It was not the life she was expecting.
In this book, she tells her remarkable story for the first time, from her early beginnings in wartime England, through to her arrival in India in 1966 to visit her Bombay boyfriend, Anand Mehta, and on to the roller-coaster ride that followed: marriage, motherhood, bereavement and grief, and the difficulties of inhabiting two starkly different worlds: the upper-middle-class South Bombay milieu of friends and family, of music, cricket and holidays with her grandchildren, and the dire poverty and deprivation of the slums she encountered in her work life.
As told by journalist Georgina Brown, My Passage to India is a candid, elegant and effortlessly engaging account of the changing fortunes of a family and a city.
In the early seventies, Annabel became a volunteer with Apnalaya, an NGO working with the urban poor to improve challenging conditions in the slums, first as Treasurer and then as President, for which she was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen.
Leaving England in October 1966 and taking the boat to Bombay was a defining moment for me. But had I not abandoned the idea of becoming a professional pianist-my first, big, independent decision-I would never have gone to the London School of Economics, I would never have met Anand Mehta. And none of this would ever have happened.
I can picture the woman I might have become, dressed in a twinset and pearls, teaching my grandchildren to play Chopin Etudes in an airy drawing room in Worcestershire. Instead, I am wearing a fuchsia pink salwar-kameez and a mangal sutra around my neck. Today, Anand, my husband of nearly sixty years, and I will be going with our daughter Anjali and her husband Sachin Tendulkar to watch our grandson's team, the Mumbai Indians, play a match at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai.
We had travelled there together and with our children dozens of times. How could he resist? But what would become of me? For decades I had been a theatre critic on newspapers in London. I had never not worked. Dramatic as it may sound, I felt I must choose between my job and my marriage. Someone else would be taking my place in the stalls.
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