The Good Immigrant Read online

  But airport security hadn’t got the memo. Returning to the glamour of Luton Airport after our festival win, ironically-named ‘British intelligence officers’ frog-marched me to an unmarked room where they insulted, threatened, then attacked me.

  ‘What kinda film you making? Did you become an actor to further the Muslim struggle?’ an officer screamed, twisting my arm to the point of snapping.

  The question is disturbing not only because it endangers artistic expression, but because it suggests our security services don’t quite grasp the nature of the terror threat we all face. A presentation outlining Al-Qaeda’s penchant for ‘theatrical’ attacks may have been taken a little literally. Their suspicion of thespians may also explain why those Guantanamo Bay prisoners are so goddamn photogenic.

  It turned out that what those Special Branch officers did was illegal. I was asked by activist lawyers if I wanted to sue, but instead I wrote an account of the incident and sent it to a few journalists. A story about the illegal detention of the actors from a film about illegal detention turned out to be too good to ignore. I was glad to shed some light on this depressing state of affairs.

  I went on to write a song inspired by the incident, called ‘Post 9/11 Blues’, full of sage advice like: ‘We’re all suspects so watch your back, I farted and got arrested for a chemical attack.’ The song got the attention of Chris Morris, who cast me in Four Lions.

  In the end, having my arm nearly torn off by people whose salary I pay led to me exploring loads of Stage Two work – loosening the Necklace. It felt good, but what about Stage Three, the Promised Land?

  It turned out there was no clear pathway for an actor of colour in the UK to go to Stage Three – to play ‘just a bloke’. Producers all said they wanted to work with me, but they had nothing I could feasibly act in. The stories that needed to be told in the multicultural mid-2000s were about the all-white mid-1700s, it seemed. I heard rumours that the Promised Land was not in Britain at all, but in Hollywood.

  The reason for this is simple. America uses its stories to export a myth of itself, just like the UK. The reality of Britain is vibrant multi-culturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of Lords and Ladies. Conversely, American society is pretty segregated, but the myth they export is of a racial melting-pot solving crimes and fighting aliens side by side.

  So America is where I was headed. But it would not be an easy journey.

  You see, the pitfalls of the audition room and the airport interrogation room are the same. They are places where the threat of rejection is real. They’re also places where you’re reduced to your marketability or threat-level, where the length of your facial hair can be a deal breaker, where you are seen, and hence see yourself, in reductive labels – never as ‘just a bloke called Dave’. The post 9/11 Necklace tightens around your neck.

  I had so far managed to avoid this in the audition room, but now I faced the same threat at US airports. It didn’t help that The Road to Guantanamo had left my passport stamped with an Axis of Evil world tour – shooting in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran within six months. I spent the flight sweating in defiance of air-conditioning, wondering what would await me.

  When I landed, the officer assessing me shared my skin colour. I wondered whether this was a good sign or if he was one of the legendarily patriotic Cuban borders officers I had heard about, determined to assess how star-spangled I was with a thumb up the anus.

  He looked at my passport, then at me, frowned and drew a big ‘P’ over my immigration card. I immediately thought it stood for Paki.

  ‘Protocol!’

  I was led down a long corridor without explanation before turning in to a side room that felt instantly familiar.

  Apart from a Chinese family and a South American pilot battling the indignity with his spotless uniform, the holding pen was filled with 20 slight variations of my own face, now all staring at me. Kinda like a Bollywood remake of Being John Malkovich. It’s a reminder that you are a type, whose face says things before your mouth opens. You are a signifier before you are a person. You are back at Stage One.

  The holding room also had that familiar audition room fear. Everyone is nervous, but the prospect of solidarity is undercut by competition. You’re all fighting to graduate out of this reductive purgatory and into some recognition of your unique personhood. In one way or another you are all saying, ‘I’m not like the rest of them.’

  The fresh-faced desk officer was no older than 23. By the time I was called up to audition for him, my spiel to explain the passport stamps was ready. I’d show a letter from the film’s producer, I’d say ‘award-winning film’, and I’d flash a shiny new DVD. But the kid questioning me seemed more nervous than I was. He’d clearly been to the same ‘beware bloodthirsty actors’ seminar as the intelligence officers at Luton.

  ‘Step back from the counter!’

  I was pinballed up the chain for a proper interrogation with a dangerously fat man and his moustache. I sat and waited, rehearsing my lines. When the interrogation came, it was more of a car crash than my Slumdog Millionaire audition.

  ‘Oh yeah? Afghanistan? What kinda movie were you making there?’

  The question shot through me with a shudder. It reminded me of the questions I faced at Luton airport, but also of the question I ask myself all the time. Was I adding to the catalogue of Stage One, Two, or Three? Was it a film my 18-year-old self wanted? Would it make the Necklace looser or tighter?

  I thought about the right way to answer him. The Road to Guantanamo was a documentary-drama, but maybe saying I was in a documentary about Guantanamo Bay wouldn’t be wise. Drama should do.

  I said, ‘Erm, it’s an award-winning drama called The Road to Guantanamo.’

  There was a long silence. He raised an eyebrow. I offered up the DVD; it had a photo of me handcuffed in an orange jumpsuit on its cover. I immediately regretted it. Longer silence. Second eyebrow went up. He leaned in.

  ‘Do you know anyone who wants to do harm to the United States?’

  I shook my head and made Hugh Grant noises, venturing a ‘gosh!’ in there somewhere. He absorbed my performance before holding up a book from my luggage. It was Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.50

  ‘What’s this book?’

  I explained, but he wasn’t really listening. He deployed a state-of-the-art intelligence protocol by Googling me, which returned a news clipping about the Luton Airport incident. Fuck. My heart sank. This was it. No Hollywood for me. I was never gonna be Brad Pitt. I wasn’t even gonna be Apu from the fucking Simpsons. What was I thinking?

  When after an agonising three hours I was waved through, I couldn’t believe it. I felt relieved, grateful, lucky – and then suddenly incensed.

  On the way out past my look-alikes, I gave a loud ‘As-Salaam aliekum’.

  No one leapt to return the greeting. Perhaps they lacked the safety net of a convincing ‘gosh!’.

  I joined a friend in Manhattan for dinner, apologising for being three hours late, and zoned out while they discussed astrology. Someone at the dinner turned to me.

  ‘You’re such a terrorist,’ she said.

  I blinked. What the fuck? My face screwed itself into the expression I wish I’d pulled instead of mewling apologetically at the border officers.

  ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’

  My friend put her arm on mine and squeezed.

  ‘Riz, she asked if you’re a Sagittarius.’

  I swallowed. Baffled faces pinned me with concern.

  ‘Right. Sorry. Yeah. Yes, I am,’ I said.

  A similar version of the same thing happened again soon after. And again. And again. And again. I grew belligerent.

  One officer asked if I had had any military training. My school had a cadet-force programme that I was swiftly ejected from, but I just answered ‘yes’ without expanding. I was asked if I had travelled to Iran, Iraq, or Afghanistan recently.

  ‘All except Iraq, but if it he
lps I’ve also been to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,’ I smiled.

  Childish perhaps, but the situation itself is infantilising. Feigning obliviousness to an officer’s suspicion and refusing to pander to it was my only defence.

  But the farce rolled on.

  Twice when applying for a US Work Visa I was subjected to a Section 221G – a lengthy background check against a global database of terrorists – which almost lost me the jobs. I saw the email correspondence between the state department and my attorney:

  ‘Hey Bill, looking at your client Mr Ahmed – pretty British-sounding name, huh? Saw his “Post 9/11 Blues” song, what’s with the “I heart Osama” routine?’

  Fair enough, you might think. Search him. Look at his racial profile and his passport stamps and his dangerously hilarious rap lyrics. But since I had been let into the US and deemed safe just the previous month, another rigmarole this month was obviously fruitless. The possibility of radicalising me in under thirty days is laughable if you know how entrenched I am in a Satanic Internet Porn addiction (and the CIA and NSA surely do).

  In the end, I was always let in, so these airport auditions were technically a success. But they involved the experience of being typecast, and when that happens enough, you internalise the role written for you by others. Now, like an over-eager method actor, I was struggling to break character.

  I tried not to ingest all the signs telling me I was a suspect. I tried not to buy into the story world of this ‘protocol’ or its Stage One stereotype of who I was. But when you have always moulded your identity to your environment and had your Necklace picked out by others, it’s not easy. I couldn’t see myself as ‘just a bloke’. I failed at every single audition I went up for.

  Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene’s emotional power and your immersion in it disappears.

  And so it dawned on me that these searches were a fictional role-play taking place in a bubble, rather than an assessment of my worth.

  This was the way to see it.

  And it turns out this is also the way to see auditions.

  The protocol lost its chokehold on me, and I started getting roles again.

  One big job secured me a proper US visa, and soon I was getting waved through without the protocol. I began inching towards the Promised Land.

  Now, both at auditions and airports, I find myself on the right side of the same velvet rope with which I was once clotheslined. But this isn’t a success story. I see most of my fellow Malkoviches still arched back, spines bent to snapping as they try to limbo under that rope. So although these days it’s likely that no one resembles me in the waiting room for an acting audition, the same is also true of everyone being waved through with me at US immigration. In both spaces, my exception proves the rule.

  Don’t get me wrong: although my US airport experience is smoother, I still get stopped before boarding a plane at Heathrow every time I fly to America. But now I find it hilarious rather than bruising. Easy for me to laugh with my work visa and strategically deployed ‘gosh!’, perhaps. But it’s also easy for me to laugh, because the more I travel, the more ridiculous the procedures become.

  Heathrow airport draws its staff from the nearby Asian suburbs of Hounslow and Southall. My ‘random selection’ flying to LA was so reliable that as I started travelling more, I went through a six-month stretch of being searched by the same middle-aged Sikh guy. I instinctively started calling him Uncle, as is the custom for Asian elders. He started calling me ‘beta’, or son, as he went through my luggage apologetically. It was heart-warming, but veered dangerously close to incest every time he had to frisk my crotch.

  ‘How are you, son?’

  ‘I’m er, ooh, er, good, Uncle.’

  As I’ve travelled more I’ve also done more film work, increasing the chances of being recognised by the young Asian staff at Heathrow. I have had my films quoted back at me by someone rifling through my underpants, and been asked for selfies by someone swabbing me for explosives.

  The last kid who searched me, a young Muslim boy with an immaculate line-beard and goatee, was particularly apologetic.

  ‘Sorry, bro. If it makes you feel any better, they search me before I fly too.’

  We laughed, not because he was joking, but because he was deadly serious. It was the perfect encapsulation of the minority’s shifting and divided self, forced to internalise the limitations imposed on us just to get by, on the wrong side of the velvet rope even when (maybe especially when) you’re on the right side of it. We cracked jokes and bumped fists.

  As I left, he called after me with a question.

  ‘Bro, what kinda film you doing next?’

  I looked at the ID badge hanging from a string around his neck. I told him I hoped it would be one he liked.

  50 Though I didn’t know it at the time, I would go on to act in the film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist – I’m sure in part because its title doubled as a description of my casting perils up until that point.

  Perpetuating Casteism

  Sarah Sahim

  Most people are aware of the discriminatory Indian caste system, but many do not realise that this form of intra-racial segregation has extended beyond South Asia and into the United Kingdom through the diaspora. While the British were not directly responsible for the caste system’s creation, their own system of classism and the violence of racism imposed on Indians during colonisation reinforced it.

  Caste is an ancient and complex social stratification system, with Dalits (Marathi for ‘oppressed’) at the very bottom and Brahmins – the spiritual and scholarly class – at the top. Such is the status of Dalits in Indian society that they are excluded from the varna (an ancient Hindu form of classifying civilisation) entirely.

  Those around today are still paying for – or, for those who are privileged, reaping the benefits of – the results of past generations’ mistakes with regards to casteism. Caste continues to affect our lives despite it being supposedly eradicated. There is a colonial ‘hangover’ of sorts and it isn’t just limited to the borders of India. It pervades other countries and the Indian diaspora. It takes place in Britain itself: the colonial source. Yet, the question remains: why do Indians who have migrated to Britain (as well as other Western countries, such as the United States) and their children continue this discriminatory practice?

  ‘Caste’ itself was a British construction, showing up on Indian census forms in 1871.51 This helped create a hierarchy of castes that worked to give Brahmins more privilege and societal advantages through their misunderstanding of the complex varna. This is not to say that the system on its own – prior to British arrival – was without fault. And notwithstanding discrimination based on caste being illegal in India, casteism has permeated factions of Indian society both domestically and internationally. The caste system has supposedly been eradicated from India,52 and was not necessarily part of the original structural inequality in other countries in the Indian diaspora. However, casteism is just as vehement today, and those who refuse to acknowledge its existence are in abundance.

  The relationship between castes is also complex. As a young light-skinned woman with a Gujarati Brahmin mother and Afghan Pashtun father, I have access to a wealth of privilege: something I have taken for granted. My family never concerned themselves with casteism and neither did I: we didn’t discriminate or abide by its rules. However, this ‘caste-blind’ attitude is extremely harmful and you cannot and must not turn a blind eye to injustices that your people are responsible for. I have the freedom to be wilfully ignorant, but others, especially Dalits, cannot afford to do so.

  The recent suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit, on January 17th 2016, reified the horrific realities of caste-based discrimination, especially amongst younger Indians. Vemula was a 25-year-old PhD student at the University of Hydera
bad. Just two weeks away from turning 26, Vemula hanged himself after being expelled from his accommodation because the university refused to carry on paying him a grant of 25,000 rupees per month, an apparently clear case of caste-based discrimination by an academic institution.

  In his suicide note he wrote, ‘I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident.’

  His death subsequently sparked protest and a much-needed discussion about the state of casteism in India.

  One of the ways the conversation has evolved is through New York-based journalist Yashica Dutt’s Documents of Dalit Discrimination blog on Tumblr.53 The page is intended for Dalits and witnesses of Dalit discrimination to share their stories; a ‘safe space for conversation that goes beyond “reservation” and “merit” and voices that echo the hurt so many of us suffer silently’.54

  As well as charting the history of discrimination, she also seeks to record the toll that the caste system continues to exact on it lower caste victims. The page documents instances of casteism denial – which in itself is casteist – instances of slurs being used against Dalits, job discrimination, assuming that someone of a lower caste was employed due to positive discrimination, unprovoked physical abuse, and how many Dalits have to attempt to pass as Brahmin in order to circumvent all of these experiences. ‘Passing’ is not only a precarious decision, but the fact that it is possible at all, just goes to prove that delineations between caste are meaningless and harmful. Dutt even used the blog to recount an abhorrently violent incident that happened to her own mother: ‘[Her neighbour] had … hit her with two different mid-sized boulders from a distance of less than two feet. One he brutally bruised her face with, using its sharp end. The other, he used to strike her forehead.’ These were stones that her mother had used to block sewage coming from his drain. Unfortunately the neighbour did not stop there as he ‘kick[ed] her twice in the shin and [struck her], using the boulders’. She immediately contacted the police but the neighbour denied attacking her. The police were of no use and she told Dutt this was because ‘everyone knows our caste’. This encapsulates the myopia through which perpetuators of the caste system perceive their world and just how tangible its effects are, but is only one of hundreds of thousands of stories about the mistreatment of Dalits.