The fire came from our father and went through all of us. We are all reformers in a way. My big sister who was the first headmistress in Rawalpindi region in Pakistan, she must have given at least 30,000 educated women to the region. When my second sister was married, she left her job because her husband said, “You are not working.” But my father brought her back! He said, “No! She will work! These are educated women and we need them! They have to work for the nation!” So she came back and she ran another women's school and she must have given about 50,000 educated women to the nation.

The fire within me came from my father. My father was a pioneer of women's education in our region in Pakistan. He was a health supervisor in the district health office. He thought, let's change our women. Let's give her back her brain to think, to work, and to change the destiny of the nation. That's why he sent his daughters away from his house to be educated, and he said, “I am very confident that you will use your education for the betterment of your own family and your own people.” There was no provision for learning English when I was a child. My father used to get hold of ex-army men – veterans from World War I and II and they learnt English using their Urdu script, so they would write the English words in Urdu. They learnt the English alphabet but they didn't go further, so they couldn't write a lot and they couldn't speak a lot. They taught me and my big sister many wrong pronunciations.

It was a huge change for me to go from a little town to a university town. I stayed in a women's hostel.