12 Dec: Perth, Australia. LIRA FONSECA-MONIZ. Wife of late Jose Moniz. Mother of late Roque/Meena, Octu/Loretta, Megan/Cyril, Mario/Charmaine.

London is one of those cities which like a panoramic moving camera shot changes with the lighting. In the morning, it is mellow; soft sunlight peeping through the sky or a light mist giving it a gossamer, almost mystical feeling. School children in their tiny blazers skip alongside their mothers on their way to school and old wrinkled women hobble onto red buses to do their shopping. In the night London takes on a menacing look; dark clouds descend to block out the light and a thick, bilious black envelops the city illuminated only by street lamps. Tattooed men gather in packs around corners talking animatedly and aggressively. Women with shiny sequined skirts and stiletto shoes walk the streets stopping to whisper in men's ears. The city at night is eerily foreboding. I've never lived in a city that changes its look with shifting light but then I've never lived in a city that has changed so much with shifting skin colours, ethnicities and cultures over the past 5 decades.

Two days ago I met an Indian couple, their hair a little grayed and their spirit a little jaded by life. The man, suffering from innumerable health ailments, had come to London in 1966, then a young lad of 13. He said he came from a village in Punjab; he had never seen a white man nor did he know anything about city life. His family settled in Southall, now a predominantly Indian area in the UK, overflowing with Indian restaurants, grocers and general stores with Punjabi signage but then, he recalls, there being hardly any Indians and just one Indian grocer. Southall was an area plagued by racial tension. The man lowers his voice in conspiratorial bonding and recalls riots, terrible riots in 1979, when Indians and white British took to the streets, each one trying to protect their own way of life in the UK. In an astonishing statement, the khallia, the colloquial Indian word for Afro-Caribbean, were with the Whites, he says. It never ceases to amaze me, this animosity which exists between the Asian and African, this barren knowledge that similarity of colour rarely means solidarity of any sort, that racism is rarely about colour.

Back in Africa, the Indian and the African had clashed repeatedly. When Uganda was on the cusp on Independence, the then Finance Minister told the press: "there will be plenty of room for Europeans even after self-government. But we are determined to get rid of the Asians." This despite the fact that India, particularly Nehru, had been a staunch supporter of African nationalism, doing what he could on the international scene as well as funding nationalist aspirations in Kenya. When in 1953, a Kenyan delegation visited India, Oginga Odinga, who would later rise to the position of Vice President, told the press that in the eyes of the African, the Indian was no better than the white settlers of Kenya.

I don't want to haul all the blame on inverted African racism. We as Indian or Goans have not been particularly kind to the African. To us Goans he was the uneducated hampri, at best the object of ridicule or at worst a menial to be treated much like a bonded slave. One Goan who came over from Kenya recalls how in London, he had to discard the parochial biases that were ingrained in the Goan psyche against the African, for in London, the African was likely to be a colleague with whom he had to share work-space, and not a servant who served him dinner.

Both the African and the Asian share a long and uneasy history of distrust and at times outright hatred. But this severance of any mutuality, this discord has even travelled to the new world of America. Here the African-American views the Indian as an economic interloper, who preys on low-end jobs and takes away from what the African perceives to be legitimately his by birthright. This scenario isn't accurate though for in America, the Indian is more likely to create jobs as many of them are owners of 7/11 shops, motels and fast-food franchises. And when the Indian does venture into the corporate sector it is in IT, banking and other middle-strata jobs. But tensions between the African and Indian community specially in the more populous cities of New York and Chicago persist, an uneasy truce declared in order to get on with the business of living cheek by jowl to each other.

Racism is rarely about colour, rather it is about dominance, about sharing scarce resources and above all it is about our innate human desire to create a pecking order and somehow place ourselves favourably on that ladder.