The Girl in the Shadows Read online

  The comrades had all failed dismally by worshipping Mao.

  Despite the fact I hadn’t been born throughout most of this ‘test’, I was not immune from AB’s ire: my name was Prem Maopinduzi. The worshipping of false idols was clearly stitched into the very fabric of me. Abruptly, I was forced to change the spelling to ‘Mapinduzi’.

  An odd thing happened as I listened to AB rant against his former hero.

  I feel sorry for Mao.

  It was such a transgressive thought I was alarmed, on edge awaiting retribution. The sheer reach of AB’s power was one of the hardest things I had to live with. He could read my mind and he would never die. I felt the tight grip of those pieces of knowledge as a noose around my neck. Tighter and tighter they held me, as day after day I made mistakes and feared for the consequences.

  But there was one way to escape it, I realized over time. From within the mist of my confused thoughts, a truly transgressive one emerged.

  The only place Bala can’t follow me is if I die.

  I was only six. But the thought was strangely sweet. I remembered the power of that Tube train travelling beneath the ground, the way it had roared into the station with such speed and sound. If I jumped in front of that train, I thought, I would be free.

  I was so lonely and unhappy. There was no Aisha; no Leanne; no light in my life at all. Every day, when the post arrived through the letterbox with a swishing sound that signalled Outside, there was never any letter for me: the only person in the whole Collective who never received a single thing. When I thought about the Tube at night now, remembering its roar, I thought idly, I’d love to just jump in front of that train …

  It was supposed to be a secret, but I was only six. On 3 January 1990, it all spilled out of me. Heart on sleeve, truth unvarnished, I haplessly declared: ‘I don’t care whether I’m alive or dead.’

  9

  Bala was dismissive.

  ‘Mind hygiene and self-criticism are key,’ he told me briskly. I had to surrender to him totally – then I would get life – otherwise I’d be trapped in the ‘death field’. He nicknamed me ‘dodo’ to signify my slowness in following his guidelines. If I did not learn to follow, I’d soon be as obsolete as the bird. My emotions were irrelevant; worse, unhelpful for my training. He blamed my suicidal urges on my ‘40 per cent’.

  Bala believed there were two types of ‘input’ I was gaining in the world. The lion’s share was AB’s Knowledge, CRIS HELP, which was my ‘good’ 60 per cent. But I also had 40 per cent of bad input, put there by what he now called ‘Maozi waves’: invisible negative energy released by AB’s enemies as they attempted to programme me with their remote control. AB hated my 40 per cent, he told me time and again. He also told me that slowly, very slowly, I was winning my battle against the evil Maozi waves, but it would take years to overcome these internal enemy forces. Only in the year 2000, when I’d be turning seventeen, would I finally reach 100 per cent good. To an almost-seven-year-old, it seemed a lifetime away.

  Yet this glory wasn’t guaranteed – and there were plenty of chances for me to take a huge step back. I nearly lost 15 per cent in one day for admiring Cindy’s shapely figure. Yet the biggest risk was my habit of not working nicely with the comrades. This was sacrilege, because AB had tasked them with my training.

  ‘If I hear comrades struggling with you,’ he told me, ‘I will beat you and beat you and beat you until you are numb and can’t move about.’ He fixed me with his black eyes, which were steeled both with threat and disappointment behind his square glasses. ‘You’re becoming very out of hand,’ he observed.

  Perhaps my glum mood – or my 40 per cent – was prompting it, but I was becoming more vocal with the comrades as I grew older. There were times when I felt very irritable about their nit-picking and surveillance, as I was still watched round the clock, including in the bathroom. Even though I knew it was for my own protection, it also gave me nowhere to hide. I always felt I lived in the unforgiving glare of a spotlight. So, using the language I’d heard AB employ, I began to shout at them, barely understanding what I was saying and often simply saying it for effect.

  ‘I want to smash Comrade Sian’s head in!’ I might yell. ‘I want to kill Comrade Josie!’

  I wouldn’t have hurt anyone; sometimes I think I wanted to start a scene just to make my days a bit different. AB once told me off for putting the comrades down by saying they weren’t brought up by him; I sneeringly called them ‘second-class’.

  ‘Never even heard of AB till they read the leaflet!’ I jeered, not liking myself as I did it, but lashing out all the same. I was put down by everybody, all the time; perhaps I just wanted to feel a sliver of superiority.

  The older I got, the more I wanted to spend time alone with AB. Until now, I had never really had any alone time with him. I saw him at Discussions, for our creepy daily hugs and when he was beating me, but that was pretty much it; he did not eat with us. I’d barely even had a conversation with him, just lectures from him at the end of which I’d say, ‘Yes, Beloved Comrade Bala.’ But I thought if we spent more time together, he might love me more. He only really saw me through the comrades’ eyes and I hoped that if he and I could have our own relationship, he might just be a bit nicer to me.

  So I was pleased when, in 1990, we did start to share a little more time.

  ‘I WENT TO COMRADE A. BALA’S ROOM! THREE TIMES! AND SAT BESIDE HIM ON HIS MAT!’ I wrote in my diary, encouraged by Sian to describe this privilege in the excitement of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS.

  I started to notice something from this time alone with AB. He was much nicer when the others weren’t around. I didn’t understand it, I was just grateful for the occasional flash of blue sky in my grey world. For my desire to make my world turn black beneath the screeching wheels of a Tube train never went away, although some days were more bearable than others. I wore the emotions like a second skin beneath my masculine shirts and trousers. They were always there, but I learned to live with them, an emotional white noise I became skilled at tuning out.

  It was a blue-sky day on 7 January 1990 when I finally turned seven. Six days before, AB had given me 1 per cent of my goodness back, in so doing deducting 1 per cent from my Superidiot percentage; I was now 61 per cent good and 39 per cent bad. I felt a real sense of achievement, commensurate with my new maturity.

  My birthday was no different from any other day in the Collective; we sang songs for AB and he lectured. I did not go Out. There was no birthday cake – that was far too Western a tradition – but the comrades made an Indian sweet. Presents were not the norm. Birthdays were acknowledged, not celebrated, in the Collective; the exception to this rule was of course AB. His birth and conception days were the biggest festivities of the year.

  I loved AB’s big days. They were the two days in the year when you could be sure the atmosphere in the house would be happy because no one would dare cause a scene on such a special occasion. I would spend weeks making things for him – a summary of his life, which the comrades made into a ‘book’; a handwritten anthology of all the lyrics to our revolutionary songs. The day before the event, the comrades would clean like whirling dervishes so the whole house would be sparkling from top to bottom, then they’d prepare a delicious feast of Keralan curry and Indian sweets. AB accepted it all with a benign, expectant smile.

  The rest of the year, every day of it, our important work towards the new world continued. Around this time, AB revealed to me that when his leadership became Overt, I was to be his minister for children, leading his children’s army. He unveiled the appointment as though he was bestowing a great honour upon me.

  I couldn’t say – although I thought it before I could stop myself – I don’t want to do that … I wanted to drive those lovely trains, not fight a bloody war.

  But that was not my destiny. So, when I was seven, rather than playing at being a train driver I began making multiple handwritten copies of a document Sian had created, ‘Convince Oneself with the Fol
lowing Affirmative Facts from 1964 with One’s Positive Experience with AB, the Uniquely Positive Natural Centre, While Using Self-Criticism to Struggle Against One’s Negativity’. It was a chronicle of AB’s life and activities and all Synchronizations since 1964, and I had to write it out, in full, at least three times. It took all year, even with me writing it every single day.

  I also started to study other subjects: science, where I experimented with chemicals and viewed objects through a microscope; history, where I wrote a series of essays on ‘Crimes of the Americans and British’; the natural world, where I charted the macro to the micro, Universe to Electrons, with AB topping and tailing the items on my list. I’d have liked to be given exams as part of my schooling, so I could feel a sense of progression and achievement – but such things were old world and too likely to lead to self-love. Always I had to remember it was thanks to AB I knew anything.

  Just once a month, I was allowed to paint; something I really enjoyed. I struggled for subjects, however. If I painted a self-portrait, I’d be accused of fascist individualism; if I painted a picture of our house and all the comrades living in it, I wasn’t focusing on AB. Occasionally, I painted pictures of our leader, and he also permitted me to recreate such scenes as ‘Indian kids protesting against Rajiv Gandhi’.

  Hardest for me was when I tried to sketch a landscape. My world was the house. Even though I’d been Outside, I found it hard to retain detailed memories of the few places I’d been, as though my brain had been overexposed and couldn’t capture the images. As months always passed between each outing, I didn’t go Out frequently enough to be able to pin the mental pictures into place; they’d be fresh when I arrived home, but bleed away over time.

  Comrades Chanda and Shobha both painted, so I tried to copy what they’d done or model my artwork on the few pictures in the house. I painted colourful skies, reflections in the water, trees in the distance: things I’d rarely or never seen myself. It was ISA, in a way, but because Chanda and Shobha also liked to paint, the rule was bent as a privilege.

  As ever, though, not always. That uncertainty was what made life hard. Once, I showed AB some flowers I had drawn and he scribbled over them, writing angrily: ‘AB hates PM’s 39%!’ Several times, he destroyed things I had created, burning them, tearing them up or stomping on them till they were dirty and torn. It was heart-breaking – because I bonded with the things I made, having no other outlet for my love. To have them destroyed was terrible, as though he was destroying a part of me.

  For AB, though, it was worth it – because we were fighting a war.

  And the other thing I learned in my lessons was who we were fighting against.

  AB revealed that there was a secret world government. One might think each country had its own, but actually they were all controlled by another body behind the scenes. Prime ministers and presidents were puppets, front men, while the real power lay behind the public thrones. AB called this organization the Shadow World Government (SWG) and its primary work, every day, was to snoop on him and analyse what he said. That was why we had to KQ: the house was bugged, both video and audio. Occasionally, he would say misleading things aloud to put their agents off the scent.

  He was their nemesis, and their power players his arch-enemies. David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, George Bush, Edward Heath, Alec Douglas-Home, Deng Xiaoping … There were many. Though Mao was dead, the ‘Mao Clique’ was another foe. AB had a pathological hatred of them all and denounced them as evil monsters and genocidal war criminals. He taught me that they ate and burned babies.

  Knowing more about our enemy made me even more frightened of the world beyond the window. At times I became hysterical with fear about the neighbours, those baby-eating agents who were just a stone’s throw away. So intense was my terror that AB actually took me Outside one afternoon to see the houses, to try to stop me being quite so scared.

  He took my fear as a slight. He wanted me to be vigilant and never interact with the agents, but my anxiety was so extreme it implied I didn’t trust him and the Collective to protect me.

  ‘As long as you follow me,’ he promised, ‘they can’t touch you.’

  As it turned out, it wasn’t long before I got a chance to put that to the test. On 2 May 1990, I was sitting on the toilet – with Comrade Josie looming over me, watching – when I heard a very unusual sound.

  There was a knock upon the front door of the house.

  Not just a knock. This was a hammering. An intervention. Fists on wood. BANG BANG BANG!

  And then: an authoritative shout.

  ‘We know you’re in there! Open up!’

  10

  The house – normally so staid, so quiet – was suddenly a riot of noise and activity. Cautiously, Josie and I tiptoed out of the bathroom. My heart was hammering – with both fear and excitement. This was something new …

  ‘Open up the door please!’ the strong voice called again.

  ‘Break down the door please!’ Bala hollered back. He sounded as if he was in his element: the revolutionary leader rising gloriously to the occasion. Taunting the men on the other side of the door, he relished the drama.

  What’s happening? I wondered, jumping in shock as the front door shook violently on its hinges once again, the pounding ten times louder than before. The defences of the Collective have never been breached like this …

  In whispered conversations, an explanation emerged: the men were bailiffs, here to evict us from our home. ‘Rent strike’ had been going on more than a year; the fascist state had now come to torment Bala for his noble political stance.

  Once I knew it wasn’t the next-door neighbours, of whom I was petrified, I relaxed – and almost began to enjoy the drama too. My days were so dull; in all my seven years, nothing so exciting had ever happened.

  For as long as I could remember, AB had lectured about this kind of battle with the BFS – now I got to see him in action. As I watched, breathless with the thrill of it, he stood valiantly firm throughout the next hour or so, point-blank refusing to open the door, no matter how many times the men demanded it, and jeering when the landlord begged him to comply.

  Finally, with an enormous crashing sound, the green front door was broken in: an explosion of splintered wood and sound that let the Outside in.

  In the eerie quiet of the aftermath, I peered curiously along the hallway and beyond the broken door. Several tall figures loomed there.

  ‘Leave all your things!’

  The order came from AB. I panicked – what about my Lego, my pink bicycle? But this was not the time to ask. With a fleeting backwards glance towards my bedroom, filled with familiar things, I followed the others into the front garden.

  I blinked on the threshold, struck by the sudden brightness of light, so different to the gloom indoors. My eyes were out on stalks at the multitude of new faces surrounding me; the people were so close to me – the comrades never normally let me Out without me being secreted within that protective circle of bodies. This time, there’d been no time to prepare.

  I didn’t dare breathe a word to any of the men, but as I stumbled out into the sunshine I studied their expressions, as though they were on scientific slides beneath my microscope. There was one I was drawn to: a short black man with a friendly face. He turned out to be the landlord. He appeared a bit sad, as though he didn’t really want to be doing this; somehow, it didn’t fit with the ruthless portrait AB had painted. As I walked out of the house, his expression turned to shock.

  I dropped my eyes to the ground before Sian could tell me not to ogle. So few people ever saw me that it was unsettling to see his face change the moment he laid eyes on me. Yet I suspected I knew why his expression had altered: because I wasn’t supposed to be here; there wasn’t supposed to be a child living in this house. I saw the same expression flit across his face when Comrade Shobha rolled out in her wheelchair, and when one comrade after another exited the house. AB was a fugitive from the fascist state, so as many of us as possible al
so had to stay under the radar. I think the landlord had had no idea we’d all been staying in the house.

  When I next risked a glance up at him, he smiled at me broadly and I felt my spirits soar. But that was as nothing to what happened next. As I stood with the comrades in the garden, all of us mingled together with the bailiffs in the confusion of the day, one of the men – perhaps motivated by a touch of guilt at booting a young child out of her home – reached out a hand and casually ruffled my boy-short hair.

  My heart almost stopped with pleasure. That felt nice, I thought happily. I liked that.

  I wanted to feel that touch again, the strange yet comforting weight of another’s hand on me – but Comrade Sian was already glaring, her eyes like daggers pinning me in my place.

  She hissed in disgust to Bala: ‘That man was touching her!’ There was an ugliness to her tone, but that simple touch to me had been nothing but beautiful.

  I would treasure the memory all my life.

  Bala led us in victory to a new home in Streatham, London. It was a modest two-up, two-down terraced house on a quiet residential street. One of the first things the comrades did was hang net curtains in all the windows; it was a priority to keep me out of sight. Similarly, the garden was left to go to ruin, the grass eventually growing three or four feet high.

  The new house was damp and attracted hundreds of insects – woodlice and centipedes – that made my skin crawl. Yet the Collective refused to do anything to rid the house of them, saying it was good to put up with the infestation so that, when AB’s leadership became Overt, we could say we had shared ‘weal and woe’ with the people of the world. AB never replaced his spectacles, which were falling apart, for the same reason, instead sticking them together with tape, pieces of plastic and, once, even some bits of fried onion.

  The dampness of the new house made the electrics dangerous. Several times comrades received shocks when switching on appliances; the plug of the iron once blew up in a shower of sparks, leaving a lingering smell of burnt plastic. The comrades explained to me that these things had happened because they hadn’t been following AB properly, which left me fearful of touching any domestic appliance myself. I was one of his worst followers – what would vengeful electricity do to me?