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could see across the valleys to the huge masses of ice and snow suspended in thesky. It made the rest of Simla with its toytown houses plastered against the lowerranges of the Himalayas seem unreal.Winters in Simla made Joan uneasy. In the morning she saw the footprints ofwild animals - the deep wide span of bears or the delicate, triangular pads ofcheetahs. At night she could hear the howling of the wolves and in the day monkeysswung low in the trees near the dining hall. These were not cute chimpanzees likethe ones in the Tarzan movies, but huge and muscular with fierce red rumps. Thegirls giggled nervously at the red rumps, but were too afraid to linger as they dashedfrom classrooms to the hall. The mali refused to cut down the trees because themoneys were from the Sacred Temple. In winter the girls prayed to St Francis ofAssisi to protect them.The girls were always bitterly hungry, but it was much worse at winter. Theycomplained to Joan about their small serves of dahl and rice - their permanentdiet. Her own serves were only slightly bigger. She complained to the nuns, whosaid they must all offer up their sufferings.Through the snow grew tempting, fat, red berries. They were poisonous. One ofthe girls was too hungry to care and ate the berries. She died of lockjaw.Joan lost her appetite. She gave away most of her dahl and rice to the girls onher table. It didn't go very far. She allowed the girls to shake and eat the fruit fromthe tamarind tree in the nuns' garden when it was time for nature walks. MotherSuperior called Joan into the office and assured her that it was not her fault, butrather God's will. She suggested that Joan was too young for such responsibility.She insisted that Joan take a holiday. So Joan went to visit her cousin in theDarjeeling tea gardens, where she met her husband. She never returned to Simla.When she'd tried to talk about her life at Simla with her husband, he would tumhis head to one side and look as if he were listening. But before she could finishhe would stop her by saying. "That's allover now. Why make yourself unhappyby remembering the past?"Just as she couldn't speak of Simla to her husband, so she rarely spoke of herlife in the tea gardens after her husband died. And in England, where there wereso many foreigners, it took too long to explain why she had an English name butwas dark, or why she spoke good English but came from India.* * *When Joan retired she found herself thinking, not of the plans she'd made -the reading group, or drama club or walking tour of the Lake district but of thelives she contained within herself. She had hardly been aware of her first life -she thought she understood Anglo Indians because she was an Anglo Indian. Shethought she understood India because she'd lived there. Her second life was reallyjust a reaction to the first. She'd chosen to come to England because she taughtthe girls at Entally Convent the names and dates of English Kings and Queens aMread to them from Wind in the Willows or David Copperfield.Now perhaps, Joan thought, she had been given a third life. She wanted to findher own India, not the reported India of news stories or documentaries.Joan began to jot down what she remembered of her days in India, asking oldfriends to fill in the blanks, sifting through letters and photos for the rest. She founda photo of a couple at a tennis party. It took her a few moments to recognize herhusband and herself. It might have been a photo of anyone of their friends - AngloIndians playing English games in clothes copied from English magazines, like minorplayers in some colonial tableau.But as she talked to her friends and friends of friends, her story and memorybecame only one of many. What did it mean to say that Anglo Indians were neitherWESTERLY, No.2, JUNE, 1989 25