If you’re not careful the past will follow you around like a rumour. For you, a third-generation child of an immigrant’s son, it’ll sound like a tired reminder: oh, look how far we’ve come. Boats from Pondicherry, Colombo Port, Kolkata, Chittagong, carried refrains from elsewhere: stories of casting outward, some expelled or fleeing, landing on homes in Harrow, Hounslow, Newham, Southall, or Brent. You’ll shake your head, say to me: I’ve heard this one before.

In this city, yours is never the only story. Narratives of migration, settlement, assimilation, separation are shared across all communities. The urban mulch of South Asian, East Asian, Caribbean, African, Arab and Jewish families amass alongside one another; consequently, our myths come brimming. It’s like in that play where the rabbi delivers a eulogy for a Jewish grandmother and says she was not just a person but a whole kind of person. The ones who crossed seas heaped with entire villages on their backs, a journey the young find difficult to imagine. I agree with the rabbi. For you, grand voyages no longer exist. For my parents, your grandparents, having left so much of themselves behind, travelling to the Mother Country must have felt like oblivion.

It’ll be a while before you realise your grandparents are two of the most fascinating people you’ll ever likely meet. Your grandad rode nationalised rail when he first arrived. He stood amazed at the NHS back when it was properly funded, and the floors were still new. He used to smoke cigars, and his shoulders still shake when he laughs. Your grandmother, having arrived much later, can’t tell you about the Grunwick strikes, or the Bradford 12, or the Bhuttos. She can tell you about Ravi Shankar live in London, after the Concert for Bangladesh. She can tell you about raising two boys while working shifts at a supermarket in Willesden Green. She can tell you about making do with what little she had, and how so much of her life seems a miracle.

Do you remember when the Queen died, and everyone went on about the history she witnessed simply by living? My mum’s stories are like that except from the other side.

Of course, you’ll never ask her. Neither did I at your age. I was all limbs and acne at seventeen, all Church of England schooling, stripey ties and busy sexuality. The point of life was to bunn parental opinion. I also had a sense that another form of inheritance could be gotten elsewhere. In books, cinema, music – Woolf, Beckett, the Wu-Tang Clan, Bresson and Scorsese. Anything my parents offered seemed overcast with conservatism. Perhaps all that tradition and religion felt worth holding on to for them. For me, it only meant everything needed to be fought over, defied, and then dramatically renounced. I kept pushing away, and my parents feared I’d forget them. Why you have to be so different to other boys? It forced a distance that threatened to become irreparable.

I am astonished to find that I’ve weathered parenthood okay so far. You haven’t been easy. It’s just that you haven’t been as aggravating as I imagine I must have been. Much is due to the fact that we’ve spent our childhoods in the same city. I can recognise myself in how you navigate the place. How you code-switch the same way. Mad how it just come out with the mandem, alie? All those invented words inflected with heritages that are not your own. It sounds beautiful to me. It reminds me that a cacophony to some is harmony to others. Even the names of your friends are stuffed with syllables. We can both grieve the murals under Kilburn Bridge. When I mention Grenfell, you know what to say, and why it matters.