I’m pacing into the night at a speed I can’t keep up with.

I both want to long the night out and wish I’d ended it hours ago. Christ sake, How much money did I spend this evening?

I could have bought 4 tops and a belt from M&S.

Or a new phone case.

Or that premium bottle of carpet cleaner.

At least those would have had several repeats. This isn’t happening ever again.

At the incline, I even out the pace.

“When was your last break up?”

Finally, a question about me. A proper question.

“1.5 years ago.”

Feels like 15.

“How did you get over it?”

By being sick of acting like you all evening.

“I did psychodynamic therapy. I began to integrate my shadow.”

Ask how that works. You should ask how that works.

“You’re so wise. You should be …”

Here we fucking go, here we go. What. What should I be? Tell me. C’mon. Define me. Let it be you instead of my horoscope for a change.

“… a therapist.”

I dry out the chewing gum in my mouth.

I was. Yours. For 4 unpaid hours. I didn’t even attempt to study psychology at any point in my life. I studied Linguistics. I never went past doing a BA.

“I do seem to be a vector for peoples …’ Bullshit. Mess. Pain. “… thoughts.”.

They huff a laugh.

That’s it. It’s either a laugh or a slump of the shoulders. Some sort of unburdening.

This skill has never failed me.

We part ways. I go round the back of the building and sit. I cry for 35 minutes. 35 minutes feels like a reasonable amount of time before people get alarmed. It’s cold. I want to be lying down. Staying upright seems too big an effort. Something is leaving me. The last scrap of strength.

I should be bent over double with a purple chunni covering my face. I just have £3.99 charli xcx imitation sunglasses covering my eyes.

The cry isn’t entirely about them. It doesn’t even stop after I get up. In the taxi. In the short walk home. In the impersonal lobby. Waves on waves.

I yank off whatever clanking silver imitation jewellery I have on. Curl up at the corner of a cavernous tan leather sofa, picking at my split ends as a futile way to ground myself. I set this whole evening up. I made the decision to be brave and face the world. And I didn’t get my due. My astrology promised me a good day. Venus promised me something. Cursed me with something.

I circle around the same thoughts at 1am:

I don’t like seeing the world like this anymore.

I don’t like seeing the world like this anymore.

I don’t like seeing the world like this anymore.

But I used to. I revelled in it. I was smug about it. Seeing 8 steps ahead of why someone does what they do. What wound is yanking at their arms and legs and mouth. Telling on themselves before they’ve realised it.

What do I get from this?

Praise or power. Sometimes I’d get money for thinking that relentlessly about why people really do what they. Sometimes people would give me space in their life because I was good at telling them what they’d do before they’d do it. I was the one they ring when they’d done something morally or ethically compromised. It was my armchair they’d sit on as they’d eke out indignity after indignity of what happened.

‘There is no remedy in silence, child.’ That’s what that nurse says in that play to a woman so committed to her own misery that she’d rather die than speak out loud on what she’s done. It’s not that hard! I’ve done it! And I’m still here! Look I’m right here! She spends her whole life serving a kneeling, snivelling woman who refuses to speak plainly and she’s so so over it. She snaps: ‘When have I ever failed you? I gave up everything - children, country. And this is my reward!?’.

It comes eventually. There’s no one else who’s going to listen for free right now. Data. It’s all data. I’m playing detective in real time. What’s mentioned and what’s not. Let me fill in that silence. I parrot something back. It elicits a groan before anything else. Ah, there it is. I poke and prod more. I get the confession. I get the satisfaction of cutting a gordian knot.

That satisfaction usually feeds me. Nourishes me. Puffs me up, ready for the next round.

But I’m empty. Why am I empty?

I don’t get seen back.

Ask me something. Ask me something. Ask me anything that I’ve offered up on a plate. I’ve just modelled it to you. I’m lobbing everything at you. Why can’t you throw it back? You have arms, legs and a mouth just like me. We’re the same, aren’t we? I thought we were the same.

Why am I better at this than you? What was I given that you weren’t? Why am I suddenly so angry that we don’t carry the same seeing? Why don’t I want to meet you in the middle anymore?

I don’t like the prescription I was given.

I don’t think this seeing came out of something good. I don’t think it’s a superpower anymore. I think it’s unnatural.

I’m scared of being blind without it.

If I can’t see good, why am I pursuing this line of work? If I can’t see good, what do my days look like? If I can’t see good, what use am I to you?

What does it look like when I refuse to see good?

What if I just show up like the actual bitch that I am.

I’m definitely the youngest person here and the brownest, so far.

It’s Flatpack Festival in Birmingham and they’re screening ‘Victoria Wood: The Birmingham Years’. An exclusive look at the archival footage of Victoria’s years as a Drama student at University of Birmingham in the mid-late 1970s and the 3 years she stayed in the city after graduating.

I scan the people who fill the cinema. ok, ok, ok … oh there’s two Indian girls speaking rapid Gujarati ok. They sit in front of me, mostly on their phones for the whole thing. I realise later it’s one of the festival ushers and her friend.

I watch the rest of the room as I wait for it to begin. I feel prepared. I have my power bank on full capacity, my drinks and snacks, my phone on airplane mode. The boy in front of me, actually probably younger than me, FaceTimes his mum as we wait. She’s in the garden. ‘I thought I’d FaceTime you because you love Victoria Wood and I’m at this screening.’. I drift away and think of how my Mum rang me earlier when I was at the train station asking If I wanted a coffee in town. I said I couldn’t I was going to a film festival in brum. ‘Oh, ok …’. I flinch. She hasn’t spoken to me in a while. Uh oh, mummy is withdrawing again. And I feel the slap I’ve given her at being busy instead of being with her. I don’t tell her I haven’t left the house to socialise all week and I’m feeling empty too and I need, hope, pray, that some art will fill me up. She doesn’t ask what I’m going to watch, nor does she offer another date for coffee. We hang up.

The lights finally shift and … three people get up on stage and sit. What. I thought this was a documentary film. No. It’s the interviewer, the man who was authorised to write Victoria’s posthumous biography and her best friend from university. She does a little bow when she’s introduced. Ok. They talk about Victoria. The best friend gets to reminisce about her brilliant friend, is self-aware enough to know that sharing anecdotes about girl she was friends with at Uni can always retroactively be framed as a payoff on how she became famous. To her, Victoria was her socially awkward and funny friend at an oppressive drama department that either treated its students with derision or degradation. The biographer gets to be sharper, has analysed the fuller picture of who she was as a person and why. He was one of the few interviewers Victoria tolerated during her time and her estate gave him the blessing to write about her after she’d gone. One got intimate access to the ingenue, the other got the national treasure. The biographer can fill in some of the blanks on the friend’s memory, gently challenge the timelines based on the letters the two friends actually sent to each other. The friend asserts the warmth and personality that goes beyond carefully crafted letters. This might be better than a documentary.

What surprises me most was that Victoria was complicated. Relatably so. Her childhood was isolating in the extreme. The family would silo in their own rooms in the house, rarely eat together, no one came to visit. No one had friends. With no one to attune to she would drift into her own imaginative world, her creativity and into food. I shift my hips in the seat. In her own words she said: “My mother, she didn’t believe in praise. She’d never say anything was great. I think that’s quite Northern, to not make people feel too good. I didn’t mind if she was proud of me or not, it didn’t bother me. I was never trying to please her.” Well, Victoria, well.

Her university years featured a dogged lack of self-confidence, she was clearly funny and kinetic, but it was a drama course that focused more on the way drama was done not actually doing it. There were few women on the course, plays that were put on almost always were for male roles, the tutors were all men, some tutors liked to have students strip for drama warmups. That last bit is just about laughed off. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. One time Victoria and a few friends broke into a teacher’s office to find out their end of term grades in advance. The tutor wrote of her “Victoria Wood: what can you do with a Christmas pudding.”. Bastard. Blind bastard. No one tapped into the talent that made her so beloved, she found it herself at an end of year showcase. She got on a piano, started singing some songs she wrote. We get to hear a tape recording of it. A jaunty piano and a sing song about the perils of the student union. Mundane. Acutely observant. It’s faint. But Victoria Wood™ is there.

When she finally became Victoria Wood™ she never put her drama friends in her shows. Ever. “Did it cause tension?” “Oh yeah, when we were struggling for work at certain periods”. She also never socialised with her on-screen collaborators at all. Julie Walters, Celia Imrie. They were firmly work friends. I wish I’d learnt that earlier. Once, while Wood was making Dinnerladies, the friend arrived too early. Wood starred and wrote every episode. Of course, she did. I hate writing with other people too. Everyone is so slow. Thinking it would be ok to mooch around until Victoria was done writing, the friend showed up anyway. Victoria opens the door with a face she’d never seen before. Utterly imperious. Unyielding. “Come back when I’m done.”. Bitch. Iconic. Her friend is now on the board of her estate, the first few years of board meetings she couldn’t get through without crying, she finds it strange to see the jacket she would wear to seminars is in a glass case in a museum. She is still deeply angry that she’s gone. I wonder who would be that angry on my behalf.

When we finally watch the footage. Everything about her comes into sharp view. It was all there underneath.

Musical sketches and songs first. About middle-aged, middle-class fathers, their ennui and their ability to connect with their children because of it. Right. A contained but internally jittery song about an assistant at a hairdressers, where she’s simultaneously anxious about doing something wrong but so painfully under stimulated with how small the job is. I’ve been that girl. Then a dreamy reflection of having no plans on a Friday night and trying every self-help tip to ease off the loneliness and the gnawing entitlement that it’s not right to be alone on a Friday night. Bitch, that was me last night.

Then, a sketch of an eager university student who befriends the awkward girl next door (Victoria). The Eager Girl wants friends. Awkward Girl is keen to be her friend. The Awkward Girl doesn’t get picked to dance at the student union unlike the Eager Girl. The Awkward Girl is looked down on by the other girls. The Eager Girl joins in on looking down on the Awkward Girl because they’re cooler and being cooler is easier than being nice. They put the entire contents of the Awkward Girl’s belongings in a lift. In the final scene we learn the Awkward Girl attempted suicide in a popular suicide spot on campus. Jesus Christ, why are you all laughing!?

The screening ends. I’m angry she’s gone too.

When I see someone I worked with on a project in the venue lobby, I hesitate in going up to her for a few seconds. No, Bitch, you need human contact. I go up to her. We chat. I tell her about what I just saw. She doesn’t know who Victoria Wood is. I reverently explain who she is. She listens. “Oh, so she’s like you then.”

Well. I look down then.

“Maybe.”

There are more screenings watch. We get ice-cream and spend the rest of the day together.

There’s something quietly threatening about languishing in British Summer in the suburbs with no plan.

Its stillness, its sameness.

The rows and rows of Barrett show homes. The concrete and asphalt blanched in yellow sun with no shadows to hide in. The shiny shiny cars bought on finance to take you to the purpose-built retail park for ‘good day out.’ and a Costa coffee.

I should want this. This is what making it good looks like. This is achievement. This is peace.

This is exactly what my grandparents came to this country for, as literal teenagers, because everything they had was either sold off, stolen or burnt down.

I’m mere months post-graduation in 2016 and I find myself back in the suburbs not wanting this at all, but not really knowing what I do want either. Or at least, not brave enough to say it out loud. I want to write. I want to write. I want to write.

I don’t say I want to, but I don’t exactly do it either.

I’m hanging out with girls from school who don’t actually like me, I’m applying for internship after internship, entry job after entry job because I spent my 3^rd year trying to scrape a 2:1 which left me no room in my mind to apply for a graduate job. I sign up for Universal Credit, my second time, and sit futile when my jobs advisor gives me pamphlets for the Channel 4 Apprenticeship Production Scheme. But that wage isn’t liveable in London, how can I go back there when I will only have £158 left after paying rent, bills and for my travel card. I eschew a career in Media and Arts all together. I apply for corporate Comms jobs instead.

My mother tows me along to visit family, I’m impotent and not entirely present, refreshing my emails every 20 minutes hoping for my meal ticket out of this stupor. My sullenness from my teenagedom is still active. I drift from room to room at these visits. For something else to catch my eye or to eat. It’s on my Massi’s kitchen counter where I see it. The Good Immigrant.

I know it. Of course, I know it. It’s everywhere. I pick it up. I scan the names on the cover. My face prickles, my head gets hot, it’s not entirely from the skylight beating down on me.

Why the fuck wasn’t I in this?

I was 22, I had 119 followers on Twitter and internships at national news outlets that I didn’t follow up on because I didn’t want to be 25 and still pitching articles about how feminist Taylor Swift was.

Still, still, still.

Why the fuck was I not in this?!

My mother and my Massi trail into the kitchen …

“All it’s going to do is make nurses harder to hire”

“The whole thing was getting racists to vote and they did”

“Our area voted Remain”

“There were definitely people at work who voted leave I could just bloody tell the next day. The ones who were quiet.”

I wade in.

“Did you buy this Massi?”

“No, your Massar did – is it any good?”

I scratch at the cover. “I don’t know” I swipe it away with me to the corner of the room. And I read.

Or I tried to. I turned the pages. I saw the words. But guess what? I don’t remember a fucking thing from reading it. Not a line. Not an essay. The book that was everywhere, that flushed me with envy, just passed through me like red and blue VK’s.

What I do remember that day is getting an offer for a Corporate Communications internship at a huge international public affairs firm. In Westminster. The floor above it The Labour Party and the floor below it was Gucci. Me and my mum went to Zara to get me outfits.

The walk from Victoria station is bracing in my plastic shoes. I commute from the Midlands for the first two weeks because the internship is only 3 months. I can’t quite get it together to find a sublet. And I feel the silent guilt of running back to London so soon, so I mitigate it, I do a door to door 3 hour commute twice a day. I read Twitter and Instagram on the trains. I read people’s reactions and quotes to The Good Immigrant but I don’t pick it up again. The internship is paid extremely well. I’m already earning more than my father, my mother notes. And by the end of the first month, I get a sublet at my friend’s girlfriends flat in Angel. The commute becomes a merciful 35 minutes instead.

The first thing I notice is that I am dressed appropriately. The second is that I am one of 3 persons of colour in a 75-person team. Everyone is unflappably nice and respectful. I shake hands and get introductory chats put in my calendar. They tell me where the tea and coffee are. How to time the visit to the canteens for free toast. They have accents that are distinctly West London or Home Counties. A few of them went to the same schools. I can’t quite complain. I was put forward to interview because my friend’s sister worked in the team. I observe the asymmetry, but I don’t feel the heat of it. The other people of colour emerge from HR and accounting mostly.

Everything is going fine. Swimmingly fine. I nod, I write things down, I make one wry joke with someone that lands and repeat the joke with each new person. It works each time. It’s then time to show me around the rest of the floor, the other teams away from the rows and rows of desks and the double screens of Corporate Affairs.

I’m trailing in lock step with my line manager.

“We have a fun thing here. We name our meeting rooms after famous comedians. We have the Bob & Mortimer Room, the Wood room, The Syal room and-”

I DON’T WANT TO BE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S ROOM. I WANT A ROOM NAMED AFTER ME.

Where the fuck did that come from?!

I keep walking.

What the fuck is wrong with you bitch?!

I keep nodding.

You’re on track to have everything you want to have.

I keep smiling.

Boris Johnson’s former Head of Comms as Mayor is literally seats away from you. You have never been closer to power, actual to-the-bone power, as you have now.

I keep making notes.

A flash of another British Asian woman. Long black hair, short, same skin tone as mine is grinning in front of a big red bus with outrageous white letters on it.

I ignore how cold I feel.

I carry on doing the internship till its end, I return to the Midlands when they can’t offer me a permanent position, I quickly get offered a role at a Communications Consulting firm whose biggest client is … The European Commission. I also, apply for a playwrighting course in the evenings for global majority writers at The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry. I do both.

Ten years later.

I go further into my overdraft buying The Good Immigrant from Waterstones. It’s lighter than I remember. I’ve got the headspace to read now. The first four months of 2026 have already burnt me out. I now juggle a part-time comms job and various writing and creative deadlines that span stage, immersive and the visual arts. I have the BFI paying me to write genre and form defying work and I have my first exhibition in a national museum. I long to be idle, bored and still.

I read it through front to back and listen to it. Each essay explains itself beautifully. It likes to explain everything it sees. It wants to. It needs to. But for who? Some essays electrify me. Some are not for my ‘British Asian – Indian’ ass at all. Some essays still … bore me. Reading it feels just like the waves of hypervigilance it speaks to, the maniac thrum and rush of finding and naming threat and then the numbing dissociative repetitiveness of it.

Then I check myself. Am I bored because I’m bitter? Am I bored cos it’s pulling its punches? Am I bored because the writer is just boring?

Am I bored because …? I’ve already lived this and sometimes the racism is the most boring bit of my day.

I think about how last week, when walking to the train station to get to work, someone threw a liquid out of moving car and screamed Paki at me. I debated throwing my drink back. But I had a train to catch. I can’t be late again or I’m going to be put on a PIP. I forget about it by the afternoon when I’m swearing at Canva, trying find the same font across two separate documents.

I get further into the book and I attempt some grace. Surely, the whole point of progressing as diasporas is that we have the chance to be just as mediocre and bitchy as everyone else. When I listen to the audiobook, I want to do a linguistic taxonomy on how many times ‘White’ is mentioned compared to ‘Asian’. Maybe white people secretly like it when we mention them so much.

The essays that do make me sit up are, of course, the thorniest ones. The ones who unflinchingly name the pain without undercutting it reflexively with a joke or tacked on charm or espouse exit strategies out of your pay and class bracket. That ones who name the harm. Name the violence. And make you sit with it. Those are the essays that put me back in the threat of whether that liquid was acid or not.

When I finish the book, I tell the 22-year-old somewhere in my sternum: I think you had something else to say and that’s fine. You lived different things to them and that’s also fine.

She doesn’t quite feel settled at that assertion yet, so I turn to Instagram stories. The local council elections are this week. I see people flip between voting Green and Reform at whiplash speeds. Two parties that 10 years ago meant different things to different people. Old binaries are collapsing. I see record numbers of Sikh candidates representing right wing parties and video dutifully explaining the phenomenon. I don’t need an explainer. I clocked it when I saw that flash of a woman that looks like me in front of a big red bus with outrageous white letters on it. I’ve always been more attuned to the ‘Bad’ than the ‘Good’. Maybe because I find it easier being ‘Bad’ more than being ‘Good’. It’s probably why I can’t shake the feeling that the book at its 10 year anniversary is more of time capsule rather than evergreen document to navigate the 2020’s.

Because the anthology explains the strain of being earnestly ‘Good’ but it can never quite look, for long enough, at what turns you ‘Bad’. Not ‘Bad’ as dictated so slavishly by the white gaze, the terrorist, the criminal, the scrounger. But ‘Bad’ dictated by the community you come from: the traitor. The one who marries outside. The one who leaves. The ones who refuse to perform family ‘goodness’ amongst violent domestic strife. The ones who go on to create policies for the white gaze that would keep their own ‘good’ family out.

The book – one of the first anthologies of its kind, written largely by second generation immigrants - couldn’t have anticipated that the Conservative government remain in power for another 8 years. That it would produce the most ethnically diverse front bench in this country’s history. The first British Asian Home Secretary. The first British Asian female Home Secretary. The first British Asian Chancellor. The first British Asian Prime Minister.

Maybe they couldn’t anticipate it because they were too busy being ‘good’ to notice.

Whiteness has a way of making almost anything - no matter how fetid - legible, desirable, even alluring. A paid corporate internship. A publishing deal. An Amazon deal. A political podcast. A seat at one of the great offices of State. The writers of these essays have gone on to become household names. Praised for making things legible. For turning immigrant’s exterior reality into something a white reader could process, could feel ‘good’ about understanding.

That’s the bargain.

You make them feel ‘good’ for understanding it.

But what about the ones who can’t write? Who can’t perform that reflexivity? Who stay ‘bad’? What does the pain and indignity turn them into?

The book doesn’t ask that question. It can’t. It’s too busy looking at whiteness. And who could blame them … it’s everywhere.

But I’m asking it now. Because I’ve seen the answer. I’ve felt the answer. I’ve watched it move into political power. It’s not pretty. And because it’s not pretty I write towards it. I make it legible because I can. Because I learned how. Because no one else will.

And if someone else wants to pay me to do it, I’ll probably let them.

I don’t want to be in my overdraft for forever.

It’s my turn to trawl through the digital archive on a Friday morning, almost 8 weeks into the programme. I haven’t touched it so far. Finding excuses. Delaying what could be an unfruitful task. If I avoid it long enough then I delay the disappointment of not finding what I want and thus don’t need to come up with a new idea. It’s the stupid kind of logic that has defined various decisions in my life, from the mundane (paying my tv licence) to the catastrophic (I absolutely need to leave this relationship I find him deeply boring and I resent him for it).

I am looking for archival footage of children living their lives in Birmingham. British Asian children. What would be 2^nd generation British Asian children. A film we were shown early in the programme, of a community caretaker scheme in Handsworth has some brilliant b-roll footage of Indian children playing in the streets, hair platted over, makeshift cricket gear. Filmed at a distance but the faint outline of my parents when they were younger.

I’m going through video to video, noting things down. I’m not fully paying attention though. The room is cold. It was a choice between an unbearably hot room to sit in or an unbearably cold room. I choose cold because the cold keeps me awake. I’ve not been sleeping. My ADHD medication is working imperfectly because I’m rationing it. A bureaucratic void means I won’t get anything new subscribed in over two weeks. So, when I take them, the tasks need to count for something. I’m aware I’m quickly approaching the cut-off point to formulate my own artistic response to this mammoth archival footage taken between 1982-1992 around Birmingham. Find something Bitch.

My hyperfixation that week is a song by this obscure band called Woo. It was recommended to me on Spotify. ‘The Western’ it’s called. Released in 1989. During the archive timeline. It’s only 2:07 and on constant repeat. I’m listening to is as I go through the archive because I don’t want to stop listening to it. Thus, whatever is getting said in the videos I look at, I don’t fully register. It’s a song with a lone guitar with a minimal track behind it that suddenly bursts into full pelt 40 seconds in. It makes my lungs swell, it gives me speed. Then it descends. And what was a curious, modest opening, then a vibrant and expansive mid-section becomes something … mournful. Expansive and maudlin. All within 2:07 minutes. Of course I’m fucking listening to it over and over again. This is the stuff of life.

Another folder of videos and press clippings: ‘WMADC – West Midlands Anti-Deportation Campaign’. I click the ones titled ‘cutaway footage’ first, I manually scrub. These ones have children and their mothers in it. There’s no 2x speed option. I sit with them. Still the song playing. Note the file titles down.

Next: ‘SallyInterview’. 8:32 minutes. Christ, ok, strap in.

A middle-aged south Asian woman, side parting hair tied neatly back, huge glasses. Glasses like mine. Sat on a sofa with an array of Hindu gods behind her. Red curtain. Red deity. Pale blue paisley gilet. Blue rings around a deity behind her.

I stay and watch. She sits still, measured, dignified. Talking about … something. The shots go from mid-section to close up above the shoulders. And back again. The camera zooms out she looks down, smiles, shakes her head, thinks and readies herself to restart talking. A moment. She talks again.

And then … wait what was that.

I rewind imperfectly. 4:34. Wait. A withdrawal of the lips. Another sentence uttered. It doesn’t complete. Eyes break off from the interviewer. The head dips. The shoulders slump. She hoists herself back up. Speaks again. Lips quiver. Jaw wobbles. Head shakes. The song is doing its maudlin ending again. A cry is emerging across her face but she’s holding it in as she speaks the next bit. It’s a while that she speaks like this, a cracking composure. Her eyes drifting to the ceiling to recall things. Almost 2 minutes. The song restarts. I don’t just track the movement of her eyes now. Just the shape of them. Heavy. She’s tired. She’s really tired. The glassiness of them never fades. The thousand-yard stare lingers longer and longer. The camera instinctively gets closer on her face. It ends on her looking … empty.

I rip the headphones out and finally listen to her.

She came to England in 1989. She married man who put an advert out for a wife in India. She called. They met. They married. 20 days and it was going ok. He goes back to England, where is he is a citizen. They sort of out the paperwork. 9 months later. She’s in Birmingham.

A withdrawal of the lips. Another sentence uttered. It doesn’t complete. Eyes break off from the interviewer.

“And turns out … he was a completely different man.”

The head dips. The shoulders slump.

“He was involved with …”

She hoists herself back up. Speaks again. Lips quiver. Jaw wobbles. Head shakes.

“He was involved with another woman.”

A cry is emerging across her face.

“And he didn’t want anything to do with me.”

She’s holding it in.

More pours out. Indignity after indignity. He kicks her out the house. She gets sent to stay with his friends. She had no access to resources. She had no job. She had no money. She sells everything she owns, Jewellery, clothes, even her shoes. The shoes bit breaks her most.

She has a brother in England. She can’t trace him. Her father was also an Englishman. Born in India. Anglo-Indian. She was orphaned during the partition of the Punjab. She was raised an orphan in a convent in a newly formed Pakistan.

Abandonment after abandonment. Loss after loss. Betrayal after betrayal.

I’m tired too.

She finds help eventually. A resource centre. Telling her about a campaign trying to help people like her. It proves to her that she’s not alone. Gives her a purpose, confidence and fight to stay.

“Why can’t you go back?” The interviewer, a woman, another British Asian woman asks.

“I’ve taken a lot of humiliation from my husband here. I wouldn’t like to have a double punishment going back and facing another set of humiliation there.”

I slap the space bar then. Pause. Push the laptop away slightly and stare at the formica table.

No one says it like that. Women like that never say it like that. ‘Humiliation’ next to ‘Husband’. It’s always cushioned. Always worked around. Always softened. Mitigated.

And this woman in 1991 just said it. Unflinchingly. With steel. With anger. Why the fuck should I go back?

Defiant.

I look at her face again. Jaw is more set now. Eyes still … lost.

I can feel it then. Something rising up my chest. Something clogging in my throat. A hot sting in my eyes. I pick up my phone. Look at my messages. Hope I’m not getting another text about a slow-moving horror of a crisis that is happening elsewhere that I’ve used this archival day to escape from. Nothing there.

I cry then.

It’s short and it’s quiet.

It’s still cold in there. There’s piles of tapes and vintage cameras.

I put ‘The Western’ back into my headphones and listen. It’s different now. Sally’s made it different now. The swell of the midsection has a cavalcade of protest footage in it. People. Placards. Purpose. I can see the arc of this film forming in my head. Within 2:07 minutes.

I swipe my eyes. And listen to the rest.

She gets help from the campaign. She gets a job at a hospital working with people with mental health problems. Blind leading the blind. Who cares for you?

The job is good. It pays well. She pays her taxes. She emphasises that last bit.

Her previous employer, a private care home, didn’t pay her properly. He took advantage of her being on the immigration list. Men are dogs.

She has a room now, of her own. Out of desperation she got it. There’s no heating or gas. Christ’s sake. But it’s good she happy there. And well …

A pause. A long long empty stare off camera.

“I’m fine now.”

The video ends.

What.

What the fuck.

You’re not fine now. YOU’RE NOT FINE NOW.

You’re not fine at all. You can try to convince yourself all you want but your body betrays you. I saw it. I saw it all over you. You. Are. Not. Fine. Lady.

I watch the other interviews. There’s another woman, Prakash from Mauritius. Married a British man who was on holiday. She was a divorcee with a 5 year old son. He assures her he will raise him like his own son, his own child. She joins him in England. He beat her and the child. She leaves under duress to Birmingham. The Home Office comes after her.

Another woman in the clippings, Kulwinder. Married to a man that eventually abuses her, uses his extended family to harass her. She leaves under duress. The Home Office comes after her.

All women who got the right paperwork. Paid the fees. All who had to leave or abandoned within 12 months. All south Asian women. All in the firing line.

There’s a pattern here. The pattern recognition is recognitioning. A story is emerging.

I google. For some reason, I go somewhere now.

I look at the faces of who have run the Home Office in the last 5 years. I wonder what they feel in their bodies when they sign that order in the nice pen and get tailed by armed guards … I’ll get to you lot later.

I tell the programme leaders about the idea. I have one now. It’s these women. It’s these abandoned women. They like it. I tell them about the song. They tell me to contact the band, get permission to use it. I’ve not contacted musicians whose song I hyperfixate on before. I hesitate. Hedge around the idea of using the song to guide the edit rather than underscore it. That notion passes the second I open DaVinci Resolve.

I’m incredibly motivated to edit this film. I feel confident I know what I want. I can edit this in a tight 3 days. I’ll be absorbed at my desk, work from midday till a healthy 7pm. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. Have plans in the evening. It will be pure and it will be clean.

It actually takes me 7. In between my day job, another monumentaly experimental writing project, real life with real people who have real problems and … actual Bank Holiday plans to party, drink and smoke.

What actually happens in between those days is this: 10mg Amphexa before breakfast and then 30 mg Elvanse decanted into water and metered throughout the day. The Amfexa forces me awake from the grogginess of the medication of the night before. The come up is swift; bathroom, moisturise, breakfast, reply too enthusiastically to DM’s I faintly think I have no right to reply to ... then focus. Clear mindedness. I have a task to do and I want to do it. I still dawdle for 4-5 hours before I should edit the next 20 seconds. I’m scared of DaVinci Resolve cos it’s serious and it has so many buttons. My sister suggest I ask my friend Tom for help, a seasoned editor and Ad Director. Gary had also offered to tag-team the edit from the outset. I think and tell her “No … I gotta master it on my own”. It sounded more monumental in my head. I watch YouTube videos by Indian YouTube editors on how to collage 4 different videos on one screen along the X and Y axis. They tell me swiftly and efficiently and don’t make me sit through unskippable ads.

I learn, I execute, I have my layout. I abandon it for the rest of the day. The next day I edit a section and I cry after it. By day 4 the crying stops, I instead become heavy after each edit. I stare at the wall a lot. The flat gets messier and messier. Eating becomes functional. Sleep is induced so I can return to the waking life and commitments I’m held down by.

At some point I realise I have only days to contact Woo to use their song. I had weeks to do it. But that same stupid logic from earlier got applied. I compose a message outlining the project, its purpose, my artistic response to it, why I liked the song and the run of the exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. I DM their Instagram. Nothing. They posted 6 days ago, it’s not totally dormant. I’m refreshing the DM’s like a mad bitch. I don’t care about the others in there. Well … maybe I do a little. But still. Nothing. I email them through their Bandcamp, where I bought the song. Nothing. Then I go find the people who own some of their publishing, somewhere in Colorado, USA. I title the email: URGENT: Permission for Woo track ‘The Western’ - exhibition in 1 week (Birmingham Museum). Because I’m a dramatic bitch.

Within 20 minutes a nice man call Josh responds: ‘Sure! I’ll pass it on!’. I go read my horoscope for 6 minutes. Check my email as compulsion. There’s a response. It’s Clive Ives from Woo. ‘Sounds interesting! Let’s chat. Are you free 2.30pm tomorrow?’ Shit. I’m not. I’m taking my Mum to the West End to watch Stranger Things on stage. As a good daughter should.

I reply, with charm, that I can’t: ‘(I’m taking my mother to the theatre!). How about Sunday?’

‘I can do 9.30am Sunday’

Oh, Jesus Christ I am going to be hungover. I’m seeing SBTRKT the Saturday night. This film needs to be in by Monday. I must convince this man I’m an artist he can trust. Also, I’m not reediting the video. The song slaps.

‘9.30am is great. Chat soon!’ I fucking better be awake.

The next day is the Saturday. I wake up at 8.23am. I take my full course of ADHD medication to cope with what feels like a Sisyphean day. I bring my laptop on the train to edit on the journey, my Mum peers over. She asks me questions as I’m doing it. Not about the film but about literally anything else. I feel vaguely guilty I’m not being entirely present with her. I ask her to listen to the first 10 seconds to see if the song and footage work together. She says it does. She scrolls X for the rest of the journey.

I try to dissociate for the 3-hour run of Stranger Things on the West End. The medication stubbornly doesn’t allow it. I see the Davinci Resolve interface in my head, think about the sections I still need to edit. My mum gives the show a standing ovation. I give those out like infinity stones. I stay sat in my seat.

I don’t sleep on my friend’s sofa until 3.15am. I set an alarm for 9.20am. The sleep is fitful. The alarm twats me awake. I get some water, fill it with an electrolyte, drink it greedily and slip outside with my phone in nothing but a slanket. Tits to the wind.

There’s a damp seating area in the courtyard. It’s 9.32am. I ring. Clive picks up on the 3^rd ring. “Hello Erinn …”. We talk roughly for 30ish minutes. I talk about the project, my artistic response to it. Why I gently find the current state of some South Asian to be rather toothless and overly romantic of the past and our grandmothers. He listens attentively. And has his practical questions ‘When? Where? How?’ and asks surprisingly ‘Why did the men leave them?’ I want to say immediately ‘Because Men are bastards, Clive’. I somehow say something more elegant ‘No discernible reason … actions speak louder than words … they’re not here to answer for themselves and they never intend to’. We talk about the artistic process; I tell him I was a little disbelieving that I was let on to the programme. I’m a writer, I have no history of making visual art, I never went to art school. I did social sciences. I’m coming into a new medium at 31. Not young in years. But young in experience. He told me how he went to art school to do visual art. His brother Mark was playing around with music and wanted a hand. They formed the band. Music became his focus. Then when it came time to rerelease the music, they needed cover art. His visual art skills came back into play. Both in their 60’s the brothers have only gotten better with time. Each year he observes he is getting sharper, and he doesn’t imagine it ending until he dies. I liked hearing that. I know I won’t retire either. The artists life. It will have me right until the end. Clive agrees to let me use the song. The call ends. I go back to sleep for an hour or two. End up back home for 3pm. The film gets complete Monday night. I hand it over. And feel slightly bereft. On to the next thing to catch my eye …

The way Sally named her humiliation sits like a stone in my chest. I was a slightly different woman before I heard her say it. Another one is forming now.

One who is compelled to feel every feeling.

Let it arrive, let it sit, let it pass.

I think my work will be better for it.

I think I can call myself an Artist because of it.

The Birmingham Media Archive Project: The First Decade 1982–1992 will be showing at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 18 April to 28 June 2026.

Which one of these boots shall I get? The second pair. But I think you will pick the first because you have no commitment to taste.

What does it mean that he watched my story? It means everything and it means nothing.

But he’s always the first to watch it? Ok maybe it means … something.

Are you sure you don’t like those first boots? I think these questions were designed to torture me.

I wanted to get your advice because you’re so wise? Why? Has the AI you’ve been talking to become too sycophantic for you?

Should I text him? No.

But what if-? I don’t think he actually respects you. And he also senses you don’t respect yourself either. That’s why he’s waiting for you to text back.

Why does she always do that? Because she can. Because you let her. Because she knows you won’t say anything.

Do you think he meant it? Yup. But I think you’re going to spend the next three days convincing yourself he didn’t.

Why do I keep letting them in? Because you’re more scared of being alone than being hurt … For now.

I need your thoughts on something? Why, just so you can ignore it and go back to doing the stupid thing with a bit more surface-level awareness than before.

Do you think she copied me? I think your algorithms are too similar not to be copying each other at this point.

Why do I keep checking? Because it’s more rewarding than eating.

Should I have said that? I think you should have said it much worse.

Do I look like I’m trying too hard? I think that 4^th picture in the photo dump was trying too hard, yes.

Do you think they know? Probably yes, probably no. I don’t think anyone thinks about you as much as you think about yourself.

Am I being paranoid? No … but that’s not what I heard everyone else say.

Why are you being so mean? Cos you like it. You find it funny. When it’s not directed at you.

I just need to make sure I’m not going mad? You are mad. Your stupidity is making you mad, that is definitely happening.

How would you fix this? By asserting my boundaries.

I don’t know what those are? Of course, you don’t, that’s why you’re here asking me to tell you what they are, after the fact.

I’m not sure what to do? Do the opposite of what you’ve compulsively done up until this point.

… …

Oh? Oh.

… …

Could you believe they would do that to me? I can, they’ve done it literally 30 times before and we have had this same conversation 30 times before.

How did I not know? You knew. Something in your body was screaming about it each time it happened before. You just trained your mind to ignore it.

If I knew I would have done something about it? Well, you didn’t, did you? You were a coward.

It wasn’t my fault I didn’t know? Now you know you desire for delusion is greater than your desire for the truth.

That delusion was all I ever knew? Ok, well, blame your parents for that.

But I love my parents? I think you should love them a little less. Cos whatever love they’ve provided for you up until this point was clearly … lacking.

That’s mean? They were mean to you; can you admit that?

No? Well, that’s why you’re here asking me questions instead of them.

How did you get so wise? I paid a lot of money to be this wise.

No but really? I went through things that would make blood curdle.

I don’t know what that means? Good. You’re lucky. Keep it that way.

If you’re so annoyed by everyone’s questions, why do you stay? Because someone has too.

Why you? Because no one else did.

That’s a very evasive answer? It’s my substack. I can do whatever I want.

Ok I have one more question. Of course you do. What?

What would you do if you weren’t so tired? …

…

…

…

I don’t remember.

I know exactly when I’m being a bitch.

I’m a bitch when I see someone has less followers than me: I will track when you reach beyond me.

I’m a bitch when someone’s relationship fails: ‘Good. You too now feel what a blight men are, you were very smug about him in the beginning.’

I’m a bitch when someone asks me what someone else thinks of them: ‘They can’t stand you and I talk about you every time they bring you up.’

I’m a bitch when I actively come up with ways to exclude people, in conversation, in plans, in my own country: ‘I wasn’t allowed so why should you.’

I’m a bitch when someone tells me they have the same therapist as Princess Diana and immediately think: ‘You should probably get a new one.’

The thing is, I’m not even trying. I’m not reaching. I’m not straining. It’s automatic.

The British Asian Bitch … she’s right there, beside me. Thinking, screaming, kicking.

The British Asian Bitch is incredibly angry. It doesn’t read as typical anger, it’s contained, it’s snide. And make no mistake, its wreaked out on her body first before it reaches yours. Not that she’ll let you see it. Not that she fully realises it has.

Because the British Asian Bitch is too busy scanning the room. She knows who’s up, who’s down, who’s wearing what, who’s seen with you, who’s married to who, who’s dating who, who was dating who, who’s in debt, who’s got the drinking problem, who’s go the coke problem, who’s secretly gay, who’s horrible to their partner, who’s cheating on their partner, who’s kid is an abject fuck up, who’s not talking to their sister at the moment, who took the third helping of mithai.

The British Asian Bitch operates by always scanning for a threat.

Who is the threat? Everyone. Mother is the threat. Father is the threat. Aunt is the threat. Uncle is the threat. The fake Aunt is the threat. The fake uncle is the threat. The sister-in-law is the threat. The dickhead brother of hers you’re married to, is the threat. The first cousin is the threat. The second cousin is the threat. The dad’s side is the threat. The grandma is the threat. The grandfather is probably dead already, but if he was alive, he would also be a threat. He was certainly a threat to your grandmother, that’s for sure.

That girl in your friendship group is a threat. That girl at work is a threat. That older woman line manager is a threat. That white girl who used to bully you at school, who now has 2.5 kids, a husband called Charlie and lives in a non-descript new build, is a threat. That girl who got the job you didn’t even apply for or even get asked to apply for, is a threat. That one girl who watches all your Instagram stories but never fucks with you in person, is a threat. That new girl in his Following list, is a threat. That nepo-baby in the same industry as you, is a threat.

The British Asian Woman’s hair is a threat. Her hyperpigmentation is a threat. Her thighs are a threat. Her hunger is a threat. Her fullness is a threat. The walk home is a threat. The bus stop is a threat. The uber alone is threat. The night is a threat.

The British Asian Bitch never feels safe. Will never admit she doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t actually know what ‘safe’ truly feels like in the body. Safety is an alien concept.

What the British Asian Bitch knows is rattling, constant rattling.

So why should she be nice to you? What have you done for her? What’s anyone done for her?

Fuck all is what they’ve done for her.

So why should you expect any different from her?

Why should you expect her to be gracious, stoic and modest? She learnt that gets you nowhere. Not anywhere nice. Just stuck in the kitchen waiting for everyone else to eat first. Just the one never picked for promotion. Just the one who never married for some … strange reason.

I’ve been defending her. I’m straining to understand her. I’m now exhausted by her.

But … I’m curious. I want to know what she’s sitting on. What she’s been guarding so tightly that she had to build all of these fetid habits, the scanning, the tracking, the cataloguing of everyone else’s failures. Just to keep me from looking at it. Looking at her, too closely.

And I don’t think I can do it alone. Not because I need support - she’d hate that word. But because I think she’s in your body too. I think you know her. I think she runs your mouth in the group chat and your brain at 3am and your posture in every room you walk into.

So, this is what I’m doing. I’m going to excavate her. Publicly, messily, probably too honestly. I’m going to write about her every two weeks and I’m going to *deep breathe* hold space where we look at her together. Not to fix her, not to thank her for her service. But to find out what’s underneath.

Because I think underneath the British Asian Bitch is something she never lets us see.

And I think she’s fucking terrified of us finding it.

You’re welcome to come.

She’ll hate it.

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