My parents love telling me about their honeymoon in London. It was the 1980s, and as two Pakistanis aspiring towards social mobility in the West, my parents were enamored with the world that stretched around them and the people they could become. Their trip took them on a carousel around all of London’s most prominent attractions. They saw Buckingham Palace, strolled through Westminster Abbey, and took shopping sprees through the city’s iconic markets.
Fast forward some thirty years or so and there I was on the phone telling them about a month-long study abroad program I was interested in that would take me through London and Paris.
“What does Bookpacking mean?” my mom inquired in Urdu. I explained to her the premise—that we were going to read a couple books by some authors in the places they were written in hopes of better understanding the French revolution and the theories around social progress. How Victor Hugo wrote this massive story about a young man being chased down by a tunnel-visioned cop. The love triangle Charles Dickens depicted that takes place amidst revolution on the horizon. The power of empathy in alleviating social suffering and creating lasting change.
After orating all of this, we sat in silence for a few moments before my mom spoke.
“Okay. So which day are you going to Buckingham Palace?”
For my parents, the real value of such a trip was not the literary experience, but the act of simply immersing oneself in a different culture. My parents—and my mother in particular—were working class their whole lives. Such texts and academic circles were not accessible to them when much of their lives were spent caring for siblings and working in factories. My dad managed to get his degree in engineering, and subsequently a job in the U.S. a couple of years after their honeymoon. And so like millions of others from South Asia, they migrated across the sea to start a new life in America.
London, however, always had a special place in their hearts. Though they were never able to return to London, the U.K. remained their biggest impression of the English-speaking world. In my parents’ eyes, going to the very same place was an opportunity for me to not just deepen my understanding of the humanities, but to learn more about their history and the world in which they became adults.
Unfortunately, their histories were rocky ones. My mom became a refugee of war at just eight years old, when Bangladesh declared its independence in 1971. Her life from there was marked with poverty, sustaining on cheap meals of lentils and rice as she hopped from place to place. My dad’s life was a bit more stable, growing up on a farm in Pakistani Punjab. Even for him, though, several barriers existed in his path as the first person in his family to try and attain higher education. By their twenties, both my mom and dad settled in Karachi, where they met at the office they worked at.
My mom standing in front of the Queen Victoria Memorial right in front of Buckingham Palace.
Among all of this, the British legacy seeped its way into their daily lives. Between British standards of education and British division of the subcontinent, their lives were shaped so significantly by London that my parents today find this fact almost redundant to mention.
Perhaps this is what made the palace so significant for them. My plan was to make the trip down to Buckingham Palace within the first few days of being in London as it was the place that had started to stick with me, too. However, this version of the palace turned out to be far different from the one my parents observed. Queen Elizabeth passed away a few months before writing this, and the monarchy has slowly transformed from a steadfast, stoic cultural force into something more sensational and celebrity-like. The crown no longer has the same prestige as it did with my parents.
Still, its remnants reveal the power England once had. This massive building, enclosed with gilded gates and staffed by red-suited guards pacing the front, still captures the essence of the commonwealth. The majestic architecture and the countless tourists wanting to see it memorialized the bloody conflicts and English subjugation my parents and their parents endured, more so than the stunning grace of the United Kingdom.
It is thus the story of class struggle and empire that I wanted to learn more about. Their lives continued to be impacted by difficulty and inequality well after moving to America, as my mom had to learn the ropes of speaking English while her mental health suffered—merely immigrating could not erase her trauma, a sad realization for someone who was told that riches lay right across the ocean.
This is the heritage I stand upon, but it’s one I hardly understand in spite of its lifelong impact. As a college student, I have been granted access to circles that my parents could only dream of. I’m able to attend an elite university thanks to a need-based grant that covers my entire tuition and then some. I have the chance to learn about subjects like linguistics and political science which in spite of fascinating my parents endlessly, were never available for exploration in the same manner.
Even simpler though, as the child of Faiziah and Khaliq Rahman, what does it mean for me to live in the country which they always looked up to? How can I possibly understand the sheer depth of their lives when I’m so divorced from the context they grew up in? Rather than being an outsider looking in, I’m a native-born citizen in the Western bubble they aspired towards. So, when my mom was asking me about when I would go to Buckingham palace, she wasn’t dismissing what I was studying. She was actually directing my attention towards something with immense gravity: the opportunity for me to empathize with her.
The British Museum was therefore second on my list of places to see, both to expand my own historical knowledge, but to further develop my understanding of the enormous empire my parents experienced. Though I cannot relive my mom’s life—and nor would that be the solution—by visiting the British Museum, I could get a glance into the world power that watched over them for much of their lives. I only had one hour to go through the museum, but I had a solid goal. I wanted to see the South Asian exhibits and take a closer look at some of the artifacts that extend for generations beyond my parents.
Unexpectedly, the journey to those exhibits itself spoke volumes. The Great Hall lived up to its name with its massive plaza and glass sky, letting in the most calming blue light I could have ever imagined. The marble floors and white walls both sterilized and framed my experience to come. The raw size of the building and the extent of its collection made a haughty statement: to learn about the world, and to learn about yourself, this is the museum.
No wonder, then, that Britain has always been so influential on my parents’ ideals, culture, and goals. The world they grew up in told them that it was the West which housed their success, that the West held the keys to their best selves which could not be found at home.
A shot of the Great Hall ceiling I took. A very fortunate sunny day in London.
The Partition portion of the South Asia exhibit, occupying a small portion of that gigantic room 33, was the most pertinent one for me. With artwork of Gandhi standing tall and clips of the first Indian film to be nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film, it crafted a neat, but perhaps too simple narrative of the subcontinent: the end of the British project was spearheaded by a handful of leaders. Yet if the museum claims to be “for the world, by the world,” what seemed to be missing were the artifacts of more ordinary lives and the victims of the violence that followed Partition. Instead of learning more about the time period itself per se, I found a better grasp of the framework that encases the stories my parents and grandparents have told me. There exists a certain kind of reverence for London after all this time, and now in 2023, it’s clear why my parents were so in love with the place: it represented an upper echelon of society, and the only one which actively invited them in.
And for what it’s worth, I’m also entranced by London. Even I myself have always had a special adoration for the British and the West as a whole, which is as a place of fine culture and elite education that I unknowingly hoped could offer me a chance up the ladder as well. At the same time, though, I have uncovered a disconnect between myself, my parents, and the structures of power above us. In order for this system to work, we need to continue believing that it is the West that contains ultimate enlightenment, and it is the West that can provide us with meaningful ways to live our lives.
How much I play into this remains unanswered. Much like my parents, I gleed with childlike joy walking around London—I simply felt so undeniably refined. I can’t say that I fully grasp what Buckingham Palace represents or what it was like for my parents to leave Asia and step foot in the West for the first time. But maybe, I can experience some of the same emotions they had. London is the city of honeymoons and a gruesome empire, of international cuisine and enriching museums. And though I’m still as lost as I was before when it comes to my sense of self and where I come from, I do know what lies in front of me and the places I can go from here. Some of these places will continue the violence experienced by my parents, and their parents, etc. But maybe some of these places can be ones that inspire social good, places that acknowledge our individual histories and actively restore the pain of those before me.