The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns

by Dohra Ahmad

He met dozens of other Abrahims, men who promised him that when they made it to London the rest of their lives would finally resolve into the picture they had imagined. “It’s different there,” they always said. There had to be at least one place in this world where life could be lived in accordance with the plans and dreams they had concocted for themselves. For most, that place was London; for some it was Paris, and for a smaller but bolder few it was America. That faith had carried them this far, and even though it was weakening, and needed constant readjustment (“Rome is not what I thought it would be. France will surely be better”), it persisted out of sheer necessity. By the time my father finally made it to London, eighteen months later, he had begun to think of all the men he met as variations of Abrahim, all of them crippled and deformed by their dreams.