I’ve not been feeling too well over the last day or so. Holed up in bed with a rotten cold and only my laptop to keep me company, every so often I will push the laptop to one side, close my stinging eyes and think the things that I just don’t normally get the time to think of: my childhood.

It sometimes takes just a little thing to bring a whole bucketload of memories flooding back. The slightest of triggers that spontaneously shifts the mind’s eye to a different time - evoking recollection of good and bad things about then that seem to stick in the long-term conciousness.

There is a shop on Ealing Road called Tip Top Video. I have gazed at this shop pretty much every working day - twice a day - for the last five years from the upper deck of Route 79. For the first time the other day though - something clicked. And I was drifting into my childhood …

A childhood with relatively few exceptionally-happy times. As a second-generation immigrant Indian (Asian, South Asian - call it what you want) I was raised in two worlds. One was the world inside - and the other the world outside. Inside, it was as the growing eldest-son of Indian parents. Strangers in a foriegn land. “We arrived at Heathrow with only five pounds in our pockets!” they would constantly remind me. Over here to work hard and make a new life - and, above all, provide the very best education for me - which in turn would result in a prosperous life for all of us - forever. Culturally intact and untainted by the “bad things” that the “white people” did. Like listening to pop music, or going out with friends after school, or (God forbid) talking to girls. Life centred around the home - and family - and friends of the family. Even when we ventured outside the home as a family - our kind, kinda stuck together. Daytrips to Alton Towers in the summer holidays - when the place was all just gardens and stately home. Or to Skegness - playing rummy with my cousins as we slid around unseatbelted on the back seat of a Ford Cortina as it winded its way through the sunny Lincolnshire countryside with Indian music on C-90 cassette blaring out aloud. (They weren’t really my cousins - but that’s how we referred to them anyhow.) And, oh my; a boot-load of samosas, gobi prathas and several thermos flasks full of garam chai waiting to be devoured in the promenade car park when we got there.

Outside, was the world in which I would one day have to fend for myself - and compete with those very “white people” that our parents didn’t want us to be like. Like all those in my generation - we were torn between two essentially opposing-in-many-ways ways of life. You’ve probably heard many stories about the things that people like me have had to endure - and I don’t have the time to go through even some of those right now. But one thing is for sure - we are a unique generation. When I examine the sociology of next generation of British Asians I see a great deal of absence of the burdens that people in my generation had to bear. When I was a teenager I resented these burdens deeply - but I no longer do now. Instead we seek some confort in the the fact that we played an essential part in easing the pains associated with transition of peoples from one land into another. Easing the pains for the future generations that is. From a diaspora - to being the very fabric of it.

My generation might be confused, and many of us are. But the next generation most definitely are not. It saddens me sometimes, to think that our unique life experiences will go with us - and one day everyone will have forgotten.

On very rare, but memorable, occasions - after a traditional Indian weekday evening dinner of either daal, aloo mutter, or marrow sabji - eaten with rotis served one by one as they were made puffed up and hot straight off the thawa by my Mum - my Dad would retrieve a tin of fruit cocktail from the cupboard - open it up and serve it out into little bowls for me and my sisters. He would also get one of those half-size tins of Tip Top dessert topping and punch two holes in the top of the tin - at diametrically opposite sides. He would then pour the cream into our fruit salad bowls. I remember vividly savouring every moment of it with teaspoons in hand - engaging in childish banter with my sisters who were doing exactly the same. Right up until the very last half-cherry - which I always left until last. This is one of the happiest memories of my childhood.