Greetings from Bury Park is journie Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir about growing up working class in Luton. Manzoor’s Pakistani father worked at the Vauxhall auto factory, his mother sewed piecework out of her living room, and Manzoor fled to college to avoid being stifled by his conservative father, ’six-foot-five and built like a brick house.’ Along the way he grew dreads, sold encyclopedias in Yuba City and took Bruce Springsteen as his personal saint and savior, criss-crossing Europe and America to see him play:

Amolak stood up. ‘Listen, my friend… Bruce Springsteen is a direct connection to everything that is meaningful and significant in life. And anyway what the fuck do you listen to then? That fool Rick Astley? … Bruce pisses on all them twats.’

Manzoor’s title is a play on a Springsteen album. Thirty-six is a bit young to publish a memoir, and this won’t comprise the core of any literary canon, but like Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Anita and Me and Love, Stars and All That, this book is apna lit. The first third left me weepy. I felt for the father, whom Manzoor now idolizes. I felt for his sister, who was put to work sewing and rarely let out of the house. I felt for Saf, growing up awkward and brown in the West. I could not put the book down, devouring it in an evening.

Resenting my father was the fuel that drove my ambition, but it also drove me away from him… it was only when he died that the desire for answers arose… He died in the same week that my very first article was published; any success I have had came when he was not around to savour it.

Manzoor’s not as cutting or cynical as Hanif Kureishi, but he’s willing to open the kurta a little. Here he is on his friend’s struggles with being keshdari and a granthi’s son:

… I had virtually no Asian friends… [My high school] was almost entirely white and when I was around Asians I tended to feel a bit of a fraud. I had always felt grateful I was not Sikh; being Asian was hard enough without a religion that insisted believers wear enormous bandages on their head and forsake cutting facial hair.

Within seconds of meeting Amolak it was obvious that while he might have looked like Chewbacca in jeans, he had the confident air of someone completely oblivious to how ridiculous he looked… Amolak walked around our college like he was a king, wise-cracking with the boys and flirting with the girls…

Later, Amolak cut his hair:

When it was just the two of us he would confide how frustrated he was by his turban. ‘Fact is there’s no way I’m getting any pussy with this on my head,’ he would tell me. He would point out how blistered the tops of his ears were from being bandaged… ‘I get mash-up headaches cos of the weight on me head.’

‘So why don’t you get your hair cut?’ I told him.

‘You’ve seen my dad, right? He would kick the living shit out of me. And then throw me out on the street. He’s a bloody priest at the temple, no fucking way I can do it while I’m living at home…’

When I saw Amolak clean-shaven and without his turban, at first I did not even recognise him.

The last phase of this memoir contains fewer insights. Your life is less processed the closer you are to the events in question; you’re more cautious about revealing still-relevant truths. And like Anita Jain, who’s written an entire book on the subject, Manzoor makes sure to mention he’s still single, hint hint

If you’re desi in the West, you will probably like this book, and recognize yourself in it.