She met the Pashtun author, poet, diplomat, scholar, and savant Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah and wrote a fictional account of her marriage and travels in the North-West Frontier Province of British India and the mountains of Afghanistan.

[3][4] Bessie Louise Mackenzie[non-primary source needed] – later Saira Elizabeth Luiza Shah – was born in Colmonell, Ayrshire.

[6][non-primary source needed] Her mother, née Bessie Margaret Bloxham, had been in domestic service to the Hamilton family.

[8][non-primary source needed] Her future husband, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, was descended from the Sadaat of Paghman.

[citation needed] Writing under the pseudonym of "Morag Murray Abdullah", her first book, entitled My Khyber Marriage: Experiences of a Scotswoman as the Wife of a Pathan Chieftain's Son[11] was described as an autobiography of meeting her husband, falling in love and leaving behind her family and her safe middle-class Scottish family life, to travel to the war-torn North-West Frontier Province of British India and her chieftain husband's ancestral homeland in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan.