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. But, as with many families who have spent a lifetime in South Asia, the relationship continued; not only did her house contain ornaments and memorabilia of her previous life, but her friend, an affluent Begum of Lahore, came regularly to stay in Ireland while his grandmother returned as regularly to Pakistan. As a young boy Wilkinson became enthralled with the exotic images these reunions evoked, finding himself ‘experiencing nostalgia for a place I’d never known’. A turning-point came in the 1990s when, aged 18, his grandmother asked him to accompany her to the wedding of the Begum’s youngest son in Lahore.
A decade later, now working as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Wilkinson returned to Pakistan, putting his ambition to be a frontline journalist into operative gear despite his less than robust health. As he rightly realised, in the 2000s ‘Pakistan was News’.
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