HOW WE GREW UP TO BE PART OF YOU

Sri Lankans, we say, are just like corks we can pop up anywhere BY ROMESH GUNESEKERA

I FIRST came to live in London in the 1970s when there were only three Sri Lankan eating places that I could find: in Hendon, Earl's Court and Finchley.

Then Kilburn started a Ceylon fried chicken joint; soon, they appeared from Southall to Victoria.

I like to find London's Sri Lankan dimension in individual portions and unexpected encounters. In the 1970s, they would be with students learning to see London as a home away from home. In the 1980s and 1990s they would be with people escaping the thuggery and war in their home towns. Every petrol station in north London seemed to be manned by Sri Lankans.

Now there might be 100,000 Sri Lankans in London, but we don't all live together. Sri Lankans, we say, are like corks: they can pop up anywhere.

Some like to gather at the temples ( Buddhist or Hindu), or the annual Vesak parade at Marble Arch in May; others perhaps only at a Sri Lankan New Year's dance night in west London.

Ethnic communities only become insular when they feel threatened or persecuted. Of course, it's natural in these circumstances to turn inward for comfort and support. But this goes against what I believe to be basic human nature. That is, that both individuals and communities are instinctively outward-looking Sri Lankan communities have always been porous. And the London I love is the London where so many communities are like that - porous and open.

Where stories from all over the world mingle and you can enjoy a life among people who don't all look like yourself.

Here in London, among others, I found the 1940s Ceylonese poet Tambimuttu in Fitzrovia, and Julia Margaret Cameron and her 19th- century photographs of Ceylon at the National Portrait Gallery. A tangle of lives that erase the distinction between us and them.

I'm not so sure we're heading for the segregated society Trevor Phillips describes, but it's important not to be complacent. There's no simple answer, but it's pretty obvious when you look back through history, especially in London, that immigrants congregate in specific areas because people have a natural tendency to interact with the familiar. That's why people travel so extensively or move to cities in the first place.

Ethnic diversity is flourishing in schools, music, and popular culture.

Boundaries put up by religion or race are especially weak among young people. The strength of London is that people can integrate into wider society and also retain their cultural identity.

Romesh Gunesekera is a novelist. His most recent book is Heaven's Edge.

His new novel, The Match, will be published next spring

Cypriots in Green Lanes can go around the world in 80 minutes BY AYDIN MEHMET ALI

LONDON created me. This is where I became a grownup - where I became the woman I am, where I fell in love and first made love. London is where I came to seek refuge from a war. This is where I ate my first curry, a volcano in my mouth. The city where I heard languages I could not decipher, sitting on the Number 38 bus from Piccadilly to Hackney. And I discovered towns in London: China in Soho, Bangla in Brick Lane, and my own - Cyprus in Green Lanes.

I can go around the world in 80 minutes or less, walking down Ridley Road Market. The old white East End market families now sell pak-choi, bean sprouts and mango, and shout the weight and price in Turkish.

Green Lanes is where Cypriots created "Little Cyprus", along the "Ladder" from Newington Green to Wood Green.

On Kingsland Road (the old Roman road), Turkish speakers say your soul is safe from Shoreditch to Stoke Newington, with Suleymaniye Mosque in the south and Aziziye, a converted bingo hall, in the north.

Halfway up the road, there is the Rio Cinema, where the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities descended from all over London in the 1960s and 1970s to watch films in their own language (arranged for alternate weekends to ensure political animosities didn't spill into the cinema). At the corner of Newington Green, I am reminded of the hundreds arriving and leaving from the offices of the company running coach trips between Cyprus and London, well before the days of cheap flights. The long waves goodbye, the kisses, the wiping of eyes with the corner of a headscarf.

Then I move to Hackney Marshes.

Football has always been big among Turkish speakers, with their own football federation and league. More than 400 teams take over Hackney Marshes on Sundays where big business rules, players are bought and sold and where winning the league is mega.

Nationalism and prejudice seem not to have a place in the league as African-Caribbean and even Greek Cypriot players play.

This is but a small reflection of the life of the Turkish speakers across London - their hopes, aspirations, loves, preoccupations and thirst for life - from the respectable to the most hidden, from the honest to the money launderer. The lack of going "outside" can be interpreted as a strength necessitated by isolation, racial prejudice and sheer determination to survive; no different from other communities. I would like to think that we are more resilient than that and we are all still learning.

Aydin Mehmet Ali is an author and translator

In Brick Lane we wear trainers with saris

BY SHAMIM AZAD

LIFE in Brick Lane, I always say, can be compared to a noshi kahta - a hand-stitched quilt - because like a quilt, you see very different people, their lives woven together.

Next to a man with a traditional beard is a man with a tattoo; the woman in a sari will also be wearing trainers. The Bangladeshi community has worked hard in this country to achieve this. We are a secular community, not an Islamist one - and we fought hard to be so.

I first arrived in England from Dhaka as a specialist teacher in the late 1980s. I came to Tower Hamlets because there was a shortage of bilingual teachers.

Brick Lane at that time was not the fashionable place it is now. But even then I found it special.

Bangla Town has a wonderful history. The time to visit Brick Lane is for Boishakhi Mela - Bangla New Year; last year, 40,000 people celebrated here.

The colours we wear to celebrate are red and white - white is seen as very holy, and red is the colour of power and joy - so you would wear a red-and-white sari. Last new year when England won matches in Euro 2004, people also brought out St George's flags and some women even substituted red crosses for their bindis.

Everyone eats traditional pitha cakes stuffed with molasses, and we play games - three-legged races, egg-and-spoon races. Not as different from British culture as you think.

In fact, the longer I live here, the more I see the similarities between the culture that we came from in Bangladesh and the one we have embraced in London.

Britain, even more than the United States, is now a country of immigrants.

But we have a very different approach from the US.

We have worked hard to be accepted in London and in my heart I feel I - and my fellow Bangladeshis - belong here.

Shamim Azad is a poet and storyteller

Southall roots and inspires me

BY YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

TWENTY-SEVEN years ago I moved from Oxford to London, stony- broke, young, married, with a tiny baby boy and no place to stay. My cousins had a flat in Ealing and let us have it at a discounted price. And here I have stayed ever since: same flat, same area - the second most racially mixed borough in London, which accommodates the million-pound dwellings of Ealing Broadway, small, collapsing homes in Acton and, of course, Southall, Little India, loud, bracing and now in tourist brochures.

Southall nurtures, then shifts immigrant groups, thanks to its proximity to Heathrow.

These days, Southall Asians complain about Somalis in their midst. The same resentment greeted the Asians in the Fifties when they rolled up to work in the factories. Yet today, many who stayed get on just fine with Asian neighbours, who take care of white old- age pensioners neglected by their own children.

Southall holds the determined hopes of immigrants invited in as the country tried to regenerate after the Second World War. At the Milan Centre, Sikh and Muslim war veterans tell you how hard their lives were in the first decades after arrival. The tribulations created a politicised community.

Asians were beaten a small number to death - by National Front supporters. I was in Southall on a demo against these neo-Nazis which ended in the death of Blair Peach, an antiracist white teacher.

Relentless activists like the Southall Monitoring Group saw the fascists off, while the Southall Black Sisters was set up to shame Asian families who were abusing women.

Today, Southall is brightly confident. There is hardly any racial segregation or surly victimhood. I feel strongly that Trevor Phillips is wrong that we are going the way of the US.

In Southall, the old cheap tea-and-snack shops and kebab houses are still there, serving grub for under a tenner and Lahori-style barbecues.

But these days the waitresses are Bosnian and customers are Britons of every colour.

Yes, we have problems, but that doesn't mean we are failing. It is not helpful to be apocalyptic - if you tell people enough times that there is a bad situation, they start believing it. We need people to remind us how well we are doing.

Bend it Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha once told me that, wherever she is, she carries Southall in her heart. The place roots and inspires her.

I know what she means.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is a writer and broadcaster

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