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| FEATURES |
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But his first book – Sorrows of the Moon – has an instinctive feel for the guts of London with his observations of Brick Lane tailors and café life in West Hampstead. Ahmed is a night porter at the Marriot Hotel in Swiss Cottage – a working regime that gives him days to wander round his new metropolis. This freedom – long, lonely hours in a big city – gave him the idea for Sorrows of the Moon. He wanted to chronicle the life of an immigrant settling in. His style is straightforward: English is his second language and it means he strips away the descriptive, frilly tricks travel writers often use. But his reason to move to England from Pakistan was a deep rooted admiration of the English language. “When I was growing up in Kashmir, London was the centre of the world as far as literature is concerned,” he recalls. And that meant when he touched down in a foreign city and wondered where he should base himself, he decided to be as close to the British Library as possible. He’d heard of the reading room and had a recurring image in his mind. “Iqbal Ahmed with his head buried in the tomes he’d heard about when he lived in Kashmir,” he says. In Kashmir he worked for his family’s wholesale company, a tradesman’s life. His family are not, as he puts it, literary, although they are great story tellers. “They had never read a book in their lives,” he says. “But one day in Kashmir I found a second hand bookshop, wandered in and picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment. “I had not read anything before. I was in my early 20s, and a world of words suddenly opened up to me.” Sorrows of the Moon is divided into ten chapters, each one a snap shot story of London life that it is easy to imagine being told to others in a Kashmiri home: an oral style of story telling, written down. “In England you have such a tradition of writing down stories. And it goes further: so many other nations have their books translated into English – it is truly the common language. This is London life as told by an Kashmiri storyteller.” Ahmed’s book is the hidden story of the immigrant experience: the world of second generation British-Asian shop keepers, working 80 hours a week, because when he first arrived he relied on the jobs they gave him to put food on the table. “I did any thing to make ends meet,” he says. “I wanted to be a writer, but I never had the money to do it. I had to work every hour I could just to live each day.” Like the immigrant communities he writes about, his book starts in the place first generations of immigrants have called home, from Chinese and Indian people in the age of the East India Company, eastern European Jews escaping 19th-century pogroms through to the modern Bengali families: the East End. As each chapter unfolds, Ahmed concentrates on areas further west and north, as if he were mimicking the routes immigrant communities take as they get established economically. And although his writing portrays his excitement of being in a new place, he also records how tough it is to be alone in London. “People treated me badly, others were nasty to me,” he admits. “But then there were those who were nice to me, and when you come to a big city and you are on your own, small gestures like that make a big difference.” And after settling in South End Green, he found Hampstead had a preoccupation that made his loneliness more acute. “Hampstead has a charm but there are so many people who live there who seem to prefer the south of France,” he says. “It has lost its communal atmosphere. “There is a feeling of solitude there, of closed doors, epitomised for me by solitary figures walking across Hampstead Heath. Such sights gave me a great feeling of loneliness.” And the people he has met find their way into the book, from the Balkan mistress of a west Hampstead businessman to a north African kiosk worker selling tat to tourists. “I was happy to see people who have come here from all over the world, just like me – that’s why I wrote about them.” |
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