Ahir Shah: Ends (2024)
Genre: Stand-up Comedy, Social Commentary
Director: Peter Orton
Writer: Ahir Shah
Star: Ahir Shah
In this stand-up comedy special, Ahir Shah takes the audience on a personal and cultural journey, reflecting on his British Indian heritage and family history. From childhood memories of watching Goodness Gracious Me with his grandparents to dealing with societal changes, class, and multiculturalism in the UK, Shah blends humor and poignant storytelling. The show covers themes of identity, family sacrifice, love, and the generational impact of immigration, all while maintaining his trademark wit and insightful social commentary.
* * *
[man] In January 1998, a seven-year-old boy was sat on the floor of his grandparents’ living room in Alperton, North West London. Three generations gathered round the telly to watch episode one of this new show on the BBC. Now, the boy’s grandparents had had tough lives, right? The sort of lives that clad you in an armour, and it’s the sort of armour from which laughter struggles to escape. But for the next half hour, the boy and his family watched episode one of Goodness Gracious Me, and he listened as his grandparents fucking pissed themselves laughing at themselves and with themselves for the first time he could remember. And watching Sanjeev Bhaskar, Meera Syal, Nina Wadia and Kulvinder Ghir on television, the boy thought, “Wait, we can do that?! I didn’t know we could do that.” “But if we get to do that, then I wanna do that,” because hearing my grandparents make that sound is the best sound I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Over 25 years later, would you please welcome to the stage Mr Ahir Shah.
Hello! Hello!
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.
Good evening, London. Are we well?
[cheering and applause] Fantastic, fantastic. Lovely to have you here. Lovely to have you in such fine voice. Hello! Uh, my name is Ahir Shah. That is my name, by the way, right? I didn’t used to need to clarify this, until a few years ago, I was doing this gig in Switzerland… I was doing a gig in Switzerland, and the theme of this gig was that every comedian was from a different country, right? I was the British entrant. Very modern.
Right? And…
[laughter] There was one comedian I was particularly excited to meet ’cause this guy’s name was Ali Al Sayed. Now, Ali is a stand-up comedian from the United Arab Emirates, of all places, right? I’d never met anyone from the United Arab Emirates, let alone a comedian from the United Arab Emirates. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think they had comedians in the United Arab Emirates. I assumed he’d just be walking onstage being like, “What’s the deal with unspeakable oil wealth?”
[laughter]
He’s a very nice man, a very funny man. After the show, all the comedians, we’re all backstage hanging out. We’re all having a laugh, having a drink. Not Ali, obviously. Right, and… We get to talking, and he says to me, “Like, uh, listen, bro.” “We’re friends now. I can ask you a question.” “You’re not gonna get offended.” I’m like, “Listen, brother.” “You’re from Dubai. I’m of South Asian origin.” “As long as the question you have for me is not, ‘Do you want a job on a construction site?'”
[laughter]
Industrialised slavery. “You can ask me whatever the hell you like.” He’s like, “Nothing like that. I was just wondering.” “When did you decide to start using the hilarious comedy stage name Ahir Shah?” Right? I was like, “To be honest, I don’t remember, but it was probably 28th December 1990 when I plopped out of Mrs Shah, and she and Mr Shah decided to call their newborn bundle of joy Ahir.” “I think that’s about when I started going by Ahir Shah.” He’s like, “Right, right, okay.” “One thing you should know, in case you’re ever in my neck of the woods, is that in Arabic, your name means Prostitute King!”
He wasn’t even fucking with me. Ahir Shah is “prostitute king” in Arabic. There are several reasons I didn’t think my career would go stratospheric in Saudi. Humble enough to know that I don’t have the best bone-saw material on the circuit. That’s Romesh, and fair enough. Right, but, uh… I put this to the back of my mind for several years, as you would, until, uh, November 2022. I was in Egypt doing some work around the COP climate conference. They speak Arabic in Egypt, and I don’t know if anyone else in the room has ever walked into a hotel and attempted to check in by announcing themselves to everyone working there as “Monarch of all Pimps”?
Really changes the vibe in a lobby, in my experience. They think you’re selling something very different to what you are. Anyway, that’s me, then. Ahir Shah. Prostitute King to my friends. Mr Shah to you, and, uh… It’s been a while since I’ve done a big show like this. A lot’s changed in the world, in my life. A lot’s changed in my life. I’m now very much in my thirties now. That’s exciting. Shit started falling apart way younger than I was led to believe, by the way. I thought I had another good decade left in me. As it stands, everything’s already just crumbling. My knees are already fucked. Absolutely no idea what’s going on there. I’m trying desperately to get a referral from my GP, right… Sorry, for younger people… Right, um, a GP… Right… So a GP was a service where, like…
Young fellow. How old are you, mate?
Twenty-two. Twenty-two. So you might remember but in the same way you remember iPods. You never had one, but you’re vaguely aware they existed. Okay, so basically, like, a GP was this, like… Right, imagine you’re a bit poorly. Not super poorly but a bit poorly. What would happen was there was this number you called, and someone answered, right, and, uh… Not even necessarily at eight in the morning. Any time during business hours. Very forthcoming. Uh, so you’d call them, and you’d be like, “Oh, I’m a bit poorly,” and they’d be like, “Ah, cool. Come see us, soon.”
Right? And so a couple of days, days, a couple of days later, what would happen was you went over to this… Right. It looked like a semi-detached house. It wasn’t. That was the first trick they played. It’s like a sphinx’s riddle. Past that, you were golden. You’d arrive, like, 10, 15 minutes early. You’re a conscientious person. And you’d sit in a sort of, uh, waiting room, and after about 10, 15 minutes, someone would call your name, and you’d go to a separate, smaller room, and there would just be one guy in there, and he would be like… I mean, he would, right? ‘Cause we’ve quite a reassuring manner in a lanyard. Right? And you’d tell this person what sort of poorly that you were, and this was a very well-educated person, so you could just be fixed then and there, but occasionally, it’d be a slightly more complex health need, and you’d get a referral to a hospital, right? Sorry. Right. A hospital. Now… Have you ever wondered where the queue of ambulances ends? Right? That is a building known as a “hospital”.
Funny word, isn’t it? Interesting thing. You were born in one. You’ll die in one. Between then, you’re fucked. Sorry. Right, uh, basically that… I’m obviously being slightly disingenuous. There are quite a lot of them. Generally speaking, they were all either built or done up when the prime minister’s name was either Attlee, Wilson, or Blair. Not sure why. Not sure why! It’s just a coincidence, isn’t it? What possible intellectual merit could there be in examining why that might have ended up being the case of all things? Fourteen fucking years! Fourteen wasted fucking years! Like, not entirely wasted, obviously. There have been some genuine achievements of Conservative government. I mean that entirely sincerely, by the way. My favourite of which is, like… Basically, it’s funny. If you ignore all of the noise and just look at the actual underlying data, over the last 14 years, the Tories so successfully decarbonised the British economy and energy mix, including all imported emissions, that if the countries responsible for the lion’s share of emissions had been anything like as impressive as we’ve been over the last 14 years, global warming basically wouldn’t be a thing. The Tories did that. They did it on purpose. It is spectacularly impressive, and they can’t admit it ’cause they think it sounds gay. Other than that, it’s slim pickings out there. Really is. Genuinely. It’s worse than it’s been my entire adult life, for sure. Listen, the vibes are awful out there. We’re genuinely skint, as a collective, in a way that we weren’t in 2010 ’cause, basically, in 2010, the Conservatives were elected by telling a sequence of lies about the British economy and society. That they then spent the next 14 years ensuring were true. Right, and… Is it… We need an election, yeah. We need an election. At this stage, I would settle for a total overthrow of the current system and the installation of one-man dictatorial rule, provided that the man in question was Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, right?
[whooping and applause]
I love that guy! I love Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, so goddamn much.
Do you sign up to his email?
Oh yeah. You do? You’re a good citizen. Well done, sir. If you do not sign up for it, do your bit for your country. That man is the only thing standing between us and the fucking brink. Right. I love Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, so goddamn… So, for the uninitiated, Martin Lewis, he’s a money-saving expert, and he runs this website called MoneySavingExpert.com, and you get a weekly email, and it’s about money saving and the expertise therein, right? And, um, basically, Martin Lewis, the Money Saving Expert, he set up his business for £80, right? Eight-zero. That’s all it cost. He is now worth 100 million, right? Isn’t that amazing? He gives a lot away to things like Citizen’s Advice ’cause he gives a shit unlike the people in charge. I love that for Martin Lewis. I love that Martin Lewis is rich. Right? Here’s the thing, right? The reason I love it is that Martin Lewis is basically the only person I can think of who’s got properly rich from helping. Do you know what I mean? Take a second to dwell on how rare that is, broadly speaking. ‘Cause there’s no money in helping, is there? We all know that. There’s money in hindering, for sure. Right? There’s no money in helping. Right? When’s the last time any of you were walking down the street and went, “Oh my god, a Lamborghini! Who does that belong to?” And someone’s like, “The lollipop lady.” Right? It doesn’t happen. ‘Cause there’s no money in helping unless you’re Martin Lewis. Because that man is rich as balls, and the way he got there was by getting all of us together and just being like, “Pizza Express. 2 for 1 on Wednesday.” “Dough balls are on me. Don’t worry about it.”
It’s gonna take more than Martin Lewis to save us now, the state that we’re in. It’s really bad out there. And it’s weird for me because at the same time as the country I love is so visibly on its knees, I am personally happier than I have ever been in my entire life. And the two things are entirely unconnected, but still, feeling personally happy when your country is suffering feels actively distasteful. Do you know what I mean? I’ve not done it on purpose, but it’s like having Chumbawamba stuck in your head at a funeral. The reason, ladies and gentlemen, that I am happier than I have ever been is that in October of last year, I got married. Yeah. Honestly, she’s the single best thing ever to happen to me. I love her with all my heart. She’s a civil servant. I’m in it for the pension. You have to understand I’m a self-employed man. Before I met her, my retirement plan was just to not live that long. Whereas now, my entire financial security and old age is wholly dependent on not upsetting one woman till the day I die. Right? That’ll be a new personal best, mate. In this economy, I’ll try anything, right? I’d always known that I wanted to get married eventually. I guess there was a certain degree of cultural expectation as well. I don’t know what to tell you. In Asian families, you get married, you stay married. It’s just what happens. Some of you may know this from your own families, maybe friends’ families. You might not be aware of the sheer extent to which this is the case, so I’ll give you the best example I have. I started doing stand-up comedy when I was a teenager, right? When I was about 17 years old, I was given the opportunity to do five minutes at the Hackney Empire theatre in East London. That’s a very big theatre. 1500 people. Some of you may well have been. It’s the coolest thing that had ever happened to me. I was on in the first section, so I invited my mum, my dad and my sister to come watch, and they saved me a seat so I could watch in the second section. And the reason I was invited in the first place is that the Hackney Empire were putting on an evening of British Asian stand-up, and I, as the new kid on the block, they were like, “Let’s give little Ahir a go.”
That’s nice, isn’t it? And so the whole audience, sold-out show, 1500 people, all British Asian. All of the performers, British Asian, apart from… right… about two hours before the show started, one of the acts suddenly had to drop out. Now, this is the noughties. It’s not like nowadays where everyone’s got email on their phones. They had to ring around, try and find a replacement. A replacement was found in the form of my friend the comedian Joe Bor. Right? Now, Joe is a very nice man. He’s a very funny man. What Joe is not is a British Asian man. Right? What Joe is is a Jewish man. Clearly, with two hours on the clock, one of the organisers was like, “Fuck! I…” [muttering] “I think Jews are basically Asian. I…”
Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t similarities between the communities. My best mate’s Jewish. We’ve been mates since we were 14 years old, and it’s ’cause the first time we met, he told me about his mum, and everything that his mum did was either shit that my mum did or hadn’t thought of yet. There’s one crucial difference between the communities, as my friend the comedian Joe Bor found out to his dismay that evening. Because my friend the comedian Joe Bor walked onstage in front of 1500 brown faces and opened with the line, “My parents are divorced.” “Gimme a cheer if your parents are divorced.”
Fucking nothing! Not a single sound from 1,500 people. I will never forget my mother leaning over and whispering in my 17-year-old ear, “Bless him. He has no idea who he’s talking to.”
So what happens in Asian families, for better or for worse, you get married, you stay married. I come from a very long line of very long-married people. Uh, my parents met at a mutual friend’s birthday party in India in 1979. Fell in love at first sight. My dad proposed that night. They have been married for almost 45 years. Right? Um… By the standards of my mum’s family, by the way, my parents had had quite an extensive courtship, uh, prior to that. I mean, like, well, her parents, my maternal grandparents, Nanaji and Nanima, I mean, the first conversation they had with one another, just, like, one-on-one, was on the night, like, several hours after they were already married, right? It’s 1955 in India. It was arranged. I don’t know what to tell you. Like, they weren’t complete strangers to one another. That would be silly. It’s, like, the families had exchanged a photograph. Uh… Right? And, um… these pieces of paper with a few bits of biographical information on them. Imagine getting shown that when you’re, like, 19, 20.
“Is this who you’d like to marry forever?”
“Oh yeah, I guess.”
Then, in the end, very happily married for nearly a half century until my grandfather sadly died relatively young. It’s so funny talking about this in front of liberal London audiences. Like, it’s just like, you all know that outwardly you have to be like, “Oh.” “The mysteries of the East.” Uh… “A rich cultural tapestry that may be interwoven with our own.”
Internally, you’re all just thinking, “That’s fucking barbaric.”
“The thing is, that’s fucking barbaric, sorry.” “You mean to tell me that two people barely out of their teens, and all they had to go on was a photograph and a few bits of scant biographical information, and within a matter of days, they were in bed together?” “That is fucking disgusting.” “We would never do anything so crass and horrific in our contemporary, enlightened Western…”
[laughter and applause]
Sorry, just because you’ve decided to do it via algorithm, not “old woman in your village”, does not make it less arranged, right? All you’ve decided to do is outsource responsibility to the one thing somehow less accountable, all right? My wife and I obviously had a far more conventional relationship, uh, prior to getting engaged, meeting in this country and whatnot. It took me a long time to work up the courage to pop the question, as they say, mate. We were going out five weeks, and I asked her to marry me. Um… I get shit done. There’s no point pissing about if you know you know. So just get it… get it done. No point leaving stuff on your to-do list for six months. Things are worth doing quickly and well. It’s the single best decision I ever made. Absolutely no downside. Admittedly, we were engaged for six months before we could start living together just because, like, our tenancy agreements didn’t… Spent half my life on a fucking bus. Then, eventually, obviously, we were able to finally move in together, but all that meant was we were two people in our early thirties living in London joining households, so now, we rent one roof that contains two copies of every Ottolenghi book and no realistic pathway to homeownership. [chuckles] I love my Ottolenghi books though. Not giving those up, even for a house. Might need the spares. Love my Ottolenghi books. Hey, mate, you got an Ottolenghi book?
Ah yeah, I love it.
Yeah? That’s the sort of thing you can afford when you get the Martin Lewis email. Love my Ottolenghi books.
“For this recipe, you will need two limes that were once briefly glimpsed by a Persian widow.”
“Or, if they don’t have that in a shop near you, just any lime.”
The thing is, you think it’s bullshit, but I got some of the widow limes, and you can taste the grief. It’s good stuff, actually. The salt from the tears adds real depth of flavour. I think that, shy of having children with someone, I think getting engaged, getting married, it’s like the most optimistic bet that two people can make on the future. Just this idea that you can sincerely look at someone and say, “Our lives could be joined in something greater than the sum of its parts stretching forward for the rest of them.”
That’s an extraordinarily optimistic way to feel, right? At the same time as it feels like we’re embarking on the most optimistic journey of a lifetime, it feels like the country around us has just given up. You know what I mean? It’s very difficult not to feel like this entire place has called last orders, isn’t it? It is acutely difficult not to feel deeply pessimistic about every element of the future of this country. Right? That’s weird enough for me as we’re beginning this optimistic journey, but it’s doubly weird when I think about the fact that if I were able to get into a time machine and travel to 1964, when my grandfather, younger than I am now, became the first member of our family to set foot on these shores, and I would just explain the present to him, he would not believe me because he would think I was describing some unimaginable utopia of progress. So that’s really what I’m trying to do. To take a step back, view things through a wider lens, a generational lens, get some perspective, not be so blinkered, try not to lose the wood for the trees. ‘Cause the story of my family is a very typical one for the British Indian community. I think that’s a very relevant story to the past, present and future of this country, right? British Indians are, by a very long margin, the largest minority-ethnic group in this country. Hindus, again we’re talking about millions upon millions… None of you know any of that because our entire cultural output consists of my mate Nish. Right? And… The story of the Indian community in this country, by and large, starts, as it did for my family, in the 1960s and has ended up, in the 2020s, with us now running everything?
“Rishi bhai did it!”
“Rishi bhai did it! Never thought I’d live to see the day that Rishi bhai did it.”
“Got that big house in the middle of town now, baby.”
“Rishi bhai did it!”
Listen, politically, I’m furious. Racially, thrilled. Ah! Are you kidding me? On an ethnic level, couldn’t be happier for him and his family. Increasingly worried about mine. Very much how I used to feel every time I saw Suella Aunty on the television. “Jesus Christ, calm down, Suella Aunty. You’re gonna get us both killed.”
Right, uh… I’m gonna talk about the prime minister a little bit. Obviously, I’ve got to be relatively careful what I say about him because we can all agree there’s about a 70% chance that a decade from now, I will play him in a Channel 4 drama. Right, right… Not gonna burn a bridge before I’ve even crossed it. Are you kidding me? I need that money. I just wish that I could get across, like, how wild that day was, right? I… A British Indian, devout Hindu, son of immigrants, became prime minister of Britain on Diwali. That was a very difficult day in the family WhatsApp for me. Get the family WhatsApp up on my phone. Yes, it’s called the Asian Network. See “Dad is typing…” Wait for the inevitable. “Ahir, have you seen what Mr Sunak’s son has done today?” “Still, Ahir, you enjoy mocking your week. I’m sure that’s nice for you.”
I’m glad the shine’s come off him now. Everyone knows he’s not really up to it. At the beginning, you all acted like he was the perfect Indian boy. At the beginning, everyone acted like he was the perfect Indian boy. It’s ’cause you just go off the CV on paper. Right? You don’t know what I know. What does it say on the CV? Fucking anyone could’ve done that. What? Piece of piss. Who cares? What? All right, fair enough. What’s the guy done? Fair enough. Does well at school. Gets into Oxford. Does well at Oxford. Gets into Stanford. Does well at Stanford. Starts working in finance. Becomes a multi-multimillionaire in his own right in his twenties, largely through executing positions as a big short in 2007-2008 that makes him rich enough that he’d never have to work again. No one even reflects on that ’cause at Stanford, he meets and eventually marries the daughter of a genuine Indian billionaire, who’s a very successful businesswoman in her own right. They move to the United Kingdom where he becomes an MP at an obscenely young age, Chancellor at an obscenely young age, during one of the worst financial crises this country’s experienced, then prime minister, at an obscenely young age, of the country that colonised and expropriated the wealth of his ancestors, leading to complex migratory patterns, in his family’s case, via East Africa, landing him on the doorstep of the most significant address in this country on the most significant day of his faith, and everyone acts like he’s the perfect Indian boy. Feel free to look this up. It is genuinely true. Rishi Sunak never made his school cricket team. I was captain of mine.
[cheering and applause]
That’s right! That is right! Any Indian father would dropkick the prime minister into a canal to get me. All right? Know what I mean?
“Who cares about Rishi Sunak? I want Ahir Tendulkar. Mmm.”
“Hearing a lot about Number Ten. Should be batting at number four.”
“That’s classy.”
His family came here in the ’60s too. Like, I… I think about that sometimes. Getting into my time machine and travelling to that cold bedsit in Bradford and explaining to my grandfather that when his grandson was a bit older than he was then, not only would this be the case, but I think the bit that he’d struggle with the most is that it’s not a thing. Do you know what I mean? The news was just like, “And the prime minister, Rishi Sunak,” and everyone’s like, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
It is remarkable how unremarkable it is, right? That’s a thing that’s worth reflecting upon. Listen, I’ll always talk about the things we do badly as a country. I think one of the things we do terribly as a country is never discussing anything we do well as a country. And I do think that when we’re at our best, Britain stands basically alone, certainly in Europe, probably in the world, as an example of what a properly successful multiethnic, multicultural democracy can look like in practice in the 21st century. That’s something that is worth discussing. It’s why I hate it when you get people on the far right decrying that multiculturalism is some grand failed experiment, when you can see its successes if you bother to open your eyes. It’s why I can’t stand it when people on my own “team”, right? I don’t like teams in the first place, but listen. I voted remain, but whenever people are like, “It was only the European Union that gave us our values of tolerance and decency to…”
Fuck off! Anyone else in the room ever been to continental Europe while not white? It’s not the relaxing holidaying experience that some of the rest of you may enjoy. Genuinely. A couple of years ago, I had to go to this wedding in France. I genuinely… The way people were… I kept asking people I was with… Like, I thought I had something on me. Turns out I did! Gonna get an Algerian president of France anytime soon, or reckon the fash’ll get there first? Same question for Germany, you know? Listen, I think that Britain stands basically alone in this. That’s worth reflecting on, right? I remember when I was 20 years old, walking across the Meadows on the south side of Edinburgh with my friend the Indian American comedian Hari Kondabolu, right? I said to him, “Hari bhai…“
I think that when you’re part of any sort of visible minority, whatever that minority might be, what you fundamentally want in life, it’s not necessarily different treatment or special treatment. Rather, it is the ability, eventually, to get to go without saying. To be part of what is. Just to, sort of, get to be normal. I think if you get to be normal 24-7, you probably don’t realise how cool it is to get to be normal all the time. And does political representation get us there in and of itself? Of course it doesn’t, right? We know this for a fact. Rishi Sunak, not even the first PM from a minority-ethnic background. First, way back in the 19th century, Benjamin Disraeli, also a Tory, right? Would you say that antisemitism does not exist in contemporary Britain? That would be a fucking stupid thing to say. But maybe these things are indicative of the fact that, in societies, we can, over time, move towards a position where more and more people can be brought into the circle of who gets to go without saying, until that sphere is eventually expanded to include everyone, which is where it should’ve been in the first fuckin’ place. I have had the very great privilege of seeing a large amount of this world through these eyes. I have been to many countries, cities, continents doing this, and I can comfortably say that Britain is, yes, as the cliché goes, “the least racist country in the world”.
It just says a shitload more about the world than about Britain. Right? And please do not interpret this as any sort of grand political point. I think the guy’s a fucking appalling prime minister. He’s, like, genuinely terrible, and no one voted for any of this. It is abysmal what is happening to us at the moment. I do not agree with his politics, but… By the way, that’s when you know that something historic’s happened. People use phrases like, “I may not agree with the politics, but…” [emphatically] No one felt the need with David Cameron. It’s just nice for someone like that to get a girl, isn’t it? Right, but Sunak and Cameron are basically the same guy ’cause they went to fancy school. That’s what explains it. Fancy school, and fancy school runs the country. That is not the school that I think about when I think about the prime minister. The school that I think about is quite a long time ago and quite a long way away. In April 1919, an event occurred in Amritsar, Punjab, at the time British India, that is now known to history as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre. This is when thousands of entirely unarmed civilians, peaceful protesters and pilgrims were kettled into a very, very small area, and tens of thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire were opened up intentionally on these entirely unarmed civilians, at least 379 of whom were murdered, probably many more, though we’ll never know the true total, and thousands more had life-defining injuries thereafter. It is one of the worst and most well-documented cases of colonial atrocities of British rule in India. I’ve known about that a very long time. What I did not know about, until an investigation in The Times last year, was that subsequent to the massacre in Amritsar, there was a sequence of additional smaller massacres perpetrated in towns and villages surrounding Amritsar as the word got out in order to stop the possibility of any subsequent civilian uprisings, including one that happened in a place called Gujranwala, right? Now, Gujranwala, it’s about 100 miles away from Amritsar. It’s a border town in contemporary Pakistan. And in Gujranwala, again, thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire were let out at entirely unarmed… just farmers tilling their fields. And over the course of two days, ten bombs were dropped, including one intentionally dropped on the school as a show of “This is how powerful we are and how little of a shit we give about you, so don’t you even think about trying to fuck with us.”
One of the survivors of the massacre in Gujranwala was a two-year-old boy named Ramdas. Ramdas’s grandson is, at time of recording, prime minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Yeah.
[applause] When… when I think about the last century of world history and what might prove possible over time and generations, I think about the school in Gujranwala rather more than I think about Winchester College. A punchline would feel distasteful.
[laughter]
Right? Obviously, I wasn’t alive at the time, but I reckon the way I feel’s basically how a lot of women felt about Margaret Thatcher in 1979. You don’t need to agree with someone’s politics in order to acknowledge that someone walking through the door means something in and of itself, and that’s the only way you pave the pathway for others to follow. And you can’t deny that it works. You can’t deny that it… Listen. We’ve now had enough white-lady prime ministers that they’re allowed to be instantly shit! That is a staggering achievement for equality in this country. Are you kidding me? Maggie and Theresa walked so Liz could fly. Liz Truss, actually very important from a representational standpoint as well. Uh, I mean that entirely sincerely too. Think about how many prime ministers there must’ve been over however long it’s been. Did you know that Liz Truss is the first who just went to a regular comprehensive school? Isn’t that mad, right? Like, 94% of children go to a regular comprehensive school. I went to a regular comprehensive school. I believe 94% of prime ministers should go to a regular comprehensive school. Admittedly, she wasn’t a great advert for us. Right? “I may not agree with her politics, but…”
In case you’re trying to square the circle of the educational background and the accent you’re currently enjoying… Uh, well, uh… What ended up happening there was I went to my local comp in Wembley, North West London. I had a wonderful time there, but it did have a few police vans outside to stop us murdering each other. Very thoughtful of them. Subsequent to that, I ended up going to the University of Cambridge, so I became functionally bilingual in both posh boy and roadman. Uh, uh… A few years ago, I was doing a TV record in Glasgow, and afterwards, I was having a cigarette with my friend the comedian Jamali Maddix. I was there with Jamali, smoking, making small talk.
He went, “You went private school, yeah?” I’m like, “Oh no, I didn’t.” “What?”
So I talked him through a few basic facts about my childhood, and he just looked at me and went, “Hang on, bruv, are you from ends?”
[posher accent] “Well, Jamali, one supposes one was.”
I’m not gonna do it down. I grew up in a wonderful place. I went to a wonderful school. I hate when people do that down. I… genuinely, it was a really good school. If you avoided gang violence, cousin marriage, it was Ofsted Good. Like, it was a great environment. All the families, by and large like mine. First-, second-generation immigrants. Parents may not have had a lot to give. What they had was the most important. An insistence that education is the best way onward, upward, outward. I think if you’ve got 100 grand, that’s a better thing to give to a child. And blessed with really great teachers. I’ll tell you about one of my favourites, Miss Lewis. Now, Miss Lewis, I think she had previously taught at a private school. I don’t know, but she definitely knew the extras they were given in order to get ahead. Maybe thought that was unfair, right? And so she set up, off her own initiative, like all great teachers do, off her own bat, she set up, for a couple of years, an additional, optional Latin class, of all things. And I, as you can probably imagine, was heavily involved. This is what I mean about the transformative power of education. You could change everything for young people in an instant. I still remember, like it was yesterday, the first time I walked into that gleaming Portakabin bestowed on us by New Labour, and I sat down, and I opened these textbooks that contained these things that I’d never even conceived of before. I was just there being like, “Oh my God, it’s true!” “Caecilius est in horto!”
Do you know what I mean, right? Led to probably my single favourite experience of my entire time at high school, which was one time, at the end of term, my boys and I were gonna go cinema ’cause you get a half day. The way that you go to the cinema, you get the 182 from Brent Town Hall. So we were walking to the bus stop, and on the way to the bus stop, there’s this blind alley, right? And a dozen guys came out to rush us and jack us and shit, until one of them just stopped all of the others by going, “Guys, Ahir’s safe, yeah? I know him from Latin.”
I sincerely believe I am the only man in the long history of this sceptred isle who has ever avoided a violent mugging because of Latin class. Uh… [chuckles] Nathaniel, gratias tibi. It’s a great environment to grow up in, you know? Not much cash but a lot of ambition. I think that’s a good way around to have it, generally speaking. And realistic ambition as well. The families just had realistic ambitions. The sort of ambition every parent should be able to rely on. The idea that if everyone does their bit, works hard, the next generation might have it a bit easier than the previous one did. That is a reasonable ambition. Parents should be able to rely on that coming true for their children. Right, now this is not an unreasonable ambition. I know all about unreasonable ambition. You don’t need to tell me about… I remember once, when I was at uni, entirely unironically telling my mate Ali that by the time I was in my thirties, I wanted to be GQ magazine’s World’s Best Dressed Man. Right? I am now in my thirties and will settle for “Dressed Man”.
[chuckles] And that’s a stretch most days. Listen, we all know, fundamentally, that any sort of vision of progress has to take into account generational investment. I think that the part that we’ve forgotten is that the flip side of that coin has always been generational sacrifice. Now, I might not know much about generational investment yet, but I feel like, through example, I at least know something about generational sacrifice because every day after primary school, I would go to my grandparents’ house in Alperton, North West London, and I would see generational sacrifice continuing to write itself on the faces of Nanaji and Nanima. Now, quick note on language. I speak another language. It’s called Gujarati. “Nanaji” just means your mum’s dad. You have different words for both sides of the family. So maternal grandfather, that’s nanaji. As you can imagine, I write a lot of stuff on my computer. My computer refuses to accept the existence of the word “nanaji” and will insist on autocorrecting it every time to the word “Navajo”. Which has led to three instances where I, alone at home, have yelled at a computer screen, “Wrong sort of Indian!”
Now, Nanaji was the first member of my family to arrive in this country when he was in his twenties in 1964. He is probably the reason that I was born here in the first place. He is the reason for so much. Even though he died a fair while ago now, he’s probably the largest part of the reason why I ended up sounding like this, right? When he was eventually reunited with his wife and children in this country, he said to the children, including my mother, “Listen, when you’re outside, you’re not allowed to speak to one another in Gujarati any more.” “You live somewhere called England now, so you need to learn how to speak like proper little Englishmen and women.” “And then if you learn how to do that, maybe one day, they’ll learn how to accept you.”
And it sounds kind of weird to our contemporary ears, but this was a very commonplace thing in the ’60s and ’70s. A sort of, like, vocal version of dressing for the job you want. You ever heard that phrase, right? And this has been entirely useless for me, but, like, my uncle is a doctor. Can you imagine if your doctor looked and sounded like me? You’d be fucking thrilled. Imagine that, he’s doing the ward rounds, just like, “Oh, good morning. How are we feeling today?” You’re thinking, “This motherfucker’s gonna cure me in two hours.” “Make lunch plans!”
Now, Nanaji could never integrate in that way himself, so I think that his way of doing it was that he worked a succession of almost comically English jobs, right? So for the most part of his career, until he retired, he worked at John Lewis. Worked on the shop floor, selling curtains, fabrics ’cause it’s what he knew from the textile factories back in India. That’s probably the most English place anyone could possibly work. You’re not gonna get a more English place to work than the John Lewis Partnership. Unless the job you had before that was conductor on the big, red bus! “Fair play. That’s the most English place anyone could possibly work.” “You can’t hit us with a more English workplace than the big, red bus.”
Unless the first job you had in this country was literally at the baked-bean factory! It’s where it all started. Baked-bean factory in Bradford. 1964, baby. Came over here. Work on those beans. Now, uh, crucially, he did not want to, uh, right? By that stage, been married for just under a decade. Had three children. Had friends. Enjoyed his work in the textile factory. Thought he might be able to work his way up and everything. Very little interest in the United Kingdom. Hitherto no interest in beans, right? But, um… It was my grandmother who pushed this. Like, Nani, quite understandably, was like, “Listen, just…” India at the time is just poorer and more violent than anyone with the dumb luck of having been born in this country can remotely conceive of. And so she, quite understandably, was like, “Listen, these children aren’t gonna have the life we wanna give them over here, but they’re taking people in England.” “So I need you to go over there. You just work it out, right?” “I’ll stay here with the children. You send money back to us.” “When you’ve saved up enough, we’ll come join you.” “All right. Cool. See you later. Bye.”
Uh… He just did it, like, pretty soon thereafter. Just went… Like, listen, I like to think that I’m gonna be a pretty, sort of, accepting, thoughtful, 50-50 type of husband, right? However, if, just under a decade from now, my wife is to tell me that I must leave her and our three children to move to a different continent with no guarantee of when I would see them again, no way of communicating with them, no guarantee if any of it was going to work out and no guarantee of my own personal safety, that would not be the end of the conversation. Right? However, of course, for Nanaji, it was. How could it not be? That’s your dharma. That’s your duty. You have to do it. It’s your duty to your family, right? So he came over, not entirely on his own. Came with a couple of other guys who did the same, left the wives and kids. But they didn’t really see each other that much for a few years ’cause they ran a system called the eight-eight-eight, right? The eight-eight-eight is a system whereby, as mathematicians in the room can confirm, if three men each have two jobs, the shifts of which are eight hours long, and you time the shift patterns correctly and work seven days a week, you only need to rent one bed in one room because one of you can be asleep at any given time while the other two are at work. One guy finishes his second shift, comes back, hits you awake, you go off to your first one, he falls asleep. Do that again and again. Saves two-thirds on the rent. That’s more that you can send to the wives and kids in India. And that’s the largest expense, isn’t it? What’s the second-largest expense? Probably food. But food, taken care of. ‘Cause at the baked-bean factory, they give you a tin of beans. Protein. Very important. For the second meal of the day, they had a big sack of rice, and they’d have some boiled rice in a pot. Apart from Sundays, obviously, because Sunday is treat day, so the boiled rice contained an onion, right? Some of you are probably thinking, “Surely, even in 1964, onions are cheap.” “Anyone could have onions whenever they wanted.”
From what you have heard so far about my nanima, do you believe she is the sort of woman who would have tolerated the profligacy of a seven-a-week onion habit? It’s what you needed to do. It’s what they needed you to do, so it’s what you did. Eight-eight-eight, 24-7, 365. Five. Five years. He didn’t see his wife or children for five years. Imagine that. It’s not like, “At least I’ve got a good data plan” or something like that. Forget about calling. That was never gonna happen. Letters? Couple of letters a year. Each time you write one, you feel a bit closer. Every time you buy a stamp, you’re driving them further away. To the extent that my mum’s first memory in this country is Heathrow Airport, 1969. Her, her brother and sister all sort of hid behind their mum because they were just like, “Who’s this man?” Right? “Who’s this big man?” Right? Just like, “Why’s he smiling at me?” “Why’s he got these tears in his eyes?” “I guess he looks like that photograph that Mummy cries over sometimes if anyone ever hums that song, you know?”
I think about that a lot too, right? Imagine that. Trying to raise three children on your own for five years, occasionally just crying over a single photograph and a handful of letters. Should’ve cried over a lime. She’d have made some money. Family reunited in 1969, the year after a very prominent Conservative politician got on a soapbox in Birmingham and said, “We must be mad, literally mad, to be permitting the annual inflow of dependents, who are, for the most part, the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population.” “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Now, Mr Powell was correct about one thing in that that little girl hidden behind the sari did become part of the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. Because that’s quite a mouthful, my sister and I tend to go with “Mum”.
Imagine that. Bringing your wife and kids into that the year after Rivers of Blood, when you’ve been here on your own since ’64, the same year as the Smethwick campaign. Right? It’s fucking grim. Right, just like the violence, the aggression, that goes without saying. It’s also… It’s always the more insidious stuff that cuts the deepest, yeah? The thing, I suppose, like, nowadays, we acknowledge as having broken him was that he was eventually, uh, accused of quite serious theft from the workplace, uh, which was, like… Suspended and investigated for ages. Entirely cleared. He’d obviously not done it. But it didn’t take a genius to work out eventually when you hear these stories, that it all starts with a couple of guys at the place being like, “Who do you reckon they’re gonna believe, eh?”
Imagine what that does to you. Like, your dignity and stuff. You have to do it again though. Tomorrow. You have to get up, brave face, for the kids. For the kids. It’s not like the kids have it any easier. There has been so much more progress in the last 20 years in this country than there was in the 40 that preceded it, and I feel very comfortable saying that because I went to exactly the same high school as my mum and my uncle. My abiding memory of that school is a funny story about the time when I didn’t get mugged ’cause of Latin. Ha-ha-ha. My uncle’s abiding memory of that school is the people who would flick lit cigarettes at him every day when he walked to and from it. My mum’s abiding memory of that school sticks with her to this day because every time she wants to eat something, she has to change her clothes entirely, cook, eat, change her clothes entirely again. No matter how many times I tell her that the smell of spices hitting hot oil is the most beautiful smell in the world, all she hears is a decade of children telling her how much she stank. And he died in 2002, so he died only remembering the shit bit, and he wasn’t old, so if he’d just hung on, he would have seen how quickly it was going to get so different. You could have at least seen a bit of that before you left. Right, in 2016, I’m on a train, reading a newspaper. Sorry, mate. A newspaper. Right, um… Imagine, like, a solid tweet. Right, and… and… On a train, reading a newspaper, and it’s the day before the mayoral election in London, and there’s this big feature article, uh, where basically Sadiq Uncle is walking around the city, meeting the various voters and talking to them. In the feature, there’s this one guy. I’ve forgotten his name. It was a West African name, I think. He’s there with his five-year-old son, and he says to him, “Son, I want you to shake this man’s hand.” “This is Mr Khan.” “Mr Khan is going to be the next mayor of London.”
And in that moment of reading that, like, my hands stopped working, and the paper fell from my hands, and the tears fell from my eyes as I thought about the fact that he died in a society where the sentence, “This is Mr Khan. Mr Khan is going to be the next mayor of London,” was completely impossible, right? And yet 14 years later, it had become totally inevitable. So what would he have made of witnessing the change in society necessary to make that happen and landing on that sentence in that paper? What would he have made of reading a sentence like that? What would he have made of reading the words, “This is Mr Khan. Mr Khan is going to be the next mayor of London”? Probably not much. I don’t think he really liked Muslims. “I may not agree with his politics, but…” And that’s how I felt Diwali before last, you know? Lit my divo, I went outside. I went back into the kitchen, and I poured a little glass of whisky, and I said, “You finding today interesting, eh?”
It’s, like, obviously, problems still exist. None of this is to negate any of the problems that we’re all too aware of, right? But at the same time, pretending that the sort of stuff that I have and have had to contend with is in any way comparable to the sort of things that they had to deal with feels genuinely offensive to me. ‘Cause this was the generation that never talked about it and so never had it acknowledged, and it’s worth acknowledging. ‘Cause they’re the ones who changed so much to make so much of what happens now possible, right? I’m not an idiot. I wander around doing this for a living, all around the country. Occasionally, people shout ignorant shit at me in the street. Like, I’m not oblivious to that. And listen, my wife is a white Irish lady. Sometimes the two of us are going about our business, out and about, and people see us together. They don’t like that too much. They make their opinions known. They’re all so fuckin’ old, right? So old. Like, proper fossils, and… When I was a teenager, it would really… Like, I’d be ready to fight, and now a part of my brain just can’t help but think, “F… I think maybe you lost,” right? No, not… Lost isn’t correct ’cause it’s not like society’s a football match where someone blows the whistle and we decide what the result’s been. But at the very least, I can acknowledge that I’m not the one who scored the goals. I’m a sub. They’re the ones who scored the goals. They scored the goals and ran straight back to the net and pulled it back to the halfway line ’cause they knew that no matter how hard they were trying every single day, they were still, 1969, two down, right? And is the point of my generation one more not only of maintenance but also trying not to lose grip on this extraordinarily fragile thing that exists around us? It’s worth acknowledging how fragile this thing is, right, because you see people, young people, trying, once again, to sow, sort of, any sorts of division in this society we’re trying to build. And you just think, “What the fuck are you doing?” “What are you doing?”
Surely, the point… If the point is anything, the point is to create a society in which, one day, everyone’s children get to go without saying. I think that you have to be staggeringly naive to believe that that’s possible, and I refuse to be anything else. It’s so easy to despair, right? Despair is the easiest position to have. It’s definitely my default. It just turns out that despair is a deeply unproductive emotion. Right? Try something else. Yeah? My wife’s way better than me at this. Like, she’s just, generally speaking, quite stable and well adjusted. I used to think that she was some sort of superhero or something. Turned out it’s because she has absolutely no social-media presence whatsoever. Uses the internet sparingly if necessary for work. If we were all slightly more like her, we’d all be slightly less fucking insane. By the way, no one’s changed their names. There’s no Mrs Shah to this story. Fortunately for all of us, in Irish, her name means “Prostitute Queen”.
Didn’t even take five weeks, not really. There was a point, one week, stood opposite her in the kitchen, and just all of a sudden, it’s like the trailers stopped. Like all life up to that point had revealed itself to be the trailers, and all of a sudden, every atom of the world outside of the two of us was whispering in unison, “Shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh. Shh.” [softly] “The picture’s about to start.” And now I get to see how it goes. That’s it. I mean, the ending’s gonna suck. Right. I’m not gonna know too much about it though. 100% gonna die first. Get in! Love it. Are you kidding me? Listen. It’s like… She’s really like, “Oh no, we shouldn’t have processed food in the house.” And all I want to do in my life is fuck a Chicago Town pizza. While chain-smoking and doing lines of salt. It’s nice to feel like you’ve had one of your last beginnings. Yeah? Frees you up to think about where things end up. It’s the interesting thing with love, right? Love, the way that it begins, begins in as many ways as there are people. If we were ever to have a conversation, and you said to me, “Ahir, can I just check, were you in love on your wedding day?”
Wouldn’t that be a ridiculous question? You’d never ask. ‘Cause the answer’s obviously yes, right? What I find fascinating is that, if you were ever to meet my grandmother, and you were to say, “Ramila, can I check, on your wedding day, were you in love?”
It would be an equally ridiculous question ’cause the answer would obviously be no. Of course she wasn’t. Right? There she was, little more than a girl, sat opposite little more than a boy. Total strangers, functionally. Of course she didn’t love that boy. Right? And yet it began. It began, right? Wild. Did she love the boy she was sat opposite on her wedding day? Of course she didn’t, right? Did she love the young man just under a decade later, who was willing to move continents because he knew that’s what the people who relied on him needed from him in that moment? Of course she loved that man. She loved that man for the next five years as she held up her end looking after three children, while occasionally taking a moment to cry over a photograph and a handful of letters. Of course she loved that man. She loved that man in Heathrow Airport, 1969, the photograph made flesh once more as those three children hid behind her sari because they barely recognised the man who had done so much for them. Of course she loved that man. She loved that man as she took his hand and walked forward together into a society infinitely more hostile than the one that has been bequeathed to me as a direct result of their actions. She loved that man as they danced together, shielding one another from as many slings and arrows as humanly possible. For the next decades until his end, she loved that man. She loved that man in 2002 and well past that, as you will know if you go to a living room in Alperton, North West London, and see a photograph on the wall with a fresh garland of flowers that you pray to when you visit. Of course she loves that man. That’s where it ends up. Nanaji died in 2002, a week after his birthday. He’d just turned 69. Oi! [chuckles softly] He’d brought a slightly hastened end onto himself, really, uh… Basically, when he retired, he wanted to spend as much time in India as humanly possible, but his lungs had been fucked since his twenties ’cause of the fibres in the air in the textile mills. The place in India my family are historically from, a city called Ahmedabad, it’s incredibly polluted. Makes Central London look like the fucking Peak District. And so he would go over there and come back weaker, diminished. And he came back, and after the second trip, his grown-up children had to get him sat down in his own living room, and my mum had to say to her own dad, “You are killing yourself.” Right? “That’s what’s happening here. That’s what’s… It’s perfectly clear.”
“You go there. You come back. You’re weaker. You’re smaller.”
“You’re more diminished.”
“And can you not see what is happening to you?”
“It’s not even about seeing. Akshay is a doctor.”
“He can hear what is happening based on your breath and diagnose you.”
“Do you not feel what is happening?”
“So here’s the thing. You’ve had your fun. You’ve had two trips.”
“But now you stay over here, right?”
” ‘Cause we love you very much, so we wanna keep you around.”
“That’s how we’re all gonna look after one another.”
“So you’ve had your fun, but you’re not allowed to go any more.”
“Here you are. Good. Yes.”
And he had to look at three adult children and say, “No.”
“I never wanted any of this. Right, I never wanted any…”
“Like, my entire life, it turns out, has just been this means to an end, and that’s fine. It’s fine because you are the end.”
“So if I had to do it again, I would, with a snap of the fingers and a smile on my face, I would do it again.”
“But can you not understand that I just need this at my end?”
“I can feel it far more than you can see it, or he can hear it.”
“Do you not understand I don’t care?”
“I don’t care because when I go over there, no one looks at me like I’m any different or yells at me or spits at me like I’m any different because I’m not any different.”
“When I go over there, I am a normal guy.”
“I have been a normal guy since the day I was born.”
“I just haven’t felt like it in so long.”
“You don’t understand that when I’m over there, I get to go without saying, and I haven’t gone without saying since nineteen sixty-fucking-four.”
He used to run off the plane as quickly as possible, sprint across the tarmac as quick as fucked lungs would carry him, and go to the first part of the airport that wasn’t paved over, fall to his knees and just start digging fistfuls of earth with his bare hands. He would dig up the earth, and he would put it in his mouth. Can you imagine? Dig the earth and put… ‘Cause you miss a land so much that you need to dig it and put it in your mouth. But you had to leave, you had to leave because that’s what they needed, and if they needed it, it’s what you had to do. He would dig the earth and put it in his mouth. It can’t have helped.
[laughter]
A third and final trip to the only place on the face of this earth that would do a normal guy the basic decency of getting to go without saying. And it killed him. That’s how much every human being wants that. You need a pretty damn good reason not to give it to them. When he did die, he died in this country, in a hospital. D’you remember? “Hospital”.
And my mother was next to him, sat down. He was in a bed, not speaking any more. It was just the beeps, you know? Most of us have heard the beeps. And a nurse came by, saw my mum, and said, “Oh, you must be Mr Vaishnaw’s daughter.” She said, “Yes, I am.” And the nurse said, “Well, listen, I’m new to the ward, so I didn’t get a chance to speak to him, but I’ve spoken to some of the other nurses who did, and they said he was a good man.”
And my mother squeezed the hand of a man she had barely recognised in Heathrow Airport in 1969 and said, “He was the best of men.” And the line went flat. And if Nanaji were capable of hearing in that moment, then the very last thing he heard on this earth was the little girl it had all been for saying that he was the best of men. And, like, objectively, he wasn’t.
[laughter]
Do you know what I mean? Not a baddie, but just, you know, a normal, complex, flawed human being like absolutely everyone in this room. And probably we could give one another a bit more of a break than we currently have the appetite for, I suppose. Yeah? But for someone, for someone, which it turns out is the only way that you can be, of course he was. He was the best of people for someone. He did what they needed from him when they needed it from him. He did the best that he could for the people he loved. If you can do that, then you can be the best of people for someone. If you can do the best you can for the people you love and who rely on you, then you damn well get to go without saying, in my book. It is not that I have currently had some sort of grand revelation that sacrifice is somehow more impressive or important than achievement. The truth is what the truth always was in the first place, which is that the sacrifice is the achievement, and with that in mind, I know full well that till my end, Krishnadas Vaishnaw will remain the most impressive man I will ever meet. I have wanted to do this since January 1998, sat on the floor of my grandparents’ living room in Alperton, North West London, listening to Nanaji and Nanima laugh at episode one of Goodness Gracious Me. And for just over a decade, I have had the absurd privilege of calling it my career. But it’s not the job. Not any more. And it never will be again, I hope. The job, as I understand it, is what Nanaji understood the job to be. He was a good husband and a good father for the people who needed him to be when they needed him to be. He was the best of men. And I am now, in front of you, the World’s Best Dressed Man. [laughter and applause] Because I get to stand in front of you and tell his story while wearing his waistcoat. Because I am finally dressed for the job I want. And it will be the hardest job of a lifetime.
[in Gujarati] But with you, Nanaji, I’ll be able to do it, I hope. Sorry. “Hope…”
[laughter]
[cheering and applause]
Thank you very much.
[Qawwali music playing]
[music ends]
