Most of what I knew about Ireland growing up as a child in India came from songs such as Galway Bay and Molly Malone, taught to me at school. I went to several different schools because my father served in the Indian Army Corps of Engineers, and regiments regularly moved all over the country. All seven schools I attended as a young child were run by Irish nuns.
India was truly secular – a far more tolerant and accepting society – when I lived there than it is today. Christians, Muslims and Hindus grew up together and went to school together. I remember attending midnight Mass on Christmas Eve six years in a row with my Catholic friends. Afterward we would go to a fairground and eat and drink. In India, like Ireland, there was always an obsession with food and with families gathering around food.
I had an idyllic childhood, and my parents had a very liberal outlook. I was a big reader, and they indulged me with hundreds of books. With one flick of a page, I was off travelling, away from utilitarian garrison towns and strict convent schools. Those books made me the woman I am today. My brother and I had got over our sibling rivalries and grown very close by the time he was killed in a car accident aged 19. It left my parents totally broken. They only came back to life when my own three children were born years later. His death continues to define my life in many ways, and I miss him terribly.
I left Madras, now known as Chennai, a city of 12 million people, in 1987 and arrived in Sligo, a county of just 12,000. In India we had an idea of what the West was like – I was expecting sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but what I got was Catholic Ireland. I soon realised I’d left a conservative country for an ultraconservative one. I should have guessed. The day before I flew to Ireland my husband, a junior doctor who had arrived four months earlier, rang me and asked me to bring condoms, explaining you could only get them here on prescription. I spent my last day in India scurrying between dozens of pharmacies and I arrived in Ireland on Valentine’s Day with a suitcase full of sin.
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Looking back on those days, it was a good time to be brown in Ireland. We often made weekend forays across the Border at Belcoo to stockpile cheap groceries and booze. We learned to roll down our windows and stick our heads out because, on being spotted, we’d be asked to leave the long queue of cars – most with boots open, passengers and contents strewn on the road – and were waved on by unsmiling, gun-wielding soldiers. We weren’t mistaken for terrorists then.
I loved Ireland from the beginning. My husband and I had always been city folk, but we took to country life immediately. It sounds corny, but Ireland was so utterly green when we arrived, and access to the outdoors was so easy. In India we might have to drive an hour and a half to find a river or lake we could swim in. In Sligo, all we had to do was walk out of the house and we were surrounded by greenery, nature and sea.
I’ve been an avid birdwatcher since I was a child. Urban India is jampacked with birds. I’m talking about birds of prey such as vultures and eagles as well as kingfishers and sparrows. During the Indo-Pakistani war in 1965, the army dug a trench around our town. When the war ended after 15 days, my dad covered it with old tarpaulins so we could use it as a hideaway for birdwatching and my grandmother made us camouflage suits out of old green curtains. In Ireland, birds are more elusive and less in your face so it’s a different kind of fun. There’s more patience required.
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I came here as an accompanying spouse without a work visa so I had a lot of time on my hands. I fell into reading the work of Irish writers. I began with a lot of William Trevor. Even today when I reach a block in my own writing and I just want to read something well written, I return to Trevor. I love Donal Ryan, Kate O’Brien and Belinda McKeon.
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As a first-generation immigrant, I had no family or relatives nearby, nobody I could ask to collect my kids from school if I needed to go to the dentist or doctor. So my neighbours were and still are all important. They have become my family. I was very lucky because when we settled in Kildare 25 years ago, all the women who moved into that first street turned 40 the same year and we all had children of the same age. These women are as good as my sisters.
One of the reasons I’m so comfortable in Ireland is because the Irish are so like Indian people. We have a similar attitude to religion and it has shaped us. Whether Hindu or Catholic, in both countries the ethos permeates your entire life, much more than people imagine. As a writer, though, I’ve observed ... well, that’s Catholic guilt or that’s some kind of Hindu hang-up.
Then there’s our obsession with family. It’s a huge point of connection between the two countries. Growing up in India, it was all about what the relations might say. There was a very similar mentality in Ireland 40 years ago. Before I married at 23, there wasn’t an uncle or aunt who wasn’t worried that I might be “left on the shelf”.
In conversation with Marie Kelly. This conversation was edited for clarity and length. The Inheritance by Cauvery Madhavan is out now
