11.04.2026

Alfonso and I had spent the day at another attraction, marvelling at the history of technology. We had been amused by one of the volunteers who had quite a quick turn for words and had been answering the questions of Alfonso in a droll and winsome manner. My friend was wearing his usually stunning arrangement of costly materials. This time, a blue blazer with cream trousers and a light flamingo pink shirt.

As we walked together home in the mild climes of April this year, Alfonso was asking me about my writing plans.

‘You don’t have any shortage of ideas, do you?’ he inquired of me.

‘I am the flood. It all comes. Too much altogether. I could write a novel every week. The trick is to have no censor and to let the explosion happen. I write without even thinking about anything. I tap into the unconscious.’

‘And what is the dream of a book that you have at the moment?’

‘Why not write a little heavy tome about history?’

‘What type of history?’ asked Alfonso, looking dreamily up at the clouds in the sky. One of which resembled the buttocks of a goat.

‘History books,’ I mused, ‘ don’t very often talk about how history has shaped a particular life of an ordinary man. How the personal is the acutely political. Look at me though. First, I have been shaped by the Partition, since my grandmother had to leave the newly created Pakistan for India and lost all of her belongings as a child. Second, my grandfather? He was a child when Independence happened in India. So he became the philosophy of Indian Independence. My mother? She escaped from the forced sterilisation of the poor as a schoolgirl and that is why I was even born in the first place. Then, add on the World War which caused the deaths of the young men and the labour shortage that meant my grandfather was invited to the United Kingdom to work. The new freedoms for women in the sixties meant that my grandmother worked to support the home. I have been brought up as a young man amidst the xenophobia and racism that erupted following 9/11, since everyone took me, with my brown skin, as a Muslim man. Then, look at the thousands of years of caste oppression in India that has made me what I am, as well as the military culture of Punjab, which has always fought against oppression and the tyrant.’

‘Why don’t you write this book and about how history has affected your life?’

‘Because of the igorance of the reader. They would have a Dua Lipa tell them what to read and promote her as an expert, with her lack of any serious credentials or hard work in the subject of literature. Because she is famous and she fits into the majority culture. Whereas I am not included in the majority culture and I do not have fame or connections, and therefore my serious credentials would be absolutely ignored and no one would read or understand anything that I wrote because of their stupidity. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing was that Dua Lipa becomes, in their stunted eyes, a ‘literary novelist’ or a ‘poet’. Laughable.’

We walked on together in this life where there was no fair competition, no meritocracy, and no justice. Where the absolutely pedestrian rose to the heights of every endeavour and captured the shallow and undiscerning hearts of what was surely the worse audience in history.