Layla yearns to see her son’s face, to hold him, the way she used to when he was a child. This is, she is sure, how all mothers separated from their children must feel, a constant sense of loss and longing. If only he had stayed here instead of moving so-so far away. “Calgary is better,” she had urged when he told her his plan to stay in Toronto after finishing business school. “But all the big jobs are in Toronto. I have to stay.”

His father agreed. “Just let him go in peace, will you, Layla? The boy is trying to make something of himself,” he said, before giving his son a thumbs-up.

Back home, when someone moved to another town, it was only a short drive away. Or a ferry ride across Lake Victoria. But here, it is a completely different story. It takes nearly five hours on a plane from Calgary to Toronto. Five hours! Toronto might as well be in another country. She has, on more than one occasion, tried to measure this distance on the map that’s still pinned to the wall of what used to be Ashif’s bedroom but is now hers. How often she has walked her extended palm across Canada. Four palms long! Uganda is but an index finger, her hometown of Kisumu in Kenya not even the tip of a fingernail. Add in the different time zones, and you need to book an appointment, it seems, just to talk to someone in another city. Not that she has many people to call. Everyone she cares to know is here in Calgary. It is only her son who is not here. Her brothers are still in Kenya. Her mother, too. Her sister Shenaz in Australia. Her sister Gulnar in Pakistan. Her family spread across the globe like stars across the sky. She hasn’t seen most of them in over twenty-five years. Not even before she left Uganda. There had been no time.

Only days before the deadline General Idi Amin set for Asians to get out of Uganda—November 8, 1972—Layla arrived with the baby at the Royal Air Force refugee camp sixty miles outside London. Months before, the Jewish community had already been thrown out. Then the Asians. Even the Muslims were given ninety days to get out. She had suggested to Mansoor that they could go stay with her family in Kenya. He refused to believe the decree and by the time he did, all countries surrounding Uganda had sealed their borders. “As if he’ll throw us out. We were born in this country, for God’s sake,” he had said. At jamatkhana, many leaders echoed his view. But as each day passed, more stories of Amin’s terror emerged: two men murdered as they filled their cars at a petrol station; a man thrown into a car boot and never seen again; twin sisters, students at Makerere University, kidnapped from their dorm room and gang-raped for days by army officers before one sister finally escaped, her nipples still bleeding when she was found on the side of a road. Panic spread. The community started to pack their bags. The United Nations organized airlifts out of the country. Each refugee was allowed to take one suitcase and £50. Layla smuggled out her wedding jewellery by sewing necklaces into Ashif’s diaper, concealing earrings in his milk bottle, snapping bracelets around his tiny thighs. “At least you have a way out,” Ashif’s ayah, Rose, had said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her kanga. “What, Mamma, will the rest of us do?”