Page 12 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

My dad had come to Britain in 1960, the year I was born. Like
so many of his generation, his life had been shaped by the Partition
of Pakistan and India at the end of British rule in 1947. As a
Muslim living in Lahore he was spared the migration that millions
of others endured when they were forced to relocate according to
their religion. Nevertheless, the turmoil that followed Partition
affected my dad greatly. The economy was a mess, there were
hardly any jobs and the entire country was blighted by the
upheaval. He had previously run a successful fabrics shop in
Lahore, but when his customers could no longer afford his wares
he had to look elsewhere for money. That meant working abroad,
and he travelled to Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and took work
where he found it. For a few years he did quite well travelling to
India buying silks and fabrics, which he then sold on in Iran.
Millions of young men left Pakistan in the 1950s, emigrating to
the USA, Canada, Australia and Britain, and my dad would get
postcards and letters from old friends telling him about their new
lives. Of course, these letters only told the good parts: to my dad
it seemed that everyone who came to Britain earned fabulous
amounts of money and lived in big houses.
By the late fifties, he was married with two young children, my
elder sister Nahid and my brother Azam. When I came along in
1960, he realised he needed to provide his family with security and
decided he would travel to Britain, despite the fact that he couldn’t
speak a word of English.
We were living with his mother in Lahore when he boarded a
boat for Southampton. He took hardly any money with him, and
by the time the boat docked he was practically broke. The most
valuable thing he had on him was a piece of paper with an address
on it, and, through a combination of smiling and pointing, he
boarded a train to London. From Victoria station he took a bus to
east London and eventually arrived on the doorstep of a friend’s
house in Brick Lane.

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