Free Worlds Apart by Azi Ahmed Page A

Lessconventional than Manchester, they didn’t seem to wear high-street fashion. Instead, they wore weird clothes, listened to strange music, and a lot of them smoked. Girls looked unfeminine with their scruffy jeans and baggy jumpers, and wearing no make-up, not even eyeliner. I wondered what they thought of me in my conventional jeans and flat, comfortable shoes.
    Living at the halls became an issue. I longed to cook chapattis and hot curry, which the kitchen didn’t facilitate. Students would get drunk, be sick, then spend their weekend in bed. Perhaps they took this freedom and independence for granted, but to me it was a waste of life.
    Now I didn’t have the kebab shop in the evenings and weekends, I was going mad with boredom. I tried to find a job in a fashionable clothes shop in Covent Garden but they didn’t seem impressed with my kebab shop CV. Working in another kebab shop would be like taking a step back.
    I moved out of the halls after the first term into a bedsit in Wood Green. It was a dreary place, but felt more like living in society than the isolated student hub of the halls. I couldn’t stand being surrounded by students any more. I wanted to meet different people. I felt removed from life.
    The fear of being financially deprived always playedat the back of my mind. I remember the jumble-sale clothes Mum made me wear to school, and sometimes having to leave home in the morning without breakfast because there was no food in the fridge. Thankfully, in those days the government supplied milk for kids at schools. Secondary school was worse, when my parents started up their businesses. I had to wear the same uniform every year, while others, whose parents didn’t work, received government allowances for new ones each year. I remember once being laughed at by a girl because I had a big hole in my shoe – my parents couldn’t afford new ones.
    In the first year of college, we were left to experiment freely on art projects to bring out our individual styles. Mine was bright colours. It didn’t matter what the brief was or materials supplied, I just went for bright colours. The teachers concluded it was because of my background, no matter how much I insisted it was my personal style.
    A few months in, I learnt how prestigious the art college was and how many famous people had previously attended. Most of the students in my year either had parents who were big in the art world or came from wealthy overseas families. I tried not to let it get to me, but it was difficult to connect with people who had no idea what it was like to live on a budgetin a bedsit and not be able to discuss art careers with their family.
    However, the teachers seemed to notice. Andrew, the head of our year, was a handsome, softly spoken man who reminded me of my dad in his younger years. He told me I had a disadvantaged background compared to most students and if I wanted to stay ahead, I would have to learn the new Apple computer programmes that had just come in. It was a new technology and everyone was in the same boat. The college had just set up a computer room with a handful of these new computers. As expected, they were in high demand and difficult to get on.
    Andrew suggested I talk to Robert, the man with the amazing curling moustache, who I had met at my interview, to see if I could get onto the computer classes he ran outside college hours. Finally, I had found something to replace the kebab shop. I missed being busy. I would leave the bedsit at 6 a.m. to attend the early-bird classes, then stay behind after college and go in at the weekends.
    It also brought me closer to the teachers, who drew me into interesting debates, the biggest one being about religion. All my life I had thought Jesus was Muslim because he is mentioned in the Koran, until one day Andrew told me he was Jewish. It left me stunned fordays. Does this mean Islam accepts the Jewish religion? I asked myself. If so, why do we have separate books, and why