progenitor

In time, they are forced to leave the trucks behind; keeping to the roads has become too dangerous, and at great risk to themselves - one danger for another - they enter the jungle to make slow progress toward the Naga foothills, the border, the Indian state of Assam. On a number of occasions, their scouts encounter the Japanese and they are forced to lie low. My grandaunt speaks of constant gunfire, the screaming of women and children, sometimes only tens of metres away, and of how it is to feel hunted. The family will make it across the border, on foot, after months of travel, but at cost; the girl who would be my eldest aunt, dead from diphtheria near Taunggyi, though she was not alone; maids, porters, other innocents, their children, lost themselves too.

Aged seventeen, my mother became responsible for the wellbeing of six of her seven sisters, and a younger brother. She and her eldest sister took charge of the timber business, and at a time when capitalism was being crushed by the general's Burmese Way to Socialism, actually turned a profit, the aim being to secure passage for each of the Ahmed children in turn, youngest to oldest, to Pakistan and the frantic, open arms of my grandmother. As the head-of-the-family elect, it was my mother who was thrown into prison in 1963, aged eighteen, for trying to preserve some of the family's wealth, having been turned in, rather unfortunately, by a misguided relative. She made headline news; to see my mother in her youth, all I need do is travel to the British Museum reading rooms, and there she is, in black and white, surrounded by 'stolen' jewellery. And when she was released, she went right back to what it was she was doing before, until she was the last of the immediate family still left in Burma. Delayed only by her trial, she finally booked passage aboard a tanker and sailed alone to Karachi, to join the rest of the family in exile. We are forbidden from returning to Burma.