I am the next generation

At first I thought I shouldn't say much about myself and who I am before embarking on putting all the context together of how I came to be here. I learnt from someone that sometimes, you have to put the ending first and that gives your story - whether fiction or faction - a direction, a gravity.

I am Hazera. I don't know who named me but my mother will once say my dad and thrice say my brother. I was born in Bangladesh on a date that eludes me. It's definitely 1975 and my passport says July but we celebrate in June. It's beautifully ambiguous, just like my identity. And Hazera is my "official" name. Not the one my siblings, parents, neighbours and myriad other distant relations and adoptive aunts and uncles called me.

I am Zoba. It means Hibiscus. Friends of my parents suffixed it with Rani. Zoba Rani.

I have three living siblings; a brother, 18 years my senior; a sister 12 years my senior and a half brother about 13 years my junior. My father remarried when I was 12 and he never met his son.

When I was much younger, my parents had a lovely clipped holdall which held all their filing of important papers and old passports. It had the airline tickets, port documents, international money order receipts , trade union memberships, gas bills, letters to the solicitors about our naturalisation, addresses of forgotten places on slips of old notebook paper, thin blue envelopes which had writing on the inside and the words Par Avion on the front and stamps with tigers on them. To avoid them being lost or filed by my mother, I took them and started going through them. When I lay them out, in date order, I suddenly saw a whole history. I could map out the very moment my father left his village in Mukimpur, Habiganj, Sylhet and follow him to the plane, imagining what window seat he took and him leaving the chaos of the primitive airport. I could then board with him on a flight from Sylhet to Dhaka and connect to Karachi and then onward to London. I started to be in his shoes, taking his first steps on his maiden voyage to a country that he did not yet know would be cold, damp, dark.