Stories That Crawled From My Brain

The Year Ahead

Whilst I have everything anyone could ever want, ever need, and far, far more than that besides, contrary to most of the rich people in this country and the planet more widely, I came by all of my money myself.

Though, of course, like most who got their hands on oodles of cash, I still didn't technically ‘earn’ it. What do I mean by that? Where others mostly inherited it, or used a position of power to milk it from the labour of others - money makes money, as they say - mine came to me in a wholly unique way. Still confused? Well, just wait a few moments and I'll tell you what I mean. And how, after it all, I'd just as soon stayed a penniless eejit, living with my parents.

I'll start right at the start.

My grandparents on my Da's side were born in the lowest caste of the Indian system in Mumbai, India. Dalits or ‘Untouchables,’ they were called, a nickname that means exactly what you think it means. They were considered so low in society that the rest of the castes wouldn't go anywhere near them, and they'd never be able to escape the bindings of the unfair caste system. Well, that's what my great grandparents must have thought, anyway.

They were cotton farmers, and, given their poverty and inability to go up in the world, they, like many other Untouchables in Maharashtra in the fifties and sixties, jumped at the chance to maybe be able to cast away their caste by converting to Buddhism as part a wider Dalit Buddhist movement led my B. R. Ambedkar.

Even if their station didn't improve all that much, their relationship to Buddha must have helped them justify their own meagre existence by knowing that through karmic forces, they would be rewarded in the next life. And, in reality, they still maintained a strong relationship to Hindu traditions and practice, so it wasn't a huge change.

I've never been particularly religious, not really having the patience to meditate. This ignorance and lack of engagement led me to think that my vast riches came as a direct reward for my own suffering, translated to karmic benefits for me. Though, I now know this was my ignorance, a complete lack of understanding of how the universe works. Now, I can see that my own cravings and desire, being seized by my innermost wants were directly leading to my misery, my loneliness and suffering. And when the universe dropped something so extraordinary in my lap it could not be explained by mere circumstance, I misinterpreted the signs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway - my grandparents. They were good people, virtuous and kind. They still are, in fact. In India in the late fifties early sixties, they were still downtrodden, locked into relative poverty, and still looked down on by a fragmented society.

So, like many south Asians from across the Indian subcontinent, they sought better fortunes abroad. In the UK, the attitudes were turning against the open door policy they'd previously had for colonial subjects, and my grandparents knew it was now or never. Whilst the British had left the decade before in relative ignominy, there was still a strange connection to them, which I suppose happened whilst India was still getting its sense of self back after the hands of the British were all over her for four hundred years. Maybe it was a psychic hangover, of sorts.

So, my grandparents thought that it would be a great idea to go to Scotland to seek these new horizons, moving just before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 which worked to slam the door on the ex-colonial holdings of Britain from getting to share in the benefits of their riches which Britain had nicked. 

But new horizons were indeed found, to a point: the rolling hills surrounding the city of Glasgow. Why they picked this miserable, eternally wet and grey place, instead of somewhere in England, maybe London or the West Midlands where most of my fellow Indians went, where you don't freeze your baws off every month that isn't August, I'll never know. I know Buddhist doctrine says to devoid oneself of attachments and that your surroundings are an illusion, but seriously, come on.