A few weeks ago I wrote a column in this paper about the lessons I learned when I was poor. I qualified it by saying that people like me, with property to their names, never really experience poverty except by choice. I fear that that qualification is not enough, because most of us do not understand what that means. The key difference between poverty and its opposite — not prosperity but the opportunity of it — is choice. Amartya Sen offers a very clear example of this in the beginning of his book Development as Freedom , in which he describes a poor man killed during the Partition riots because he had to earn his living in a neighbourhood despite the communal tension.

I have been without money, and had to beg for it from my family to keep me afloat. I have sat with ₹10 in my hand, calculating that it would buy me three boiled eggs and a hard candy before I could get some more money in three days’ time. In the end though, what I was paying for in these deprivations was my pride. During this time, my friends and family, many happily earning good salaries and living comfortable lives, would often call me over for a meal, or offer help.

This is the kind of support that the truly poor just do not have. To be truly poor is to know that the network you have is largely in as difficult circumstances as you are; that they do not have the leisure to support somebody who — because he wants a job in something like international relations and cannot find one — chooses to go without earning until he can. That is not poverty: it is the luxury of poverty.

This was brought home to me by an incident in the UK. I was in London because I wanted to research a book on the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, and the city has a vibrant refugee community and some great research institutions. I even had a visa that allowed me a year’s work. I had no real support network in the country, as I had not studied or grown up there. And while finding a job in my field is difficult enough in India, it is even harder in a foreign country.

In the end I took up a job at Starbucks because it paid for my basic rent and food needs, and I got as much coffee as I needed. One day a friend called up while I was cleaning up before closing for the day. She laughed when I told her what I was doing, saying she could not imagine me doing that. And then asked if I would like to come to her parent’s house in the country for lunch on her birthday. I happily agreed.

The London countryside is as pretty as it is often shown, or at least it was where her parents’ house is. Her father, a retired intelligence operative who had worked in West Asia, was interested in some of the things I was researching and we were talking about those when my friend’s grandmother arrived. As we were being introduced I noticed her brooch, a strikingly simple thin bone set in gold. I asked her if it was a tiger’s wishbone — a tiny bone that is free floating and rarely located.

Her eyes lit up, and she said, “Why it is!” Her family had grown up in India, and this was a relic of the past. She asked me how I recognised it, and I mentioned that both my mother and her younger sister had such brooches, from tigers my grandfather and his father had hunted. We talked a little about India and other things and I left after lunch.

I did not meet my friend’s family again, and left the UK soon thereafter. But the conversation played on my mind for a while, and the truth of it is this: In a foreign country, in the house of people who were privileged even by their country’s standards, where I was working at a job that was just above minimum wage, the conversation I was having wasn’t about India, or a brooch, or anything else except that my family had power in their time that was comparable to theirs.

These are the ways that privilege is kept and preserved, by seemingly innocent conversations that hide a hundred ways to identify where a person comes from, the network they enjoy, who they might be. This is how people of “similar backgrounds” help each other, giving each other chances that those outside the circle of privilege never get. This is also why you shouldn’t trust the privileged when they speak of poverty.

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water issues in the Himalayas; @OmairTAhmad

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