‘The phone call that brought me freedom – but broke my mother’s heart’

A graduate, Runi had been head teacher at a kindergarten outside Dhaka, but she started off doing menial jobs in London, as that was all that was available to her then. In time she became a teacher and later trained as a psychologist. She brought up three children, and it was hard. When you raise children in your own society, she says, talking of Bangladesh, “you have a kind of scaffold around you: your family, your friends, your society.” Here, she and her husband were on their own. She worried that if her children went astray, it would be their fault. And then there was the racism they regularly encountered.