My parents met in Delhi in 1980. My father had just written a biography of his political idol, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; my mother was sent to interview him. That night they went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant called the House of Ming. Then they disappeared together for a week. Not long after my father left India, my mother discovered she was pregnant. There was no question of keeping the baby. The bad blood between India and Pakistan was not an abstract thing: my mother’s Sikh family had lost everything during the 1947 Partition and had come as refugees to Delhi. For my mother now to be pregnant by a citizen of that enemy country was unthinkable, not to mention that my father was married at the time, with three small children. In a week when my mother had gone to an abortion clinic with a girlfriend, my father called unexpectedly from the Marbella Club in Dubai. She told him what happened, and by the end of their conversation, according to her telling, he had persuaded her to keep the baby – me. They had no plan beyond cobbling together a partially secret life, spent between London and Dubai. It lasted two years and ended badly. In 1982, my mother returned to India, where she reported on conflict – the secessionist movement in Punjab, the insurgency in Kashmir, civil war in Sri Lanka, the election and downfall of Benazir Bhutto. My father had returned to Pakistan to fight military dictatorship alongside Bhutto, suffering jail and torture. The last time they met was in 1990, during a general election that Bhutto lost, and wherein my father apparently tried to seduce my mother again.
