Two Immigrants
I.
A few summers ago, on the final day of a cycling trip from Lisbon to Seville, I stopped in a small village to wait out the hottest part of the day. It was the siesta hour of deserted streets and shuttered shops. I slumped against the wall of a small store, pulled my knees back into a slither of shade, and closed my eyes.
I woke to a voice calling bhai (brother) and saw a brown-skinned man stumbling across the street towards me, a beer bottle in one hand. “India?!” he announced triumphantly as he reached me. He was from Delhi and wanted to know if I was too.
I grew up in the suburbs of London, England, but my roots are Indian and when I encounter fellow South Asians I have a sensory reaction. I hear Hindi love songs, sad and simple, and think of family weddings where cousins sleep on top of each other in houses filled with noise. A warmth of recognition spreads through my body.
But recognition can easily give way to discomfort. If I meet an immigrant man, I also imagine the struggles he shares with my father—to survive, earn money, and carve out stability from precariousness—struggles that I will never have to overcome, but whose inheritance has indelibly shaped me. Guilt and confusion strangle the warmth.
The man from Delhi dragged me to a café terrace. We sat on stools at a small table, and he told me stories of Indian businessmen he knew across Europe. I listened but was distracted, speculating about why he was drunk and alone in a tiny Spanish village while everyone else slept.
Sensing my unease, he became clownlike, eager to please. He jumped on a child’s tricycle that had been left on the terrace and rode it with his knees bumping his chin. He produced an electric fan from his pocket, held it to the bike like a motor, and challenged me to a race to Seville. Reluctantly, I was charmed. I began to relax.
When I insisted I needed to rest, he took me to a small park and pointed out a fountain—“you can bathe there”—and wooden tables and benches—“for sleeping.” As I had guessed but hadn’t been certain, he was homeless.
I leaned against a tree and watched as he selected a bench and lay on his back. He folded his hands beneath his neck to cushion his head, then lifted his knees and tucked his legs to keep them from falling off the wood surface. Almost immediately, he began to snore.
I lay down on the ground and tried to nap too, but twigs scratched at my legs. Stubbornly awake, I brooded on what chain of events had brought this man’s life to a small patch of grass in Andalusia. And I imagined my father alone too in a country not his own.
II.
As the child of materially successful immigrants to the West, you learn at a young age that you have been saved from the places your parents left. Even if there are no trips back to the home country, or multiple migrations have made it unclear where exactly home is, you understand that life there is brutal. Poverty is in your blood and you must not forget that, yet you will never experience it firsthand.
You also realize that, while you are safe here and lucky to be so, your parents do not feel at home. You see it in the accent your mother adopts when she answers the phone or the way your father drinks tea from a cup, rather than slurping it from a saucer, when in public.
Finally, you learn not to ask questions about the past. An ambient anxiety swathes your childhood, but it is an anxiety that cannot be spoken.
III.
For many immigrants, Portugal, where I have lived for several years, is a kind of purgatory: a country of limited economic hope but great legal opportunity.
Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Nepalis pay brokers up to $15,000 for a visa to visit another EU state. Then they fly to Portugal and start job hunting. It is the start of a Faustian pact: up to a decade’s low wage work in restaurant kitchens or on vast fruit farms in return for a Portuguese passport that will eventually allow them to move again, to the rich north of Europe they dreamt of back home.
Five years ago, I too moved to Portugal, but from London on my British passport. Like many other youngish Brits, Americans, Dutch, and French, I am on the run from rising rents and declining livability at home. For us Lisbon is a warm Berlin or an Atlantic Barcelona: a pretty city to be weighed against others as a place to start afresh.
Our move to Europe’s periphery is a watered-down version of what middling Europeans have been doing for centuries. Once, colonies in Africa, Asia, and the New World appeared to be empty spaces where a little capital could be transformed into generational riches. Today, the destinations are nearshore and already largely developed. Our dreams are shrunken too: salvaging some disposable income and a flat for ourselves.
IV.
To live among newly arrived South Asian immigrants while enjoying far greater freedom to move is to pick at the scab of my family’s history of migrations. The shop beneath my apartment building is run by two Bangladeshi brothers. We are friends and often share moments of recognition: nostalgia for a Hindi song playing on one of their mobile phones or how the smell of fresh coriander recalls childhood mealtimes. That familiar feeling of warmth spreads through my body.
But sometimes when I stop by early in the morning, the flap of plastic that marks the entrance to the storage area hangs open. The brothers also sleep there, on a bunk bed surrounded by clothes and toiletries, and I will see one of them brushing his teeth or shaving. We exchange greetings, but I leave embarrassed by my privilege and estranged from our companionship.
Occasionally a South Asian immigrant to Portugal will ask me the glaring question: what am I, a British citizen, doing in this poor outpost of Europe instead of London, where they long to be. I have to explain why I have broken my family’s generational chain of upward migration from India to South Africa, from Johannesburg to London, and then my own brief advance to New York.
The answer should be simple: I came to Portugal for something slower and simpler, because it is easier. But that does not sound right to me. As a child I absorbed the idea that to be South Asian was to struggle. Without that fight my brownness feels at best contingent.
V.
Last summer I watched the Portuguese men’s cricket team play against Malta on Lisbon’s only pitch, an hour outside the city. Apart from one white man representing Portugal, both sides were made up exclusively of South Asian players. Recent immigrants to the EU, hoping to move further north, for now they represent their temporary southern European homes in a British colonial sport.
While watching the game a fellow brown-skinned spectator asked if I would like to play for a team in the local league. Early one Sunday morning I arrived at a metro station to catch a ride to the ground. Three Pakistani men were waiting in a car. They addressed me first in Punjabi and then Hindi before I explained I could speak neither. The captain turned to face me from the front seat and asked simply, “How can this be? You are Indian?”
During the game I was the butt of jokes that I could not understand but every other player could. (Along with the shared goal of northern Europe, Hindi is the thread that links Nepali to Bangladeshi and Indian to Pakistani in Portugal). I chased balls dutifully through the hot afternoon and berated myself for expecting to feel closer to these South Asian men than the white English-speaking family who owned the ground.
At these moments the gulf that separates me from my immigrant contemporaries in Lisbon, and my parents’ experience in the UK, feels unbreachable.
But like the man from Delhi in the village near Seville, the cricket players and I are linked. We share skin color, common ancestry, and a culture some of whose rhythms I feel in my body, even if we are divided by passport, class, and language. The cricketers, in a rare part of Portuguese life where they have power, focused on the gaps between us, whereas the man from Delhi, lonely, drunk, perhaps simply bored, reached out over what we share.
Ajay Makan (@ajay.makan) is a British South Asian writer, living in Lisbon, Portugal. He writes an occasional newsletter about race and immigration in Portugal. https://lisbonincolour.substack.com/