I fly into Heathrow from Entebbe in March 1972 feeling blessed by the angels. I am about to start postgraduate studies at Oxford and marry my own True Love (TL), who has been there a year. He is a zoologist, embarked on a DPhil recording the reproductive habits of voles in Wytham Woods. I don't know what voles are. They look like rats in his photos. But heck, it is Oxford. Until we were disabused, we believed England was an orderly, genteel haven, the antithesis of African mayhem.
On the flight over, the plane is packed with Asians who consider themselves unbelievably lucky. Life for Asians in Uganda has become perilous; my fellow passengers have fled before they were pushed. Wise philosopher-housewives calm distressed ladies. Tupperware boxes are passed round containing samosas, dhal bhajias, home-made mithai, fried mogo, bright chutneys that inevitably drip. I smile stupidly, shake my head, then rudely turn away to the window.
I am not quite one of them, or so I pretend even though my mum makes the same snacks at home. I fear I will smell of garlic and ginger when my TL kisses me. My mouth must be peppermint-sweet when it meets his. What they don't know is I have two boxes of snacks for the ride. One contains hot cashews, picked and roasted at a farm in Mombasa, the other cocothende, a fabulous biscuit covered in a layer of sugary crust you first suck off slowly. Our very own Danish pastry.
Cocothende
4 cups (560g) plain flour
1 cup (170g) semolina
1 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp ground cardamom (optional)
1 cup (175g) desiccated coconut
1 tbsp hot oil
¾ cup (175ml) water, as hot as you can bear it
Oil for deep frying
1½ cups (350ml) water
2 cups (400g) granulated sugar
Mix dry ingredients, then rub in hot oil. Add water; knead into a pliable dough. Shape into a large rope, divide into small sausages, then indent with three fingers. Place on a clean cloth and leave for an hour covered with another cloth. Heat oil in a fryer; cook until golden brown. Return to cloths to soak up oil. Meanwhile, boil water and sugar; simmer for 15-25 minutes until syrup is stringy. Remove from heat and quickly dip in pastries. Whip out, then leave to cool.
We land. I rush to get away first. My TL is waiting, leaning over the barrier. I am wearing a black velvet dress with pearl buttons, short enough to show six inches of thigh. He is still gorgeous - that manly jaw, that aristocratic nose, those liquid brown eyes. I am not at all pretty, or so they always said, the kind worshippers in our mosque. But I am smart and funny. At 17, I nabbed the best-looking guy in town.
I can't remember the first embraces, kisses, tears and laughter as I rush to my TL and lose myself in vaporous joy. I have been transported to London, the capital of the world, to my future husband with whom I will discover Oxford, the heart of greatness. Kampala hardly matters. That small-town life under the hot sun recedes, will not be missed all that much in those first years.
My memories of growing up in the early 50s in East Africa are too vivid to be entirely accurate. We lived in a tiny flat above the marketplace in Kampala. Home life seemed infused with despair, the misery of misfits. My primary school was where I found my voice and spirit far away from the heat and dust of my parents' crumbling marriage. I entered secondary school as the crosswinds wafted over op art, Twiggy, the Beatles, Blue Hawaii. My hormones were rocking, and it didn't take long for me to throw myself into teenage angst and daring romance. I got myself a real boyfriend, Vinod, who didn't look much like Cliff or Paul McCartney but still was a catch. I also got the part of Juliet for a British Council drama competition, with the Capulets played by Asians and the Montagues by African pupils. Romeo was John Abwole, a graceful, idealistic young black man with treacly eyes. The dangerous truth was that we touched and kissed on stage. Remember, I existed in that space between superior whites and the beasts of burden - you did not reach across to touch black skin or kiss black lips or give your heart to a black man. Even in a school play.
Vinod, the cool boyfriend, was Tybalt, and thus the tension between Romeo and Tybalt was as real as that between the Montagues and Capulets.
Our play won first prize and that incredible evening a teacher drove me home. As I entered the dimly lit living room, I saw a crowd of people - my mother, my father, my brother and his wife - whose faces were hard as granite. There followed a frightful beating. I still carry some marks. My crime? Romeo was black. They called me a vaishia, a slut, a polluter of their good name. My father didn't hit me, but he never spoke to me again.
I couldn't breathe at home, so choked up was I with tension. Yet at school I attained the highest A-level arts grades in the country, so was awarded a scholarship to go to university. Immediately after, destiny delivered to me my own TL, in the back of a car belonging to his good friend Diamond. I was iridescent with happiness, high on success. Like a ripe and ready piece of fruit, I must have exuded a powerful, beckoning aroma. My TL bit.
He was already at Makerere University and I joined the literature department. I was intellectually stimulated like never before, surrounded by friends, music, books and drama, and truly in love. I gave myself to TL one hot afternoon, in my second year there, in his room in a hall of residence.
Food was terrible. Precious homemade pickles made it edible. Jena, my mother, sent over jar after jar of her marmaladey mango concoction, a favourite among Asians and also African students who had not been exposed to Asian cooking. They loved it so much, they stole many of my jars.
Hot mango marmalade
1lb (450g) unripe large green mangoes
280ml water
1½ cups (300g) granulated sugar
5 cloves
4 sticks cinnamon
1½ tsp chilli powder
½ tsp salt
Grate the mangoes and boil in water for six minutes. Drain fruit; return water to pan, add sugar, cloves and cinnamon, and cook until sticky. Add mangoes and carry on stirring and cooking until thick. Stir in chilli powder and salt; cook for a couple more minutes. Cool and store in sterilised airtight jars.
Away from campus, the mood was bleak. Independence had arrived in 1962 - the Union Jack quivered down the pole and the Ugandan flag, with its chirpy crested crane, was raised. But Milton Obote, the new prime minister, turned out to be an unsafe pair of hands. Using his willing general Idi Amin, Obote launched a reign of imprisonment, torture and killings of dissenters.
One day, Obote's secret police broke into our family home. My brother was arrested, taken off in his pyjamas to some unknown destination. No reason was given. A deportation order was handed over. The entire family was to leave forthwith.
By this time my father was deeply depressed and barely functioning. Leaving me in Makerere, the family few to London and shortly after a letter arrived. Papa was dead, suddenly. We had never been reconciled. I was numb and had to pretend sorrow I couldn't yet feel. I flew to London to bury a man who'd made me but couldn't be a father.
In Makerere in January 1971, I opened the yellow cotton curtain of my small room in college one morning and a baby bat fell on the floor, dead. Sophie, my roommate the previous year, rushed in: "Yasmin, stay in, stay in, don't go anywhere. The military has taken over - Obote is out."
Loretta, a brilliant English undergrad, rushed in holding a knife. She said she wanted to kill herself before soldiers killed her. The bat stopped her. She saw it and screamed like she was being murdered. We threw it over the balcony and it fluttered down through the silence outside, thick as fog. The next day there was rejoicing in the streets. Obote was out, the man of the people Idi Amin was in.
Amin turned up at Makerere at graduation time. Dressed in full academic gear, he insisted on conducting the ceremony. TL (who had passed with first class honours) had to kneel in front of the hulk and get his blessings. Students who tried to walk out were roughly pushed back by soldiers.
One of TL's external examiners was the zoologist John Phillipson, who offered him the chance to study for a DPhil in Oxford under his supervision. My future in-laws were elated. Then the state stepped in. TL was told by his African department head (who admired Amin) that he had no right to sweep off to Britain when his own country needed science graduates. We realised TL would have to get out before they took away his passport.
As soon as he was gone, the night raids started. One night they took Esther and her twin, Mary, students of agriculture. Esther came back a week later, shuf...#64258;ing painfully and unwilling to talk. Both sisters had been taken to the nearby barracks to be gang-raped until the soldiers grew bored.
In March 1972 I got my results: first class honours, one of the best they had ever had in literature at Makerere. There was no one to celebrate with. Uganda was a graveyard filling up. As the day of my departure approached, I believed I'd one day come back and teach here, and that Amin's reign of terror would soon self-destruct. I had not the slightest sense that this was a final parting from who I was and the history that had made me.
And so I arrived in London. In the days that followed the ecstatic reunion with TL, I came down to earth. The country was smaller, meaner and colder than I ever imagined it would be. Bitter industrial unrest had resulted in a three-day week and power cuts. Everybody was angry. Enoch Powell was the hero of the white working classes.
In June I married TL. I was 22, TL 23. Plenty grown up already, said the elders; too early, I now think. I could please TL in bed all right but couldn't cook. I set about learning the basics from my mother over the phone. I have it still, my red hardback notebook with the first simple dhal recipes and a dozen ways to make spicy potatoes.
Dry potato curry
Serves 4
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
1 dried chilli
1 tsp turmeric
1 cup (about 250g) diced, boiled, peeled potatoes
2 cloves garlic, chopped into slices
A little sugar, salt and citric acid
2 tbsp desiccated coconut
Heat oil and cook seeds, chilli and turmeric for two minutes, then stir in potatoes and garlic. Stir-fry over low heat, then add remaining ingredients. Stuff into pitta bread, adding yogurt and cucumber slices.
The land I had left behind imploded within three months. On 5 August Idi Amin announced he had decided to banish British Asians from his country and take over their businesses, lands and possessions. He gave them 90 days to pack up and go.
The arrival in Britain of unwanted Ugandan Asians hastened the decline of prime minister Edward Heath and national disintegration. At the airports, Asians clutching their children and a few belongings were welcomed by lines of "patriots" with obscene placards. In Ealing, where my family lived, a small mosque was opened in a back street. During those early years this was packed out.
Bit by bit, TL and I withdrew from these people, no longer our people, the huddled masses. In Oxford, supremely detached from all reality, we believed we could abandon our past identities as we did our old clothes, homemade and embarrassing. Here we were, a married Asian couple surrounded by wild sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. We declined the drugs and excessive drink but barely a year after our marriage TL confessed he had been spending an awful lot of time on a filthy mattress with a sexy woman with long hair who wore calico, didn't wash that much and lived in a squat. Her feral sex consumed him for a while. I can't blame him. We had no compass. The past was not even another country; it had been dissipated, and we were in a place without restraint.
In 1973, I got pregnant and we decided on an abortion. We had no money to raise a child, and were changing so fast we barely knew ourselves. TL took off his ring; I didn't show him I minded. I worked all hours, passed the MPhil exams, showed the supercilious dons who had so little faith in me.
TL's research on voles went on and on. With no confidence that I could do something with the MPhil, I taught English to foreign students.
In 1977, we agreed it was time for a baby. TL got a job teaching biology at a private school for boys. None of us had planned it, but my mother Jena had more or less joined our household. Our child was born on the coldest day of the year, 30 January 1978. We called him Karim. TL seemed besotted.
Three months after Karim was born, TL got a lectureship at Bedford College, University of London. Within weeks I, too, had a job, teaching English as a foreign language at a private school. Then, three weeks before Karim's first birthday, in January 1979, my cousin offered us a flat to buy in Ealing Common. TL said the place had potential, I was less enthusiastic. Jena hated it but stayed. I still live there; it gives me a sense of continuity.
On warm summer days, I used to take my boy to the college in Regent's Park where TL taught zoology. He would show off his son to adoring students and at times introduce me as well. Never, though, to a tall, shapely young woman with a square jaw and a cascade of wavy golden hair down to her waist who was often just leaving his office.
The old talk of open marriages had started up again. Why did I agree? Was I so desperately in love I couldn't deny TL anything? Was I plain stupid?
TL always made sure I knew when he was going to visit the blonde. I caught the whiff of her on him, and blond hairs twinkled on his clothes, but I behaved impeccably. As TL became more entangled in Rapunzel's hair, I went to work for the Inner London Education Authority, teaching English and job skills to immigrants and refugees.
When TL confessed he felt trapped in his job and wanted to become an acupuncturist, we agreed I would try to write freelance articles, so we could manage the finances and pay for his course and equipment. For three years he would be going off virtually every Friday, returning Sunday evening.
My first journalistic breaks came through: an article published in the Guardian, another in New Society, contract work at the BBC. At eight, Karim, smart and super-confident, passed the entrance exams for the best public school in London.
Jena had moved to a small council flat near us. Karim was always there, after school, and she made him roti, puri and pudla - yellow pancakes made of gram flour, one of the best Indian snacks ever.
Pudla
1lb (about 450g) gram flour
2 spring onions, finely chopped
1 tsp ajwainseeds (or broken cumin seeds)
½ bunch finely chopped fresh coriander
½ tsp chilli powder
(or 1 finely chopped green chilli)
1 tsp salt and ½ tsp black pepper
A pinch asafoetida
1¼ pt (700ml) water
Mix ingredients, then add water to make a batter. Leave to rest for an hour. Heat flat griddle or frying pan; spread a little oil on it. Pour in a little of the mix and spread it out with a wooden spatula so it thinly covers the pan. Cook for about a minute, then turn over. Serve with yogurt, pickles or chutneys.
I gave up my teaching job and joined New Society. I was elated. On 20 December 1987, I bought tickets for us all to see The Wizard Of Oz at the Barbican. The next morning TL brought me coffee and blurted out that he had never stopped seeing Rapunzel and that he was tormented, confused, suicidal even, hated himself more than I could imagine. I remember a flash and brief blackout; all my organs seemed to collapse into my stomach.
There followed more weeks of torment as TL vacillated between leaving and staying. I finally told him to go. The act had gone on too long; the play needed to end. I was exhausted.
The days and nights that followed passed in a natural or induced coma, interrupted by violent outbreaks of emotion. TL's guilt and shame were replaced by a militant sense of entitlement towards our son. After a number of exhausting rows, I told TL that Karim was mine, that I would manage the money and the care. I would never ask him for any help. I never did; I never have.
Four months after TL left, in April 1988, at Bristol Temple Meads station, I looked into the face of a man and was enchanted. He was Colin Brown, a race researcher at the Policy Studies Institute. He had written a book, Black And White Britain, that was on my desk, but in my head the author was a middle-aged, radical Caribbean man, not this boyish white bloke. We had both been invited to Bristol to take part in a BBC TV debate on race, and were in the taxi queue. We had drinks and talked as if continuing a conversation we had started a long time back. We were ideological soul mates.
I chose to share my life with an Englishman, and that shocked many of my old equality warriors: I was sleeping with the enemy. I was now at the New Statesman and Society, an amalgam that never worked. I hated the job, the atmosphere was ruthlessly misogynistic and, as the Satanic Verses row broke out, I realised there was among many of my peers a gross intolerance of Muslims. I was then the only person in the mainstream press who came from a Muslim background, and came out as a Muslim at this time, just when the row turned into a war of words between liberal fundamentalists and fanatics. It was a political label, embraced for political reasons and, I think, because of innate loyalty. I left, and felt this absurd sense of liberation.
In November 1990, my decree nisi came through, and three days later, after apparently plotting with Karim, Colin proposed to me.
A year after our wedding, I conceived. It was not planned, but suddenly a new desire surged. We wanted a baby. There were two miscarriages, one after another at around 12 weeks, followed by inconsolable sadness. Then, after a holiday, a third pregnancy was confirmed, and on 11 April 1993, my girl was born. Jena was ecstatic: another grandchild to nurture and bathe, sing to and spoil.
In 1994, I was pulled back to the old continent for the first time since I had left. The drive from Entebbe airport to Kampala seemed so familiar, I felt I had never left. Within two days I was a mess. My home town was slummed down; bullet holes and wrecked buildings reproached the eyes. The biggest shock was Makerere, so dilapidated I cried. I rushed back to London, acutely distressed. My country was gone, memories burned away in the violent years.
The human urge to trace bloodlines is strong. But our far past was swept away. Like many other East African Asians whose forebears left India in the 19th century, I search endlessly for the remains of those days. Then Africa disgorged us, too, and here we are, people in motion, now in the west, the next stopover. There is no place on earth we can historically and unequivocally claim to be ours.
In the autumn of 2007 Gordon Brown made his first prime ministerial speech at the Labour party conference. He used the word Britishness about 78 times. His patriotic whacks gave me a headache. What the future holds seems as uncertain as ever. Perhaps I should keep a suitcase half-packed. Just in case.