The Story

Shabana. Persian. Lady of the night. Night moth.

Lyla. Arabic. Beauty of the night.

My middle son named her. He was seven. He just liked how it sounded. I went with it because something already knew, before I did, that it was right.

I found out later what it meant. Then I found out what my own name meant.

The night named the night. A seven-year-old boy did that without knowing it.

This is Lyla's Blend®. Make of that what you will.

Bradford

Bradford. The 1980s.

Back-to-back houses on a street that was the whole world. Pakistani families. Jamaican families. Irish families. One quiet French man nobody really knew; he kept himself to himself and we let him. My Jamaican uncle fixed the telly. My Irish aunt was just aunt. The smell of cumin and coal and wet Bradford stone. Charcoal pits in the yard making tandoori roti. Everyone's aatta, raw flour, the weight of it, going to one mum who made bread for the whole street because that was what you did and it had no other name.

My mum was that mum.

She read and wrote English, the only one on the street who could. So she did everyone's letters, everyone's forms, everyone's everything, and called it being a good neighbor. No biggy. Three jobs. She carried everything. Battle axe and bottomless generosity, sometimes in the same sentence. She had a spark that circumstance quietly asked her to bury.

It surfaces in me sometimes.

I recognize it immediately.

She burned sandalwood at the khatms, the prayer gatherings, the women of the street sitting together counting beads, the room filling with something we had no clinical name for. I now understand, as a GP and a TCM practitioner, exactly what that room was doing to every nervous system in it. We just knew the food was coming after.

The food was always magnificent.

I was the one who carried the incense around the house before the guests arrived. My job. Also my joy. The physical act of marking a threshold: this moment is different from the one before it. I still do it. So does Lyla, without being told. She just knows.

My Father

My father worked nights.

He worked at a restaurant. The sweet shop was next door. Every Friday evening, one hour, that was him. Pressed suit. Silk scarves. Smelling of something I couldn't name, and Benson and Hedges, and an elegance that had nothing to do with money. He called his four daughters his flowers. I was Chamelli. Jasmine.

I ate so many sweets in that one hour I got cavities.

One hour. Every Friday.

Then he was gone again, nights at the restaurant, different rhythms, the kind of father you visited rather than lived with. I didn't have language for that then. I had the smell of him. Warm and floral on the silk. Tobacco underneath. The combination of a man who was entirely himself on a Friday night before the week asked something else of him.

Unemployment came quietly. The silk scarves were folded away. The smell went with them.

He came to live with me at the end. My insistence. He died with me. Those were the happiest years of my life. Unparalleled wit. Unparalleled charm.

When I made Lyla's Blend® and opened the neroli bottle, I stood very still in my kitchen for a long moment.

There he was.

The Shop

There was a shop.

Near the supermarket we went to on Saturdays. I always went for art materials first, always, because I was always painting, always making something, always trying to get the thing in my head onto something I could hold. Art was not a hobby. It was where joy lived. Not the soothing kind; something more electric. The feeling of being most present and most yourself at exactly the same moment. I have felt it twice in my life: in front of a canvas, and making Lyla's Blend®.

The shop had dream catchers in the window. Dark purple velvet. Hemp. Tie-dye. The door slightly open.

The smell came through before I reached it.

Sweet and earthy and deep and ancient and completely itself. Not punchy. Not sharp. The kind of smell that reaches something in you older than recognition, that you feel before your mind has named it. It pulled me in. I stood inside and didn't want to leave. Went back. Kept going back. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen: the years after everything changed in my body and before GCSEs, the years when you are becoming something and haven't yet been told what.

And then one day it was gone. No warning. No goodbye. No chance to finally ask.

Thirty years passed before I knew its name.

I opened a bottle of myrrh in my kitchen in 2020 and understood immediately.

That was it. That was always it.

Ama Glama

I was fifteen years old when I first made a skincare brand.

GCSE Art. 1996. Bradford, and nothing on any shelf that felt like mine. The Body Shop. Clinique. Nothing in Kirkgate Market I could identify with. Nothing that was green and glamorous and honest and mine.

So I made it.

A full catalogue. Natural skincare, haircare, body care. Green and gold. I called it Ama Glama, Amazonian, because in 1996, at fifteen, the Amazon was the only landscape big enough to hold what I was trying to say.

I got an A.

And then life asked something different. Not because medicine made obvious sense; it didn't, not at first, not easily. I spent years deciding I was worthy of it. Years convincing myself that a Pakistani girl from a Bradford back-to-back, who had spent her best hours painting and chanting and getting lost in dark shops, had the right to stand in a lecture theatre and call herself a doctor. Nobody told me I didn't have that right. Nobody had to. I was already doing it for them.

Medicine is art and science. I know that now. Feel it in every consultation. But arriving there required first deciding I deserved to try.

Chemistry nearly killed me. Biology enthralled me. The bills needed paying.

The catalogue went into a drawer.

Thirty years passed.

Partition

The curly hair came from somewhere nobody could name.

Too thick, too coiled for a Pakistani woman: we think Arabic ancestry on my mum's side, a lineage that moved through Delhi and Partition and Pakistan and Bradford, expressing itself on my head with complete indifference to expectation.

My mum's father came through Partition. His best friend was Sikh. When the killing came, his Sikh friend put his own turban on his head and walked him through it.

My grandfather survived because of that.

Moss Side

The Afro-Caribbean shops in Moss Side were the only places that understood my hair.

You know the ones. Wigs outside in colors that stopped traffic. Extensions floor to ceiling, stacked so high you needed a step to reach the good stuff. The warm specific smell of shea and coconut, something that belongs entirely to those shops, that I can still find in my body if I close my eyes. I started going during my MPhil years, Manchester, 2001 to 2004. Scholarship that didn't stretch. Co-op job selling mortgages and ISAs between lectures. Helping my mum with some loans. Swimming at Moss Side leisure center, wet hair on the way home, stopping at the shops and staying far longer than I meant to.

Shea wasn't from my tradition. It belonged to the Ghanaian women, the Nigerian women, the Afro-Caribbean women who used it the way my mum used almond oil, without ceremony, with the quiet authority of inherited knowledge. Different soils. Both right.

I was probably the only Pakistani woman in those shops. I took a quiet pride in that. This was before Etsy. Before YouTube. Before everyone discovered whipped shea butter and called it a revelation.

I bought it for my hair. Took it home. And then, deliberately, knowing exactly what I was doing, put it on my skin.

It was delicious.

Lockdown

2020. Lockdown. My kitchen.

My ex-husband thought I was crazy. A four-day-a-week GP salary. For cream.

I made a whipped butter anyway, every oil chosen the way I choose a prescription: for a reason, with evidence, with thirty years of reading and carrying and understanding behind it. Shea and jojoba and castor and avocado and almond and frankincense and neroli and sandalwood and myrrh. Every one carrying something. Every one chosen.

For myself first. Then the kids. And then the family tried it… and then the friends… and then the colleagues… and then they kept coming back.

They kept coming back.

I called it Lyla's Blend®. After the girl I always wanted, who came without being asked for, a surprise after three boys, named by her seven-year-old brother who just liked the sound of it. He didn't know her name meant night. He didn't know mine did too.

Ama Glama. 1996. Green and gold. An A in a drawer for thirty years.

This girl has gone back to that shop to do some
unfinished business in that myrrh filled room.

LYLA'S BLEND® · MEDICINE, APPLIED TO THE SKIN.