A fortnight in Pakistan this spring has concentrated Abdul Malik's mind on the great adventure that he and his family are about to undertake.

The headline story a few weeks ago was that he was quitting his Lib Dem seat on Bristol City Council in June, leaving his chain of halal butchery businesses in the hands of his brother, and moving to a remote Kashmiri village to take care of his parents.

All of this is true. Mr Malik is a fiercely loyal and committed family man and a devout Muslim, and his sense of duty towards his parents is absolute. But his recent visit, with his younger daughter Nabeela, nine, told him other things. One was that with three children aged between nine and 15, their education would dictate that the move would not be permanent, but for one year only.

And the other was that as a 35-year-old with a quite phenomenal record in both business and local politics, this change of pace will be a boon to himself, as well as to others.

"For the past five years, apart from my business commitments, I have been totally occupied as a community organiser in Easton," says Mr Malik, who came within a whisker of becoming Lord Mayor of Bristol two years ago. "I want to be a family man for once. My father was a disabled factory worker, and I tried to take financial pressure off him from my mid-teens. At 15, I was selling leather jackets on Eastville Market.

"At 16, I opened my first butcher's shop, in an old Dewhurst's on Roman Road in Easton.

"Now I want some quality time for myself and my wife and children. You know, there might even be a bit of tourism. The kind of things other people do!"

Well, let us hope so. He's certainly earned it. Yet as the elder son of parents who are not too old but not too well, either, that sense of duty will never be far away. And while you can take the boy out of the work ethic, it's not quite so easy to take the work ethic out of the boy.

"Job creation will not be part of my brief over there," he declares, but then again: "There's no denying that there could be business opportunities. For a start, there is no clean, hygienic meat enterprise, and a large, well-organised slaughterhouse would definitely be an advantage to the community.

"What I do plan to do is work some of my father's fields. His father was a sheep farmer, and he's got some land, which I want to rejuvenate.

"It's never been ploughed for the last 30 years, and I want to see oats and rice growing there again. Nobody does that any more, but I'd like to do it to send a message to the local community. I'm sure two seasons of successful crops would make an impression on them."

Back in 2005, Mr Malik spent time in the family village, Ghasipor, in the Jatlan area of Pakistani Kashmir – or Free Kashmir, as it is known by its residents. This was at about the time his father, Abdoul, decided to move back, after coming to Bristol as a teenager in about 1966.

Abdul was born in the city in 1973, and says he's Bristol through and through. "I identify myself with here incomparably more than with Kashmir," he says. "But my father started going back for quite long visits and discovered that the psoriasis he suffers from was so much easier there, with no central heating. My mother's diabetes also seems much more easy to control in Pakistan.

"When dad said 'Come and live with us', it made me look hard in the mirror and think about where my priorities lay. Looking at British life, could it be that we were missing the point of our religion and our tradition by continuing to live here while they were over there? In families like ours, putting parents in old people's homes is never enough."

The villagers of Ghasipor have already experienced the Abdul Malik effect from his 2005 visit, when he helped organise getting roads, electricity and sewers put in, partially through liaising with a local United Nations official.

He, his wife Saeeda and children Haroon, 15, Tanzeela, 13, and Nabeela will leave Bristol in August, in good time for school beginning in September. And it will be school that will bring them back 12 months later, with concerns about Haroon's job prospects in Kashmir high on the agenda. Relatives will move into the family's home in Colston Road in the meantime. For the children, it will all be a long way away from their present respective places of learning – the City Academy, the Andalusia Academy (the Islamic school for girls in Old Market) and Whitehall Primary School, where Mr Malik is chairman of governors.

"The fact is, they already go to Kashmir on long holidays, and love it," he says. "When Nabeela came back with me after our two weeks over there in February, her six aunties – my sisters – all said how much she had come out of her shell. She was louder than usual!"

A glimpse into Abdul Malik's approach to being a committed Muslim in a (traditionally) Christian country can be seen when one of his first actions when taking over as chairman at Bristol's Whitehall Primary, was to reinstate Christmas as something the school recognised.

"With 70 per cent of the children Muslim, it had been decided that there would be no acknowledgment of Christmas," he says. "I was horrified. I didn't want today's children to miss out on learning, as my generation had learned about the traditions of their native country."

When his family returns to Easton, we can be sure that his parents will not be neglected in any way.

And the way he is talking, we can be equally sure that he would relish the chance to get involved in local politics again. A tilt at a Parliamentary seat in a Bristol constituency might be deferred for just a little while longer – but it is clear that Abdul Malik's special impact on local life will not be lost forever to the rice fields of Kashmir.