Portraits of Pakistan

By his own admission, Isambard Wilkinson’s memoir of his experiences in Pakistan a decade ago as a foreign correspondent has taken ‘criminally’ long to write. A litany of thanks to assorted individuals in his acknowledgements is testimony to the book’s painful gestation. Perhaps the most surprising is to his brother, Chev, ‘who is missing a vital organ on my account’. Reading Wilkinson’s narrative, which is both humorous and poig-nant, the reason is clear. From an early age he suffered kidney failure requiring a kidney transplant; but dire predictions of the disease, which might leave him bound for life to a dialysis machine, did not prevent him from being ‘internationally curious’.

That his destination became Pakistan had its origins in his youth. In the wake of Partition and Independence in the subcontinent in 1947, his grandmother, whose family had lived in India since the 19th century, had returned to her home in Ireland.