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was held captive to be massacred. By what can only be described as the grace of Allah, somehow Nana Abu escaped the massacre that followed. In that chaos, desperately seeking his new bride, Nana Abu ran from platform to platform, avoiding rampaging mobs while searching for his wife. He stumbled across her, frantically waiting for him at another station. Together, the traumatized newlyweds fled India, now a foreign country, back into Pakistan, now a new country.
    Things changed so rapidly for Nana Abu after the Partition. Having been raised in a multiethnic and multifaith united India, he lost many of his childhood friends. Those who now belonged to the “wrong” faith were forced to immigrate to India; others left for England. Disturbed by memories of the ghost train, and having been torn from many of his friends, he became restless.
    The British education system was seen as something unparalleled, and Nana Abu wanted his children to have that opportunity. In those early days, he often instructed his children, “Be not as strangers to the goodness and kindness of others. We must adopt as our own piety, truth, and goodness wherever it comes from.”
    And so he took advantage of his right to live in the UK. Immigration, at that time, simply wasn’t an issue. It was Southend where they—we—ended up: a seaside town with no family links, no halal meat shops, no mosques, and no community. Nana Abu and his friends set all of this up. They created the first mosque in the town and organized space for Muslim burials in the town cemetery. Due to his education, good temperament, and thoughtful nature, Nana Abu quickly became a leader for his community.
    Nana Abu was a traditional Muslim, which in those days meant being conservative, not extremist or fundamentalist. He expected his children to accept arranged marriages to other Muslims. Pakistan, like most of South Asian culture, was historically non-dogmatic. That comes from the way in which mysticism became entrenched across the Indian subcontinent. My grandfather was typical of that mind-set, liberal when he was young and more religious as he got older. That was a very Pakistani thing to do. I say “was” because of the rise of extremism among so many young Pakistanis today.
    My mother was the third of nine children and was roughly nine years old when the family moved to Southend. They started off in a rented property for two to three months, then bought their own home. Despite being an accountant back home, Nana Abu found that his qualifications weren’t easily recognized in England. Undeterred, with dreams of the hospital spurring him on, he supported the family by getting a job as a bus driver, and drilled into his children the need to study, work hard, and make the most of themselves. He typified the stereotype of the hardworking immigrant and was determined to give his children the best chance; he made sure that they grabbed it with both hands.
    The result was that his children excelled at school. They started off in some of the worst schools but ended up going on to universities. Every one of that generation in my family is an engineer or a doctor of some kind, apart from those, like my mother, who were married off before they could go to university. But Nana Abu , for all his forward thinking, still believed in arranging husbands for his daughters.
    Before he could ever build his beloved hospital, Nana Abu collapsed and died from a double stroke. He was only fifty-eight years old. I was nine at the time, and I still remember how much I cried on that day.
    My mother had been born and brought up in the UK and has always been very liberal and progressive in her outlook. Most Pakistanis in the UK had parents who grew up in Pakistan and then came over here. It was unusual, therefore, for me to have a mother who had been brought up in England, speaking in an English accent. It meant that her experience was similar to mine. I was brought up