They are married on a cold September day in 1963 in London. My father arrived a year or two earlier from Kenya, which he left in the months during the run-up to Kenyan independence – the second independence movement he would witness in his life. The Indian state of Punjab, where he was born, was almost exclusively agricultural at the time, its economy fundamentally entwined with the soil and seasons.
The family owned a small portion of land, divided, as far as I know, between my grandfather and his two brothers. I would ultimately inherit the tiniest surviving scraps, butchered by time and obligation to descendants, into sixteenths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths. There were few jobs, and what land we had was rented out for income (years later, my father would continue the arrangement though refuse to take any payment – small plot farming in Punjab was seldom an occupation much above subsistence level – his generosity here marking another of his contradictions).
His father was already living and working in Kenya and had been there for at least two decades. When my father turned 20, he joined him in Nairobi, where there were jobs with the British colonial administration. My mother travelled directly...
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