THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
It must be 35 years ago that I first met Abbas and his wife and three young children – two boys and a girl. Abbas was from Pakistan and had come to live in the then small community where I and the mother of my three children were building our lives.
Against the background of today’s growing and fractious debate on immigrants, this was a time, remember, when they were few people of a different hue living in Ireland. The occasional person who was not caucasian whom you might encounter on the streets of Dublin, well it was a safe bet they were a student at the Royal College of Surgeons and many, when qualified, stayed on to practise and are the backbone of our health system.
Abbas was a handsome man, his wife too, and the children so well-mannered. My wife and I and our three – older than the Pakistani children – became friends, if not intimately so, the friendship brought about because my wife and Abbas worked in the hospitality business together.
In all the years I have known Abbas and his family I have never asked him – because it was of no consequence to me – whether he was Christian or Muslim. I still don’t know. He had the piety and humbleness of what I would consider an Islamic trait. Then again, persecution of Christians in predominantly Islamic Pakistan had been recorded since the country’s independence in 1947. The persecution has taken many forms, including violence, discrimination, and blasphemy laws.
When I first met Abbas, religious extremism was on the rise in Pakistan, and Christian churches and schools had been targeted in attacks. The country’s blasphemy laws have also been used to target Christians. Still are, even more so in these days of religious extremism.
For a few years running, Abbas and his wife and three children came to our house on Christmas morning for coffee and happy wishes and when my own three children would have made, or bought through the Bank of Dad, little gifts for their three, younger new-found friends.
“I came here, Paul you know, so as to have a better life for my children,” he said to me one Christmas morning back in the early ‘90s. That may have been a clue as to his religion and what brought him to Ireland. But I didn’t pick up on it back then.
One Christmas week my eldest child – my only daughter – took the three young Pakistanis to visit Santa Claus in Clery’s department store. They were the only children of a different nationality in the queue of giddy children waiting to meet himself. Himself was an overweight Dub and played the Santa part to a tee. When he saw the children in front of him he said: “Ho, ho, ho… what have we got here? When are you three little people from?”
Each of the three proffered a handshake and said, collectively: “We are from Pakistan.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” said the overweight Santa, “ I always say it does not matter where you are from but rather where you are going…”
As they were leaving Clery’s, gifts to hand, the little girl said to my daughter: “Very strange man, that Mr Claus.” Probably another clue as to their beliefs, but I never thought to pick up on that either. It just didn’t enter into the equation of our friendship.
Abbas worked hard from dawn to dusk to put his children through school. Once I asked him where he saw his children in the future of a changing Ireland. “Oh, Paul,” he said, “they will do very well. Very well, indeed. I will insure of that. Doctors and lawyers.” I smiled to myself at his unrepentant self-belief but his carefully considered confidence struck a chord.
The years have come and gone, the children all grown, and between intervening years of travelling the world and of living in Belfast and Kilmainhamwood – and the pandemic – I have seen little of Abbas and his family, though, whenever I would bump into him, there was ever the gregarious smile, the gentleness, and the inquiring of me and my family and compliments exchanged.
I met Abbas the other week, first time in years. I asked after his wife and their three children.
“Oh, Paul,” he said, “they are all grown. So grown. My eldest son is a surgeon in Beaumont. The other a pilot. And my daughter is a barrister.”
He smiled. An immigrant father full of pride and joy. His unrepentant self-belief having paid dividends.
