AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH fell out of an old school textbook, Sinews of Empire ‑ A Short History of British Slavery. Taken on one of the few sunny days in England during the winter of 1977, it depicts five young men, aged 18 or 19, a brotherhood of the A’Level class of Bedford College (although it’s hard to reconcile the jpot-bellied, bald me of today with the skinny, long-haired kid in the photograph).

With me are: Mahmood Motamed, from Tehran, Iran, whose father was a regular visitor to the palace of the Shah; Emmanuel “Manny” Idowu, the son of a lawyer who helped draft one of the many Nigerian attempts at a civil constitution; Branko Atanskovic, a two-metre, 175-kilo, blue-eyed Yugoslavian; and Faris Al-Jabbar, from Iraq, the only supporter of Saddam Hussein I have ever met personally.

Branko, Manny, Mahmood and Faris stand together in a loose group, laughing. Behind them, standing on a bench, is someone called Basil, who . deliberately stood on the bench in 1977 so his head would be level with the much taller Branko’s and Manny’s.

I looked at the picture that contained me but I could see only the others: a Yugoslavian; an Iraqi; a Nigerian; an Iranian.

It hit me like a kick in the teeth: these happy young men grinning at the camera, these pardners I laughed so hard with over fish and chips and pints of lager, these milestones in my life… could all have been killed in violent revolutions in their home countries.

Manny would probably have gone first, as a priority target, whenever his father’s civil constitution was overthrown by the Nigerian army. Next to Manny, probably next into the grave, were Mahmood, the Iranian, and Faris, from Iraq; they might conceivably have killed one another when Iran and Iraq went to war, if Mahmood hadn’t died in the Ayotollah’s revolution and Faris had survived Saddam’s rise to power. Branko, a Serbian, might have lasted longer than the rest, since he would have been on the correct side of ethnic cleansing when what used to be Yugoslavia fell apart.

This morning, the picture fell out of the book and landed at my feet. My possibly-dead friends looked up at me, grinning. “What are you laughing at?” I thought. You all could well be dead now.

Branko, a Yugoslavian, had possibly been killed by another Yugoslavian in a violent upheaval in Yugoslavia; Manny, a Nigerian, possibly killed by a Nigerian in a violent upheaval in Nigeria; Mahmood, an Iranian, possibly killed by an Iranian in a violent upheaval in Iran; Faris, an Iraqi, possibly killed by an Iraqi in a violent upheaval in Iraq. I picked up the photograph and held it to eye level… and at last saw myself in it: BC, a Trinidadian, possibly killed by a Trinidadian in a violent upheaval in Trinidad. It amazes me, sometimes, my stupidity: how could I have forgotten July 27, 1990.

We made six prints of that photograph, one for each of us and one for Segaren Naicker, an Indian South African, who took the shot. Manny, in 1990, may have been sitting in a flat in Manchester, watching the BBC coverage of the Red House siege; he may have turned to his wife, if he had one, and said, “Eh, Ah once knew a guy from Treeneedad. Ah wondah eef dey keel heem yet?” Manny may have retrieved his copy of our photograph from some old scrapbook and stared at it the way I do this morning.

We, the kids in the photograph, lived in a different world. Every person in my snapshot, and even the one who took it, could have been killed in a civil violence at home. We were on holiday at school in the mother country, where we had someone to look after us; at home, our own orphan countries squabbled like children, with the biggest bully always likely to win.

Five school friends of mine may be dead for all I know. For all they know, I, too, may be dead. The Microsoft world on cable television promises a computer on every desk but the Macrohard one we live in delivers pointless death at the hands of men with guns for six young men in six different countries in one photograph. And now I put the photograph back into the book and glance at the cover: Sinews of Empire. I look at Branko, Manny, Mahmood, Faris and me, forever tied together on one winter’s day. I close the book.

BC Pires is a rebel without applause. A version of this column appeared in July 1997