It was the mantra of our childhood, repeated more frequently than our prayers. She firmly believed that teaching and learning was best done by pain and punishment, and if she had been a volunteer in the New Haven test, she would have been surprised that they went to the trouble of using a shock machine and a separate room. She would have happily stood over the learner with a blunt instrument until he got the answers right.
I was jealous of my sisters, and teamed up with my little brother, Jamal Kamal, whom we called Jay-Kay for short, and eventually Jakie from convenience, as that was how he mispronounced his own name as a toddler. Our mother claimed it was easier to copy than correct him, but the truth was that she preferred Jakie, as it sounded more English, and she was the one who probably taught him to say it in the first place. My brother and I would seek out opportunities to torment the girls. We’d go up to them in the garden, where the servants couldn’t see, and give them the hardest pieces of mango, to make them struggle and sputter, cough and cry as they tried to chew them down; when they saw us laughing, they’d run to Cook to tell on us. We would hide their stupid dolly-babies, the collection of hand-made rag dolls stitched by the ayah from bright sari offcuts, which they slept with at night. The ayah didn’t find them until Jakie gave us away.
‘They’re definitely not on top of the wardrobe. No one could reach to hide them up there. Not unless they were the best thrower in the world,’ he said too proudly. Jakie was the best thrower in the family; he told me that I threw like one of the girls.