From Curry to Crumpets: An Immigrant’s Life, One Anecdote at a Time
In 1962, Vijay Anand arrived at Heathrow from New Delhi, expecting, perhaps, to begin a new chapter in his life. He was wearing a double-breasted woollen overcoat that nearly reached his ankles, carrying an old leather suitcase and an army-disposal rucksack stuffed with clothes. Britain was cold. The luggage was heavy. Roller wheels had yet to come to his rescue.
It is a wonderfully appropriate beginning to From Curry to Crumpets — a memoir in which the grand story of immigration is repeatedly brought down to earth by the small, funny, awkward and very human business of actually living it.
Anand arrived in Britain as a young Indian engineer, but there was no neat five-year plan waiting for him. Instead there were rented rooms, job interviews, unfamiliar social conventions, unfamiliar food, unfamiliar accents and the constant business of working out how things were done. He remembers being young, short of money and largely without the network of friends and relatives who might have helped him find his feet. His room in Teddington was hardly luxurious, but it became, paradoxically, the setting for some very pleasant memories.
And then there were the people.
Old classmates turn up unexpectedly in London. Strangers offer lifts. Fellow immigrants become acquaintances. Colleagues become friends. A chance conversation in the Royal Festival Hall canteen leads, unexpectedly, to a job offer in Cologne. Anand finds himself moving between Britain and Germany, learning not only how to negotiate workplaces and bureaucracies, but how different societies reveal themselves through their people.
The result is a book crowded with characters and encounters — some warm, some eccentric, some uncomfortable and some simply hilarious.
Anand has a particular talent for noticing the absurdity of ordinary life. A chance meeting with an old college friend leads to the discovery of a bizarre communal room. A visit to a London tea stall becomes an opportunity to observe the strange assortment of humanity gathered around it. Even the British fondness for the famous “stiff upper lip” becomes material for gentle teasing when his colleague Peter explains that the English are like polo mints: “solid white, smooth, sweet and shiny on the outside” but rather different at the core.
Food, inevitably, becomes part of the cultural comedy. Why does Anand like hot curry? What exactly is curry powder supposed to accomplish? And why, he wonders, should anyone
voluntarily endure certain aspects of British cuisine when there is perfectly good Indian food to be had?
Yet beneath the humour is a perceptive portrait of a changing Britain. Anand observes class, manners, race, language and the sometimes uncomfortable distinctions between people who have come from elsewhere and those who regard Britain as home. He notices the tensions within immigrant communities too, including the curious phenomenon of people who have crossed cultures themselves nevertheless becoming anxious about who speaks “proper” English or who is, culturally speaking, Indian enough.
There is also a vivid sense of time and place. This is Britain and Europe before the world Anand’s later readers would recognise: before smartphones, cheap international flights, multicultural Britain as an accepted fact, and the effortless movement between cultures that younger generations may take for granted. To navigate such a world required resourcefulness, patience and a willingness to laugh when things went wrong.
And things certainly went wrong.
But that is part of the pleasure of From Curry to Crumpets. Anand does not present himself as the perfectly prepared immigrant hero. He is candid about his mistakes, hesitations, regrets and social awkwardnesses. He looks back at his younger self with affection, amusement and occasionally a raised eyebrow.
What emerges is neither a conventional travel memoir nor simply a story of migration. It is a richly anecdotal portrait of a man finding his way between cultures — one job, one friendship, one misunderstanding, one cup of tea and one unlikely encounter at a time.
Funny, observant, occasionally provocative and often wonderfully digressive, From Curry to Crumpets invites us to remember something easily forgotten: that history is not only made through great events. Sometimes it is made in rented rooms, railway stations, workplaces, tea stalls and chance conversations between strangers.
And sometimes, if we are lucky, those memories make a very good story.
CV Vijay Anand – book author
Born into the family of a high-ranking government servant in British India, Vijay was raised by a doting father and a strict mother.
He was educated at Sacred Heart Convent and St Anthony’s in Lahore, followed by St Edward’s in Simla.
After his studies in India, he moved to London, where he built a career in the British Civil Service as a Building Services Engineer.
He also spent a year in Germany before returning to England where he has since lived with his wife in Kent.
Alongside being a writer and a keen observer of social norms and practices, he enjoys country driving and jazz music.’
