My grandmother's voice

Or why I am very grateful to Woman's Hour.

My grandmother Sabiha Husain

There’s a story that periodically does the rounds online, rewritten on content-churn sites and feel-good Instagram accounts. It’s about Margaret McCollum, an elderly doctor living in London. Her husband Oswald Laurence was an actor, and back in the early 1950s recorded an iconic voice-over announcement familiar to anyone who uses the London Underground: “Mind the gap”. Reminding passengers to avoid the gap between the train and the platform, Laurence’s message played at every northbound Northern Line station for years. It was gradually phased out, and at the time of his death in 2007, it was only playing at Embankment station in central London. McCollum went regularly to the station to hear her husband’s voice, until one day in November 2012, she found that the recording had been replaced. McCollum was devastated, and contacted Transport for London, who provided her with a CD of the recording and, moved by her story, worked to reinstate the recording at Embankment. "Since he died I would sit and wait for the next train until I heard his voice. On 1 November he wasn't there. I was just stunned when Oswald wasn't there anymore,” she told the BBC in 2013, when they covered the reinstatement of the recording.

Over a decade later, this story is still regularly repackaged, with headlines like “This story will MAKE YOUR DAY” and “This is what true love looks like”. On the surface, the situation is unusual - the iconic nature of the recording, the specific location - but I think part of the reason it’s so enduringly popular is how relatable it is. How many of us long to hear a loved one’s voice one more time? Most of us, I’d guess.

I am telling you about this because I actually have my own version of it: an interview that my grandmother gave to BBC Woman’s Hour in 2017, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India. (If you’re interested, the episode is here, and she appears about 30 minutes in). My grandmother, Sabiha Husain, was born in Indore, in India, and moved to Karachi, then the capital of the new state of Pakistan, as a bride around the time of Partition. She and my grandfather were married the day after Gandhi was assassinated, and their wedding celebrations had to be drastically toned down as a mark of respect. Soon after marriage, she rebelled against her in-laws to go to the refugee camps surrounding Karachi to help provide aid to the thousands of displaced people converging on the city. I’d heard snippets of these stories, but it was always hard to draw out details from her. I’m a journalist, and my mother is a writer, and a few times, we talked about trying to write down some of my grandmother’s memories, or record her talking about them. I actually attempted to do this a few times, but whenever I got the dictaphone out, she would clam up, start answering in monosyllables and evading my questions. So I gave up.

Then in 2017, she ended up agreeing to do an interview with Woman’s Hour, as part of the BBC’s coverage of the 70th anniversary of Partition. When I listened to it for the first time, it stopped me in my tracks. The interview contained those few familiar details - the toned down marriage celebrations, the voluntary work - but there was so much I’d never heard her talk about. She described the panic steadily creeping up as news of killings and displacement spread to Indore. She talked about hearing the news that a train carrying Muslims had been stopped and everyone killed. Interviewer Kirsty Starkey asks how she felt hearing that. “Deep, deep sadness,” my grandmother says. “You just think that everything is going to be for the best, but the killings and the ugliness of the whole thing was very disturbing.” She goes on to talk about her brother being in Delhi when violence really set in there. “He was staying in the Imperial hotel, and he had Hindu friend, and he found out that the people would mark the room, and they said, ‘Tonight, these are the rooms that we are going to attack.’ And one of the rooms was my brother's room. And this friend came to my brother and he said, ‘Just get out. Leave everything.’ My brother was unaware of anything that was going wrong. He came wearing the one set of clothes that he was wearing and nothing else with him.”

Although we were very close I’d never heard her talk about Partition in those terms - the fear, the anxiety, the violence. Listening to it for the first time in 2017, I thought about some of the people I’ve interviewed over the years, and how sometimes perhaps it’s easier to open up to a stranger than to the people closest to you. My grandmother died in 2020, a few months into the Covid lockdown. (I wrote about her death, and our relationship, in a New Statesman piece a year later). Although I’d seen her every couple of weeks for my entire life - bar a few periods living outside of London - I didn’t see her in the days leading up to her death, because of the lockdown. After she died, I played the Woman’s Hour recording a lot, listening to that incredibly familiar voice telling extraordinary stories.

It was Pakistani Independence Day yesterday (Indian Independence Day is on the 15th), and it’s now been 77 years since Partition. That made me think of this recording for the first time in a while, so I looked it up and played it again. Unexpectedly, it made me laugh, because she’s introduced as being “in her 90s” rather than with a specific age, which I know will be because she was being coy about exactly how old she was, which, by the time you’re admitting to being in your 90s seems a bit futile. Then the amusement gave way to a flood of emotion. It’s uncanny to hear the voice of someone who has died, just chatting away as if they were still here. Uncanny, but wonderful, and I am very grateful that it has been preserved.

Reading/listening

• This Guardian Long Read essay by Israeli historian Omer Bartov, looking at shifts in Israeli public opinion since 7 October, is fascinating, and I found it genuinely illuminating.

• Truly insane reporting in this profile of Ecuador’s new president and his war on narcos, in the New Yorker.

• I was gripped by this Vulture story about the warring narratives of four writers enmeshed in a messy romantic situation, involving an affair and a divorce. Gossipy in the best way.

My recent work

• I wrote a comment piece for the Guardian about public inquiries, and whether government uses them to avoid accountability rather than take it.

• My first feature in the Sunday Times magazine! It’s about the rise in tongue tie surgery on babies, and whether this is being hastened by the pressure on women to breastfeed.

• The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast did an episode based on my recent reporting on heat death in Europe. (You can read the written piece here, and my Substack post about reporting it here).

Thank you for reading! As always, please share this with anyone who might be interested - forward the email, post it on social media, all of it helps. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.