I was four years old when my father, with help from his family in Kenya, had enough to put a down payment on a semi-detached, two-and-a-half-bedroom house on a tree-lined road in suburban North West London. We’d swapped the lake and the park for a tarmac road and a concrete pavement and driveway, but the back of the house faced a huge playing field, and we had our own bedrooms, two reception rooms, a garage, a little garden at the front and one at the back with a fish pond, plus our first car, a Ford Escort. It was a decent enough trade.
My parents made many friends in the area. They were all young, lively couples, mainly Indian immigrants via East Africa, too, who had kids around the same age as us, mostly sons. I was one of only a couple of girls in the big group of boys, so I was a right little, what they used to say back then, ‘Tomboy’. I wasn’t into dresses or playing with dolls. I had short hair, and played card games, cricket, football, snooker and pool. We rode around on our bikes together, chasing down the ice-cream van man. We loved watching kung-fu movies, and we used to re-enact our favourite moves from WWF wrestling and have arm wrestling matches, which, although I was a skinny little thing, I often won, by the way.
My parents were an enviable young couple; my dad was six feet tall and fashion-conscious, with chiselled features, and my mother, a natural beauty, was the spitting image of the Bollywood actress Parveen Babi in her younger years.
My parents were clearly in love and lived life to the fullest. Our house was always a hub of activity with music, dancing, dinner parties, fun and games. With whatever little my parents had, they were always smiling, kind and generous, making sure every guest was well-fed and taken care of. Everybody loved coming over to ‘Vip and Naina’s’ place; they were the perfect hosts, and we were always busy with invites to people’s houses or a celebration party somewhere.
My parents even had such a great relationship with our next-door neighbours that we opened the fences that connected our back gardens on both sides so that we could easily go over to each other’s houses and hang out in each other’s gardens. There were never any disagreements. Such a relationship among neighbours was rare then and probably even rarer now.
In the summer months, we’d often pack up huge hampers of food and head to the park or drive off to the seaside in our convoy of parents and kids, spreading out on picnic blankets, eating, playing games and making merry. I guess you could say, we were living the immigrant dream…
…until…
One couple in our group had made a friend in the neighbourhood, an elderly Englishman, a pensioner, who lived alone. He had no children or family of his own, so we opened our hearts to him. He’d join us for our get-togethers, birthday parties, picnics and days out. He loved us, and we loved him, and he became a trusted part of the family, like a grandfather. He would sometimes babysit and give our parents time off, taking all of us kids out swimming, to museums or to the fun children’s attractions in London and the countryside. He always had little treats for us. And his home was full of vintage children’s toys, games, dolls and books, and his garden was a child’s dream with a Victorian-style miniature railway artfully crafted throughout the space. He had a workshop in the garden too, where he assembled and painted his trains and the little houses, animals and characters that were dotted along the tiny train tracks that ran amongst the flower beds, grass, and sand pits. We loved playing there, we loved gardening and building parts of the miniature village and railway together. The old man often picked us up on weekends or after school and either took us out somewhere fun or to his home to play.
My memories of those years are hazy, as I was only four when we first started going to his house. I have a snapshot memory of being at his house alone with him one day because I’d been unwell and both my parents were at work. He’d picked me up from school on their behalf.
I remember being naked in his bathtub, and he’s showing me a rubber duck. It’s not a comfortable memory – but that’s it. It’s as if I’ve blocked out much of those years altogether. The rest of my memories of him are because of the photographs I’ve seen of us playing in his house and garden. Perhaps somewhere, somehow, my mind doesn’t want to remember. Unfortunatley though, my brother, a year older than I, we now know, remembers everything that happened to him. He lives with the trauma to this day.
I was around eight years old when, on a family and friends’ group holiday in Kenya, we received the message that the old man had died. He’d gassed himself in his car in his garage, intentionally. His body was found after the neighbours had complained about the stench coming from his property. Sometime after his death, there was talk of the father of one of the kids in the neighbourhood being angry with the old man about something his child had said the old man did to him. The father reported him to the police. Perhaps the old man was scared of being caught and punished, perhaps the guilt had finally caught up with him. Whatever the case, the abuse was over, and so was his life.
As young children, my brother and I didn’t know the difference between right touch and wrong touch, so we never spoke about it then. In any case, the eight-year-old me couldn’t make sense of the whispers about the old man’s death. I remember feeling guilty, as if it were somehow my fault. I thought he took his life because we’d all left him and gone on holiday without him. I thought he did it because he missed us.
(Originally published on os.me on January 28, 2021)