Nikita Lalwani

But if he could, he would tell her everything. He’d tell her he’d got into all their universities — all the bloody jewels they treasured so exclusively in this country: that he had been offered a place at their Cambridge and their LSE. He had ended up in Cardiff because they had offered the cash — all two thousand pounds of it, a sum that no one could deny for its totality. Full fees. They had wanted him here, a foreigner with no more than five pounds in his pocket and a slip of a wife, bare-toed and shivering. That is how he got off the plane with Shreene in 1972, newly-wed and alert, dignified by the patronage of their redbrick institutions, sure as a compass, leading the way for them both.

He had not been part of the thirty thousand Indians haemorrhaging out of the ugly scar in Uganda’s belly that same year, seeping into the dark spaces of Britain, afloat in the soiled bathwater of Amin’s shake up: the crawling masses who had fallen into the pockets of Leicester and Wembley. He was not going to be dissolved into the rivers of blood: part of Enoch Powell’s armies of bacteria, defecating in people’s nightmares on the landscape of their precious country.