Poor, Paris!

Paris serves a great deal for tourists, lovers and artists across the world. It is a vibrant city of a culture known for perfumes, arrogance, monuments, wines and romance. But there is something else which is taking place there in the shape of a sorry reality: the phenomenon of poor illegal migrants.
Prominent of this lot that you happen to come across right outside Gare du Nord are South Asians, who made their way to the Continent for better economic conditions and a happy future, only visualized in fairytales. They are not proud salesmen or dishwashers. Instead, they are beggars and barely live a life less privileged than our homegrown
beggar mafia. Sometimes, they even lack a room to live or a tram ticket to travel. The roadsides and pathways of this cultured city serve them well in cold, more cold and bitter cold seasons. The temperature is minus something these days, isn’t it?

So what is it that the French authorities do when they find out about such unwelcome creatures on their soil? A wagon-driver from Rawalpindi and now an illegal migrant Muhammad Bashir told me his story in a long-spell of an October night. “They cannot do anything practically, for they can neither get us jobs nor send us back. The law enforcing authorities mean business here. That’s why we can’t get jobs without legal papers. We don’t have our passports, because the agents in Pakistan took them from us when we came here. Now we are mourning over our sad situation and depend on the daily meals we get from a charity run by a nearby-located church.” Bashir is living, of course on the sideways, for past four years. He barged into Europe about seven years ago via Iran to Turkey to Greece. Since then, he claims, he is unemployed. Paris is his home for past four years.

Bashir has forgotten to speak his native language. He’s taught himself to speak in a sign language he has designed for his convenience and begging for a living. He greeted me
with affection, offered me a puff, and asked me to sit by him. Fond of current affairs and political analyses, he was a fan of Hamid Mir’s columns. While exchanging views on the state of affairs in Pakistan, he unrolled a month-old Urdu newspaper and tried to read an article for me. A fine reader, indeed!

But he couldn’t speak Urdu for a conversation. He was not mute. Instead he spoke a few words of English. For instance when he told me about his journey (from Pindi to Paris) he would get up, take a position and do the round of acting rather than talking about it. It stumped me with the fact he was extremely disturbed psychologically. He needed a
doctor (so I felt) and a few hundred euros (so he told) to get his passport anew, to fly back home. His wife and children are waiting for him, he said.

There were other Bashirs around as well across the sinuous landscape of Paris. A large number, mostly young, turned out to be vendors roaming around Eiffel Tower and de
Louve. They are new to this land and know the tricks of escaping in case the policemen come to catch them. Some of them were Africans and Indians, who managed to transport
themselves here by paying thousands of dollars. The human trafficking is on the rise, one of them said. It seems the Gujrat to Greece mafia is doing great business these days, I remarked.

On my dream journey to this carnival city accompanied a dear friend and fellow-traveler Fabian Pianka, whose an upper-middle class German by birth and a French by heart. His
eye for beauty and horror is quite unparallel, just like Parisians. His appreciation for human intelligence and achievements lies in his knowledge of Paris, precisely because he views all things French as inescapable and invincible for all romantics. But I found it interesting that he couldn’t find a way to escape from his usual argument when poverty unleashed itself on the alleys of this city of love. “You will even find French poor toiling on the streets. The state wants to take care of them, but they arrogantly refuse,” says Fabian, pointing at a beggar lying in a corner. I took his answer for truth which, I suppose, was based on his five-year life in Paris. I wonder if Muhammad Bashir would dare refuse if he was offered a job or unemployment aid. Probably, he lacks the guts to be
a French.

Published in TNS, The News International, in December, 2009.