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My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.

My grandfather is from Peshawar; he was born there.

I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it.

Shortly after I was born he emigrated to Durban, where members of my mother's family had settled at the turn of the century, and the rest of the family followed soon thereafter.

Growing up in Pakistan in the 1980s, I lived in the shadow of a tyrannical state.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.

Yeah, my family is of Indian heritage.