Stories of my life

We always ask of a good novel, play or film: did it really happen? Was the perverted narrator really you, the family from hell yours? Faced with such interrogations, writers tend to scurry for cover, as if to be found out would somehow belittle their achievement. Ayub Khan Din has no such inhibitions. The 42-year-old actor turned writer, best known for his hit screenplay East Is East, repeatedly plunders his experience of growing up in a large Anglo-Pakistani family in Lancashire.

"It's more honest, isn't it?" he says amiably, as though his upbringing was somehow ordinary. We meet in the bar of the Royal Court. Rehearsals are under way for his new play, Notes on Falling Leaves, which opens next month. In this dense two-hander (starring Pam Ferris and Ralf Little), a woman suffers from early onset Alzheimer's. Her grown-up son revisits the family home one last time before the council arrives to put the malodorous remnants of their past on the municipal dump. The text has a jerky, Beckett-like quality. The result is raw and painful.

"It's the hardest piece I've ever written. It's got shorter and shorter," - running to less than 50 minutes on stage - "as I've gone over every word, reducing, purifying. My mum was 51 when she was diagnosed. The stages of senility happened exactly as the doctors said. Then, three years later, in 1985, she died. She was still a good 20 years younger than everyone else on her ward."

Khan Din had just started at Mountview drama school in Crouch End, having found his vocation late, following a failed stint as a hairdresser which had left him "bored as hell". Salvation had come in the unlikely form of David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon. "I read the book and thought if he can switch from the Army to the stage, I can get there from a hairdressing salon." He secured a place to do A-level drama at Salford College of Technology. "They said it was the worst audition they'd ever seen. They've since given me an honorary degree."

The eighth child in a family of 10, Khan Din's early life closely resembles East is East, which was originally a stage play but won huge box-office success as Damien O'Donnell's 1999 lowbudget film. This black comedy portrays the turbulent life of Pakistani chip-shop owner George Khan, his white Irish-Lancastrian wife and their large family, who live corkscrewed into a terraced council house in 1970s Salford. "Yes, we had a tin bath and slept four to a double bed." Its central theme is the struggle between the devout, authoritarian, sometimes violent father, a mosque devotee, with his infidel teenage children.

"I started writing an early version of East Is East when Mum was ill. I wanted to capture it while I could, because each time I went back something more had been lost." Khan Din's father came to Britain in the early 1930s, from an Imperial India still undivided. Like many Pakistanis, he started in Whitechapel, then gravitated north. "He met my mum on top of a bus. She was the clippie. He used to sit out the entire route. Eventually, he asked her to the pictures. They got married and bought the chip shop in about 1948."

Khan Din's Irish-Catholic grandmother was resistant to the mixed marriage, in part because of the common assumption that white women who went about with Afro-Caribbean or Indian men were prostitutes. Times have changed. His own wife is half-Nigerian, half-English. They are currently in the process of seeking a mixed-race child for adoption.

"Most people of my generation assimilated very well. Ours was a close-knit, dock community. Black people weren't unusual, or Chinese or Japanese or Kuwaitis. We all joined in. It makes me angry when people talk about fanaticism. None of our Muslim friends was fanatic. They weren't then and they aren't today. It's like saying all Irish Catholics are IRA bombers. Whether we were Pakistani or Indian or Bangladeshi, we grew up as English working-class kids. We celebrated Christmas and Easter. Only Dad was the problem. He prayed five times a day and fasted and tried to make us go to mosque. In those days there weren't proper ones. We'd just go to someone's front room. No one except us spoke English. We had no idea what was going on. Not one of us was religious."

Khan Din claims that he still knows little about Islam, "just as I don't know about cricket, though people expect me to. One of my brothers married - willingly - a Pakistani girl in an arranged marriage [a key subject in East Is East] but they're now divorced. Another brother married a Maltese girl and converted to Catholicism." Their wedding was the first time his mother had gone to confession for 22 years. "Mind you, it only took her 20 minutes!" He gives a wry laugh then adds: "Four of my brothers and one of my sisters are gay."

An introverted child, he based the nervy, Parka-wearing Sajid in East Is East on himself and admits to having fallen into trouble for truancy after failing the 11-plus and ending up at a comprehensive. At the age of 12, he was sent to Pakistan to live in the family compound with his father's first wife. "It made me grow up. I'd left a 20th-century Salford comprehensive for a place with no electricity, no gas, no toilets. You used the fields. Water came from a well." What did he do all day? "I hung around. I picked up a reasonable bit of Punjabi. I didn't do much. Then I got ill with malaria and dysentery and came home."