Love the Dark Days E-Book

Ira Mathur

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 510

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

- A Guardian biography of the year 2022 - Non-Fiction winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Literature 2023 This frank, fearless and multi-layered debut centres on a privileged but dysfunctional Indian family, with themes of empire, migration, race, and gender. The Victorian India elephant in the room in Ira Mathur's silk-swathed memoir, Love The Dark Days is in chains. By the time calypso replaces the Raj in post-colonial Trinidad, the chains are off three generations of daughters and mothers in a family in their New World exile. But they are still stuck in place and enduring insecurity and threats, seen and unseen. Set in India, England, Trinidad and a weekend in St Lucia, with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Love the Dark Days follows the story of a girl, Poppet, of mixed middle-class Hindu and Elite Muslim parentage from post- independent India to her family's migration to post-colonial Trinidad. Profoundly raw, unflinching, layered, but not without threads of humour and perceived absurdity, Love the Dark Days reassembles the story of a disintegrating Empire. "Reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire" - Guardian Best Biographies of 2022 "Compelling" The Observer "A gem of a memoir... Monique Roffey is spot on when she calls it a blaze of a book" The Bookseller

Leseprobe

IRA MATHUR

LOVE THE DARK DAYS

First published in Great Britain in 2022

This ebook edition published in 2022

by Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

England

© 2022 Ira Mathur

ISBN 9781845235352 (Print)

ISBN 9781845235697 (Epub)

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission

PART ONE

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

— Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

ONE

Kelly Village, Trinidad, 2000

I would like to see a kite in the blank blue sky. This rootless place of sameness is not where she, or we, thought she would end her days.

Mummy, Daddy, Winky, Angel and I have been standing under the shed watching Burrimummy’s grave being dug. She has been dead for less than twenty-four hours.

The noonday sun bounces off lumpy graves covered in thick weedy grass, off whitewashed houses on stilts, skims over the fields to the narrow river where it rests its egg-yolk reflection.

Burrimummy is inside an open wooden box on the concrete floor to our right, swaddled from head to foot like a mummy in two yards of white cotton. This is the two yards of white cotton she always talked about, carried about with her, repeatedly replaced. It is now being put to use.

Her creamy skin, of which she was so proud, is now a marmoreal jaundiced yellow, its dull shine reflecting the harsh light as if it were a crumbling bust in a museum.

The round-faced mortician with the red-hennaed beard informed us he had turned her head to the East the previous night, ‘before she get too stiff.’

It is so quiet I can hear the flapping of Angel’s white dupatta against her narrow shoulders.

Angel never thought Burrimummy would actually die. My first memory of Angel is of a chubby, pink-faced three-year-old, stumbling around in the many rooms of Rest House Road crying, saying that Burrimummy was ‘dying of a broken heart’. Burrimummy had then appeared and asked, ‘What would Angel do in this big house by herself?’ The two wept, unaware of anyone else.

Angel says ‘no’ decidedly when the mortician says this is our last chance to touch her face. She had already had her time doing that yesterday evening when she lay down on Burrimummy’s bed with her and stroked her still warm face for almost an hour until the white van came to take Burrimummy away. When the paperwork was finished and the body released from the nursing home, Angel wanted to climb in because, as she explained patiently to everyone who tried to prevent her, ‘Burrimummy will be alone. She needs me.’

We held Angel back while the van raced into the dark.

If I close my eyes, I reach back to the beginning when we were young and in her care in 17 Rest House Road.

Bangalore, India, 1976

It’s three in the afternoon; the end of the school day.

The nuns of the Sacred Heart Girls’ High School unlock the heavy padlock and pull open the tall, black, wrought-iron gates, releasing girls in white, pleated uniforms and red ties into the bustle of Bangalore’s fashionable Brigade Road.

My sister Angel and I are carried along with the flow, a jumble of elbows and legs. Angel is seven; I am ten.

I spot our ayah’s enormous yellow-and-red striped umbrella before I see her. Khaja is one of Burrimummy’s oldest servants; she is here to take us on the short walk home. She is a tall, lantern-jawed woman whose thin cotton sari does nothing to disguise her angular limbs. The sharp point of her umbrella is a weapon dodged by drivers, ayahs and orderlies. She looks after Angel, not me. She gives me a warning look.

Ignoring Khaja, I duck behind the other girls and shove towards the vendors’ carts where flies circle sliced green mangoes and cucumbers. I push between the jumping schoolgirls waving their money and thrust a crumpled rupee note at the vendor.

I return with sour cucumber in powdered chilli pepper, wrapped in newspaper. Salty water seeps through, making my hands sticky.

Khaja holds Angel with one hand and balances the umbrella over her head.

‘Baby, baby, don’t eat that,’ she screeches at me.

I bite into the fly-infested vegetable.

‘Want some, Angel?’

‘No, Baby!’ Khaja cuts in sharply. ‘Your grandmother will be angry. Angel baby will get sick.’

Angel lives with Burrimummy all the time.

I am sent to Burrimummy for months at a time when Mummy is tired. Mummy says army life is a strain with constant moving and all the cocktail parties.

We pass Bishop Cotton Boys’, a rectangular redbrick building next to our school. Mummy can’t manage Winky either because he’s impossible to control. When Mummy was unpacking her china in Chandigarh, he said, ‘I can jump over glass. Want to bet?’ Before she could stop him, Winky took a giant leap and landed in the middle of her dinner set, sending glass everywhere and ended up with a bleeding chin. Mummy had had enough and put him on a flight to Bangalore to live with Burrimummy.

I stop to look back at the boys walking out of Bishop Cotton Boys’ School dressed in white shirts, blue ties and khaki shorts, hoping Winky will be one of them. But he never is, even though at fourteen, he sometimes gets to leave the compound. Winky boards at Bishop Cottons because he was rude to Burrimummy, calling her a Pakistani spy after Burrimummy caught him shooting rubber bands at the servants’ quarters from the terrace. I was standing with him when she hauled him down and booked a trunk call to Simla, bellowing at Mummy for bringing up her son like an infidel. She wouldn’t keep her Hindu grandson for a moment longer under her roof. ‘Do what you think is best,’ Mummy told her. Burrimummy marched Winky to Bishop Cottons and admitted him as a boarder with immediate effect. I begged and begged her, but she refused to take him back.

I don’t know why, but I always felt afraid I wouldn’t see Winky again. I remember listening to the radio news with Mummy when we lived in Guwahati. Mummy screamed. A school bus had turned over on a slope near a tea plantation, and children may have been killed. It was always raining in Guwahati, and I climbed up on a stool watching the rain on the window and sobbed until Winky came charging in.

Winky has lived with Mummy and Daddy the longest, moving with them from Calcutta, where he was born, then Guwahati, where I was born. We got broken up when Angel was born in Sagar, and Burrimummy came to look after Mummy and took Angel away at just five days old and never gave her back. We four kept moving to Chandigarh, Bangalore, Simla, but Angel stayed in Bangalore – that’s why she’s a civilian, we military.

Winky and I are always last in class because of the changing languages in the different states we’ve moved to. Apart from English and Hindi, we need to learn Punjabi, Himalayan and Kannada. The resulting incomprehension bleeds into maths, geography and history. I feel I don’t belong here or anywhere. In class I pretend I’m not me, and the not-me is not there. That’s why I don’t mind being short-sighted. I don’t mind the foggy blackboard because it reminds me of Simla before the snowfalls.

Our teachers are Irish nuns, Anglo-Indian and South Indian women. Only two are men. The PE teacher is stern-looking with sensual lips and a moustache; the male art teacher has a pink harelip. A week ago, he drew a bird in ink and smudged it as he went along. That smudge was the only thing that made sense to me. When a teacher draws attention to one of my shortcomings – forgetting homework, not copying from the blackboard, not understanding – I imagine floating outside, feeling sunshade and breeze and hear the teacher from far away through the chattering of insects. I hear no shouting and feel no shame.

Even when Daddy was posted to Bangalore, and Winky, Mummy and I lived together in St John’s Road, near the officers’ mess, Angel never came to stay, except for one night when Burrimummy, wearing a crisp white linen sari, dark glasses and her lips in a flattened red line, brought Angel from Rest House Road, looking as if she was going to a funeral. Mummy met them at the door in her dressing gown, halfway through getting ready to go out, as she and Daddy did every evening. When Burrimummy drove away out of the circular driveway, Angel strained to watch her car long after it was gone, standing on the veranda like a statue, refusing to come in. Mummy asked me to take her to the dining room where dinner was laid out, and she took my hand, but once inside Angel walked backwards until she was standing against the dining room wall and wouldn’t touch her food, so before Mummy and Daddy left for a dance at the officers’ mess, Mummy gave her my doll, which had blonde curly hair and was almost two-feet tall. I brought her to my bedroom and let her hold my doll in my bed.

I thought how nice it would be if she lived with us. With my arms around her, I tried to convince her St Johns Road was a place of fun, but she said it looked like school, with halls and wooden floors, so I told her of the nights Mummy and Daddy gave parties, how the floors shone, and silver gleamed like mirrors. Lots of people came; the army band played, and the grownups danced in the drawing room; wandered about in the garden and drank and swayed and kissed people who weren’t married to them. Once I saw a couple near the swing under the tamarind tree; they looked as if they were wrestling, but now I knew what it was, and I told Angel I would tell her if she lived with us. I told her Mummy was always the loveliest of them all in her chiffons and neon silks; how Daddy looked like the actor Dharmendra in his dark evening suits. I told her the orderly played Snakes and Ladders with me when they went out.

Angel looked at me with large uncomforted eyes. I didn’t tell her that I would often hear shouting; glass would be thrown and shattered; then they would go to bed. Desperate for her to unfreeze, sleep and not lie down like a doll with its eyes permanently open, I told her we could go outside and play Winky’s grownup game. The shouts outside were him pretending to be Daddy ordering the orderlies. Winky made the servants turn off the lights, and they would walk through the dark house looking for Pakistani spies and then go into the garden with a flashlight and knife, where they would follow him around the walled house, behind the long deep shadows of the tamarind tree. Angel remained motionless. I told her how when Winky’s friends came to play, he let me play Dhakka with them – it was like hide-and-seek except you had to hit the person who got caught hard on the back and then they were ‘it’. The boys hit me hard whenever I played, and I would be ‘it’ for hours because I never caught them. When Angel turned away, I continued, even though I was aware I was making it worse, telling her how Winky played kabaddi and sometimes wrestled the boy servant right down to the ground. I told her about how the mummy rabbit ate the bunny in the hutch we kept at the bottom of the garden and we’d found the bones. When she began to cry loudly, I stopped.

Mummy had to call Burrimummy to fetch her back to Rest House Road the following day. The two of them ran to one another as if they had been holding their breaths all along and could finally breathe. After, I found my doll’s legs had been wrenched out. I went wailing to Mummy saying I would thrash Angel when I saw her next. Mummy slapped me for saying such cruel thing about my little sister.

The afternoon traffic is revving – scooters, autorickshaws, cars – tooting and disappearing. Our stunted shadows are barely visible on the concrete. Khaja darts behind us to provide cover from the sun for the five-minute walk to Rest House Road. I dodge the umbrella to keep her hopping about on the pavement.

Angel walks placidly behind me under the umbrella, her hand in Khaja’s while I skip around, past giant movie billboards of voluptuous actresses displaying cleavages and candy-pink-and-white made-up faces. Like Angel. And Mummy.

Angel, tucked obediently under Khaja’s umbrella, says, ‘Can you save some cucumber for me, Aapa?’ She uses the respectful term for older sister. She has exquisite manners. ‘I’ll have it when Khaja isn’t looking.’

Burrimummy would be furious with me if I gave Angel some. She says Angel is delicate and quickly gets infections and colds, especially from filthy outside food. I eat it all by myself, making huge licking sounds, saying, ‘Khatta, khatta, nice and sour.’

I am dark and thin with wispy brown hair; Angel is fair, plump, with slanting light eyes and cupid-bow lips – so red the teacher once checked her for lipstick. That’s why Burrimummy calls her Angel, after her own mother. Her thick black hair is neatly plaited and held in place with rubber bands and red ribbons. Mine won’t go black or thick – even with daily applications of olive oil. Winky is dark, but Burrimummy says that’s okay because he’s a boy, handsome and tall.

Angel edges towards me, and I shoo her away. Sometimes, I forget I hate her for getting me into trouble, and we play as sisters. Last week we stuffed newspapers into a broken piano stool and covered it with a cloth and laughed and laughed when the Anglo-Indian piano teacher, Miss Mosquito, fell into it, her bony hip sinking deep inside the chair. When she said she wanted her money and was never coming back, Burrimummy thrashed me, breaking a slipper on my back. Angel can prevent Burrimummy from beating me with just a look – if she feels like it – but that time she put her thumb in her mouth and watched. Burrimummy never beats her.

I wanted to teach Burrimummy a lesson for that thrashing, so yesterday, instead of coming home with Khaja after school, I asked my army friend Saloni if I could go home with her in the army truck. I wanted Burrimummy to be worried about me. Saloni’s mother believed me when I said Burrimummy had given me permission to spend the night. She gave me a frock to change into, made sure I ate properly at dinner, put me in Saloni’s pyjamas and tucked us into bed. After breakfast, her father took us to school in his army uniform, making me miss Daddy more. The last time Daddy came to Bangalore, he took me to a Laurel and Hardy movie – to watch me watching the film to see me laugh – and then to the officers’ mess where I drank lime juice in the garden with the grownups. Everyone is always saluting my handsome daddy.

Khaja says, ‘Burrimummy is furious. Whole night she wanted to know where you were.’

Angel says, ‘Yes, Poppet Aapa, she is. Saloni’s mummy phoned early this morning, saying her driver would drop you off to school. Since then, Burrimummy’s been shouting and shouting.’

My palms are sweaty; I know I will get another thrashing today. I dawdle. I don’t want to go to 17 Rest House Road. I stop to stare at the chauffeur-driven cars with curtains for women in purdah and jump out of the way of sputtering lorries spilling grey fumes. Men riding scooters and cycles with women holding on tight, their kurtas and saris flapping around them, swish past us.

Khaja makes us cross the street to avoid Cubbon Park. Its large shadowy grounds – laid out with shrubs and flower beds, benches and little paths – feel dangerous. Burrimummy says the park is for low-class people.

I’ve been there with the servants’ children in the afternoon while Burrimummy and Angel nap. Men and women do vulgar things there, fondling and whispering under dense trees. Flies, bees, armies of ants, and endlessly chirping insects hover around oozing fruit on the damp ground. As we pass, I play games with my eyes, blinking at the imprint of the green of the park, the flash of South Indian saris, the light in the puddles of water. Then I pretend I’m blind, put my hands out, palms up while walking. Khaja roughly straightens me when I collide with a beggar.

‘If you behave like this,’ she tells me, ‘Burrimummy will write to your Mummy.’

I haven’t seen Mummy in months.

The last time she flew to Bangalore, she had to come from Simla to see me. Mummy said she dreamt I was wearing a white dress, floating towards her, asking for her. She missed me so much she came to the school straight from the airport. With her peach lipstick, shades and a chiffon sari, she caused a sensation among the dark South Indian girls. She took me, but not Angel, out of school for the day.

We sped out of the school in the army jeep to the silk sari shop, where we spent the morning. Two male attendants leapt about, throwing open bolts of silks, chiffons and georgettes. She examined borders, patterns and materials and waved most of them away. ‘Gaudy’, she would say, or ‘terrible’, or ‘absolutely frightful’.

Eager to please her, the attendants threw them aside and unfolded yards of material to show her different ones, creating heaps of crumpled silk on a white sheet. They served her cup after cup of hot tea. I sat quietly and watched, drinking Coca-Cola. They stared at her throughout.

She picked out a dozen saris – some from the heap, some from the neatly folded stacks. She chose French chiffons in colours Burrimummy taught us: Mountbatten pink, aureolin, amaranth, cerulean, or heavy silks in jewel shades with broad contrast borders.

Afterwards, she took me into a crowded bakery – Koshi’s, Bangalore’s most famous – and treated me to dosas, pancakes filled with spicy potatoes, and mango lassi. While we waited, she drew me to her and kissed me. ‘My quarter pint, what tiny hands you have, pet. Is anyone unkind to you?’ Before I could answer, she saw a friend, and they began talking and admiring one another. She dropped me at 17 Rest House Road, saying she was late for dinner with friends at the Bangalore Club and she didn’t want to be late back to the officers’ mess where she was staying. I hadn’t seen her since.

I want to turn around, go back to Saloni’s house. I felt safer there, with an army family, safe from the thrashing I know is coming, but there is nowhere to hide.

17 Rest House Road has a red postbox marked BAIG in uneven white paint at the gate. The high walls with their yellowing decay and missing chunks of plaster make the house look sad. They are partially covered in jasmine, tiny crimson and green parasitic creepers and wood roses painted in dull silver. For years I thought they grew like that until I saw the painter on a ladder in the garage, colouring them in.

Burrimummy’s shouting never stops the dark, dirty, semi-naked servants’ children appearing from their quarters, where I often run off to play. These are five tiny, dark, airless concrete structures at the back of the house where the ayahs’ families sleep, cook and eat. The women crouch over smoky stone stoves built with sticks and newspaper; thin children in rags, who never go to school, play cricket with sticks and chase bony dogs. Some afternoons, while Angel and Burrimummy sleep, I go to their quarters and eat rice and dal smelling of ghee and firewood off a plastic plate from Burrimummy’s kitchen. I enjoy myself while they sit around me as if I am doing them a favour, and then we play.

The ayahs’ ‘men’ – as Burrimummy insists on calling them, even though they may be married to the ayahs – are rarely visible. They are not encouraged to hang around the house. They disappear swiftly, either into the rooms or out of the compound.

A nine-year-old girl comes running towards us to meet us at the gate. She is Mary, the cook’s daughter. She is followed by a boy of the same size with snot running down his nose. Mary looks at me and asks if I’m coming to play. I give her what I hope is Burrimummy’s withering look. Light streams behind Mary’s sun-bleached, matted hair, turning it ashen; briefly, she is a haloed angel. Close up, her skin, patchy with white spots, and her protruding stomach makes her look diseased. She races back to the servants’ quarters while the boy stares at us defiantly, one hand sweeping the snot upwards around his face.

We pass the three steps to the front door and go through the green gates at the side of the house, along a path to the kitchen, past the Millingtonia tree with its fragrant long white leaves and the lime tree. Under the mango tree in the courtyard, Ansia, Burrimummy’s youngest ayah, is pounding fresh masala paste with a large mortar, hammering away so the smell of crushed garlic, ginger, mint and green chillies overpower the nearby roses and lime tree.

We walk into the kitchen to the smells of cooked golden onions and butter. Three table settings have been laid on a gingham tablecloth.

Margaret, Burrimummy’s cook, looks like all the other ayahs – dark and tiny and beaten up, with a brood of small, undernourished children. Burrimummy says there is not a drop of Anglo blood in her, even though she says her great grandfather was British, and she goes to church to prove it. Even if she had Anglo blood, Burrimummy tells Margaret, it’s worse than being Hindu, since she’s neither here nor there.

We hear the jangle of keys on Burrimummy’s dressing gown before we see her and when she comes towards us, Angel bows her head and curves her right hand to her forehead, saying ‘Salaam, Burrimummy’, after which Burrimummy engulfs Angel in her arms. ‘You’ve come. You’ve come. Sweetheart. The child of my life, my chand ka baccha, my moonchild, my darling child, is here. May you live long, my belovedest.’

I’m hiding behind Khaja and I am looking at both Burrimummy and a large black and white portrait of her on the wall – her eighteen-year-old self: wide eyes on a broad, pale face; full, painted lips; pearls, a diamond in her crimped hair – a remote actress on a billboard. At sixty, Burrimummy is a hard beauty – tall, boxy, muscular, broad-faced with deeply-set eyes, and a tight, thinly curvaceous mouth stained with tobacco and betel nut. Her stomach is round but firm, with little fat on her, which is strange because we never see her exercise. She doesn’t look at me. I touch her arm. She brushes me off, draws Angel closer and shouts for Khaja.

‘Angel, your face is so hot. Khaja, Khaja, you haramzadi, daughter of a pig, where are you, you black Tamilian? Ooh God, she’s gone to the servants’ quarters again.’ She slaps her forehead hard as if the only way to get anything done is to maim herself. ‘Ansia, quickly, fetch lime juice for baby.’

She holds Angel’s head. ‘My baby is getting a fever in this heat.’

Ansia appears. ‘Yes, Maa, yes, Maa.’

Burrimummy towers over Ansia, her face and torso like a marble bust in the museum. When she is angry like this, I don’t know what to feel. I hate it when she thrashes me but am sadder when she doesn’t notice me at all.

I get tired of hearing Angel’s name. I long for the moments when Burrimummy puts her large arms around me and says Angel and me are her two eyes, that without us she is blind, and tells me I possess the dark olive colouring of the Prophet Mohammed himself. I’m purposefully naughty just so she can say ‘Poppet this’ and ‘Poppet that’.

‘Bring the lime juice. Bring ice. Where is that woman whose teeth stick out? Khajaaaaa! She was just here. Call her. Khaja of the unlucky face. Every time I turn my back, you run off like a whore to the servants’ quarters. Take off Angel Baby’s socks and shoes. Wash her hands and face. Quickly. My bacchas are hungry, you haramzadi.’

The servants, sensing my lower status, are careless with me. I like their food but hate their hands on me, bony fingers smelling of cheap soap and the smells of poverty that can never be scrubbed out.

Finally, Burrimummy stands over me. My uniform is a dirty white, stained with dust and food from yesterday.

‘Mrs Bhaveja called me this morning, you know.’ Burrimummy sounds dangerously calm. ‘You wicked child.’

‘I wanted to be with army people,’ I say, sticking my chin out. ‘Her mummy and daddy are in the army.’

‘And what if you’d been run over, stolen, taken by beggars? What would I say to your parents then?’

‘Oh, you get your money from Daddy for keeping me, don’t you? Why do you care where I go?’

She picks me up as if I am a stick and turns me on my stomach. I can feel her knees. She hits me with the flat of her hand on my skinny bum, striking bone. I’m not here. I’m with Mummy and Daddy in Simla in the Officers’ Club. Daddy is in uniform and playing bridge. I’m sheltering behind Mummy’s billowing sari on the terrace, looking at mountains with snow.

‘Are you truly repentant?’

I say nothing.

I feel pain in my arm, where Burrimummy grasps me with one hand. She uses the other to strike me in tapping movements as if she was playing the piano. She wasn’t sad that I was gone. I don’t care that she wants to hurt me. She regards me as if, like Daddy, I’m a Hindu outsider. I am a constant reminder of Mummy’s defection from Islam and towards lowly, dark-skinned Hindu blood. Well, then, I am Hindu, like Daddy, who loves me best.

‘Your damned father would have torn me to pieces if something terrible had happened to you.’ She hits me until her hands are bright red; I let out a cry, and then she lets me go abruptly as if disgusted with my tears.

Angel tugs her. ‘Burrimummy, I’m hungry.’ She holds out her little hand to me. ‘Poppet Aapa must also have lunch.’

Burrimummy promptly softens. ‘Wash your face, Poppet darling. Khaja, take Poppet to the bathroom.’ She switches like this. I never know how she’s going to be.

In the bathroom, Khaja splashes water on my face, takes my hands and washes them, then wipes me dry. I’m not grateful to Angel. She shouldn’t decide whether I’m thrashed.

When I return, Ansia has served up the soup. She is barely fifteen, dressed in a petticoat and old dupatta, still not old enough for a sari, but she seems so much older than my ten. Burrimummy turns to Ansia. Her hand is chalky against Ansia’s chocolate face.

‘Ansia, haramzadi, you bastard’s child, the fork is not laid on this side. It’s on this side. How many times am I to tell you, you silly girl?’

‘Put faark on this side, Maa?’

‘Yes, put the faark on this side.’

After the forks are laid on the right side of the table, she points, plump white fingers upwards, blowing paan, spit and obscenities into the ayahs’ gaunt, dark faces.

‘Bring cold water. Put ice. Put more ice. Bring limes. Cut them in four. Give to Baby. Not with your filthy hands. Let me do it. Bring chillies.’

‘Saarlt, Maa?’

‘Bring. Take back the soup.’

‘Courld, Maa?’

‘Yes, cold, Maa. Don’t you know soup is meant to be hot, you daughter of a donkey? Oooh God.’

Margaret hovers near the stove and helps Ansia.

Ansia brings the hundi – the steel pot with no handles – back to the table. We all pour our soup back in the pot.

It comes back spouting steam. Ansia scalds her fingers while pouring soup back into our bowls. Burrimummy shouts. ‘What will I do if you get burnt? Your drunken men will be after me. Now go wash your hands in cold water.’

The girl doesn’t bother to wipe away the tears sliding down her face. Burrimummy’s voice is suddenly gentle, caressing. ‘After you wash your hands, go and wash your entire body.’

Ansia nods and runs out.

Burrimummy is continually frustrated in her attempts to force her bewildered, shrunken, Tamil-speaking Bangalore ayahs to recreate her exquisite, courtly Mughal food, to cultivate the mannered household of her Hyderabadi ancestors in that long dark kitchen. Inevitably, it’s a failure since Burrimummy’s explosive obscenities destroy the thing that she tries to recreate.

The roast is well done, surrounded by spicy, plump red chillies. Vegetables rarely make an appearance in our diet unless they are heavily disguised or dissolved in meat.

As we eat, Burrimummy’s mood improves. She smiles at us.

Everyone brightens and relaxes.

‘Go now, Maa?’ Ansia says.

‘Yes, Ansia, you can go. Be back by three sharp.’

‘Yes, Maa.’

Now Margaret is in her line of attack.

‘Fetch the bread-and-butter pudding. Bring cream. Bring coffee. More water for Small Baby. Don’t put your filthy hands in the glass, you ignorant gavaar woman of the streets. Now, come on, Angel, finish up.’

We can all tell by her tone she is no longer furious.

After a second helping of pudding, I want to bury myself in her warmth, her pale hugeness. I want her to love me properly. Without looking at them, she tells Margaret and Khaja, hovering now in corners of the kitchen, ‘Clear the table. Take it away.’

The table is cleared. After Margaret hands her a cup of strong black coffee, Burrimummy sends her away, too. ‘Go, eat your lunch. Be back at five o’clock SHARP for tea. No lolling. Tell Ansia to come back.’

Khaja, Angel and I follow Burrimummy into the spacious bedroom, with a big bed specially made for three. It’s time for our afternoon nap.

Angel is whisked under Burrimummy’s arms with a stream of endearments. ‘Come, my child of the moon, my liver, my life, let’s lie down.’

I lie down next to Angel. The sheets are fresh and soft.

We hear the horns of the traffic on the main road and, closer, the sharp rustle of monkeys jumping on the mango tree outside. The tree is so tall that we can reach out and pick mangoes from the terrace.

A hawker on the street below shouts, as if reciting a poem; curtains lift in the breeze and bring us glimpses of Burrimummy’s tea roses, miniature and fragile. The wind goes wild briefly, parting the branches of the mango tree; a monkey leaps; sunlight slants through closed curtains; light moves in squares on terracotta tiles.

Wanting to please Burrimummy, I say, ‘Please, can we see the photograph of your great-grandfather, Sir Afsar, who was appointed the general of the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad?’

‘Go fetch it, darling.’

I run to the drawing room, take it off the wall and fetch it for her, as if transporting a treasure. Burrimummy shifts to the centre of the bed. Angel and I curve into either side of her as if concentrating for an exam. I know it well, this photograph of a trim, old, European-looking man in uniform with a curly moustache and a tiny woman with her sari pallu pulled over her head, surrounded by many people: young men in high-collared shirts, ties and pin-striped, three-piece suits. The women are like dark-haired Europeans, pouty, dressed in fine gauze. What Burrimummy tells us is dull gold shows through a photograph that’s almost a century old. The impression is of the sulking ease of the privileged who are rarely pleased.

I am acutely aware, as I place my hand on her arm – as tiny and brown as that of the servants’ children – that I would never be one of them. I’m too dark, too rebellious. My father doesn’t send me enough money to dress like Angel. Maybe by showing an interest in Burrimummy’s people, I could claim them too. Angel doesn’t need to do anything to belong.

Burrimummy points at the man. ‘Here is Sir Afsar. My great-grandfather and your great-great-great-grandfather.’

Angel says, ‘Great great great great.’

Burrimummy puts her finger on Angel’s mouth.

‘Afsar was only three when he accompanied his parents from Uzbekistan to India. The British offered Afsar’s father, Balath, money to fight against the Indians in the mutiny of 1857. He was a poor man, so naturally, he agreed. Balath, my great-great grandfather, came down with dysentery because of the faeces and rubbish in the filthy water in Delhi, Agra, Kanpur and Allahabad, where the fighting took place. He was brought back to Hyderabad half-dead and between sleep and wake kept asking Allah for forgiveness for what he’d done in Allahabad, where he had to stand over Indian soldiers – fellow Muslims and Hindus – with a whip, while they were force-fed pork and made to lick the blood off the floor of the British women and children slaughtered by Nana Sahib. Then they were hanged while British soldiers jeered. After Balath died, a young British officer, Sir Charles, who had just lost his own wife in childbirth, adopted Balath’s son, Afsar, when he was just eight, and when Afsar was sixteen, enrolled him with the Gurkhas in the British army, sending him to fight for them in Afghanistan and China before he became the general of the army of the Nizam of Hyderabad.’

The ceiling fan goes a creaky flap flap over our heads, above the mosquito curtain in the room.

Burrimummy shuts out the Bangalore of temple dances, Kannada songs, kanjivarum gold-bordered saris, spicy vegetarian food, Gods and garlands displayed on autorickshaws, homes and temples, cinema posters of dusky voluptuous Tamil actresses that take up entire walls, and hawkers selling garlands of jasmine flowers for the oiled black hair of chocolate-skinned women.

Burrimummy reads the caption under the photograph: General Nawab Sir Afsar-ul-Mulk Bahadur, KCSI SCIE MVO ADC. 1852-1930. 1877: On his first visit to India, the Prince of Wales conferred the title of the Order of the Star of India to Sir Afsar.

Angel says into Burrimummy’s ears, ‘abcdefg…’

I shove Angel. ‘Don’t be so silly,’ I say.

‘Poppet, don’t hurt Angel.’ Burrimummy’s voice is cold.

Burrimummy turns to the darker lady at Sir Afsar’s side, with none of the glamour of her ten children, and dismisses her by saying she was a good woman, a child bride from Arabia who could not speak English and lived in purdah all her life.

‘Sir Afsar loved position and titles. He forced ALL his daughters to marry men they hated because they were powerful landowners.’

‘All of them were miserable, Burrimummy?’ I look at the six beautiful girls: my great-great-grandmother and her sisters.

‘Not all. One ran away and married a common man, and Sir Afsar never spoke to her again.’

‘Soo soo,’ says Angel, and Ansia takes Angel to the bathroom. I have Burrimummy to myself.

‘This is your great-great-grandmother, Sadrunissa, Sir Afsar’s eldest child.’ Burrimummy is pointing to a sharp-featured woman. She is captured off-guard by the camera while adjusting something gauzy over her head, a gesture beautiful women in India use to bring attention to themselves. ‘Sir Afsar made her marry Mumtaz Yar Jung, just because he was a companion to the Mir Osman Ali Khan, the VIIth Nizam of Hyderabad. Mumtaz was old enough to be her father, married with two grown daughters the same age as Sadrunissa. Unhappy all her life. My grandfather tried to impress his second wife with his close relationship with the Nizam, walking her through the Nizam’s terraces where mountains of pearls were washed and laid out in the sun to dry, and keeping her in a grand house with a zenana, even driving her in the Nizam’s Rolls Royce Silver Ghost Throne car. None of that grandeur meant anything to my grandmother because she could never get him to divorce his first wife.’

‘This is Mumma, my mother and your great-grandmother. Shortly after this photo was taken, her grandfather, Sir Afsar, got wind of a plan by the Nizam to abduct her for his harem and so he married her off in a proxy ceremony.’ She was a teenager in the photo in a cream, puffed-sleeve Victorian dress, her hair wild and wavy, sulking as if she’d rather be elsewhere. ‘The grand Begum of Savanur. She was sulking because Sir Afsar brought her back from boarding school in England on her sixteenth birthday.’

I can’t connect this with Mumma – obese, without teeth in my greatuncle’s home in Bangalore’s old city.

‘She was brilliant, too, you know, Poppet, and athletic – fenced, rode, played tennis. She was the first Indian woman to be sent to boarding school in England. She felt duped by that proxy marriage because they let her think she was marrying the richest man in the world, the Nizam, but when she was asked to sign her acceptance, she saw my father’s name. She’d never heard of this minor state and kicked up a fuss. She refused to sign, so Sir Afsar signed on her behalf. Sir Afsar married her to the Nawab of Savanur. She was forced.’

‘So much forcing,’ I say.

Sir Afsar looks thin and mean. I don’t like him. I don’t say that he makes me think of Burrimummy, the way she is constantly forcing the servants to do things, forcing me not to fidget, forcing me to be helpful to Angel.

‘Mumma’s the real Angel,’ I say, as she returns from the bathroom.

Angel makes a crying face.

Burrimummy’s eyes narrow with a look that makes my heart race.

‘Poppet, stop talking rot.’

She shifts to the edge of the bed, gathering Angel into her.

I tell Angel it is my turn to sleep next to Burrimummy.

‘You lost your turn when you didn’t come home last night,’ Burrimummy replies.

Angel lies between us, like an ocean I can’t cross.

‘Where did I come from, Burrimummy?’ Angel asks.

A muscular chalky arm encircles her.

‘My baby, my Angel, six farishtas, brought you from heaven on a gold chariot on their wings. They put you in my arms. You had skin like milk, so I called you Angel after my own mother. I called you Sadrunissa after my grandmother. I called you Puppa after Father. I asked Allah for you, and that’s how He sent you, my tiny mite.’

Angel sleeps in the crook of Burrimummy’s arm while I lie alert. She changes her tone when she speaks to me. ‘DON’T fidget, Poppet. Go to sleep. You’ll be ill if you don’t rest in the afternoons, and your mother will be at my throat.’

I touch her face. Soft as roses. I want her to love me.

Burrimummy is now reading Georgette Heyer, and I ask her how I was born. She looks outside at the monkeys around the mango tree.

‘You’ve seen how baby monkeys are born, haven’t you? From the mother’s gaaf.’

I feel ashamed, not knowing what I’d done wrong.

TWO

St. Lucia, 2016

In the air, through thick clouds on the rocking plane to St Lucia, I feel like a late guest at a party. The Nobel Laureate had invited me to see him for the weekend about my writing. I wonder whether he was just in need of an acolyte to buoy him up. Perhaps I’m good at the trope: woman, a worshipper of language, sensitive to rejection.

The invitation followed an interview I did with him when the university at St Augustine honoured him. I was in the audience, craning my neck to see him, eager to hear him read from his latest work, as if he had answers to all things.

Walcott didn’t fuck up the audience or professors as V.S. Naipaul had done, in this same hall, with his supercilious, truncated, pained answers. He hadn’t, like Naipaul, sneered at questions from students. ‘I don’t understand’, or said, ‘Schoolchildren shouldn’t study Literature.’ No, he was all theatre, with his solid build, the leathery, slashed skin of a seafarer, the darting green eyes of a sunning iguana. He held back from being intimidating by being alert, alternately jokey and silent.

Amidst knowing literary laughter (and the academics collectively holding their breath when a student got something wrong), he grinningly skirted peccadilloes, turned the audience into his private performance, and said the things he always did: ‘The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself’ and, ‘The Caribbean is full of visual surprise.’ He took his time, comfortable with saying nothing we had not heard before.

Afterwards, he patiently signed old books and new copies of his latest volume, unlike Naipaul, whose wife Nadira, in the same venue last year, shrieked, ‘No old books, only new books’, like a hawker in a bazaar in Bombay.

I sat in the second row and sent a message to his daughter, Anna. Trinidad being a small place, our social circles overlap; our children go to the same school.

‘Will your dad grant me a brief interview?’

During a break, Anna said, ‘Dad wants to see you.’

He gestured towards a chair next to him, still signing books, seeming not to notice that I was sitting at the head table facing an audience and flanked by him and the Dean of the University. I couldn’t look ahead at the audience, nor could I be seen staring at Derek.

I still have those photos of me wearing a baby-blue cotton dress, showing an abundance of cleavage. It wasn’t intentional. Squirming like a trapped insect on the stage, unable to explain my presence there, I touched Derek lightly on his back.

‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’

‘Go away and have a sandwich while I decide what to do with you,’ he said. Off I trotted, obediently.

He still hadn’t learned how to speak to women, despite the damning book in which allegations had been made against him – an extract from which had damaged his reputation in England when he was a candidate for the Oxford professorship of poetry in 2009. In the book, called The Lecherous Professor, published in 1984, Walcott had featured in four pages of a general account of sexual harassment on American campuses. He had allegedly taken a student from his poetry class to coffee and asked her how she made love with her boyfriend. She had reportedly said, ‘Why should I tell you? It’s none of your business.’

He allegedly persisted. After all, he was the professor and the gatekeeper of poetry. Did he imagine this was his due as man and poet? ‘Would you make love with me if I asked you?’

‘No,’ had insisted. ‘No way. You’re married. Don’t you love your wife?’

Walcott, thrice-married, had reportedly replied, ‘Love has nothing to do with lust.’

There was a complaint to the Dean. How this was settled was not revealed.

I knew I should leave, but I stayed, as I always do, having learned from Burrimummy that patience yields approbation and sat down on the stairs in the Faculty of Literature, watching students go by.

I wasn’t sure why I asked for the interview, let alone why I waited, wondering if it had anything to do with standing by while someone else interviewed Walcott years before, or if I had begun the wrenching process of wondering why I only cared about the people who withheld their approval.

What unsaid thing could I ask him about his Nobel Prize for Literature, (and every literary prize worth having), his magnum opus, Omeros, twenty-four collections of poetry, twenty-two plays, seven books, his watercolours, essays? Faltering, I began walking towards the car park when I heard a tall black girl, with hair in cane rows, say, ‘How this man rewrite Homer’s Odyssey, for God’s sake?’ The boy she was with shrugged, replying, ‘He reach.’ The graceful girl said, ‘I just want to sit at the feet of that man on a strip of sand while he paints or writes.’ They wanted to absorb him as one would absorb sunlight. That’s why he could just sit there without saying a word.

I waited to hear from Anna in my car, parked under the scant shade of a poui tree. I put the car windows down watched the breeze sweep yellow blossoms across the path to the Faculty of Engineering.

I’d bumped into Derek Walcott in 1992 when the news was full of his triumphant return with the Nobel Prize. I had been threading my way through the Carnival Sunday crowd across the Queen’s Park Savannah at dusk, its chaotic din made worse by dust kicked up by the crowds pounding the earth in time to the music and trucks carrying the steel pans from the competition stands back to the pan yards. The traffic fumes mingled with perfume from the cannonball tree, a vine with rosebud-shaped flowers throwing out the combined scents of lilies, ylang ylang, freesia, jasmines – so extravagant it could have emanated from a maharaja’s wedding chamber.

I nearly tripped and fell over the roots of the cannonball tree, spreading out beneath the cracked pavement, when a large, veiny man’s hand firmly grasped my arm. It was Derek Walcott.

‘If you’re not red, you’re dead,’ they say on these islands, meaning that men like him outstrip all other men, in appeal, in imagined sexual prowess. Men like him – with that mix of European and African blood – have the reputation of getting any woman they want. A moment with him had been enough to confirm this. He was all charge, all force, deep voice, well built, skin like molasses in milk. I thought of his poem ‘The Schooner Flight’, where his poetic alter ego, Shabine, claimed it all. (‘I have Dutch, nigger and English in me, / and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.’)

‘Derek Walcott?’

My question didn’t warrant an answer.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘That is, apart from someone who’s not looking where she’s going.’

‘Freelance journalist. The Trinidad Guardian. Congratulations on the Nobel.’

‘I once wrote for that paper,’ he said.

I knew that. As did V.S. Naipaul. As did Naipaul’s father.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Tobago.’

He laughed. ‘With that accent? What is it, continental? Indian English?’

Across the road, two ghostly shapes among the magnificent seven colonial mansions stood sentry over the Savannah – which some call the most giant roundabout in the world: Whitehall, with coral stone from Barbados, built in the style of a Venetian Palazzo by a cocoa planter in 1904 and home to the prime minister’s office; and next to it Stollmeyer’s Castle with its turrets modelled on Balmoral Castle. He was waiting to hear what I would say next.

‘I’m doing freelance work, covering the Steelband competition in the Savannah for the Government Information Unit.’

He pounced quicker than light with a question: ‘Information expert? Well then, can you multiply 25,435 by 234?’ He’d laughed uproariously and disappeared into the dust. A full twenty-four years ago, this vanishing left me unsettled, longing to hold onto that vast ebullience bubbling from his Himalayan brain, erupting into its full laugh so much like my grandmother’s it gave me a jolt. It was a depressing thought that so much time had passed. Twenty-four years, and, in some ways, nothing had changed for me.

My mobile phone rang. Anna said the interview was in an hour. I dawdled some more, looking at the students wandering the campus without seeing them, watching the dry leaves as if they could mop up something in me, and eventually drove down the highway, past cane fields, factories, and the hills where gangs warred for guns and drugs, to the Hyatt in Port of Spain where Derek was staying. It was close to the cruise ship arena where tourists gingerly stepped out for a few hours, rifling through the vendors’ goods: beads, T-shirts, stewed mangoes. The five-star hotel, with its pool on the thirteenth floor seemingly dropping into the sea, water on water, was the conceit of a former prime minister.

Sigrid, his partner, ushered me into his suite, gave me her hand briefly, then dashed away, the way women do when their children are occupied, to complete necessary tasks.

Close up, without the prop of the wheelchair, slumped on the sofa the way Burrimummy used to be in the nursing home, squinting with one eye, made him look sneaky rather than imposing; he was not the same man I’d met on the Savannah. There were sagging hollows under his eyes, his face was streaked, the very flesh on his face seemed folded. I didn’t want to look down at his legs in the wheelchair.

I wondered if I’d embellished the details of that first meeting. Now, twenty-four years later, there was a quiet in him I hadn’t seen before, even something tremulous – the tremulousness of a majestic creature in fall. All this was reflected in his latest volume of poetry, White Egrets.

I sat down on the plush hotel couch, and he said, ‘I don’t know what you want, but it better be short.’ With an unexpected familiarity and a hint of apology, he said, ‘I’m diabetic.’ I could see it. He would rest his head on his hand, as if falling asleep, like Burrimummy. He had death on his mind.

‘My sister died last week – my twin brother last year. Friends are dying. I might be next.’

Still, I went in for the kill: the persistent bitter aftertaste of having to withdraw from standing for Oxford’s Professorship of Poetry in 2009, after the resurrection of old charges of sexual harassment. He looked blank.

In the anonymous smear campaign against Walcott, up to a hundred Oxford academics were sent photocopied pages from the book which included the sexual harassment claim made against him by a student at Harvard in 1982. Widely felt to be the favoured candidate of the Oxford English faculty, he’d resigned from the race on 12th May 2009. There was outrage amongst the black intelligentsia in Trinidad. People said Ted Hughes got away with pushing women to kill themselves with his infractions; that white professors had been getting away with far worse allegations of actual misconduct.

Did he feel he was attacked because he was mixed-race? I knew he never thought of himself as black. He prided himself on being an amalgam of continents, but he didn’t escape the label in the west.

He behaved as if he hadn’t heard any of that question.

Instead, he said, gazing out at the ocean, ‘This is the first time I’ve had this view, watching the ferry coming in. It’s beautiful. The sea, the sunset, the docks. These are “touristy” things, but, to me, these are beautiful experiences. The ocean, the street, the shore, and the scenes below us have the ebullience of life that Paris lacks. All these people from everywhere in the world, the Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, African, in this tiny city. Something is bound to ferment. For me, it’s elation.’

I thought that at least he was not fucking with my head as he did in 1992. I saw a poet who was satisfied he had achieved immortality. But as a man, afraid of his failing body, fearful of dying. I felt our conversation was more about his wanting a witness than about poetry.

He handed me an early copy of his book White Egrets, with its milky-grey cover. In the heartbreaking crack in his voice, in that weathered face, I scented fear. I knew from experience he could be as dismissive and intimidating as Naipaul, even more commanding, but by the end of the interview, he had shed his crustacean exterior.

He watched me speculatively. I knew I should baulk, but I didn’t. I’d seen his poetry and wanted to see the dirt – how he approached the struggle of being human among the scattered bones, excrement, selfishness and sordidness and violence of life, and how he reconciled this with his constant search for light in words, in the landscape, in faces.

Not long after, he called me.

‘It’s me, Derek. I’m in Trinidad still. In my daughter’s home in Petit Valley.’

‘Derek. Gosh. It’s you. How are you?’

‘The interview was okay.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I didn’t say it was terrific.’

He must have relished my discomfort and the brief ensuing silence that would have unnerved me had I been younger. But, by now, embarrassment has become a dull instrument.

‘What else do you write?’

‘I’m writing about my grandmother,’ I said.

‘What about her?’

‘She lived in the embers of the Raj in India and died in Trinidad. As a child, I subsumed myself in her and needed to push her out onto paper. I thought it a way of finding or freeing myself. You know what Naipaul said about going back and back and back.’

‘Is it done?’

‘Maybe,’ I said miserably. ‘I’ve got some chapters.’

‘Send me them. No, bring it to the opening night of my play.’

The following night, my husband Sadiq and I arrived in the amphitheatre, the crowd buzzing around Derek in anticipation of a revival of his play, Dream on Monkey Mountain.

Shaved, groomed, and dressed in a crisp shirt, in his wheelchair, Derek appeared like a child being taken on an outing. He laughed the hardest at the typically West Indian bon mots, quips, fuck-ups. How he loved these islands.

He gave me a sour, side-look but didn’t speak to me. I applauded and laughed hard to show my appreciation. I was anxious; had I done something wrong?

Afterwards, in the foyer, I thanked him. He took the envelope with the first three chapters with a blank look, which I suspect he had mastered to punish people, wanting his acolytes to beg for a bone. He pointedly ignored my husband’s outstretched hand. We slunk away.

A week later, the phone rang.

‘Come to St Lucia for the weekend.’

*

On the approach to St Lucia, the small plane swoops, drops, quivers, and the seatbelt light comes on. I close my eyes to the seraphs of blue Caribbean clouds, its phosphenes and clutch the seat even while wanting the plane to rock harder. Take me away from myself. Take me back.

THREE

Saturday. My birthday. I watch through the open window to see Angel in the garden holding a basket as Burrimummy clips roses with her scissors. Pale sunshine and a dewy rainfall keep them blooming year-round.

I’m ten today. Burrimummy got me out of bed with a kiss on my forehead. ‘May Allah and his Prophet bless you. Come, I have something to show you.’

I had rushed ahead of her to the kitchen. On the table, covered in cheesecloth, was a cake in the shape of a doll wearing a pink rounded ball-gown covered in sugary, silver dots. You had to turn it around to read ‘Happy Birthday, Poppet Darling’. I stared at that cake throughout breakfast, too excited for toast and even Angel couldn’t resist touching it.

I only noticed I didn’t get a present when Burrimummy said, ‘I’m sorry, Poppet darling, but your father didn’t send me any money for a present for you. Your mother is expected.’ I am sure Mummy will bring presents. Will it be a dress, a doll, or an outing at Koshi’s, where we’ll have ice cream together?

When Burrimummy and Angel are back from the garden, we are summoned to our bath.

The ayahs fill the boiler with water, prepare the bathroom, and lay out towels. We are allotted three towels each: one for the face, one for the hair and one for the body. If they touch one another, there is the danger of transferring germs. The full bath that we have once a week will take all morning. Khaja oils my hair. Burrimummy oils Angel’s hair. I feel the oil running down my scalp and to the sides of my ears, Khaja’s skinny hands in my hair.

I gaze at the four of us in the triple dressing-table mirror in an enclave of Burrimummy’s bedroom. It is flooded with light from the white walls of the stairs leading to the terrace. Angel’s eyes are closed, her thick glossy head moving with Burrimummy’s massage. Burrimummy says, while plaiting Angel’s hair in two French braids, that the one thing she’s learnt from South Indians is that coconut oil keeps the hair black, soft and thick. I am ashamed my plait is thin compared to Angel’s.

‘Put on more oil, Khaja,’ I hiss. ‘More.’ I’m hoping, as it trickles down my neck, that it might make my brown hair black like Angel’s.

After giving Angel her bath, Burrimummy sends her to stand outside to dry her hair.

The water from the boiler tap is again close to boiling point.

It’s my turn. We are in a dark bathroom.

I am guided onto the low wooden stool in the bath. Two buckets, thoroughly disinfected with Dettol, one with cold water, the other with hot, are placed next to the wooden stool. Khaja fills a silver jug with water. Burrimummy says pour, and Khaja pours warm water over me. The ayah passes shampoo to Burrimummy. As Burrimummy tips my head back and rubs her strong hands into my scalp, I feel the warm soapy water on my face. The room steams up. She kneads my back as if my body is covered in rubber, showing me specks of old skin.

‘Khaja, aur pani,’ she orders.

Warm water glides over my back.

When Burrimummy kneads her own skin, she resembles a Rubenesque figure, her white skin coming up in stripes of bright pink. Mine goes a dark berry-brown.

I close my eyes, feeling like liquid gold at Burrimummy’s touch, when Angel howls from the garden, ‘Red ants, red ants!’

Burrimummy rushes out. Khaja follows. I sit on the stool, waiting, soap from my hair running down my face. Angel stops crying. I see Burrimummy holding Angel up, Khaja bending down, wiping ants from her feet, Angel burying her head in Burrimummy.