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“Thank you for finding me,” says my wife. Finding me… because? Because she was from a world away? Because we were lost? Because we nearly missed each other?

But the truth: I didn’t do anything. My involvement in our meeting was minimal. No, as the years have passed by, with all that I have seen, there is an eery certainty here: our meeting was decreed for us.

“Thanks for enquiring…” she adds when I shrug off my role in our meeting. But even here I must laugh at my own plans. I remember that enquiry… banter on a bus along the Uxbridge Road, from West Ealing to Southall.

As far as I was concerned, I was just trying to make friendly conversation with a kind brother I didn’t know very well, who had spontaneously invited me over to lunch one afternoon after the midday prayer at our local mosque.

True, we’d been exchanging salams in the mosque for weeks up until that point. I may even have encountered him at my favourite kebab shop on the corner of Boston Manor Road. But never having spoken a word more than peace be upon you, I had imagined him an English convert much like myself.

It turned out I was completely wrong about that. But he was and remains exceedingly caring about converts. His own brother, he told me then, had married a Sikh convert, and there he went on to tell me about the large Indian convert community in his vicinity.

Who knows, perhaps he might even have tried to introduce me to a sister from amongst them, had I not responded with thinking of my own. Which is to say I had decided to go back to my roots, seeking a companion amongst the restless natives. A convert, yes, but ideally an Irish girl.

A tall order, I knew unlikely to lead anywhere at all, and nor did I expect it to. For this was all just talk, filling the air between us on the 207 route from house of prayer to family home. But though it may have been mere banter for me, my new friend took it seriously, setting wheels in motion soon after we parted company.

Did I return to my roots? Not as I imagined them! While they say that the Irish trace their ancestry back to the region surrounding the Black Sea, I can’t say I had the early Bronze Age in mind when I imagined what would be best for me. A literal Caucasian, hailing from a region I was barely cognizant of.

Far from finding her, all that came to pass was very far from anything I could have planned myself. So much of our introduction and subsequent life together has collided with my backstory. From childhood dreams to the yearnings of youth. Sometimes the strangest of happenstance. Approaching a quarter of a century on, it still blows my mind.