Free Out of India by Michael Foss

weighed down under the shadows and gloom of those long tunnels that seemed both a part and a cause of our despair. Often they led to mystery or to forbidden territory, to locked doors, dead-ends or notices saying PRIVATE and NO ENTRY . In these places we took to talking in whispers, haunted by dreads that we could not resolve into the clear light of day. Other children had homes. We had the corridors, or certain specified rooms left unlocked and void, with too many hard chairs arrayed around the walls and threadbare carpets that spoke of penury and dearth. Outside, the playground mocked us with memory of childish uproar. We threw stones, or squabbled half-heartedly, or dug in the sandpit, too dejected to make anything better than holes.
    At night, still whispering, we told each other stories, trying to console ourselves with fantasy as we awaited the oblivion of sleep. We were the sole occupants of ghostly dormitories. The other beds were stripped bare, the place smelling of pine-scented disinfectant. The plaster statue of Christ at the end of the room was shrouded in a white sheet. In the night, I woke often, drifting in the vast darkness. Going to the lavatory I stumbled back bemused by the dead rows of beds. My heart thudded at the increasing muddle in my head. Where was my bed? I could not find my way and curled up like a foetus onto the nearest mattress. When we opened our eyes we saw morning light dribble through the big east window onto the shrouded Christ standing as the sentinel of the day.
    Set apart in this way, we began to value our difference from others, even though we suffered for it. How had it come about? We were refugees clinging, in this sepulchral world, to a faint memory of heat and light in the India of our birth, though in my own case the memory of the pastwas so unformed that I had to take it on trust from my elder brother. From time to time this conviction was confirmed by a sudden surprise, such as the arrival of a box of Turkish Delight as a gift from our father in the desert. The spongy jelly, perfumed with attar of roses and covered with a light dust of sugar-powder, seemed to us like a promise deferred.
    Such a promise was thin fare to live on. In the meantime I was realizing the worst fears of Sister Mary Bede. My temper was becoming uncontrollable. I was a little liar. I began to wet my bed. I was a naughty child and God did not love me.

FOUR
Banana Man
    G RIPPED BY RELIGIOUS discipline, both in term-time and in holidays, I grew used to a daily life of small dangers – arbitrary and sneaky punishments, petty meannesses, little mind-controlling tyrannies. We all became wary, recognizing the signs of trouble: the stealthy swish of long black robes, the click of rosary beads; the harsh intake of breath and the command to stop at once , followed by an enraged middle-aged face thrust towards us, framed by the weird bonnet of the wimple; then the scolding, in a fierce undertone, often accompanied by a good shaking – ‘ stupid child, naughty boy, wicked little nuisance’ – which led to the rap of a ruler across the knuckles, or banishment to stand in a dark corner, or the long trek to an early bed without supper.
    After a time I no longer knew that life could be otherwise. I was inured to misery, which became endurable so long as it avoided actual bodily pain. Life was bleak, but were not greyness and emptiness the colour and the shape of the times? ‘Some little boys,’ Sister Mary Bede used to say with heavy emphasis, ‘will never learn when they’re well off.’ I acknowledged what seemed to be the facts, hard though they were.
    So I accepted the judgement of the nuns on my own behaviour, being forced, in the usual manner of childhood, to navigate by the only moral map available, the one licensed by guardians and teachers. But I came to feel, inloneliness and the peculiarities of our situation, that I was marked out, set apart from the common lot. It was a distinction of a kind, and I