I thought of the carts pulled by the patient-looking, long-suffering bullocks; the narrow streets; the vicious, persistent flies; the bales of brilliant coloured silks in the shops, water-carriers, hungry-looking dogs, goats with bells round their necks which tinkled as they walked, country women, come in from the nearby villages to sell their wares; coolies, peasants, Tamils, Pathans, Brahmins, all mingling in the colourful streets; and here and there would be a dignified gentleman in his beautifully arranged puggree with a smattering of brilliant jewels. And in contrast the beggars. Never would I forget the beggars . the diseased and the deformed, with their appealing dark eyes which I feared would haunt me forever and of which I dreamed after my ayah had tucked me in and left me under my protective net which kept me safe from the marauding insects of the night.

Vaguely I remembered my mother tender, loving, gentle and beautiful.

I was four years old when she died. Before that she seemed to be always with me. She used to talk to me about Home, which was England, and when she did so there would be a great longing in her voice and in her eyes which, young as I was, I was aware of. It told me that she wanted to be there. She talked of green fields, the buttercups and a special sort of English rain soft and gentle and a sun which was warm and benevolent and never or hardly ever fierce. I thought it was a sort of Heaven.

She would sing English songs to me. Drink to me only with Thine Eyes, Sally in Our Alley and The Vicar of Bray. She told me about the days when she was as little as I was. She had been in the Humberston rectory then, for her father had been the rector. Her brother James had taken on the living on his death, so when my turn came to go, it was not an entirely strange place, for I felt I had been there with my mother in those early days.

Then came the day when I did not see her and they would not let me go to her because she was suffering from some sort of fever which was infectious. I remembered how my father took me on his knee and told me that we had only each other now.

I was perhaps too young to understand the tragedy in our household, but I was vaguely aware of loss and sadness, though the magnitude of the disaster did not strike me immediately. Well-meaning ladies officers’ wives mainly invaded the nursery; they made much of me and told me my mother had gone to Heaven. I thought it was a trip to a land where there would be green fields and gentle rain, like going to the hills, only more exotic, and perhaps taking tea with God and the angels instead of officers’ wives. I presumed that she would come back after a while and tell me all about it.

It was then that Mrs. Fearnley came. The same fever which had killed my mother attacked her husband who had been one of the officers. He died during the same week as my mother. Mrs. Fearnley, who had been a governess before her marriage, was very uncertain about her future and my father suggested that while she made up her mind what she wanted to do, she might act as governess to his motherless daughter.

It seemed a Heavensent opportunity both to my father and Mrs. Fearnley and that was how she came to me.

She must have been thirty-five years old; she was well-meaning, conscientious and determined to do right by me. I was fond of her in a negative way. It was my ayah who was a source of excitement to me, alien, exotic, with soulful eyes and long dark hair which I liked to brush. I would lay aside the brush and rub my fingers through it. She would say: “That soothes me, little Su-Su. There is goodness in your hands.” Then she would tell me about her childhood in the Punjab and how she had come to Bombay to be with a rich family, and how her good friend the Khansamah had brought her into the Colonel’s household and that the great happiness of her life was to be with me.

When my mother died my father would be with me almost every day just for an hour or more, and I grew to know him better. He always seemed sad. There were tea-parties with a number of people and they talked to me and asked me how I was getting on with my lessons. There were one or two children with the regiment and I would go to parties arranged by the parents and then Mrs. Fearnley would arrange for me to return this hospitality.

The ayah used to come and watch us while we played games. Poor Jenny is a-weeping and The Farmer’s in His Den and musical chairs with Mrs. Fearnley or one of the other ladies playing the piano. My ayah used to sing some of the songs afterwards. Her rendering of Poor Jenny was really quite pathetic and she made The Farmer’s in His Den sound like martial music.

The officers’ wives were sorry for me because I had no mother. I understood this as I grew older and realized that her journey to Heaven was not the temporary absence I had at first imagined it to be.

Death was something irrevocable. It happened all around. One of the houseboys told me that many of the beggars I saw in the streets would be dead the next morning.

“They come with a cart to collect them,” he said. It was like the plague of London, I thought, when I heard that.

“Bring out your dead!” But the beggars on the streets of Bombay did not have to be brought out, for they had no homes to come out of.

It was a strange world of splendour and squalor, of bustling life and silent death; and memories of it would be with me forever. Flashes of it would come back to me throughout my life. I would see the Khansamah in the market-place, a smile of triumph on his face, and I knew later that meant he was making a profit on all his purchases. I had heard the wives talking about it and telling each other the sad tale of Emma Alderston who had thought she would outwit her dishonest Khansamah by doing the shopping herself, and how the market salesmen had conspired to charge her so much that she was paying far more than the Khansamah’s ‘commission’. “It is a way of life,” said Grace Girling, a captain’s wife.

“Better accept it.”

I liked to sit in the kitchen, watching our Khansamah at work. He was big and important; he sensed my admiration and he found it irresistible. He gave me little tasters and folding his hands across his large stomach watched me intently while I sampled them. I wanted to please him and forced my features into an expression of ecstasy.

“Nobody make Tandoori chicken like Colonel Sahib’s Khansamah. Best Khansamah in India.

Here, Missee Su-Su, look! Ghostaba! ” He would thrust a meat ball made of finely ground lamb at me.

“You find good, eh? Now drink. Ah good?

Nimboo pani. “

I would drink the chilled juice of limes flavoured with rose syrup and listen to his chatter about his dishes and above all himself.

For ten years that was my life the first impressionable years so it was small wonder that these memories remained with me. There was one which was more vivid than any other.

I can recall it in detail. The sun was already hot although it was morning and the real heat of the day was to come. With my ayah I had passed through the narrow streets of the market, pausing at the trinket stall to admire its contents while my ayah had a word with the owner, past the rows of saris which were hanging on a rail, past the cavern-like interior in which strange-looking tarts were being cooked, avoiding the goats which blundered past, skirting the occasional cow, looking out for the quick brown bodies of young boys who insinuated themselves between the people, and being even more watchful for their quicker brown fingers. So we came through the market-place to the wider street, and there it happened.

There was a great deal of traffic on that morning. Here and there a loaded camel made its ponderous and disdainful way towards the bazaar; the bullock carts came lumbering in. Just as my ayah was remarking that it was time we made our way home, a boy of about four or five ran out in front of one of the bullock carts. I stared in horror as he was kicked aside just before the cart would have run over him.

We rushed out to pick him up. He was white and very shaken. We laid him on the side of the road. A crowd gathered and there was a great deal of talk but it was in a dialect I did not understand. Someone went off to get help.

Meanwhile the boy lay on the ground. I knelt beside him and some impulse made me lay my hand on his brow. It was strange but I felt something I am not sure what but a feeling of exultation, I think.

Simultaneously the boy’s face changed. It was almost as though for a moment he had ceased to feel pain. My ayah was watching me.

I said to him in English: “It will be all right. They will come soon.

They will make you better. “

But it was not my words which soothed him. It was the touch of my hands.

It was all over very quickly. They came to take him away. They lifted him gently and put him in a cart which was soon moving off. When I had taken my hand from his brow, the last I saw of the boy was his dark eyes looking at me and the lines of pain beginning to re-form on his face.

It was a strange feeling, for when I had touched him it was as though some power had passed from me.

My ayah and I continued our walk in silence. We did not refer to the incident, but I knew it was uppermost in both our minds.

That night when she tucked me into my bed she took my hands and kissed them reverently.

She said: “There is power in these hands, little Su-Su. It may be that you have the healing touch.”

I was excited.

“Do you mean that boy … this morning?” I asked.

“I saw,” she said.

“What did it mean?”

“It means that you have a gift. It is there in these beautiful little hands.”