Personal tumult led Farah Damji to rejoice in the multi-ethnicity of her children. The editor of ‘Indobrit’, Britain’s new magazine celebrating the sub continent, on how it all came to be

There has been a lot of reporting in the British press recently about a half-Asian woman who murdered her husband’s lover in a fit of depression-induced rage. The judge said he had no option but to sentence her for life. Now life for murder means 14 years, so she will be at least 50, in the best possible scenario, when she is released. What happens to her ‘nigger’ children? To the unfit father who abandoned them and went on to have an affair? His lover told his wife that they were going to have children and that the children from their coupling would not be black, like hers.

I felt saddened and appalled by the incident. It recalled old memories. The blond blue-eyed ghastly Ulsterman who stalked my existence for nearly two years reared his ugly head once more. He was outwardly respectable, sound, sensitive, so I embarked on an affair with a man I thought I knew. Just an affair — he is not marriage material; his friends call him the most engaged and engaging man in Northern Ireland. When we fell pregnant, he had me threatened, followed, harassed by the police and heavies. Worst of all, he shut me out completely. Now I have some very good friends who held onto me and didn’t let me drown.

A circle of love embraced me. I took up Buddhism and chanting for hours at a time to let go of the hate and the darkness. I became undone. Friends were genuinely worried and I set upon a course of self-destruction. I think I lost the desire to live in those dark days of anger and pain. I was lost in my hate for this man. Nasty letters came through his inept and insensitive solicitors. I naturally, retaliated, faxing the chairman of the ‘global-going-local’ bank he worked at and letting my hormonally-challenged state take hold of my better senses. Marina was born almost two months early by emergency C-section and arrived in the bright lights and panic of the operating theatre, a far cry from the water birth and aromatherapy-scented labour I had discussed with my holistic consultant. She was born way underweight and had to be put into an incubator, and yet she held on and grew and managed to regulate her own body temperature within two days. We went home on New Year’s Day 2002.

I had a bad bout of postnatal depression and asked my mother to take Marina to Cape Town so I could start to put the pieces of my life back together. Those three months were key in redefining who I was and where we were going as a family — my two children and I. I was prescribed sedatives and anti-depressants and finally, the fog of lethargy and desperation started to lift.

A friend with more money than sense asked me what I wanted to do. I muttered something about wanting to start a magazine. He asked what it would cost and I let out some horribly inflated figure, hoping he would be shocked and drop the subject. He wrote me a cheque and the rest as they say, is history. In a lot of ways I think, that was the turning point for me because suddenly, here was a goal, a project in sight and something that needed to be accomplished fairly rapidly. Marina came back and we soon bonded and I settled into life with a new happy baby.

Asian Accents
I determined she would know who she was and where she came from, from my side. I wanted her and my son Imran, my two Indobrats, to be proud of their heritage, to lay a claim to the vast and rich resources at their calling. To India. But they are also irrevocably British. Both my children have fair fair skin, Marina has blonde hair and green/brown eyes. Imran has some of my features, but a porcelain complexion and chestnut-coloured eyes. When we go through airports, immigration officials check our passports twice. My children do not look like me. But we celebrate our ‘Indianness’ and they can be true citizens of a multicultural world and appreciate their ethnicity. Learn to love it, not try and hide it.

A friend told me that I was lucky that my children were so fair. This, to a mother who plants them outside in the garden at even the faintest hint of sunshine. My son spends his long summer holidays with my parents in South Africa and comes back golden and proud. “See, Mum, now I am brown like you,’’ he says. Oh, you are so clever, you gave her an European name, another friend says; she’ll fit in so well. Why did I choose the name Marina? I didn’t! Her brother did. It’s the name of the mermaid on a TV programme he was crazy about at the time.

‘Indobrit’ is a celebration of all things Asian; anything that comes from the sub- continent, which has cultural, political, aesthetic, economic value, should be part of their vernacular. I want them to grow up knowing Ayurvedic cures for the coughs and colds that plague them, to understand Vaastu and to know the stories of the Hindu gods and the special significance of fasting in Islam. I hope the music of the spheres that started in the place in which their great-grandfather was born calls them.

Let them pluck exotic fruit, bursting with succulent juices and eat it, to know and feel and live taste. I want them to look with fresh eyes at the worlds around them, the way Marina’s birth gave me a chance to shift my perspective and enter into a paradigm of change.

I wonder how I will tell her this story when she asks me who her father was. I can give her a clear identity and pride in her ancestral roots. But I also want to protect her from his gnarled emotions and the endless rivers of shame that feed poison to all around him, killing joy and life. I know these are not my decisions ultimately and I pray daily I have the character to face the day with courage when the question comes.

Love happens. I have an ongoing love-hate battle with my flowerbeds. I remember the realisation coming to me that Marina’s father just wasn’t worth it, one Hampshire Sunday afternoon. About a hundred people had told me that a thousand times before; I just had to get there myself. I have finally let go of the hate. I remember the moment I was relieved and emptied. Years of pain dissolved like cobwebs and dust.

An old but new man entered my life and my space; he made me laugh again, come out into the sun and to live fully again, with him, basking in this thing called us, and life dances before us reflected in his sea-green eyes. And we reclaim each other 22 years after the story started. On the back of his BMW 1200 BX. Go figure!