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 tizzy, we bought presents, got vaccinated against hepatitis, malaria and cholera, went to the hairdresser, got our visas. The boys and girls in my class had a vacation 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 vacations with my grandmother in Karachi, they made eyes as if I were telling an oriental fairy tale.

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

"Come, let's have breakfast," said Nani after the greeting. And while she and mother cried tears of reunion, father, my brothers and I laid a large white blanket on the floor and placed plates and cups on it. Nani and mother joined us, we sat down and, over fried eggs with rock salt, black pepper and fruity Kashmiri chili, chapati bread and chai, we told each other which class we children went to, who worked where, that food had become more expensive again or who the neighbor's daughter was going to marry.

This is how I remember our arrival, every summer, in Nanistan. In the grandmother country. With every visit, 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 kissed her right and she said: "Live."

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

Sometimes her eyes lingered on the obituaries and death notices. Lonely tears fell on the letters. 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, his leaflets, which he printed under the cover of night and brought to the people on his bicycle, led to him being thrown into prison several times. Not even the lawyers and judges he was related to could protect him and his family any longer.

When the colonial power withdrew in 1947, political leaders argued about 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. Fifteen million people lost their possessions, their homeland and their land as they fled looting and rape. One million were killed. Nani didn't like to talk about it. That was all she told: 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 took care of the clandestine journey through hamlets and villages and hostels where the family could hide. In Bombay, he procured tickets for the ship passage across the Arabian Sea to Karachi, the first capital of the four-year-old Pakistan.

In my hunger for answers to the many questions I never asked, I shoot short films with my eyes closed. I see the port of Bombay and the colors in the sky. The fruit on display, the roasted chickpeas in packets of newspaper. 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 Nana'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 rings out from the on-board loudspeaker: "The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, shot dead in an assassination attempt. I see Nani looking at Nana in horror. But her otherwise combative husband 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 wants to travel on to the pilgrimage site of Karbala. He falls ill on the ship and falls 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 colonization 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. I can still hear her saying today: "Do I have to eat like the English now?" 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 colonization, I thought back to the dining room 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 spoon, knife and fork. "Otherwise we'll always stand out as strangers," 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 this delicious bread." I jumped up, a Pakistani boy from Lake Zurich in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, went to the bakery with the hole in the ground made of baked clay and ordered ten naan in my Swiss-German Urdu. The baker added an eleventh, just for me. When I came back, Nani said, "Here it is," and placed the ten loaves I had ordered on the large cloth next to the bowls and dishes, from which it smelled 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 kissed each other left and right, knowing that from now on their names would be etched in the memory of world history. Nani rejoiced, but with bitterness. She held the newspaper over her face with outstretched arms and shook the open pages gruffly. Her voice was a sigh: "There used to be dancing here too." She talked about the glittering parties and glamorous cinemas, 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 connections in Moscow and did not want to take part in the West's fight against the Soviet Union, whose soldiers were soon invading neighboring 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 swore them in to a version of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia, aggressive and archaic, which Pakistan had never known before. The general amended the constitution, abolishing the separation of state and religious institutions. From then on, women had to wear a headscarf, which prompted the more pious among them to veil their bodies completely.

While my schoolmates were on vacation at Lake Garda or in Bergün, my family and I were stuck in Nani's three-room apartment in the summer of 1977. 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 the military vehicles. Sometimes gunshots and explosions.

During the day, when the curfew was relaxed for a few hours, the shouting of the flying greengrocer could be heard as he pushed his store, a large plank on four wheels, through the streets. Nani hurried onto the balcony, lowered her basket on a string and ordered onions, tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants. She pulled up the produce, sending two or three items back each time and shouting to the seller that they weren't fresh. It seemed to be a game. There was a grin on both of their faces when Nani pulled up the replacement goods and sent the basket with the money down. The man tapped his forehead with the banknotes and moved 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 are terrorizing 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 become weak. 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 resting bed, her hair loose, mottled gray and 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 talked about her childhood, which had begun in 1921 in Bhavnagar in British India. Her parents baptized her by first whispering a prayer in her ear and then her name: Zainab Bano Kokadwala. She described the smell of the monsoon rains as they fell on the dusty earth and the children skipped happily through the alleys. She told how she and her siblings dried cow dung and took it to their mother. She fired up the stove with it and cooked. A few hours later, she sent the children off to share the feast with the neighbors, regardless of their 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.