"This Is Not My Home"

Ismat Ullah's expression of polite amiability is oddly out of sync with the fury of his words. In the 20 years he has spent as a Pakistani immigrant in Britain, slurs and rejections have engendered an abiding bitterness. But the mask remains in place. "I keep it all inside," he explains. "I listen to the jokes about Indians and Pakistanis, and I laugh so as not to show my weakness. But I resent it. As a colored person here, you have to be different from what you are. You have to keep a cosmetic appearance."

The cost of keeping up that appearance is high. Despite his youthful face, Ullah, 41, relies on tranquilizers to remain calm, and the occasional stabbing pain warns him when too much stress has awakened his duodenal ulcer. He earned it.

Arriving in Glasgow in 1963 with $300 and the clothes on his back, he quickly learned that he was condemned by the color of his skin. "I went to office after office, to every possible organization, and I couldn't get a job," he recalls. "They told me I was too old or too young. Some people told me to my face, 'We don't employ black or colored people.' " Angry and humiliated, he took a job as a bus conductor--inappropriate, he thought, for a college graduate. Working double shifts, 16 and sometimes 20 hours a day, living in a slum on tea and biscuits, he saved enough money to take a full-time accounting course and move to London. There he found the color barrier even harder to penetrate. He landed a factory job by pretending to speak pidgin English--"Me good worker, guv'nor. Give me job." When his opportunity finally came, he was almost too alienated to recognize it, but he rewarded that first real employer ("an angel") with exceptionally hard work.

Today Ullah is affluent by immigrant standards. He earns $19,500 as an administrator for a manufacturer of security devices; on the side, he and his wife Nighat run two thriving shops, a grocery store and a clothing boutique, in the East London borough of Newham.

It is not enough to offset the heartbreak of racial insults and random attacks from young white thugs. The Ullahs and their children--Daughters Sonia, 15, Shazia, 14, and Samia, 10, and Son Sohail, 6--believe they are living a life under siege, and they have had enough. This year they are returning to Pakistan. "This country is not my home," declares Ismat Ullah, "but I have learned something here I'll value as long as I live: to work hard, to be tolerant and to fight and not give in."