EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER ONE
Desire, according to my mother, at least in the context of sex, was a false friend, seriously to be avoided. Desire had brought my parents together and desire had driven them apart. Of course, my mother never said as much, because she never talked about my father. But I had long ago learnt to read between the lines of my mother’s hang-ups. The more she railed against desire, the more determined I was to escape the life she and my grandmother had planned for me: a safe life; a calculated life; a life without pain; a passionless life.
Well, I’d escaped all right, but to what, I wondered, as I picked at the julienne carrots and baby potatoes on my plate. Could things get any worse? Around me in the oak-panelled dining hall, the sounds of conversation and cutlery blurred into a background of white noise, against which the truth invaded me, uninvited and unwelcome. I was lonely.
Two weeks earlier I’d arrived in Oxford bursting with hope and enthusiasm. I was eighteen, poised on the edge of the third millennium. Oxford would be my home for the next three years, and three years is forever, when you are young. I’d come to study history, but that was of minor importance. Freedom called and with it countless pleasures, taboo in the land of the Kama Sutra, but tasted in tantalising paperbacks from Bangalore’s overflowing bookshops on Mahatma Gandhi Road. I was hungering for a relationship of my own choosing. And a link with my father’s land. As I’d watched the red soil of India fade into a memory, I’d wiped away tears of excitement and anticipation, shrugging off the idea that they might also be tears of parting grief. I’d laughed when I recalled Amma’s warning. Remember: India is your home. It has been your home since you were ten. You belong here, not in Europe. You will never be a child of the West. I was convinced that my mother was wrong, as always. The UK was to restore my heritage, to change me back into Sara Davis. When I stepped off the plane at Heathrow I had no doubts. I had returned from exile.
Like a liberated prisoner, at first I’d feasted on the sights, sounds and smells of my newfound independence. No grandmother around to threaten me with marriage. No Auntie Bina to tell me to go to temple. No cousin Sanjeev to tease me about boys. No Uncle Girish to lecture me on the need to work instead of play. No Amma to fill me with her complexes and fears. I could do whatever I wanted. But it hadn’t taken long after my optimistic arrival, for reality to paint a different picture of university life.
Reality was at this moment embodied in the meal on my plate. A formal college luncheon in honour of the new intake, the invitation had stated. Some honour. Wild Alaskan salmon and no vegetarian option. On my right a boy talked soccer with his other neighbour, his back turned to me. I smiled at the girl on my left.
‘Hi, I’m Sara,’ I said.
She looked at my plate. ‘No fish? Are you a veggie? I’m a veggie too. But fish is okay.’
‘Actually, fish isn’t a vege … ‘
‘I lived on burgers before I became a veggie. Couldn’t touch meat now. Don’t suppose the stuff from the kebab van counts, does it?’
‘I really don’t …’
‘I mean, by the time they’ve finished with it … No idea what it started out as, have you?’
‘I’m afraid I …’
‘Turkey, probably …’ She giggled. If it was meant to be funny, I didn’t get it.
The unaccustomed odour of fish, coupled with my futile attempts to break into the girl’s monologue, made me feel nauseous. I was gripped by a feeling that I’d got off the bus at the wrong stop and found myself on the dark side of the moon.
As I played with my insipid meal (how I longed for a few chillies), I faced up to my situation. Until then I’d tried hard to fit in, socialising with fellow students whose lifestyles and attitudes were very different from those ancient values inculcated in me in India. Even the way they spoke was strange to me. Sometimes their language shocked me. Some took drugs and most of them hung out around pubs and bars. The women wore short skirts that stretched my boundaries of decency. The men were still boys, preening themselves like adolescent peacocks.
In India my family connections and my rebelliousness had earned me respect. Here I was a gauche, anonymous little foreigner. I found myself hankering after the safe cell of my maternal home in Malleshwaram, a select suburb of Bangalore.
My thoughts turned to Kamala, my best friend in India. How innocent we had been, like characters in a children’s play. I missed her a lot. Yet since my arrival in Oxford I had not contacted her. I had my heart set on a different kind of soul mate. I dreamt of romance, a future seething with passion, in defiance of all that my mother had tried to instil into me.
But where was the shining cavalier, who would sweep me off my feet? Not among this lot, surely? I’d find him one day, I was certain of that. Simply a question of biding my time. Now I promised myself that I’d write to Kamala as soon as I could escape from the dining hall.
© Irene Black
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