OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND

The strains of adapting to the British way of life and making ends meet take a personal toll

BEGINNING again in a new country costs more than the fare. As the growing body of transcultural psychiatric literature now shows, the mental and emotional price of leaving one's own cultural background is considerable. For each poor family who struggled from Asia to Europe in search of opportunity, or even from the North of England to the South, most of the feelings involved will be the same.

First comes the bright euphoria of arrival when everything looks pleasing and hope- ful. This is followed by a less ecstatic 'sojourning' phase. CI will make some money and go home.') Next comes alarm at a new economic.

system. (`Everything costs so much. I can scarcely earn enough to cling on here.') But after a short while, to go home permanently means loss of face you mean you are not a success in Britain? You mean you are not a suc- cess in London?

Only now can the pain and stress of readjust- ment really begin. Slow- ly, for sound Western scientific reasons, men and women disman- tle their own ancient beliefs and customs. (`There is a poisonous thing called lead in surma. Can you tell Mrs Patel that she mustn't put it on her baby's eyes?') Out of confusion and distress a new British citizen with a changed personality will be born.

Looking back over the years we have lived in King's Cross, where there is a small Bengali population of some 5,000, I now realise how many times I saw Asian people whose desperate inward circumstances I never began to understand. There was the haunted trembling Bengali man in Safe- ways supermarket who pointed at tins of Heinz baby food asking, 'Does it say banana, does it say banana?' We went through all the tins picking them out and somewhere, hidden away, a woman and at least one child depended on the tremulous social contact he could make.

Then there is a wretched palsied man with only one foot, the other stump clad in a round leather hoof, who runs as if pursued by the devil across Regent Square one day, across Farringdon Road in the rain the next. Another man with brilliant disordered eyes chatters loudly to himself in Camden public library. (I am sitting here with 30 pence in my pocket, I am voting Communist. I am sitting here with 30 pence in my pocket, I am voting Communist.') Once you realise they are not there very much on the street, you then ask: 'Where are the Bengali women?' Because on top of all this, racial hostility has hindered the gentle opening up of the purdah state of mind.

For both white and Asian people, vio- lence and poverty now gnaw like rats in every corner of East End life. A new report prepared for the director of housing in Tower Hamlets (not an easy job these days) confirms that as elsewhere in Britain, reclusive Asian women and children bear the brunt of racial hostility. Looking at 201 reported instances of racial harassment on council estates in Tower Hamlets from July 1985 to October 1986, it records that 72 per cent of the victims were Asian, that physic- al assaults on Asians have increased three- fold since 1985 and that the Isle of Dogs, Globe Town and Wapping are probably the least safe places for an Asian family to live in the borough (if not in England). Attacks seem worst on predominantly white estates.

Most Indian restaurants in London are staffed by Bangladeshis, who also work in East End clothing sweatshops. There are other Bangladeshi communities in Cardiff, South Shields and Sunderland. As a rural people, touchingly surprised by Western violence, pitifully poor and often with a slender grasp of English, they are particu- larly vulnerable to ridicule and attack. It is a pity that we always seem to look at minority peoples in Britain purely numer- ically or in terms of problems. They usually have good things to offer in return, and for emotional health everyone needs to feel some of their positive attributes are recog- nised. Hashmat Arabegum is a nutritionist who formerly worked for the UN. For the last ten years she has liaised with Bengali families in Camden. 'People do not appreciate their good qualities. They are country people and they are relaxed, polite and do not use bad words. They respect the elderly and love their children — they are not beating them up like other people do.' Apart from the fact there is air to breathe, emerging from the Metropolitan Line at Aldgate East or Whitechapel is like landing on the moon. The pavements are deeply cratered and broken, a hint of the ramshackle East End poverty beyond. On an afternoon livened by sharp spring show- ers, I went to explore Brick Lane, high street of the biggest Bangladeshi village in Britain. Even for a Londoner, Brick Lane is a surprise. Here the austere grocery shops (for example the Eastern supermar- ket in Hanbury Street) are like exotic versions of old-fashioned fifties Co-ops. Rickety freezer cabinets are full of enor- mous smiling ruhi. (`Very tasteful. Best fish in Bengal'). On the shelves are fins of Tat brand Turkish okra, Dutch spinach, KalaKola hair oil (`shines the hair glamor- ously) and plastic bottles of something simply called 'Bright Red Powder', used to tint food an artificial tandoori crimson. Up and down the street, posters invited people to the Empire Ballroom, Leicester Square for a Cracking Basakhi Night Out, but in this neighbourhood people rarely venture away from Brick Lane after dark. Inside the Clifton Sweet Mart with stacks of Indian puddings in the window, Bengali men drank tea, watched television and were surprised to see me. (I lowered my eyes and left.) Further on a lorry was unloading the biggest consignment of orange pampers (second size disposable nappies) I have ever seen, which meant there must be a lot of women and children here. But in the course of an hour I saw only two Bengali Women and babies. They emerged from the friendly new Spitalfields Health Centre (opened in 1984), in which even the brushed steel notice saying 'Padlock Your Prams' is also given in Bengali. The women walked very closely together, looking rather miserable, and quickly disappeared into a crumbling Georgian house, up a steep damp staircase covered in grimy nylon carpet. Tower Hamlets has over 1,200 homeless families and its housing is quite appalling. In the Brick Lane area two families share one lavatory, three families share one house and children commonly sleep with adults. Last summer the Liberal council wanted to buy an ancient passenger liner to float 800 families on the river but was opposed. The desperate housing crisis affecting the white and Asian poor is thought to be one reason for the hostility to Asian families on Tower Hamlets council estates. At a local level, white tenants have also expressed grievances about the noise, illegal sub-letting and different housekeep- ing standards of some Bengali neighbours — this is not 'racialism' but straightforward annoyance at lack of neighbourly consid- eration.

Real racialism is not very pretty. Spitting at Bengalis or verbally abusing them is now the least of it. Physical assault includes stabbing, kicking, punching, shooting with airguns, iron-bar attacks and pelting with stones, eggs and sticks. Women, children and the elderly are jostled on the street. Criminal damage to property figures large- ly. Windows are broken, doors kicked in, washing vandalised or stolen and cars are damaged. Police behaviour during a recent attack on the Christian Street Mosque (the culmination of at least 20 attacks on worshippers on their way to prayer) is the subject of a report now being compiled by Sir Kenneth Newman for the Home Secret- ary. Most relentless of all is the endless Letterbox War. In Tower Hamlets the night-time post brings burning cloth and paper, dog and human excrement, domes- tic rubbish, stink-bombs and soiled dispos- able nappies. Even though its housing is of higher quality and its Bengali population much smaller, the Letterbox War occasionally affects King's Cross. Abi Gilbert is a member of the Health Visitors Association and she visits Bengali families in the strikingly modern ziggurat flats built over the Brunswick Shopping Centre. 'I noticed their letterboxes are always caked up with oil stuff. When a Bengali family is in temporary accommodation you can see what is going through their minds when they are offered a permanent home. They think, in that area have there been racial attacks?' Ironically, these flats overlook a pleasant Bloomsbury street on which a chic new restaurant called Memory of India has just opened signalling the new romance between yuppies and 'luxury' Asia.

Even if it is only once in their lives, most people experience moments of panic and paranoia when a prowler or burglar seems to be breaking in. The unwise politicisation of race seems to have blunted our aware- ness to the fact that all over Britain thousands of Asian householders have lived with these terrifying and exhausting emotions for decades. (Asians in Britain deal with racial hatred very stoically.) Suffering is so often hidden away.

Close to us in Tonbridge Street stand handsome red-brick flats originally built by the East End Dwellings Company in 1904 (recently refurbished by Camden Council). Even here the lives of one Bengali family are circumscribed by fear. The woman stays in with the children almost con- tinuously because she dare not go out by herself. Hashmat Arabegum described her day, punctuated by a shower of stones at the window every time neighbouring chil- dren pass. 'The husband works in a res- taurant where there is very low pay, but he has to pay for a taxi because the hours are late. Every time it drops him he has to creep in the back way because he is afraid.' If he is lucky this man earns £72 gross per week for waiting into the small hours. In addition to poverty he bears the stress of humiliation and fear.

The stress under which not only Bengalis but most other Asians in Britain live is reflected in their physical and mental health. The depression, isolation and Vita- min D and A deficiencies of reclusive women are commonplaces of inner-city medical comment. At a more sophisticated social level, fathers are outraged by Wes- ternised daughters, mothers are rejected by their English-speaking children as `backward', erring husbands are tempted by British sexual licence. These are the emotional cracks and groans of a dynamic society in rapid development. In all this women are often caught in the pincers of a hostility coming from both outside and inside the home. Refuges for battered Asian wives are spreading across Britain.

Purely by chance this winter I saw how one Asian woman in this neighbourhood slid by her nails down the terrifying spiral of serious depression. I do not know whether she is Bengali or not. She had dared to go out with her three children, a boy of six or seven, a girl of three and a baby of perhaps six months. The first time I saw them was at a neighbourhood 'drop in' centre for bed-and-breakfast children to stretch their legs. Her children were all dressed in rather sticky third or fourth- hand acrylic clothes and she had the febrile alertness of a woman who was coping to her limit. She spoke some English and said she was hoping to be out of temporary accommodation soon.

The second time I saw her she was standing in a nylon sari shielding her children against driving December rain beside an unsheltered modern Telecom phone booth in Cromer Street. She had that look of being switched about between officials. She raised her arm in recognition, looking strained but still determined. The last time I saw her was in Safeways supermarket this spring. Something about her had broken. The baby and her own clothes and hair looked filthy and neg- lected. She mumbled something about the damp and cold of the terrible place they were living in and would not communicate any further at all.

In Coronary Heart Disease and Asians in Britain (The Coronary Prevention Group, 1986) Jill Russell reported on research carried out by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. This indicates that Asian women are 28 per cent and Asian men 19 per cent more likely to die of heart disease than the white population as a whole. This is even though their intake of saturated fat is lower and they smoke less. The report raises more questions than it answers about Asian health in Britain. It seems a pity that the DHSS this year refused to fund a proper epidemiological study of Asian heart disease to be carried out by Michael Marmot, Professor of Community Medicine at University Col- lege Hospital.

I understand that all Indian languages have a free and romantic use of metaphor concerning the heart. 'My heart gives me news' (a premonition); 'My heart is sink- ing' (depression); 'My heart burns' (a tragic event). Asian people seem not to speak of their mood but of their bodies. Describing mental states by bodily symp- toms is called `somatisation' by transcultu- ral psychiatrists such as Philip Rack. Given this, can it be that brutality, barbarity, cold, poverty and the sheer suffering of trying to fit in as striving decent British citizens has literally broken the noble Indian heart? And will we also discover that in our century, Mrs Rochester is Mrs Patel?