MUSIC IS MY memory. If I were to tell you when my life began, when our story began, I wouldn’t start with our birth in a south London hospital, or my mother’s birth on a Bengali birthing stool at her maternal grand-father’s house. I would tell you when I first had the sensation of being alive; the first time I heard the cha-cha-cha, the ay-yi-yi, the wails, grunts, groans and mournful sighs of discharged love - the first time I heard song.

And if I were to tell you when I first started living, it would be when we started to control that cha-cha-cha for ourselves - with the beat-beat-beats and the explosion of words and melodies in our mouths. It was when we started the band, in the flat above my dad’s restaurant.

Our parents were a local success story. My father had gambled on getting a loan to buy a share in a restaurant, and eventually took it over, moving us to the two-bed flat above it when we were toddlers. By the time we were teenagers he had opened a second restaurant, further up the Northern Line at Balham, cunningly buying it with a long lease before the first signs of gentrification appeared in the area. We abandoned the honking, tooting traffic of the flat on the Broadway, as my dad did well enough to buy Amma and us a nice family house on the Heaver Estate in Tooting Bee, one of the most respectable addresses in Tooting. Again, he bought it before the prices rocketed.

While my father was the business success of his family, my mother was the academic success of hers. Once we were at school, she followed us, returning to school herself. She took an MA in modern languages, and then a teaching qualification. She didn’t teach in our school, but in a private girls’ school in Wandsworth. She spoke to us in English as pure as that of the chilled angels frozen on any dreaming spire; she chose not to speak to us in any other language as we were growing up, and insisted sweetly that our father didn’t either. Her intention was to avoid us having foreign accents that might set us below our fellow pupils - she wanted us to have accents that would set us apart, English accents as crisp and stiff as architecture, that would carve the way for us in our future endeavours. When we eventually learned our father’s native language, we spoke it like the firangis we had become. We were never taught our mother’s Bangladeshi; we only heard her speak it on the phone to her own mother. On the occasional family trips to Dhaka, never more frequent than every other year, we were like deaf and dumb aliens, trapped in our bubble of well-spoken English.