She could not stay in India. That was made perfectly clear. All the children went to boarding school in England, including Anglo Indians with fathers who cared, and that included her.
There was a long list of clothing and other things that would be bought when she got there. She took very little with her. A silver backed hair brush. Just one sari.
In London the grandmother she'd never seen before took her shopping. Everything on the list was carefully purchased.
The school uniform was dark green and exceedingly ugly. She felt her heart sink as she looked at herself in the green scratchy skirt and grey scratchy shirt. The green and grey tie and the grey cardigan. Grey wool knee socks with a green band around the top. Grey blazer with a green coat of arms on the breast pocket with a motto in Latin that she would never understand. Clunky black shoes.
Then all the sports stuff. Lacrosse stick, field hockey stick. Stout grey shorts. Green Air-Tex shirt. New tooth brush, soap box, toilet bag, pajamas, dressing gown ...would it never end?
Her grandmother, large and shy, stopped at a Lyons for tea and biscuits. She put on her glasses and scowled at the list. She was over budget.
``Do we have everything?'' she asked. There was a neat check mark by each item on the list.
``I think that's everything,'' she said.
It didn't take long to get settled. Everyone was homesick. Everyone was lonely. Quiet sniffling sounds from half the long row of beds in the dormitory room. So many others like her, half a world from home with nothing to look forward to but the light-weight blue aerogrammes with their red and blue striped borders. Treasured, weeks old news of home.
She was always cold and hungry. She ate voraciously. Great stacks of bread and dripping. Deep fried fish paste sandwiches. A steamed suet pudding called dead man's leg.
She ate and ate and grew tall and thin, shooting out at the wrists and ankles.
Then her smooth skin erupted into a mass of pimples. She could not bear to look at herself and she avoided the glances of others. She hid herself in books and did well in her studies.
She was so aggressive on the playing field that she was sometimes made to run laps instead of playing. She nearly broke someone's ankle with her hockey stick. She didn't think she'd meant to.
Then she started to bleed. It was no surprise. Her grandmother had packed one box of sanitary napkins ``just in case''. She wrote to her grandmother to ask for more but her grandmother was on Ibiza for the winter. None came. She wore the last ones way too long. She smelled bad. Then she used gym socks which she rinsed out and tried to dry in her hanging cupboard. She was tired of the blood on her clothes, her underwear.
At Christmas everyone left for a couple of weeks but she had nowhere to go. No English girl had invited her home. She was alone in the school except for Miss Twist the housekeeper. Alone to sit in the great Georgian windows and look out at the cold green countryside. Time to meander through the well stocked library and dream over any book she wished.
Miss Twist pitied the poor child with her acne and outgrown clothes. There was a parcel on its way from India she knew, but it hadn't arrived by Christmas Eve. Miss Twist gave the girl some money.
``You can walk to the village and buy some sweets,'' she said.
The girl walked through the fields to the village. Frost glittered on dead grass. Rabbits popped out of blackberry tangles to stare at her in astonishment. All so strange.
At the village store she had just enough money to buy a box of sanitary napkins, though it turned out she didn't need them.