'A Foreboding, And A Longing For Something Soft And Pretty'

We went home that holiday to a large, empty house. Sometimes Padmaja Naidu, a great friend of my mother’s, used to come and stay with us. I can’t recall if she came that winter, but we had our governess, Anna Ornsholt. Anna was the last in a long line of governesses my parents employed to make up for their frequent absence. She was Danish, and very unusual. She made us get up early and take cold showers, winter or summer. We had our daily exercises in the sun. It was she who encouraged me to spend time alone with myself and write poems. She recognised the talent in each of us and let us develop in our own way. She used to read aloud to us from newspapers and when the Germans invaded Denmark she read out the news in tears. We understood. As children, the world was always with us at home.

At school—Woodstock, Mussoorie—this marked us out as different from other children. We didn’t have a uniform, so we wore khadi. This was a rule in the family—towels, sheets, handkerchiefs, everything was khadi. We wore it as a matter of pride and even spun every day for a few minutes on a katli. But sometimes I longed for something soft and pretty, especially when I had a cold—the khadi handkerchief was so rough it made my nose very red. We went about the business of being children like other schoolmates: doing one’s homework, meeting friends, reading from the school’s large library. But it was as if a shadow hung over us, a foreboding of what will happen to my parents next. An American boy came up to me in school to ask if my parents were in jail. "Yes," I said, "because they want India to be free." Don’t worry, he reassured me matter-of-factly. "We kicked out the British, so you will be able to as well." We didn’t go back to Woodstock after the next summer. The political situation had become so uncertain that my parents decided to keep us at home in Allahabad. Nobody knew what was going to happen in the country in the coming months and years.