Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

he had extracted himself from the clutches of the ex-tour guides and was installed in his own bedsit in Kitchener Road, a ten-minute walk from Queen’s Market and the West Ham football stadium.^* It was a warm evening and it was pleasant to stroll past the shops on Green Street. I had been back in the country for less than twenty-four hours, so that familiar things seemed somehow marvellous, almost poetic in the way they represented London and home. I heard music in the squealing brakes of a black cab; a polystyrene coffee cup skewered on the wheelnut of a Routemaster bus made me wish for a camera. But the shops along the pavement were as unfamiliar as ever. They were trading in a socio-economic bracket wholly alien to me, while the variety of races and creeds they represented was repeated nowhere else that I had ever been.

      Yet there were intelligible clues to the immigrant history of this place. In the faded telephone numbers that the shopfronts carried, the countless newcomers who had washed the long shores of east London’s High Streets had left tidemarks. As all Londoners know, the telephone-number prefix for the capital changed with annoying frequency during the 1990s. Businesses were required to change their stationery or the sides of their delivery vans three times in ten years, from 01 to 071 or 081, then to 0171 or 0181, finally to 0207 or 0208. However, West Ham’s shopkeepers either couldn’t afford or couldn’t be bothered to make the necessary adjustments. For instance, Place Victoire (African cosmetic produits, exotic food & CD video), Bindia (Specialists in wedding sarees, suites and lenghas) and Farha Fashion (Wedding accessories, beauty cases, Sherwani & Kabuli) all advertised 0181 numbers. Their owners had clearly arrived here before the 0208s such as Al-Madina (Islamic goods, videos, ahrams, hijabs and Islamic clothing), Bismillah (Gent’s hairdressers) and Malik Hairstylist (& International call box) – but after the 081-prefixed Good Luck Restaurant (Chinese takeaway) – while Carlos, the eponymous owner of a unisex hairdressing salon still displaying an 01 number, must have regarded the whole lot of them as irritating parvenus. Meanwhile Duncan’s, a Dickensian-looking institution selling traditional East End pie, mash and eels (jellied and stewed), was sandwiched between an 0208 halal butchers and the 0181 Rana Food Store (purveyors of green bananas and minicabs), and was so old and established that it didn’t deign to carry a phone number at all.

      I felt I had discovered an intriguing new sociology, and arrived at Mir’s new address quite pleased with myself, but his appearance at the door checked me. His face looked grey and he had lost weight. He ushered me into a sour-smelling hall and up a dingy staircase, a worse place by far than the Mafeking Avenue house. His room was tiny and he was paying a Rachmanite Pakistani landlord £40 a week for it, no deposit or advance required. He had cleaned it thoroughly, but damp still seeped into the corner of one ceiling and the frame of the curtainless window looked rotten.

      He sat me down in the only chair and himself on the mattress on the floor and began to relate the latest news from Mazar. He had managed to speak to an uncle who had a farm fifteen miles west of Mazar, near the ancient ruined city of Balkh. His father, younger brother and cousin had somehow managed to get out of prison and were now in hiding nearby. It seemed the Taliban had accused them of being traitors and spies, of hoarding boxes full of dollars and gold, and of much else besides. It was trumped-up nonsense, and I knew that Mir’s earlier collusion with Western journalists was largely responsible. His younger brother Musa had been tortured, left hung upside down for days. The jailers had beaten his feet so badly that there was some question as to whether he would ever walk properly again, while their father had been forced to listen to his screams from a neighbouring cell in a bid to extort a confession, or money, or both. His father was old, and the weeks in prison had gravely damaged his health. Mir said he could no longer sleep at nights. He was in despair, and didn’t know what to do. Squatting there on the mattress, his pitifully few possessions neatly arranged around him – a cheap alarm clock, a copy of the Koran – he suddenly looked small and sad, as though someone had punched him, the loneliest person in the world.

      I questioned him about his fellow tenants. He replied that two Pakistanis, a Malaysian and an Iranian also lived there, all of them men. The Malaysian was all right. He worked at the Ford plant in Dagenham, three or four miles to the east. But Mir strongly disapproved of the Iranian, who for asylum purposes was pretending to be an Afghan, the con trick that Aaron Stein had mentioned. The two Pakistanis mostly kept themselves to themselves, although Mir suspected that one of them, too, was an illegal immigrant. They shared the downstairs sitting room that had been partitioned into two bedsits, leaving just a small kitchen as the only non-bedroom living area. There were two bathrooms, but the loo in one of them was permanently blocked and so smelly that the room was unusable. Mir said he spent much time cleaning and sprucing up the other bathroom, but that here too he was fighting a losing battle. A newly installed shower curtain had already been torn, and no one had owned up to it.

      We went down to the kitchen to make tea. The surfaces were squalid and the carpet was stained and greasy with trodden-in food. There was a bench along one wall and a single broken chair by a rickety round table. Mir, explaining that they mostly cooked eggs and rice, was crestfallen to find that someone had been into the fridge and stolen the milk he had bought especially for my visit.