My mother, Shahnaz Yawar, who has died aged 74, emigrated to the UK from India as a teenager and spent her career as a teacher and tutor, often supporting marginalised children.
She was born Mohini Sekhon to a Sikh family in Ludhiana, Punjab, India, eight months after the violent partition of that state. Her father, Gurdial Sekhon, had been a political prisoner for his non-violent independence activism. Her mother, Jagjit (nee Nan-Toor), was the daughter of a road-haulage magnate, who initially strongly disapproved of their marriage.
Mohini was brought up in a remote village, where her father was the schoolmaster. Jagjit also worked as a teacher. After her paternal grandmother died, Mohini, aged 13, was left to run the household, looking after her younger brother, Raminder, and sister, Amar, and running a chicken farm that her parents had bought. Despite these and other stresses, Mohini won a scholarship to study medicine at Panjab University, but in 1965, when she was 17, her family migrated to London before she was able to start her studies. Instead, she found a job in an ice-cream factory, where she worked double shifts.
The day she arrived in London, Mohini met Tasnim Yawar, a social worker, who had been asked by a mutual friend to help the Sekhons settle in the city. Tasnim arranged for Mohini to resume her education and she did teacher training at Maria Grey college in Twickenham. During that time she became a Muslim, changed her name to Shahnaz Fatima and married Tasnim in 1971.
After graduating, Shahnaz taught maths at Westbourne secondary school (now Westbourne academy) in Ipswich. She left in 1975, when Tasnim was asked to set up the social work course at Kingston Polytechnic. Shahnaz was by then pregnant with the first of her two children. She never returned to classroom teaching, but tutored children at home. Most of her students had been bullied, abused or marginalised; by offering love, cake and intellectual rigour she gave them the foundations to accept themselves and to excel.
Tasnim died suddenly in 1997; Shahnaz continued with her tutoring until just before she was diagnosed with oral cancer in April 2022.
She is survived by her sons, Asad and me, her mother and her brother.
