Spice up your life: preparing first time in India
My father’s family left India for England via boat in 1960. It’s 2025 and I am flying to my ancestral land for the first time.
A few weeks ago, I announced to my friend: I’ve been thinking. Maybe I’ll never go to India. Maybe I had no business going to nose around the ghosts of my ancestors. Surrendering to this new idea, I pinned up an old map of India in oranges, tans, browns, greens and blues with an old photograph of my family - grandad, nan, dad, aunt - on top of it. Strangely, in the similar colour palette as the map, as they’re all dressed in blue denim and wool in front of the brown walls, orange pine fireplace (nan still has the same one today) and orange crystal hanging lamps of their small Birmingham living room. It must be around 1976, judging by my dad’s Abba hair, flares and doe-eyed late teen youth.
Finally, I tacked the back of an old phone cover to the map - my friend Emi, my only other British-Asian friend living in Copenhagen, had typed out SPICE UP YOUR LIFE on her label printer. The sudden, accidental collage seemed to summon something just days later: a very interesting invitation to India leaving in three weeks’ time.
Depending on when they land, my work appointments can feel fortunate and luxurious, unnecessary and yet absolutely vital at times. I spent so many years fearing travel and being away from home, but something shifted in my late twenties and I began to live rather morbidly, picturing an early death and trying to squeeze in my experience in and imprint on the world as tightly as I could. But I was still uneasy about the idea of going to India and passed up a number of opportunities over the years.
At the end of last year, I published a travel essay in Vogue, which was probably my most personal to date. Though I’ve written about ancestry, feeling unmoored, spiritual searching, and family before in my travel journalism, this felt very specifically something I should do more of. But writing about family is so hard. Writing about travel is weird, yet I’ve done it for over a decade. Here feels like a good place to start delving back on why and how I’ve done this.
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A brief history of Anglo-Indians and my family
One’s Anglo-Indianness is officially accredited to one’s paternal bloodline containing British blood, and Indian maternal ancestry. In the 19th century, cross-multiplications of generation after generation within Anglo-Indian communities were frequently topped up with British blood courtesy of soldiers and other armed forces settling with Anglo-Indian women - particularly in the Raj era between 1927 and 1949. Various European colonial blood trickled through, but Eurasian was shirked as a racist term. For example, my paternal nan Norma Joyce Bridget Pereira’s parents and grandmother were Anglo-Indian; her paternal grandfather was a British man named Fred. Same goes for my paternal grandad Noel Victor Don Bosco Pereira whose immediate descendants were all Anglo-Indian and from Goa - save for his Portuguese grandfather, whose identity is unknown apart from being from Lisbon and landing where most Portuguese did in India just before the turn of the 19th century - reflecting the extended history of colonisation in India.
My grandparents and my father were all born in eastern India’s steel city of Tata Naga, or Jamshedpur, in the 1930s.
The golden ticket
About my chance to fly suddenly to India after announcing dramatically that I’d probably never go. No one is more surprised than me when I change my mind, in fact it happens so much that people expect me to. This does happen less as I mellow and age - and it’s less about spontaneity and commitment than about staying true to my values and mental capacities. People think I’m a flighty, worldly person, but I actually spend greater swathes of my time quietly, alone, wondering what the hell anything is/means.
I meet so many people in my job and placings, timings etc can sometimes give way to some incredible coincidences and chances. Via a rainy meeting across oceans with an editor, followed by a triggered memory of a publicist dialogue last year, and a quick phone call with an enthusiastic person from someone in Delhi and someone else in London, I found myself faced with the opportunity to travel to India on an aviation research mission. Part of me always feels like a fraud when I get sent away on assignments but I still throw myself into the role studiously and one hundred percent in ways I didn’t actually do at school or university.
It was an exclusive invite to explore the history of Air India, formerly Tata Airlines. Part of the Tata magnate family included its industrialist Jamsetji Tata founder, who also founded the steel capital my grandparents were born in. My grandmother’s father, an Anglo-Indian who worked for Tata Iron and Steel Co, was a draughtsman and a semi pro boxer named Barney. They were a happy family, as my nan tells it.
My grandfather and his side’s history isn’t so clear, and what is, isn’t so happy. I’ve always felt wrong using the term ‘lucky’ to characterise a chance experience or situation that gives me happiness, relief or satisfaction. It goes hand in hand with the banal notion of ‘everything happens for a reason.’ We justify, we weigh up and conclude, we reason with reason. Our attempt at - and need for - justifying every single high and low throughout life’s mangled path discounts the unlucky time, the unlucky people. It grants us even more power in our privileged position, and breaks the freedom of the less fortunate.
Aunt Lucky is someone I never met and never will. She was my paternal grandfather’s little sister. They grew up in India with an abusive father, and eventually, after a violent marriage, she ended up doing what a lot of abused women do to make a living. She died making that living, of syphilis before she made it to 40.
As luck would have it, there’s no way of determining the reasons behind one’s good or bad fortune. I’ve never understood the life I’ve come to live. No fortune teller has told me. As I perceive it, fortune is an entity itself, something having its wile with you, chewing you and spitting you out: whether it's into a fluffy cloud, the sewer, or somewhere where normal and unremarkable in between.
I still found it hard to imagine visiting the place where my ancestors suffered and passed without ever having had the chance to leave. Travel? What is travel?
Stranger on a train
I try to call my nan each week and we chat for quite a while. I’ve been less good at calling since life sped up my end, and life slowed at hers. I try to plug her for stories on her youth and the move from India to England. In regards to travel, the trains she took to and from Jamshedpur. the steel industry capital of India, to Calcutta where she attended a boarding school Entally Convent along with her female siblings, were the extent of her adventures. The brothers went to a monastery school called Don Bosco’s.
Until a conversation this week, however - I was unaware that my grandparents had met via my grandad’s sisters (one being Lucky), who attended the same faraway boarding school as my nan. It warmed me because not only am I now picturing the scene of them meeting in passing on a train - they weren’t introduced properly till some dance back in their hometown that summer - and that they met through her friend and his little sister feels strangely parallel to my own current love life constellation.
My nan says the train journeys could take over a day, and speaks fondly of the journeys back home in particular. At some point, my nan and grandad left school, got jobs, officially went on a date and got engaged. Grandad would whip them around town - to Chinese restaurants, their favourite, on his red Yamaha Indian Scout motorbike. ‘Twin cylinder, 1400cc!’ I have my grandad recorded saying, like I knew what the f that meant. I wish I’d recorded what he said more often before he passed away suddenly in 2018, following his final holiday - to visit me in my then-new home of Copenhagen just before Christmas 2017.
On the Suez
On the boat to England, women and children sailed on a separate half of the ship to the men. My dad was just two years old, and my nan was also pregnant with my aunt and recalls being quite aggrieved at being separated from my grandad for what felt like the first time. Noel and Norma were just 23 and 21 years old.
The first trip my grandparents ever took overseas was this voyage. Out of then Bombay, the only time they’d seen it. And out of the Indian Ocean, down the Suez Canal and through the Med, into the Atlantic docking at Southampton. My nan describes pulling into the coastal city and being shocked at the concrete and pigeons. They carried one suitcase each; their entire life’s belongings that would set up their life with ten others in a house in Birmingham, before they could afford their own house - the one my nan still lives in.
‘Me and your dad - he was so little!’ she laughs, seeing my face crumple at the idea of my own dad as a toddler baby. All she remembers is bad food, bad stomachs - she was heavily pregnant - stormy waters, and a mad woman who sat rocking in the shared cabin occasionally opening an umbrella and staring out from underneath it. ‘Did you chat?’ I ask my nan.
‘No. I wanted to get little Gordon away from her,’ my nan replies severely - followed by her signature chuckle. She’s always had naivety and slight suspicion, paired with a wicked sense of humour.
P&O Ferries stands for Peninsular and Oriental (Steam Navigation Company) In trying to work out which boat my grandparents, dad and unborn aunt took from Bombay to Southampton, I found that P&O ran voyages including the SS Chusan, SS Nevasa, and RMS Windsor Castle with journeys taking around three weeks.
My first ever journey to India was a flight, on which I’d been given a business class seat on a flagship A350-900, and took around eight wee hours. They invented time travel between 1960 and now, I think.
Whilst I won’t make it to Tata Nagar or Calcutta on this trip, my next installment will detail what unfolded. I was chatting with an Indian Uber driver in London about my excitement for the trip last week. ‘They’ll treat you like a queen with them green eyes!’ he remarked.
‘I think I’d rather be invisible,’ I replied. Travelling invisibly would be such a superpower, I think.
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reading
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom At The End of the World
Ted J Kaptchuk’s Chinese Medicine
Erica Jong’s Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones
Nussaibah Younis’ Fundamentally
Joy Chase’s Embers
watching
Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby) Revisiting this classic in my 30s hits hugely different; the nuance and romance between these two, the hysterical helicopter mum and the singular breaking of the fourth wall just floored me this time round. I sobbed and can’t stop playing the Cat Stevens soundtrack.
The Ruling Class My new housemate is thankfully as down for weird old films midweek as I am. Peter O’Toole - what an inspiration - plays Jesus in this serious romp. It’s a lurid, musical, dark mediation on class systems and mental health and has a talking fox scene that I’m convinced inspired Antichrist and Fleabag’s talking foxes.
Herdsmen of the Sun (Werner Herzog) Halfway through this at jetlag got me. It so far features the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen and makes me want to make more documentaries around the world in a way that isn’t voyeuristic or shiny. If you want to watch my little films on Khmer New Year and Inti Raymi, watch here.
Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh) There’s no other film like this, and yet it almost feels like it was made in 1999 not 1989. James Spader is sublime, Kit from Pretty Woman excellent too. This film has sparked a performance art idea I’m developing around life coaching and videotapes at my new loft space Atelier Craster.
Sister Midnight (Karan Kandhari) A Mumbai-set body horror produced by BFI that feels very Warp; a comment on female freedom and desire. Watched this the day before I flew to India just to even more remind myself how massive and so-many-things the country is.
White Lotus I pretend it’s industry research. This season is so boring; I miss the Sicilian sex workers and lightness of the other seasons. I find it so strange that the show makes people want to go to Four Seasons as it just comes off as bland and far from a vibe. Do love me the odd Four Seasons though; especially the time when they printed out a picture of my internet nemesis Alexandra Pereira and her husband and son on a cake in my room. More on that in future post.
Meghan Markle’s show I’m only human. I recently moved out from living with my dear friend Will, and since the pandemic remote co-views of high brow viewings, we keep up a nice tradition of watching utter shit together with a full commentary. Meghan delivered, and it was a nice throwback to our Cork roadtrip listening to Prince Harry’s audiobook.
listening
Finally, I have my first review on Vittles coming out soon which I’m really excited about. Other recent work of mine I’ve enjoyed writing are this interview with Emile Saba of Ashtar Theatre in Palestine and a first-look at this Okavango Delta village hideaway, in the shadow of Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills.