I am homesick, I wrote to a friend in Kashmir who hasn’t left his native town in about a year, and is now possessed by wanderlust.

But London is home for you, he replied.

My birthplace, where I grew up, is always home for me too, I responded. Home has many meanings. For me it is the landscape that formed me. Desert, seas, long days, sun, subtropical temperatures ...13 years of that. And so many returns.

As the December days grew shorter and darkness fell before 4pm, and the doctor told me I needed strong vitamin D supplements for lack of sunshine, I missed Karachi more and more. In London, I feel at home only in my flat, or within a one- or two-mile radius from where I live. Beyond that, I am on alien ground.

I thought of a time I was in Karachi in December 2021, and the words of a poem by Kishwar Naheed, with whom I would have long conversations over hot drinks on that visit (we were both attending the annual Urdu conference), on a patio overlooking a garden of palms and the sea, came back to me:

Mujhay lambay hotay huey saayon ki chhaon nahin chahiye
Mujhay tau nikaltay sooraj ki shu’aon ki himayat haasil hai
Sooraj apni tawanaai meray mulk mein arzaan karta hai
Sooraj aur main
Sooraj aur tum
Saath saath nahin chal saktay
Sooraj to mera hamsafar hai

And the title of the poem, ‘Sard Mumalik Ke Aaqaon Ke Naam’, has a particular resonance for me, as the protesters against the assault on Gaza throng the streets of London in this long season of discontent with its rising prices and chaotic public transport and its disenchantment with the ruler of their world.

But let me continue on a lighter note. Just after Christmas, housebound audiences looked forward to the customary Agatha Christie adaptation — of Murder is Easy this time. However, there were major differences this year: no Poirot, no Marple, no Tommy and Tuppence.

Their investigative role is taken over by an upper class, anglicised Nigerian, Luke Fitzwilliam, who has arrived in Britain to take up a position as the ADC to a colonial officer. Instead of reporting for his job, he is caught up in the intrigue surrounding one murder he witnesses, followed by several others.

The shenanigans that ensue are typical of any minor Christie mystery, but there have been rumblings in the popular press about the reframing of the plot to include colonial matters; many of them seem to focus on the black scriptwriter Sian Ejunwinmi-Le Berre, lead player David Jonsson, Indian-born director Meenu Gaur, and Pakistani actress Nimra Bucha, who plays a small but important role in the proceedings.

Why, some of the reviewers asked, didn’t the architects of the miniseries write a new screenplay instead of meddling with Christie? Obviously, it was the postcolonial reading, which the scriptwriter found implicit in Christie’s novels, that disturbed critics: let us descendants of migrants go away and make our own marginal films, of which there are now many, instead of meddling with the canon of the cosy Golden Age mystery.

Evidently more people are going to watch a Christie adaptation than a film that comes from the ‘other side’ with its own agenda. I didn’t see Murder is Easy as an attempt to grapple with weighty issues; rather, it shows us the underside of a time that ignored and bypassed its imperial trajectory, and would rather not engage with the racial politics of a previous age.

We have now become used to films with ‘colour blind’ casting: an actor of Indian origin plays David Copperfield, an elite family of Africans appear in a Jane Austen adaptation with no explanation of how they gained their place in haute bourgeoisie society. It was Persuasion, I think.

We watch various romcoms where we are expected to believe that isolated English villages are inhabited by happy clappy ‘people of colour’. I have never seen such places. No mention is made of their origins in the erstwhile domains of the benighted British Empire.

In this case, however, the scriptwriter, in what I’d call a tribute to Christie’s intelligence, mined a story of this author’s that dealt with gender and class, to include empire and racism. She does it well. Jonsson has said he did not accept colour-blind roles.

In a haunting cameo appearance, Nimra Bucha, cast as an exemplary village vicar’s wife, tells the hero that she met her husband in India: her eyes show a longing for a lost home, and her body language a sense of displacement, that isn’t in any of her dialogues. This is rendered even more poignant in the script, when her mixed race daughter finds that her suitor, the village doctor, believes in eugenics and racial superiority.

I didn’t see this adaptation as an attempt to make big statements about race and colonialism. I saw it as a way to include ‘us’, with our different legacies, and spice up light entertainment in the way that Pakistani chaikhanas have transformed the paratha with fillings of cheddar cheese, and the pizza with Bihari boti, or British confectioners sell chili chocolate. Frankly, such adaptations work better than culinary hybridity.

I will return to the title of Naheed’s poem: our hero, soon after he arrives in England, is confronted by a cousin about why he would give up the struggle for decolonisation in Nigeria to become a part of the British establishment, at that time among arguably foremost among the Masters of Countries with a Cold Climate.

He has no answer. But in the final scene — which seems to me like a subversion of Fielding’s return to England in A Passage to India — we see him rejecting the possibility of an assimilated future in the imperial graveyard, to opt for the struggle for freedom and autonomy in the land of his birth.

The columnist is a London-based short story writer and novelist

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, January 7th, 2024