From Immigrant to Expat and Back Again

Where do I really belong?

Hello friends,

This is a personal essay I wrote back in 2021. With the racist and Islamophobic riots currently taking place all across the UK, I wanted to share my perspective as a British-born Pakistani Muslim woman who has lived abroad as an ‘expat’. I am sharing this piece exactly as it was published 3 years ago. I pray you can take something from it.

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Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

I was six years old when I first heard the word ‘paki’ being thrown around the playground. It wasn’t used in a derogatory way — at least that’s what I thought — rather, it was just a couple of little white boys repeating words they must have heard at home, without really understanding what they meant. But still, it made me feel uncomfortable, even though I didn’t know why.

I never really understood that my family was different. I mean, we spoke a different language at home, I wore traditional clothes at the weekends and I wasn’t allowed to eat anything with pork in it — but I still didn’t realise we were different. I guess that’s the beauty of being a child.

When I was really young, our neighbours, the cutest elderly white couple, would turn up on our doorstep every Christmas and every Easter with presents. My best friend in my primary school days was white; I spent afternoons with her at her grandparents’ home and sleepovers with her at home with her single mum, teaching her Bollywood dances. They never really made me feel that I was different apart from the one time she innocently linked her arm through mine in the playground and proudly said, “You’re the coolest Asian person I know!”.

But behind all that I knew and the way I saw the world as a child, there was a dark history and even a dark present reality that I, in my childhood innocence, was oblivious to.

I didn’t know that my grandparents, having immigrated to the UK from Pakistan in the 70s, had to live in constant fear of when the next brick would be hurtled through the living room window. I didn’t know they woke up some days to mounds of dog shit having been maliciously shoved through their letterbox. I didn’t know that their car windows were boarded up with cardboard because they had been mercilessly smashed yet again. I didn’t know that despite being loved by the elderly white couple that lived next door, they were equally despised by the family of eight that lived just across the road.

Even as I grew older, throughout school, college and university, being of Pakistani descent didn’t really ever make me feel like I was less than. After primary school, I was surrounded by other children of immigrants as we navigated our way through life, and we often stuck together in groups. In my all-girls high school, I did often wonder why the brown girls only hung out with the brown girls, why the white girls only hung out with the white girls and why the black girls only hung out with the black girls. I mean, I could see the divide, but I had never really outrightly experienced racism, although by this time I was well aware that it existed. More than anything, I just thought that this was how things were and I was honestly quite proud of my culture, the clothes, the food and my religion, happily and openly sharing everything.

I didn’t bat an eye when classmates or teachers mispronounced my name. I didn’t really care that the white kids across the road would never play with us. But again, I was still a child and that was my innocence. I knew I was a child of immigrants, and that was okay. It didn’t make a difference. I was just me — even if others saw me as the other.

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I woke up in Paradise in mid-2016, aged 27 and 6 months pregnant with my second bubba. My husband and I had decided just a couple of months previously that we would grab life by the balls and move to Mauritius — the tropical island home of his parents’ birth. How ironic that they left a life of peace, love and sunshine to move to London, UK, in the pursuit of a better life, and how now their British-born son and his wife were returning to the island decades later in their pursuit of a better life. It’s funny how life works out, eh?

I realised very quickly the power that a British accent held in Mauritius. Although we could blend in quite easily with the locals, sporting the same brown skin, brown eyes and dark hair, I realised that once I opened my mouth and they heard that I didn’t speak like them but more like the rulers from their colonial past, things changed.

My accent highlighted that I wasn’t Mauritian. My accent showed that I was, in fact, British. My British accent made me an expat. And in the world we live in, expat and immigrant are two very different things, despite being the same.

My British accent helped to land me two weekly features in the biggest and most popular English newspaper on the island. My British accent helped to win me a large social media management contract with one of the biggest luxury hotel groups on the island. My British accent helped me to secure a fully booked gynaecologist for the birth of my daughter, and the only doctor on the entire island who offered pool births.

My British accent was a commodity in a country where people were still deeply conditioned by their colonial heritage; a country where the locals still viewed the western foreigner as somewhat superior to them. It really saddens me and on some level angers me when I think of how deeply Britain’s colonial history runs and how much it continues to affect millions around the world, consciously and unconsciously, even today.

It was because of my British accent that I was heralded above others in a country that I wasn’t born in and barely even knew existed until I met my husband. That was me, with my brown skin and Pakistani heritage. Now imagine life for the white expats on the island? And it’s the same pretty much everywhere: the Westerners are expats, not immigrants. They could never be immigrants, right?

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Two years into our new life in Paradise, after having battled mild onsets of post-natal depression and what I believe was fully-fledged ‘expat depression’ (yes, it’s a thing), I was finally settling into my new home country, proud of the life we were building and excited for all that was to come.

We decided to book our first visit back to the UK, which would be a 2-month stay. I’d missed so much — family, friends, British supermarkets, Amazon Prime deliveries and pavements, to name but a few. I was overjoyed to be going back home, oblivious to the fact that re-entering my home country would change things I’d once believed to be part of my identity. My re-entry to the UK after two years of living away was about to change everything.

After a 15-hour trip, straddled with two young children and through sleep-clogged eyes, the grey streets, grey buildings and grey skies of London were a welcome sight and at that moment seemed to be the most beautiful things I had ever seen. The taxi ride from the airport to my inlaws’ home in East London felt like a celebratory parade within myself. I was home. I was finally home.

Or was I?

“Once again, I return to my home country as a foreigner,” I wrote in an Instagram post, a few days later.

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“Being the British-born daughter of Pakistani immigrant parents, going “back home” always meant returning to their homeland of Pakistan. But the two times I have been back and been old enough to remember it, Pakistan never truly felt like home. As much as the farm animals in our backyard and the smell of cooking outside on an open fire brought a beautiful kind of peace to my heart, in many ways I still felt like a stranger in a foreign land: among cousins who referred to me as “angrezi” (English) and aunties who mocked my attempts at speaking Urdu.

Now, being a British-born Pakistani living on the beautiful island of Mauritius, going “back home” means returning to the U.K.: the land I was born and raised in; the country that gave me an education, healthcare and a home; the place of my family and all of my friends and countless experiences and memories.

Just before leaving Mauritius a few days ago for our first trip home since we moved there almost 2 years ago, I was filled with a mixture of emotions. I felt nervous, apprehensive and excited all at the same time. I felt like I was suddenly bursting free of the little bubble we had created on that tiny little island and returning to the real world.

I wondered how much everything would have changed; especially the people and places dearest to my heart. But more than anything, I contemplated how much I had changed in these 2 years since making one of the biggest decisions of my entire life and whether I would be able to slot back into the life I had left behind. Would I now feel like a foreigner in the country I had always known as home?”

With all intention to return to Mauritius, our 2-month stay turned into a 6-month stay; that 6-month stay turned into a 2-year stay, and at the time of writing this, we’ve now been back in England for 3 years and counting. But England, since returning from Mauritius, is not the England I once knew. England is different now, or perhaps, I am different. Or maybe, it’s neither and I am now just seeing clearly what was there all along.

We returned to an England that was more divided than I had ever seen it before. In the throes of Brexit, my Facebook feed was filled with pro-Brexiters and anti-Brexiters who couldn’t seem to establish any middle ground or mutual understanding. For me, Jeremy Corbyn was a hero who stood up for the things I believed in and gave me hope for a better Britain. But for some of my white Facebook friends, he was a threat and a foe and needed to be gotten rid of. This was also a time when Trump was in power in the US, and suddenly undercover racists seemed to be crawling out from under the woodwork everywhere I looked.

And then, for the first time in my life that I was actually aware of, I began to experience racism in person, directed at me. I knew it existed, even some of my nearest and dearest had experienced it directly. But I never had. Not like this.

You see, returning to England and then subsequently deciding we were going to stay for many different reasons, meant that we had to kind of start again from scratch. It meant that we needed to move out of my in-laws’ home, in a very multi-cultural area filled with South Asian and Eastern European people, and find a place to live of our own.

We ended up moving just a 15-minute drive away from my in-laws’ house — but those 15 minutes felt like moving from one country to another; the differences were just so vast.

In my new neighbourhood, every other house harboured a glaring white flag with an angry red cross marked across the middle — and there was no football tournament happening which could have been used to justify them. From my new garden where I envisioned the kids happily playing, the English flag swayed in the wind in a neighbouring garden, right beside an ugly black skull and crossbones flag, casting a dark shadow over the vision in my head. Not exactly the warmest of welcomes, I’m sure you can imagine.

It wasn’t the fact that anybody said anything outrightly or did anything completely terrible. But it was the looks. It was the hushed tones when people hurried past. It was the defiance on their faces when they looked at us and expected us to move out of the way. It was the unreciprocated smiles, the stealing of supermarket checkouts, and having to explain to our children that so-and-so was probably just having a bad day.

I’d never really felt like a foreigner in the country I called home. But, after having re-entered the country after experiencing life elsewhere, the truth is… now I kinda did.

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The thing about society is that it is constantly churning up new ways in which to divide us. Yesterday it was Brexit. Today it is COVID vaccinations. For centuries, it has been race and religion. Tomorrow it could be anything. And it is this very notion of ‘the other’, of ‘them vs us’, that is subtly and in some cases not-so-subtly, destroying humanity.

In Britain, I am an immigrant — an outsider who doesn’t belong.

In Mauritius, I am an expat — superior because I am British.

In Pakistan, I am English and Pakistani, but not quite Pakistani enough.

For many of us in our human experience, wherever we go or whatever we do, we don’t really belong anywhere. There will always be a reason for others to see us as the other.

So today, let us remember, even if others may have temporarily forgotten, that wherever we go and whatever we do, the one constant, unifying truth — for all of us — is that we are human, and therefore we all belong.

Expat? Immigrant? I am neither. I am human. Only human.

We belong wherever we are and most importantly, we belong to each other. For me, no amount of unwelcoming English flags, dirty looks or angry Facebook statuses can ever change that.

With Light, Love & Peace,

Sabah x

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