It was 1983. Bucks Fizz were enjoying pop success, Aberdeen won the Cup Winners’ Cup and a slightly overweight 14-year-old Sikh boy contemplates something dreadful.
Alone at home, he turns on the hob of the gas cooker and starts to unwind his long, glossy hair. Transfixed by the dancing flames he realises he has had enough of the abuse, the taunts, the derision — in a few moments the hair will be burned away and with it memories of humiliation .
That was me, contemplating something dreadful. (What gave it away? The slightly overweight bit?) I didn’t burn my hair off in the end. I saw sense. The hob was turned off, my hair rewound and normal transmission resumed. Twenty three years later I couldn’t be more relieved by my fortitude in resisting that easy way out. I wear my turban with pride.
Why am I telling you all this? Because a 15-year-old boy in Edinburgh had the same thought. He too got fed up with wearing a turban, fed up with the onerous life he led, and chopped off his hair. But instead of a quiet kitchen moment with a gas hob, he chose to invent an imaginary and very public racial attack in an Edinburgh park. He told his parents and the police he was attacked by a gang of sportswear-clad white yobs who beat him, kicked him and punched him in a frenzied assault and then proceeded to cut his hair. And we all believed him.
As lies go, it was an effective one, a lie that reflects a very real edginess in our society between the host white community and Scots, like me, of a darker hue. Fascist graffiti daubed around cemeteries on Remembrance Day; Islamophobia on the rise and the number of racist attacks now standing at about 12 a day, according to police figures reported last week. It seems cultural identity within the national Scottish context has never been as questioned and as questioning. So it is little surprise that the boy’s claim provoked outrage, and protests that drew people from around Britain to the streets of Edinburgh.
But behind that lie, behind the sense of outrage we all feel about this boy’s behaviour, nestles a truth hard for many traditional Sikhs to bear. The burden of turban wearing is proving too much for young Sikhs.
Much of my childhood in Glasgow was spent with my eyes averted downwards for fear of catching an eye that would lead to a mouthful of abuse. Turban wearers tended not to grace the pages of L’Uomo Vogue or feature heavily in pop videos or Hollywood movies. (Or Bollywood movies for that matter). Growing up with a turban in Glasgow was a lonely and difficult life. And the fact that I went to a Jesuit school (a school I loved) didn’t make life any easier. To accessorise with my green blazer I had to wear a green turban. And in doing so I triumphed in the most unique embellishment of the west of Scotland’s sectarian divide.
There’s nothing low-key about turban wearing. I had experiences of being chased by gangs and being beaten up. I was laughed at by doormen as they refused me entry into night clubs; the times they let me in it was the fellow clubbers who found me hilarious. I got accustomed to being made to feel not terribly welcome anywhere. I remember with horror watching my turban roll down Garnethill, having been dislodged by a rather cruel school “friend”.
But that was in the 1980s, before the City of Culture, Deacon Blue and Jeff Torrington novels made Glasgow seem so much more civilised than we all knew it really was. Yet this 15-year-old boy from Edinburgh still felt this way nearly a quarter of a century on from my experiences.
When it comes to our hair and our turbans, few things are more sacred. Long, uncut hair has throughout Sikh theological history signified spiritual purity. Hindu holy men have never cut their hair and that Old Testament Samson chappie soon understood the power of a long Bee Gee-like mane. The Sikh religion was born in a time of great political change in North India, when the Moghul empire swept through Persia, bringing with it enforced Islam and great architecture. The only men allowed to wear turbans were the soldiers of the Moghul emperor. As a martial race and the self-proclaimed defenders of freedom, the Sikhs fought the Moghuls to bloody defeat. India was built on the blood and bones of Sikhs. One can understand how so much history, religious and cultural pride means so much to so many.
So you can’t just wander in from school one day and blithely mention that you did well at the science test and you fancy cutting your hair and not wearing a turban.
Even as a grown man with a mortgage and something resembling a career, my parents, groovy as they are, would be devastated if I chose to cut my hair. Imagine how a 15-year-old boy would deal with such a task? This boy would have known that in addition to the wrath induced in his family, Sikh society would have judged his parents harshly. Factor in the difficulty of being a contemporary teenager to this already heady blend of cultural and religious pressures — you soon begin to understand, if not condone, what this teenager did.
It’s a curious scenario really, because many Sikhs, such as my younger, better-looking and more critically acclaimed brother Sanjeev, do not embrace the turbaned way of life — yet they still lead a full and functional life, guided by the tenets of what I believe to be the world’s grooviest religion. And they do so with fashion-aware hairstyles.
I suppose where things get complicated is when boys who were never given a choice as to whether they grow their hair are faced with over-bearing pressure not to choose another way.
I reckon our east-coast friend was one of this constituency. Hence the concocted attack. It was a type of racial attack unprecedented in Scotland; which is probably why it led to an equally unprecedented response.
I now live 400 miles away, among the Sassenachs, a life bereft of Irn-Bru and square sausage. I never missed the brutality of the Glasgow street abuse — an abuse that comes from the same coruscating core as the humour we know and love. But times have changed and Scotland has changed. If this Pilrig park event can be spun into a positive, it is this: the nation stood four square in condemnation of this “attack”. And there’s a Sikh kid in Edinburgh, who in the words of Monty Python, has been a very naughty boy.
Hardeep Singh Kohli is a writer, actor and director. His documentary, Shopkeepers of the Nation, is broadcast on Radio Four at 11am tomorrow
