I sit at my desk in the open-plan London office where I work part-time as a brand consultant. Like so many authors, I write novels for the money, and I feed my soul by brand consulting. On this particular day, the seven British colleagues whose desks form a contiguous mass with my own are bent over with laughter. “You can’t be serious,” says Charlie. “They really ask you that?” says Joanna. “Wait, wait, I know,” says Nick. “It’s a lump of coal and whisky.” “Almost,” I reply. “The correct answer to the question, ‘If you were the first visitor of the New Year to a Scottish home, what might you be expected to bring?’ is coal, bread and whisky. This tradition, my friends, is known as ‘first footing’."
I am reading from pages 24 and 26 of the British Citizenship Test Study Guide. This, for those unfamiliar with the foundational text of our common culture, is “A comprehensive study guide containing official material, study advice and sample questions”. So far, each of my colleagues has on average been able to answer only about one in three questions correctly. None, for example, could describe the intricately choreographed tribal ritual with which one year gives way to another in Wales.

Q: If you were visiting a Welsh home during the New Year, what tradition might be observed?

A: In Wales, on the stroke of midnight, the back door is opened to release the Old Year. It is then locked to keep the luck in, and at the last stroke, the front door opened to let in the New Year.

But unlike my colleagues, I, a 35-year-old, brown-skinned, Pakistani-born, US college and law-school-educated, sometimes bearded, innately peripatetic, and rather obviously immigrated man can answer virtually all of the 175 sample questions correctly, because I spent much of the previous two days committing them to memory. I have, to borrow an expression from an illustrious group of navigators, The Knowledge.

The reason I undertook to know these things, along with such facts as that until 1857 women in this country had no right to divorce and that the Northern Ireland Assembly has 108 members, is that I am taking my “Life in the UK Test” tomorrow morning. For prospective Britons who have lived here for several years, diligently paid their dues to the Inland Revenue, and avoided the acquisition of a criminal record, this test is the final hurdle they must cross before they can apply for citizenship.

I wake up at the crack of dawn and huddle over the counter in the kitchen, engaged in a last-minute review of the Study Guide. It has been almost a decade since I last sat an exam, and my test-taking skills are rusty. But as my sleep-addled brain is slowly resuscitated, I feel a cold and merciless confidence begin to glint, bodkin-like, from within. “Yeah, baby,” I say to myself with a Texan squint. “Bring it on.”

The official testing centre I have selected is run by a company called A4e and is located on Great Portland Street in central London. As an invigilator explains the procedure, I cannot help but cast a glance over my fellow suitors of Britannia in the waiting area. There are perhaps two dozen in all, and I am surprised by their varied appearance. I see Sub-Saharan Africans. I see Arabs. I see white Europeans. I see East Asians and South Asians, and if my accent-allocation instincts are correct, an American Latino. I see – is it possible? – an oddly pale-skinned pygmy. No, I am mistaken; she is merely a child walking out of the lavatory. I feel a sense of camaraderie as I look around: this motley and eager crew is precisely the sort of nation to which I would be happy to belong.

I am taken to a computer, made to log in, shown a sample question, and then it begins. We have 45 minutes to answer 24 questions with a maximum of six mistakes. The first question is one I am familiar with. Relief floods over me. I answer it and move on to the second, which I again recognise. Yes! And the third: a hat-trick! I make rapid progress and before I know it I am done. Less than 10 minutes have gone by. I raise my hand and am escorted back to the waiting area. As I get up, I glance at the test-taker beside me. He is wearing glasses. One hand rests uncertainly on his keyboard. A finger of his other hand is tracing a line of text on the screen. He is still on the first question. Frustration and despair are visible on his face. Nor is he alone. Many of us have completed the test early. But at least as many seem barely able even to begin.

It is only then that I realise what surely must be the real purpose of the test: to exclude the illiterate and those with a poor mastery of the English language. That is why it does not ask us the practical questions that might actually be of use to life in the UK – the number to dial for emergency services, for example, or how to register to vote – and instead focuses on arcane trivia unknown even to most native Britons.

I am given my result. I have passed. I leave with a certificate. It is an unexpected anticlimax.

My immigration advisor tells me that it could take three to six months for my citizenship to be approved. Being a Pakistani, and therefore used to onerous security checks, I expect a wait at the longer end of the spectrum. Instead, I receive my letter of congratulations from the Home Office in just a few weeks. “MI5 have lost the plot,” Nick tells me at work. “What are they thinking, giving citizenship to a potential terrorist like you?” Then he laughs and presents me with a pair of Union Jack cuff links. Other colleagues gather round and applaud. I spread my arms and launch into an impromptu rendition of “Rule Britannia”, of which I must admit I know only the first two lines.
I am not yet a citizen. I am now required, as the final step in the process, to attend a citizenship ceremony. But that, I am told, is merely a formality, and for the first time I allow myself to think it will actually all work out, and I will not be turned down on some technicality. This paranoia, the sense that a way will be found to exclude me, is part of why I set out to become a British citizen in the first place.

When I left Pakistan for college in America, I had no intention of staying there. But as college gave way to law school, and as law school gave way to a job in fabulous New York, I began to imagine that I might make a permanent home for myself in the United States. But I also felt a pull eastwards. Every three or four years of my dozen-year residence in America, I would return to Pakistan for an extended stay of several months to a year.

In 1996, back when I could still imagine becoming a lawyer, I took a summer associate position at the British offices of an American firm, thinking I might prefer Britain’s greater proximity to Pakistan. I turned 25 on a flight from New York to London, which I remember thinking at the time was symbolic. But the summer was quickly over, and years would pass before I found myself living in Britain again.

Throughout the 1990s, I remained caught up in America’s labyrinthine immigration system. The F-1 visas of my college and law-school years were followed by a brief statutory period of work permission and then by discretionary H-1B visas that tied me to a single employer and could at that time be extended for a maximum of only six years. This limit gave rise to a desperate urgency to progress in one’s application for a Green Card, with its promise of permanent residency. Half the starting class of my firm in New York were foreign-born, and immigration was one of our most frequent topics of conversation.

The process of receiving a Green Card in America was a black box into which petitions disappeared for years at a time, constantly threatened by arbitrary decisions, labour-certification requirements and misplaced paperwork. The government department responsible for handling all this was, we were convinced, kept deliberately understaffed as an indirect form of immigration control. I knew many people who had been in the US for over a decade and still had not received their Green Cards. This state of legal limbo bred in me a sense of unease. At the same time, other countries were making it more and more difficult to travel on a Pakistani passport. When I first began work in New York, I could often get foreign visas in a day. Four years later, they could take as long as a month, making it almost impossible to know in advance whether a particular vacation or business trip would be able to take place.

By the summer of 2001, I was once again feeling a pull eastward, so I arranged a one-year transfer to the London office of my firm. A month after I arrived, the carnage of 9/11 occurred, and America changed both in its attitude to Muslims within and in its actions abroad. The contrasts with Britain became more and more pronounced. An article I wrote for a US newspaper had a paragraph on Muslim resentment deleted; a similar piece here was published in its entirety. There the Iraq war met with broad public approval; here I marched with over a million people in protest. There immigration officers at airports wore pistols at their hips and treated me as a suspect in a criminal proceeding; here I had polite encounters with unarmed public servants who asked me my business and stamped me through. When visiting the US, I was constantly under the impression that the decision of a single official could have me thrown out of the country. In Britain I went easily from a work permit to a highly skilled migrant visa to permanent residency. My American Green Card was finally approved during this time, and for a while I did consider again living in the US. But a year ago I posted my Green Card back to the American embassy.

I had decided to stay. And I am not alone. More and more of my friends – and not just bankers and lawyers but also novelists and journalists – are choosing to make Britain their home and contributing to London’s dramatic rise as perhaps the most cosmopolitan city in the world today. We are making our way through what is, despite its inequities, a comparatively efficient and welcoming immigration system. And I, with a certified passing mark in the Test of Life in the UK, am now at the end of the process.

It is clear to me that I have much to gain by becoming a British citizen: the right to travel more easily, the right to be more free of the fear of a change in the public mood followed by sudden deportation, the right to exercise my vote to have some say in how the taxes I am paying will be spent and in how my new country will be governed, the right to be less self-conscious in calling my home, home. It also occurs to me that I have something to lose. I am a Pakistani and proud of it. Inevitably, I wonder if I am not somehow being disloyal to the country in which I was born and which I have always loved. I have the nagging guilt that I imagine accompanies thoughts of divorce. But then I remind myself that I am allowed dual citizenship. My situation is not analogous to that of a husband who is leaving his wife for another woman. No, I tell myself, I am more like a father who is about to have a second child. Of course I am nervous about neglecting my first-born. But surely I can find within me the affection and commitment to be true to both.

It is in this spirit that I address myself to the ethical question of affirming my allegiance to the Queen, her Heirs and Successors – which I am informed I will be called upon to do at my citizenship ceremony. As an abstract concept I am troubled by monarchy; as a matter of history I have an even greater reserve; but as a citizen I have a duty to respect the constitution of the country to which I seek to belong. So I decide that I will interpret my statement of allegiance in this manner: as being made to symbols of the nation rather than to persons functioning in their private capacities as individuals. My pledge of allegiance will, in other words, be a statement of loyalty to Britain, which strikes me as entirely appropriate.

The next appointment for a group citizenship ceremony is two months away. Consequently I ante up for an individual one instead. I report as scheduled to the registrar of my local authority, accompanied by my bemused wife and her camera. There I witness the rather sweet and self-conscious spectacle that results when a national culture known at least in part for self-deprecation comes up against the demands of an officially mandated grandeur. A kindly woman is in charge of my ceremony. She explains the procedure and tells me not to be embarrassed. She reads a message of welcome from the Home Secretary. “The talents, backgrounds and experiences you are bringing are very important to us,” she says. “There is much that is good in British society. And there are things we could make better. And together, working as a community, we can make it even better.” As she continues, I am struck by the humility and inclusiveness of these statements.

There is no “We’re the greatest nation on earth and you’re lucky to be here. Hoo-ya!” Instead, there is a respectful and generous invitation. She recites my affirmation of allegiance and I repeat after her. She presses play on a small portable stereo and the muffled strains of the national anthem struggle to fill the room. Then we stand together, a portrait of the Queen and a pair of Union Jacks behind us, in this little office which has perhaps known better times, as my grinning wife takes a picture. I am presented with a framed naturalisation certificate and it is done. As I leave the building, I must say I am touched. And I feel a little different.