The new Europeans: Trimming beards and selling beer in Barcelona

For Pakistanis in the city, life is increasingly squeezed.

BARCELONA:

Ask the Pakistanis of Barcelona why they chose this city over other European options and two answers dominate. Firstly, it’s warmer and brighter than the pale-skied Anglo-Saxon north of the continent. Secondly, of more significance, it takes three years for a Pakistani to get a full work permit.

A fair amount of time, but having your ‘papers’ means you’re set, including full entitlement to state benefits. The trouble, as I found out from a lonesome Pakistani, aged thirty and too embarrassed to want his name printed, is how to survive the three years as an illegal worker.

At midnight on a week day, the man was on the street selling cans of beer to those keen on prolonging their merriment through swerving walks around town going from bar to club. His body and face sagged, but his eyes were alert predators: watching for customers and, with more animation, the police. It could be worse, he said, telling of friends who had worked in sweat shops on the city’s periphery. “The situation at home is so bad. This is bad too but it will be better in the future,” the beer-seller said, swinging his four-pack like the pendulum of a clock.

During the day in El Raval, the central part of Barcelona which is home to many Pakistanis, time seemed to stand still. It was perhaps siesta time. Prostitutes waited with bare-faced boredom, underemployed men stood about holding up the walls, Pakistani immigrants sat in barbershops, talking.

S Ali, 25, said he “would love to go home” though he might be forced to for reasons unforeseen when he moved here a few years ago. Business has steadily declined since the financial crash and everyone is feeling the pinch. Ali is struggling to pay his bills. Rents are about 550 Euros for a two-bedroom flat, which is often shared by four to six men.

He’s also furious with PIA, who despite running two direct flights in and out of Barcelona every week, are still more expensive than other airlines, in his view. They are prohibitively expensive, Ali says; thus he has not been able to go home and see his family.

The other characters gathered in the barbershop are also unhappy with the Pakistani Consulate in Barcelona, specifically set up to deal with the growing numbers in the city. For one, a 58-year-old man who has full legal status and sings the praises – indeed, dances flamenco – when he speaks about the Spanish government, it is like “being back in a piece of Pakistani land” with its inefficiency and bureaucracy.

There’s less indignation, more incomprehension, about the 2008 raids in the city in which a dozen Pakistanis were arrested for suspected involvement with al Qaeda. Four years on, the community feels that its image took a big blow – but this was only temporary. There are five small mosques in the area and, considering the tilt towards Islamophobia in Europe, Pakistanis in Barcelona seem very comfortable in practicing their faith and customs. Those around them, by and large, seem equally at peace.

El Raval is, ever so slowly, becoming gentrified. At a chic café, the owner, a Spaniard in her fifties, says she likes and respects the Pakistani community, but can’t say she really knows them. “They work and they stick to themselves.” In a generation, this partition might perhaps have been eroded. For now, peaceful if not intermingled coexistence is surely good enough.

Meanwhile, Jagjeet Singh, 30, says that in Barcelona it is as if Partition never happened, describing the life of Indians and Pakistanis in El Raval. His is a modern epic, though to many immigrants in Western Europe it is as banal as it is typical and horrible.

Five years ago, as a poor man “who had nothing in the world”, Jagjeet left his native Faridkot in Indian Punjab for Delhi. He took a flight to Ethiopia. From there he made his way to West Africa, and from there to Tenerife, an island belonging to Spain. Trying his hand at street-hawking for sheer survival, he was arrested for working illegally. Released four months later, he flew to Barcelona and started the long journey to legality. He now owns two barbershops in El Raval – I can testify that he trims a beard with the care of a man who has had more than a few scrapes in his life.

For Jagjeet, “everyone is together here, Indian, Pakistani, Punjabi, Kashmiri.” Pointing to a man he was just bantering with in Punjabi, he says: “Look at him, he is from Pakistan.” The friend laughs and says, in accented Spanish, “I am from Barcelona.” They high-five as men from the subcontinent do when sharing a joke, before carrying on their lives as the new Europeans.


Published in The Express Tribune, March 6^th, 2012.