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This article was originally published in the Sunday Times.

The first time I went back to India, I was four years old. I remember running across a muddy field trying to find my grandmother’s house. Despite it being dark, I managed to find her, sitting on the veranda, rocking in a chair. “I knew you would come back,” she said, wrapping herself around me.

Going back to Kerala was like stepping into a fairy tale – a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by palm trees and paddy fields; an old grandmother who lived in a light-blue-painted house with a farm and a rice mill and lots of interesting characters passing through to gossip with. My grandmother proudly told all who came that I was her granddaughter who had come from London. When my mother came to collect me after the six-week summer holiday, she had to drag me back onto the plane. It was cold and wet in London; I hated it and spent days crying, wishing I was back home.

The next time I went back, I was eight. It was Christmas and I remember feeling reluctant, as I knew Father Christmas would not travel to places like India – I thought it would be too hot for him. I was happy to see my grandparents, but I remember sitting around a lot and wishing for a television, and baked beans. My uncle said that he could make me a doll out of a sweet wrapper, and I watched as he turned one corner of the sweet wrapper and said: “There.” He obviously had no idea what a Barbie looked like.

The last time I went back, I was 13 and filled with dread at the prospect of returning to the village. “India: a hygiene hazard” was my main perspective, and I packed toilet roll as there was no way I was going to employ the bucket-and-mug system. I refused to eat with my hands and spoke only in English, to dissociate myself from a place that I thought was dirty, dusty, polluted, filled with strange insects and disease – carrying mosquitoes. I know I was a complete brat and I wish things had been different, because, six weeks after I returned home, both my grandparents died.

There are a number of reasons why it took me almost 20 years to go back – above all, I think I had been putting off the sadness of seeing an empty house and the guilt of not having said goodbye properly. But a book I was writing needed some first-person research into ayurvedic spa treatments. Kerala is the centre of ayurvedic medicine. It was time to go home.

I landed at Coimbatore and breathed in the smell I remembered so well from childhood – roasted peanuts, humidity and traffic. My village was two hours away, near the border of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and my uncle (the one that made the Indian version of Barbie) came to meet me at the airport. It was 32C and he was wearing a woolly hat. I held out my arms to hug him and he shook my hand.

He showed me to the car and asked why I wasn’t married. I desperately searched for questions to ask him, but after 10 minutes we both fell silent and the sound of horns and rickshaws dodging errant cows became even louder. I watched a group of people dressed in the brightest colours congregating outside a shop called Bloomingdale’s; as far as I could see, its wares consisted of a few odd shirts and a bucket. An hour later, the road became quiet, and on either side there were paddy fields, palm trees and banana plantations. Across in the distance was the backdrop of purple mountains.

As we drove into the village, the people at the communal pond stopped to stare. Some pointed, and some children ran after us. As I got out of the car, my uncles, aunts and cousins came to meet me. It was strange, I didn’t feel a connection with any of them, and I tried so desperately. I gave them their gifts and they scrambled away. My aunt invited me into her home and a few people followed. She asked me why I had not got married and why I was so thin. Some intelligent cousin made the connection between not being fat and not being married; food was soon being pressed on me from every direction.

After lunch, another aunt commented that perhaps nobody wanted me due to the fact that I had short hair and wore no jewellery. Yet another nodded fervently and said that prospective husbands would think that my family could not afford the dowry. “Is this the case?” she shouted in Malayalam.

I felt strangely alone and sad and wandered off, without anyone really missing me, to my grandmother’s empty house. The mill had been pulled down, there were no cows, but the house had been renovated and whitewashed by my parents. I walked in and went straight to grandmother’s bedroom, the room that she and I had slept in. I looked for the secret hiding place in the wall where she hid the money my mother had saved up to give her. Then I went into the kitchen where we had spent hours cooking together.

My mother had put in a Western-style toilet, hoping that one day I would return. I looked at the bathroom and I was overwhelmed with tears. “I’m so very, very sorry,” I cried, looking at the toilet.

For two nights I stayed in that house, feeling safe and unconcerned about the mosquitoes, the lizards running up the wall and the sound of croaking toads. I stayed there, concentrating hard on trying to remember every conceivable detail of how it used to be.

When it was time to move on to the “real” reason for my visit, my uncle and aunt drove me to Cochin airport. I felt nothing when I left them, except perhaps a sense of sadness at that very lack of emotion. My uncle shook my hand and my aunt said that she would pray for me, and they left me outside the airport because the car was running on a meter.

My room was a little thatched Keralan cottage overlooking Manaltheeram beach; even if there had been no treatments, this would have been restorative enough. But soon I was booked in for a consultation with a young doctor who looked like an Indian version of George Clooney.

“Thirty-one,” he said. “Don’t you want to get married?” “Are you asking?” I wanted to reply, but managed a coy smile instead. He diagnosed me as a kapha/vata type (kaphas have smooth skin, thick hair and are calm, cool and complacent; vatas are tall, have irregular teeth and are inclined to mental illness; nothing to worry about there then) and suggested a 10-day rejuvenation package to restore balance. I was promptly given a dressing gown and led away.

As two technicians started praying over me, I wondered what I had let myself in for. They began massaging me in sync with each other, and then one of them asked me to lie down on the floor. She washed her feet, hoisted herself up on a rope and began sweeping her feet across my body. After that, a stream of warm oil was poured over my forehead to enhance mental stability. Instead, it sent me off to sleep and when I awoke I had a mudpack plastered to my face.

After 10 days of being massaged in this way, I felt I had found my paradise and it was incredibly hard to leave. I’d made friends with various members of the staff, and each felt obliged to impart invaluable advice. The doctor asked me to eat lots of black-eyed peas and, realising they might be hard to get in England, suggested “brusol sprats”. The cleaning lady said that I had changed so much in 10 days that a husband must be on the horizon, as long as I grew my hair, ate more and wore earrings. Maybe I could get hold of some gold jewellery, she suggested. I told her I would try. She wept as I said goodbye and said she wouldn’t eat for three days.

We drove to the airport and the smell of wood smoke and roasted peanuts made me cry. I’d come home looking for the warmth and love of my childhood, and found it gone; but another warmth, a genuine welcome and connection, had taken its place, and when I’d least expected it. The Kerala of my grandmother was a memory now, but something of her tenderness lived on.

As I boarded the plane for London, I found myself surrounded by children. The one behind me must have been about four and she was crying her eyes out, saying she didn’t want to go home; her older sister was pestering their mother for one of the items in the in-flight magazines; and the teenager was scratching her bites, saying that she hated India. I closed my eyes and I wished I had gone back sooner.

By |

This article was originally published in the Sunday Times.

When I was little, my father used to tell me stories about Mexico, where he worked for three years in the 1960s. He had travelled there from India, before settling in London. It was the first time he’d travelled abroad, and the contrast was so stark that it left a lasting impression: he would reminisce about Mexico at every opportunity and dazzle us with a few mouthfuls of broken Spanish.

The Mexico he talked about was the stuff legends are made of: a place where time began, where magical characters lived and transcendental things happened. I have drawn on the sense of mysticism he evoked many times in my writing. This year, finally, I set out to find the places he told us about. My objective was Oaxaca, 500km southeast of Mexico City, but en route I wanted to visit a typical Mexican town, and chose Puebla, an hour east of the capital.

Octavio Paz, the Mexican writer, said: “For Mexicans, colours shout so loudly that you cannot hear the silence of darkness.” This is so true. On every street corner in Mexico City there is some splash of vividness, or the promise of it, whether it’s the green uniforms of the schoolchildren or a sapphire sky painted on a wall. Only on the outskirts does the colour bleed away into an urban sprawl of uniform grey.

I am told by my driver, José, that the poor don’t paint their houses. “The moment they do,” he says, “they will be taxed, for colour is symbolic of wealth.”

This saddens me, because it is the poor who need colour most. Sensing my feeling, José says: “But you should see the inside of their houses.” I imagine the walls splashed defiantly with an explosion of paint, like a child’s finger painting; all the signs so far indicate that it would be this way.

José looks about 50 and is the image of the actor Charles Bronson. He insists on speaking to me in English, “for Spanish is the language of love”. Unsure of how to take this, I let him explain things in English, even though there are times when I feel Spanish might be easier. We head out towards Puebla, set among the mountains, and José points out two snow-clad volcanic peaks. Popocatepetl is tall and supposedly male, while

Iztaccihuatl (White Lady) is much smaller. As we drive, José tells me a Romeo and Juliet kind of story. It is the same one my father told me as a child. Iztaccihuatl is wrongly informed that her lover has been killed in battle, and dies, grief-stricken. When “Popo” returns and finds her body, he lays it out in the open and keeps vigil. Today, he is an angry volcano, ready to erupt at any moment against the inoffensive sunny sky. If you look carefully, José says, Iztaccihuatl has the form of a woman lying down. To please him, I pretend to see it, while hoping that this won’t cause offence to the wounded Popo.

I arrive in Puebla on Sunday. The town has a Spanish colonial feel, with grand churches and a huge cathedral built in the zocalo, or square. The zocalo is vibrant with balloon sellers and craftspeople selling little models of mythical beasts. Children are scattering across the square; musicians play, and couples both young and old dance spontaneously. Waiters bustle in the background, flitting between the customers who are people-watching on the terrazas.

Some of the buildings here have real majesty about them: one house in particular looks like it has been dripped in gold. In a passageway next door, I find an antiques market with rows of crafts, bric-a-brac and records. I pick up a small hand-carved wooden box and set about haggling for it with a toothless old man and his daughter. “If you tell me I’m handsome, I’ll lower the price by five pesos,” the man laughs.

“What if I said that you’re the most charismatic man I’ve met in ages?” I flatter. He smiles and says forget the box, if he were 40 years younger, he would marry me. As a novice barterer, I feel guilty about clawing 25 pesos off the original price and hand him 50 pesos more. Laden with curiosities, I make my way back to my hotel, and a dinner of mole, chicken served with a traditional bittersweet chocolate sauce.

The next day, José takes me to Cholula, 15km from Puebla, to see the largest pyramid ruins in the country. The people here wear much more traditional clothing and the architecture is different again. The churches appear less colonial – next to the Convento de San Gabriel’s mustard door, I notice brown angelic faces carved into the stone as opposed to white ones.

The pyramid, built between 200BC and AD800, is embedded in a hill, on top of which stands a simple, beautiful church. It is possible to walk through the tunnels at the base of the pyramid – an eerie feeling. I manage to find my way out and come upon the open-air excavations of several shrines. It’s truly humbling to think that a civilisation built this with none of our know-how, guided mostly by intuition. I am overwhelmed by feelings of timelessness and peace, but José reminds me there is a five-hour drive ahead of us, to Oaxaca.

As we drive through the Sierra Madre mountains, he points out vegetation in every kind of green. By the end of our journey, the landscape has changed into arid, red desert. We reach Oaxaca, set deep within a valley, and head straight for town.

The zocalo here even outdazzles Puebla. Balloons are everywhere and mariachi singers break into song at even the slightest encouraging smile. The air smells of hot chocolate and freshly baked bread, and the aroma lures me into the most animated market I’ve ever seen. Here, women with braided hair and fine jewellery wrap up their babies in hand-embroidered blankets, resting them on the counters as they sell their goods. There are racks of fruit, spices, chillies, cheeses and other edibles – I’m especially taken by the enormous tortillas and the dried grasshoppers – and there are locally woven rugs and jet-black pots.

The vendors are mostly wise-looking old-timers: the women look as though they hold many secrets. I want to follow these characters home, and ask José if we can visit the villages outside Oaxaca, where all this stuff is made. He looks slightly baffled at first, but we spend the next few days doing exactly that.

In San Bartolo Coyotepec we meet Valente Nieto, the son of Doña Rosa, who became famous throughout Mexico for her perfectly round black pots, made entirely without a wheel. Valente continues the tradition, sharing few secrets. In Teotitlan, the Gonzalez family invite us into their home and demonstrate how they use the cochineal bug to make bright red dye for tapestry work. Señora Gonzalez is probably 80, and despite the many lines etched into her face, there is youthfulness in her eyes.

Each of these families passes down not only heritage, but their passion for fine detail. I find this everywhere in Oaxaca: from the starched white aprons of the waiters, to the embroidered blankets in which babies are wrapped, to the three yellow flowers placed fresh every day in my room.

José says he’s saving the best for last, and on our penultimate day he takes me to Monte Alban. Built high on a flattened mountaintop more than 2,500 years ago, this was the first city in North America. I can only describe it as like a lost city of the gods. As I walk among the temples, shrines and altars, the afternoon sunlight turns everything to shimmering gold. I find some narrow steps overlooking what might have been an observatory. I sit here for hours. The energy of the place is tangible, and I feel completely revived. Fearing I’ve gone missing, José comes to find me.

Having been enveloped by the colour and the culture of the people, I find it incredibly difficult to leave Mexico. It makes perfect sense, now, why my father carried these places with him and transported himself back here whenever he could. He did it without exaggeration.

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