A rarity in the interviewing world once asked me, “You seem unsure of what you are. One minute you say you’re a writer, another minute an author.
Which are you?”
The question haunted me, as I was dissatisfied with either title.
At the age of five, I was parcelled off from a middle-class Muslim home in Africa—complete with our own servant—to an English working-class family living on a low-income “council” estate, thirty miles south-west of London.
Joseph Conrad, the renowned author of Heart of Darkness, was said to have spoken five languages before he turned to English. It was the same with me. In Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, everyone in my community spoke five languages: Kutchi and Gujarati amongst ourselves; Hindi and Urdu with the rest of our Indian neighbours; and Swahili with the indigenous African folk. At five, I knew but a few words of English. In my adopted home, no one spoke anything else.
Little by little, I began to master English. Books became my sanctuary from a world of aliens. Books allowed me a kingdom of my own. My father, an airline employee, gave me free travel home during every school holiday in England. There, I would haunt Khan’s second-hand bookstore beside the Empire Cinema. Within its womb lay every book imaginable from European literature-all brought over by an overabundance of zealous foreign government advisers on three-year contracts, determined to help Tanzania’s economy and social structure bloom under Socialism. One week I would be immersed in the powerful rhetoric of Churchill; the next, the realism of Émile Zola.
If Tanzania’s economy didn’t bloom, my love of the English language certainly did.
It wasn’t just reading that influenced me. I fell in love with the hymns sung each morning at school—those of William Blake and Sir Cecil Spring Rice. With the King James Bible. With Shakespeare. In my time, the Beatles and Rolling Stones first appeared on Ready, Steady, Go, bringing forth more words to memorise. I remember, one Christmas Eve in my final year of grammar school, heading off to meet my girlfriend while singing Slade’s “Gudbuy T’Jane”.
From storybooks and hymns to plays and pop songs, it was always the words that gripped me. I devoured four large dictionaries, each with 50,000 entries, reading their meanings and etymologies, ticking off every word within. In Canada, I became an incorrigible player of Scrabble. To me, each word held power, a certain vibration.
Finally, in my sixties, I found the strength to rebel against my mother—now 93, suffering severe dementia— and rediscovered my salvation in writing books and articles. More than storytelling, it was the imagery that set my heart alight. Descriptions such as “The Shambalaya stood like a Victorian grande dame in mourning”, or “The man was as thin as a rasher of bacon”, or “Khan’s Restaurant reminded him of a hospital ward run by Florence Nightingale in Scutari during the Crimean War”.
As I write, it’s not the plot I care most about—the narrative is merely the scaffolding—but, like the finest goal in football, the sheer power and resonance of words strung together in perfect harmony.
When you bury my heart at Wounded Knee, please refrain from inscribing “Writer” or “Author”. Endow me with the simple accolade: Wordsmith.
