Never ever having thought of myself as an immigrant, I realised while writing this, that in the true sense of the word, I am exactly that!

I was born into an anglicised Indian family but, happily, not like that of Judge Patel in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss [Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006], who took Anglophilia into the nth degree. We always spoke English at home and as a child I immersed myself in Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome before moving on to Dickens, Austen and Hardy. My subject at University was English Literature. When I came to London as a nineteen year old everything was wonderfully familiar - from the chimes of Big Ben to the riot of March daffodils in Hyde Park. I never felt like a stranger, like the ‘other’ - merely someone vaguely exotic and the richer for it!

Since that time I have met people less fortunate than myself, who were driven out of their homeland owing to war, poverty and political differences. They had to leave their loved ones and all that was familiar in order to make a better life for themselves and their families - in most cases they did not return to their country of birth. They face discrimination, deprivation and inequality - take for instance the young men in Sunjeev Sahota’s novel The Year of the Runaways [Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways (London: Picador, 2015)] - men who did menial, unrewarding jobs for a pittance, living hand to mouth, dogged by the very real terror of being deported. Their families had scraped together every penny, had borrowed money from loan sharks in order to send them to the West in the hope that these youths would obtain well paid jobs and send money home to support aging parents and younger siblings.

I have brought many things back with me from my home in India over the years and my mother’s shawl is one that I now cherish. My sister and I hated this shawl as children, we thought it was dreadfully dull and old-fashioned and we teased our mother whenever she wore it. The shawl belonged to my grandmother who gave it as part of my mother’s dowry and in time my mother decided I should have it. When I look at it now I realise that it is really a work of art - handwoven by a traditional shawl maker from Kashmir but as a child I was completely unaware of the skill that went into weaving it.

We always used finger bowls after dinner when I lived in India.  The little silver bowls were filled with warm water, scented with rose petals, poured by the waiting staff and we rinsed our sticky fingers. This fashion of course is now no longer in vogue but I love the flask and bowls because they evoke such wonderful memories of a carefree and tranquil time and I have them on my kitchen dresser.

I am often asked if I miss being in India and, of course, I am nostalgic about certain aspects of my childhood and teenage years. I regret that my children and grandchildren will never truly know about the life I led as a young person, the sense of freedom I experienced - ‘never know the hour of splendour in the grass and glory in the flower’ to paraphrase Wordsworth [William Wordsworth, ‘Intimations of Immortality’, in Selected Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Joseph B Seabury. New York: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1902, pp. 105-112] - to never know my Indian family as well as I do and, therefore, not feel the same love for them, and, perhaps, not to truly understand what makes me the person I am.

The aging process has been very liberating and has turned me, I hope, into Jenny Joseph’s purple-wearing old lady who has strong opinions and is unafraid to voice them [Jenny Joseph ‘Warning’, in Rose in the Afternoon and Other Poems. London: Dent, 1974, p.16]. When I look at my friends, I see feisty, outgoing women. They travel, take up new interests and acquire new skills. They are ready to take on the world and to be accepted for who they are without having to conform. This is the one chance they have to live their lives according to their rules and they seize the opportunity - a sort of gathering of ‘rosebuds while you may’ because time is flying by.