Searching for my lost father

In 1972, Jenny Potts had a baby by her boyfriend who had just arrived from Pakistan. After the birth he left and she never heard from him again. Now 38, her son Joseph is on a mission to track down his missing father

Sarfraz Manzoor
Saturday 1 May 2010

The first time Jenny Potts met Mohammed Rafiq was in the spring of 1971, when she was a 26-year-old art teacher and he was the manager of the Elite, a cinema on Soho Road in Birmingham that screened Indian films for the city's Asian community. Jenny was not Asian – she was a delicate-featured white woman who was at the Elite after accepting a date with an Iranian man from her evening dance class. The man had offered to take Jenny to the cinema to introduce her to some of his friends, and that was how she met the man who was to change her life.

"I wasn't very keen on the Iranian man," she recalls "but there was just something about Ahmed [the name that Rafiq used] that meant we had an instant rapport." Ahmed was newly arrived from Pakistan, a sharp dresser who worked out at the gym – and Jenny thought he was devastatingly attractive. "It was basically physical," says Jenny, who is now 66 and still lives in Birmingham. "I thought he was very nice-looking, and so when he rang to ask me on a date a few days later I said yes."

Birmingham in the early 1970s was not the multicultural city it is today, and the sight of a white woman and an Asian man walking together attracted attention. On their first date Ahmed took Jenny to the Market Hotel, and as they left the bar Ahmed grabbed Jenny's hand and they walked out on to the street holding hands. "I remember feeling that there was something unusual about us as a couple," says Jenny, "because it was rare to see mixed-race couples back then."

Ahmed and Jenny began seeing each other regularly. He talked about his parents who were still in Pakistan, and she would visit the house he rented and eat with him. "It was the first time I had ever eaten curry," she says. For three months the relationship blossomed and Jenny was happier than she had ever been. "I had been raised in a very respectable middle-class family," she says, "and during my teens I had been a loner, so meeting Ahmed was like entering a dream world. This was a new world to me."

Her parents did not voice any objections to her dating an Asian man and when they went out, far from experiencing hostility, Ahmed found himself the subject of unsolicited attention from women impressed by his dapper dress. Then Jenny became pregnant.

The news was unexpected and, for Ahmed, unwelcome. "I wanted to settle down, marry and have a domestic life," says Jenny, "but Ahmed was scared – he feared his father would kill him if he ever found out what his son had done."

Brought up in a traditional Muslim family, Ahmed was confused and torn between his faith, his feelings and his fear. "He was in over his head," says Jenny, sadly. Her parents also took the pregnancy badly. "My dad was upset that the pregnancy was outside marriage and that it was with a non-white man, and my mother would have been happier if I had had an abortion."

Ahmed and Jenny continued to see each other for the first seven months of the pregnancy but then he stopped calling and Jenny had to deal with the reality that he was not committed.

In February 1972, two months after last seeing Ahmed, Jenny gave birth to their baby, a boy she named Joseph. Afterwards, when Jenny was living at her parents' home, the absence of Ahmed began to weigh on her mind. On her bedroom wall, she had hung a Pakistani film poster he had given her. One night, when little Joseph was two months old and sleeping in his cot, she picked up a pen and wrote Ahmed a letter. "I pleaded with Ahmed to come back. I told him I needed him in my life." As she speaks, I notice Jenny's clasped hands trembling.

Some days later Ahmed rang Jenny and arranged to visit. He walked into the bedroom and saw Joseph in his cot. Ahmed picked up his son and looked tenderly into his eyes. Jenny began to believe that perhaps he had changed his mind and was intending to come back to her. A few days later he rang and they talked about plans for the future. They chatted for an hour and Jenny tried to persuade Ahmed that they should look for flats and move in together. But it was the last time Jenny would hear Ahmed's voice. "I called his home some time later and the solicitor he shared the house with told me that Ahmed had moved back to Pakistan. When I pleaded with him to give me Ahmed's address in Pakistan he refused."

So Jenny was left to raise her son alone and Joseph grew up without a father and unable to explore his Pakistani heritage. "We were living in a very white area," says Jenny. "I didn't have any Asian friends and I felt really helpless because there was a massive gap in Joseph's upbringing that I couldn't fill on my own."

Listening to her talk, sitting beside her on the sofa in his city-centre flat, is Joseph. "I knew from the time I was seven or so that my father came from Pakistan but that meant nothing at that age," he says. "I did get called 'Paki' a few times and I remember using a powder puff on my skin a few times when I was in my teens because I felt life would be easier to be pink than to be mixed."

Mostly, though, Joseph wasn't treated any differently and he spent his 20s developing and exploring his own identity – growing his hair, playing guitar and reading existential novels.

Ahmed seemed to belong to another world and age and Joseph believed that he had left his long-lost father behind. It is only in the past few years, as friends have got married and had children, that the primal desire to understand where he came from and who his father is has returned. "I grew up without a male figure in the immediate background to guide, challenge and rebel against," Joseph explains. "His absence has been his metaphysical mystery challenge. His enigma. I am having to become a father to myself, but why does he want to hide?"

In an effort to trace his father, Joseph went to Lahore in Pakistan, where he met men who claimed they had heard of a Mohammed Rafiq who once managed the Elite cinema in 1970s Birmingham. "They said he was living in London and had a son who had married someone in the Pakistani film industry," says Joseph. "So I wrote to every Rafiq in London, all 270 of them, but without success."

Joseph wants to meet his father to ask him to acknowledge his actions from 38 years ago, to show him the impact his absence has had and to demand that he face the reality that he has a son. "I would like to tell him that I missed out on him passing his culture on to me," he says. "And I would like to know why he hadn't the courage to stay and support my mother."

Jenny also has questions. "There are questions I have asked myself for 38 years, questions that only he can answer," she says. "Was I deluding myself about this man? I want to know what he really thought about me, what his real feelings were and why he never got in touch with me."

Jenny and Joseph don't know if they will ever hear from Rafiq, where he lives or even whether he is alive. But Joseph does know that there is a father-shaped hole in his life that he longs for Rafiq to fill. And Jenny knows that, even after all these years, Mohammed Rafiq is the only man she has ever truly loved.

If you have any information that could help Jenny and Joseph Potts, please email Sarfraz Manzoor at sarfraz.manzoor@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/01/single-parent-absent-father-sarfraz