoi dance when you thrust your foot in and out of the circle – like the Punjabi hokey cokey - I simply loved them. However, he reserved the best until last - the ‘pendu’ or ‘freshie dance’ as he referred to it. This was when he would stand on the spot doing a double light bulb screwing move with his hands up above him and with one leg up to knee height jumping off the ground continuously, all this with an accompanying grin that would have put the Cheshire Cat out of business.

It was eight in the evening and this part of Slough was a relatively quiet and leafy area. My biggest concern was probably worrying about being mugged by a gang of gun toting field mice armed with sharpened blades of grass than anything more deadly such was the tangible tranquillity on the streets, unlike other parts of Slough where you would be mugged for your teeth or bad breath let alone anything else.

Her culinary paradise of herbs and spices, not to mention succulent curries wafting throughout the house like the Bisto advert always buckled my knees whenever I set foot through the door. She nailed it every time and I had a smile bigger than The Joker when I prepared to sink my fangs into her dishes of delight.

Well, that was until a few years ago when for some bizarre reason she went bonkers and lost the plot. She was the quintessential March Hare, bells and whistles too. Before then I had noticed an ever burgeoning state of insanity seeping through. One time Dalj and I even caught her standing on a chair in the kitchen one day after school, licking bits of paper and sticking them to her face before trying to blow them off with her mouth. Other times she would come hurtling out of the kitchen armed with the broom chasing imaginary mice from the kitchen and out into the street. She would sometimes even get to the end of the road screaming like a banshee with the broom held above her head like some kind of zulu warrior. It would often take a monumental tussle just to get her back in the confines of the house and convince her that we were not being over run by killer mice.

The first advert we stumbled across in the back of the weekly Asian paper was for the ostentatious Mr Varma Shah, a spiritual God. The advert stated that he had the skills to pay the bills. This virtuoso of the spirit world could while away your troubles with the deft flick of a coconut such was the write up accompanying his photo. His picture in the paper had already amused me and he looked as though he had been dragged through a hedge backwards such was the state of his frazzled hair. We sat in the front room of his house, a terraced brick built place in the heart of Southall. Mr Shah, the high priest of bollockso, the ancient art of pulling the wool over your eyes as he rifled your pockets sat there in his pyjamas and waistcoat. I mean what the hell was that about? I looked on painfully. This bloke looked as though he had just escaped a comic strip. I sensed there were cartoon illustrators scouring the earth looking for him, either that or the fashion police. He never looked at us for the entire time that Dalj and I sat there, but instead examined the rolled up piece of paper he held in his hand and made little notes on the paper with a pen. I looked closely and noticed that he had the property page open and was seemingly putting down the deposit on his next house as the two gullible dummies, namely us, sat before him.
`So I will need five hundred pounds to do a prayer for you. Then I will take this blessing to some water and you will receive good luck.` His demand was painful and ludicrous.

THe sat on the sofa opposite and studied me carefully for a reaction. I was painfully aware that one Freudian slip, one spoonerism or other faux pas would result in my guts being spilled out across the carpet - that was for sure. I glanced over nervously at the belt resting on the mantelpiece. I could see that it still housed sickening remnants of my blood splattering from erstwhile beatings that he had meted out to me. I remained silent.

I could already feel my throat and tongue were like sandpaper and akin to the most baron part of the Sahara Desert.
`When are you going to wake up and realise that there is no fucking Yellow Brick Road? There isn’t no god damn OZ and there is no chance of you making it in Pakiwood or whatever it is called. You hear that sound? Listen carefully.’
His eyes scanned the room and we both tuned into a hollow tapping sound that could be heard. Hear it? The tapping continued as he brought his hand up from underneath the coffee table where he had been tapping it and then repeated it on the top of the table. Now that is the sound of reality knocking and saying get your fucked up head out of the sand and give up this stupid pipe dream of yours

He was a brooding beast of a guy with a Desperate Dan chin that had patently been no stranger to solvent abuse over the years. He shifted his stocky Popeye type frame over to us with all the smugness of an over confident buffoon. At five feet ten inches he wasn’t particularly imposing in the height stakes but he more than made up for it with his rippling muscles bulging out from his jean jacket, I mean I could actually see his six pack through his clothing.

I woke up the next morning to the aromatic smell of cow dung wafting in through the open window of our hotel room. Prity wrapped her silky legs around mine as she puckered up to kiss me, her perfume from last night still lingering tantalisingly from her soft body. She bought her lips closer to mine, soft, sexy and so kissable had it not been for the sewer type smell seeping from her mouth such was the toe curling stench of morning breath that threatened to eviscerate me where I lay.

As soon as I walked in, I was instantaneously ripped to shreds by everyone. The guests thought that I was some kind of comedian that they had booked to entertain the guests. I looked like a page out of the Arabian knights. The little kids at the party rinsed me for every joke under the sun and the coup de grace for me was when I had to bend down and touch the feet of the head of the house as Prity had showed me beforehand and pay my respects to them in this traditional manner. Well it all went Pete Tong when in the excitement of it all I lunged down at the first auntie I came across and touched her feet. The nauseating stench of cheese, peeling corns, and eau de bunion making me retch. Auntie Balwant’s feet were the answer to curing the foot fetish fever that millions around the globe had harboured. I mean if you sucked on those babies you’d be lying on your back in a coma for a long time to come. I glanced up at her husband standing obediently by her side and immediately solved the riddle of cold sores that were covering his mouth. I felt a shiver run down my spine that had me instantaneously traumatised. I felt myself choking out as I shot back up to my feet, light headed and in need of some much needed air. My turban had now shifted to the other side of my head and was barely hanging on by a thread or two. I did not have time to adjust it as Prity pinched my arm and positioned me in front of the real McCoy and the auntie whose party it actually was. I went down to touch her feet and pay my respects and heard a rip. I looked around anxiously and saw that the tail of my kurta pyjama jacket had got caught in the door behind me and had ripped. From my bent position I felt aunties hand patting my head like I was some kind of dog, either that or she was knighting me. In my petulance I yanked my head up quickly and my turban went flying off of my head and through the living room window and out into the street. Auntie and the rest of the guests looked at me in disgust. Suffice to say that the party was relatively short for me and I was ushered home with my turban under my arm and Prity not seeing the funny side of it.