Kabir and Gary are walking along the river outside Cambridge, which is about fifty miles away from the family home. They have only been together for a fairly short time. Gary has not met Kabir’s family, and doesn’t yet know much about them.

Gary: So your dad is not going to like this?

Kabir: You can say that again. Nor my mum, come to that. But my dad… well, he’s a big figure in the Muslim community in our borough: chair of the Mosque committee, all of that. It’s going to be very very difficult for him.

Gary: Difficult for him? For fuck’s sake, Kabir, what about you? He’s supposed to be your dad! He’s supposed to love and support you! Not try and shove you into the straightjacket of what he’d like you to be!

Kabir (stopping in his tracks and turning to face Gary): Listen, Gary, let me get one thing straight. My dad is a good man. He’s a loving dad. And he’s one of the few religious people I know who really tries to live according to his faith. You and me are not going to get on if you insist on making him into some kind of cartoon Islamic bigot!

Gary (laughing and taking Kabir’s hand): Hey! Hey! Calm down, Kabir mate! I never said that. I never said that at all! But when I came out to my—

Kabir: Gary, your parents are Guardian-reading white British liberals. Your grandparents too, I’m guessing. My grandparents grew up in rural Bangladesh. They were peasants. They could barely write their own language, never mind English. But they were good people. They came to England to make a better life for their kids, slogged their guts out for them, and brought them up to be good people too, according to their own lights. My dad doesn’t hold his beliefs in order to be a nuisance to his kids. He genuinely believes that’s the way God wants us to live. That’s how he was brought up. And what’s more, it worked for him. He is a really really good man.

Gary (gently, as they resume walking): You obviously love your dad.

Kabir: I do, very much. And my mum, and my Nan.

Gary: She’s got dementia, yeah?

Kabir: That’s right, poor Nan. It’s hard being with her these days, but we all absolutely loved her when we were kids. She’d do anything for anyone. And it didn’t matter how sad you were, she could always make you see the funny side. She had the sweetest laugh I’ve ever heard. Still has actually, though we don’t often hear it now.

Gary: Hard for your parents.

Kabir: Very hard, but they do the best they can. They’re good people, Gary. I don’t want to cause them the kind of heartache that Mohammad caused them…. Or Monty, as he likes to call himself these days.

Gary: Your big brother.

Kabir: Yeah. When he told my parents he was going to marry a non-Muslim woman, they were upset. They would have dealt with it eventually, but my bloody brother in his self-righteous way took the hump big time, stormed off down to Brighton and just cut off contact with them completely. He even started going by an English name, for God’s sake. (Monty, of all things: I ask you!) Honestly, the whole thing broke my parents’ hearts. They absolutely doted on him.

Gary: Yes but—

Kabir: To be fair, he has been diagnosed as on the autistic spectrum, which I guess is part of it. He always did get very stressed out by any sort of family disagreement, even if it was just about what to watch on TV. But you should have seen Mum and Dad at the time, Gary. Their clever son, their pride and joy, telling them he didn’t want anything to do with them, rejecting just about everything that gave their life meaning. The hurt! The sheer dazed incomprehension that he could just cut them out like that!

Gary (gently): You don’t want to hurt them like that again. I understand that. That’s sweet of you. You’re a good man yourself, you know, Kabir, and I love you for it. But you’ve got needs too, don’t forget. You don’t have to do what Monty did, but you can’t live a lie all your life just to protect them!

Kabir (after walking in silence for a while): Yeah, I know, but now’s an absolutely terrible time.

Gary: Isn’t it always going to be a terrible time? If you’re not careful, your whole life can go by while you wait for the right time.

Kabir: Now isn’t the time. It’s my Nan. She’s—

Gary: Dementia is very challenging I know.

Kabir: She can’t keep still. She can’t settle to anything. She doesn’t know who we are most of the time. She thinks she’s back in Bangladesh and, all day and every day, she’s trying to leave the house and walk back to her childhood home which she imagines is just down the street. When she’s stopped from leaving, she wails and screams and calls whoever’s stopping her, which is usually Mum, all kinds of horrible names. This can happen ­–I don’t know– ten or twenty times a day, and sometimes in the middle of the night.

Gary: Sounds absolutely grim.

Kabir (laughing bitterly): Yeah, and just to put the icing on the cake, our racist neighbours, the delightful Dudley family, who mum and dad have bent over backwards to be nice to, are reporting mum and dad to the police and social services on a regular basis, accusing them of elder abuse.

Gary: Jesus.

Kabir: Mum’s actually pretty close to breaking point. I’m not just saying that, I really mean it. She’s seriously depressed, I’m sure of it. She’s just not Mum at all any more. At least my dad gets a break from it all when he goes to work, but Mum… well okay Dad and Sajid do what they can, and there’s some nice people from the Mosque that come in and give her a break every Wednesday, though that’s taken quite a knock since Covid. But basically Mum’s in the firing line all the rest of the time. And I’m not just talking about verbal abuse. She tries to hide them but she’s always got scratches and bruises. Nan gave her a black eye not long ago when mum wouldn’t let her out of the door. Nan was punching her really hard. You can’t blame her. She thinks she’s being held prisoner. But mum just had to stand there and take it.

Gary: That’s awful.

Kabir: And of course Mr Dudley chose to report the black eye too. He said he thought my dad had done it. My dad! The gentlest man in the world.

Gary: Where’s Sajid in all this? He seemed like a nice kid that time I met him.

Kabir: Oh he is. My little brother is the sweetest guy. But he’s basically put his whole life on hold because he daren’t leave my mum to cope on her own. He’s probably the smartest out of the three of us, actually, the one who could really make something of himself, but he’s just working in dad’s shop part-time, and helping mum cope with Nan.

Gary: And your dad?

Kabir: His mum is everything to him. He adores her. And he just can’t bear the thought that anyone but the family should care for her… so he’s always desperately trying to persuade us that everything’s going to be fine, that everything is fine right now, and we just need to pray to God for strength and guidance. He’s not stupid. I’m sure deep down he understands that something is going to have to give, and we’re going to have to get some outside help in before Mum goes under. We’re all working on him to get him to admit that, but he’s really struggling to face it. Mum is too, actually. It’s not like Dad’s forcing this on her. She feels this should be the family’s job, just like he does. She berates herself for finding it so hard. Obligation to your parents: it’s a big big thing for them. I find it hard to explain to people from different backgrounds just how deep that goes.

Gary: And of course that’s a good thing in many ways, but—

Kabir: I can’t do it, Gary. Not in the middle of this. I can’t walk into my parents’ house and say ‘Hey, meet my new partner! Not only is he not Bangladeshi and not a Muslim, but he’s a man!’ Not now, not anytime soon. I’m really sorry, but I just can’t.