I searched for you in the early days of the Internet. Even before Google, I put your name in AltaVista and Ask Jeeves. The first email I sent you, I signed ‘Your fan from Aberdeen’. I always used this signature so that I would stand out and be remembered. ‘Ah’, I imagined you saying with fondness, ‘that lady again from North Scotland.’ Perhaps you would also be proud that you were read so far north, though, over the years and with your growing success, you might have started taking a larger readership for granted. I wrote to you about my parents’ divorce. I cringe now when I reread this email and intend to delete it. (I will delete them all). When I wrote that first email my husband was away on business, my youngest child was ill with fever and it was a public holiday so I couldn’t get him to the doctor. My period was late and I was holding my breath, anxious that I was pregnant again. To make matters worse I was also getting obscene anonymous phone calls so upsetting that every time the phone rang, my blood ran cold. Because I couldn’t sleep I wrote to you about my mother.

The toddler with the rasping hot breath tossing next to me, the phone off the hook, my body on high alert for the first sign of my late period – the women in your novels don’t go through these things. They are not always in control but still, their will is strong and their confidence high. They triumph and they surge forward climbing mountains, confronting riot police, filming a lioness giving birth. My mother resembled your heroines. I elaborated on that in the email. She was outspoken and vibrant, the kind of person everyone agreed was ahead of her time. She left my father because he stifled her. She walked out on us and struck out on her own, supporting herself and fulfilling her potential. My mother’s story would not have shocked you. You understood that the West’s image of ‘the Muslim woman’ was a reduced, simplified cliché. My mother was neither more nor less Muslim than others, she was different because of her personality, education and more significantly her independent means. In my email, I showed off about her because I couldn’t show off about myself. I couldn’t write down how fervently I was praying for my period to come, for my husband to return, for my son’s fever to break. Instead I spoke of my mother standing up to society and how pioneering she was. I glossed over the abandoned child (me) running after the car, my father vomiting through the night, the scathing things people said. I told you that she, like you, was an inspiration to me. That night I dreamt of a woman who was my mother and who was you at the same time. She hugged me and I wept with relief.