Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

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СКАЧАТЬ the call. Then he was forced to break off to deal with a query from an assistant.

      Mir spoke badly. Mazari politics were labyrinthine, difficult enough to explain even for a native English-speaker, and he went into much more detail than necessary. It was all taking far too long. Aaron furrowed his brow but the effort was clearly too much, and little by little his expression glazed over.

      – All right, he sighed eventually, putting down his pen. I’ve heard enough. It won’t matter in the end anyway. They’ll definitely grant ILR.

      I stole a look at his notes. Mir had been speaking for fifteen minutes, yet Aaron had barely covered half a page.

      Aaron explained what would happen next. He would write to the Home Office and the Home Office would issue a case number. They could demand a hearing, but it was more likely in his opinion that they would simply upgrade Mir to full refugee status by return of post. The Home Office was supposed to adjudicate within three months, but the backlog of cases had grown so huge that it was unable to cope – which was why the Home Secretary was in the process of trying to reform the system with a new Immigration and Asylum Act.

      – I predict disaster, said Aaron, with the undisguised relish of the vindicated critic. But he added that it was a good time to claim asylum. The backlog was a political embarrassment, and the government was desperate to get the numbers down for appearance’s sake. Due process was going by the board.

      Mir sat mute throughout this discussion. Back out in the street, it soon became clear that he had understood little of it, but he didn’t seem to care. Britain, he said simply, was a good country. If Allah willed it then the system would work fine. Nevertheless, I could see that there was something on his mind.

      – This man, he said by and by. Do you think he is a good man?

      – I think he’s excellent.

      – But where is he from?

      – You mean his name?

      – Jewish? said Mir. I thought so.

      There was a pause.

      – Is that a problem?

      – The Jews are everywhere, he said, shaking his head.

      I had come across Muslim anti-Semitism often enough in the past, but it was disconcerting to find such fear and prejudice in Mir.

      – In London everyone is everywhere, I said lightly.

      – You don’t think that he might not want to help me because I am a Muslim?

      – Of course not! You shouldn’t think of him as Jewish. Think of him as your lawyer.

      Mir looked thoughtful and did not reply. We walked on past the shops and restaurants of Upper Street towards the tube station.

      – You know I am Ghilzai, he said eventually, naming one of the two main branches of the Pashtun nation. Some people say the Ghilzai are Children of Israel – one of the lost tribes. This is why the Tajiks sometimes call the Talibs ‘Bloody Jews’.

      – Well, if you’re Jewish you can’t have a problem with Aaron Stein, can you?

      – Personally I do not believe this Ghilzai tradition. It is werry stupid – maybe even Zionist propaganda.

      – So what’s your point?

      – Only that the Jews are werry clever people, he said.

      I did my best to fulfil my side of the bargain with Mir. The initial euphoria of getting him in subsided soon enough. I was uninitiated in British immigration procedures, and the grinding inefficiency of the Home Office machinery was shocking. I began belatedly to read into the subject, snipping out relevant newspaper articles and buttonholing certain lawyers and political types I knew on the drinks and dinner-party circuit. I soon concluded that the Home Office wasn’t being deliberately callous: it was simply overwhelmed. It was obvious too that the situation was getting worse. Asylum seekers were turning up in Britain in ever-increasing numbers – twenty-two thousand in 1993, thirty-two thousand in 1997, and (as it later turned out) forty-six thousand in 1998. No wonder the officials couldn’t cope. Mir was part of a 42 per cent rise in asylum seekers over the previous year alone. In some cases they had been waiting literally years for a final decision. Such people lived in fear of a knock on the door, or perhaps just a formulaic letter that would launch them back to whatever disaster area they had come from. While the civil servants deliberated, these people were forced to live in a terrible limbo, an immigrant half-world whose inhabitants were in constant dread of the future and who had almost no status in the present. It seemed a cruel sort of sanctuary to offer people who had fled for their lives, and it was certainly no foundation for a young man trying to start a new life in the West. I resolved to do one more thing for Mir to make his limbo period as short as possible. I spoke to an uncle, a former Foreign Office Minister.

      – Go and see his MP, he advised. It’s amazing what a letter on House of Commons writing paper will do to speed things up. It’s one of the few areas of government where the MP system actually works.

      This wasn’t quite the offer of direct intervention I had hoped for. Mir was disappointed too, because where he came from nepotism was not so much the oil in the engine as the motor that drove the entire machine. But it was still a sensible suggestion, so not long afterwards we set off together to visit Tony Banks, the Member of Parliament for West Ham, in his constituency office in Stratford High Street.

      We were late as usual for our appointment. Mir, full of enthusiasm for the possibilities of London life and excited by the prospect of the short journey to Stratford, had insisted on procuring a minicab to take us there from Mafeking Avenue.

      – I’ll be two minutes, he cried; and disappeared out through the door for thirty. Hamid was out, and I was left alone in the front room, nibbling sugared mulberries and listening to the silence of the suppurating house. Mir returned at last in a dented Toyota driven by a decrepit Pashtun tribesman who spoke no English and had even less idea than I did how to get to Stratford High Street.

      – He is a werry good man, Mir explained in a whisper. He lives close to here. I believe he is in need of the work.

      It was a wet London evening that slowed the traffic in the tortuous gyratory system of central Stratford to a crawl. I sat low in the collapsed and greasy front seat, swatting irritably at the condensation on the windscreen and trying to match the prismatic chaos in the dark outside to the tattered road map on my lap. Ever deferential, Mir had insisted on sitting in the back. He chattered happily at the deaf old tribesman, who turned out to be an Afridi, from the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.

      Tony Banks’s office was in a lone redbrick Victorian building, incongruous amidst the 1970s brutalism that surrounded it. The windows were protected by stout grilles. A large Labour Party banner mounted on the façade seemed defiant, like a Union Jack above some lonely imperial outpost in a foreign land.

      We arrived so late that the officious young volunteer on the reception desk almost turned us away. We had missed our slot, he said, and there were many other people wanting to see Mr Banks. From the little waiting room over his shoulder a dozen brown faces silently turned to look at us, upturned white eyes in a small sea of turbans and beards. But the volunteer relented when we pleaded, and eventually we were granted an audience.

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