Rizwan Rahemtulla

Oh, my goodness. Seeing snow for the first time, it was just amazing. It was like a dream – almost like, what’s this white stuff falling from the sky? I had never seen it, never seen it at all. And it was almost, well, wow, these are like diamonds falling. And then a few days later the newspapers turned up, and they decided to help myself and my brother by taking photographs of us and putting on the front pages of the newspaper to say the Rahemtulla family, expelled from Uganda, have now made Inverness their new home. And so what one of the journalists did was she took some of the snow and she turned it into a ball, told us it’s a snowball and said, 'Now throw this at your brother, whilst the photographer takes a photograph'. I remember that and I’ve got the newspaper cutting of that, of me throwing this snowball. Haven’t got a clue how far it would go. I was only 4 years old, first time I'd held snow in my hands. I didn’t have gloves. My hands are freezing. But I threw the snowball at my brother, completely missed, but the photographer got a good shot.

Whatever it might be, we have a craving as human beings to belong. And for me, I feel that this is the community in Peterborough in which I belong. But we also have Ugandan Asians of the Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri community who also have mosques in Leicester, or London, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Chelmsford, Leeds and other European countries. And I feel that I belong to them too, and they belong to me. Because we have still got the same heritage, we have still got that shared heritage, shared language, shared culture and shared religion. So not only do I belong to the community in Peterborough, I also feel that I belong to those extended communities and I would like to think that they feel the same about us. So it’s that sense of belonging that I’m very satisfied with, but at the same time I’m also citizen of Peterborough, I was also citizen of Inverness. I’m also a citizen of England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the world. So I have that sense of belonging that I’m put on this earth for a purpose, and that I feel that I belong in this world but interactively, on a day-to-day basis, it’s my family and my community.

But also if I just mention one more thing, because I did mention you know the Khoja Shia Ithna-Asheri community but also when we moved from Uganda there were many, many other communities that also moved. You know, the Hindu community were huge, you know they also had a traumatic time moving here. As did, you know, there were some, a smaller number, but there were Sikhs as well that had moved, as well as Christians, and in Peterborough we have the Bharat Hindu Samaj, the Hindu Community Centre, and we get on really well because again we speak the same language, we look the same, we both have the heritage of Indian culture, living in Peterborough, but at the same time also share the trauma that we faced when we moved from Uganda to Peterborough.

Image credit

Courtesy of Hadithi C.I.C and Rizwan Rahemtulla