The Pakistanis in the Park: a long weekend in Trieste

one of the lads warned, I reassured them I wouldn’t use their real names, three Pakistani men sitting in the Giardino di Piazza della Libertà, a small rectangular park spread in front of Trieste’s central train station, which was how some arrived. We spoke in Punjabi.

They were pure Pakistanis, I was born to Pakistani parents and brought up in the UK, but when I wear a shalwar and a kameez, tear a chapati with my hands to eat a curry of lentils I can feel like them.

Why are you here, I asked? Pakistan is shit they answered, there’s nothing there for us, Shehbaz Sharif can go fuck his sister, he’s a crook, his family have ruined the country, they continued.

I didn’t need to check if the current Pakistani prime minister had one since telling someone to have sex with their sister is a common insult in Pakistan. I wasn’t in Trieste to meet them.

Walking nearby I’d seen Nepalese men, Afghans and then heard the Pakistanis, so squatted to chat, one had been there two days, another five months, all sleeping rough, the park was strewn with space blankets.

There was a public tap where they wet their mouths as Italian girls skipped through with ice creams.

A statue of Elisabeth of Bavaria, known as Sisi, sat near. She was murdered in 1898 by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, who on being asked why he had driven a file into her heart declared

Because I am an anarchist. Because I am poor. Because I love workers and want the rich to die.

Sisi had not settled into royal life and from Trieste would find adventure on the sea, in Greece at the age of 51 she got a tattoo of an anchor on her shoulder and stayed in the Miramare castle in the summer where today Italians took lunchtime naps while waves crash against the rocks.

Her poetry searched for a place.

O'er thee, like thine own sea birds

I'll circle without rest

For me earth holds no corner

To build a lasting nest

I didn’t want to interrupt the men who were in full flow having gotten past suggesting incest to tell me why they were sat in an Italian garden.

One had recently left London. Call him Ahmed. His work visa was ending which meant returning to Pakistan, instead he sneaked onto a truck’s trailer which travelled to France in a ferry possibly passing migrants coming the other way in inflatable boats, the truck left the ferry and stopped and he used a knife to cut himself out, the driver stared but didn’t stop him, he said he ran away and made it here to Italy by walking.

I was familiar with these stories. I’d trekked with a Sudanese man high in the mountains evading the Italian police on their skidoos as he made his way to France, I’d infiltrated an Iranian people-smuggling gang in the Calais jungle, coming close to witnessing a murder while an undeterred agent told me the price for a space in a boat, I’d stood waist deep in the sea secretly filming Syrians asking me to get in the boat, had met the brother of one of those who fell from the plane in Kabul as the US left, he showed me the video of his dead sibling on the runway, a body that had hit the earth at speed, broken and bleeding, and I’d met a young woman in Kabul who with a little bit of money and luck made it to Paris.

I’d heard how the police in the Balkans forced migrants naked and burned their clothes, these men repeated that. Pakistan to Iran to Turkey to Greece and then the burning of the clothes, after which came Italy, then France and those boats the UK is trying to stop.

Why?

Pakistan is shit

they reminded me. Ahmed said living rough and getting what little work he could he was able to feed his family in Pakistan.

As we talked a young Italian man dropped a carrier bag in the centre of us, “Cioccolato”, he said making a circle with his finger at us all before walking off. Inside were three gold Lindt bunnies and two large chocolate bars. They’re good people, said Ahmed who I found was from the same Punjabi village as my parents.

If you’d put the UK and Pakistan in our hands and said choose one, we’d both have said the UK. My dad had made that choice, I hadn’t had to choose.

The Italians are good, he carried on, I don’t even mind that they walk around naked, by which he meant T-shirts, shorts and skirts, they would be perfect if they accepted Islam, he concluded.

Another interjected, call him Bilal. Why don’t you just respect them and they’ll respect you, he asked, why do they have to change? Let them live how they want. We should learn their language, he advanced, they’ve just given you some food.

Another disagreed saying the Italians should indeed all become Muslims and that everything that happened to them was because of Allah. From the burning of the clothes to the Lindt bunnies.

But Bilal argued they were here for a reason. Couldn’t they see they were better off? The lads agreed and got back to calling the Sharif family crooks.

Bilal said the local police were looking for a group of Pakistani migrants who had used knives against some Afghan refugees. Why were they fighting I asked, village idiots he answered, fighting over nothing.

Bilal was a thinker, softly-spoken, smiled as I spoke to him in his language, he’d made it over hanging onto part of a train he’d been directed to by a smuggler, he’d spent money getting to that point and this was the only choice offered to him, he was scared he’d fall off and be crushed under the wheels, he’d seen men die and said they kept appearing to him, he felt sorry for their families who would never know if they were dead on a track or a mountain or in the sea or somewhere in the sun licking ice creams and enjoying their lives, he wished he knew who they were, they were somebody’s sons, he said.

I don’t understand it, I need help and when I feel like the world doesn’t want to help me, I don’t want to live in it, the Italians have been good to me, he repeated to the lads.

He was one of the lucky ones, hundreds of Pakistanis had drowned off the coast of Greece in June 2023. Pakistanis had also fallen from planes near Heathrow in London like Muhammad Ayaz in 2001, whose father said

“My son was as strong as four men, but he died in search of bread.”

I went back to the man who wanted to convert the Italians.

I didn’t want Islam for Italy, I wanted this Italy.

On a ferry returning from Muggia after visiting a friend, a middle-aged man looked at me as I stared at him for a few seconds which hung around for some time. He was commanding a small white motorboat pushing into the Adriatic Sea, a bronze lithe body, bright red shorts his only clothing, sunglasses and hair swept back, sat next to him was a beautiful woman with her black hair pointing to the marina they’d left, looking forwards perhaps towards a spot on the sea they knew.

I wanted to be him. I wanted to be on that boat. I wanted the Italians to walk around naked. I wanted to be naked.

I wanted the sun on the Piazza Unità d'Italia, I even wanted the rain, I wanted the huge Italian flag and the bright red one of Trieste to fly on the poles which stood like staffs guarding the square, I wanted to eat alici at the Caffè Degli Specchi and the proud waiters to keep pouring the wine, I wanted to sit there into the night full and happy with Giannola Nonino telling me her Amaro was the best and to learn it might just be. I wanted to get the ferry to Muggia again and eat pistachio ice cream at Jimmy’s with Annali again and on the ferry back see the man and the woman in the boat again.

Wasn’t Italy enough? What was this Italy I wanted? Was it just a sea and some land and some boats that I wished for?

No.

It was freedom, it was a chance, it wasn’t perfect but you could win. That’s what I had in the West. I hadn’t always won but I wanted the chance to play the game.

I felt grateful for 1961. The British saw the cotton industry failing and decided to run the mills all day and all night.

They asked people from India and Pakistan to come over and work the night shifts and that call made it to my parent’s village. My dad, a single man, answered it. Like Ahmed, his family expected him to work, be that in Pakistan’s fields or England’s mills. His parents missed him but he was moving for more.

In the end my dad and his friends could not save the cotton industry but they did their bit. He said the British were handing out citizenship papers at the airport and that Enoch Powell wasn’t a nice chap.

We had to fight physically at times, were spat at at times, were called names but we got through it.

I served in the British Army in the Iraq war, was an editor at The Economist, and today I am reading philosophy and theology at University of Oxford. I’ve had a life I could not have in Pakistan coming from a family that had a bit of land they farmed.

On summer trips to Pakistan as a kid I’d seen my family forced to give bribes to the airport staff, to the police, to anyone in charge of a gate, saw the neighbours had moved the boundaries of loose bricks, stealing our land slowly, been helpless as the electricity stopped twice a day, saw men who had worked those fields with skin looking like leather and people praying for water.

But 1961 has gone, it’s not here for Ahmed or Bilal.

Maybe there is a way that Ahmed will get his life in Europe and maybe it will change him, maybe he won’t mind being naked after all.

The Pakistanis who came over with my dad didn’t just get racist abuse, the mill workers wanted to know about them, took them to the pubs, the men from Pakistan got drunk and married local women, they saved their wages and bought shops, got their children to universities, those children bought houses, some became millionaires, some made it into the government.

I could not hate the country of my parents, it was simply a place with people, some of them corrupt.

But I knew where I was, was better.

I wasn’t in Trieste to meet them, I was here to give a talk on migration to a journalism festival, I’d landed at Venice the previous evening, Edoardo, asked if I wanted to sit in the back, instead I rode up front, aside from driving he was studying Italian literature, on the two hour drive to Trieste he educated me. 

I’d asked about Dante and Ezra Pound because that was all I knew, and he responded with Giacomo Leopardi, Ugo Foscolo, Giovanni Verga, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and it was when he recited Ungaretti’s Soldati as he drove through the beating rain as weather warnings flashed on my phone from the Italian Air Force that I stopped him and asked how to spell Giuseppe’s last name.

This short powerful poem said all there was to say, I thought maybe it was because I’d dug trenches as Saddam’s troops bombed me as we inched closer to invading Iraq from Kuwait in 2003 or because I’d watched Ukrainians on the news fighting from them, but on reflection it was not because Ungaretti had written it from a trench in France, not even how Edoardo had taken time reciting it since he cared for the written word, no, it was because it was the truth.

The poem starts with the title Soldiers, he was one, are we all as we fight through life? With his first line “Si sta come” (we are as), Ungaretti has already captured us, he is in the trenches with his friends and the ‘we’ is him, his friends and by the end will be all of us, the next line “d’autunno” (in autumn), the season nearing the end of the year, near the end of us, our lives?, then “sugli alberi” (on branches/trees), we are not the strong trees, we don’t stand forever, we aren’t even the branches, we are at the ends of them risking it all stretching out, being hit with the weather, looking for something, and he confirms we are “le foglie” (the leaves), that will fall to the earth. He signs off “Courton Forest, July 1918”, he was in the war that we referenced in our history classes, cold, wet, alive, in a hole in the ground so he wouldn’t take a bullet and die unknown, but knew he could fall like a leaf and never get back up, break apart and become the ground.

We all fall. And now we are letting some fall, the tree can only provide for so many, we argue.

We are as

in autumn

on branches

the leaves

Is it Ahmed’s fault for leaving Pakistan, it could be argued he’s thinking for himself, don’t we all?

Is it his parents’ fault? They’re also thinking about him and perhaps themselves, that he’ll be able to feed them.

Is it the Pakistani government’s fault? Their corruption? Why have they had two dozen bailouts by the IMF in less than eighty years? Why are the Sharif family accused of buying houses with public money? But if they keep being given money is it their fault?

Is it the IMF’s fault for enabling them? Our fault? It’s a poor country with around a quarter of a billion people with patchy electricity and nuclear weapons bordering India with which it has poor relations and fought wars, Afghanistan where it has fallen out with the Taliban and Iran with whom it had recently exchanged cross border fire. On that border with its western neighbours sits the Reko Diq mine reputed to have the biggest deposits of gold and copper in the world, though no one has yet managed to make Pakistan a country of wealth for its people who like Ahmed keep believing Allah has given them their poverty.

On leaving them I was going to a free dinner on the central square from where you have a widescreen view of the Adriatic Sea. They were also going to eat for free as a Catholic organisation, Comunità di Sant’Egidio, formed in 1968, gave them food. An old Italian couple were also regulars in the park, feeding migrants daily. The Pope had visited in July to meet the migrants.

Ahmed was talking about conversion because it was all he knew but here the Christians were feeding him. Wasn’t Italy enough? They’d come from a country that could not feed them.

This story is at least as old as the Hebrew Bible and as young as today. When the Hebrews left Canaan during a famine they went to Egypt looking for refuge and were instead imprisoned, the migrants who make the crossing from Calais to Dover are put into hotels until their cases are heard, recently some were housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge where 500 men could stay, it was closed down being described as a floating prison, the prison isn’t simply walls, it’s the political language of governments, it’s the actions of the far right who tried to burn the migrants in the hotels, it’s the demonisation of a potential workforce left in a country but out of work.

I wanted to stay with them longer. Migration won’t end, be it from war, economics or climate change, if we are to understand this recent politicised iteration we need to talk to those moving but I needed to go.

‘Can we stay in touch, Ahmed?’, this was when his friend warned him not to ruin his chances. His chance of a life in Europe. Fine, I offered him a business card. On one side my telephone number, on the reverse a photo I’d taken of a Taliban soldier and he laughed passing it back asking what would happen if the police searched him and found that picture, I gave him of a young girl, Mama, who I’d met in Afghanistan, she’d left her family in Mazar-e-Sharif and begged on the streets of Kabul, an internal migration, she was around eleven years old and feeding her family, risking her life around the drugs and the gangs that would sell her for sex. If you’d shown her the road to Europe she’d have started on it too. This is the top of the tree, I reminded Ahmed. He replied anywhere he could get his ‘Thana, panee’ was a good place, thana being a grain, meaning a chapati and panee being water.

I searched out the Christians and found them in the night with backpacks of food, saying this was the right thing to do. Perhaps they had a feeling of needing to help, maybe they knew that our history showed we’ve all moved or they knew the future would see this continue, I saw them in a group giving their food and their time. Why did the Christians help? In Matthew (22:37-40), Jesus is asked what the great commandment was in the law,

Jesus said unto him,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,

and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment.

And the second is like unto it,

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

On these two commandments

hang all the law and the prophets.

Years before this interaction Rabbi Hillel (also known as Hillel the Elder) was similarly pressed by a man for answers, asking to be taught the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel told him “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is commentary. Now go and study.” It was on Jewish foundations that Christianity was built. The love of one’s neighbour became central to the Christians, seen also in Matthew 7:12 as “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” This is commonly known as Jesus’ Golden Rule and the Christians have not forgotten it.

Carrying on into the night walking southeast along the sea I saw the three red lights of the impounded Yacht A, they reminded me of the five red lights migrants in Calais aim for at Dover. This boat, one of the largest yachts in the world, was seized by the Italian authorities after sanctions against Russia. Owned by Andrey Melnichenko, a Russian industrialist billionaire, the locals say the staff come to the shore in dinghies for food and wine, that there are Manet paintings onboard. The locals don’t love it as it costs them millions of euros in upkeep.

The next day the talk was about migration covering Afghanistan and France. There were students keen to become journalists who asked how to get to a war. Afterwards, walking in the sun a middle-aged couple stopped me, she was a medical doctor, he had a PhD in physics and assumed I knew about Abdus Salam, I did not, but you must learn about him, he insisted.

Abdus was a Nobel prize-winning Pakistani theoretical physicist who founded an institute in Trieste which still runs today. Salam’s work had led to the discovery of the Higgs boson and in his acceptance speech in Stockholm, he had quoted The Quran, from Surah Al-Mulk, saying that on searching for imperfections one cannot find any when one considers God’s creation, and ended the speech acknowledging that it was God who had given him these gifts of mind and what he wanted most was to share them,“for the benefit of all mankind, ” saying his victory was also “for those in the Third World, who feel they have lost out in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, for lack of opportunity and resource.”

The physicist showed me his library card with Abdus’ name across it. I felt it again, a sense of being Pakistani, belonging to a set of people, I didn’t know a damn thing about physics but we’d both have shared a country. On looking him up, I found he was an Ahmadi Muslim, rejected by Sunnis and on the orders of the Pakistani government his gravestone was defaced to remove the word Muslim and now reads under his name that Abdus, ‘In 1979 became the first DEFACEMENT Nobel Laureate for his work in physics’. He left Pakistan after riots in 1953 in Lahore aimed at the Ahmadis but kept working with Pakistani scientists regularly inviting them to Trieste. After thanking the Nobel foundation his first line had been “Pakistan is deeply indebted to you for this.”

A few days in Trieste and I had to leave. I have no answers. Only questions. What will happen to the Pakistanis in the park? They weren't running from a war but poverty, did that count? Britain’s new migrants need to have jobs offering at least £38,700 (46,156.91 Euros), these men won’t qualify. Hundreds of Pakistanis died this year from heat, in May this year the temperature hit 52.2C, will they run from that too? Who will win the argument about migrants, the Pope or the prime minister?

Is there another view to take, from above? What would you see? The men in the park, the couple in the boat, higher now, wider than the Adriatic Sea, even higher past the Black, Caspian and Arabian Seas and the Indian Ocean in the east, the Mediterranean to the south and the English Channel to the west and the land in the north you would see people running from the Russian border with some Ukrainians drowning to escape the draft, you would see over a million Syrians in Lebanon and over three million in Turkey having been bombed out of their own country, the bombs landing on Gaza displacing survivors, you would see the scars left across Iraq and Afghanistan by the American and British wars, you would see a corrupt official tightening the screws on poor Pakistanis, the war in Sudan between two rivals in the military government, you would see war, heat, hunger, bombs, desperation and you would see Syrians, Sudanese, Ukrainians, Pakistanis, instead you might see women, men and children and you might even call them a neighbour.

Landing back in the UK with my British passport I knew that by some mix of opportunity and time I was here and not there, I was guilty and glad, I could have been one of the Pakistanis in the park far from my family needing help and food, and finding it in a Christian hand.

Click here to visit Adnan Sarwar’s webpage. He welcomes feedback. Click here for the Italian translation of the piece.