Your thatha’snani's stories deserve to live forever.

When I passed my MBBS in 1971, my mother stood outside the exam hall and wept. Not from relief — from a pride she had no words for. Nobody from our lane in Jaipur's old city had ever become a doctor. Not a man. Certainly not a woman. I came to Birmingham in 1976 with two suitcases and a specialty in paediatrics. The hospital assigned me a room above the canteen that smelled of chips. I was on call every third night for the first five years. I never complained. I spent three decades tending to children of immigrants who reminded me of myself: small, bewildered, learning to belong. When my granddaughter was born, I was in the delivery room still wearing my white coat. My patients call me Dr. Sharma. My family calls me Dadi. Both feel true.

I arrived at Heathrow in November 1978 with one suitcase, forty pounds in my pocket, and the address of a cousin I had met once at a wedding. The fog that morning was so thick I could not see the terminal until I was standing inside it. I still laugh about that when I tell it at the dinner table in Southall. I had an engineering degree. My first job here was washing dishes. My second was driving a van. I never told my father. For the next ten years I did work that had nothing to do with my education, and I raised three children in a terraced house on a street where everyone's name ended in -wal or -wala. All three went to university. I attended every graduation wearing the same expression my mother had worn the morning I boarded the plane.

I remember Lahore the way you remember a dream — vivid in parts, blurred at the edges, with a longing I cannot quite name after ninety-two years of trying. The house on Anarkali Street had a blue door. A jasmine vine that climbed all the way to the second floor. In August 1947 we left with what we could carry in two hours. A bundled quilt. My father's land papers. A small brass idol my mother refused to leave behind even as we ran. We never went back. I built a whole life in Delhi — married, had children, watched them grow — and then followed them to Toronto when my knees gave out. I still remember the smell of that jasmine like it was this morning. Some places, you carry whether you choose to or not.

When I opened Krishnamurthy's on Belgrave Road in 1983, I had eleven tables, one laminated menu, and genuinely no idea what I was doing. I had come via Singapore, worked three jobs to afford the lease, and slept on a mattress in the storage room for two years because I couldn't afford rent elsewhere. Within a year there was a queue out the door every Friday. Within five years we had fed three Bollywood actors, one sitting Prime Minister, and most of Leicester's South Indian diaspora on both their good days and their bad ones. I kept a photograph pinned by the till the whole time: my father's roadside idli stall in Mylapore. Two rupees a plate for thirty years. He taught me everything.

Every summer of my childhood, the mango tree in our courtyard gave more fruit than the whole neighbourhood could eat, so every summer the whole neighbourhood came. My mother would wake before dawn to make aam panna — grinding the spices in a stone mortar, humming a Lata Mangeshkar song in a voice that only that kitchen ever heard. I left Karachi in my twenties and kept that recipe in memory for forty years without ever writing it down, because some things you don't write down. I made the same aam panna in Manchester every July. Each time, for a few minutes, I was back in that courtyard. My mother was alive again. The tree was full. Nothing had changed. In my seventieth summer I finally taught my granddaughter to make it. I measured nothing. I explained everything.