My post is inspired by ‘York’, by Belgian Waffle, a fascinating blogger, who has written a nostalgic piece about her city of birth.
I was born in Lahore, Pakistan and left my homeland when I was two years old. My life, if sketched as a path on a map, would be a series of zig zags, going from Pakistan to America, to Nigeria, to America, back to Pakistan, then to Kenya, to Bangladesh, to the UK, back to America again, to Italy and finally, Canada. At the age of 13, when we were living in Washington DC, Baba, my father, decided to send me to live in Pakistan with Mader, my paternal grandmother, because he didn’t want me to become “Americanised”. I didn’t want to leave my parents, my sisters, and I especially didn’t want to leave my Ami; my mother, my best friend. But I didn’t resist or fight back; racist children in school had made my life miserable beyond comprehension, and all I wanted to do was to run away from them. Read More
