AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Ira Mathur and my memoir Love the Dark Days was published last year.

I was born in an army hospital in Guwahati, the heart of India’s tea country. My earliest memory is being in my ayah’s arms, following my grandmother and several soldiers on a hunt for mushrooms in the rainforest.

The exact address of where in Trinidad and Tobago I come from would be: The Museum, The Fort, Scarborough, Tobago. The museum annexe, our first home, became the heart of my childhood.

I live in Woodbrook now. But I think I am more ‘Bago to the Bone than Trini.

In the Indian Army, my dad was always moving all over India.

My brother was sent to boarding school at eight and my sister lived with my grandmother.

I was a very dreamy short-sighted child who spent a lot of time alone, making up stories.

My father sometimes got his orderly to play Ludo with me. Soldiers complained I cheated at snakes and ladders.

My mother said I was a very naughty child so, occasionally, I was sent to Bangalore to live with my grandmother. I adored her. She stuffed me with stories of the British monarchy and the Indian Raj, Sufi poetry and Arabian nights and her own family.

I have a family, my adult son Kiran and daughter Anika and my husband Imshah.

My beloved parents are still my best friends.

My sister also lives in Trinidad and has two children.

Always I was being admonished for my manners.

My adolescence in Tobago was the happiest days of my life, go-carting down the hill with my brother and his best friend Warren (now Dr Wheeler), the Yips, the Khourys, the Maharajes and the Serranos.

Moonlight picnics at Pigeon Point, parties at Mt Irvine, cocoa estates, overnighting at Charlotteville, watching fishermen bringing in early-morning catch.

There was always the sea in our hair and the salt and sun on us.

There was one tiny disco in Tobago but my brother wouldn’t let anyone dance with me or my sister. Some smart boy once asked my mom if she minded if he danced with me.

She said, “Yes.”

He said, “Yes, I could dance?”

Mom said, “Yes, I mind.”

The day a classmate called me a c---ie I was puzzled.

I said, with a strong Indian accent, as I had just arrived, “But I don’t lift loads!”

She called me crazy and we became best friends.

I didn’t realise c---ie was a pejorative term, just thought people were using it incorrectly.

I went to at least five primary schools in India and Tobago before going to secondary school at Bishops in Tobago.

And Oakdene School in Buckinghamshire, England.

I did my masters in journalism at City University, London.

We were raised around religious texts, the Quran from my grandmother and the Gita from father – but no rituals were involved. They were just part of the books we read in abundance, English classics, Urdu poetry, Archie comics (!).

I don’t believe in a standard God. I have an amalgam of beliefs that help me through tough times: karma exists; it’s clever to recognise how insignificant we are as humans.

We need to surrender to know we are no