The Good Immigrant Read online

In 1986, they moved from the family home to the flat above the shop. Dad continued to work nine to five at the dental technician’s, taking over the shop in the evening so Mum could look after my sister and do the housework. This work ethic is what forms the foundation of my life and it’s knowing how hard my parents work that continues to humble me. Mum often tells me what happened when they first turned a profit of £1,000. They’d never physically seen so much cash in their lives and it was theirs to spend, but they weren’t entirely sure what to do with it. So they wrapped it in a plastic bag.

  ‘Perhaps we should hide it in the oven?’ Mum suggested.

  ‘Yeah, but if we forget it’s in there we might burn it,’ Dad replied.

  They ended up hiding it in the drawer underneath the cooker.

  In 1989, Dad gave up working as a dental technician to join Mum in working full-time at the shop. Business flourished – their hard work was paying off.

  1990 was a year of contrasting emotions for my parents. In August, my dada passed away. Two months later, I was born. By now, they’d moved to a house in Sawtry. I spent the first nine years of my life there. It was a fairly lonely existence. None of my school friends lived nearby and I didn’t know anyone in the area. The time spent alone here was what fired my imagination – making up for the lack of a world outside, I built imaginary worlds in my head. I wasn’t just playing football in the driveway, I was playing a match at Wembley. After watching Toy Story, I used my old baby monitor to see if my toys were coming to life (sadly they didn’t, but toys are clever like that). When I did finally make friends down the road, it turned out to be the beginning of my career as an actor – I managed to convince them that I was an American kid called Michael. This continued for some time. One of the kids was actually American and even he fell for it. I have no idea why I did it and shortly after I began this performance art piece, we moved house. I don’t think they ever found out.

  We moved to another village nearby, where Mum and Dad had bought a house with a shop downstairs. The village was a tight-knit community of around 350 people (a stark contrast to 5,000 people in Sawtry) and soon enough everyone was a friend or a familiar face. The shop had been shut for over two years so my parents garnered a lot of affection simply for reopening it. Regular customers became family friends, I attended church services and played in village cricket matches. The annual village panto was a huge boost for my confidence as an actor.

  For Mum and Dad, it was the closest they’d felt to home since they left India – they both originally came from tiny villages in Gujarat. Despite moving to a country 4,000 miles away, they found themselves calling a tiny village home once again. I, on the other hand, was still finding my definition of home. At the time, it meant countryside, a small community and … not many ethnic minorities.

  Yet Indian culture remained a huge part of my childhood. Behind closed doors Mum only spoke to me in Gujarati so I’d learn the language. Bollywood was my introduction to cinema and the soundtrack of my childhood. Hinduism was also at the core of our household, but this is one of the aspects of my identity that left me conflicted. I was brought up and identify as a Hindu and there’s no doubt that some of my earliest memories are linked to this – the smell of incense sticks and the learning of prayers that we recited at the shrine in the living room. Still, I don’t know a lot about Hinduism and the philosophical intricacies of what is known to be the oldest surviving religion. Surprisingly, my mum feels the same way.

  Growing up in India, she recalls faith as being a very personal thing. Each home, whilst observing the basic tenets of the religion, would favour a certain deity. She can only recall community worship at her village mandir during annual festivals, such as Navratri, Holi or Diwali. Her experience of Hinduism was of a very lenient, polytheistic religion that meant different things to different people. Having said that, I’m aware of a lot of traditions that began to clash with my liberal perceptions as I grew up – the separation of male and female seating at some weddings, funerals and festivals; the expectation of a girl to be married by a certain age (which carries across several religions) – this sort of thing made me begin to question the validity of my faith.

  The ethnic demographic of my village was echoed by most of the schools I attended and especially the school where I eventually settled to do my GCSEs and A levels. I was one of two Indian guys in the entire school and the overall student population wasn’t particularly diverse. Due to this being my general experience, I never saw it as an issue and I guess it wasn’t – it was a pretty honest representation of the local population.

  As a teenager, I struggled to fit in, but not for lack of trying. Like everyone else at that age, I followed closely what my peers were watching and listening to. So I was drawn towards bands like Arctic Monkeys, Muse and Kasabian, watched Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, whilst studying Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht. Meanwhile, at home, I was still listening to Bollywood music and watching Bollywood films. My sister, who was having a cultural epiphany of her own at university, introduced me to the music of Nitin Sawhney and Niraj Chag. Yet, because no one else knew anything about these things, it was never of any interest to them.

  I remember telling someone at school about Rang De Basanti, a Hindi film I’d seen that had a big effect on me. I wanted to lend him the DVD, but he didn’t seem particularly interested. A similar attempt to introduce someone to Nitin Sawhney’s music was briefly humoured and then passed by. Looking back, this dismissal of my Indian cultural reference points must have caused me to start burying that side of my identity – if it wasn’t relevant to my social growth, what use was it? Talking about any of it just drew blank looks and an awkward end to the conversation. It gradually became a very personal part of my life, rarely shared or spoken of with anyone else. Until now.

  I’ve always been something of an outsider and at this point it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation – I’m not sure if I’m just naturally this way, or if being ostracised at an early age made me so. Either way, my teenage years at school kind of enforced the feeling. Although I made some friends, I never found a group that I got into trouble and came of age with. I kept my head down and did my work. I only really came alive in drama lessons – acting was the only thing I was confident doing. It didn’t matter who I was in real life, because on the stage I could be anyone and I seemed to be good at it. Even when everyone else had seen Bugsy Malone and I hadn’t, it didn’t stop me being a part of the play. The difference in cultural background didn’t seem to hold any sway here. This was what first drew me to acting – here, my propensity for imitation and jumping out of windows was actively encouraged. I could be anything that I wanted to be.

  The summer before starting A levels, my life changed when I got the role on EastEnders. A whole world opened up to me, not just as an actor but as a person – I made lifelong friends and finally felt accepted into a family outside my own. I was riding high on the fact that I was getting to do what I loved for a living. I was working with actors I had admired for years and I was part of a show that was sewn into the fabric of British society – it was an absurd privilege for a kid from a tiny village in Cambridgeshire.

  I stayed in my village for five years after starting on EastEnders. Keeping my family and my home near me during this time helped keep my feet on the ground – until I moved to London I still did the paper round for my parents. Outside of the job, very little changed in my life. I moved to London in 2012 and it seems strangely appropriate that it was then that I had my first brush with the issue of race on screen. London’s awoken me to just how incredible multiculturalism can be and how dishonestly we’re representing that in television and on film. At the same time, I began to analyse the part I’ve played in on-screen diversity.

  Although the Masood family on EastEnders were specifically Pakistani Muslims, I think they were widely regarded as a kind of generic representation of a South Asian family. There were intricacies regarding their faith and how it impacted on their li
ves but I, as a Gujarati Hindu, could always relate to the stories my character and the Masood family were part of, and I know that there are people from various South Asian backgrounds who felt represented by the family. What I loved most about playing Tamwar was that his unique qualities had nothing to do with his ethnicity or religion – he was just like anyone else and perhaps that had a part to play in my forgetting that I was representing a huge section of our society.

  Recently, I was reminded of how impactful our media can be. The Monday after the Paris attacks, a scene that we’d shot two months earlier was broadcast. In it, my character reads a Surah from the Qur’an to his girlfriend and explains to her what being a Muslim means to him. ‘Be kind to people … and love them.’

  In the wake of the weekend’s events, it seemed to strike a chord with a lot of viewers.

  This is why I became an actor. It started because I wanted to pretend to be a mutated bipedal turtle. It became a way of escaping from the drudgery of everyday life and now I’ve come to see it as a responsibility. Storytelling is the most powerful way to promote our understanding of the world in which we live and the vessel to tell these stories is our media. Britain is filled with people from all corners of the earth, each with a wealth of stories to tell; sometimes, race, culture ethnicity are a key part of the narrative, sometimes not.

  In discovering so much about how my family arrived here in the UK, I discovered how rich their story is with the culture and traditions of their homeland, but at its core it’s a universal story about love and life. My heritage, while inherently linked to my ethnicity, only makes up a part of the role I play in society – day-to-day I’m just another face in the multicultural population of twenty-first-century Britain. If we share the gifts that people have carried across continents and acknowledge them as part of the fabric of our society, from the national curriculum to the mainstream media, we could be on the cusp of a paradigm shift in our understanding of the world.

  I must have been about six when I had my first sleepover. My friend Adam had come over and we stayed up till the early hours talking about god knows what. When we finally grew tired, I looked out of my bedroom window and found myself transfixed.

  Through the same bedroom window that had been locked to me, I saw my first sunrise.

  It was beautiful.

  Is Nish Kumar a Confused Muslim?

  Nish Kumar

  On September 18th, 2012, I was sitting in my house. This is a common occurrence. ‘Sitting in my house’ is one of the things I’m best known for, amongst my group of friends, along with ‘Bob Dylan trivia’ and ‘being asleep’. That month was a period of relaxation for me. In August I had performed a run at the Edinburgh festival of my debut stand-up show Who is Nish Kumar? A show that one critic had described as ‘a comedy show’. The writing and subsequent execution of it had left me in a state of physical, emotional and financial exhaustion, so I had given myself a couple of weeks off in September before I began looking for a new office job so I could continue to support my dream/delusion of being a full-time comedian. My aim that month was to sit around and play a football management computer game. This may well be the least athletic endeavour of all time. It’s worse than computer games where you pretend to be a footballer; at least those involve the simulation of exertion. This game requires you to do the admin for imaginary footballers. Still, everyone needs a hobby and that was mine.

  Anyway, that morning I was about to return to the fictitious dugout as Manchester United manager Phileas Q Superfly (they let you choose your own name) when I opened my laptop and decided to quickly check in on Facebook. My friend, the comedian Jack Barry, had written on my wall. I clicked on it excitedly as Jack is always good for a laugh, whether it’s onstage, in conversation or inside the internet. He had written the following:

  ‘Don’t know if I’m the first one to show you this but this just popped up on a meme website I was on. Apparently you’re an angry Muslim in the US.’

  I was, as you can imagine, utterly baffled. Below the text of his message was a link to a meme website called Quickmeme.com. The link led me to a picture of my own face. This was a surprise. If you’re not expecting to see your own face, it’s always a surprise. I have no idea how twins get anything done around each other. The picture was a publicity shot that we ended up using as the poster for my aforementioned Edinburgh show, and above it was the title ‘CONFUSED MUSLIM’. Around the picture, in a white font with a black outline, was text that read:

  ‘Angry that Christians insulted my prophet, cannot insult Jesus as he is a prophet too.’

  At this point my confusion had escalated from bafflement to mild panic. I had not been informed that this was going to happen. I had no idea what any of this meant. I really didn’t know what a ‘meme’ was. It’s a point of pride to me that I stay resolutely oblivious of much of contemporary culture. I try to pretend this is because I’m too cerebral to be concerning myself with all this nonsense, but in reality it’s probably a manifestation of my own intellectual insecurity. As is my tendency to overuse polysyllabic words.

  My flatmate quickly explained to me that people on the internet share pictures with each other and they all change the caption to variations on a single theme. So he showed me one of ‘surprised man’ and there were loads of different captions speculating as to why this man was surprised.

  But here’s the thing – I am not a Muslim. My parents are Indian by birth, and as for their religious classification, my father would identify as a Hindu while my mother prays to ‘all the gods, because that way I’m covered every which way’. I try to inform her that I’m not sure you can trick God, but she’s convinced she’s found a loophole. I wasn’t offended that anyone would think I was a Muslim. There’s no reason to be. In all honesty, I was offended that they hadn’t recognised me as NISH KUMAR ‘comedic genius and star of stage and screen’ (citation needed).

  Also I was pretty used to it. There’s a huge Muslim population in India, as you all probably know, so people assuming that an Indian is a Muslim isn’t the strangest thing in the world, despite the fact that the majority of Indians are Hindu. However, it’s more likely for me. My family is from Kerala, a state in the south of India, which has a long history of immigration, dating back to the sixteenth century when Vasco Da Gama led a Portuguese delegation there. This immigration appears to have crash-landed on my face. I have a face that people seem comprehensively unable to place. I’m regularly confused for being pretty much every ethnicity other than my own (Indian).

  Most strangers assume I’m from the Middle East, which isn’t a problem, aside from when those people work for US customs or are themselves from the Middle East. A few times a year, in London, someone will approach me and start speaking to me in Arabic because they think they’ve found the reassuring familiarity of someone they share a language and culture with, in what is otherwise a strange and foreign land. I then have to dash those dreams. I used to say, ‘I don’t speak Arabic’ but now I say ‘I’m Indian’, only because I don’t want them to think that I am Arabian and haven’t bothered to learn the language. I don’t mind people thinking I’m an Arab, I just don’t want them thinking I’m a lazy one.

  So it wasn’t a surprise, necessarily, that people would think I was a Muslim; it happened fairly regularly and I had no problem with it.

  But this was a different kettle of shit.

  I had no idea what this was supposed to mean. Was this a knowing joke from one Muslim to another? After all, it takes some rudimentary knowledge of the tenets of the religion to know that Jesus is a prophet in Islam. That’s the kind of knowledge you don’t often associate with racists, a group not known for their attention to detail. Or was this just Islamophobia with my face plastered all over it. What if people thought that I was behind this?

  There were three possible alternatives and none of them were good.

  1. It was a person being Islamophobic. I was therefore being racially abused and not even correctly. The only thing wors
e than racism is inaccurate racism. It was hurtful to me and to people who are actually Muslims.

  2. It was a knowing joke made between some Muslims, of which I was now, unjustifiably, part.

  3. People would think that I was involved and it was somehow part of an attempt to reinvent myself as some kind of non-white racist comedian, like a non-ironic Borat.

  You might think that I was overthinking things. I would inform you that, overthinking is inevitable as a comedian. It’s an occupational hazard, like being punched in the face if you’re a boxer, or being roundly despised if you’re a member of Coldplay. In reality, no one cared, and hardly anyone even saw the meme. That didn’t stop The Good Guy (me) from boarding the Neuroses Train to Crazytown.

  Here was my central concern – the great thing about joking around with your friends is that you understand each other’s intent. If you make fun of your friend, there is a pre-existing understanding of your shared values and assumptions about the world. It’s what comedians try really hard to do onstage. We try to establish our personalities and our beliefs so that the audience trusts us enough that when we do make a joke about a contentious subject, there’s a reason for it, and it’s not just crass or an expression of prejudice.

  But on the internet jokes appear untethered, and out of context.

  Context is all-important in comedy. Journalists and audience members will often ask you to tell them your favourite joke, but very often it’s all about who tells it. It’s the singer not the song. The material of a stand-up comedian is intrinsically bound up in that person’s onstage identity. Nowhere else is this problem better summarised that in ‘Diversity Day’, an episode of the American remake of The Office. In the show, the hapless boss Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) is hauled in front of a racial diversity seminar for performing Chris Rock’s seminal ‘N***** versus Black People’ routine in the office. Scott is entirely oblivious to why a white American repeating that routine verbatim would be a problem in any circumstance, much less in an environment where he is the manager. In his frustration he says: