Needle to elephant

My father was born in 1935 in Jalandhar, India. While he was still a child at school, he sold samosas from a wooden cart. It was the first of many businesses.

In 1961 he came to the UK, first to Rochdale and then to Oldham.

From the late 1960s to the late 1980s he lived between Oldham and Ireland, running market stalls in Galway, Sligo, Limerick, Dublin and Belfast. In the early 1980s he started on markets in England too.

He began in fashion, but he never liked it. Styles changed, and he was left with dead stock and sizes nobody wanted, which ate the profit. So he moved into discount goods and sold everything except clothes and food. "Needle to elephant," he used to say. Until 1988 he also had a big furniture shop on Liverpool Road in Stoke, selling all sorts of furniture, beds included.

In the early 1990s we lived in a rented house in Crumpsall, Manchester. My parents worked the markets almost every day: Fleetwood, Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, wherever the best market was that day. They were up in the early hours to get the best pitch and set out their stock.

In 1995 he opened his first shop at 2–4 Swan Bank in Burslem. At first my parents drove down every day from our home in Longsight, and around 1997 the family moved to Stoke. He later opened a second shop on the High Street in Hanley, near the Regent Theatre.

The shops were called T&A Wholesale Cash and Carry, after Tasnim and Ahmed, and my parents used to joke that I was the "&" in the middle. The sign over the window said it all: toys, fancy goods, electrical goods, household goods, car audio. His slogan was "Forget the rest, we're the best!" If you lived in Stoke between 1995 and 2011, you probably met him.

He could sell you anything without ever pushing, and you would still want to buy from him. He gave away the secrets of his trade to anyone who asked. He believed Allah had already written his rizq, so nobody could take away what was meant for him, and there was enough for everyone to earn and be happy.

Some evenings he closed the shop at 6pm and drove homeless and unemployed people to different businesses to help them find work. I was usually asleep by the time he got home. The next morning he would wake me for Fajr with a hot mug of milk, then drive me from Chell Heath to my primary school in Kidsgrove, and later to St Peter's High in Newcastle.

Anyone who needed work, money, advice, or just someone to listen could come to him.

He wasn't interested in money or possessions. Apart from helping people, he loved the gym, which he went to religiously, sometimes twice a day, and the news from Pakistan. Whenever something good happened, he would say it three times: "Zindibaad, Zindibaad, Zindibaad!"

People who met him once still remember him. Ask anyone who knew him and they will tell you the same thing: he was the nicest man you will ever meet.

In 2006 I started college in Manchester and the family moved to Cheadle. I had an unconditional offer to study pharmacy at the University of Manchester, and a chance at medicine, but I didn't want to be away from my parents. I studied Business Management at Manchester instead, so that I could take his retail business into wholesale, importing and exporting.

In 2011, before I finished university, I persuaded him to retire, and T&A closed. After I graduated in 2012 we spent every day together, at work and on holiday. In 2014, with his help and blessing, I started Clearance King, an online wholesale business, and achieved my dream of selling to his own suppliers.

Between March and June 2020 I spent nearly three months on a ventilator with Covid. More than once, the doctors said I had 24 hours to live. My father never doubted that I would come through. His belief in Allah and His final messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him), was the strongest I have ever known.

It affected him deeply all the same. Afterwards he wanted to go back to Pakistan to spend time with family and old friends.

On 7 December 2020, on the journey home to Burewala, he passed away suddenly. He is buried in Burewala.