I Am My Dad’s Son

I am my Dad’s son.

He might have referred to me as Imran when speaking with others, but when he spoke to me, I was always “beta” — his word for son, and his word for me. Beta translates literally to ‘son’ in Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati and several other South Asian languages. It’s also used as a term of endearment for any younger person.

“Hi beta,” he would say when I called. “How are you? How’s business?” That was all he needed to know.

When I was very young, I said I wanted to be a garbageman or a zookeeper. He insisted I should become a doctor or a lawyer. I think he was drawn to these careers because he wanted me to become a professional: someone who behaves in a reliable, respectful and disciplined way, and whose work makes a positive contribution to the world.

My Dad didn’t know much about the fashion business, but he did shape my love for clothes. As an architect and the son of a seamstress, he paid attention to the quality of the fabric and the construction. Before buying a piece of clothing, he would study the material. He loved the look and feel of a crisp cotton shirt, beautifully pressed. He loved the colour yellow. He believed things should be made well and built to last. Those lessons had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with standards.

He also cultivated my interest in music. We would listen to Jagjit and Chitra, Abida Parveen and Ravi Shankar on long road trips from Calgary to Vancouver. He had a beautiful singing voice and taught himself to play the harmonium and tabla. I inherited my voice from him. When my teachers said I showed potential in voice, music and theatre, he made sure I got professional training, experience which has made me a confident convener, interviewer and communicator — skills I use every day at BoF on the podcast and on stage.

My Dad was a gifted and natural athlete. At university, he was a star cricket player, so when I was born — a few months after my parents arrived in Canada — they named me Imran, after the star Pakistani cricketer (and later prime minister) Imran Khan. In the years that followed, he taught himself (and me) to skate, curl and ski. Every so often, I’ll receive an email or dinner invitation addressed to “Imran Khan.” This used to upset me. “They should at least get my name right,” I’d think. But maybe that was just another reminder that I was making my Dad proud, in my own way.

Around the time of the first Gulf War, as hostility towards Muslims rose around the world, he quietly took the ‘h’ out of Ahmed for me and my sister. Amed, he thought, would be one less barrier for us to face. It was a small but significant change. It says everything about how he saw his job as a father: to clear the path ahead of obstacles I would face, but couldn’t yet see.

In February 2017, we went together with my mum and my sister to Buckingham Palace to receive my MBE for “services to the fashion industry.” As a father and son whose personal histories were inextricably linked to the former British empire — from India to Kenya to Canada to the UK — the irony was not lost on either of us. But this was a meaningful recognition, and something that neither he nor I could have planned for — and it was his honour too.

In recent years, as his health declined, we grew closer, even though I was far away. He was a man of his generation, taught to be strong and to keep his feelings to himself. But the tenderness had always been there, in the way he called me beta. In those final years, he let that guard down bit by bit. He made a point of telling me he was proud. I had become a professional, just not the way he expected. The path I took was different from the one he imagined, but everything I have built was rooted in what he taught me.

I am my Dad’s son. I always will be.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​