we gave her much cause to. I think the last straw for her was when we almost became the centre of a hostage situation. One evening, there were helicopters patrolling above our house and policemen surrounding our street. We were playing in the yard and these two men shouted at us to open the gate. We were about to do so when the Polish man ran over, picked us both up, and dragged us inside. I kicked, bit him and screamed because that was what Miss Brown had told us to do if men unexpectedly picked us up. Maggie came running down to see what the commotion was all about and the Polish man told her that we were about to let some escaped convicts who had been on the news into the house.
‘You kids can’t go on like this. I know it gets boring but I thought you’d have more common sense than to let strangers in, especially armed ones,’ she yelled. ‘You know it’s not safe.’
It wasn’t safety that we wanted, it was excitement, adventure, something out of the ordinary to happen, but it didn’t.
After that day, she decided that we were definitely a hazard and thought it was probably better if we went up to her flat after school and the days she was there on our school holidays. We could only stay at Maggie’s until seven in the evening and then she would have to go to work. Sometimes, when we came home and Maggie wasn’t in, she would leave One Eye in our bedsit as a substitute, but when she was around she cooked us stew and played with us. Maggie became all things to me, I could talk to her about almost anything.
Upstairs in her home, Maggie taught me how to sew and to knit. That birthday, she made me a rag doll named Kirstin. ‘Here you are, Maya, darling, to replace the one you used to have, Jemima, wasn’t it?’
‘Jemina,’ I corrected her.
Maggie handed me a parcel. I unwrapped the package eagerly, waiting to find a rag doll with long blonde hair but found a creepy-looking thing with black button eyes sewn too closely together. Her black hair was everywhere and she looked like a mad woman who wanted to go out on the rampage. I made a comment about the hair but Maggie said that was fashionable and the current style. I didn’t take her to bed but left her on the sideboard where she stared evilly at me. Maggie insisted that we spend weeks just making different outfits for her. The first thing I made was a large pink hat that covered her eyes. ‘It’s too low, Maya, darling, you can’t see her eyes,’ Maggie said. Then I was resolute that she have a home of her own so she wouldn’t have to glare at us. We got her a cardboard box and made her a house that looked better than ours. I shut her up in there and allowed Satchin to use it as a garage and store all the cars he was collecting, turning Creepy into a parking attendant. He was ecstatic.
Satchin and I also bonded further that summer through the raids we carried out on Mr Patel’s shop. We didn’t do it because we were poor; Amma often bought us the kind of things we stole. For me, it was the excitement of being Satchin’s young accomplice. I would distract Mr Patel by asking him to weigh a quarter of cola cubes, and then Satchin would stuff some Wotsits up his jumper and cough, which meant that I had to then change my mind about the sweets. We would then run out of the shop as fast as we could and laugh uncontrollably. If we were lucky, there would be a packet of Smarties up there too. My brother and I would never have got caught, but one day Maggie overheard us arguing over the stash. The brown Smarties were the source of much contention and, as I threw the whole packet at Satchin, she came in, made us put on our coats, and marched us both into Mr Patel’s shop to confess.
We stood there defiantly, following the procedure that we had rehearsed many times, that was, to say nothing or claim complete innocence. After five minutes, the word police was thrown about a few times and Satchin, forgetting our pact, just broke down and cried. So then some slave labour arrangements were made and we had to help Mr Patel and his wife brush the floors and clean out their storerooms. Maggie made out like we had stolen the Crown Jewels or something, saying that she was extremely disappointed in us and didn’t think we’d sink to such depths. After going on and on she finished by saying that she would not tell our mother as it would break her heart to know that we had been thieving, but I wished she had, then at least Amma might have had some reaction towards us.
I missed Amma desperately, or maybe I missed the idea of having a stay at home mum who baked cakes and read stories, who shopped and gossiped. I felt sad in the mornings when I followed the other mothers taking their children to school and I wished mine was there too. Looking back, I never felt like I really had her and that she was mine, but then I don’t think I ever gave her a chance. It wasn’t because I didn’t love her, for it was hard not to want to love her, it was because I was terrified that she too might be taken away. So I used Maggie as my security and clung to her so she couldn’t throw us on the streets if anything happened. On the days Amma was around, I found it hard, as I also didn’t want to be reminded of India, the good times or our culture, because things were bad enough without all of that to deal with as well. I felt we were forced to make a choice and I chose the easiest route, which was to forget the place and the culture that I was from.
At prayer time, when Amma woke us to pray to the Goddess, she would just manage to say the first few words, ‘Aum, namo Guru Dev …’ when I would suddenly cut in with the Lord’s Prayer which Maggie was helping me with. It probably upset Amma but there was enough confusion without praying to some foreign God. When she prepared for Onam and told us some king story, I interrupted her with the story about the king who asked his three daughters how much he loved them. And as she decorated the bedsit for Onam, I made no comment at the intricate petal design she put on the doorstep and trod all over it with my dirty shoes. When she cooked Indian food, I insisted on something else. I wish I had never done these things but I was desperate for her to shout at me, to react, to tell me that she didn’t love me, that she couldn’t cope with it all and that she was going too, but she never did.
On the days that things got really tough, I locked myself outside in the toilet and talked to Achan, begging him to make things a little better from wherever he was. I knew he was always consistent and listened, as things always improved after I spoke to him. That is how I knew that, despite him not being physically present, he was around us. Sometimes, I would ask Satchin if he spoke to him to make things better for him, but Satchin would get really sad. One day he became very distressed and said maybe he was to blame for what had happened to our father because of what he had done to Fluffy. There was nothing I could say to that as I remembered what the astrologer said about the rules of karma so I decided not to bring up the subject again and thought that maybe he did die because of the bad things we did. Maybe that’s what happened if we did really bad things. I would talk to Achan alone and I asked him many times if it was this but he never said anything. Other times when I talked to him, I would tell him what we had done in the day, because somewhere I was sure he could hear, even if he couldn’t answer. But my greatest wish was that I would wake up and he would come and find us in that house and take us away, saying that there had been a terrible mistake and that he hadn’t died.
I cannot easily put into words why I told my children that their father had died. To save them from the lies that inextricably led to the fact that the only person he could have possibly loved was himself, I suppose. Not only this, but what do you say to two small children who are about to lose almost everything? Self-worth is fragile enough as it is, isn’t it? What was I supposed to tell them? The truth? ‘Monu, Mol, your father has had enough of responsibility and if that is not enough, he has another family, he’s gone, left us.’ Maybe there are one hundred shades for explaining truth, a spectrum of light to dark, depending on the vulnerability of those who have to hear it. Things are not always so clear-cut, they are not either black or white, life just isn’t like that. I know my mother would disagree, arguing that there is one immutable truth and it is just a question of facing it. My husband left, just as my own father did, without saying a word. Not even goodbye.
My mother had a series of miscarriages before giving birth to me. She did not really care if I was a girl and she would have to find a dowry for me to marry. I think my mother was happy to prove to her in-laws and everyone else that she could bear children. She was elated when she found out she was carrying me and did not hide her bump like all the other women in the village