Sticks and stones may break your bones; words can do so much worse. Words can batter your self-esteem, bruise your confidence and bludgeon your patriotism. They can make you hate yourself and convince you that everyone else hates you too. In the mouths of the hate-filled, words can be weapons, and for Asians like me there was one word we feared above all others. It was a term of abuse that could be deployed at a second's notice; a two-syllable response that could end any argument and leave wit, sarcasm and logic pummelled into irrelevance. My entire childhood was spent in fear of it. Every morning I would see it daubed on the walls of the pedestrian subway as I walked to school. Sprayed in thick black aerosol next to an NF sign, it read: "Pakis Out".
When we weren't reading the racist writing on the wall we were being called it at school; our fathers endured it at work and stand-up comedians used it in their acts. No wonder then that for the Pakistanis, Indians and Bengalis who have grown up in Britain over the past 30 years, "paki" is not so much a word as a wound - if not bleeding, then still painfully tender - a visceral reminder of a past most would choose to forget.
Abdul Rahim remembers. Now 35, he remembers being 13 and seeing his local team, Peterborough United, play Wrexham. He was the only Asian on the terraces and recalls how self-conscious he felt when thousands of fans began chanting: "I'd rather be a paki than a taff." He never went to a football match again. More than 20 years on, Rahim, who now runs a small clothing business, wants to ensure young Asians today do not have to endure the shame he felt. Rahim wants to reclaim "paki" from the racists.
"The word has been misappropriated by the racists," he argues, "and our elders, white society and the media have allowed them to do so." We are sitting in the living room of his Peterborough home. His offices are next door. "The racists hijacked this word and the power and confidence is with them. I want that power and confidence back with us."
His campaign began by accident with an advertisement for his business. In it, an Asian man walks past a wall that has "Paki" sprayed on it. He returns a few seconds later with a spray can and adds "proud to be a" above the offensive word. The advert was promptly banned by a British-based Asian satellite channel but that only spurred Rahim to create a range of clothing.
The inspiration for the label's logo came 15 years ago when he read the licence plate of the Pakistani ambassador's car: "PAK 1". T-shirts bearing the logo are already being sold in Bradford and local community leaders in Peterborough have warned Rahim that he risks damaging race relations with his designs. To his critics Rahim is a publicity-hungry troublemaker who is creating controversy to make a name for himself and money for his business. But he denies such base motives. "Those who think I'm doing it as a business gimmick have invested so much time into this word being derogatory," he says, "that they are naturally upset if someone comes along and tells them that they have been upset for 40 years for no reason." Why no reason? "Paki is just a shortened version of Pakistani - its literal meaning is 'the pure' - so why should anyone be afraid of being called pure? A native from Kazakhstan is a Kazakh, someone from Uzbekistan is an Uzbek; so why is someone from Pakistan not allowed to be called a Paki?"
Rather than being considered a form of abuse, paki should, he suggests, be declassified from a class A word such as nigger to a class C term such as Aussie, Yank or Taff. "There is no way that paki is as bad as nigger," he claims, "because nigger is a bastardisation of negro, it describes biologically what someone is - paki does not."
The attempt to reclassify paki has precedents in nigger and queer, which have been at least partially reclaimed by the black and gay communities. Forty years ago Lenny Bruce outraged audiences by using the N word; his argument was that if you use a word often enough, it loses its meaning and can no longer hurt. Today it is used by comedians and hip-hop stars, and few are shocked.
The linguistic reclamation of nigger and queer has its origins in an increased confidence and pride in black and gay culture. But even now this "flipping", as it is called, has not been totally successful. The black comedian Chris Rock can do a routine with the line "I love black people but I hate niggers" but Quentin Tarantino faced widespread criticism for using the word in his films. None the less, according to Randall Kennedy, author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, the demonstration of how the N word has been flipped has given others the opportunity to do something similar.
But while we may have learned to relax about sexual swear words, there is still confusion about what is acceptable when talking about race. Last autumn a Manchester man became the first individual to be banned from using the word paki; if he uses it he faces imprisonment. That court decision followed an earlier high court ruling that using the word in football chants is racially offensive and not the same as using Brit, Aussie or Kiwi.
The logical conclusion of those who would seek to rehabilitate paki would be, in the short term at least, to allow the abuse and the chanting to continue and perhaps even encourage it. And that is the difficulty with reclaiming the P-word: its potency has nothing to do with etymology and everything to do with intent. The reason it feels acceptable for Pakistanis to refer to each other as pakis and for Chris Rock to call ignorant blacks niggers is because the intent is demonstrably not malicious. This is obviously not the case when whites refer to "pakis".
Rahim is persuasive when he says we should not get hung up on a word; he may even be correct that the way to reappropriate it is by using it in a positive sense. When I suggest that he might be giving permission to racists to use it too, he offers this comparison. "The use of the internet has led to an increase in child porn and the September 11 bombers used aeroplanes to carry out their acts of terror. Does that make the internet and the airline manufacturers responsible for child porn and the terrorist attacks?"
As someone who is primarily interested in profit rather than being a prophet, Rahim should not be held responsible for the consequences if the word is rehabilitated. And there is something deliciously defiant about young Pakistanis proudly proclaiming they are Pakis; where their parents and older siblings may have worn their ethnicity with shame, their children can be more assertive. But rehabilitating the word might also mean hearing it on our television screens again and at work, with claims that there was no malicious intent.
According to a recent survey, four out of 10 whites would still rather not have an Asian neighbour, and racial harassment is still a reality for many Asians. In such a climate it may be premature to try to decommission paki as a weapon of offence. As a fashion statement, Rahim's designs are bracingly provocative; as a political manifesto his argument feels more exposed. Whether couched in irony or repackaged as self-assertion in the mouths of the hateful, racism is racism no matter how it is dressed up.