Waseem Hussain was born in 1966 in the Pakistani port city of Karachi and grew up on Lake Zurich. At a young age, he organized cultural events and made the multi-award-winning short film "Larry". As a journalist, he reported from the South Asian region for the Swiss press and was awarded the Prix Mass-Médias by the Fondation Eckenstein in 1998 for his investigative research. He lives as an author and songwriter near Zurich and speaks German, English and Urdu.

For weeks, my family was in a tizz; we bought presents, got vaccinated against hepatitis, malaria and cholera, went to the hairdresser, and got our visas. The boys and girls in my class had a holiday apartment in Graubünden, a house in Ticino or a caravan that they took to the south of France. When I told them that I would be spending the holidays with my grandmother in Karachi, their eyes widened as though I were telling fairy tales.

At the end of the long night flight, mother said to me and my brothers, very solemnly: "Listen carefully: the first thing you do when we get to Nani's is wash your faces. Then you go to her and kiss her hand."

"Come, let's have breakfast," said Nani after the greeting. And as she and mum shed tears of reunion, my dad, brothers and I spread a large white blanket on the floor and arranged plates and cups on it. Nani and mum joined us, we sat down and, over fried eggs with rock salt, black pepper and fruity Kashmiri chili, chapati bread and chai, we caught up -  which class we children went to now, who worked where, that food had become more expensive again or who the neighbour's daughter was going to marry.

This is how I remember our arrival, every summer, in Nanistan. In the grandmother country. Every time we went, I heard old and new stories, learned more and more Urdu. Even today, Niwala is one of my favorite words. "Here," Nani would say when I had finished my plate, "have another niwala!" She grabbed a piece of her egg with some chapati, formed a scoop with four fingers and shoved it into my mouth with her thumb. It was the most precious bite of all. Precisely because niwala is not translated as a bite, but as: a gift that you receive. Everything Nani told me was a niwala. Just like the blessing of the ancestors, when she put her left hand on my head, I would kiss her right and she would say to me: "Live."

After the welcome meal together, Nani sat cross-legged on her day bed and read the newspaper. How she could rant! Her soft, high-pitched voice descended into a cellar full of growling anger. The outraged citizen rebelling against the power and greed of Pakistan's landed aristocracy, who had seized all the parliamentary seats and high offices.

Sometimes her eyes lingered on the obituaries and death notices, shedding lonely tears. Her husband, my Nana, who had studied law in British India and worked as a journalist, had died young. His militant newspaper articles against the foreign rule of the British Empire, the leaflets, which he printed under cover of night and distributed by bicycle, had landed him in prison several times. Even the lawyers and judges to whom he was related could no longer protect him and his family.

When the colonial power withdrew in 1947, political leaders argued over whether free India should become a majority society with tolerated minorities or a country of diversity and balance of power. The Indian subcontinent was divided. In an unparalleled tragedy, two new states emerged: India and Pakistan. As they fled from the looting and rape, fifteen million people lost their possessions, their homeland and their land. One million were killed. Nani didn't like to talk about it. That was all she would say: When the threats against Nana became unbearable in October 1951 and they too had to flee India, she was thirty years old and had four children. Nana arranged the clandestine journey through hamlets and villages and hostels where the family could hide. In Bombay, he procured tickets for the passage by boat across the Arabian Sea to Karachi, the first capital of the nascent Pakistan.

In my hunger for answers to the many questions I had never asked, I shoot short films with my eyes closed. I see the port of Bombay and the colours in the sky. The fruit on display, the roasted chickpeas in newspaper packets. I hear the voices of people, some barefoot, others on carriages. Sailors untie ropes, seagulls screech. In the swell on the high seas, Nani hugs her son and three daughters, letting them know with her enveloping arms that everything will be all right. How I wish I knew the words she used to comfort five-year-old Zohra, who gave birth to me fifteen years later in Karachi and carried me in her arms a year later when we emigrated to Switzerland in 1967, because Dad was setting up a bank branch here. How I would have loved to see Nani's big, dark brown almond eyes as she looked at Nana questioningly: "Tell me that we will want for nothing." Just as he is about to answer, the captain's voice booms from the ship's loudspeaker: "The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, shot dead in an assassination. I see Nani looking at Nana in horror. But her husband, usually so combative, gazes silently into the distance. Ten years later, he is on his way from Karachi to the Iraqi port city of Basra, from where he plans to travel on to the pilgrimage site of Karbala. On board, he falls ill and dies, silent forever. Nani only found out many days later.

From then on, Nani lived with her son, my uncle, and his family. Resentful of British colonisation and all the suffering it had caused in her homeland, she turned up her nose when her son, thanks to a promotion, bought a dining table and cutlery. To this day, I can hear her saying : "I have to eat like the English now, do I?" When I learned a few years ago that Swiss companies had sailed into Nani's homeland in the wake of the English ships in order to profit from colonisation, I thought back to the dining table in our apartment on Lake Zurich. It was there that my mother and father had taught me to sit up straight and eat with a knife, fork and spoon. "Otherwise we'll always be seen as foreigners," they said.

When I leaned against Nani's arm after my nap in Karachi, she stroked my head and neck with her hand, gave me five rupees and whispered: "Go and get some of that delicious bread." I jumped up, a Pakistani boy from Lake Zurich in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, went to the bakery with the tandoori oven and ordered ten naans in my Swiss-German Urdu. The baker added an eleventh, just for me. When I came back, Nani said, "Here we are," and placed the ten loaves I had ordered on the large cloth, next to the bowls and dishes smelling of ginger and garlic, green cardamom and black cumin seeds, star anise, cinnamon bark and mace.

I often stood with her in the kitchen, watching as she prepared vegetables, meat and herbs, washed rice and kneaded dough. "Every spice in its own time," she taught me when she opened one of the many small and large tins.

In November 1989, she read in the Daily Vatan Gujarati, the newspaper Nana had worked for, that a long, high wall had come down in Germany. There was talk of a thaw between East and West, of people streaming into the avenues of Berlin. One editorial said that what belonged together was now growing together. Photographs showed people from both sides dancing on the ruins of their estrangement. Heads of state embraced left and right, knowing that from now on their names would be etched in the memory of world history. Nani rejoiced, but bitterly. She held the newspaper over her face with outstretched arms and shook the open pages brusquely. Her voice was a sigh: " Here too, there was dancing once." She talked about the glittering parties, the glamorous cinemas, the elegant restaurants and crowded music clubs that had once existed in Karachi. But in 1977, twelve years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the USA removed the then Pakistani Prime Minister from office. He had ties with Moscow and did not want to take part in the West's fight against the Soviet Union, whose soldiers were soon invading neighbouring Afghanistan to close the Iron Curtain on the Arabian Sea. The strategists in Washington made the radical religious Chief of General Staff Zia the new head of state of Pakistan and gave him tens of millions of dollars, disguised as economic aid, to drive the godless Soviets, as they called them, out of the region. Zia trained mercenaries and drilled them in an archaic and aggressive form of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia, previously unknown to Pakistan. The general amended the constitution, abolishing the separation of state and religious institutions. Women were now required to wear a headscarf, which prompted the more pious among them to veil their bodies completely.

In that summer of 1977, while my schoolmates were holidaying at Lake Garda or in Bergün, my family and I were stuck in Nani's three-room apartment. For weeks after the coup, there were tanks in the streets and a curfew. Anyone who left the house without written permission was arrested. At night I could hear military vehicles, sometimes gunshots and explosions.

During the day, when the curfew was relaxed for a few hours, the cries of the mobile greengrocer could be heard as he pushed his stall, a large plank on four wheels, through the streets. Nani would rush onto the balcony, lower her basket on a string and order onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines. She would pull up the produce, sending two or three items back each time, shouting to the grocer that they weren't fresh. It seemed like a game. They would both be grinning as Nani pulled up the replacement goods and sent the basket back down with the money. The grocer would tap his forehead with the banknotes and move on.

In February 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet troops withdrew and the Iron Curtain disappeared. But not Zia's spiritual heirs, who terrorise the entire region as the Taliban and al-Qaeda. To this day, who rules and who fails in Pakistan is determined not only in Pakistan, but also by governments and intelligence services in Washington, Riyadh and Beijing.

In December of the same year, Nani was at the end of her life. Her heart had weakened, she had too much sugar in her blood and had gone blind in one eye. The lead in her drinking water had damaged her kidneys. Most of the time she lay on her back on her day bed, her grey hair loose, long and thick, like a pillow under her head. I asked her: "Will Pakistan and India ever be reunited?" She pondered. Then she said, "My dear grandson of many questions," and began talking about her childhood, which had begun in 1921 in Bhavnagar in British India. Her parents baptised her by first whispering a prayer in her ear and then her name: Zainab Bano Kokadwala. She described the scent of the monsoon rains as they fell on the dusty earth and the children skipping happily through the alleys. She told how she and her siblings dried cow dung and took it to their mother, who would fire up the stove with it and cook. A few hours later, she  would send the children off to share the feast with the neighbours, regardless of faith. From one hand to the other. All niwalas. Nani looked at me and said: "This is history."

Waseem Hussain's story was first published in German in the anthology Fragen hätte ich noch: Geschichten von unseren Großeltern by Wolfram Schneider-Lastins, published by Rotpunkt Verlag. We would like to thank the publisher for their kind permission to republish this book.