by Eleanor Wood
‘We can just share!’ I suggest.
‘We cannot,’ says Nan.
Rather than agree to share the vast king-size bed with me, Nan asks if an alternative sleeping arrangement can be found. The staff tell her they can sort it out immediately.
And this is how I end up spending the forthcoming weeks in what is widely regarded as the second-best hotel in all of India (Nan tells me with good authority that the Oberoi is slightly nicer), sleeping on a child-sized camp bed.
What the fuck have I done?
December 1947
Imagine Glasgow, in January. Pretty fucking cold, right? Now imagine it if you had only ever lived in India for your entire life and you didn’t even own a winter coat. Or a pair of tights.
My family originally emigrated from the UK to Rawalpindi in India, in the nineteenth century, when my great-great-great-grandparents moved there to build railways.
My great-grandmother, Dolly, was born in 1905, technically a third-generation immigrant. She did not set foot in the UK until she was forty-two years old, where she had to start an entirely new life. As I remember her, she was a tiny but very spirited old lady in a flowered housecoat. She was definitely staunch.
Dolly lived until she was ninety-seven, vocally hated my Doc Martens when I was a teenager and always beat me at Countdown. She had a creepy picture of Jesus, bleeding far too realistically in his crown of thorns, on her bedroom wall that we were all frightened of. We all lived in fear of her asking us to ‘just nip upstairs and fetch my handbag for me’ because nobody wanted to deal with Jesus. He almost definitely had eyes that would follow you around the room.
Dolly was married for the first time to William James, who was by all accounts not a very nice man. She had her six eldest children with him: Clara (the staunchest woman I have ever met), Rose, Dorothea (my nan), and Bill, plus two others who died in early infancy.
Rose told me her abiding memory of her biological father was that she wasn’t allowed to sit on his lap as a child in case she somehow spoiled his perfectly pressed trousers. He was a dandy, a philanderer and, reading between the lines, a bit of a dick.
In 1944, in a bold move for the time, Dolly left him for Chum (whose real name was Samuel, but everyone called him Chum – I guess because, as I remember, he was basically the nicest man in the world). He was also younger than her and very handsome. I remember him as a dapper gent with slicked-back hair, who could play the harmonica, had a lovely singing voice and adored children. Whenever he won at cards, he would split his winnings between the kids.
William James, on the other hand, shook his teenage daughters by the hand and never saw them again.
Anyway, Dolly took the children with her and she and Chum had two more: Ann and Sam. They remained evidently and very sweetly in love until death did them part – Chum when I was sixteen, Dolly when I was twenty-one.
They met in Rawalpindi, then lived for a time in Lahore – both of which were in the north but are now in Pakistan – and settled in Pune, which is further away in the south, near Mumbai. The family lived a pretty charmed life in British India. It was a life built on very problematic colonialism, but I can’t deny it sounded like a good time.
‘We treated our servants very well. They adored us,’ was the sort of thing I would hear Dolly say. ‘They all cried when we left.’
They didn’t realize they were subscribing to an oppressive regime; it was the life they were born into. Like a lot of other British people in India at that time, they were living a better life than they would have been back home. They didn’t think to question any of it.
Yes, it was a life of servants and hanging at The Burt Institute (white people only), going to dances and putting on plays. Basically, they pretended they were in Britain; so much so that everyday life sounds like it was some sort of Merchant Ivory film. It was all afternoon tea and croquet on the lawn, and Cook asking what the menu and seating plan should be for supper this evening, madam.
The small children were brought up by ayahs, whom they adored. At six, they were sent away to an English-style boarding school in the mountains, where they would spend nine months of the year.
For the other three, they were spoiled rotten at home. The servants would bring them chota hasri (‘small breakfast’), which was served in bed and followed by burra hasri (yep, ‘big breakfast’). They would be brought tiffin tins of curry and rice by a bearer for lunch, followed by a grand afternoon tea on the lawn, and a full ‘English’ dinner. No wonder my grandmother says she was quite a podgy child.
The family’s household staff consisted of the aforementioned ayahs, a cook, a sweeper, a gardener, a bearer (whose jobs included laying the table and washing up) and a bishti (or ‘water bearer’, whose job was to carry water in a goat skin on his back).
Nan’s best friend was the cook’s daughter, even though this was slightly disapproved of on all sides. Nan was the naughty one. She spent most of her time hanging in the servants’ quarters, speaking Urdu with them and generally making a nuisance of herself. While I don’t think this was her taking some sort of political stance on the upstairs/downstairs divide, rather just the result of her chatty nature, it does mean that she’s hung onto more of the language and culture and still considers herself more ‘Indian’ than her siblings.
Partition happened in August 1947, the end of British India and the division of the land into India and Pakistan. It was messy and awful and shameful. Over a million people died and millions more were displaced.
By December 1947, the family would have to flee their home in India. Despite considering themselves very much ‘British’, they had never set foot in Britain. And so they prepared to go ‘back’ to a country they had never been to, as refugees with nowhere to live. And, inconveniently, none of them had ever even owned a coat …
December 2016
My nan is my mum’s mum, and it’s funny that I should end up finding out so much about that side of the family, as it is actually my dad who got me interested in our family history.
There have been very few discernible upsides to the events of the past few years, but my relationship with my dad is possibly the biggest one. We’ve always got on, but we have never been as close as we are now.
I used to think my dad and I were totally different, probably because I take so much after my mother. My mum and I look alike, we have identical handwriting, our voices sound so similar that people can’t tell us apart on the phone. If my mum is going through something, I feel as if I am going through it myself, and vice versa. Somewhere along the line, I’m pretty sure there was a psychic cord somewhere that never quite got cut the way it was supposed to.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t pick my dad out of a line-up. My sister has his blue eyes, freckles and teeth, but I got nothing. As a teenager, rather insultingly to both of my parents, I used to ask my mum if she was sure my dad was my real father. Was there any possibility that she had somehow got this wrong? This was mainly inspired by – having watched Empire Records – wanting to be just like Liv Tyler, who had famously only discovered as a teenager that Steven Tyler from Aerosmith was her biological father. This situation sounded rather glamorous to me.
My parents split up when I was eleven and both married other people extremely quickly afterwards. My sister and I would go to stay with my dad, who now lived in our house with my stepmother and two young stepbrothers, every other weekend. I was moved into a converted bedroom in the cellar and we’d all make Cinderella jokes.
I was the eldest, the independent one who just got on with it. My dad and I got on, but I was never really an adoring daddy’s girl like my younger sister was. During my teenage years, we spent much of our time low-level arguing that I (understandably, at that age) wanted to spend all my weekend time with my friends, while he (also understandably) thought that I should be making the most of the limited family time we had together. I’ve never spoken to my dad much about it, but it probably wasn’t very nice for him that I was living with my mum�
�s new husband the rest of the time, eating dinner with him five nights a week and having him help me with my homework.
My dad moved to rural North Wales when I was at university and we would mostly stay in touch on the phone. He had my stepmum, Sue, and before too long I had K, and neither of us had to worry about each other too much.
Sue died suddenly and far too young, when I was thirty. I went to stay with my dad for a little while afterwards, after the funeral, and stayed on after K and my sister had both left. I knew it was time to leave when he started asking me to do his ironing, but I was glad I could be there during that time. My brilliant stepbrother Simon then moved back home with him for a while and heroically taught himself to iron shirts properly from a YouTube video, as well as many, many other things.
From then on, my dad and I started speaking more frequently. I liked to make sure that he was OK as he was more in need of the company than before. We found we got on so well, we chatted far more than we were required to for these ostensible purposes.
K and I had just moved into our new house when my dad came to stay the night, saying that he had a date the following evening. We drank wine and discussed the new Guardian dating profile he had just set up.
By the time K and I finally broke up, Dad was engaged to Fiona, his Guardian Soulmates girlfriend. Fiona has been one of the other main upsides to the past few years, a wonderful addition to the team of staunch women in my family. Fortunately for me, she is a truly lovely person, and is the sort of generous-spirited stepmother who doesn’t find it too odd that my dad speaks on the phone to his elder daughter nearly every day, often for two hours at a time.
I now actively look forward to my conversations with my dad, and miss him terribly if he goes away on holiday and I don’t speak to him for a week. We talk a lot about politics, quite a bit about writing, generally about big ideas rather than minutiae. Surprisingly, even to me, we talk at length and in some detail about my love life.
I know there are some people who think this is oversharing, considering he is my father and all. The thing is, my dad is nosy and can’t resist asking me questions, and I am apparently incapable of answering a direct question with anything other than the truth.
The great thing for me is I have learned a lot about my father during the process. He often punctuates my tales of dating woe with anecdotes from his own life. Thus, for the first time, I am now aware of his regrets about his marriage to my mum, how he didn’t consider himself a fully functional adult until he was in his forties despite the fact that I was born when he was thirty-two, that he is now critical of his own hands-off Eighties parenting style with my sister and me, and how he felt about embarking on dating again when he was in his sixties. It’s been illuminating for us both. Occasionally I feel sad this didn’t happen sooner, but I guess a lot of people don’t come to appreciate their parents fully until they are proper grown-ups themselves.
My dad is academic by nature and loves a research project. In recent years, he has been doing the classic retirement project of investigating our family history. He assured me this is something that most people become more interested in the older they get, and the more they are confronting their own mortality.
At first, I was slightly sneery about this and opined that people are only ever keen to explore their family trees because they’re hoping they will uncover something extraordinary that will prove that they are interesting by association. For most people, surely, this was more than likely to be a disappointment. However, as time went on, I had to admit that I was wrong and my dad was right. Of course. He not only uncovered some fascinating stories about his side of the family, he totally sparked my interest in the subject. It became yet another topic that we would discuss frequently and at great length.
For Christmas, my dad made me, my sister and stepbrothers two family albums each. These are the best presents I have ever received, and the work he put into them is phenomenal. Each of us had an album dedicated to our family history, and an individual album each about ourselves.
The family album went back to 1600 and included stories I had never heard before, my favourite relative being Dennis, a pianist who played on Clacton Pier, despite having lost a finger in World War One. Apparently he had a ‘racy’ wife.
As we got closer to my own generation, and the people I actually knew, I was surprised by how emotional I found it all. This was really what inspired me to find out more about the family members around me while I was still lucky enough to have them around. I wish I could talk to my dad’s parents about some of the stories he unearthed. I can’t bear the idea of these stories – the hopes and dreams, the great loves and break-ups – being lost.
‘You should talk more to your nan and Rose about their side of the family – there are certainly some stories there,’ my dad said in passing, not realizing this would turn into a quest that would take me halfway around the world with them.
I took this idea and ran with it, embracing the idea of family stories with a zeal that some of my family began to find a bit wearing.
A few months ago, when I was staying at my sister’s house, she got out our parents’ old Seventies wedding album, which I had never seen before. I took one look at the first picture of them and burst into uncontrollable tears that didn’t subside for about an hour.
‘Oh my God, Ellie,’ my sister laughed. ‘I just thought we were going to have a laugh about Mum’s perm and Dad’s moustache.’
‘It’s just,’ I managed to gulp, ‘they really loved each other once, didn’t they? Look at them. Everyone gets married with such high hopes. They had no idea what was going to happen. They thought they’d be together for ever.’
‘What is wrong with you?’
It is testament to the work that my dad put into the albums that my famously self-contained sister did, in fact, burst into tears the first time she saw hers.
My dad had saved things that I had no idea existed. There were not only old family photographs, but also short stories I had written as a child, and my old school reports. I was extremely pleased to note that my creative writing talent had been spotted early, although my grasp of basic maths was ‘shaky’ and I was apparently ‘suspicious of new work’.
They say that all women in the end turn into their mothers. The thing is, I have basically always been my mother. As I’ve got older, I think I’ve become more like my dad. Sometimes I laugh and my mum says, ‘my God, it’s spooky how much you sound like your father.’ I recently saw a picture of myself – in the pub, clutching a full pint, and grinning broadly and crookedly – in which I am convinced I look a bit like my dad. No more unfounded Steven Tyler conspiracy theories. Seeing this slight resemblance brought me a flash of deep joy.
Whether I actually look like my dad or not is beside the point. He has, among other things, given me a mixed bag of blessings that include but are not limited to the following:
An appreciation of Neil Young
An endless appetite for red wine and crisps
Deeply held and idealistic opinions
The habit of starting a to-do list with something I’ve already done, for the sake of positivity
An interest in family history that I was convinced I’d never have.
Present Day
I wake up on my camp bed on my first morning in India and I realize that our room is beautiful. It’s incredible; probably the nicest place I have stayed in my entire life. It embodies ultimate hotel luxury: tasteful lighting, sleek wet room and stacks of thick white towels, and a bowl of fruit that never gets touched.
Back home, my house is grimy and damp and I can never afford to do any of the things to it that need doing; my commute means that all winter I only see my house in daylight at weekends, and by then I just want to get drunk or eat pizza in bed while watching Netflix.
This clean, bright hotel luxury is what my poor privileged basic bitch soul never realized it needed. I feel better already.
Best of all is the view from the balcony. The hotel
grounds stretch out for some distance: immaculate swimming pool, palm trees and hammocks, little lanterns everywhere that are lit up at night. But beyond that, there is the beach. The sea!
I am in India.
It’s early and nobody else will be up for hours, so I decide to go for a run. I am usually first up, wherever I am. Early morning is my favourite time, as long as I have no alarm and nothing I have to do. Did you know Leonard Cohen used to get up at 4 a.m. to write? He was a devotee to that half-world time between being awake and asleep. That’s why I should do morning pages but I invariably wake up too late and end up having to run to the station before managing to have a cup of coffee or apply lipstick.
On the worst holiday of my life, for my sister’s birthday, when nobody could know that K and I had already broken up, I would wake up determinedly earlier and earlier every morning, to avoid us having to look at each other with our eyes open, let alone touch. Every morning I would go out running for miles as it was getting light, crying behind my sunglasses, dreading going back and with no idea how we could possibly have got to this point.
Here, I am free. However, the hotel is a perfect bubble, and it strikes me that this must be much like how my grandmother’s life was during the British Raj. It’s all staff saying ‘good morning, madam’ and nodding politely as they water the impossibly lush plants. It’s not real life.
On one side of us is the beach and, on the other, the road into town; if you get close enough, you can even hear people chatting, mopeds whining and wild dogs barking. But it is all separated from us by a fence that runs the perimeter of the hotel grounds. There are guards posted at gates on each side; you have to give your room number to enter or exit the place, and cars are checked inside and out with an alarming level of detail.
I’m too jetlagged and too nervous even to venture a little way outside yet. I run slow laps around the hotel grounds, sticking to the edges like I’ve got some kind of Stockholm syndrome. Around the pool, the tennis courts, the spa, the restaurants. It’s already hot.