We have booked our return to London, on 28 May, a day that will live for me always. It is what I privately call bum dhamaka day, on which twenty years ago when the mountain turned white in Chaghai, when Pakistan tested the bomb some days after India’s test. It felt like such a betrayal. I remember sitting in my room and staring at my fingernails, trying to comprehend it. The next such day was 20 March 2003 when the Iraq war began. The previous day I had submitted my thesis and gone straight to a protest, first in Cambridge and then in Boston, feeling the same sense of betrayal, and knowing that the world had changed again. That night the war began and we are still living in its reality.
The next was the Brexit vote, but I won’t mark that date as between those two events and today there have been years of betrayals, suicide attacks, and who knows what else. Also I’m in my thirties now.