Excerpt from A Lantern in the Wind: A Fictional Autobiography (Hansib Publications, forthcoming)

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jofstudindentleg.1.1.0149
• Pages: 149-162
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• Author: Ameena Gafoor

Journal of Indentureship 1.1 September 2021

Excerpt from A Lantern

in the Wind: A Fictional

Autobiography (Hansib

Publications, forthcoming)

Ameena Gafoor

Ameena Gafoor is founding editor, The Arts Journal

Ninny was a little over two years when Abdel was born, ten weeks

before the Nazis invaded Poland and Britain replied by imposing an

economic blockade and declaring war against Germany, a war that

would change the world beyond recall and change our lives forever.

The whole decade leading to the Second World War saw an economic

Depression in the Western world. War came on the heels of sugar

strikes that brought the colony to a crisis, sugar barons to their knees,

and the peasants to abject poverty. If Hitler could only guess the dev-

astation he caused in homes thousands of miles away, he no doubt

would not have cared, powerful nation that Germany was, but Hitler

could not know that the colonies would come to the assistance of their

imperiled Mother Country, nor was he counting on capitulation.

Haniff would surely have seen newspaper reports of the war rag-

ing between Germany and Great Britain, of the Battle of Britain – the

large-scale aerial battle between Britain’s RAF and Germany’s

Luftwaffe over London and the English Channel from 1940 to 1941.

Driven back with heavy casualties in the day raids, Hitler blamed it

on the weather and then started the night raids, called The Blitz,

when Britain was pounded with bombs as fast as the Germans could

regroup, until May 1941; the RAF pilots showed their mettle but with