When my mother and aunts moved from West Bengal to west London, it wasn’t just the weather that made them realise this wasn’t the place of their dreams…

Fifty years ago, in December 1968, two young women got off a plane that had flown from India and landed at Heathrow. They wore their best outfits: hand-embroidered silk saris, Bollywood-style beehives, bright pink lipstick – looking like minor film stars. They were, after all, travelling to England, a place of dreams, a mythical country of prestige and opportunity. They had read in books that the houses were colourful and the streets so clean you could almost eat your food off them. The women were my two aunts – Apa and Bhaiti, nervous new brides, who had left small-town India for the first time. They were about to join their older brother and his new wife – their childhood best friend, my mother, Tripti.

The three women had grown up on the same narrow road, in 1950s West Bengal. The daughters of strict Brahmin families, they prayed every morning, were given classical singing and dance lessons, and played in the jungles of their semi-rural neighbourhood. My mother describes it now as a lost, dream-like world, full of adventure and freedom. On hot humid days, they would roam and climb trees, picking mangos, guavas, coconuts. They would cool down by jumping into the ponds, swimming and floating on giant fallen banana leaves for hours.

Their families were devout upper-caste Hindus. My mother and her sisters would get up at five every morning to clean and prepare the family prayer room, picking flowers and praying to stone idols of Shiva and Narayan. A few doors down the road, my aunts and my father lived in an even more intensely religious household. There were elaborate rules on how to prepare food: it was strictly vegetarian – no meat, fish, eggs, or even onion and garlic. There was daily ritual bathing, and my grandmother spent hours every day meditating and reading from the Bhagavad Gita.

My aunts remember watching TV in the living room, trying to keep warm, wearing saris with woollen long johns underneath

But this was post-independence India, and society was changing. My mother and my aunts were allowed to go to college, and a flicker of ambition was lit. Bhaiti worked hard at school, got the best exam results in her district and studied medicine; Apa did an MA in social work, while my mother studied chemistry. She dreamed of being a headteacher or a scientist. “I wasn’t interested in getting married,” she told me recently. “I wanted to do so many things, go here and there, be political.” But by their late teens they were no longer allowed to roam freely: my aunts had chaperones to take them to college, and all three girls were expected to have arranged marriages to Brahmin men.

It was from this constricted life of caste privilege that they suddenly found themselves on their way to England. My mother and Apa finished college and their marriages were quickly arranged, to men who had decided to settle in Britain – the fabled “mother country”, a modern and civilised place to study, work and achieve great things. Bhaiti had, defiantly, fallen in love with a non-Brahmin. She and her new husband decided to move to Britain, too, hoping she could find work as a doctor and live a freer life, away from the disapproval of her family.

The two sisters, now in their 70s, remember how their fragile optimism faltered as they arrived at Heathrow. Apa looked out of the plane window and saw the pillow-like clouds, the dazzling white sun, but was shocked when they landed. Under the clouds, the sky was an endless blank grey, while the sooty houses all looked the same and there was a perpetual drizzle. “I thought, ‘What a place!’” The huge impersonal airport, the sea of unfamiliar white faces, was unnerving. They realised how much their lives had changed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bhaiti, Apa and Tripti today. Photograph: courtesy of Sheela Banerjee

My aunts came to live with us in Southall, west London that winter, in the little semi-detached, pebble-dashed house my father had bought for £500. They remember watching TV in the living room, trying to keep warm, wearing saris with woollen long johns underneath. It was the only room with a fire. Apa laughs, remembering how they would all look at one another if the phone rang, hoping someone else would answer it in the freezing cold hallway.

My mother had also recently arrived and hadn’t realised how isolated she would feel. “I felt like a baby, I couldn’t even buy bread. I am an educated woman and suddenly I didn’t know the language – it was as if I was ignorant and begging the whole time.” When her best friends joined her, she had, for the first time, a little community. “The first Christmas we had together was beautiful. We tried to cook like English people. We did a roast and I stuffed it with rice! We got a tree and we even had Christmas pudding – we really enjoyed it.” My Dad took them to Oxford Street for the January sales, where they bought a set of red Bakelite chairs – three for £5 – which survive to this day.

In photos of them in those early days, they look beautiful: smiling young women with their lives ahead of them

But outside the house, it could be a hostile world. My aunts had landed soon after Enoch Powell’s Rivers Of Blood speech; they saw people on TV complaining about the influx of immigrants. In Southall, Asian children were bussed out of the area to different schools, after protests by local parents. My mother remembers going out in her sari and being stared at, with men sometimes barging into her. “I felt afraid whenever I saw the young men, in large boots, with their heads shaved,” she says. A Bengali friend was dragged from a car and punched; others were routinely threatened with violence. Bhaiti recalls being spat at by men from a passing bus.

But they were resilient, and things slowly started to improve. My mother navigated an impersonal world of suburban job centres and 1960s light industry on the edges of the capital: at Bellamy Knitwear; doing a technician’s job at the huge Metal Box factory in north Acton. It was a postwar industrial world by the Grand Union canal that has since vanished. She worked hard, cooked and cleaned every day, and went to night school to study chemistry again, as employers wouldn’t recognise her Indian qualification. She eventually got a job as a lab technician at Brunel University, where she worked for 23 years.

Bhaiti remembers writing endless job applications. Ads often asked for “British-born” candidates only; Bhaiti realised that as an Indian doctor she would never get a job in the south; she managed to find work in hospitals in the north instead – places that were friendlier, places she came to love. But after several years, she returned to London to be near her extended family again.

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As I write this, I am looking through photos of my mother and aunts in those early days, and they look beautiful: smiling young women with their lives ahead of them. I feel it’s been a bittersweet journey for all three, since that winter of 1968. They built good lives, got jobs, and made lasting friendships with the English people around them. They had opportunities they would never have enjoyed in India – and have remained close all their lives. I grew up with my funny, charismatic aunts and all my cousins, spending every weekend, all the holidays, within a huge close-knit family.

But there’s a sadness, too: when my mother and aunts visit India, their old neighbourhood seems unfamiliar and unsettling. The ponds have been blocked up and the jungles around their old houses cleared to make way for flats. They no longer know most of the people who live there and the way of life they grew up with has disappeared. They spent their lives far from their parents; they couldn’t be with them when they died. In gaining their freedom, they lost their homeland. “India” as my mother puts it, “is not mine any more”.

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