If you’d met me before I joined university and asked me then about my life, I’d have shrugged and said, ‘I was born in Karachi. Grew up there. Studied in India for a couple of years. Then came to live here at sixteen.’ In fact, I turned sixteen nearly a year after I arrived, just before East Pakistan split away to become Bangladesh. But my mother hadn’t finally left Pakistan till the war broke out, and presenting my departure as a result of war and strife sounded more convincing as a valid reason for leaving. It was easiest to talk about my thirteen years in Karachi, say I didn’t remember it well because I’d been away so long, and dismiss my time in India as two lost years in a dreary boarding school in a damp, chilly mountain town in the south, a place at least as foreign to me as Europe. My father had moved to England in the late sixties, and we had a flat overlooking the park for the first few years of my life here; then one or both of my parents took to spending more and more time (especially the colder months) in India, or Pakistan, summoned by matters of property, family ties and old loyalties. After selling the parkside flat at a loss, they had rented and then bought a smaller flat I found for them on the edge of St John’s Wood. My older sister Sabah met her husband in Bombay, where she’d gone to a family wedding in 1972; he was the bridegroom’s brother. Two years later, in her mid-twenties, she married and moved to Delhi. Sara, the youngest, was studying in Kent and was engaged to an Englishman she had met there. Whatever else had happened in the years between my arrival and my entry into university didn’t seem to matter. I finished school, learned a few languages, travelled in Italy, France and Spain, but I drifted through all that without really caring.