Swings and roundabouts

It’s a bit morbid to mark the anniversary of my mum’s death – today would be the third – but I use the time to celebrate and investigate her life.

Last year, I travelled back to Smethwick in the Midlands to see where she grew up, went to school and had her first job. And the year before to Tilbury Docks, down the road in Essex, where she landed “fresh off the boat” from India, six years old. A sort of backwards biography.

This year, however, I’m facing forward, travelling somewhere she always wanted me to go – and that’s into parenthood. She longed for Brook and I to have children, and though she passed before we did, I quietly imagine her here with us as we bring Winona into the world.

I imagined her at our 12-week scan, in the chair next to us in the doctor’s office, sitting on her hands and pressing her lips together, as if to supress any outward display of joy through fear of jinxing anything (though her smiling eyes would give it away).

I imagine her with Winona on her knee on our couch, singing the Punjabi nursery rhyme ‘Jhoote Maate’ about the back and forth of swings and mango crops, spinning wheels and storms.

And I imagine that nursery rhyme sang to my mum in a village back there in the Punjab and now to my daughter here in London – and I’m back and forth again, past and present, here and there. Winona’s smiling eyes and my mum’s.