Tracing forgotten footsteps: Uma Lohray on giving voice to India's lost ayahs
Raised across Pune, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad by scientist parents, and trained as a lawyer in Delhi, Uma Lohray never imagined her literary debut would be sparked by a Blue Plaque in London. 'It began quite unexpectedly,' she shares, recalling the moment she came across an article about the Ayahs' Home. 'The name alone gave me pause. Who were these ayahs, and why did they need a home in Britain?' That small question unlocked a forgotten world of Indian women and girls—many barely teenagers—who were taken overseas by British families as caretakers during colonial times, often only to be abandoned later.
This haunting silence, and the systematic erasure of these lives from mainstream history, drove Lohray to write The One-Way Ships. Set in pre-independence Shimla and England, the novel centers on Asha, a spirited girl whose life changes after her father's death. 'Asha is entirely fictional,' says Lohray, 'but she's built from many echoes—girls mentioned in records without names, just fleeting presences.' Through Asha's journey, Lohray offers a lens into a hidden world of displacement, survival, and quiet strength.
The research behind the novel was both rigorous and intuitive. Lohray devoured historical texts, shipping records, and period literature, from Dr. Rozina Visram's academic work to Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, piecing together an emotional landscape from archival fragments. Her legal background, she says, helped shape this approach: 'Law teaches you to read between the lines, to question what's missing. That was invaluable in handling archival material and imagining what those silences might have felt like.'
Balancing Asha's innocence with growing awareness was one of the novel's artistic challenges. 'Children don't always have the vocabulary for power, race or class—but they feel those things deeply,' Lohray notes. 'The goal was not to make Asha precocious, but perceptive, shaped gradually by experience.'
Lohray draws a literary parallel between Asha and Black Beauty, evoking the emotional resonance of a powerless narrator finding dignity and voice. 'Asha doesn't control her world, but she sees it clearly. Her strength isn't granted—it's chosen.'
Though rooted in colonial history, The One-Way Ships feels powerfully contemporary. 'So many young people today live between worlds,' says Lohray. 'Asha's story may be set in the 1930s, but her emotional terrain—of loss, resilience, and identity—is timeless.'
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