Greetings from Bury Park

My Father's House I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart Will never again, sir, tear us from each other's hearts 'My Father's House', Bruce Springsteen In the summer of 1995 I was twenty-three years old; an unemployed British Pakistani with shoulder-length dread-locks, a silver nose ring and a strange fascination with Bruce Springsteen. It had been six years since I had last lived with my family; having left to study in Manchester there had never been a reason to return to my hometown, Luton. After graduating in economics I had assumed I would be deluged with lucrative offers of employment but these had failed to materialise. While my friends were beginning careers in accountancy and medicine I was most successful at being fired from low-paid temporary jobs: I had been sacked from a data-inputting job for only typing with one hand and doodling with the other, and fired from a credit control agency for having stuck an obscene Public Enemy lyric scribbled on a Post-it to my computer screen. The longest job I had was as a directory enquiries operator. Being a slacker had never been a specific career goal but it was a lifestyle to which I seemed suspiciously suited. My parents had assumed that once I graduated I would return to Luton with a degree and a job, but despite my lack of career and cash I was still not willing to come home. In Manchester I was free; I could stay out late, play music as loud as I wished, wear black leather trousers and red velvet shirts and shake my dreadlocks to Lenny Kravitz. Once a month I would make the three-and-a-half-hour train journey back to Luton to see the family but only out of a sense of obligation. I was barely on speaking terms with my father and most of my conversations with my mother were about how I hardly talked to my father. When I walked through the front door of my parents' home in my blue corduroy jacket with a 'Born to Run' enamel badge pinned on its lapel and my rucksack on my back, my headphones still plugged in my ears, I could sense my father's confusion. I knew he was thinking, 'What are you doing with yourself?' and the worst part about it was that I could never explain it to him. When I rang my father to tell him I had secured my first writing commission he was silent for a few seconds. 'How much will they pay you?' he finally asked in Urdu. I never spoke in English to my parents. 'I don't know,' I replied, 'but it's not about the money. This is my first chance to be published in a newspaper. It's the local paper here in Manchester. The Evening News.' 'What are you going to be writing?' he asked. 'It's an interview with an American writer called Elizabeth Wurtzel,' I answered. Nothing. 'I am coming down to London to talk to her and so I will be in Luton too.' The interview with Elizabeth Wurtzel would be my first published article. Her book Prozac Nation was being published that summer; I had read an advance copy and noticed it contained countless references to Springsteen and his music. Wurtzel was someone who, like me, had found inspiration and sustenance in Springsteen's music. I persuaded her publishers to let me interview her on the promise I would place the interview myself. I then sold the feature to the Manchester Evening News. 'If you like the piece you can publish it,' I told the women's editor, 'and if you don't you won't ever have to hear from me again. You have nothing to lose.' I boarded the Intercity train from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston on the morning of 16 May 1995. Once in my seat I opened my copy of the Guardian, which had a story on the former Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan and his engagement to twenty-one-year-old Jemima Goldsmith. From my jacket pocket I pulled out a CD player and placed the headphones around my head. Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits had been released only weeks earlier and was in my CD player. As the train rolled slowlyManzoor, Sarfraz is the author of 'Greetings from Bury Park', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307388025 and ISBN 0307388026.