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JAMILA GAVIN
When I am asked if the Surya trilogy is autobiographical, the answer is yes and no. Yes, that I couldn’t have written it had I not been born in India into the period leading up to the Second World War, independence and partition; yes, that as a child I lived both in a palace the Punjab and in a drab flat in a war-damaged London street; yes, that music, sea voyages, schools, friends were all part of my rich Anglo-Indian experience. But no – in any accurate sense to do with the plot or events described in the books. Everything I experienced simply became material with which I could overlay a complete fantasy. As a child can turn a table into a house or two chairs into a train, I turned my life into a fiction in which any resemblance to characters living or dead is purely coincidental – as they say in the movies.
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As Jhoti stared down the road towards home, the tears fell again as she remembered how they placed the garland around her neck; how, as the hoarse chanting of prayers rose higher and higher, her father pulled her to her feet, and taking the end of Govind’s scarf had tied it to the end of her veil. Thus joined together, she was led four times round the priest and his sacred book. She had wanted to cry out, ‘Oh, Father! Are you glad? Is this what you’ve been waiting for since the day I was born? Just waiting to give me away, to get me off your hands? Do you feel liberated? Is your burden lessened? If it is, then I shall feel comforted.’
How red everything was, red as the first drops of blood which had fallen from her body. Then she knew that her childhood was over; that the next blood to fall from her body would be on the bridal bed, and the old women would be sure to come and take note, and then they would click their tongues with satisfaction as they announced that her honour was upheld and the bride had indeed been a virgin.
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