A Bearded Man

There are INDIAN FANS everywhere and they are always boisterous. SHREEDUTTA CHIDANANDA recalls his encounters with them in London and there’s also another one with a taxi driver.

These are not the most blissful of times in London, and the Diary will admilt its long beard has made more than one native uncomfortable.

There has been a couple of nervous looks in pubs, and one proper hostile stare on the tube late one night. It seems silly and devoid of sense; as if wearing an eye-patch makes one a pirate. But fear and suspicion often need no logic. One evening, the Diary finds itself in a taxi driven by aman with a beard much longer than its own. Masud, it turns out, is from Afghanistan. His family fled the civil war there in the nineties, when he was still five, and moved to the UK.

“After all these attacks, my father wanted me to take my beard off,” he tells the Diary. “But I refused. It’s not my problem if they give me dirty looks. Why should I give up my faith just because someone else doesn’t like it?”