In Bangladesh, where I was born, they call me ‘Bideshi’. Foreigner. My closest relatives say it, not with contempt or disgust, but affectionately, with a curious sense of awe. They coo ‘Bideshi’ despite my flat, Bengali nose; my round, Bengali face; and my immeasurable tolerance for spicy food. They are protective of me and my western sensibilities, unsuited to their tap water or their climate. Although I speak Bangla fluently, over there I’m illiterate. I never learned to read or write the complicated script. At home, other Brits hear my smooth, lilting English, and are shocked to find out that I was born at Holy Family Hospital, in Dhaka. Some look betrayed and my cheeks burn with guilt, as if I’ve deceived them.

We moved to England when I was three years old. The pages of my Bangladeshi passport have become so gummy that I have to prise them apart with a nail file. Inside, there is a handwritten note of my height, 80cm, and a photograph of me looking terrified in my favourite dress. Other relatives had settled long before us. In the sixties, my eldest uncle had relocated to be a GP in Southgate, London. Another arrived in the seventies to go on to work as an electrical engineer at a glass factory in West Yorkshire, subjecting residents of Castleford to perhaps the first brown face they would ever see. My father had flown out a few years earlier to make the necessary arrangements for uprooting our lives – and this long stretch apart would mean that when we reunited, I would ultimately fail to recognise him. Before we’d left, my mother had palmed the walls of her childhood home and wept. She tells me I was mercifully quiet during the 13-hour flight. I’d fisted one hand in the silken pleats of her sari, and with the other I sucked on my fingers, tasting them for salt. I have, of course, virtually no memory of this journey, nor of my life prior to it. Landing for that first time in Heathrow in 2001, I was twice-born.

I grew up in a relatively diverse part of the country, where other, higher-ranking members of the diaspora had choice words for people like me. ‘Freshie’, as in, fresh off the boat. ‘Yardie’, co-opted from Jamaican Patois, was an ethnic person from a nondescript ‘backyard’. Certain missteps guaranteed you a ‘Fresh’ label: accented or mispronounced English, being spotted in public wearing Desi clothes, or, in my case, committing the cardinal sin of being born elsewhere. I quickly learned to keep this shortcoming a secret. When I first enrolled in nursery, the teacher asked my mother to accompany me for a week because I couldn’t speak a lick of English. Afterwards, I spent an inordinate amount of time sharpening my Home Counties accent and reading novel after novel until I’d caught up with my peers, then surpassed them (at which point I was at risk of being dubbed a ‘Coconut’, instead). Still, I was perpetually afraid of slipping up, which felt tantamount to being caught and arrested in a sting operation.

‘Freshie’ existed, mainly, to distinguish the birthright-havers from their have-not parents or grandparents. To distance them, I suppose, from the utter indignity of emigrating; of traversing continents in search of a better or safer or more prosperous future. This singularly self-sacrificing act, when undergone by brown or black people, seemed to reek of desperation. And many second and third generation immigrants – who, paradoxically, aren’t immigrants at all – did not want others to catch a whiff of that stink on them.

I, for one, have always resented British-born Asians. Their sense of identity appeared to come so easily and unthinkingly. I imagined that when confronted by racists to ‘go back to where you came from!’, they’d simply, smugly, quip that they were born in Tooting or Tower Hamlets. And what would I say, if similarly attacked? I had no such response up my sleeve.

Second-gens and beyond have a superior kind of citizenship to mine: implied, non-negotiable. Whereas I have silently weighed up my Englishness for years, tallying up arbitrary points on a rolling mental scorecard:

  • Not born on British soil, -20pts.
  • When eating spicy food, has never said ‘ooh, this has got a kick’, -9pts.