The daughter of the Khan had struggle upon struggle heaped upon her. Like water dripping on a rock, it slowly wore away at her, revealing someone new beneath.

And so it was that, with time, Jia Khan developed a thicker skin. She built a wall around herself and tried to do the same for Maria, planting her feet firmly between the world and her sister. Maria could not be allowed to feel the pain she had felt. ‘Let me raise my children my way,’ her mother had shouted at a nineteen-year-old Jia. ‘Why do you think it is your place to always play lawyer for everyone else in my house?’

‘Because if you’d had faith in me instead of worrying about the rest of the world and what it has to say, I wouldn’t be cleaning up the mess my life has become,’ Jia had said. Head down and gloves up, she stood her ground. Her actions meant the world in which her younger siblings grew up was less restrictive than the one she had experienced. Having learnt his lesson with Jia, Akbar Khan had allowed his wife to raise Maria in ways she saw fit without interfering, and Sanam, seeing the hurt heaped upon her older children by others, had softened her approach.

One day Jia walked away from that life without looking back. But years later, memories of the wagging tongues and pointing fingers could still make her smart a little.

There had been a time when her wardrobe, like her manners, had been neatly divided into two sections, one half for polite white life and the other for Pakistani society. The two parts of her life ran in parallel like the lines of latitude on a map, the space between widened by language and custom. The number of occasions she’d heard old aunties gossip about some poor girl or other, before turning to Jia and reminding her that ‘nice girls speak quietly, nice girls are patient, nice girls don’t answer back’. So-called ‘nice girls’ were demure and non-confrontational, their opinions of no threat to the status quo. But England was full of not-so-nice girls, because white society demanded each person speak up to be heard.

After the matchmaker’s failed attempts, Jia had tired of the balancing act of being a Brit Pak girl. There came a day when her heart felt heavy as she looked into the long mirror beside her after finishing her Isha prayers. The soft drape of the chador across her hair and shoulders made her feel safe and she’d pulled it tighter. Then, remembering her father’s words – ‘I fix the world’s problems but what can I do for her?’ – she’d pulled the shawl from her head, leaving her brown hair exposed.