I have always been drawn to the mysteries of roots. Like icebergs, most of their being exists below the visible surface. Knitting the ground beneath our feet. The ficus is a case in point.

Occupying the entire western half of our garden it is an ecosystem in its own right. The weather changes when you enter its dense cool shade, a canopy that shelters koels, mynahs, squirrels, bats and lime-green geckos.

I remember when my father planted the ficus, or more accurately, casually stuck the six-inch-long stem he had found in a pile of cuttings outside a posh Defence bungalow into the sandy soil near the slow leak of the water pipe running down the side of our building.

(Yes, this was so far back that there was actually a pipe with water running in it instead of barren air.)

Our family was the first to move into the newly built Seaview Apartments. It was 1981 or 82. Where the apartments ended the shoreline dissolved into sand dunes.

Sand and desert scrub colonised all the spaces between the empty buildings. There were no gardens, not even a blade of grass.

A young couple moved in next door to us on the ground floor but everything they planted wilted in the salt breeze and hostile earth.

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Before moving into Seaview we ourselves had been rootless for a while, the last several years had been spent in a succession of cities since my father had been pushed out of his job as Health Secretary for the Northern Areas, forced to retire from the army after Zia’s coup.

There was no room for the secular and incorruptible values he stood for in the general’s worldview. So abba found himself looking for work at the age of 60.

Who wants to hire a 60-year-old? After a stint of unsuccessful job-hunting, he finally found employment in Europe, running St Luke’s Hospital in Malta.

We rented a beautiful apartment with a stunning view of the turquoise blue Mediterranean but no garden.

Still, our little balcony groaned under the weight of dwarf avocado trees, Meyer lemon bushes and gardenias.

Politics reared its ugly head again with a newly-elected Maltese government refusing to renew contracts of foreigners. It was a precursor of the xenophobia sweeping Europe today.

So it was that returning home to Karachi that made my father eager to plant a garden. We were still struggling financially, so he would ask his friends for cuttings.

Close on the heels of the ficus came pink frangipani followed by bougainvillea, cacti, crotons, date palms and finally, for my mother, the many bushes of mogra — jasmine — whose blooms would grace her wrists and ears for years to come. But the ficus was the oldest inhabitant of the garden.

My father himself was not the first fruit of the family tree. That mantle was worn by his elder brother, who discarded it in a defiant gesture that would change the course of all their lives.

My grandfather was the principal of a school in Uttar Pradesh before Partition in a village called Mustafabad, or Musarfa in the local dialect. My father described life in the house as an extremely regimented routine.

Each aspect of the six siblings’ existence from the smallest to the largest details, everything from their time of play to their careers, had been mapped out in advance. My eldest uncle upset this neatly ordered apple cart by running away from home.

Medicine, the profession that had been in store for my uncle, was now thrust upon my father and he was forced to give up his dreams of coming a botanist.

I inherited my love of plants from my father. In the evenings we would take a stroll around the garden and talk. It was the time he was most relaxed and I could pepper him with questions about his past life in pre-Partition India.

History as an abstract subject taught in school felt distant but the firsthand experiences of a parent born in 1920 who had already lived a good many years as an adult in a country that was once home and now officially an enemy nation was fascinating.

The first-year medical student carefully folded his pants and placed them under his brick-hard cotton pillow at night so they would be pressed in the morning and he would look smart in the company of pretty Anglo-Indian nurses.

The Second World War was raging when my father graduated from Lucknow Medical College in 1942. The Quit India Movement had also begun and my younger uncles and aunt were getting involved with leftist progressive politics.

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Abba was more of a philosophical bent even though he was supportive of their ideals. As he would tell me later, he did not have the luxury of being a revolutionary — he had to support the family.

So while my aunts and uncles were agitating against colonial rule, he enlisted in the British Indian Army Officer Corps and shipped out to the Mediterranean.

Like many before him who saw the effects of conflict up close, the trauma of treating the war wounded would render him a changed man with periods of deep introspection where all he would do was paint or sculpt.

At Partition the family left their sprawling lands in the village and moved along with tens of thousand of emigres to a modest flat in Burns Road. My eldest uncle returned and began working for PIA.

He was active as a union leader and apparently rubbed some powerful people the wrong way, as he was mysteriously run over by a car as he was returning home from work one evening.

Abba found himself at the helm of the family once more. A decade passed. My father remained unmarried and garnered quite a reputation as a ladies’ man. Until he met a beauty that would stop him in his tracks.

That beauty was my mother who had just left an abusive first marriage behind in India. It was love at first sight for both of them but their families were staunchly opposed to the match.

On my father’s side no one had married outside of Shia Syed clans and moreover they were scandalised that not only was my mother the ‘wrong’ sect, she was a divorcee with two children from her previous marriage! Lucky for me both of them defied convention and tied the knot.

My favourite photo is the two of them at their valima gazing at each other, their eyes brimming with love and happiness.

Abba nurtured relationships the way a gardener would a seedling, with plenty of patience and attentive nourishment. He was comfortable enough in his masculinity to perform traditionally feminine roles in our house.

Some of my earliest memories are of him cutting and feeding us fruit, making unusual dishes from his rural childhood such as watermelon rind curry, or dishes he had learned in Sicily such as caponata.

Another hybrid creation was a desi-Mexican omelette recipe he created while living in San Antonio, Texas in 1955, where he was sent by the Pakistani government to do research in the field of aerospace medicine as NASA was located there.

On Sundays me and my brother were recruited in the task of whipping egg whites until they were stiff. In the days before ubiquitous food processors this was a task that required a fair bit of energy.

Our young wrists were sore by the time we had achieved perfect fluffy whites, but the end result was worth all the effort. A golden crust of caramelised onions, a sumptuous centre of chopped spinach and green chilies all the while so light it would melt in your mouth. I have tasted nothing quite like it before or since.

If human beings are plants, our memories are our roots, the things that ground us, give us a sense of continuity, make us feel secure. When we are rooted we are not easily dislodged by each new tempest, each passing wind in the weather known as current affairs.

My father died relatively young at the age of 74. Most of his contemporaries have also left this earth.

It saddens me immensely to think that a generation who was aware of a reality other than a manufactured national myth on both sides of the border is largely no more.

In 2016, after my mother passed way, we sold the flat and I went walking in the garden abba planted for the very last time.

I was told that the buyer was going to plant a new garden. I left hoping against hope that he would leave the ficus untouched.