London Kills Me
The picture above is of Iqbal Ahmed, a Kashmiri living in London since 1993, who writes books by day and works as a hotel doorman by night. Ahmed’s book Empire of the Mind: A Journey Through Great Britain is just out in that country. My friend Kamila Shamsie in London took time off from her writing to send a link to an article about Ahmed that gives information about his first book, Sorrows of the Moon. When I got Kamila’s note, the name she had sent me rang a bell, and it was only half an hour later that I was able to find in my files an article by Ahmed, written back in 2002, which I had kept for use in my class on “Black Britain.” Here is an excerpt from that piece, which had appeared in the London Review of Books:
I arrived in the British Isles only with a copy of A House for Mr Biswas. Yet I had all the time on my hands without work. I frequented a local library in Haringey in the mornings. It was a dismal place used by exiles like me to read newspapers in different languages. One day a Sinhalese man told me in the library that reading was the only useful thing we could undertake in this wasteland. I needed food for the body more than food for thought. I was living on one meal for two days and I roamed the streets in search of wretched work. I finally found some afternoon work in a corner shop at the south end of Hampstead Heath. I worked like a deaf mute during my first year due to my false comprehension of the insincere English language. I became aware of my circumstances in the melancholy neighbourhood of Hampstead.
