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with their limited number of ethnic characters who had boot-polish painted faces and caricatured catchphrases that gave a window onto how Britain viewed the Asian and black immigrants they had once colonized and who were now slowly becoming part of British culture. We, too, were swept away by the rarity and simplicity of the portrayals, happy to see ourselves on television at all. At least the characters representing us in these comedies appeared human and humorous, not barbaric, oppressed, or rebellious. “You Pakistani poppadom! ” we would chuckle to each other. “You Indian chappati! ” we chortled. “A thousand apologies,” we waggled our heads without irony.
    Even rarer were the occasional programs about Muslims. After much turning of the pages of the newspaper TV listings, there would be a network of telephone calls to and from friends and relations to stay at home in the evening to watch a particular program. This would be followed by a thorough post-programming analysis. We would gather in front of the screen and view each scene meticulously. Once we had a video recorder, each show would be captured for posterity. Mostly these programs were inaccurate, plain and simply wrong about the tenets of Islam, showing shoddy research and a poor treatment of the subject matter. I remember vividly a series entitled The Sword of Islam , which depicted a besworded group of warriors thundering across Arabia and Asia, painted as all but a horde of vampires sucking blood from the necks of children. My parents were horrified that Islam was being portrayed in such an alien and stereotyped manner. We weren’t converted by the sword, I reflected. Our family had been merchants who found Islam on their business travels. Even I knew that the sword story was a myth, and I was only a child. I concluded that the TV people really didn’t know their stuff.
    When I first started school, the question I found most difficult was: “Where do you come from?” This was not a question to do with babies, whose origins were simple: they just appeared. They popped out of belly buttons and you knew their gender by looking at their faces. I was shocked at a conversation between my mother and her sister after her first baby had just been born. “Why don’t you have another child? You should try for a second,” said my mother to my aunt. I was puzzled. How could my aunt cause a child to happen? You couldn’t just “have” a baby. It was quite straightforward: children came only because God sent them, when God chose to send them.
    It was my own origins that were much more complicated: a British East-African Asian Muslim girl in the bubbling ethnic mix of North London in the context of 1980s Anglo-Saxon monoculture made it hard for me to articulate succinctly my origins.
    At the age of six, if you are asked, “Where are you from?” the location of the house you live in is the obvious answer. It is the answer that anyone who does not look different would proffer. But you know they want more. They want to know why your skin isn’t peaches and cream if you’re from North London. They want to know why you wear those brightly colored, strange-shaped clothes. Why your food smells strange and why you eat with your fingers rather than with cutlery like civilized people. Why, sometimes, you have strange brown tattoos on your hands. The questions were never verbalized directly at me in real life, as they were in the mouths of comic racist characters like Alf Garnett. But they sat accusingly, demeaningly, disparagingly, tucked between lips and teeth. It was always easier to hide, to deny, to keep things separate. As long as the worlds never overlapped, there was never any danger, but the fear of collision was constant.
    I never revealed that we ate curry at home. I never prayed in front of my friends. I didn’t tell them about going to the mosque. How to explain all this, when the students at my nice middle-class independent school all came from