After believing his life had been mapped out for him, he eventually chose to go down a road that surprised even him
I was 16 when I first found the idea of performing. We were doing Hamlet at school and I got a smaller part than I wanted. But I still got the gravedigger, who is really good. I enjoyed it and wanted to do more, so I got together with some mates and we put on a production of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter in the tiny little theatre at school. I remember feeling like I was connecting with lots of people. And that’s a really lovely feeling. At the start of The Homecoming, we put on a track called The First Big Weekend by Arab Strap. This was the first time I was getting into music as well. Bands and plays – my brain was opening up to something I would only revisit later on.
A lot of stuff was mapped out for me. But I was not sure the stuff that was mapped out for me was the path I wanted to go down. Depending on your perspective, some might say I had quite a moderate upbringing, but we were practising Muslims and others would say it was on the stricter side. I knew things were laid out for me by my dad, in the sense that acting definitely wasn’t an option. My dad was the kind of dude that, essentially, filled out my UCAS form and said what I was going to be doing.
You look to your parents and your culture to understand more about the path you want to take. My parents were immigrants and had to battle against a lot and they understood their path to get to a situation where they could afford to give us a really good life. So that, for them, was a template of how I should live. In terms of who I would eventually end up with, there were these sort of arranged/non-arranged-y sort of situations with marriages within our culture at the time. It was all up in the air, but you were gently guided to follow a particular path. And sometimes not gently guided, sometimes actually told what you were going to be doing.
I went to quite a posh boarding school from the age of 11. I was a minority. There weren’t many Asian or non-white kids at Cheltenham College. But that was the place I was being educated and I just normalised it. My understanding of what society is was quite narrow back then.
I would tell my younger self to be loyal to your first instincts.
But also, don’t stress out about it, because there are cultural pressures and societal pressures that get in the way of figuring out who you fully are. It was a complicated time. He was trying to understand about himself, his family’s culture, the society he was in.
