The writer also known as Ami Rahman

I’m Rachel Rahman. I write fiction using the name Ami Rahman.

A lady never tells her age, though it might tell on me!

I was born in the swinging sixties and raised in the University City of Cambridge, England, in the cosmopolitan area of Mill Road.

My parents weren’t Cambridge University people. My father had a Doctorate in Mathematics, gained from Dhaka University, in what was then East Pakistan. He came from the far North East of India, having been born in a tiny town in Assam, in the thirties.

My mother was the daughter of a Chartered Surveyor from Ipswich, Suffolk. Her mother had been a teacher during the war but was otherwise a stay at home mum and a Potter. It seems a bit of a shame, she was a pianist to concert level.

My mother was extraordinary. Sometime around her fifteenth birthday she woke up and found that the world had become a blur. Her eyesight had been affected by severe Cornea problems.

Nothing seemed to stop her. She studied shorthand when my brother and myself were little and worked full-time in secretarial roles. With the help of specially designed contact lenses and a very thick pair of glasses, she typed intricate accountancy documents for my father, who had a day job as a Tax Consultant and ran his own book keeping business in the evening.

Our childhood home was always full of Sylheti speaking restaurant owners and our weekends often involved long drives up and down the country to visit clients with ‘Indian’ restaurants.

There was a closeness in the restaurant community, brought on by the struggle of relatives in East Pakistan, as they fought for liberation and formed The People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The community fund raised and, of course, my father became heavily involved. My mother worried that, if Bangladesh failed to become a reality, my father could be seen as financially assisting terrorists.

Thankfully that did not happen and I remember a huge celebration dinner being held in ‘uncle’ Ali’s restaurant, The Taj Mahal, Regent St, Cambridge.

It was an education in life but my academic education wasn’t as special as you might expect in a place like Cambridge.

I went to three schools, set a little apart from each other, in an area known as Romsey Town.

You wouldn’t have thought me capable of writing a letter, yet alone a book. 

Age nine, I suffered the weekly indignity of being pulled out of the classroom to go to another room, where they held a ‘Remedial’ class. In spite of the name, they didn’t remedy anything. I was, and still am, ‘vowel blind’ and have a frustrating time spelling words as I hear them.

All this meant that my mother picked up on my only real skill, cooking for large numbers, and sent me to the local Technical College to become a chef.

It was something of a limiting experience and the only time I was really happy was when I was working as a Pastry Chef, under Raymond Patterson.

My parents moved to Bangladesh in the mid eighties and I plodded on as an agency caterer, feeling stuck for years, truly miserable.

I worked as a Catering Manageress in Bangladesh for a short time, my parents having failed to return after the four years they had spoken of when they had moved there.

It was there that I managed to fill the heads of humble rickshaw riders with my youthful, political, ideals and caused my mother a great deal of embarrassment.

I returned to England and moved to London where I again indulged in the misery of catering work, compensating with song writing and singing in bands.

I was thirty years old when my daughter was born and I decided to try something nobody thought I could be good at. I studied Journalism and was accepted for my first choice of University, without an interview, but life got in the way.

Instead of doing my degree, I returned to my home town as a single parent and worked in catering.

When my daughter became more independent my mind returned to writing, which I had always kept up as a hobby.

I adjusted my values and chose to work in Housekeeping Departments, servicing college rooms for conferences. It was something I could do until mid afternoon and return home to write.

I didn’t write anything I was proud of until my father’s death, in Dhaka, 2018. Then, I took his life story on, a fictional version containing much of the truth.

I eagerly put my vowel blind burnt offering onto an eBook platform and found that my mother was appalled by it’s execution. I unpublished it the same week it came out but a quick look round my Facebook friends soon revealed that someone knew a talented novelist.

Hugh Ashton was the kindest teacher in my writing journey. I can never express my truest gratitude for his help in editing an amateur mess.

Since then I have published my mother’s travel writing, experiences of living in Bangladesh for thirteen years. It was a matter of copy typing and editing it myself.

She was a wonderfully expressive person and I didn’t want her experiences to be lost after her passing. There where also some fantastic photographs, taken by my father, of far flung places.

Jill’s Journey ranked on Amazon as a Hot New Travel Release, thanks to my large family and my mother’s many good friends.

I passed on the profits to The Arthur Rank Hospice, who helped me through looking after my mother during the Covid Crisis.

After that, I hit a full creative flow with The Shard Puzzle, a thriller about a woman being stalked, and am now editing Amanda Drake’s Heart, a generational story of prescient women, dating from 1066 to the present day.

I will continue to write in a state of semi-literate bliss, believing writing is no longer dominated by Traditional Publishers.

Everyone has a story within them, freedom of expression should be exactly what it says on the tin.