My mum and I were in Starbucks the other day, sipping cups of coffee, when she suddenly lunged for the table. I looked to see what she was doing and it turned out she was trying to conceal her keyring from public view.

The picture on the keyring, which she'd carried around with her since she came to Britain in the late 1960s was the green and white Pakistani flag.

But here she was trying to hide it.

"You never know nowadays. They don't like us in this country any more. I don't want to be chased by the police or get in any sort of trouble," she said.

I laughed at her a little and poked fun but, at the same time, I was worried. My mum had always looked racism defiantly in the eye. She'd been through the worst everyday indignities in the 1970s, being called 'Paki' by the neighbourhood kids on a regular basis as she walked us to school. She had never been cowed by it.

I remember a gang of tykes hurled snowballs at us one winter's day and were telling us to "go back home" when she turned to face them and gave them an almightly "Pakistani mother's telling off". It worked and they fell into a shamed silence.

My dad would tell her, when the climate was most hostile, not to wear her traditional shalwaar kameez out of the house for fear she may get picked on, but she would wave away his suggestion.

"I can't change who I am. I'm a Pakistani," she would say.

It took us years to adopt the same proud attitude. I was actually scared of being different at school, where there were very few other Asian children, and I would have preferred it if my mum hadn't insisted on being so visibly Asian.

But now I love her for it. She has never changed and is no different now that everything Indian is trendy.

So I was genuinely surprised at her fear of being picked out as a Pakistani. Was this the emotional fall-out of the July 7 bombings - where three out of four of the suicide bombers were of Pakistani origin - on my mother's generation? We had been hearing a fair amount from young Asian men in the country in the aftermath of the bombings but we haven't heard from women of my mother's age; their fear and incomprehension at how these bombers decided to interpret Islam.

Like many others, she has stopped taking the Tube and is apprehensive on a bus, and I suspect she worries about my and my brother's journey into work every day. But it is sad that the country she has always remained so proud of, which came into being the same year she was born, 1947, is now something she feels she has to hide.

And I think it is not just her fear of police scrutiny or racist attack that made her bundle her wee keyring away, but the shame she feels at being a Pakistani right now and what other Pakistanis have done in the name of her faith.

Published: 01/05/2005