Fourth Suspect: BS (The Big Spender, aka my older brother)

When I was growing up, I was a typical gawky teenager with very long, brown hair that I liked to sometimes untie, so that I could feel like Rapunzel (probably wanting my prince to climb up my hair and save me – if that sounds weird, blame the fairytale, not me). Now, my family, although quite traditional, were not uber religious. But as we grew up, my brother became quite conservative – only when it came to me of course. Like most Asian boys, he was naughty himself (girlfriends, smoking, etc) but at a certain age, he decided that he did not like other boys looking at his precious younger sister. At the time, I didn’t question it – and I didn’t question the level of assertive control he had over our family either.

My father made a secret deal with the Afghan boy who worked at our local cinema. He said that if we attended the late 10pm show on Friday night, we could watch the latest Bollywood film at a significantly reduced rate. As a Bollywood mad family, who were not financially well off, Friday nights became our haven. Each Friday, we used to all pack into dad’s banger, the exhaust pipe sellotaped together, and after a big push from my brother and me, the car would slowly set off with the family towards our weekly treat.

One day, my brother decided that if we were going to continue going out as a family, I would have to agree to wear a dupatta on my head. Nothing was going to get in the way of me and my Bollywood hero, Shahrukh Khan, so I started doing it. We all made jokes about it but mum and dad didn’t question it and nor did I. We just thought of it as a phase, really. Soon, it turned into me having to sit next to the wall on one side and then each member of my family on the other side so that I always had an army of security guards protecting me from any boy who may dare to look my way. This level of control escalated from amusing to disturbing quite rapidly and ended with him replicating some of this behaviour with later girlfriends too. We laugh about the way his now wife, then girlfriend, had to prove that she had reached home from a night out by letting him listen to her dogs bark to prove she was home. Her word was not enough.