PROLOGUE
The first time I saw her again, I felt as if I’d been hit.
I have heard that said a thousand times, but I had never until then understood its true meaning: there was a delay, in which my memory took time to connect with what my eyes were seeing, and then a physical shock that went straight through me, as if I had taken some great blow. I am not a fanciful person. I don’t dress up my words. But I can say truthfully that it left me winded.
I hadn’t expected ever to see her again. Not in a place like that. I had long since buried her in some mental bottom drawer. Not just her physically, but everything she had meant to me. Everything she had forced me to go through. Because I hadn’t understood what she had done until time – aeons – had passed. That, in myriad ways, she had been both the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
But it wasn’t just the shock of her physical presence. There was grief too. I suppose in my memory she existed only as she had then, all those years ago. Seeing her as she was now, surrounded by all those people, looking somehow so aged, so diminished . . . all I could think was that it was the wrong place for her. I grieved for what had once been so beautiful, magnificent, even, reduced to . . .
I don’t know. Perhaps that’s not quite fair. None of us lasts for ever, do we? If I’m honest, seeing her like that was an unwelcome reminder of my own mortality. Of what I had been. Of what we all must become.
Whatever it was, there, in a place I had never been before, in a place I had no reason to be, I had found her again. Or perhaps she had found me.
I suppose I hadn’t believed in Fate until that point. But it’s hard not to, when you think how far we had both come.
Hard not to when you think that there was no way, across miles, continents, vast oceans, we were meant to see each other again.
India, 2002
She had woken to the sound of bickering. Yapping, irregular, explosive, like the sound a small dog makes when it is yet to discover where the trouble is. The old woman lifted her head away from the window, rubbing the back of her neck where the air-conditioning had cast the chill deep into her bones, and tried to straighten up. In those first few blurred moments of wakefulness she was not sure where, or even who, she was. She made out a lilting harmony of voices, then gradually the words became distinct, hauling her in stages from dreamless sleep to the present.
‘I’m not saying I didn’t like the palaces. Or the temples. I’m just saying I’ve spent two weeks here and I don’t feel I got close to the real India.’
‘What do you think I am? Virtual Sanjay?’ From the front seat, his voice was gently mocking.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I am Indian. Ram here is Indian. Just because I spend half my life in England does not make me less Indian.’
‘Oh, come on, Jay, you’re hardly typical.’
‘Typical of what?’
‘I don’t know. Of most of the people who live here.’
The young man shook his head dismissively. ‘You want to be a poverty tourist.’
‘That’s not it.’
‘You want to be able to go home and tell your friends about the terrible things you’ve seen. How they have no idea of the suffering. And all we have given you is Coca-Cola and air-conditioning.’
There was laughter. The old woman squinted at her watch. It was almost half past eleven: she had been asleep almost an hour.
Her granddaughter, beside her, was leaning forward between the two front seats. ‘Look, I just want to see something that tells me how people really live. I mean, all the tour guides want to show you are princely abodes or shopping malls.’
‘So you want slums.’
From the driver’s seat Mr Vaghela’s voice: ‘I can take you to my home, Miss Jennifer. Now this is slum conditions.’
When the two young people ignored him, he raised his voice: ‘Look closely at Mr Ram B. Vaghela here and you will also find the poor, the downtrodden and the dispossessed.’ He shrugged. ‘You know, it is a wonder to me how I have survived this many years.’
‘We, too, wonder almost daily,’ Sanjay said.
The old woman pushed herself fully upright, catching sight of herself in the rear-view mirror. Her hair had flattened on one side of her head, and her collar had left a deep red indent in her pale skin.
Jennifer glanced behind her. ‘You all right, Gran?’ Her jeans had ridden a little down her hip, revealing a small tattoo.
‘Fine, dear.’ Had Jennifer told her she’d got a tattoo? She smoothed her hair, unable to remember. ‘I’m terribly sorry. I must have nodded off.’
‘Nothing to apologise for,’ said Mr Vaghela. ‘We mature citizens should be allowed to rest when we need to.’
‘Are you saying you want me to drive, Ram?’ Sanjay asked.
‘No, no, Mr Sanjay, sir. I would be reluctant to interrupt your scintillating discourse.’
The old man’s eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror. Still fogged and vulnerable from sleep, the old woman forced herself to smile in response to what she assumed was a deliberate wink.
They had, she calculated, been on the road for nearly three hours. Their trip to Gujarat, her and Jennifer’s last-minute incursion into the otherwise hermetically scheduled touring holiday, had started as an adventure (‘My friend from college – Sanjay – his parents have offered to put us up for a couple of nights, Gran! They’ve got the most amazing place, like a palace. It’s only a few hours away’) and ended in near disaster when the failure of their plane to meet its scheduled slot left them only a day in which to return to Bombay to catch their connecting flight home.
Already exhausted by the trip, she had despaired privately. She had found India a trial, an overwhelming bombardment of her senses even with the filters of air-conditioned buses and four-star hotels, and the thought of being stranded in Gujarat, even in the palatial confines of the Singhs’ home, filled her with horror. But then Mrs Singh had volunteered the use of their car and driver to ensure ‘the ladies’ made their flight home. Even though it was due to take off from an airport some four hundred miles away. ‘You don’t want to be hanging around at railway stations,’ she said, with a delicate gesture towards Jennifer’s bright blonde hair. ‘Not unaccompanied.’
‘I can drive them,’ Sanjay had protested. But his mother had murmured something about an insurance claim and a driving ban, and her son had agreed instead to accompany Mr Vaghela, to make sure they were not bothered when they stopped. That kind of thing. Once it had irritated her, the assumption that women travelling together could not be trusted to take care of themselves. Now she was grateful for such old-fashioned courtesy. She did not feel capable of negotiating her way alone through these alien landscapes, found herself anxious with her risk-taking granddaughter, for whom nothing seemed to hold any fear. She had wanted to caution her several times, but stopped herself, conscious that she sounded feeble and tremulous. The young are right to be fearless, she reminded herself. Remember yourself at that age.
‘Are you okay back there, madam?’
‘I’m fine thank you, Sanjay.’
‘Still a fair way to go, I’m afraid. It’s not an easy trip.’
‘It must be very arduous for those just sitting,’ muttered Mr Vaghela.