Being the other in the UK

The relative lack of emphasis on sanitary privacy and cleanliness in British culture meant that visiting bathrooms, like communal changing, could be an awkward experience. Physical cleanliness is seen as a path to spiritual cleanliness in Islam, and toilet hygiene is one of the most important aspects of maintaining cleanliness throughout the day. 

Growing up in Britain, stand-up urinals which spray back speckles of urine onto one's trousers and toilet cubicles without wash basins were all sources of daily anxiety. Bathroom challenges, of course, weren't restricted to my experience in Britain, as challenges extended to trips to Sylhet as well as countless incidents in other places. 

When I grew up in London, no bathroom offered facilities for rinsing one's genitals properly after a visit to the lavatory, and many users would leave the bathroom without even washing their hands. To avoid contact with urine-smeared bathroom appliances, I developed techniques for not coming into contact with door handles, locks, flushes, toilet seats or anything else. The methods used are so honed that now my senses are keenly attuned to dealing with almost any sanitary layout or arrangement. 

Fellow students at Oxford University would snigger when they'd see me going to the bathroom with a "bodna" in my hands; as fellow holiday makers did once when one of my cousins and I did the same on the Isle of Wight. What possessed us to spend half-term in a holiday camp near Cowes with hundreds of half-drunken teenagers I don't quite remember. 

In those years we were less confident of our cultural differences in regard to bathroom behaviour and so we would hide the necessary water vessel in a Marks & Spencer polythene bag. Cultural differences concerning attitudes to hygiene fed a strong feeling of exclusion from British society, and the ridicule attracted from being different in such personal matters was acute. 

The resultant pressure to conform was strong, since the cost of not doing so was to be made to feel even more foreign, inferior and uncivilised. Being occasionally referred to as "dirty Paki" added a laughable yet unfunny irony to the situation. The same cousin who visited the Isle of Wight together with me was spat on once by teenage girls on the number 141 bus coming home from Catford. As they giggled off to their seat at the back my cousin and I were too shocked to react, and too gentlemanly to do so with girls, concentrating instead on wiping embarrassing bubbles of spit from our faces before others would notice and ridicule us further.

In the grand scheme of life, bathroom behaviour may seem a trivial matter, but in Britain (for different reasons to bathroom challenges in Sylhet!), it was an element of the daily challenge. Going to the toilet, eating, praying five times a day, all meant that being foreign wasn't an occasional challenge; no, we were foreign all day long. 

Successfully visiting a "hole in the floor" toilet at Karachi Airport some years ago, this time dressed in a hand-cut Cerruti suit from Bond Street which emerged spotless and neatly creased from the experience, is one of thousands of more recent successfully executed bathroom operations over the years. Once upon a time a fearful ethnic minority, secretly performing acts of toilet hygiene, today we are easy-going masters of sanitary cleanliness. 

As time has gone on, our toilet traumas have been transformed into technical execution challenges, negotiated using a carefully constructed compendium of tools and techniques to suit almost every circumstance. Buying water bottles from a street vendor before going, keeping perfumed ittar and loose tissues in the pocket, and being able to hook open a toilet door with one's shoe being just a few. No contact is the objective and failure may result in a swift trip home, a shower and a change of clothing. 

Being made to feel foreign extended to other fields too. When Pakistan beat England in a cricket match at Lord's in 1990 and their opening batsman Mohsin Khan scored a magnificent double century, my encouraging cheers to applaud their victory were met with stony stares of silence by the English fans sitting around me in the stands. I was supporting England as usual, but felt happy to see the underdogs win a contest that levelled matters between the two teams; all summer Pakistan had been subjected most uncharitably to accusations of cheating by sections of the tabloid English press. As I trudged back to Baker Street tube that night, I felt bitter about backing an England team whose fellow supporters didn't even trust me. 

"If it had been a white man applauding Pakistan in the stands that afternoon," I thought as the escalator steadily descended down into the depths of London's underground, "it would have been regarded as hearty sporting behaviour."

Back in 1990, I was years ahead of my time in the way that I was already comfortable with a multiplicity to my identity. I was happy to be British, and to support and encourage the success of Pakistan and saw no truck in this combination. Whilst this caused no issue to me, because of my skin tone it created a negative reaction from white English people around me who judged my responses as somehow ungrateful or foreign. It wasn't me who failed the famous Norman Tebbit "cricket test" that day, but the Englishmen sitting around me.

Using cleansed fingers to break, sort and eat food was another case in point. In Bengali culture using hands for eating is quite commonplace, and is somewhat more practical than using cutlery when it comes to negotiating fiddly elements of food such as fish with a large number of fine bones that could easily be choked on. 

In the context of a culture of cleanliness, eating with fingers was of course as hygienic as using cutlery, only more practical. But some of my English friends and colleagues at work regarded it as either dirty, or uncivilised. Once I met two professionals from the British Council in Dhaka who explained to me the purpose of their cultural project in Bangladesh was to "teach the locals how to be civilised and use knives and forks to eat with." Similar to our humiliation over toilet activities, eating with hands was too often also seen as a way of being somehow different, foreign and inferior.