Traces of South Asian Heritage in Way Up North in Scotland

By Jawahar Malhotra

DUNDEE, SCOTLAND: My first contact with a desi in Scotland was the taxi driver in Dundee who dropped me off around 10 pm to my hotel (Malmaison) in the center of the city. He was an inquisitive type who struck up a conversation and I was only too glad to know more about the city I had arrived in that morning.

And I had guessed right that he was from Bangladesh (and he was wrong as he thought I was Italian or Greek!) and then lamented how he had wasted his youth there for 30 years after coming as a young child from Bangladesh with his parents. “I did some things that took me nowhere,” he said sadly, as you would reveal only to a stranger you may never meet again.

The next day, Asif a long bearded Pakistani with a local Scottish accent picked us up from the hotel in his taxi. I took one look at him and spoke in Urdu and from his accent, I took a chance and switched to Punjabi and he was equally surprised and responded back in kind! It turned out he was born and raised in Dundee (he was in his forties), was on his second wife and owned not only his own taxi (his dad had started the business) but was in technical school to learn to become a plumber! In his mid-forties, he had never been to Pakistan, but learned to speak Urdu and Punjabi at home. Asif made over $120 that night on three trips with us alone!

The next day, Iqbal picked me up to go to the wedding venue, Fingask Castle, about 30 minutes from the hotel. It turned out that his dispatch service (he owned his taxi) did not take credit cards, and as I did not have any local currency, I had to get some from the hotel which was also short on cash! Iqbal said it would be about $28, which was exactly what the cheery and helpful hotel receptionist Zahra Suleiman (a second generation Anglo-Pakistani who spoke no Urdu) had in her register. Though the meter read $33 at the end, Iqbal was a man of his word and only took $28!

Iqbal was an ambitious young 38 year-old Bangladeshi with a long beard who had come to Dundee only 20 years earlier to work in a restaurant and rose to become a manager. “There are 15,000 Indian restaurants in the UK, He said as he looked at me in the rearview mirror, “and 75% are owned and managed by Bangladeshis.” He got tired of working 18-hour shifts and decided to drive a taxi while studying to get a diploma in IT and write code. With another year to go, he, his wife (who did not work) and his 6 year-old daughter lived in a flat and he made ends meet.

Curious about all the Indian influence in Dundee, I walked around and found four Indian restaurants, two fast-food kebab types of them owned by Bangladeshis; and the plush Jehangir owned by a Pakistani and the modern Rishi owned by south Indians from Edinburgh – both across the street from the University of Dundee. Fed up with the bland English food, I dropped in for lunch at Rishi – which was not cheap at $13 for a very tasty and spicy lamb vindaloo and one naan – but the decor is appealing with broad windows opening up to the main road.

And almost behind Jehangir, in the area where the jute mills once lined each street, was the plain looking Dundee Masjid with four stubby minarets, still not busy on a Friday afternoon. As I walked back around 4pm, a few bearded men in salwars and heavy pullovers walked towards it from the city center, only a few blocks away.