The Burning Land. George Alagiah

Lindi headed west from Stoke Newington towards Finsbury Park, where she shared a flat with friends. Her journey took her through one of the most cosmopolitan parts of London. She’d become blind to it but friends from her university days who’d settled outside London would occasionally remark at how there were more foreign faces than English ones. What they meant was that there were more black and brown people than white.

      Kebab restaurants jostled with pound stores and pavement vendors. The Finsbury Park mosque had long since lost its radical associations but not its huge congregation. On Fridays, after prayers, the men would crush into the numerous cafés, with the Al Jazeera Arabic news channel providing a constant stream of information to argue about.

      Lindi cycled past one of many internet cafés in the area, its window plastered with advertisements for phone cards, all of them promising the cheapest rates yet to keep in touch with people back home. She wondered what they told their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. Did they admit to being lonely, or did they dare to tell them that they loved this place and they wanted to stay? These Somalis, Algerians, Moroccans and Pakistanis were buffeted by the same competing emotional tides that generations of migrants before them had struggled with. Some longed to call this grimy city their home but worried that it might never fully accept them. Others saw how their children embraced its mayhem and materialism, and knew in their heart of hearts that they would never get away, as they had promised the folk back home. All around Lindi were people whose lives had been transformed – for good or ill – by journeys begun in a fit of hope, but often lived in the limbo of not knowing for sure if they had made the right move.

      In only twenty-four hours’ time, it would be Lindi’s turn to find herself in a foreign country.