Looking back over my life, there seems no way of tying up the loose ends without imposing some artificiality – the discipline of craft, the comb that stops the wisps of hair from straying. I want to present Life in all its untidiness, random thoughts and contradictions.

I no longer want to conform to what is expected of me. That is what ageing does to you. Have you noticed how a tulip goes from closed, elegant, upright and mysterious to a wild thing, petals obscenely wide open, leaning dangerously out of a vase?

In Britain, my experience of racism was to drop down the class hierarchy from middle to working. And to inhabit forever that grey area of nagging doubt whether the pile of rejections was a comment on my writing, my race or my sex.

When I was asked halfway through my MPhil whether I would like to convert it to a PhD, I said no. Not for any academic reasons but because I was working in a shoe shop and I could not see myself progressing to another job where calling myself Dr Gupta would not be met with laughter. The double negative – another gift from this nation of understatements.

I don’t come alone
I bring the sun with me
Imprinted on my skin
The glare is too much for you
You wear your mirrored sunglasses
To protect your eyes
My reflection bounces back at me,
I ping off your glasses,
I boomerang,
Like a pin ball,
I bang
Against hard surfaces.
All I see
Are reflections of me,
I am concave,
Convex,
Tall and thin,
Short and fat,
Blue, yellow, brown and pink,
Unrecognisable,
I am not held by your eyes,
Not taken in.
I remain the outsider.

If I am ever asked how long it took me to feel settled in this country, I will say 30 years. As an Indian, my need for exerting ‘influence’, ie pulling strings, has not been diminished by all the years I have lived here. In India, as a middle-class person, if there is a medical emergency, somebody will know somebody who will know somebody who can give you advice – the class advantage which I lost. I needed a close connection with a doctor, an accountant and a lawyer to make sure I had all contingencies covered. Three years after I arrived in this country, my aunt birthed a baby boy who took 24 years to qualify as a doctor. I meanwhile had to ‘grow’ an accountant as they say nowadays – keep my partner in jam, in his late forties for five years, while he qualified to become an accountant. And lawyers, well, I’ve come across a few, some of whom have become dear friends. But then my wants increased – I wanted a plumber and an electrician too. So I remain unsettled.

After 30 years of being in this country I finally made arrangements to ship my books over from India. This is not testimony to disorganisation but the idea that home was where my books were kept. For some reason, I well up as I write this.

Bringing my father from Delhi to London when he could no longer travel on his own – on his final journey, as he dubbed it – was a further cutting of my ties with India. So I sat at Delhi airport, feeling emotional and for some reason my mother, who had died long ago, popped into my head – she, bowed over her sewing machine and then forward in time to me bowed over my computer – the continuity of images bringing comfort to me.

Because he was increasingly prone to falling, we set up a camera in my father’s room so that I could keep an eye on him while I was working. There was a tiny monitor in my room with a black and white picture showing his bed, which was usually in darkness and his sitting area with the TV which was extremely bright. It felt like a low-budget, poorly lit arthouse movie in which nothing happens for hours at a time. So every time my father ambled across the set, it became laden with meaning. I could not drag my eyes away until he had completed the journey. It was hugely invasive. I kept hoping he wouldn’t do anything that would embarrass him to know that I had seen it. He knew about the camera, of course, but how easy it is to forget that your life is being watched. A metaphor for all of us ungrateful non-believers.

When I was reading a piece about how the British Museum’s exhibition on Indian tantric tradition aims to overturn Western stereotypes about it being solely about sex and yoga, I realised that those are my stereotypes too. When I was growing up in India, my own culture was chewed up by the West and regurgitated back to me so I saw it through a Western lens. This is the typical imperialist model. Taking our raw materials, manufacturing them and selling us the finished goods. I took an interest in Ravi Shankar (a disservice to see him as raw material) only after the Beatles collaborated with him.

When I came to England, the few writing assignments that came my way required me to be an expert in my own culture but the truth of the matter was that I could sooner quote Wordsworth than Ghalib. Today, age has robbed me even of that ability.

I entered the park
The raw green of England stung my eyes
Special –
Just like the gravy coloured spit

I have a cousin who went to live in the States. He used to visit me and threaten to piss on the walls of Buckingham Palace as some kind of reparation for the theft of Indian riches that gilded the monarch’s jewels. He now makes a case for Trump.

Recently at a party in the North of England, my daughter reported to me, in the Mancunian accent in which the compliment had been delivered, that she had ‘lovely Paki eyes’. ‘Lovely’ is progress, yes?

Surprising how soon you develop a specialist perspective on things. A couple of hours leafleting (to urge people to vote for the Labour party while Jeremy Corbyn was leading it) and I had become quite the expert on doors and letter boxes. Openings that allowed only small envelopes to get through, others with a stiff nylon brush guarding the entrance and
taking at least thirty seconds to push through a flimsy leaflet unless I could suspend my conscience long enough to thicken the delivery by pushing in three or four at the same time, being cheered by metal flaps that covered a huge hole and allowed a bunch of leaflets easy entry within seconds. I felt no shame in criticising the taste of the people who lived behind those doors – cheap plastic doors pretending to be antique wood, patterned glass doors with aluminium trims bound to belong to an Asian household, turning my nose up at the smell in one front garden, the clutter in another, the peeling paint in another. In a street called Gay Close, a sign reads ‘No Ball Games’.

When my daughter and I went on a march to support the women’s revolution in Rojava, she pointed to the holes in the Southall Black Sisters banner, implying it was time to get a new one. I said the holes were made to let the wind through otherwise it’s a real struggle to carry on a windy day. Isn’t that also the way to make an effective argument? You need to
have some holes in it to let your opponent’s voice come through otherwise it’s a real struggle to hold firm against a barrage of opposition.

I have friends who say that they don’t watch the news anymore because it is so depressing. I find that attitude unforgivable. What right do we have to retreat into our cocoons that we cannot even bear witness to the suffering of our fellow human beings. But this righteous me head-butted against that me that now avoids stories of migrants in boats, of the terrible conditions in the detention centres in which we hold refugees, of the narratives that dream
of Rwanda as the final solution. It is the sense of helplessness against a tsunami of hate and prejudice. That is why I wrote a book about it and having immersed myself deeply in the issue and seen for myself how governments and people have hardened, I can no longer bear to confront something about which I can do nothing.

In the days after the publication of Enslaved, I participated in a campaign with Lush, the radical cosmetics business, who supported the idea of open borders for which I had made a case in the book. We attempted to board the Eurostar to Paris from King’s Cross armed with nothing more than a must-have ‘World passport’ with the legend, ‘This document confirms that its bearer is a human being, and not an alien’. There was a child-like drawing of the globe. My pulse was racing because borders produce that kind of reaction in migrants, a sense of inauthenticity, an impostor syndrome. Will I be discovered stealing into your country? I was very nervous even though I have a British passport and even though the idea of never being safe in this country hadn’t sunk in yet. It was in the days before Shamima Begum when it became commonplace to try and deport British citizens to their grandparents’ country of origin. Of course we were picked up by the French immigration officials, who methodically and hilariously photocopied every crayoned page of this so￾called passport. The one who looked like De Gaulle looked at me and asked, without hope of an answer, ‘Eez a joke, no?’ My companion, the white Campaigns Manager of Lush, was totally calm as he surreptitiously recorded the proceedings on his mobile, all the while lecturing De Gaulle about the irrationality and inhumanity of borders. To be posted on Youtube eventually. I wonder if today that action would have been enough to revoke my status.

Romesh Gunesekera once said that migration is the way we make the world our home. People have done it ever since human beings stood up and noticed the horizon. But. Where you pitch your tent and stay is a privilege afforded only to those with power.

Artists can make borders disappear. Governments can’t or won’t.

As a writer I feel like a scavenger of human experience. I don’t live life so much as I research it.

I inhabit that space where art and activism meet.

When a film I had co-scripted opened in Cannes, I decided to attend even though I had not been officially invited which is when I discovered how far down the food chain writers were, especially in the film industry. I was asked by a journalist in Cannes what I made of it all as an activist, I said, I found it all very glamorous. It’s not a pond I usually swim in but fortunately it is shallow enough for me not to feel out of my depth.

Life is a series of deaths, (and yet we profess happiness, even contentment at times) caught between a past that is constantly dying and the future which holds our deaths. My daughter, aged two or four or ten, is no longer with me but I must find comfort in the illusion that that child stands in front of me wrapped up in this adult envelope even though
she does not have the memories to independently confirm her childhood existence for me. I have to rely on a failing memory for that confirmation. There is relief only in the present moment but that, as we know, is short-lived, slipping into the past even as we experience it. The past has resisted all the direct and indirect tactics used by my memory to strip it down, all the manipulative charms, all the circling and prowling, the tangential approaches. I end up gaslighting myself. My daughter believes that neither the past nor the future hold any interest for me. Your tense is the present, she says. I become tense when she says that.

Women should not boast about multi-tasking, it’s just another form of exploitation. Every time I walk away from my computer and open the door, the smell of something burning wafts from the kitchen. That is the price I pay for concentrating on my writing – somebody’s dinner gets burnt, possibly mine too.

My relationship with the English language was forged in India which infused my writing with a floweriness that crept in from Urdu. I had to force myself to shed adjectives, to adopt as bare a style as I could in order to please the English palate. I did not have the sophistication to differentiate between Americanisms and Englishisms. I used words like normalcy without blinking. After independence, American neo-colonialism and the soft power of American culture had grabbed hold of ex-British colonies almost unnoticed. I couldn’t believe that the British could compliment me on my perfect English and then say, ‘You was’ in the same breath. That was the equivalent of seeing a white person sweep the roads on arrival to this country. The concept of class never permeated my understanding of the monolith that was
British colonialism. A Victorian coyness riddled my language with euphemisms. ‘She was in the family way’ to describe pregnancy. ‘He was acting fresh with me.’ Actually he was sexually harassing me. ‘Peacocks danced because they loved the monsoon rain’. Actually, the magnificent display of feathers was part of a mating ritual and the monsoon was their mating season.

Journalists, like bankers, are careless with the commodity in which they deal daily. They empty words of meaning at an alarming rate, leaving the rest of us with an impoverished language. Other writers, the more serious ones, then painstakingly keep pumping in meaning but the pool feels chlorinated rather than truly fresh. When a writer does come up with something fresh that catches our imagination, it is repeated ad infinitum. Take Arundhati Roy’s description of loss ‘a Joe-shaped hole in the universe’.

As a writer I have always wanted to be that person who coined a phrase that became stale with use, pompous enough to want to leave behind a linguistic imprint. One night I dreamt this line ‘These words have the potential for becoming a cliché – that is their distinction.’ Although I couldn’t identify which words, in my sleep I thought it was a really profound
statement. All night, slipping between sleep and wakefulness, these words kept coming back propelled by the anxiety that I will forget them. Seen in the bright light of day, its wisdom is not apparent. What is clear is my desire to be the author of those words.

Nowadays, one man and his blog seem to have a disproportionately loud bark.

Writing is a way out of loneliness. You can say the unsayable, the things that you cannot share even with your closest friends, through a character in your fictional world. A thought shared is a victory against being locked inside your own head.

It is possible to walk down a whole street in London without anyone noticing that you are crying. I thought I’d tweet this but stopped myself in case people drew conclusions about me and worse, if no one liked it or retweeted it. It would compound the loneliness.

Grief is a long conversation with yourself. You know you’ve come out of that corridor when you start talking to other people, I mean really talking.

Words, trembling with tears, fell from her mouth. They glistened like a blade of grass at dawn that trembles with the weight of a dewdrop.

For years I carried the grief of losing my son into polite drawing rooms like dirt under my nails.

Grief makes you live more in the periphery. That shirt on a hanger caught by peripheral vision gives the illusion of a loved one still alive, still present whereas looking straight ahead, all you see is bleakness and emptiness.

The funeral march had always played through his body
Like a reed
Only I hadn’t been listening

His birth pre-figured his death. My womb was shaped like a headstone and I didn’t notice. It was a graveyard but the blood and contractions, pain and movement gave it a semblance of life and fooled me.

Eliot said, ‘Every poem an epitaph’. The Ballad to my son is the longest epitaph that I could have written. Too expensive to be chiselled into marble. So I wrote it on paper. The only cost is my grief.

I used to go to a halal butcher’s staffed by mainly young Pakistani men whose hormones were riding pillion on motorcycles. Once when I asked for the Hindi word for kidneys, someone yelled out from inside, goliyan, the Urdu word for testicles and everybody laughed. I actually knew that word so I wasn’t going to ask for testicles when I actually
wanted kidneys. I resolved never to go back. About ten or so years later, when I was passing and needed to buy some meat, I thought I’d venture in again. The staff had changed but they were all still clones of the men who had served me years ago – but this lot was surprisingly very respectful. It was only when one of them addressed me as aunty that I realised that I had changed. I looked too old for sexist banter. They hadn’t changed at all.

I know I am getting older when zooming up and down in my hospital bed is the closest thing to a fairground thrill. When bruising on my arm is caused neither by a lovebite nor a strong loving grip but a careless phlebotomist’s needle. When you need glasses to flirt, to clock the men who’re clocking you. Even my dreams lack ambition, those that I can remember anyway. As you age, you wake up in the morning as if from the dead. That is, on the days when you are lucky enough to have a full night’s sleep. There will have been no visits to technicolour worlds of fantasyland. I used to dream of flying; now I dream that I don’t have time to complete this or that task. The most positive thing I can say about ageing is that you acquire a hinterland, time which only you have possessed by virtue of having been born earlier, things that you have seen which sets you apart from others who are curious about the events that preceded them. History.

Her corpse was bloated
By ambitions unfulfilled
B movie stardom

If I was to ever write my autobiography I would call it, The Final Rewrite, because when I look back on my life, I constantly rewrite who I was in the light of who I am at the moment of looking back and that changes by the minute. But at the end of my life, I would know that there could be no further revisions of my character.

I have resolved to go, one more time before I die, to where I had been once before, with a school friend, to a beach in Java where the horizon was hollow. We sat at night on the beach while the children slept and looked at the horizon. Instead of being a tight line stretched across the sky, clearly demarcating where the sea ended and the sky began, it appeared hollow, allowing us to see the battle of lightning and thunder that was taking place beyond the horizon but yet was somehow reflected above it. It was a place of possibilities not endings.

As I get older I notice that friends and family are increasingly writing epitaphs for my headstone – as if all of life’s complexity can be sucked into a single vortex of meaning. The suggestions are piling up. My headstone is getting as big as Labour’s Edstone when Ed Miliband carved out Labour’s manifesto on a nearly 3m tall block of stone and then had difficulties finding a permanent home for it. A stab at Stonehenge immortality? Mine has no such pretensions. It’s all on paper, actually what looks like paper but is even more immaterial – the digital space.

‘Attractive to dogs’ – no, this was not a comment on my partner but if he outlives me there is no way he is going to use that on my headstone. This was coined by my dog-infatuated friends and referenced the fact that much as I disliked dogs, the compliment was never returned. They would always make a beeline for me, licking my feet and demanding my attention. Are they dumb or just won’t take no for an answer? Hmmm. That’s usually a question I ask about men.

‘She couldn’t walk past a soapbox without standing on it.’ That’s my partner.
‘She believed her only flaw was her inability to sing.’ That’s me.
‘She hated waste.’ That’s my daughter.

But what I actually want is a QR code which directs the casual passer-by to my full biog. Ain’t I the cool one?