The Girl in the Shadows Read online

  Any transgression could incur a punishment. Making noise; being drowsy in the morning; praising another comrade if you liked her hair. One of the most difficult things about living in the Collective was that the rules could change instantly, so something that was allowed one day was anathema the next. It made me worried sick; there was no contentment or peace for a moment. If I’d been beaten wearing a particular outfit, I’d try to avoid wearing the same shirt and trousers again; I felt the clothes were cursed and I might be hurt if I wore them.

  But despite my superstitious efforts, I was beaten all the time; sometimes with his hands, on other occasions with a ruler or the huge wooden broom that was used to sweep the patio. Every now and then, he even made me beat myself, taking hold of my little hand and forcing it brutally into my face. Yet the most humiliating punishment was when AB took off his slipper and hit me with it; a way of displaying his contempt for me. ‘You’re not worth the dirt on my shoe!’ he would sneer. Or, another favourite: ‘You can’t qualify to eat the shit I dropped as a little kid!’

  The beatings were painful – so painful. He’d hit me again and again on the same spot. He often beat me so hard his own hands would bruise. ‘Look how you’ve hurt me!’ he would cry. He would say how much it pained him to hurt somebody he loves.

  Occasionally after a beating he would hug me to him and ask – gently now, the consummate teacher – ‘Who causes the rift between us?’

  From everything I’d been taught, even at three years old I knew the answer I must give: ‘It’s me. I caused the rift.’

  It was always my fault; if I’d been a good person, this would never have happened. That knowledge was awful: it made me hate myself. With no one ever speaking up for me – with everyone I knew only ever agreeing with AB that I was bad – my wickedness was an incontrovertible fact, as much a part of me as my shadow.

  Having been battered for saying I liked ugly dirty whites, I picked myself up off the floor gingerly. I was lucky, I reflected, that it was only a beating. For AB could kill us using a single pressure point or his death stare if he wanted. ‘Do as I do if you want to live,’ he would intone. ‘Do what you want if you want to die.’ Frequently, he threatened me: ‘You will pay with your life.’

  The power I perhaps feared most of all, however, was spontaneous human combustion (SHC). AB and Comrade Josie used to discuss it a lot: how it had happened to a few people and all that was left of them were a few buttons from their clothes, the rest had vanished without a trace. ‘Wrong ideas can burn you to death!’ promised AB – and I knew it was not hyperbole, for no transgressive thought was safe. I learned AB had the power of thought control, which meant both that he (and his invisible machines located all over the world) could read minds and that he could cause bad things to happen with a single thought.

  AB’s lessons were drummed into me daily. Over time, they started to take effect. One afternoon in the mid-1980s, I was permitted a rare trip out to the overgrown garden with Comrade Sian. AB deliberately let our garden become wild so that fascist agents would struggle to spy on us or gain access. On this day, I happened to glance up through the long grass to see that, shockingly, the ugly dirty white woman next door was brazenly waving to me from her window. She, too, rarely went out; she was disabled.

  Comrade Sian had also spotted the woman’s gesture. ‘The bloody fascist state is trying to take you away!’ she exclaimed in disgust. ‘Don’t wave to her!’

  And I kept my hands by my side. I turned away from the woman in the wheelchair. Like the good soldier I was being trained to be, I obediently followed my leader.

  2

  ‘Comrade Prem, no!’

  Comrade Sian took firm hold of my hands, which had been hopefully reaching for a cuddle, and pushed them roughly away from her. She was a white woman in her mid-thirties with long light-brown hair; I thought her very pretty, but her personality was nowhere near as beautiful as her face. Cold and disciplinarian, she was the person who most frequently reported me to AB, for the least infringement, and I despised her. Yet she was also lying beside me in my bed right now, in my tiny little box room, during the compulsory Collective-wide afternoon nap, and I yearned for some love and kindness. True to form, however, she had rejected me again.

  I found the afternoon naps very difficult. Stuck in the house all day, with no opportunity to be active, I had unused energy zinging through my veins and the last thing I wanted or needed was to sleep.

  I could have borne those naps if I had been allowed to cuddle the comrades who took turns to sleep beside me. But the comrades and I were banned from hugging or even touching: we had to lie like sculptures next to one another instead. I couldn’t reach out a hand to stroke their hair, nor nuzzle gently into them. To do so would be to betray AB. If I became close to another, I was not focusing on him. So I was reprimanded if ever I said I liked someone else and was instructed to be hostile to them instead, while the comrades were ordered to report me for reaching out to them affectionately.

  This included reporting things I’d done in my sleep. Comrade Josie was terribly worried one night when, fast asleep, I put my arms around her. It was such a shameful episode it was never spoken of aloud: Josie’s written report was handed back to me along with AB’s written guidance: ‘Be self-critical! No laughing matter!’, adding that I must destroy my weaker self if I wanted to stay alive. For months afterwards I kept wetting the bed in fear. If I couldn’t even escape punishment for things I did in my sleep, what hope was there?

  The comrades, too, would be at fault if they ever responded to my clumsy attempts to make friends. AB declared that any comrade conspiring with me against him would be thrown out of the house. Project Prem, he lectured, was about leaving the old-world encumbrances of friendship behind, to stand alone, the better to serve AB. Part of my training was to be denied any measure of companionship.

  So, time and again, my hesitant overtures of friendship ended in failure and betrayal, either shot down by the comrade I was befriending or by another observing our growing closeness. Time and again, I was reassured by all the comrades that if such ‘friendship’ had continued, it would have been bad for me and my future. ‘Don’t be upset,’ they would urge, as my bottom lip wobbled and I fought the need to cry. ‘It’s in your best interests.’

  AB, in contrast, was permitted to touch me. Every morning and evening, I stood meekly before him. At the appointed time, he would embrace me, running his fingers slowly up and down my back. Sometimes, he would even give me a ‘big smell’, pursing his lips and pressing them to my cheek. (Later, I learned this was also called a kiss, but AB deemed kissing to be poisonous and never used the word to describe his own actions.)

  I found his touch creepy, as though he was putting his stamp on me: you’re mine. Given the amount of beatings I received at his hands, the supposed niceness felt contrived. It never felt like a hug from somebody who cared about me, but more like an exchange: payment for obeying him and being what he wanted me to be. Comrade Bala’s love was always conditional.

  I couldn’t make sense of my feelings. Everybody else loved and worshipped him so much; why didn’t I feel the same? I put it down to not knowing enough; to my ‘infantile disorder’, as AB called it, when he blamed my inability to follow him 100 per cent on my being a child.

  Nevertheless, as AB was the only person who ever touched me, who pressed a warm hand to my equally warm, honey-coloured skin, some part of me liked his embraces. I was so starved of affection that as a child I was grateful even for Bala’s creepy touch. Desperate for cuddles, at night I would hug my blankets to me, burying my face in them. Sometimes the sheer loneliness of my life would swamp me: a sob would rise up through my throat. Hurriedly, I’d stuff the quilt into my mouth – a friend indeed – and it would muffle my cries so they were not discernible to whoever was lying next to me. I was not allowed to cry in front of others.

  I soon learned that inanimate objects were much more trustworthy than people. I used to feel so heartbroken
every time a comrade betrayed me that in the end I learned not to put my trust in anybody. I didn’t have much – AB gave me only educational toys; dolls were banned – but I did have some Lego, and I formed a real attachment to a little figure in a white suit, whom I named Maria Franklin. But one day Maria disappeared. Wherever I looked for that Lego figure, it was nowhere to be found.

  The same thing happened to other objects to which I became attached. Aged three, I loved to cuddle a particular yellow blanket. But because I liked it, it was taken away. Bala kept it in the top cupboard in his room so I couldn’t have it. He’d show it to me from time to time, and I’d feel so sad because I wanted to hug it, but that was not allowed.

  My isolation was perhaps most apparent when I was sick. Illness was a sign of not listening to AB’s guidelines; the view in the Collective was that you were bad if you were poorly, as though the rottenness inside was now on show. So I’d be chastised if I vomited or had a poorly tummy; if I’d been focusing on AB properly, such a thing would never have happened (despite the fact I sometimes found it was because I’d been focusing on AB, anticipating a beating, that my guts had clenched and I’d soiled myself in fear).

  ‘Think yourself well and not ill,’ AB would instruct. All I had to do was focus on him to get better: every disease was reversible with AB’s help. The rules applied to everyone in the Collective; I would never have been permitted to go to the doctor anyway, because of the need to conceal me from Outside, but AB said ‘NHS means Never Help Self’ and that doctors (DR) were Death Restorationists: all part of the old world.

  Sometimes, AB made allowances for the backwards, old-world needs of the comrades and permitted medicine to be taken. He himself never needed it; ‘I never even go to the pharmacist,’ he would boast. More often, however, he would declare that the illness needed to be beaten out of the person.

  That was what happened in September 1987, when I was four. I’d been ill for a week, vomiting every morning. Bala was enraged at this continued disobedience and had been showering his ‘practical love’ upon me, but it hadn’t made any difference. I heard him and Comrade Sian discussing me in hushed voices. My stomach turned over again: being beaten by Bala was only one of the punishments given for violating his guidelines, and my mind was churning about what they might do next.

  Some of the penalties were more bearable than others. No food was one, but eventually mealtimes would resume and they did not let me starve. The one I feared most was when everybody walked out of the room and closed the door behind them, leaving me alone. I was never alone. I’d been told over and over about the life-threatening consequences of not having a comrade watching over me, so it was petrifying. AB made a point of reminding me of the danger: ‘Go out of the room,’ he’d say to everybody but me, ‘and then the neighbour can come and take her away.’

  I was so afraid that something bad would happen to me if I was on my own. I’d run to the door and struggle to get out, wanting – needing – to be reunited with them, but they’d stand on the other side and hold the handle to stop me. The more I cried, the longer they did it. In time, I learned that the best thing to do was pretend I was in agreement. From an early age, I adapted to become quite deceptive, just to survive.

  I must never show what I am truly thinking; I must learn to hide my real feelings, as adeptly as the Collective keep me hidden from the world.

  But there was no hiding from AB’s mind-control machines. Any thought transgression was soon punished, for example by my becoming ill.

  In AB’s view, the worst punishment of all was when he refused to talk to me or see me. Yet I always felt a mixture of rejection and relief when that happened. Some anxiety, too – because I didn’t know what else he might be plotting while he was silent, so the eerie quiet was pregnant with unknown horrors.

  That was how I felt on that September day, queasy both with sickness and with fright, listening to AB and Comrade Sian on the other side of the door discuss how best to handle me. Unexpectedly, AB came into the room and said he would call ‘them’ if I didn’t get well immediately.

  I didn’t know who ‘them’ was; I think, now, he may have meant an ambulance. But ‘them’, to me, meant fascist agents and I was horrified. It was the worst thing he could have said. When I saw Comrade Sian picking up the phone I hurriedly pasted a fake smile on to my pallid face to stop her calling.

  I succeeded in holding them off – but still I didn’t get well. So AB finally decided enough was enough. As I lay weakly on the floor on Sunday 20 September, with the acid tang of vomit still souring my mouth and nose, he dragged me through the house and hurled me into the hallway, near the front door. I lay curled in a ball; I had never seen AB so angry. Drawing back a foot, he booted me viciously in the head, then prepared to stamp on my face, nose-first. I quickly turned my face away; his bare foot trod on my cheek instead.

  Yet it wasn’t punishment enough. With a final, frenzied roar, AB seized me, threw open the front door – and threw me Outside.

  I felt the shock as though I’d landed in icy waters, even though it was a balmy autumn day. AB slammed the front door in my face and I felt terror rising in me, just as a drowning victim feels her lungs fill with briny sea.

  I was Outside. I was alone.

  Anything could happen.

  Although making noise and crying were both outlawed in the Collective, I screamed as loud as I could. Tears mixed with snot and vomit on my face as I sobbed and begged for mercy. I pounded my little fists on that hard green door, increasingly desperate, casting looks over my shoulder for fear a fascist agent might walk down the tree-lined street beyond the gate. I didn’t know the Outside world; I barely spent time even in the garden. It was as though I’d been stranded on a hostile, unknown planet. And without a comrade to guard me, I knew an enemy agent could kidnap me at any minute. I knew I would die without AB – it was only a matter of time.

  Weakly, I banged again on the door, whimpering now in terror and distress. They had to let me back in. Please let me back in …

  Finally, like the good man he was, AB proved merciful. After what may have been only a few minutes, the green door opened and I was permitted into the warmth of the new world again. I was grateful to be back, subsumed within the protection of the Collective, so when the comrades next recited AB’s Truths, I joined my voice to theirs, finding relief in the familiar refrain.

  ‘AB is Nature, Nature is AB.’

  For AB had power over all the world: the sun, the moon, the Earth, the stars. He could make a frost sweep a nation; a wildfire burn for days. Earthquakes were engineered by him as retribution for his enemies; explosions could be detonated at will or individuals doomed to death. ‘ARA [Aravindan] is everywhere – Supernature,’ AB explained in my lessons, drawing diagrams which showed him at the centre of all things.

  The comrades and I continued to chorus: ‘India is the World, and the World is India.’

  AB came from Kerala, in India, so when the time came for it to be Overt, India would be the centre (as, covertly, it already was). ‘Everything originates from AB’s India,’ I was told. ‘If you think it doesn’t, you are mindless.’ AB would become enraged if he ever read lying propaganda that the first man came from Africa or rice sticks from China, or if the British Fascist State (BFS) claimed credit for any innovation. ‘Comrade Bala said how the ugly dirty whites say that they have discovered everything … whereas it is AB’s KERALA that has discovered everything,’ I recorded neatly in my book.

  ‘AB’s Knowledge is the Truth, and the Truth is AB’s Knowledge,’ the comrades and I went on, our voices melding together until we spoke as one. ‘AB’s CRIS HELP is the Key, and the Key is AB’s CRIS HELP.’

  CRIS HELP meant Continued Revolution in Stages and Heavenly Eternal Life Programme: the name of the training AB was giving us to allow us to be part of his new world. The ‘Eternal Life’ was significant; something else I was taught about our leader.

  AB was immortal. He had the power of eternal life.
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  He claimed that if we followed him properly, we too could have extended, even eternal life.

  There was a final, fifth Truth – but it was a hidden one, something we had to KQ about. When we reached it in our litany, our voices would always fall away to silence. Nevertheless, our mouths still moved.

  ‘AB is God, God is AB.’

  3

  Somewhat unusually, AB was modest about his divinity, perhaps because of the huge nature of the secret that we lived with a god. Though some of his followers wanted to pray overtly to him, as one might do in a traditional religion, he would dismiss such ideas.

  ‘You look at me through the eyes of the old,’ he would lecture the comrades. ‘Practice is prayer.’

  This meant: carry out his instructions to the letter and never disagree with anything he said.

  Perhaps because of AB’s modest attitude, I had confusing, mixed feelings about his holiness. To me he seemed just like everybody else, but with the others all fervently believing, treating him with reverence and faith, I had to go along with it. I don’t understand because I am just a child, I reasoned.

  Comrade Sian was his most devout worshipper, completely servile to him. ‘Beloved Comrade Bala is the STAR of our lives! We owe our lives to Comrade Bala’ was the very first thing she taught me when I started my formal education in the Collective. She wrote it in huge Communist-red letters in my book, the colour we reserved for anything special.

  I considered her to be rather like the sheepdog of the pack, snapping at the heels of the other women to keep them in line. I suspected her devotion to AB was the reason she was appointed to oversee my training; Comrade Sian was the woman who looked after me the most.