These young women hailed from middle-class landowning families in Gujarat, west India. They grew up with wealth and status, and were now expected to live in tiny terraced houses, cold and damp with outside loos. Within weeks of my mother’s arrival to this new land, she dutifully married my biological father. The marriage failed to last six months and they separated. Concerned for her daughter thousands of miles away, my nannyma paid for my mum to fly back home to India.
