The following is from Beena Kamlani’s debut novel The English Problem. Kamlani is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer whose work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Identity Lessons: Learning to Be American, Growing Up Ethnic in America, The Lifted Brow, World Literature Today, and other publications. A former senior editor for the Penguin Group, she taught book editing at New York University for nearly two decades.

London, January 1931

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It was raining, English rain, that first night when he came to England. Thin, fine icicles that fell at a slant and made incisions. Standing outside Victoria Station, waiting for a cab, he felt its needle pricks pierce his skin like markings. This is how England claimed you—through its rain. His hands and face burned and tingled. He felt alive, his senses acutely picking up every impression, from the stone in his shoe to the gaslights rippling through puddles, their slight hiss. Exhausted yet exhilarated at having finally arrived at his destination, he noted how unsuitable for this alien cold and damp his thin tropical trousers and shoes were. The rain had already seeped through them, and the woolen coat he was wearing, which would have weathered a cool wave in the hill stations of India, was as useless as a rag here. Ah, how it reached for his bones, the chill damp. A low, whistling wind funneled through his clothes and up his neck; warmed by body heat, it seeped out of him like smoke coming out of the chimneys of London’s homes. He scanned the traffic on Victoria Street for a cab. When one drew up, the cabbie rolled down his window and said, “If it’s East London you’re wanting to get to, I can’t take you.”

“No,” he replied, his teeth chattering, his lips swollen with cold. “It’s 24 Gloucester Square.”

“Hop in, then.”

Shiv lugged his suitcases into the cab and sank back into the seat. Fatigue held him now in a vise. From Karachi to Bombay, a two-day train journey; from Bombay to Marseille by ship—seventeen days that covered nearly seven thousand miles on the SS Rajputana. Then waiting to board the ferry at Marseille for Dover, and finally, the train from Dover to London. He sighed, drawing cold air into his lungs. Everything he touched was freezing. He hugged himself for warmth. The dampness of his clothes and the lack of heat in the cab made him certain he would catch some terrible disease.

“Raining nonstop since last night. Hardly anyone out this evening. Reckon they’ve all taken the tram or the underground home.” Chatty and jocular, occasionally whistling during silent pauses, the driver was beginning to get on Shiv’s nerves. He finally screeched to a halt outside a house on a quiet street. “Here you go, mate,” he said, doffing his cap and smiling broadly at Shiv when he received an overly generous tip. The cab suddenly seemed like a place of warmth to Shiv, though his teeth had been chattering from the cold all the way and his nerves were at knife-edge. Even before the tip, the cabbie seemed not to know that Shiv was one of the colonized, the people his people lorded it over every day back home in India. Shiv had been treated with deference and courtesy in a normal world where everyone who got into his cab was an equal. “Cheerio, sir,” the man said as he left the cab.

Standing outside the door of the house, with his suitcases on either side of him, Shiv felt his heart beating. He felt fear and impatience both. As he had walked out of his father’s home with the family to board the ship for England, sobs threatened to break his cool exterior, a façade both he and his family needed so they could do the unthinkable—bid goodbye to one another. Now that he was here, the other side of parting—desolation and uncontrollable anxiety—bared its teeth. Had he felt this back home, he wouldn’t have come, he told himself. He badly needed a pee and thought about his hosts, an English family who had offered to take him into their home, with growing nervousness. His father had met Mr. Polak on a trip to South Africa to see Mr. Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was then living in Johannesburg. The two men had become close friends, and when Mr. Polak visited them in Karachi, years later, Shiv had been a nine-year-old boy. “I want to be a lawyer like you so I can save the world,” he told a bemused Mr. Polak. His moment had come. He stood outside the Polaks’ door shivering uncontrollably. His teeth chattered. More than likely, his host wouldn’t recognize him.

There was no going back now.

As his finger went to the doorbell, the door opened. A young couple, arm in arm, stopped at the door and looked him over, their smiles fading. “Yes, can we help you?” the woman asked in a formal tone of voice.

“I’m looking for Mr. Polak. I’m Shiv Advani and I believe he’s expecting me?” He hadn’t meant it to sound like a question. His voice sounded weak, unsure.

The young man by the woman’s side gave her a quizzical look. She frowned at Shiv. But then, just as quickly, recognition seemed to run through her. “Oh my goodness,” she said, clutching her companion’s arm. “Of course, it’s the Indian who will be staying with them while he’s at the Inns of Court.” She turned to him. “They were talking about you earlier. You’re a day early,” she said. Shiv stood in the doorway, his mind calculating the distance he had come, to be told he was too early. “I’m sorry,” he said, deeply uncomfortable. “I’m sure the telegram  ” She glanced at his luggage, noting, no doubt,

the wet edges of his thin trousers, the skimpy orange silk scarf around his neck. “You’d better come in,” she said. “No use standing there, getting wetter than you already are.”

“Here, let me give you a hand,” the young man said, reaching for the larger of the two suitcases. Shiv picked up the smaller one and followed him into the house. From inside came the sounds of laughter, and music. “It’s their anniversary, Mr. and Mrs. Polak’s,” the young man explained. “Their twenty-fifth, and everyone’s celebrating. There’s lots of food, and champagne. It’s very jolly.” The woman by his side held out her hand. “Violet,” she said. “I’m Millie Polak’s niece.” He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with his hand—put it out to shake her proffered one or just nod. He nodded. She stared at him, perplexed. Finding his voice, Shiv said, “I’m sorry I arrived early.”

“Early?” The man laughed. “You’ve only come from the other end of the world to us. Joseph Rowland, Joe to everyone.” He held out his hand. On firmer ground with a man’s hand, Shiv took it and released it almost immediately, aware of the English aversion to touch. “Less than a second,” a friend back home had told him. “Touch it, then let it go.” But Joe’s grip was firm, friendly.

Shiv focused on him, his easy, smiling ways, his affluent charm. He sensed how much separated them—his dark skin, an almond brown, seemed to have turned several shades darker just standing there, and his clothes, wet and puckered around his ankles, would mark him for life in this man’s eyes. He had picked an orange scarf to wear around his neck. “You’ll need colour there,” his mother said. “It is a cold, dark, rainy country.” Now the bright orange scarf felt like a glossy python around his neck. He couldn’t wait to throw it off.

Joe gave him a quick, curious glance. His discomfort grew. A wet, bedraggled brown man walking into a celebratory party—so far from the first impression he wanted to make. He threw a quick look at the hallway mirror as he entered and saw, to his dismay, a wary, uneasy face. He seemed as he felt, defenceless and vulnerable.

Joe left the suitcase by the stairs. “There’s the lav, if you need it,” he said, pointing to a door by the stairs.

Shiv nodded and went towards it with relief.

The heat from the blazing fire in the grate hit his face, drying and warming him at the same time. He saw flushed red faces, glasses filled with wine, trays of cheese and smoked salmon, brown bread and butter. He recalled the pictures his English tutor back in Hyderabad Sind had showed him in anticipation of a time when he would leave India for England. “Beer.” “Wine.” “Smoked salmon.” “Mince pies.” “Spotted dick.” Now here they were, those trays of smoked salmon and deviled eggs, wine and beer. The women were in pearls, the men in suits, and everyone was very jolly. Mr. and Mrs. Polak received him warmly, she with an embrace, he with a hearty handshake. “You’re here, my boy,” he said. “Just in time. We’re celebrating our twenty-fifth, Millie and I and our friends. Feast today, we go back to gruel tomorrow!” Everyone laughed as they turned to look at him. Mr. Polak handed him a fluted glass and poured a hissing liquid into it. Champagne? Shiv wondered. “Cheers! Welcome to London!” Mr. Polak said.

Shiv squirmed as his guests examined his thin wet trousers, the bright silk scarf wrapped around his neck, marked his uneasiness. One elderly woman fixed her lorgnettes on him as she ran them up his body from head to toe. Her jowly face and bejeweled fingers glinted; her inquisitive eyes were like lice combs as they teased out his discomfort. He felt like an animal in a zoo.

“I’ve never seen one of them in the flesh before, Henry,” she said, turning to her host.

“He won’t be a stranger to you for long, Lady Sophia,” Mr. Polak said. “You’ll be seeing a lot of him, I promise you that!”

He came over to Shiv with the bottle of champagne in his hand. Shiv placed his hand over the glass. “I’d better not, sir. Still feeling a little sea-whipped from the journey here.” He observed Mr. Polak’s large, slightly red ears, like abalone shells. With ears like that, you’d miss nothing in a court of law.

“Nonsense!” Mr. Polak said. “You’ll be the British in India when we leave.” He refilled the glass. “You’re here to learn, to work and think like us. Some would say that there’s an even more important requirement—that you play and drink like us.” When Shiv raised his glass to his host, Polak’s genial face broke into a proud smile. “Good stock, this one,” he said, turning to Lady Sophia.

Shiv watched Joe with a group of young men who resembled him, men whose strong, confident jodhpur-clad thighs pressed into the flanks of horses as they played polo back in India. Shiv considered Joe’s smoothness, an assured quality that came from a natural assumption of one’s place in the world. What was it called, that? He recalled the prized falcons of Hyderabad Sind and the balletic precision with which they landed on their prey from on high. To be so highly trained that your responses were ingrained, bred in the bone, was to assume a privileged place in the world. He had not been trained to hunt, to discern weakness in others, to conquer. He felt incapacitated. His thin frame felt weak and puny to him. He didn’t have it, what these men had.

But with a glass of champagne in one hand, which he had disliked at first sip, and a smoked salmon canapé in the other, he laughed at everything they said, and tried to suppress the intense loneliness that gripped him as he looked around the room. These were his country’s oppressors and here he was, one of the chosen, sent to live among them, become like them. His father’s parting words came to him now, the bewildered look on his face, as if he was reconsidering his decision to pack his son off to the land of their oppressors: “It’s too late to wonder if this is the right thing. There’s no avoiding it. You will come back an Englishman, for that is the only way to succeed in their world.”

A wave of sound rose and fell around Shiv. He heard the polite laughs and ironical accents of the men and women around him now—the women, their jewelry tinkling as they reached for their glasses, a little tipsy and gay; the men, so well trained in social mores that even when their voices, emboldened by drink, grew louder, their laughs broader, they were still, always, within timbre, within the wave. Nothing cracked the air around them—a smooth social atmosphere hid all tensions, blanketed all desires.

He glanced around as the crowd became merrier. They soon lost interest, the novelty of a brown-skinned man who had landed so unexpectedly among them beginning to wear off. As the observer now rather than the observed, he viewed them as members of a tribe at war with his own, and himself as an interloper in their midst. The steamy damp from the cuffs of his trousers travelled up his legs like a tropical breeze. Never, he told himself, as he took in the flushed faces of the guests and heard their champagne-fuelled laughter. I will never become an Englishman.

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From The English Problem: A Novel by Beena Kamlani. Copyright © 2025 by Beena Kamlani. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.