by Eleanor Wood
I finish my run unsatisfied, with a sense of curiosity about what’s on the other side of the fence.
Present Day
I head back to the room to be greeted with the daily routine that will become very familiar to me over the next few weeks. My nan and Rose faffing over what to wear to breakfast.
Anything they tell you about vanity going out the window after a certain age and how liberating it’s going to be? That is utter, utter bullshit. And actually, I’m glad it is. I think there’s something heartening about being in one’s late eighties and still really caring about looking nice.
Nan and Rose have both brought more clothes with them than they could possibly wear. There are different shoes to go with each outfit, a variety of day and evening bags, always a pashmina ‘just in case’. Little cardigans that go with particular dresses. Lipsticks in shades of coral and pink that are indistinguishable to me, but apparently very different. Necklaces with coloured glass beads that go with particular trousers, plus the inevitable matching earrings.
Then there are the patterned sundresses that they have both stockpiled in various colours from the market in Spain, which they inexplicably call ‘floaters’. There is much discussion about floaters, as they each have an identical collection and want to avoid matching.
‘Rosie, are you going for a floater today?’ reverberates regularly through the adjoining rooms.
‘Dot, I’m going for the yellow floater today. So don’t wear yours!’
Incidentally, the housekeeping staff clearly think that my camp bed is for a small child and that there are in fact three people staying in the room. I am fine with this as we start getting extra bottled water and a third more of the luridly coloured marzipan sweets every day that we never touch, plus three pairs of slippers, which can only be useful.
The housekeeping staff are extremely zealous. Every day my flip-flops and trainers (the only shoes I brought with me, unlike Nan and Rose) are lined up on a mat. Pretty bookmarks are inserted into each of my stack of holiday paperbacks. Nan can’t find her phone charger for three days because it has been so efficiently tidied away.
I can’t help but feel they must be baffled by the sheer volume of stuff that Nan has brought with her. It’s like she’s moved in permanently. She was up until gone 4 a.m. on our first night, just hanging up her clothes. There’s a sarong that matches every different swimsuit, and a corresponding pair of sandals and various items of jewellery.
All of this means that we won’t make it to breakfast before 10 a.m., ever.
‘What do you think I should wear today?’
At first, I reply in the same way I would reply to this question from any friend.
‘Pfft. Who cares? Anything!’
There will then be a long explanation about exactly how wrong I am. How she can’t wear the turquoise floater because she wore something too similar yesterday (what would people think?). She’ll try on the pink top with her white Capri pants, but decide the proportions don’t work at all, and the purple top is probably better. This necessitates a change of bra, as it absolutely must match in case a millimetre should peek out.
My first instinct is eye-rolling boredom and mild piss-taking. I wear the same trousers every day for the first week in India, alternate the few T-shirts I have brought and have the same bikini on underneath at all times. I only brought one and just wear it when I get in the shower every evening to give it a rinse, then hang it out on the balcony overnight. Boom. Job done.
I soon realize how wrong this attitude is. Lack of vanity is fine for me but it’s not a virtue. As Nan tells me repeatedly – and Ann, who has a level of vanity similar to mine – ‘of course you can just throw on anything when you’re young; you have to make more of an effort when you get to our age’. She’s right, and I also really like how she doesn’t differentiate between thirty-six and seventy-two, both qualifying as ‘young’.
So, anyone who tells you that you lose your vanity with age is lying, and I’m glad. It seems to me that the inverse is true. A certain type of vanity increases the older you get, which makes perfect sense.
So much of ageing involves a dispiriting feeling of invisibility. I’m feeling it already, although I have actually always prided myself on being something of a niche market. When I was younger, I always had to have something to mark me out as not caring, to show that I was out of the race and not trying to be ‘pretty’, so please don’t bother judging me by those standards: if I wore a nice dress, I’d stick an ugly brown Oxfam granddad cardigan over the top; if I’d made an effort with my eye make-up, I’d make sure I didn’t brush my hair. I have always had an absolute horror of looking ‘overdone’, of trying too hard. I grew up in the Nineties, when ‘try-hard’ was the worst insult you could say to a person, and I’ve never grown out of it. These days, it feels like the pressure is on all sides – we must be ‘body positive’ and practice radical self-love while looking effortlessly sexy at the same time.
As I’ve got older, I’ve accepted that I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. I certainly don’t expect well-groomed men in expensive suits to go for the woman with tattoos, who cuts her own hair and doesn’t shave her armpits.
But with age I’ve started noticing that the pool of men is getting smaller. I sometimes see boys with skinny trousers and guitars strapped to their backs, and wonder why they aren’t noticing I’m doing my sexy face at them. Then I’ll remember that I’m probably fifteen years older than them and the whole thing would be grossly inappropriate. And don’t get me started on the seemingly huge numbers of men exactly my age who have set their online dating age range as, say, twenty-five–thirty-two. I tell myself I wouldn’t want to go out with those guys anyway, but it’s still insulting.
My mum, who is conventionally and unarguably attractive, says the worst thing about ageing is the steadily diminishing numbers of heads that turn when you walk into a room. I can understand that. It’s depressing.
This is why I love the fact that Nan and Rose are convinced that people are looking at them closely enough to care whether they wear the same dress twice in a row for breakfast. And it’s true: these things come full circle. Nobody wants to be invisible, and being a middle-aged woman feeling like nobody notices you is shit. However, I soon realize that everybody is actually paying attention to the two fabulously dressed octogenarians in the restaurant who are laughing loudly, wearing jaunty outfits and having a better time than anyone else.
Trite though it sounds, I think it’s about confidence. In her own more understated way, Ann also busts out some pretty sexy outfits in the evenings – nobody wears a black shift dress like she does. She has a next-level attractiveness that would be impossible in a young person. It’s based on her imperiousness as much as anything physical.
There comes a time when there is no point trying to look younger, or smaller, or anything other than you are. You don’t have the energy to hold your stomach in or squeeze into jeans half a size too small. And so it becomes about what it should have been all along – comfort, fun, maybe a bit of self-expression.
Establishing the confidence of Ann and the exuberance of Nan and Rose is definitely something I aspire to. From now on, I want to get a head start and try my best to feel like that already.
I start saying things like ‘yeah, the purple top with the sparkly bit on the neckline really does look cool with the white trousers’ and make sure I tell them they look nice, as it’s very well deserved. They do and I’m glad. I thought it didn’t matter but it really, really does.
December 1947
When partition happened, the family didn’t literally have to flee overnight: partition happened in August and they left in December. They had to leave, but they had choices due to Chum being in the Army Medical Corps: there were boats going to Australia, Canada or the UK. They only chose the UK because Chum’s father owned a house in Manchester (where none of them had ever been, of course). He sent a telegram to let them know that the whole family would be coming shortly.
They had not foreseen how violent and dangerous the region would become at this time, amid escalating tensions between the newly divided states of India and Pakistan, and the understandable antipathy towards the British.
My nan was born in Rawalpindi, which after partition was in Pakistan. After the family settled in Pune, further south in India, the children were sent away north to boarding school in the mountains for the majority of the year. Nan’s school was in Murree, in the foothills of the Himalayas, over the new border in Pakistan. When partition happened, she was mid-way through the school year.
At the time of partition, the rest of the family were sent from their home in Pune to Deolali, where they would be transported to Bombay to take a boat to the UK. This was a transit camp for British troops who had to leave India, and was known for its unpleasant environment and extreme heat. Incidentally, this is where the term ‘going doolally’ comes from, as apparently that place was enough to make people go mad. Deolali was in India, but Nan and her eldest sister Clara were over the border, and travelling between the two was fast becoming not only extremely inadvisable but pretty much impossible.
Clara had finished her medical training and was working at Nan’s school as the school nurse, so they were together, but somehow they had to get back into India to meet the rest of the family. Their passage on one of the last ships out of India was booked; if they had not arrived in time to make the crossing, they would have been left behind.
Fortunately, my auntie Clara was, without question, the absolute staunchest of all the staunch women in my family. She was eight years older than Nan and they were closer than any sisters I have ever met in my life. I suspect that one of the reasons for this was that Clara literally saved her little sister’s life in 1947.
Murree was quite cut-off and there were no trains available. Clara managed to get them a lift in a mail van as far as Rawalpindi, where they were then able to get onto a train to Lahore. This was still within Pakistan, so the next step involved them having to get over the border into India.
They joined a military convoy to take them over the border from Lahore to Delhi. This was unpleasant – three days and pretty much sleepless nights stuck in the back of an army truck – and highly dangerous. Clara wouldn’t let Nan look outside, and to distract her from the dead bodies that were piled up by the sides of the roads, she read to her from True Story magazine. It specialised in real-life romance stories; Nan can still pretty much recite them from memory, she heard them so many times. She remembers lying down in the back of the truck at night and hearing protestors shouting about freedom for Pakistan and getting the British out, explosions ringing in her ears.
The truck was being driven by Indian soldiers who looked after them, but would have been in great danger had they known they were harbouring British girls in the back. People attempting to travel from India to Pakistan, and vice versa, were being slaughtered indiscriminately. Getting over the border was, as Nan puts it, ‘mildly hazardous’.
‘I can remember the shouting. All sorts of patarkas [firecrackers] going off. It was a horrendous time. People were being killed. Slaughtered. It was quite stressful for us, really. The driver and co-driver would feed us, secretly getting food for us while we had to stay in the back of the truck. We couldn’t get out in case we were spotted. Who knows what would have happened if we had. We just had to hope we would make it through and join up with the rest of the family.’
Once they were in New Delhi, they were able to take a train to Deolali, where the rest of the family were anxiously awaiting news of the two girls. Chum walked back and forth to the railway station every day, hoping they would be on one of the trains. There was no way at this point of even knowing if they had survived. Boats out of India were leaving and time was running out, but they were only leaving if they could all leave together.
‘They were even killing people on the trains. We were actually very lucky to make it. Our parents were very worried. So many trains were derailed, people were climbing up and travelling on the roofs. The roofs were covered with people. Everyone was trying to get over the border, both ways. So sad. It was the saddest thing.’
During the train journey, Clara made Nan wear a headscarf and keep her head down. Clara was dark and could just about pass for Indian; my nan was blonde and most definitely could not. By this point, not being spotted was a matter of life and death. Nan was a pretty sheltered and naive sixteen-year-old and didn’t fully grasp this, as Clara told her to shut up and kept reading her stories from the same True Story magazine.
When they finally arrived in Deolali, Nan can still remember how much Chum cried when he spotted them getting off the train.
‘I could cry myself, when I think about it now, so many years later. He put his arms around us, crying, “my girls, my girls.”’
On seeing him there waiting for them, Nan remembers feeling overwhelming relief at having reached ‘safety’, even though they still had to get out of India. The family travelled together from Deolali to Bombay, where they were booked onto one of the boats leaving India for the UK. They stayed in army quarters until they received the signal to leave.
Now the family just had to get out of India, and ‘back’ to the UK, where none of them had ever set foot in their lives.
Present Day
Before we arrived in India, my nan informed me there would be only one rule for the duration of our trip: none of us is allowed to leave the hotel grounds alone. Being the most mobile of our travelling group, I couldn’t help but feel that this was directed largely at me.
Having grown up in India, Nan is visibly at home from the minute we arrive there. However, having been brought up in a little bubble of Britishness behind gates and walls, there are some outdated ideas that became ingrained that she has brought along with her. She was brought up to be respectful and somewhat wary of everything beyond the gates – of the people, the food, the water. Most of the time, I am grateful for her knowledge, but there are times when I suspect her caution to be unnecessary.
Also, I try to tell her that some of the questions that she deems to be essential to our survival may be unhelpful.
‘Is it clean here?’ she asks in every restaurant we go to. ‘Is the kitchen nice and clean?’
‘Nan,’ I say. ‘They’re hardly going to tell you it’s dirty, are they? You’re just offending people.’
‘Nonsense, darling. You always have to ask.’
Where we are staying, on the coast outside the small village of Benaulim, is very safe and friendly. As we settle into a routine, I begin exploring by myself.
Immediately outside the front gates of the hotel, there is a little parade of shops and several stalls set up around them. Hardly anybody seems to come out this way – I am surprised at how many of the hotel residents seem to stay permanently within the hotel grounds. They stick by the pool, putting out their towels to secure their favourite spots before breakfast. When I wake up early for my daily yoga class, I can see them trotting across the lawns.
So when I begin venturing outside of the gates, I become something of a curiosity. I guess the shopkeepers don’t realize how broke I am: how would they know that my grandmother is funding this luxury hotel stay and I have left behind a house that is literally falling down?
There are two Ayurvedic medicine and massage centres. There’s a tiny convenience store, just like a corner shop at home but with far more exotic wares, which boasts a revolving, flashing sign proclaiming it a ‘superstore’. This never fails to delight me. There are a couple of restaurants. There are the ubiquitous packs of dogs, milling around and calmly minding their own business.
I am soon on chatting terms with pretty much everyone in this little mini village, and it starts a routine that I keep up daily, when we’re in the area. When we go off on outings or travelling around, and I return a couple of days later, all of my local friends wonder where we were. They worry that I’ll leave without saying goodbye (or without making some last purchases before I
go). They constantly make me promise that I won’t go home without remembering them. I duly promise.
‘Keep your promise. Look at me. You are my friend. Keep your promise,’ they all say.
The women who work on the stalls are very friendly, as are their ridiculously cute children, who hang back shyly and stare at me. I’m sure they must be brought out as some sort of marketing ploy, and it works. The stalls all sell pretty much the exact same things: sarongs, Indian dresses and scarves, bits of jewellery, fridge magnets in the shape of Shiva and Ganesh. That sort of thing.
Of course, on my first outing, I get carried away and buy loads for far too much money. A red kaftan that I barely take off for weeks on end. Random beads, scarves and fridge magnets for all my friends back home. Then I feel guilty whenever I come back and don’t do the same every time.
Beyond the stalls, there are two roads. One goes into town, which is a walk that Ann and I do together whenever we feel like a change of scene and stretching our legs. It takes about forty-five minutes or so along dusty busy-ish roads with no pavements, to get into Benaulim. In Benaulim there is a bustle of people and mopeds and various animals, along a few fairy-lit roads. It is small, but at first it is dizzying. Everything just feels so different. The colours, the smells, the sounds, the people. It feels like it’s all turned up to eleven. On my first visit, I found myself rooted to the spot and awestruck while everyone else rushed around me, with places to go and things to do. Luckily, a kind breakfast waiter from our hotel spotted me and helped me to find my way.
In the opposite direction from the road into town was a smaller dirt track that looped back around to the beach. Everywhere led to the beach, basically. If you take any road, you would just eventually end up much further along the same beach.