Sarfraz Manzoor

I have just got back from New York City and while there I had a chance to catch up with a friend of mine who is now living in the East Village. We are hanging out in his apartment and then he suggests that maybe we get something to eat and says how about the Lebanese restaurant across the road. I head over to the restaurant with him. Its a place called Moustache and I am sitting there when the waiter walks up to take our order. He looks at me and says ‘and so we meet again’. I look up at him and realise that it is someone I last saw in Istanbul last summer when I went there for the Observer to do a feature about an Iraqi heavy metal band. The waiter was Marwan who was one of the two band members I interviewed. when I had met him in istanbul he had told me that he had been given asylum status to move to the US but that was the end of it. When I saw him in the restaurant I was totally floored and it took me some time to recover from the shock of that chance encounter.