Politics

Multiculturalism in black cabs and at Davos

February 06, 2012
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I arrived in London from my home in Brooklyn, New York last week, for the launch of my first novel, A Small Fortune. The book is a tragi-comic tale about a British Pakistani patriarch called Harris (after the tweed) who loses control over his unruly extended family.

I took a taxi from Paddington, and found that my cabbie was an east-ender, eager to know my business in London. When I told him about the book, set partly in Whitechapel, where I used to live he said that loved the title. “Is it about gangs, then?” he enquired. “The Krays? That type of thing?”

“Not really, no,” I replied. I didn’t admit that it was about Pakistani Brits; nor did I mention my own Muslim name or Pakistani father. I’m wary of such things after 10 years in the east end, where I was once stopped by an old white man, who congratulated me on my baby, saying, “So nice to see a white face round here.”

The cabbie was a cockney from Bow, he told me, though he’d moved to Kent. He began a mournful tirade on how the east end had been ruined by foreigners. We’re flooded, he moaned, they don’t mix in or talk to you. “It’s all just become a big mix,” he said, contradicting himself.

I’d just heard that fear expressed the week before when I’d spoken on a panel on multiculturalism at the Open Forum in Davos. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party politician on the panel tried to explain why it was not fair on the Swiss to have their schools flooded with foreigners; they don’t speak the language, he said, and they drag down standards. He was gently but firmly booed by the audience of Swiss locals.

Everybody fears the flood, it seems—whether the Biblical flood, the flood of information, or the so-called flood of immigration. The last fear is as present in east London as in the alpine villages of Switzerland. In my novel, Rashid, a struggling minicab driver and estate agent who drifts into radicalism, fails to overcome it.

In Davos, I’d given out my newly minted card at parties and to people I’d talked to on shuttle buses. At the end of my ride, I wondered about handing it to the cabbie. When he looked at my name, would he see that I was the very thing he feared, the incarnation of the mix? I decided to tip him instead.

Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune is published by Quercus Books