Why don’t we go on a pretend holiday? That’s the idea of Sassy Yazzy, the British Punjabi playwright. “I used to have them all the time as a child,” she says. “Proper holidays were a foreign concept.
My family, like other Asian families, never went away for proper holidays. We’d visit our Asian cousins in the next town for a few days of biryani consumption and that would be it. When my English school friends told me about their exotic holidays by the sea with candyfloss, piers and carnivals, I’d want to cry. So I invented a holiday instead, with the anecdotes to prove it. From jet planes to Florida, to the train to Brighton … my pier was better than any classmate’s pier.”
