Sunanda K Datta Ray: New homage to Catalonia

WHERE MONEY TALKS

Don't let it spread but a subcontinental visitor on a tourist visa can still get lost in Spain. Several Bangladeshis who would themselves be regarded as illegal immigrants elsewhere have invited me to stay on in Barcelona.

Our common Bengali makes for kinship in a region whose Catalan language, suppressed by the Bourbons in 1714 and again by General Franco in 1939, now gives it a sense of robust confidence.

Not that these jaunty lads from Sylhet and Chittagong, peddling their wares on the broad pavements of the Passeig de Gracia, have any idea of Catalonia's tortured history. But their homage to a region that promises them new life is as sincere as George Orwell's.

Race and colour may play some part in this bonding for the Moors once ruled Catalonia. Mustafa, 28, doesn't know it, as he spreads out his belts on the pavement's distinctive hexagonal tiles which Barcelona's famous architect, Antoni Gaudi, designed, together with the ornate street lamps and surrounding benches.

But he knows of Gaudi, for the tourists who queue up all day outside Gaudi's whimsical creations along the Passeig are Mustafa's rice and curry.

His family spent nearly six lakh takas on the great adventure of his going west. It landed him in Morocco with other enterprising young men similarly bent on improving their prospects. They tried to cross the Mediterranean, and this is where the tale gets hazy, not because Mustafa hides anything but because of his innocence.

All arrangements were handled by dalals in his desh and Morocco. Mustafa knows only that their ship bound for Spain went to an island instead. What island? He hasn't a clue.

"Mahasagarey dwip" "" an island in the great ocean "" he says simply, and nods with equal conviction when I mention the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. He was there a whole month. The police were very helpful. They brought him to the mainland, showed him round, and let him stay. That was about a year ago. "They are now arranging my papers," he adds.

Not everyone is so vague. Salim, seller of diaphanous scarves of many hues, grins knowingly when I say I must return before my tourist visa expires. "Mine expired 18 months ago!" But tourists are jailed in London if they take up employment.

"London is London, e-Spain is e-Spain," says Salim. "You stay on and find out." Other boys look up from their pitches with warm invitations. At the other end of the Bangladeshi spectrum, the middle-aged owner of the Supermercado Bengol, is a respected member of a city that has always been dominated by burghers and bankers.

Matching his establishment, which his saree-draped wife helps run, are the Rajah restaurant, Bazar Ganesha and Kashmir Doner Kabab shop. Catalan nationalism has always had firm commercial roots.

I met only one Pakistani in Barcelona and one in Tarragona, with its austere Roman ruins, 135 kilometres along the coast. The first was a sad man hovering among the tables of a pavement cafe ineffectually trying to sell single red roses.

The other "" encountered in a public bus "" was sadder still for he had moved from his native Sialkot to South Korea where he claimed to have had a cloth business, and is now looking for factory employment.

According to him, Tarragona's 20 Pakistanis are factory hands, and five Indians are mistries. I have no idea whether the statistics are correct.

But there is no doubt that Indians are flourishing. Enter any souvenir shop along Barcelona's Rambla, the noble boulevard that sweeps down from the mountain to the sea, and a cluster of Punjabi and Sindhi youths will rush to serve you.

They are chatty boys even if they charge eight euros for a four euro film and sell 52 cent stamps (for postcards within Europe) for 60 cents.

Most are legals, sponsored by Indians who had already established themselves in Barcelona. Who sponsored me, one asks. "Arre yaar," another answers, "no sponsorship needed. He can get tourist visa. He is aged."

The sponsors elude me. Some say they control the electronics business. Others tell me they are in computers. One theory is they made fortunes in currency when Spain's peseta was giving way to the euro. I remember, too, ancient scandals of coal and old British Centurion tanks being exported from India to apartheid South Africa via Spain.

A long departed friend, Maharajkumar P N Ray Chowdhury of Santosh, decorated with the order of Isabella the Catholic, Spain's honorary consul in Calcutta, told me that Indian businessmen had imported both from India with misleading end-user certificates. South Africa had cannibalised the Centurions for its own tanks.

Two Indians defy the stereotype. One is a single parent from Delhi who has worked in Kuwait and Singapore and now runs an antique shop to give her teenage children a better start in life.

The other, a muscular youth with a ring in one year pushing a laden barrow, would have escaped notice but for the snatch of Hindi song that escaped him: he is from Rajasthan, saving up to marry.

Friends in the local paper, La Vanguardia, tell me there could be 200,000 South Asians in Barcelona. But though Catalans traditionally resented the xarnego, as migrants from other parts of Spain were called, and though "Negroes, No" is scrawled in a telephone box, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis seem to be accepted. They don't stand out physically as in Britain, and that is a major step towards integration.