My mother, Saida Sherif, who has died aged 90, moved to Britain in 1965 as a single mother with two young children, and committed herself to humanitarian and educational work.
Saida was born in Delhi, an only daughter after five sons. Her father, Shamsul Haq, was a civil servant and her mother, Razia (nee Syed), came from a line of religious scholars. She attended the Jamia Millia school in Karol Bagh, Delhi, where she learned to use the microphone to address the audience in the school hall and was soon hired for the children’s Sunday programme on All India Radio.
Partition in 1947 forced the family out of their home in old Delhi into a refugee camp, and then to Karachi. There, she met Ansaruddin Sherif, a recently demobbed officer in the British Indian army, and they were married in 1948. By the end of the year she was in Switzerland, where he had been appointed Pakistan’s representative at a UN agency.
In 1951, she went to live in London, with her brother Misbah Ansari, who was training as an engineer, to undertake a journalism course at Regent’s College while her husband continued his job in Geneva. She also broadcast on the BBC programme In-se-Milye (Let’s Meet), earning a fee of two guineas for 15 minutes. Her husband’s career as a diplomat was short-lived, and on their return to Karachi she became the family breadwinner.
Economic circumstances were dire and there were few options but to start a new life in Britain, where she worked for the BBC’s Eastern Service. She would write her script for her three-minute broadcasts in Urdu on the double decker to Bush House. She also enrolled for evening classes at Willesden College of Technology and obtained a teacher’s certificate in 1984.
When conflict started in the Balkans in 1992, she volunteered with the charity Convoy of Mercy, and set up a rehabilitation centre for the wounded in Croatia and a teaching programme in Jablanica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. She soon acquired a working knowledge of Bosanski and was a rare Muslim female relief worker who comforted victims of Serbian sexual violence. She would return to London to gather strength and relax, often hosting musical soirees and poetry recitals at her home in Willesden Green.
In 2004 she published Kasak, a collection of poetry in Urdu and English, and in 2014 her memoir, Sparks of Fire. She received the Muslim news award for excellence in 2007.
Saida’s refugee support and educational work took her to Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and Indonesia – and to Turkey, a country she came to love, as an English language teacher at Sakarya University from 2007 to 2009. In 2013, aged 80, she took a longed-for trip to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Ansaruddin died in 1969. Saida is survived by her children, Jasmine, Ajmal and me, 10 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.
