No Papers, Just Peaches

Our first excerpt from Forbidden Fruit

Cake friends,

We’re thrilled to share the first excerpt from our new issue Forbidden Fruit: a profile by Sithara Ranasinghe of her local frutería clerk, Bilal, a 24-year-old from Pakistan who spends twelve-hour days selling fruit in Barcelona’s El Raval, and long nights cooking chicken karahi in his crowded flat of fellow migrants. He runs on three coffees a day, Tupac, and messages from his family group chat.

Barcelona’s fruterías are tied to a so-called “mafia-run” underground economy, often staffed by undocumented workers who are smuggled into Europe by traffickers promising visas in exchange for grueling shifts and low pay. When Bilal’s family wheat farm in Punjab began to struggle, he decided to join the ranks of frutería workers, selling fruit to send money back home in hopes of a better future.

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Excerpts from Forbidden Fruit are presented by Plugra, premium European-style butter slow-churned for pliability, consistency, and richness.

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No Papers, Just Peaches

Profile by Sithara Ranasinghe

Painting by John Rego

Bilal is dusting a pyre of plantains, not because he needs to, but because there’s nothing left to do in the shop. He’s already picked the wilted leaves off the strawberries’ tops, trashed the softest bananas, and dragged the display crates onto the street to tempt passersby. Mounds of fruit piled outside like billiard balls, sweating under Barcelona’s sun. Only ten more hours until he gets off work.

The fruitería is one of many dotting the city, a sub-economy in plain sight. While they look like any other fruit shop—stacks of limes, clunky fans, orange walls—many run on a handshake economy built for those not meant to be here. Police reports love the terms “mafia,” “labor exploitation,” and “human trafficking,” but to men like Bilal, this is just a job. Eighty-four hours a week. Two euros an hour.

At twenty-four, Bilal has the look of a man always in motion, even when standing still. Despite his tired eyes, he’s buzzing with third-coffee energy and dressed like he’s about to go for a run, track jacket zipped up to his chin. Bilal looks sharper, younger, and leaner-faced than the man in the photo on his ID. Still, he keeps it in his pocket, within reach in case the police appear for an inspection. It hasn’t happened yet, but word is that it’s standard practice in this neighborhoods. They might come in to check he’s not selling alcohol past 10 p.m. or working without documents. He has documents, of course. They’re just not his.

A red-faced couple stumbles in, dragging oversized suitcases. Fanning themselves with flyers for a Gaudí light show, they deposit their findings on the counter: a nectarine and two beers from the fridge.

Bilal confidently diagnoses them as tourists and improvises a price: “10.60€.” They tap their card, out of the shop before they even notice the residue of a peeled-off supermarket label on the nectarine.

Later, a delivery driver will walk in with roughly the same order. Bilal charges him 5.30€. It’s not quite legal, but very little about the shop is, from creative pricing to twelve-hour shifts.

“Still,” as he says, “at least it’s not Pakistan.”

Bilal comes from a long line of wheat farmers in the Punjab stretching well before the formation of Pakistan, or so he likes to say. Two years ago, he was one of them. His days used to start at dawn, when the air was still cool enough to work in. He harvested what he could before the heat turned everything dry and brittle. He ate his meals with his mother and then, when the work was done, he’d meet his friends. The group of farm boys would carry a shisha pipe and a speaker to the edge of the farmland. Sprawled in the dry grass after a long day, they spent their evenings smoking and listening to Tupac until the battery gave out. That’s how Bilal learned English: line by line, pausing to repeat the lyrics.

Slowly, as the year drew on, the group began to shrink. His childhood friends turned into pixelated WhatsApp icons and grainy voice notes sent from abroad. It was a tradition passed on from their fathers who’d left in the ’90s to work in the Gulf. They’d always known there was nothing left for them in Pakistan. Climate change took many of the farms; corruption took the rest. Remittances ran through neighbourhoods like IV drips, relatives sending whatever they could from wherever they’d ended up—Qatar, Iraq, Dubai, Spain. It was Bilal’s generation’s turn. Everything has its season.

Bilal’s father had spent years driving taxis in Dubai. When the pandemic hit, he was forced to return home, severing the family’s financial lifeline. Bilal was a student back then, but someone had to look after the family. He dropped out of university and took a temporary job scanning groceries in an upscale Lahore suburb. While his family anxiously waited for the next harvest, customers with family in Europe rolled up in German cars to buy American candy.

Last year, Pakistan received the highest annual remittance total from overseas Pakistani workers in its history: $34.1 billion, around 9 percent of its GDP. The diaspora functions as a financial engine, sometimes keeping rural economies afloat. Most of it comes from the Gulf region, but Bilal says the real money comes from Europe. A euro goes a long way in Pakistan.

When the year’s harvest was poor, Bilal’s supermarket wages weren’t enough to keep the family farm afloat. He was their only son. He knew what came next.

“I had to find a travel agent,” he says. That’s the polite term; the more accurate word is “smuggler,” the kind who nestles teenagers into the footwells of minivans and tells them not to cough in case a border security agent spots them.

His parents refused. They’d heard too many stories: boys collapsing in the Iranian desert or left to die in the mountains if they slowed the group down. A month before Bilal arrived in Spain, forty-four Pakistani men drowned trying to reach the Canary Islands by boat. It was out of the question. Instead, they scraped together the money, selling the farmland for a dubious student visa and a one-way ticket to Barcelona.

Bilal didn’t know anything about Spain when he left, except that a friend from his village was already living there. He watched a one-hour YouTube documentary on Christopher Columbus and figured it would be fine. Spain was Europe and Europe had jobs. Besides, he felt fine about his chances—if his old schoolmate made it work at fourteen, why not him at twenty-four? That friend, now a taxi driver, called in some favors within the local Pakistani community and got Bilal a job in three days. He says this was a pretty soft landing.

Some of Barcelona’s fruit shops exist as links in a chain reaching all the way to Pakistan. The networks are vast—recruiters, travel agents, flat managers, and shop owners. Recruiters promise papers, a job and a way out, for up to 14,000€. The men don’t need to be convinced. If they can’t pay, they’ll work off the debt. Once they arrive in Spain, the “agency” crams them into overcrowded flats. Their passports are taken as “collateral” and they work fifteen-hour shifts in fruterías to pay back the debt.

Bilal has read stories about other immigrants being paid in leftover fruit, sleeping on mattresses wedged between crates of mangoes. It’s hard to know who’s been forced and who’s simply doing what they have to in order to survive.

“People are very secretive,” he says. “They don’t even share these things among our community.” He doesn’t know how his friend arrived in Barcelona, alone at fourteen, either. They’ve never discussed it.

It’s the same with his flatmates. For the last three months, Bilal has split a three-bedroom apartment with seven other young men, mostly delivery riders and fruit-slingers. They bicker about loud pans at night, sleep through each other’s alarms, and scold whoever left rice in the sink again. Bilal, who has to simmer his karahi until 2 a.m., is often the central figure of these showdowns. It’s the only thing he knows how to make except eggs. He starts it as soon as he gets home from work at midnight, dropping chicken into bubbling oil then stirring in tomatoes, chilies, and garlic, and letting it simmer down into a deep red sauce. He doesn’t sleep until 4 a.m.—around the time he used to wake up in Pakistan—but insists it’s worth it. “It’s so delicious,” he says, “the time doesn’t matter.”

The flatmates come from different countries, but they’re stuck in the same system–working for papers. To get their residency, they need to stay under the radar for three years, then show the government proof that they were there the whole time. The state keeps them on a bureaucratic tightrope—no criminal record, but no legal income either. They keep their heads down and work the jobs locals won’t touch, even though they know they can’t see a doctor if they get hurt doing them.

When asked what surprises him most about Europe, Bilal laughs, “I didn’t expect so many Pakistanis.”

He lives in El Raval, Barcelona’s most stubbornly diverse neighborhood, where neon bazaars stud medieval alleys. Despite the government’s decades-long crusade to “revitalize” it, 61 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are immigrants, compared to the rest of Spain’s 18 percent. Here, gentrification means a coworking space opening between two halal butchers, with a graffiti tour passing through twice a day. With such a diverse clientele, some of the most god-fearing Pakistani fruit shops and supermarkets still opt to sell beer. They’re not worried about the police. They’re worried about the religious judgment from pious WhatsApp groups back home. Bilal’s not so bothered. Although he doesn’t drink, he finds the whole thing funny. “I already texted my home friends a photo of the beer fridge.”

He doesn’t mind his job at all. The twelve hours are fine, as long as he can sit next to the fan and watch YouTube documentaries on his phone. When business is slow, he plays videos about Palestine, finance, colonization, and politics. “How white people conquered the world,” he says jokingly.

Despite how the newspapers frame it, Bilal doesn’t see himself as exploited. Sending remittances feels less like a choice and more like routine, passed down like his family’s fields once were. As he sees it, the whole system isn’t some grand scheme, but people trying to help each other, sometimes poorly. After all, when you’re living in a place where your existence is already against the law, what else can you do?

Some mornings, before the shop opens, Bilal sits outside the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, a spaceship-white cuboidal museum, part of the city’s gentrification effort. Immigrants sit and mingle outside, blasting music on their speakers, hanging out with expat skaters. Sometimes Bilal chats with them; other times, he scrolls on his phone, looking through old pictures or checking in on his scattered group chat.

There’s one photo he treasures, taken this March, his first Eid away from the family. He’d sent his paycheck home that week. It was the first time in a long time that his mother could buy the family new clothes for the celebration, proof that the remittance came through. In the picture, everyone is beaming.

When Bilal gets his papers, he plans to leave the fruit shop behind to find online work, or anything that doesn’t involve selling alcohol. It’s fine for now, but he notes the irony of going to the mosque every week and selling Desperados at work all day. With the political situation back home deteriorating and historic floods and droughts displacing Pakistanis year after year, Bilal doesn’t expect to see his family any time soon. Until then, there are three more years of grapes to shift, beers to misprice, and tourists to upcharge. Bilal’s not trying to be noble. He’s just trying to make it work.

Sithara Ranasinghe is a writer who takes evil joy in informing people that there's at least one digested wasp in every fig.

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Attend: Secret Riso Club is hosting a one-day art book fair at Selva in Brooklyn on September 6.

Join: Myca is a global collective for women in food.

No-bake bake: Brown butter banana pudding from Kassie Mendieta.

Support: Briana Holt, head baker at Tandem in Portland Maine and Tough Cookie contributor, is raffling off a special cake in partnership with Watermelon Seed Collective to support The Sameer Project’s urgent aid work in Palestine.