Dheera Sujan takes a personal journey back to her childhood in India and her “memories of a parallel mother.” She shares the sounds, smells and tastes of childhood with her sister and searches for a fish curry recipe.

Josephine Fernandez was my 20-something, bow-legged, horsey faced Goan ayah. I was about five and my sister two years younger when Josie came into our lives. She stayed with us till we emigrated to Australia a few years later. When we left India for good to start a new life, it was Josie who we missed more than anything else we'd left behind.

Josephine taught us to play gin rummy and dance the twist on a floor she'd made deliciously slippery with talcum powder. She sang us songs – Christian hymns and Hindi movie love ballads - and told us a great many old wives tales. We would watch her comb her knee-length hair and gazed on adoringly as she rubbed a wonderful rose-scented cream onto her skin, and applied her lipstick and eyeliner before her night out.

During those early years of our lives my sister and I loved Josephine as completely as we loved our mother. Now I'm a mother myself, I wonder if I would be jealous if my child loved another woman as much as she loved me. My sister puts it in perspective: "Wouldn't you rather leave your child with someone they love than with someone they don't?"
 
Fish curry recipes

The world my sister and I had with Josie was almost completely separate from the world we shared with our parents. With the family we ate bland Sindhi food – spinach, mutton, rice and dal. But we would sneak away in the afternoons when my mother was at work and the rest of the house was napping off their lunch. We'd run to the kitchen and squat on the cool cement floor with Josie and she would feed us her fiery coconut fish curries. Over the years, I've been haunted by the memories of the smell and taste of these Goan curries, but despite trawling through cookbooks and internet recipes I've never managed to replicate the taste.

After we left India, Josie went on to be the maid of a family friend. On a couple of visits back to Bombay, she was the one we were most excited to see. We would fling ourselves on her, and jabber about our new lives and Josie would smile and listen and feed us treats she'd made especially for us. On one visit, she told us she was going to be married but assured us she would still be there the next time we came back. But she wasn't. We never saw her again.

We missed her, and then Josephine memories gradually faded into the background as the fragmented realities of growing up took over. But in recent years memories of Josie have been coming back – first just the odd one or two, and then, especially after I became a mother myself, a deluge.

Dancing the twist

I'll be in the middle of writing a memo at work, or in a supermarket and suddenly will remember how Josie taught us to make a hand for card games. An odd snatch of song on the radio triggers the memory of Josie singing as she folded our clothes, and I'll remember the sound of the Bombay traffic and the cawing of the crows streaming in from the open balcony doors. And the other day, I put on an old Hindi music album, turned the volume up and my daughter Riya and I – to our mutual hilarity – danced the twist.

These days, I often find myself wondering where Josie is, what she's doing, what her life is like. We have no way of tracing her. I hope she has moved beyond the hard life of a maid or ayah. On recent return trips to Bombay, I find myself looking out for her. I think of the things I would say to her. Do you remember us the way we remember you? Or have you forgotten that once, long ago you danced the twist on a talcum-powdered floor with two little girls who thought that you were the sun and the moon?

I have so many questions I want to ask her about her life, mainly to reassure myself that Josie did well for herself after we'd left her to her fate. There are so many things I want to tell her about mine. But I guess mainly what I'd like to do is bury my head in her rose scented lap and say thank you.

Ode to Josephine was produced and presented by Dheera Sujan. The programme was originally broadcast in September 2004 as part of the series Vox Humana.