The last time I remember fainting was when I went to see my parents. I was taken to Aden to join them. My father looked like Hitler. He had the same moustache, the same jerky military ways. In my mind I called him the High Command, and in my diary I had him under the code HC. They lived in Crater.

I ran away to Steamer Point and tried to get onto a boat taking passengers to the P & O lying at anchor. The police on the quay took me home. When we arrived, my father raised his hand to hit me, and I fell in a dead faint. After several such attempts, they sent me back to India to a boarding school – for Grandfather was dead and to Grandmother I was just one of dozens of grandchildren. I did not last long in any of the boarding schools. I went to eleven, a new one each year.

At the second boarding school, the nuns told us not to pluck mangoes. But the Indian priests told the Indian Catholics that it was no sin to pluck mangoes and they need not confess. There was a gap between what the Indian priests did not consider sinful and what the good nuns thought heinous. Caught between two subversive currents, we plucked mangoes.

So the nuns decided to mortify us. They passed a string through the mangoes and tied it around our necks and sent us to class. They thought the day scholars, who did not board with us, would laugh at us. Instead, we were a sensation. At recess, we sold a bite each to anyone who came along. Result? We got ill.

At the third boarding school, they did not want us to read anything that was on the Index. This stricture did not bother anyone else at the school, but it did me. It turned reading into a crusade, a declaration of independence. Not that I did not read for pleasure; till I was fifteen, what I loved most was fairy tales. But the censorship imposed by the Mother Superior impelled me to explore such forbidden material as Dumas, father and son.

I wrote a theme on The Three Musketeers and handed it in instead of my French verbs. The Mother Superior sent for my mother, whose favourite book was of course the blessed Bible, also on the Index! But my mother was overcome by the Mother Superior’s outrage at my philandering among forbidden books. She became sterner than the Mother Superior as I stood facing them in a closed room in the school.

As I looked out of the window, I saw the cemetery with all the crosses, statuary, and memorials cheek by jowl next to the Mother Superior’s room. One inscription began, “Greater love hath no man…” I was not penitent, merely appalled by my mother’s expression. I toyed with an idea – should I expose Mother? Did she not read the Bible morning and evening? Did she not quote from it, sometimes movingly, as when she’d say something like “My children like olive trees around my table?” But then followed this ritual.

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Kneel down. (I kneel down facing the low window and the memorials to the dead.)
MOTHER SUPERIOR: Repeat after me: I promise…

M: I promise…

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Never to read a book…

M: Never to read a book… (Surprise, indignation, voice

begins to crack.)

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Not approved by Mother Superior.

M: (Sobs, sniffles, omits first word.) …approved by Mother

Superior. (Tears flow.)

MOTHER: Crocodile tears!

M: (Looking up.) Et tu.

MOTHER SUPERIOR: Mira has real feelings. No, she

has real feelings. (Kindly, very kindly.) You may rise.

M rises, not dubbed an initiate into the society of the spiritual elite but stabbed to the heart by this mother. It takes Mira years to realise that her mother is female incarnate. She has no shape or form; she is everything or nothing. She is fluid; pour her into any mould and she takes it. Set her in any group and she becomes it. Except that she is all impulse and all imagination, a child forever, to be brought up by her six children, each born at five- year intervals – with each child, she the mother again the child, reshaped and reared by the growing child, but as now, in the presence of the Mother Superior, superior to the child that raises her, by virtue of the very Presence in Front of Whom She Becomes It. Ideals and principles lie outside her nature. Shapeless as water, necessary as water, these were the good moments, but what about when she becomes pure air, beyond touch?

Lest I forget, I was that day given an imposition of a thousand lines: “I must not read anything not approved of by Mother Superior.” I learnt to write with four pencils tied together. No one can decipher my handwriting to this day – I did too many impositions.

One day, in a mood of defiant experimentation we stood, some of us, on the tennis court, in the sun, with sliced onions in our armpits. We ran up a temperature and were sent to the infirmary, stinking and in a fever, but happy to have exercised our freedom, by however tortuous a manner, to be at the place we wanted, with the choicest of our companions, away from the world we suddenly found impossible to accept.

Everyone except Billy knew this. That year there was a new teacher for us. She wanted me to ask Billy’s permission for something, since I was one of Billy’s favourites.

“I will fix it with Billy,” I said.