Layla had begged Mansoor to come with them. “Please, they will kill you.” Mansoor refused. He wanted to stay as long as possible, to try and salvage their fortune. Besides, he reminded her, the British Consulate strongly advised against attempts to enter without proper documentation. Illegal entrants, they warned, would be detained indefinitely no matter if your wife and children were British subjects. It is terrible, they said, this expulsion of eighty thousand Asians, but we have no choice: we must stand by our voucher quota system. City councils, like Leicester’s, placed adverts in Ugandan newspapers urging the Asians to stay away from their city. Layla countered Mansoor’s refusal by naming other men who didn’t have British passports but who were still going with their families. “I’m not like other men,” he said matter-of-factly. “Be strong, Layla, for our son’s sake. We’ll be together again before you know it. I promise.”

In London, she watched enviously as families clustered together at the camp cafeteria, eating and joking. Many of the illegal entrants were detained at the camps, but at least their families were together, and what else mattered? Eventually, many managed to immigrate successfully to countries like Sweden and Argentina after applying to ads posted on the camp’s bulletin board with the headline, “Have You Considered Emigrating?” Mansoor’s three sisters and their families had been on the same flight to London, but she lost track of them in the crowd at Heathrow. When she tracked them down at another camp, they said they wished they could help her, maybe even move in together, but they were unable to leave—their husbands were detainees. Years later, she learned that their husbands had successfully smuggled their fortunes out of Uganda through a travel agent they knew. They had purchased airline tickets that went around and around the world, as if they were spooling the earth with miles of golden thread. Once they were released from the camps, they settled in Birmingham, where they quietly arranged for refunds.

At the camp, Layla was deeply lonely, the way she had been when she first moved from Kenya to Uganda to marry Mansoor. She didn’t know anyone in Kampala. She hardly knew Mansoor, either. She’d only met him a few times before her father accepted his request for her hand in marriage. Layla never said anything, not even to her own family, about the agony of missing them. She kept her feelings to herself. She understood that a woman can’t expect to be part of the same family she was born into. Her home, like her name, must inevitably shift to that of her husband’s.

Months passed, and there was still no word from her husband, leaving her in a constant tangle of worry. Would she ever see him again? Was he still alive? In London, the Uganda Resettlement Board began urging people to get jobs; newspapers reported that many refugees were getting too comfortable. Soon, representatives from different employers visited the camps and Layla was offered a job at a dressmaking plant in Manchester. The job included Council housing and child-minding facilities at the plant. But she didn’t want anyone else to take care of her child, and she worried that Mansoor would not be able to find them if they left London. So she stayed put at the camp and prayed daily for his safe return to them. Each night, as she nursed the baby to sleep, she said the same thing to him, like a mantra. “Pappa will be back with us soon.”