2 suitcases. National Express to Yorkshire down the M6 . Only yesterday you were typing your last byline. It’s midnight and you are searching for quarters at the bus station. You need to make a call for the pick up. 17 hours on the trot across immigration lines and the comfort of familiarity.
It’s midnight and the van rolls in, bleary pools of headlight lightening the fog in a desolate bus shelter somewhere in Leeds. A solitary Arab ( another student from Jordan) is sitting inside. You feel the hunger gnawing inside. The Arab reaches out and shares a few biscuits. You bless him.
The van rolls outside a nondescript B&B. They put you up inside a small room where everything is as unfamiliar as the hours that have passed. Exhaustion creeps in and you pass out in your shoes. A silver sheen of sunlight irritates the blessed darkness, and you wake up to see the Headingley stadium outside your window.
Welcome to the University of Life.
The Arab and you saunter to the Uni, for registration and accommodation. The lady at the counter offers a last minute offer for 2 room-mates, who would like to share a room at 35 pounds a week for each.
It takes exactly 30 seconds for you to cut your first deal with the Arab and become room-mates from rank strangers in less than 6 hours. Because by now you know that the 500 pounds you have as savings will run out pretty fast if you don’t save every penny and land a job, any odd job, to survive the next 2 years of University life. You won’t ask for any money from family, because they have already done a lot and tapped out. And for once you are trying to live up to your own promise of doing this entirely on your own with no help from anyone.
It is shared accommodation at 20 North Grange. An Arab, a French, a Brit, a German, a Korean, three Italians and they are now your new family. They all come and meet you with quizzical looks. We draw straws to choose our beds and tables and that’s it. We have a roof on our heads for the next 9 months.
The Arab cooks. And you wash up. You are already learning to be a wheeler dealer, learning to sell shoes in a shoe-store at 5 pounds an hour , learning to code to make websites at night ( it’s easy money).
Learning to hustle, to survive.
Saturday mornings at the market square; busking with a keyboard, the pennies pile up. Ayn Rand’s “objectivism” rears its ugly head and music kills itself.
Evocation.
“Fucking Paki — Go Home” ! You hear this more than once at more than one place and you become really aware of who you are for the first time. That’s when you loose your fake accent and fake charisma, cos it’s fake as much as you have been all this while. Your indignance forces you to learn to hate in very simple but constant restrained manner. You realise if you don’t stand up for who you are, your roots, there is no true respect.
Nationalism hits home harder than any speech on independence day.
Late night from the library. It’s raining and you are walking home. You hear the shuffling sound of sudden footsteps behind you and feel a hand on your face. It’s all too sudden. A swollen eye and a bloody nose later you get a sinking feeling in the gut, cos your wallet’s gone. That’s when you realise what it means to get mugged.
The rent’s late. You come home to see that the landlord has thrown your suitcases and everything else on to the kerb. You got 5 pounds for the weekend cos you lost the shoe-store job after you fell ill and ran out of money.
For the first time you are truly scared. Like you understand the real meaning of fear. 5 pounds to survive in a place which is a million miles away from home.
It’s midnight, and there’s no home and no one to turn to, so you sleep on the park bench and dawn breaks.
The next morning you call a friend and she lets you crash her place until you land a job.
4 am: The banshee shriek of the alarm. It’s snowing, but you got to get to work.You got a temp gig to manage the mail room at a large bank. The S96 rolls up in the fog and your eyes are bleary and fingers are numb. 11 am — you are in the lecture hall; 3 pm — you are teaching the undergrads; by 5 pm you are on your way for the night shift, at the late city edition of the local newspaper , cos you promised yourself you would never go hungry again. By 11 you are back home, preparing notes for the next day, or coding a website. By midnight you are asleep on exhaustion.
Christmas Day — and you take up a gig to fuel up at the gas station and run the till. They pay triple by the hour and you have got the vacation to Mykonos in your mind. It’s 10 at night after a 12 hour shift and you are already 300 pounds richer. Then the door opens — and it’s a hold up. Nothing dramatic like the movies, but the gun’s real and you are learning to be really calm and do exactly as you are told. To simply live. The whole thing is over in 10 minutes, no heroics and no superman.
Then you light a cigarette, to celebrate Christmas…and life. The next day you go to Mykonos.
In the same way you make it to Ireland, Paris, Rome, the Matterhorn, Riga, Brugges, Berlin, Madrid and a few more place. The modus operandi is simple; Sell more of yourself. Do more work, any work! Over deliver every single time, because that’s the only thing they care about. Earn but don’t make it the cornerstone of your life. Spend and do exactly what you want thereafter, the way you want to in your own world.
You learn to make decisions. Swiftly. You learn to cut the cord.
By this time you have changed. Only you still don’t know it.
So you decide that the damn degree better count, and you learn to really focus for the first time. The bitterness helps. You feel this sense of rage inside and you don’t know why. But it refuses to go away. You learn to beat the institution at it’s own game, and on graduation day you refuse to go to the auditorium even though you have topped in 6 out of 8 modules. ‘Cos now you are calculatedly calm — and a defiant dude in your own mind.
You ask them to send your degree to the mailbox.
The fancy job comes over a phone call and London beckons. The pounds and defiance are cashing in, and looking out of your duplex apartment near Croydon you think, “hey this was good experience”. You feel like you have never felt before, and you thank all those whom you never thanked before. Those who helped and those who didn’t.
And smile. On another cigarette and some Moet Chandon.
Cos by now, you know that in this world, no one loves you for anything, but they will give you something, provided they get something from you. It’s that game which you have to play and survive. You have also learnt that the lesser you focus on your ego, the less hurt you will be. You have learnt to be a different person with different people almost always, so much so that sometimes you yourself cannot figure out who the hell you are.
You open your eyes and you see the mirror and you are startled, because you cannot recognize the guy in the mirror anymore.
That’s when the Cranberries ask
“ You know I’M such a fool for you….you got me wrapped around your finger…do you have to….do you have to let it linger “?
And you wonder…and ponder….and realize.
The doppelganger is now you.
