Racist

Mr Mallhotra, the owner of a newsagents, was sick of young thugs coming into his shop and threatening him. The young white youths from the nearby estate, aged anything from five upwards, would come into his shop and hassle him. Either they would buy something and ask for it at half price, so that when he refused an argument would ensue; or, they would try to buy cigarettes and alcohol and again, when he refused, they would question his authority. On other occasions, when they came in and out without buying anything or without bugging him, he simply suspected them of shop-lifting. He would stare accusingly at them, and they would respond by questioning his insolence.

Over the last few weeks, he had seemed to spend his evenings doing nothing more than being in these stand-offs; whilst during the day he worried about them and got stressed and irritable. Last night had been typical. A gang of six teenagers, two of them girls, had refused to leave the shop, after he’d politely asked them to. They’d spent a long time inside without purchasing anything, and he had believed they were up to no good. They hadn’t taken kindly to the treatment and the six of them had stood near his counter, aggressively arguing with him.

Standing there alone at his till, he had felt really intimidated. They were so abusive and threatening, their language was foul. The boys were like hooligans, with their shaven heads, and their muscular, athletic teenage bodies. The girls were like tigers. They were harsh, common, and attractive, and they were insolent and contemptuous too. He had been called a Packie. One of the boys had said he was going to kill him.

He had come to this country over thirty years ago. Back then, with no money to his name, he had entered Britain carrying a decrepit suitcase in which were all his belongings. He had worked in an Indian restaurant, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. He had felt despised, lonely and vulnerable. Youths had thrown a conquer in his face and injured his eye. In the first flat he’d lived in, he’d been burglarised and lost most of his possessions. In another house, the Greek landlord had demanded, after just two weeks, that he pay £100 in order to repair a crack in the floorboards. He hadn’t made the crack and refused to pay. Then a policeman came round to the house and in the company of the Greek landlord threatened him. He’d felt so intimidated that he’d duly paid. He’d been so upset by the incident that he moved out straight away, losing that month’s rent. It was only afterwards that he’d realised that the policeman was probably not genuine.

In general he had felt despised, dirty and looked down upon. He had lived in the cheapest of accommodation, he had driven a cheap, second hand car, that youths would jeer at, as he drove around. But all of this had motivated him to make money, to keep working hard, dreaming of the day when he would be a somebody, somebody who garnered respect. He’d worked for ten years in the restaurant industry, after which he’d been able to set up in business. For the last twenty years or so he’d been doing well.

Ironically, now that he had made it, the locals, the youths, and just about everyone seemed to hate him even more. Whatever he did, he realised, he would always be in the wrong. More than this however, his wife, whom he had wed in an arranged marriage, wasn’t very happy with him, and took out all her frustrations with life on him. She resented having to work in the shop, and was often huffy, terse and short with him. So too were his daughters. Insolent, disrespectful, they didn’t do as they were told. They hated working in the shop as well.

From all angles he was sick of his life. The youths came in every night, spoiling for a fight. It would bubble over one of these days, and in some ways he wanted the fight. He was sick of everything.

*****************************

Karl Bradshaw, aged nineteen, was a very angry young man. Unemployed and on the dole, his prospects in life were bleak, his options limited. He had no stomach or discipline to do a menial job. There was a sensitivity to him, a weakness, he wouldn’t bow like an ox. He thought about joining the army, but here again, he was somehow too clever, too philosophic, not really tough enough to do so. So he was frustrated. He felt he had lots of strength and energy, but utterly nowhere to put it. He felt he had something to give, but that he was not needed. He felt nobody gave a damn about his life.

He lived with his mother and siblings in a tower block apartment. Inside it was small, poky, and run down. The kitchen was dilapidated, the upholstery and crockery was all so old and fetid, the dishes and cutlery dirty and stained. The living room and bedrooms were drab and miserable. The carpets were old, the wallpaper dirty, the beds mangy, the sofa falling apart. Everything was worn down and filthy. The bathroom was smelly, dirty, a place to be avoided.

He hated living here, more so because he had grown sick of his mother and his siblings. He had managed to wreck a good deal of the furniture. Returning home from wasted days at the job centre, or days spent lolling around town watching happy people and looking for a fight, or again, days where he went drinking with his friends in the woods, he would come home so frustrated, bitter and angry, that his life was wasting away and that he was a nobody, that in an outburst of rage he would pull the door off the wooden cupboard, ripping it off its hinges, and throwing it across his room. In a similar way he had kicked and kicked a door until the glass panes in it shattered, and he’d thrown his ghetto blaster against the wall so that it smashed.

He hated his life, that it was going nowhere, and when the miserable, lonely, prison-cell of a bedroom annoyed him, or a malfunctioning ghetto blaster worked him up because he couldn’t listen to music, he gave vent to all his pent up rage and aggression, all his hatred of the world. He hated himself for it, absolutely hated himself. But he was at the end of his tether and didn’t know what else to do. Yet he hated it because he reminded himself of his father.

That man too had vented his anger and frustration with the world in a similar manner. When a toaster had failed to work, his father, sick, tired and out of humour, and preparing to go to work in a factory, had been so aggrieved that God should so peeve him, by not allowing him a simple slice of toast, that he had picked the stupid thing up, and unplugging it, hurled it across the room, at his four noisy, irritating children. It had hit Karl on the face. He had burst into tears.

When yesterday he had pulled a bathroom cabinet off the walls in a fit of rage, and thrown it across the room, he realised just how like his father he had become. It was an extra cause of pain to him. But he couldn’t stop his violent behaviour.

The thing however that iced his cake, were the foreigners. They were everywhere. Everywhere in the tower block, everywhere in the neighbourhood. Blacks, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Kurdish, Turkish and so on. He was sick of the sight of them. They got the best housing, the best furniture, the best of everything. They had nice cars, nice clothes, the best jobs. He detested the sight of foreign women, in beautiful, colourful clothes, often in native dress, arrogantly strolling around the place as if they owned it and paying him no attention. He hated being in their presence when there was a group of them. For example there had been a party of Pakistanis picnicking at a park near his flat. He had been loathe to see them, the women especially prominent in their fancy costumes, all of them gobbling away in their native tongue, caught up in their own world, oblivious of him. The same was true of all the races. They all got together, stuck together, and an especial camaraderie seemed to be bred amongst them.

So he hated being insignificant. And now, in order to show them that they should take more notice of him, he had shaved off all his hair and had a swastika tattooed on his arm. He wore a leather jacket and big leather boots. They would pay him some attention now.

He walked along the dark, lamp-lit street, and crossed the road. He stopped and looked left. There it was: Mallhotra’s Newsagents. He had a knife in his pocket.

He hated that man, not only because he ripped off the locals and sold alcohol to children, but because he thought he was superior with his BMW and fancy house. And Karl hated his daughters. They were so insolent and haughty and they went to their fancy private school for girls, and he felt jealous of Mallhotra for being their father, and also annoyed with him for allowing them to be so horrible. He crossed the street and entered the shop.

*****************************

Mr Mallhotra was beaten black and blue. Fortunately someone else had arrived during the fight and called the police. He had received some nasty injuries though, and lay on his back in hospital. He would be here for a few days at least.

His eldest daughter was at hospital with him. She had been here since morning, and was now going to take a break. She left Mr Mallhotra’s bedside, and walking into a waiting area, passed a few words with his new guest. It was one person at a time only, so she would go off for a fifteen minute break now. She thanked the new visitor for coming and showed him where to go to.

It was Karl Bradshaw. When finding, on entering the shop, that Mr Mallhotra was being beaten up, his only reaction had been to step in and save him. He saw how the youths were savagely kicking the innocent old man, and hurling one of them aside and smashing the other across the back of the head, he had saved poor Mallhotra. Then he’d called the police and seen to Mr Mallhotra’s injuries.

In fact Mallhotra had to some extent started the fight. Although he hadn’t thrown the first punch, he knew he had precipitated the affair. He had been waiting for a fight all night, but it had not been forthcoming. The two youths who in the end he’d fought with, had seemed, whilst in his shop, to be minding their own business and having a day off. He had been too quick to leave the counter and accuse them of shoplifting; they had probably just been taking their time, deciding what to buy. In the end though, it hadn’t taken much to get them started, and once Mallhotra had accused them of being thieves, and cursed them as insolent youths, the fight had quickly followed.

Mallhotra recognised the youth who had saved him. He’d come in on several previous occasions and simply bought a pack of chewing gum. Mallhotra had been unable to determine the mindset of this youth. With his skinhead and leather jacket, and with his silent aggression, he had felt threatened by him. Yet he had, on buying his chewing gum, always remained silent. He had said nothing and done nothing. But Mallhotra had sensed a tension in the air. He had felt there was something more to this youth. However in the end, appearances had been deceptive. This youth had saved him.

Karl had planned the assault on Mallhotra on several occasions, but every time, he simply didn’t have the requisite nastiness or viciousness to carry out the attack. He had simply entered the shop, and, slowly and menacingly, walked up to the counter. Then he had told Mallhotra he wanted chewing gum, pointing to it, not picking it out himself and speaking without manners, in monosyllables. Mallhotra had responded with monosyllables, staring insolently back at him, though he had felt nervous and intimidated. Karl had stared back. There had been a tension in the air, an unspoken hatred. Finally he had left the shop.

The whole incident had done him a power of good. He had finally felt necessary, needed, that he was making use of his energies. He felt like somebody now, he felt he had garnered respect, respect from Mallhotra and his daughters, respect from the immigrant population.

Yet nothing much had changed, and he foresaw that, in a few weeks time, when all these feelings had worn off, his old frustrations would resurface, and he would need someone or something on which to vent his rage. However, there could be no possibility of being a racist or a neo-Nazi now. Just the simple fact of having contact with Mallhotra and his daughters, the fact that he had honourably saved him, and that a tense friendship had now arisen between the two – all of this meant he could no longer become a racist. If he did, he would betray all of what he had done, he would betray Mallhotra. The easy option would be to become a racist, to hate the immigrants one and all. That would be the easy option, an attractive option once the banality of his life returned, and he felt once more frustrated and bitter. But he couldn’t go down that track anymore, because of this single, almost disgenuous friendship with Mallhotra. It would be incredibly, incredibly difficult, but he couldn’t ever tarnish the sparkle of this moment.

And Mallhotra too felt exactly the same. Though being beaten by the youths might finally have made up his mind, converted him, for good, into a bonafide hater of the white race, he couldn’t allow himself to give in to this easy and unrestrained way of feeling, because Karl had saved him and he couldn’t think ill of him. It was the difficult thing to do, but honour demanded that he do it. There was no possibility that he could like Karl and hate the white thugs. If he did that the hatred would eventually gain the ascendancy. So, to try and be true, he had to give up all that hatred entirely, and concentrate purely on trying to like this young man whom he was indebted to. He owed him, and he had to be sincere to him.

Karl stood at his bedside, Mallhotra lay on his bed. Karl said little, Mallhotra said little. The conversation was slow, both men reticent. As they looked at each other, it was as if they both read each other’s minds, and knew what their true feelings were. But they both saw that they had to make the effort. Karl poured out a glass of water and passed it to Mallhotra.