Earlier this year I was invited by the Kitab book festival to visit Mumbai. I arrived on a searing February afternoon and took a taxi to my hotel, the Taj, in Colaba on the southern tip of the city. From my window I could see the Gateway to India, the giant stone arch through which the last British troops to leave India passed 60 years ago. Born in Lahore, I was slightly nervous about being in India; I had a faint suspicion that my Pakistani heritage would be instantly identifiable to every passerby. The truth was, of course, that I blended in as well as any other person who did not truly belong; I spoke Urdu to the street vendors and they replied in Hindi, which is practically the same; I ordered saag aloo, which my mother makes for me at home; and everywhere I inhaled the city’s wild, chaotic energy. And as I sat in the back of a speeding rickshaw and soaked up the sight of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs living in the city, I kept wishing I could take my mother to Bombay.
Like my late father, my mother was born Indian in what 14 years later became Pakistan under the 1947 Partition. I wondered how she would feel about being in India and whether it would feel like home. She left Pakistan in 1974, bringing me and my siblings to join my father, who had come to Britain 11 years earlier. For second-generation British Pakistanis, home is a complicated question. I see my generation as the casualties of a double fracture: ripped out of India and then torn from Pakistan. The enmity that is meant to lurk inside every Pakistani towards India has therefore always seemed ridiculous to me; it is like being asked to hate one’s own past. It seems natural that my best friend of the past 20 years is a British Indian Sikh: what is different is so much less important than what is shared.
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3:22 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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