Before I Met My Husband — The Girl I Was Becoming

The need to be accepted can shape a life long before love appears.

Before Chris met me at that birthday party, he knew nothing about the girl I had been.

The lonely child.
The quiet observer.
The girl who had already learned, far too early, that life does not always give you the love you expect.

By the time I walked into that room and played the Honeymoon Game, I had already travelled a long emotional road — though I was still very young.

I was born in India, into a family that, from the outside, appeared privileged, during the final years of the British Raj, a period when the country itself was standing on the threshold of profound change. The old colonial structure still shaped many aspects of daily life, particularly within families who moved in professional and administrative circles. Manners were formal, expectations clearly understood, and reputation quietly guarded.

India was moving toward independence, yet in many homes the rhythms of the earlier era continued. One behaved appropriately. One did not speak openly of private difficulties. One learned early that dignity was something to be maintained.

My parents belonged to this world.

My father was Anglo-Indian, strikingly handsome, with a distinguished bearing and a magnificent handlebar moustache that fascinated me as a child. Before I was born, he had served as a bomber pilot in the Royal Indian Air Force during the Second World War.

He flew with a squadron known as The Twelve Apostles. Of those twelve young men who left the ground together, only one returned alive.

My father.

He rarely spoke of the war, yet it seemed to live quietly within him. Those who survive such years often carry their memories privately.

His career continued to advance steadily. In time, he rose to a senior rank and later held international positions, including service with the Indonesian government during President Sukarno’s tenure. He trained the pilots for Garuda Airways.

To the world, he was disciplined, capable, and respected. To me, he was simply Father — elegant, thoughtful, and quietly protective in ways I would only understand many years later.

Yet even as a small child, I sensed the delicate balance of authority within our home.

My mother was its centre. Composed. Intelligent. Strong-willed. A woman who understood how easily a family’s standing could be affected by the smallest misstep.

My father could command a squadron in the air. At home, he chose harmony.

I was their first child.

And yet, despite the structure and privilege that surrounded us, I often felt profoundly alone.

When I was one year old, a white bull terrier named Gruff entered my life.

He was not simply a pet. He was my constant companion, the small white shadow who followed me everywhere and asked nothing of me in return. I told him everything. To a lonely child, he felt like family. Perhaps even more than family.

My lifelong love for dogs began with Gruff — and never left me.

I was seven years old when I was sent to boarding school.

In those days, it was considered proper. Necessary. A good education. A structured upbringing. But no one explains that to a child standing on a train platform.

I can still see the scene clearly. My mother is adjusting my red polka-dot dress.

“Stand up straight. Watch your posture.”

My father kissed me lightly on the cheek.

“Goodbye, daughter. Do well in your schooling. See you in a year or two.”

A year.
Two years.

At seven years old, those words felt endless.

As the train began to move, I waved bravely from the window while tears burned behind my eyes, watching my parents grow smaller and smaller on the platform until they finally disappeared altogether.

I did not know then that I would not come home for three years.

When I finally did return, there were two small strangers in the house.

A baby brother.
A little sister.

Children, I was meeting for the very first time.

Life had quietly continued without me.

The convent school stood high in the hills, often wrapped in morning mist and long afternoon shadows. Life followed a strict and orderly routine designed to shape discipline and character.

The nuns and priests who ran the school believed strongly in discipline and order. Life followed a strict routine.

Wake at six.
Mass at six-thirty.
Lessons. Discipline. Order.

Structure governed each hour of every day.

Yet discipline was not only about routine. Academic performance was taken very seriously in our family, and from an early age I understood I was expected to come first in class. Second place was not encouraged, and third was quite unthinkable. Achievement was seen not simply as effort, but as duty.

If I did not maintain first position, small consequences followed — the loss of tuckshop privileges, or other quiet reminders that expectations had not been met. To a child, such things felt enormous.

Competition did not frighten me. It compelled me.

There was one particular girl who came very close to overtaking me. Sometimes the difference between us was only a single mark, occasionally even half a mark. I still remember the anxiety that accompanied those results.

On one occasion, when I had come second, fear overcame judgement. Late that evening, when the classroom was empty, I quietly entered and opened the teacher’s mark book on her desk. With trembling hands, I erased the one mark that separated us and added it to my own.

The following day, I was announced first in class. I waited for approval from home. Instead, the response was simple.

“Maintain your position.” No celebration. No acknowledgement.

Only expectation.

I do not recount this with pride, but with understanding for the frightened child who believed she must not fail.

There were other moments when fear overshadowed learning. I struggled to remember my seven-times tables, and for this I was required to stand in the corner while the thin bamboo cane struck across my calves seven times.

The anticipation of punishment made remembering even harder.

Fear has a way of emptying the mind.

Looking back now, I recognise how early the desire to meet expectations became intertwined with the fear of disappointing those whose approval mattered most.

And yet, what I remember most clearly is not the discipline, but the absence.

At night I missed many things, but I missed Gruff most of all.

Then one day a letter arrived.

Gruff had died.

I remember sitting on the stone steps outside the classroom, holding the paper in my hands, reading the words again and again as though they might somehow change.

I did not cry.

But something inside me broke quietly that day in a way I would only understand much later.

The one creature who had loved me without condition was gone.

From that moment on, love became something that appeared only during rare visits home — visits so few that even now I can count them on the fingers of one hand during ten long years of boarding school.

Love was something that arrived briefly… and then left again.

Not something one could rely upon.

Packed away, like something too fragile to leave out in the open.

As adolescence approached, I realised how much of life’s ordinary understanding had passed me by. Other girls spoke easily of subjects I did not yet understand — the quiet mysteries of growing up that mothers usually explain gently to their daughters.

I learned about such things from whispered conversations in dormitories, from girls just as uncertain as I was.

Once again, life was explained to me indirectly.

Quietly.

Without guidance.

One afternoon, I noticed my friend Rani carefully fastening a strange arrangement of cloth inside her bloomers with large safety pins.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’ve got my period,” she replied casually.

“My what?”

“It means you bleed every month… and you can have a baby.”

I stared at her in horror.

“But I don’t want a baby!”

She burst out laughing.

“Silly. It doesn’t just suddenly happen.”

“Well then, how do you stop it?” I asked anxiously.

“Ask your mother.”

But I never did. Some questions felt too difficult to put into a letter home. Months later, when it happened to me, I was terrified.

“I’ve got the blood,” I whispered to Rani.

She helped me quietly.

Gently.

And once again I learned something important about life not from the person who should have guided me… but from another girl trying to understand the world herself.

Like many young girls at boarding school, I sometimes longed to belong to the small circle of girls who seemed more confident, more daring, more certain of themselves.

One evening, inspired by stories of older girls sneaking out to meet boys from the nearby school, I decided I too would be brave. Or at least, what I believed bravery looked like.

The girls who did such things returned as heroines. They belonged. So I tried. Not because I particularly wanted to meet anyone. But because I wanted to feel part of something.

Instead, I hid in an empty classroom reading by torchlight. When the nuns discovered I was missing, panic spread across the school grounds. Voices calling. Footsteps echoing in corridors. Search parties formed.

I was found.

And expelled.

My father later arranged for my return. But something had shifted. The other girls kept their distance.

And the loneliness deepened.

After ten years, I finally returned home at seventeen. But it did not feel like coming home. A younger brother and sister filled the house with the easy noise of childhood — laughter, quarrels, the small chaos of family life unfolding naturally.

I watched quietly from the edges.

Not quite part of it.

Not quite outside it either.

I felt less like a daughter returning home and more like a visitor arriving late to someone else’s story.

I enrolled in secretarial college and soon found work with an aircraft company. My employer, Mr Cortese, was kind and encouraging, and I quickly became known as an efficient and capable secretary.

Yet something restless stirred inside me. There had to be more.

A life of my own.

Bombay, the big city, began to occupy my thoughts. Bombay meant possibility. Freedom. A future that belonged to me.

In a moment of desperation, I took a small pair of diamond earrings from my mother’s jewellery box and went to sell them at a jeweller’s shop in town. Surely she wouldn’t miss them; she had a zillion.

What I did not realise was that I had walked into my mother’s regular jeweller, a man who knew our family and our jewellery very well. The moment he placed the earrings under his eyeglass, recognition flickered across his face. Without drawing attention, he quietly telephoned my mother.

I waited nervously at the counter while he examined the stones with exaggerated care, turning them slowly beneath the light.

Then my heart stopped.

My mother entered the shop.

Under full sail.

There would be no escape.

Sometime later that night, I rose quietly to get a glass of water. As I passed my parents’ bedroom, their voices drifted through the slightly open door.

“We will have to ask her to leave,” my mother was saying calmly. “Otherwise, she will bring disgrace upon this family.”

The words struck like a blade.

I stood frozen in the hallway, listening.

The decision had already been made. The following morning, my mother called me into the sitting room.

There was no raised voice. No dramatic confrontation. Mother rarely needed such things. Instead, she handed me an envelope. Inside was a small amount of money.

And a train ticket.

One way.

Bombay.

“This will support you until you find work,” she said quietly.

I looked down at the small piece of cardboard resting in my hand. I had been sent away once before as a child. The first time, I had cried. Now I simply stood there, holding the small piece of cardboard that would determine the direction of my life.

I was seventeen years and eleven and a half months old — an age I remember with unusual precision, perhaps because it marked a threshold I felt so keenly. One needs to be 18 to be sent out into the world, and in 2 weeks, I will reach that milestone. Old enough, it was decided. Old enough to begin a life of my own.

There was no celebration to mark the occasion. No gathering, no small moment of ceremony to acknowledge the passing from childhood into adulthood. My eighteenth birthday arrived quietly, almost unnoticed, and with it came not a sense of arrival, but of departure.

Two weeks later, now officially eighteen, I boarded the train to the great city.

Frightened.
Determined.
Completely alone.

It was not a coming-of-age as I had imagined in childhood. It was an exit. A leaving home once again, this time with the understanding that the road ahead would be mine to walk.

And so I stepped onto the train, carrying with me more than a small suitcase — I carried the unspoken hope that somewhere in the wide world there might be a place where I would finally belong.

Yet the loneliness no longer frightened me the way it once had. I had been living with it for years. Somewhere ahead lay a life that would belong to me. What I did not yet know was that the city waiting for me would bring both my first great love… and my first great heartbreak.

At eighteen, I stepped onto the train and into the unknown.

I did not yet understand how much courage that journey would require, or how deeply the years ahead would shape me. I only knew that staying no longer felt possible for the person I was becoming.

Looking back now, I can see that the girl who stepped onto that train carried far more than a small suitcase. She carried unanswered questions, a quiet resilience, and a heart that still hoped — despite everything — that somewhere in the wide world there might be a place where she would finally belong.

Bombay was waiting.

And with it… everything that would shape the woman Chris was about to meet.

Because sometimes the roads we are forced to take…
These are the ones that lead us most directly toward ourselves.

And sometimes the life we believe we are leaving behind…
It is only preparing us for the life that is about to begin.

Continue reading:

Bombay — First Love (coming next)

Part of The Long Road of Love — Memoir Series

A story of love, resilience, and a marriage shaped across continents and decades.

New chapters are added regularly.

Thank you for reading, dear friends ღ.

© Stephanie Roberts