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calling her Baji —a title for an older sister—and it was easy to relate to her. Until, that is, I became interested in political Islamism: almost immediately, she became representative of everything liberal and Western that I began campaigning against. How such an estrangement could occur is the rest of this story.
    One way in which my mother—known endearingly to all as Abi—enlightened her children was through literature. She encouraged me to read from an early age, and I have many memories of the sort of books that I read at the time. Roald Dahl was a particular favorite: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, George’s Marvelous Medicine, and so on. C.S. Lewis was someone else I read, though I had no idea about the religious connotations of The Chronicles of Narnia until much later. I also used to love those Fighting Fantasy books, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and so on, where you’d read a page and be given a choice as to what you wanted to happen next. The idea of being able to create my own story always appealed to me.
    All of this was quite different from the old Pakistani tradition of storytelling. The old tradition was oral, most obviously represented to me by my Tai Ammi , my dad’s brother’s wife. When she visited, she would tell us stories at bedtime in Urdu, such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. My brother Osman and I would love hearing them because there was something magical in their telling, in the inflection of the story voice and the emotion each line would portray. Rather than putting us to sleep, they would awaken our senses to imagine a far-away land of flying carpets and genies, or jinn . We never told Tai Ammi that her stories woke us up rather than helped us sleep. There’s a lot of skill within that oral tradition: it’s all about telling stories in a way that is intriguing and suspenseful. Tai Ammi was very good at that: we’d sit on the edge of our seats, wanting to know what happened next.
    But as wonderful as this oral storytelling tradition can be, it doesn’t necessarily encourage children to read themselves; even today reading in Pakistan is not as widespread as it should be. How expressive a child could be if parents were to combine these two methods, the old and the new. I believe that it was precisely this combination within myself that gave me passion during the most difficult times.
    One book that particularly tested my mother’s liberalism, and my own changing views as a teenager, was Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. When this was published in 1988, it caused a huge furor among many Muslims around the world. Its depiction of the Prophet Mohammed, upon whom be peace, was deemed blasphemous, and the author was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his now infamous fatwa. True to her fiercely independent spirit, Abi bought the book and read it to make up her own mind.
    By then, my belief that she was dangerously on the wrong side needed no more confirmation. Abi’s response had been a classically liberal one: “Let him write his book. If you don’t like it, go and write your own book against him.” That is Abi through and through.
    My father was affectionately known to all as Mo. From an early age he grew up with a lot of responsibility. Both his father and elder brother died when he was young, which left him as head of the family before he was married. In the old days in Pakistan, when a man died, his wife would often return to her parents’ family. The absence of a welfare state left only blood relatives as the safety net. But my father wanted to do things differently. He asked Tai Ammi , his brother’s widow, to stay with him so that they could bring up his two orphaned nieces, Nargis and Farrah, as his own daughters. This ensured that Tai Ammi did not have to remarry again merely for convenience. Over forty years later, Tai Ammi remains a widow out of love