Tawseef Khan is a qualified immigration solicitor and holds a doctoral degree from the University of Liverpool, where he examined the fairness of the British asylum system. He is also a graduate of the creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia, where he received the Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary. His fiction has appeared in Lighthouse and Test Signal: a Northern anthology; his non-fiction in the New York Times, The Face and Hyphen. His debut non-fiction book Muslim, Actually was published by Atlantic in 2021 and his novel Determination was published in 2024. He lives in Manchester.
Find Tawseef on BlueSky (tawseefkhan), Instagram and Twitter (@itsmetawseef).
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EPISODE REFERENCES
Sheila Heti; Jane Austen, Persuasion.
Tawseef’s recommendations: Mark O’Connell, A Thread of Violence; Garth Greenwell, Small Rain.
TRANSCRIPT
[Full transcript to come soon; see a version of this on the Zencastr site].
In the detention centre, it wasn't freedom of movement that Nazish had missed, but air - breezes, sunlight flickering along her skin, the powdery scent of violets in the park. When the enforcement officers grabbed her, she felt like she had stopped breathing. When they drove her to London, she held her breath the entire way. Some of the other women in the van wailed to themselves, some were trapped in an intoxicated stupor, some bartered with their gods. Nazish closed her eyes and waited for it to end. People entered the continent like this, hiding in lorries, squeezing themselves behind wheels. She had considered herself better, superior, for arriving through legal channels. But once captured, she understood that she was the same.
The detention centre had a dining room, day room, gym, library and laundry. The bedrooms were freshly painted, brightly lit, decorated with cheerful curtains and beech furniture. An idea of airiness, but ultimately synthetic. Nazish still didn't breathe, not for the three weeks that she was inside, sharing a room with a Congolese woman who had threatened to knife her by day and who had screamed for her mother at night. The indignities of that time would not leave Nazish for as long as she lived. She had plugged her period blood with tissue paper. Eaten potatoes and chicken nuggets and other processed stodge that left her unable to use the bathroom. Shivered in the cold with nothing to shield her but her grandmother's shawl and the clothes on her back. And not until she sat on the train that returned her to Manchester back in August, not until she made an appointment to see Shah & Co Solicitors, had she dared to hold air in her lungs again.