White Girls

Her name was Bo and she was the first girl I ever loved. I was ten years old, a shy skinny brown boy with a mop of black curls, and Bo wasn’t just out of my league – she had descended from another universe. Bo was tall and beautiful, with sparkling white teeth and golden hair that swung in braids when she ran. I loved her but knew she would never be mine. She did not live in Luton, for a start, she was somewhat older than me, she was married and – the highest hurdle – she was white. Even at the age of ten I knew that while I could possibly have persuaded her to leave her husband, swap Los Angeles for Luton and consider being with a younger man, I could not make Bo brown. The futility of my adoration did nothing to dampen my feelings. ‘I love you, Bo,’ I would whisper as I gently caressed her photograph. The boys at school all loved Bo too, but I was the only one who took the trouble to write to her. One afternoon I strode into my local library and pulled out an edition of Who’s Who from which I located a Los Angeles address. That evening, while my family was downstairs watching television, I composed my first-ever love letter. ‘Dear Bo,’ I wrote, ‘I am writing to you because we both have something in common: I am ten years old, and you were in a film called 10.’ There was no response. I was hurt at first, but I persuaded myself that it was for the best. We had always been doomed, Bo and I.

I was the son of working-class Pakistani parents, and they assumed I would have an arranged marriage with a fellow Pakistani Muslim. To them, white people were to be tolerated – but socializing was discouraged and forming relationships with white girls was unthinkable. I suspect my parents knew the scale of the challenge. Their favoured tactic to encourage me to stay away from the Caucasian menace was to relate stories, supposedly drawn from real life, which featured Pakistanis they had known who had drifted into relationships with white girls. The location of the stories could vary but the narrative was suspiciously similar in every tale. The story would begin with a gullible Pakistani boy who thought he knew better than his parents. This brazen lad would somehow be introduced to a white girl. In my parents’ retelling of these stories, the girls never had names and they seemed more like villains in a Grimm fairy tale than recognizable human beings. This nameless white girl would lure the poor Pakistani boy with her base charms until the fellow was helplessly under her spell. She would then proceed to fall pregnant, or bleed him dry of his money, or introduce him to hard drugs. ‘And do you know what happened after that?’ my mother would ask, her voice trembling and her eyes widening at the horror she was set to reveal. I would shake my head nervously, suspecting that whatever she was about to relate was unlikely to involve a happy and successful marriage. Sure enough, my mother would explain how the foolish Pakistani son had ended up becoming a heroin addict, or had been forced to sell several of his internal organs to repay his girlfriend’s debts, or had moved to Hitchin and become a taxi driver. These stories all finished with the same tragic coda. ‘And, you know, his parents . . .’ my mother would whisper darkly, her eyes reddening, ‘. . . they never speak about him – he is dead to them.’ I was raised on these miserable parables and so learned early on the barely veiled moral: if you find a white girl, you will lose your parents.