Go West — Resistance, Ricky Reel, and the Real Southall

I drink all day. Anything I can get ahold of works—I don’t care what it is, as long as it mixes with Red Bull and can keep me awake. I need it to stop the voice in my head, the one that endlessly criticizes me for my shameful shortcomings. It’s not a heroic amount of alcohol, but I haven’t eaten all day.

Night arrives without me really noticing. I should be writing my dissertation, but instead I roll another cigarette and slur along to a Sleeper song. “What do I do now? / Are we going under? What did I do wrong?” I go to the student union bar and they won’t let me in because I can barely stand. I walk to my former residence hall, where I lived two years before as a freshman. The keycode to enter is the same. I see the fire alarm. I punch the glass.

[Content warning: This story includes accounts of racist slurs, discriminatory language, violence, and suicidal ideation.]

I’m so drunk I can’t move. Blue lights appear as the fire engine turns up and someone points to me. I run but don’t get far. The rest fades to black. The voice in my head ramps up the criticism to deafening levels. I want to die.

When I look back at these events, which happened while I was a student at Brunel University in Uxbridge, West London more than 20 years ago, I don’t actually think I had a drinking problem. I just had an anger problem. I couldn’t control the rage that burned in me. Except back then, I didn’t know its source. 

THE EARLY LIFE OF RICKY REEL

Many years before Ricky Reel’s name appeared on flyers and at local protests, he was a happy kid growing up in West London—every parent’s dream child, according to his mother Sukhdev. “He was a very quiet and intelligent child,” she tells me over Zoom. “He liked Superman and Batman from a young age. I remember him putting a towel on his head and running around saying he’s Batman.”

Ricky, who would later attend Brunel University, was a calm presence (superhero antics aside), and also very intelligent; he loved school projects. One year he amazed his teachers by creating a woodwork model of a car garage with doors that went up and down. 

“The reports from his school said how dedicated he was to his studies,” Sukhdev says. “At primary school he would stay in the classroom when the other kids went out to play to help teach children who were less competent.”

One day, Ricky was digging in the garden with his father, and he worked so hard that his hands became covered in blisters. When Sukhdev saw his injury, she looked tearful, and Ricky immediately hid them so she wouldn’t worry. 

When he was still in primary school, Ricky took part in a play that aimed to educate his classmates about racism—the trauma that would eventually explode at the heart of the Reel family. But by all accounts, his experiences in the classroom and at home were happy. Heathrow Primary School was attended by a multicultural mix of children whose families lived in the shadow of the airport, and the same was true of Langley Grammar School, where Ricky went as a teenager.

At Langley, he wasn’t really into parties but instead could be found in his bedroom, teaching himself to code. Once, when he was about 12, his mother wondered where he was; she opened his door to discover that he had created a math game and had roped his unwilling six-year-old brother into testing. 

That was the most rebellious thing that Ricky ever did, she says. “He would never get into fights,” Sukhdev says. But he did get into one fight—an unfair, tragic one—that would change everything for the Reels. 

THIS IS SOUTHALL

There’s a wonderfully disorientating feeling whenever I walk around Southall in West London. Located adjacent to Uxbridge and to Brunel University, the neighborhood has long been relatively cut off from the rest of the city (although the gleaming new Elizabeth Line has just changed that, as I write), and it was unlike anywhere else in London that I’d seen when I moved to the area as a student. 

Southall is so varied, so personal to me, that it is hard to describe it to people who are unfamiliar with it. The best I can say is: Imagine a town that has somehow managed to recreate many aspects of daily life in South Asia—it’s often dubbed “Little India”—but appears distinctly harmonious, with Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian residents all living side by side. 

Southall is, unsurprisingly, the place to buy South Asian ingredients in London—you can find everything from huge bags of spices to Indian spirits like Old Monk. Large-scale wedding celebrations regularly spill out onto the streets. And it’s also the place to eat a hearty, South Asian meal, whether at traditional restaurants or British-Indian “Desi” pubs, even though it’s overlooked by many Londoners in favor of Brick Lane’s heavily commercialized curry houses. That’s a shame, because where else in the capital can you eat mouth-freshening pan leaves filled with tobacco or sweets? Find pani puri filled with tamarind water? Where else do people set off flares when India wins the cricket?

But for all that Southall looks to me like South Asia at a glance, it is still inescapably British-Asian. 

The area started to change in the 1950s, when the growing popularity of Heathrow Airport, and the increase in nearby factories, provided a number of job opportunities for Commonwealth citizens who had newly relocated to England. For a time, the Glassy Junction, once one of Southall’s most frequented Desi pubs, even accepted rupees from Indians who visited as their first stop off the plane. By 2011, a local census revealed that 76.1% of Southall’s residents were of Asian descent. 

Still, as much as Southall can feel welcoming and harmonious, it has never been a utopia. In the 1970s and ’80s, gangs such as the Tooti Nungs and Holy Smokes frequented the area, while lurid tabloid headlines described the neighborhood as a haven of crime. In those days, violence against Asians was a truly pervasive problem, however, as the hateful murder of Sikh teenager Gurdip Singh Chaggar showed. 

At the time, the National Front viewed the area as a key battleground in its campaign of “paki-bashing.” The racist party is considered a fringe, far-right organization today, but from the mid 1970s into the 1980s, its influence penetrated popular white culture. If you were an Asian person living in the U.K. in the 1980s, their threat loomed large, and those fears were exploited by numerous depictions of skinheads (including in breakfast cereal advertisements aimed at children). “NF” graffiti was plastered everywhere, from train carriages and school desks to motorway bridges. I’ve even seen it tattooed.

Southall’s thriving, diverse communities stand as one of many examples of resistance to that threat. That spirit is best exemplified in an episode from 1981, when the National Front descended on the area to visit a pub that has since entered London folklore, even if it’s not as well-known as it should be: the Hambrough Tavern.

BRITPOP VS BHANGRA

That voice. That voice. It won’t shut up. It’s there in social situations. It’s there when I’m in job interviews. It’s not mine. It’s my mother’s. It’s the voice of a mother whose love I chased, yearned for, and was denied. I’d try to talk to her and she’d ignore me. I’d try to explain why I broke toys. She hit me but it didn’t hurt. The real pain was when she stared at the TV while I tried so much to talk to her.

The first time I walked home from school alone, a group of older kids called me a “paki.” When I started to tear up, they said with joy, “The paki cries!” I told her about it but she didn’t listen. I was seven years old.

The pain of these experiences was pushed down into the pit of my stomach. When I moved to attend Brunel University, I expected things to be different. I heard that the area was multicultural, that the university had a large proportion of South Asian students. 

But when I arrived, I struggled to relate to my Brown contemporaries—English was the only language I spoke, and my CD collection was more Britpop than Bhangra. To manage this new form of isolation, I tried to suppress my real background by acting as if I were posh, despite my humble upbringing—my mother was a nurse, and my dad unemployed.

To supplement my income at university, I worked in a pub called the Crown. It was the beginning of my love of cask Ale, and I enjoyed being in the cellar, moving barrels and making sure the beer tasted right. But it was also where I suffered on-the-job racism from both the landlords—I stayed there long enough to work for four publicans—and the customers.

The worst was a landlord from the Midlands, called Keith. He used to call me Gunga Din (in reference to a poem by Rudyard Kipling), and would tell humiliating jokes in my presence. The customers weren’t much different, and I tried to hide my identity from them as best I could. I remember one regular would use the worst racial slurs when telling “jokes” whose running theme—that all immigrants were a drain on resources—was tacitly accepted.   

Ultimately, hiding my true history from my peers and from my employers led me to hide it from myself. I could’ve visited the many Desi pubs in Southall, but I was ignorant of them at the time. Instead, I stayed in Uxbridge, spending the money I had just earned on beers drunk with people I hated to be around. It would be years before I gravitated towards more welcoming watering holes, before places of leisure didn’t also feel imbued with an ambient threat.

TERROR ON THAMES

On October 15, 1997, 20-year-old Ricky was with three friends in Kingston-upon-Thames in Southwest London, some 14 miles south of Uxbridge. They decided to go to a nightclub. It was the first time he had ever set foot in the area. The friends had a few drinks in a parking lot before the club, called Options, opened. Ricky was reluctant to stay out late, as he was on a work placement at the time, and had to attend a conference the next day. 

En route to the club, near the Benthall shopping mall, the friends were confronted by two men in their early-to-mid 20s. “They were saying, ‘Paki, go home,’” says Sukhdev. “Then the attack took place, and everyone ran in different directions, and Ricky was never found alive again.”

Ricky’s body was found face-down in the Thames a week later. Despite the evidence, witness statements, and pressure from the family, his death was ruled as open by an inquest in 1999. It has not been re-investigated, even though a new witness came forward alleging that a man connected to the death was in prison serving a sentence for murder.

Reggae musician and record producer Tom Robinson, 46, who is of Indian and Irish descent, was living in nearby Kingston at the time, and went to Brunel around the same time Ricky did. He remembers the city of that era as riven by tensions and segregation.

“My friend from Grenada moved in and he hated being a Black man in a town that wasn’t very accepting of him,” Robinson remembers. “On the day he was moving out, a woman called him a ‘jungle bunny.’ I was called a ‘white paki.’”

Robinson was familiar, too, with the club that Ricky and his friends were going to. “Options was a shithole,” he says. “There were people coming from nearby towns and Surrey and going there for a big night out.” But few could have predicted the mundane, suburban enclave’s role in such an incident.

SKINHEADS IN SOUTHALL

In the early 1980s, a series of riots rocked Thatcher–era Britain. In Brixton, Black residents faced growing social inequality and racist police practices—including the so-called “sus laws,” which saw 1,000 people in the area stopped and searched in six days—which eventually sparked violent unrest over a three-day period starting on 10 April, 1981, injuring 300 people and causing an estimated £7.5 million in damage. 

In Southall, a few months later, tensions would flare up again. A skinhead band called the 4-Skins was cleared by the council to play a gig in The Hambrough Tavern. The National Front had been using the skinhead subculture (including the Oi! Scene) to target disaffected, white, working-class young people, and many such concerts were accompanied by racist violence (even if not all bands in the movement aligned themselves with far-right causes).

British-Asians were seen by racists as easy targets—in 1981, the Sun ran an interview with a skinhead who said “paki-bashing” was more common because they thought we were particularly meek and vulnerable. The violent attacks led to a number of Brown-led resistance groups and gangs, and residents in Southall tell me that many of these groups were formed after a National Front meeting held in the town hall in 1979. 

“Word spread like wildfire, and the next thing you know it’s all fucking kicked off. ”

It was provocative, then, for the 4-Skins (alongside other bands, including The Last Resort and The Business) to play a gig in a majority British-Asian area. Such a concert was certain to attract violent skinheads who would sing along to lyrics like, “Come back of the skinhead / Come back of the boot / People that we don’t beat up / We’re gonna fucking shoot.” 

Indeed, community leaders said they were offered no police protection after busloads of National Front members from East London entered the area and attacked shopkeepers. As the skinheads advanced on the pub, Southall locals began to make molotov cocktails, and even took bricks from the walls outside their homes to pelt the police. The five-hour street battle culminated in the Hambrough Tavern going up in flames. 

Recently, in an attempt to follow the trail of that history, I discovered that the Hambrough Tavern (which reopened following the riot) has since been permanently closed. Instead—accompanied by Gaurav Khanna, who runs the Gladstone (a Desi pub near London Bridge)—I walked over to the Scotsman nearby. There, we met local resident Gurlochan Brar, who was more than happy to talk about the Hambrough Tavern, permissiveness in Southall, and his daily alcohol consumption—he got the bartender to confirm that he does indeed drink 20 pints of beer each day before hitting the vodka and Cokes. Luckily, we caught him on his first of the day.

Brar, who is also called Terry or Tosh, was about 18 years old when the riot sparked outside the Hambrough. The Hambrough Tavern was a white pub in those days, he said, but Brar would go in because most of his mates weren’t Asian, and it wasn’t uncommon for other Brown people to drink in there. But that accord was disrupted on the day of the 4-Skins gig.

“As the skinheads were walking to the pub, they spat at a little Sikh boy and he went home and told his brother,” he said. “Word spread like wildfire, and the next thing you know it’s all fucking kicked off. The police tried to crack down on it but some guys [stole a] police van and drove it into the Hambrough Tavern and that’s when it caught alight.”

A REVERSAL OF FATE

The fire alarm incident happened in my third and final year of my studies, when I was tired of being there, frustrated at what felt like a lack of trajectory. The fallout could have left me in a desperate situation, but there were a few people in my life who stepped in to save me. The first was my tutor, Tim Fernyhough, who listened to me when I revealed the damage I had caused and who refused to judge me. Fernyhough represented me in a disciplinary meeting where I was given a warning, which allowed me to finish my degree. I didn’t attend my graduation ceremony, and my mother didn’t mention it.

Without Fernyhough, I wouldn’t have ever become a journalist. I learned from his African history lectures, which imparted the importance of oral sourcing, and how vital it was to listen to those from marginalized communities. And I wouldn’t have created the body of work—including this article—that now defines my career.

“He was genuine”, says Trevor Burnard, a former Brunel professor who is now at the University of Hull. “He was Tim. He was always himself. He always responded honestly to people. He was a down-to-Earth person. You find in academia, like most other places, that most people are self-interested, but that wasn’t Tim at all.”

A few years ago, I Googled him and discovered he had died of a heart attack aged 50, just two years after I left, robbing me of the chance to tell him how much he helped me, and how much I loved him. “I’d say I was devastated when he died,” says Burnard. “Students came to me and said similar things to me that you said, that Tim spoke to them in ways that other people didn’t. I think of him often.”

When he died, I was still living within walking distance of Brunel. I stayed in Uxbridge after I left university, juggling an admin job dealing with Heathrow freight, and continuing to work at the same pub as my student days. This would’ve been my life if my best friend Neil hadn’t moved me into his house in Hertfordshire while I studied to be a journalist. These intercessions would open up new possibilities to me, and change the course of my life.

POLICE RACISM

When Ricky failed to come home, Sukhdev and her husband contacted the police. Instead of investigating their son’s disappearance, they said he had probably run away because the family was trying to force him into an arranged marriage. “They didn’t want to know,” says Sukhdev. The family was forced to investigate the crime themselves, and they searched the many derelict buildings in Kingston. Sukhdev says they even formed a human chain to lower themselves into basements.

“You cling on to hope,” she says. “There was a scarf of mine that Ricky liked and my mother said to take it when I was looking for him as it would bring him back. And I used to take that scarf with me every day [to Kingston] thinking it would bring him back.”

Sukhdev would flier passersby about her son, and posted “missing” posters around the area. Other concerned people—at one time, 50 or 60—turned up to help search for him. In the evenings, she went on night buses and showed passengers Ricky’s photo. “People in Kingston were horrified and said, ‘Why are you doing this? It’s the police’s job!’”

“This is going to affect me throughout my life but the people who killed my son are going to have to live with this as well.”

Even after Ricky’s body was found, the national newspapers largely ignored the event, despite the fact that Sukhdev and her husband Balwant made a formal complaint about the Metropolitan Police’s handling of the incident, which had ruled his death as an accident. John McDonnell, the Member of Parliament representing Southall, even raised the issue in Parliament a month after the attack. Because of the Met’s ruling, the case was never properly investigated. It wasn’t until the inquest in 1999—which reached an open verdict—was the case covered by the press. In 2014, Sukhdev discovered the police had been spying on her at the time.

Sukhdev is holding out hope that the case will be reopened, and is writing a book detailing Ricky’s short life that will hopefully put pressure on the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. As for the alleged killer, Sukhdev says, “I’ve forgiven them. The reason why I’ve done this is my anger and hurt is not going to affect them. This is going to affect me throughout my life but the people who killed my son are going to have to live with this as well.”

SOUTHALL’S PRESENT (AND FUTURE)

Nowadays, there’s something a bit theme-park-like about Southall. As night falls, it’s obvious to me that I’m not the only visitor who’s come from other parts of London to immerse myself in its atmosphere.

“When India won the Cricket World Cup against Sri Lanka [in 2011], we were in the Prince of Wales and Glassy Junction,” says Saptarshi Ray, a friend of mine who used to work for an Asian lifestyle magazine called “Snoop” that was based in Southall from 2001 to 2005. “People were down from Birmingham and Manchester. There was a real carnival in the streets. […] Some days it was weird. During a British parliament election there were cars with loud hailers attached to the roofs shouting in Punjabi like in India. I would joke to my colleagues that it’s only a matter of time before you’d see a cow walking down the high street.”

These days, change has come to Southall. The number of Desi pubs has diminished, and the once-famous Glassy Junction has been turned into a vegetarian restaurant. For Ray, the pub’s disappearance is a real loss. “It seems sacrilegious,” he says. “It’s famous, and not just among British Asians. When I was in Delhi, you’d meet people and the first thing they would say is ‘Glassy Junction!’”

“I would joke to my colleagues that it’s only a matter of time before you’d see a cow walking down the high street.”

Glassy Junction is right by the train station, and I linger outside its closed doors for a bit, wondering what type of atmosphere we would’ve encountered there. “Raucous” was a word many used. “It was quite lairy,” says Ray. “There was a lot of swearing, a lot of people stumbling over—and 95% of people would be Punjabi. It was very welcoming, and I took white people there.”

Even without the Glassy Junction, Southall is an intoxicating place. After visiting several pubs, we get so merry we’re kicked out of the gurdwara for smelling of booze. We go to a pan leaf shop, and for a moment I have a queasy feeling of not really fitting in with the residents we speak to.

Later, I tell Arup K Chatterjee, author of “Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India,” that Southall feels like part of Asia to me, whereas Brick Lane in East London is more like a part of British-Asia.

“I’m in awe of how you’ve just phrased it,” he says. “Southall is not a catering region [like Brick Lane’s curry houses] but it’s got everything. But above all it’s a residential area and a very multicultural region. It’s also an important part of Bollywood [being featured in films like ’90s blockbuster “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge”] and a bigger cultural phenomenon in the minds of Indians than Brick Lane.

“It’s got all the ingredients of India and Pakistan and it makes one feel very nostalgic.”

How long Southall will retain its present-day identity isn’t certain. Politicians—including Boris Johnson, who is the Member of Parliament for Uxbridge—are more than happy to swing by the area for photo ops, all while ignoring its present-day social problems: A friend who grew up in Southall said that heroin was always present locally, and when I last visited the Scotsman, I saw a woman using a syringe in a nearby phone box.

The Elizabeth Line, while opening up transit links and accessibility, also means the area may be at risk of gentrification in future. New flats are already being built by the train station, and there’s a possibility that housing developers and soaring real-estate costs will conspire to drive out many of its longtime residents. Only time will tell how Southall will weather these challenges—even while, today, its vitality is unignorable.

THE GOOD FATHER

When I tell people about my mother, they often don’t understand, and think I should keep trying to have some sort of relationship with her. As I’ve grown older, I’ve been able to reflect on the forces that have shaped her life—the trauma of the racism she experienced in Malaysia under colonial rule, and the pain of relocating to a hostile England. The way that she absorbed that and passed it along as inheritance.

Her repression of this anguish turned into acting out her anger, and I can see my past behavior reflected in her actions. In her, that pain was revealed as snapping and passive aggression, like the time she told me in front of my then-pregnant partner that I “wouldn’t make a good father.”

I had to stop chasing her love, and accept that we could never have a relationship that I gained anything from. Instead, I’ve tried to raise my children differently than how I was raised, to empower them by telling them the truth about who they are, and about the country they live in. I also drink alcohol in different ways than I used to, and see beer more as a meditative pursuit that’s about finding flavor rather than a tool to try and hold back dark thoughts.

It’s still difficult when I speak to people who are a good mother or father themselves, or who have supportive parents, because their life experience is so different from mine. Sukhdev is thrown when I tell her a few stories about my mother and how she treated me. But in many ways, both Sukhdev and my mother have lost children to the same social factors. “Racism leaves mothers like me with empty arms,” Sukhdev says.

The voice in my head is still there, but there are now a few more. There’s Fernyhough impelling me to succeed. I can hear my partner’s loving empathy. There’s the brash noise of the street markets at Southall. And now, after our conversation, there are Sukhdev’s words—the way that she uplifts her son’s life and memory, and even extends forgiveness, all while fighting for her 25-year-long pursuit of justice.

Words by David Jesudason
Illustrations by Colette Holston