Anita and Me - Extract 2

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"Beti, if you want something, in future, you must ask us. Don't we give you enough? Do you feel deprived?" I shook my head sorrowfully. I desperately wanted to eat my jam tarts.

"You have heard the story of the boy and the tiger?" I shook my head again and snuggled into the crook of his arm. I loved his stories, I loved the timbre of his voice and the places it took me, effortlessly. "Once a young boy was gathering wood in the forest and he decided to get some attention for himself. So he shouted to the village that he had seen a tiger. All the villagers came running with axes and torches and lathis and when they got to the forest, there was no tiger. 'I did see a tiger,' said the boy. 'It must have run away...' The next day..."

I felt cheated. This was The Boy Who Cried Wolf! I had read it hundreds of times in my Golden Anthology of Fables and Tales. Did he think I would swallow an old story dressed up in Indian clothes? I closed my eyes, pretending to listen, and imagined myself in lime hot pants and blonde hair singing "Let's Go Fly a Kite" whilst Hughie Green sobbed unashamedly into a large white hanky and the clapometer needle shot off the scale and flew out of the television, shattering the glass..." And the tiger had eaten the boy. All that was left was one chappal. So you see, if you tell lies too often, no one will believe you when you are telling the truth."

"I'm sorry, papa," I said, almost meaning it. I left a suitable pause and then asked, "Papa? Were you in the war? Like Mr Worrall?"

"No, beti," he laughed. "I was only nine when the war started. Besides, it was not really our war. We were fighting different battles..."

"What battles? Did you have a gun? Did you..." I was going to say "ever kill anyone", but I remembered mama's expression when I asked for a rendition of the rickshaw murder story and thought better of it. "...Did you do anything dangerous?"

Papa hesitated a moment, looking at me protectively. I could see he was rifling through possibilities, wondering how much he could give away. There was something leonine in his expression, that long noble nose and steady eyes, that tiny teardrop shape above his lips, replicated exactly in my face. I stroked my finger into the well beneath my nose. I liked looking like him. "Well, there was one occasion..." He checked the kitchen quickly, making sure mama was still occupied, "when we lived in Lahore, just before Partition..."

I knew something about Partition, about the English dividing up India into India and Pakistan, and of some people not knowing until the day the borders were announced, whether they would have to move hundreds of miles away, leaving everything behind them. However, I had fallen upon this information inadvertently, during one of papa's musical evenings.

Papa's mehfils were legendary, evenings when our usual crowd plus a few dozen extra families would squeeze themselves into our house to hear papa and selected Uncles sing their favourite Urdu ghazals and Punjabi folk songs. Once the mammoth task of feeding everyone in shifts was over (kids first, men second, then the women who by then were usually sick of the sight of food), the youngsters would be banished to the TV room. A white sheet was spread in the lounge upon which the elders sat cross-legged, playing cards, chatting, until someone would say, "Acha Kumar saab, let's go!" Then papa would take down his harmonium from the top of the wardrobe, unwrap it from its psychedelic bedspread and run his fingers over the keys whilst the other hand pumped the back, and it coughed into life like a rudely-awakened grumpy old man.

Meera Syal, Anita and Me (Fourth Estate, 2012)