Huma Qureshi - How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures, Will add sunshine to your year. Stylist, best non-fiction 2021

There are the books that touch you. Then there are the books that open out their arms and straight out hug you How We Met is this second kind of book. Honest, joyful, at times heart-breaking, at times laugh-out-loud funny, but always generous in its telling... this is Huma Qureshi, heart and soul.

Ami Rao, author of David and Ameena

A fearlessly honest memoir of courage, love and loss, and trying to find your place in the world. Quietly heartbreaking but life-affirming too.

Kia Abdullah, author of Take It Back

How We Met is a wonderful read... a memoir of grief, becoming and true love. Huma Qureshi is a writer with a sharp eye and a romantic heart.

Katherine May, author of Wintering

How We Met is the book I, and countless women of similar heritage, have been waiting our whole lives for. I cried, and laughed out loud as I recognised myself in so much of Huma Qureshis story... Its about being the child of immigrants, its about dreams, about motherhood, and it is about familial love, in its many forms. Its such a beautiful book of quiet confidence, and deserves to be read widely. Huma is a huge talent, and a skilful storyteller with an eye for an exquisite turn of phrase.

Saima Mir, author of The Khan

First published 2021 by

Elliott and Thompson Limited

2 John Street

London WC1N 2ES

www.eandtbooks.com

EPUB: 978-1-78396-542-7

MOBI: 978-1-78396-543-4

Copyright Huma Qureshi 2021

The Author has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

: Extract from Love After Love by Derek Walcott published in The Poetry of Derek Walcott 19482013 and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typesetting by Marie Doherty

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

DEREK WALCOTT
Love After Love

For Suffian, Sina and Jude

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The past is always remembered differently,
depending on who is remembering; this is my version.

M y six-year-old son Suffian has a friend at school whose parents apparently met on the Piccadilly line on the way to work. Suffian announces this while eating his dinner in the out-of-context way six-yearolds and their ilk are prone to do. Charlies parents met on the Piccadilly line and then they got married, he says, with knowing authority.

I am sceptical. Things like this dont actually happen in real life, I tell him.

Are you sure? I ask.

Yes. They met on the Piccadilly line and then they got married. They are the Piccadilly People. Charlie told me, he says triumphantly.

The detail, for a six-year-old, is specific (it was definitely the purple line, of that he is certain) so I suppose it might be true. Perhaps Charlies parents really do call themselves the Piccadilly People, perhaps they really did meet across a crowded Tube carriage many years ago.

Thats nice, I say, because it is nice when two people come together in the universe, even if it is in a crowded Tube carriage.

What line did you and Dada meet on? Suffian asks expectantly. I understand from his hopeful expression that he now believes that everybodys parents must have met on the Tube. Was it the Northern line? he asks, because we live off the Northern line and it is by default his favourite.

Ah, so we didnt meet on the Tube, I say, shaking my head.

You didnt?

No. Most people dont marry people they meet on the Tube. Most people dont talk on the Tube. Most people dont even make eye contact on the Tube.

So where did you meet? he says.

Weve never had this sort of conversation before. His curiosity suggests that perhaps he has some sort of understanding that we were people before he and his two younger brothers came along; this feels like a turning point. But right now I dont know how to answer his simple question because theres the story of how we met and then theres my mothers version of how we met and then theres everything that happened before and also in between. I dont know where to begin.

Well, I say, technically, we met in a coffee shop.

And then you got married?

Not straight away.

After coffee?

No.

But you dont like coffee.

No.

Then when?

Later. It was... complicated.

What does that mean?

I tell him to finish his dinner.

I text Charlies mum. She has no idea what Charlies talking about. They met at work.

Sometimes when Im upset, when things dont work out the way I had hoped they would, I find myself wanting to gather my children in my arms and hold them close. I tell them that I love them, that I want them to know that they can be whoever they want to be, love whoever they want to love, do whatever they want to do.

My children are still very young and so they arent yet embarrassed by such affection, often seeking it out and instigating it themselves. They respond to my fervour with their arms flung tightly and hotly around my neck and I breathe them in the way you do when you dont want to let someone you love go.

My declarations are randomly announced and often out of context. But somehow it feels urgent for them to know how far my love stretches, no matter how mundane the moment or what we might be doing at the time. It feels urgent for me to say these things, again and again, so that they will always know.

You are my sun, you are my moon, you are my earth, I say over dinner, pointing to each of their three faces in turn.

WE ARE YOUR UNIVERSE! four-year old Sina, the middle one, clamours back, punching the air like the superhero he is.

I love you to infinity, I say at bedtime.

INFINITY NEVER ENDS! Suffian shrieks. INFINITY GOES ON AND ON AND ON! He jumps on the bed.

And so it goes, on and on and on.

Suffian still wants to know how we, his parents, met and now Sina does too. I deflect their questions and ask them instead what they think marriage means. Sina doesnt know but says he will marry me anyway. Suffian says: It means that you love someone and that when you love someone, it means youre going to live with them forever. He asks me if hes right; I tell him he is. He tells me he wants to live with me forever. I tell him Id love that but that I also completely understand if he ever changes his mind.

My friend Saima says: You should write about how you two met. You should write about how it happened. I laugh and tell her its really not that interesting. Besides, as parents of three small boys all we do is watch Netflix and eat dinner on the sofa once the kids are in bed. But people need to hear that you can break the rules and live happily ever after, she says, in earnest. Women, girls like your younger self, they need to know its not impossible.