Acknowledgements

This entire account is completely true. Some names (and other personal details) have been changed or lightly disguised, but most have not.

Acknowledgments is the most difficult part to write, for fear that I may inadvertently exclude someone. I am grateful to everyone mentioned in this book, whether family, friend, colleague, teacher, or perceived enemy. Without you there would be no story.

To those dear friends who reviewed my early versions, and gave me their feedback and insight, my thanks and appreciation.

In my narrative, in a couple of places I have employed a turn of phrase that I find very effective; thank you to Katharine Davies for this.

I am grateful to certain people in the industry who saw something of merit in my amateurish original manuscript and helped me on the path to publication: most notably Scott Pack.

I am indebted to my agent, Charlie Viney, whose unwelcome and disagreeable advice I followed only reluctantly, resentfully and sullenly, but which resulted in a book which actually got published. Also to Ivan Mulcahy and Jonathan Conway, for their encouragement.

Many thanks to the team at Aurum: Bill McCreadie, Piers Burnett, Lizzie Curtin, Graham Eames. That first meeting was the most fun I’ve ever had in a suit.

My joyful gratitude to my wonderful editor, Karen Ings, for supporting this narrative just as it was, and not demanding more sex and violence.

Separation

Age: pre-0 1947–61

My mother’s family and my father’s family were from the same village in India but, in the chaos and insanity of Partition*, they headed in different directions. I could describe those events and years of separation in heartrending, excruciating six-hundred-page detail, but this is not that kind of book. (This story will proceed mercifully briskly and you will not be tortured along the way.) Suffice to say that, eventually, both families ended up in Karachi, the capital of West Pakistan.

My father and mother were students together at Karachi University. My father took a liking to my mother and became fixated on the idea of marrying her. Of course, any form of romance was out of the question, so he took to visiting my mother’s house, as a ‘family friend’, virtually every day for about five years. He could never seem to be there for the explicit purpose of seeing my mother, so he would busy himself with my mother’s younger brother, who was a teenager. My father had a scooter and he would take my future uncle on rides around Karachi, perhaps to visit the beach, or to eat hot, fresh samosas, or to buy mangoes when they were in season. He had numerous traffic accidents in the process. Eventually, he was allowed to marry my mother and he moved into the house of my mother’s family. My father was a civil servant and my mother was a primary school teacher.

I didn’t find out about any of this until my uncle told me, when he came to London from Texas, for my father’s funeral.

* On granting Independence to ‘old’ India in 1947, the British also partitioned the country into the predominantly Hindu ‘new’ India and the Muslim Pakistan – which was itself created in two separated fragments, West and East, on either side of India. This was a recipe for catastrophe. Millions of people had to migrate to their ‘correct’ new countries. Karachi was the original capital of West Pakistan, later superseded by Islamabad.

Monsoon

Age: 0 1962–63

I was born during a particularly heavy and prolonged rainstorm, this being the last big splash of the monsoon season. The streets were flooded.

I was already two weeks late when my father, tired of waiting, had decided to go out for the evening. My mother went into labour and my grandfather had to run out in the heavy downpour to find a taxi to take my mother to the maternity clinic. My father returned home that night to find no one there except the servant.

Meanwhile, I took my time in arriving (a trait I still exhibit sometimes) and I emerged in the early hours of 13 September 1962, after an extremely difficult labour.

It is possibly a divine blessing that my father was not at home when my mother went into labour. Faced with the seemingly impossible task of finding a taxi in the middle of the deluge, it is possible that my father, in a state of panic and desperation, might have decided that the scooter was the only option.

Bond

Age: 1 1963–64

I came second in the Karachi ‘Bonnie Baby’ contest. I was wearing a black suit, white shirt and dark tie. Smartly dressed, suave and handsome, I looked like James Bond, although I was too young to have seen either of his movies. I was also somewhat unsteady on my feet. People were particularly impressed by my light skin.

First prize went to the child of the organiser. The judges were her friends. This is absolutely typical of third world, banana republic unfairness. In the West, the organiser’s child would not be allowed to enter the contest. I was denied the title of ‘Karachi’s Bonniest Baby’ by blatant nepotism. I began my lifelong struggle against corruption and injustice.

Life in Karachi was stable, but unpromising. The British government was encouraging Commonwealth migration to post-war Britain, due to acute labour shortages. Many people were going and my mother thought it was a good idea: an adventure with great promise that would break the stagnation of life. She persuaded my reluctant father, who enjoyed life in Karachi, that we should move to England.

If you knew someone who knew someone in England, then that person in England would be your first contact on arriving. My parents knew of someone in Manchester, so that was their first destination. Fortunately for me (as events would later reveal), they soon decided to move to London.

There was a nasty shock on arrival in England. The kinds of jobs that my parents had access to were not what they had expected. In England, they were not considered to be educated professionals. They were expected to be lower-class manual workers. Only if they accepted this could they get jobs. Accommodation was another problem as well.

Bed-Sit

Age: 2 1964–65

England at that time had a very defined class system. I think that it could be analysed in great detail, worthy of a doctoral thesis, but a broad representation would be as follows:

1. Royalty

2. Aristocracy

3. Upper classes

4. Middle classes

5. White working classes

6. Irish

7. Coloureds

In this society, my parents, who were from the educated middle classes in Karachi, found themselves in a very hostile environment, at the mercy of uneducated, uncouth people in terms of jobs and accommodation. The latter, in the earliest days, was a series of bed-sits.

A bed-sit, for the benefit of my American readers, is a part of a house that is rented out, consisting of a bedroom and living room (which may be the same room) and use of a bathroom and kitchen (which may be shared with other bed-sits). The term ‘apartment’ is therefore too grand for this accommodation. If the bed-sit consisted of two proper rooms, then Pakistanis invariably ended up sub-letting one of the rooms to other Pakistanis.

This wasn’t always due entirely just to lack of money. Accommodation was hard to come by for Pakistanis. Although many people in London were renting out rooms, some had signs which read ‘No Irish or Coloureds’. The more liberal-minded ones had signs which read ‘No Coloureds’.

Even without the signs, some would make excuses to my parents, such as: ‘We don’t allow babies.’ So, it was a very difficult time and it was in one such bed-sit, where my parents had rented a room from another family, that I formed my first permanent memory.

… My mother is standing precariously on top of a stool, facing a window in the kitchen. Something has happened to the old window – some part of it has dropped on my mother’s hands, trapping them in the wooden frame. She is caught in a very awkward position on the stool, her hands stuck in the window frame, looking back down at me and trying to give me instructions. My father is out at work, I am two years old and my brother Rehan is a baby. Fortunately, the woman we sub-let the room from returns eventually and calls the fire brigade. I watch the fireman in his uniform, working on the window to free my mother …