Saira Niazi is a London-based writer, renegade guide and founder of the Living London project. Over the years, she has written extensively on the places and people that make up her home city. Niazi’s writing has been published in various magazines and journals including Huck, Time Out and the New Statesman. In 2020, Niazi self-published a collection of personal essays entitled, Belonging: Reflections of a Renegade Guide. In 2023, Saira was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Futures Award for place-writing. She is also a Churchill Fellow. Saira received a scholarship from the Aziz Foundation to undertake an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths.

Barber King 

The barber king crumpled onto the floor of the small toilet, tears long withheld streaming down his face. In his hand, a letter he had been waiting on. Enclosed, news he had been dreading. Hold it together Hozan, he willed himself as he wiped away his tears. He took a deep breath and, mustering all the strength he could, picked himself up and pushed open the door. There were customers waiting for him.   

As he walked onto the floor of his barbershop, he signalled to a seated man that he was ready for him.   

“You alright Hozan?” Adam, a regular, asked. Hozan was too tired to fake a smile. He was too tired for anything.    

“I’m okay, thank you brother. The usual trim and hot shave for you?”  

“Yeah please!” As Hozan began to trim his hair, the man spoke again. “It’s horrific what’s happening in Palestine right now! My wife wouldn’t stop crying last night. She kept scrolling through videos of them poor innocent children, bloodied, left to die. And no one’s doing anything. There’s no justice, I’m telling you… no peace…” 

“Mmm,” Hozan murmured in vague agreement, willing the exchange to end. He didn’t want to hear about dead children, about explosions and apathy. He’d witnessed enough bloodshed to last a lifetime. He was a Kurd after all.   

“We take it for granted, you know. Our lives. We have it so easy here,” Adam continued. Hozan suppressed a sigh, a stranger to ease.  

“Where did you say you’re originally from again?”   

“Kurdistan.” A pause.   

“That’s not a real place though, is it?”   

Hozan suddenly felt himself grow impatient, and hot with anger. He continued snipping his hair, half-wishing he could snip off an ear, or part of an ear. Hozan realised early on that most people don’t know where Kurdistan is. They don’t know that it’s a region spread across four nations. People hardly ever spoke of the atrocities his people had faced at the hands of multiple dictators. The ongoing persecution, the genocide. People didn’t care that his brothers’ arm had been blown off when a land mine exploded in front of him or that his grandfather and two of his uncles had been killed in the Halabja massacre. Their land (never their own) was seeped in blood, and their collective memory fraught with pain.   

“For us it is a real place. Kurdistan is our home,” he said eventually.  

“Fair enough.” Adam turned his attention to his phone.    

Everyone needs a home: somewhere safe and secure. Somewhere where the rain falls more frequently than bombs and sirens aren’t a substitute for birdsong. Hozan understood this. He felt the anguish of the Palestinian people, more than most. He felt the despair, the sorrow, the abandonment, the fury, the fury, the fury. But what could he do? He knew the feelings of helplessness would paralyse him and send him to a dark place, a place he was forever trying to avoid revisiting. Was he really to go back there?   

He glanced at the letter resting on the counter. His appeal had been rejected. His refugee status revoked. He knew what this meant. It was time to go back. It had been over ten years since he arrived in England. It was time to put an end to his suffering, to accept his kismet; to return. He was tired of existing in an in-between state. He was tired of trying to build a home of fuzz and foam. Of withstanding uncertainty and living with the unknown – or for it.      

A lot had happened in the years since he left. His mother had died unexpectedly in her sleep. He had heard that she said her ‘ishā prayer on the night of her passing. That she lingered a little longer in prostration and that her funeral was well attended. His father’s hair had faded white not long after, and his wrinkles had deepened. His grandmother had started to forget. Her memories were vanishing, and she was slowly vanishing with them. Shadows on sheets. Flickers on glass.     

Adam slowly turned his head side to side, admiring his fresh trim and clean-cut shave in the mirror. He cheerfully handed Hozan two notes.  

“Cheers mate. You’re honestly the best barber in Brighton!”  

“Thanks Adam. Have a good day.” 

Hozan took a breath. The fluorescent lights were blinding, and the smell of product made his stomach turn. Strands of his life, that had for so long been held together by industrial strength hairspray, were beginning to loosen.   

He glanced over at the clock. It was almost 8pm. He sighed and closed his account book, a sum half-finished. He needed air. He put on his jacket, turned off the lights and pulled down the shutters of his shop. He walked down Grand Parade Road towards the seafront, passing the gleaming white dome of the Pavilion. It was an unusually quiet evening. As he passed by the corner of St James Street, an ageing rough sleeper approached him. His eyes were vacant, hair flaying.  

“Got any spare change?” 

Hozan stopped and sifted through his pocket and pulled out a ten-pound note. He handed it to him.   

“Thank you mate, thank you!” he flashed a grin.  

“No worries. Stay well brother.” Hozan remembered when he first arrived. He had no fixed address, no money, no belongings. And long before that, when he drifted through Europe. He would sleep wherever he lay his head, on the green outside Milano Centrale station, on a bench behind Goodwill Caravan. He would go days without eating. He would pick up cigarettes stubbed out too soon, desperate for a smoke. He knew what it was like to have nothing. He hadn’t gotten very far when he felt a tug at his heart and decided to turn back. The man was still loitering on the side of the road.   

“Do you want a haircut?” he asked. “I’m a barber. I have a barbershop down the road”.  

The man looked surprised and then pleased.   

‘Alright mate, why not.” When you have nothing, there are fewer reasons to be suspicious. They walked side by side for a few blocks.   

“My name is Hozan.”  

“John.”  

Hozan pulled up the shutters once they’d arrived at his shop, unlocked the door and switched on the lights.   

“You can shower first if you want?” He picked up a towel draped across a faux leather seat and handed it to him. The man nodded and Hozan took him through the back to the entrance of the bathroom.   

“I’ll leave some clean clothes outside for you.” Hozan rummaged through a box of clothes in the corridor. He pulled out a navy jumper and a pair of creased cords. He hung them on the doorknob outside the bathroom and re-entered his shop and waited.        

Years ago, when business was booming, Hozan would often invite rough sleepers to his barbershop in Ipswich and give them free haircuts and clean clothes. Sometimes he would make videos documenting their transformation. They always left beaming. A man needed to feel good about himself. A man needed to be taken care of, somehow.   

An hour later, after he had cut the stranger’s hair, listened to his wild and woeful life story, and swept the floor of his shop, Hozan finally arrived at the seafront. He sat on a cold mount of pebbles not too far from the colourful lit up pier. The wind raged and the sea waves crashed brutally against the shore.   

He liked Brighton. It felt like a town full of runaways – a caravanserai for adrift souls. It was a place where students and elders looked each other in the eye and smiled. It was warm and colourful and noisy. You could be anyone. It had only been two and a half years since he’d opened his second barbershop, but he already felt at home in a way he hadn’t felt elsewhere since his arrival. He’d created a community around his barbershop. More than that, it was in this city, Brighton, that their paths crossed. The woman that would teach him to dream again. Teach him to believe once more in love.     

Hozan was handsome. His skin was camel brown. He had curly black hair, long eyelashes framed his bright hazel eyes, often bloodshot from overwork. His beard was always perfectly manicured, he had full lips, and the smell of Arabian oud enveloped him in a fragrant cloud. It masked other smells. He was tall and thin, but sturdy, almost unshakeable. Hozan took great pride in his appearance. He often wore designer brands. He never wore trainers, only shoes. Trainers are for boys, he would say, I’m a man. The way he dressed reflected his personality; he was smart, upright, popular, and chivalrous. He had a sense of humour. You had to. He was a touch mad. Life rendered him so. He drank too much. He smoked too much. He worked too much. He worked himself into the ground. Often because he needed to. Sometimes because he couldn’t bear to be idle. Being idle caused him to ruminate on his situation. It was hopeless, however he looked at it.   

Hozan gazed at the flickering red lights belonging to the wind turbines on the horizon. The black waves grew bigger and bigger. They looked like jagged, menacing monsters. When he was a boy, his mother once told him that the jinns live in places of ruin: derelict places, unclean places. But they also lived in the sea. It used to terrify him. He used to have nightmares. In them, he would be violently dragged under the surface. Maybe they weren’t jinns, but the raging spirits of souls claimed by the watery abyss.   

Memories long repressed surfaced. Hozan recalled sitting on the deck of a rickety fishing boat bopping haphazardly across the Mediterranean Sea. The engine went out on the third day. Someone on the boat, an Iranian seeking a safe place who happened to be an engineer, managed to get it started again. It was a miracle from God that they made it to Italy alive. He knew they would. He had faith. He never prayed but he had faith. He recalled months later being trapped in a fridge inside a moving lorry. Stowaway in a hollow. Time and thought ceased to exist. He emerged numb, bleary, and bewildered. He couldn’t feel his body for days.   

He tried to remember a time when he felt warm. The heat of the sun stifled. Everything was hard. Always. But there were moments, fragments of moments when he experienced warmth. Maybe it was gratitude or the rarity of feeling alive, feeling present. He remembered looking down at Athens from a mountainous summit, lying on the grass in an unnamed park in Nice, sharing a meal with a stranger outside Duomo di Milano. And home, as a boy, surrounded by his family. He missed home. His small village in the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah.   

He remembered sunlit turquoise. Those midsummer afternoons they spent together by the sea and in the sea, just the two of them. Hozan and Zoya. The world and its people always faded into the background.    

Warmer than warm, his favourite place was her embrace. He remembered when they would sit in his empty barbershop at night and watch Kurdish films. Each one, sadder and more sentimental than the last. They were his favourite kind. The stories felt familiar and real. Those movie nights felt like a lifetime ago now.   

“I’m never letting you choose a film again,” she said at the end of a particularly sad film, tears rolling down her cheeks. In it, a jilted man had died alone in a house fire after his wife left him for his brother.    

“It’s real life, jaan. Life is sad,” he said, holding her closer.   

“But life is happy, too. There are happy endings.”    

“I don’t know.” 

“Do you think we’ll have a happy ending?”  

“I don’t know. Insha’Allah” He knew his answer wouldn’t satisfy her.   

“I pray for you every day,” she said unexpectedly. “You’ll have a happy ending. You will.” There was something about the way she said it, her voice imbued with love, sincerity, and reassurance, that rendered him safe. He was a boy again.   

“I’m scared.” For the time, he named the monstrous feeling that had made a permanent home in his chest.    

“What are you scared of?”  

“Many things. I’m scared my grandmother will forget me. That she will die without me seeing her. I’m scared that my father will grow old alone. I’m scared I won’t get my papers. That I’ll have to go back. That I’ll no longer be able to support the people that rely on me.” He took a breath. “I’m scared that I’ll lose you.”       

She turned to face him. Her eyes gleamed in the darkened room. He was sure she could see it, the fear that he’d concealed for so long. She took his rough hands into hers and squeezed them.   

“It will be okay; everything will be okay.” She paused. “Trust in God. He’s brought you this far. He won’t abandon you now.” Her voice was soft but sure. The words irked him. You won’t lose me, he wanted to hear her say. He wanted to believe her. She had been his support, his closest friend, his truest lover. She was patient and kind, but their paths were diverging, and goodbyes felt imminent.  

 Spring gave way to summer and then autumn, and by winter Zoya left. He didn’t stop her. Deep down he knew they weren’t right for each other. She wanted the promise of a shared future. She wanted him to change. To stop smoking and drinking; to practise his faith so she could practise hers again. He wanted her to stop wanting things from him.   

Hozan picked up a pebble and threw it into the sea. It made a loud splosh sound. He threw in another one and then another. He then grabbed two handfuls of pebbles and threw them in all at once. They disappeared into the fizzling black water. Noise faded into silence. He wondered if everything he built would sink into the void just as quickly.     

Hozan had moved from Ipswich two and a half years ago. In that time, he had opened four more shops. He trained up men, mostly young Kurdish men in exile who needed to send money back home. He taught them what he knew. He knew how to cut hair. How to make people feel seen and heard. How to clean and to fix things. But now his limbs felt exhausted. Spent from working, walking, withstanding a life of struggle. His mind was elsewhere. He had done everything he could, for everyone. Maybe that’s why he had worked so much, why he had busied himself creating a barber empire. Maybe he knew he would go back, never to return.  

He’d seen a lot of the country during his 10 years, with friends and family displaced across the islands in a way that only those in exile ever truly are. She didn’t understand the closeness that he shared with his people. It’s a closeness that comes from being persecuted. They took care of one another. The love has no limits, the care is unending and loyalty unwavering. She would never understand. Few would.  

He loved his people. Kurds. He loved seeing them, supporting them, being with them. He loved to eat with his friends, on the floor of his living room. They would eat with their hands, sharing tepsî and dolma like they did back home. They chattered and laughed as though every meeting was their last. Because it could be. Why do endings and beginnings always come about abruptly?  

His phone rang. The sound pulled him out of his head and into the world. It was his father. Hozan didn’t tell him his news. He wasn’t ready. Instead, he felt relief when he handed the phone to his grandmother. They spoke for a while. These days his grandmother always called Hozan by his brother’s name, Aras. She always asked about him. She told him she recently had an eye operation. That her eyesight was deteriorating. That she wanted to see her grandson before she went blind.   

“Yes. Hozan, he is going to Kurdistan. He will see you soon.” He ended the conversation. Kurdish was a melodic language, both soft and hard – so close, yet distant, heavy on his tongue. He is going to Kurdistan. He will see you soon. The words reverberated in his mind. Finally, he meant them. He was going to Kurdistan. For the first time he almost felt relieved. He would no longer live as a castaway, stuck on an island he couldn’t leave.   

Hours passed. Hozan stretched out his body, lay his head onto the hard pebbles and looked up at the clear night sky. The stars shined the same way they did from his village. He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked, really looked at the stars. He connected them up. An outline appeared, of a curly coiffure attached to an oval face.      

He would miss being a barber. He would miss being the Barber King. He took pride in his work. He considered himself an artist. He was an artist. He studied art in university in Sulaymaniyah. He specialised in sculpture. He’d created sculptures mostly of men with chiselled features and defined abs and sad eyes. He loved working with his hands. He would walk to university every day because he couldn’t afford the fare. He wondered what that boy, really, he was a boy then, would think if he could see him now. He wandered what he would say to him. There was no denying that a small part of him had died somewhere between departing and arriving.    

Hozan left the beach and wandered towards the lanes. Every so often he took a drag from his cigarette. He lost count how many he’d gotten though. It was late at night and there were few people around. He watched a laughing couple as they exited The Walrus. Further on, three teenage girls were sitting drinking on the steps outside the hippodrome. Close by, a man with a large suitcase was eating a wrap in Kebab House. The world kept turning unaware, all around life went on, it pushed outwards.    

As he wandered, his mind sifted through the moments it took for him to get here. For months he found himself perpetually lost in foreign cities; lost in translation, lost on the streets, and lost in his head. A drifting drifter with a destination in mind. He’d spent most of his life on the dividing line. Against the edge of a blade. Had he ever really lived?   

Two laughing men passed Hozan outside the entrance of Clarence Square. He turned over memories of fleeting friends he met along the way. Jalal, a young Afghan trafficked by a Romanian gang and forced into crime. He ran away and eventually settled in Marseille, where he worked in a Vietnamese restaurant. He would spend his evenings hosting strangers, mostly travellers, sometimes refugees. He remembered their last exchange.  

“Don’t forget me Hozan,” Jalal said wistfully as they sat by the water’s edge at the port in Saint Raphael, smoking together for the last time. Nearby, a crowd of wealthy young holidaymakers partied in a yacht. The music was loud and jarring. Their world so distant, so unfathomable.   

“Never. We’ll meet again one day brother, if not in this life, then the next.”   

He remembered Kareem from Syria, a handsome young shepherd boy who was forced to grow up too fast. He lived on the streets of Germany and France, before finally making the journey on the back of a lorry to Dover. He almost never did. He ended up working as a live-in gardener in London. He stayed in a manor, with a music room and a library and a chapel. He’d clear out the pond and put out the chairs and send money back home.   

He remembered Fatou from Senegal. She had mysterious eyes, a gentle soul and possessed wisdom in abundance. She had walked for longer distances than most. She travelled alone whenever she could. Their paths crossed at the Goodwill Caravan, though Hozan was sure he had seen her before. A glimpse in Izmir, or maybe Bodrum. The world was at once too small, too big – too vague. Shadows on sheets. Flickers on glass.  

 Their lives intertwined for a moment in time, really it was a just a moment. When you look back, that’s all they ever had. Moments. Transient and affecting. Most of the people Hozan met were all from small villages like his. Some ravaged, flattened, erased almost entirely. They all harboured secrets. They all dreamed of a life without waiting, without wanting. Simple things come hard. A sigh. The world was cold and dark again: a moving fridge.  

When he could no longer feel his hands and feet. When he had finally run out of cigarettes and thoughts, Hozan made his way back to his fuzzy foamy soon-to-be-blown-away home, wholly defeated.  

He didn’t know then, that in less than a month he would go back to Kurdistan. Before he left, his friends would throw him a surprise party at his barbershop in Ipswich. It would be attended by his family, his customers, those who loved and supported him throughout his journey. He would go back with his head held high. He would feel proud of himself. He would remember that he left a poor broken boy with secrets that threatened to swallow him up whole. He would return as a Barber King. A resourceful businessman who made it against all odds and who helped others in his community to do the same. He would realise that it was time to let go – to trust his journey. He would trust in God. He did not abandon him.  

He would see his father. They would cry tears of joy, of loss and remembrance. He would embrace his frail grandmother. She would call him by his name for one last time. Hozan. Days later he would be at her funeral, glad that he had returned. Glad that he got to say goodbye. He would feel then, finally, as though he was exactly where he was supposed to be.   

In the months that followed, Hozan would take his father to the Holy Land, to Mecca to complete his pilgrimage. A dream realised; a dream fulfilled. He would miss Brighton and Ipswich. He would miss living in a world he worked so hard to build. He would miss the friends and family he left behind. But he would embrace his new life. Hozan would use his resilience and creativity to find new ways to thrive. He would come to know that the world was so much bigger than it was before he left. It was so much kinder to him.  He would receive a modest monthly income from his barbershops. He would use the money to continue to support his family and community. He would travel to places like Tbilisi and Baku.  

Hozan would not say goodbye to the woman he fell in love with outside the Duke of York cinema one winter’s evening in Brighton. He would never see her again, though she would often cross his mind.         

At that moment, as he stepped inside his empty dark flat, Hozan didn’t know that in the distant future he would meet a spirited Kurdish woman. A woman who spoke his language, understood his culture and his pain. A woman who accepted him the way he was. A woman he would come to love, marry, and build a life with.   

He didn’t know then that he would one day open a barbershop in Sulaymaniyah, for no other reason than his love of service and feeling of connection to his fellow man. And that eventually, he would start making sculptures again. They would take on many forms.