It was an apartness that had begun when men like her father had crossed sea and land to come here in search of a better life. Her father. The thought of him brought a sudden, sharp shot of sadness, but she had no time to indulge the emotion and she knocked it back.

She thought of the tangas and taxis and ships and planes carrying their passengers from rural parts of sixties Pakistan. They had settled slowly, some marrying here and others ‘back home’, and their families had grown. Their sons and daughters, the next generation, were born and raised in the city, and schooled in places that would later be described as ‘enclaves’. They’d worried they’d lose their heritage, their language, their way. But that hadn’t happened.

Instead, the next generation of children had become something else, something caught between the land of their heritage and the place of their birth. Something that would find more acceptance in the village of their forefathers than in the green fields of the county where they were born. Cocky and confident, the boys held on to tribal divisions, speaking of them with pride in their own form of patois. Using the same mash-up of English and Punjabi, Pashto or Mirpuri, and dressed in the vibrant pinks and parrot greens belonging to the bright shine of the Indian sub-continent, the girls were caught in an even bigger crossfire. The East gave them grace, the West gave them freedom. And of course they wanted both. They were proud to call themselves Pakistani, wearing the cricket shirts and flying the flag of the crescent moon on Eid, but their mindset belonged to the land where they were born.

Their patriotism was lost on Jia. She wondered why they boasted about a nation that was built on blood, sweat and rape, run by power-hungry, money-grabbing misogynists. What did it offer them? Life would be simpler without the troublesome burden of her bloodline, without the battle for identity that drove young people to places like Syria to fight a war that was never theirs to begin with, for a people that would slaughter them, given half the chance. How easy it would be to change her name to something more European and lose herself in the majority society. But she was a Pukhtun and to the Khans that meant more than patriotism. It meant heritage and responsibility. It meant loyalty and love of nation. It meant changing the world for the better.