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My father’s best friend was a Muslim. It feels pretty darn weird to write that. And it feels like a betrayal of some kind to describe Masood Uncle as a Muslim; to see him through the prism of his religion; to reduce him to his religious identity. Especially since I never really saw him as ‘Muslim’. He was just ‘Masood Uncle’, the tall, shambolic man who grew up with my father in Lahore in Pre-Partition India, and whose visits I longed for when I was a kid.