A powerful debut, The One-Way Ships unearths the forgotten voices of colonial India’s ayahs—young girls torn from home, navigating loss and identity across continents and generations. The author Uma Lohray spoke to Sakschi Verma.

The One-Way Ships by Uma Lohray is a compelling debut novel that blends historical fiction and bildungsroman to illuminate the untold stories of India’s “baby ayahs”—young nannies taken to Britain during colonial rule. Set in pre-independence India and featuring rich historical detail, the novel follows Asha, a resilient girl forced into caregiving, who transforms her abandonment into strength. Through immersive storytelling and meticulous research, Lohray revives a forgotten chapter of colonial history with emotional depth and narrative grace. Ideal for readers interested in Indian history, women’s voices, and powerful literary fiction rooted in truth.

Uma Lohray’s debut literary endeavour, The One-Way Ships, a book that’s as much a bildungsroman as a historical fiction, has been getting great reviews ever since it was published about a month ago. Set in pre-independence India, the novel is inspired by the real-life accounts of a generation of lost, unsung victims of the colonial machinery, the ‘baby ayahs’, who played an indispensable role in the households of the Raj as doting mother-surrogates, but too often found that they themselves were dispensable. Uma holds a law degree from one of India’s premier national law schools. She has worked with a leading law firm and a leading media house as legal counsel. The author spoke to Sakschi Verma.

Uma, congratulations on your debut novel, The One-Way Ships. Can you start by telling us what first drew you to this story?

It all began with an article I stumbled upon during the COVID lockdown. It described an ayah—an Indian nanny—abandoned at King’s Cross station with just a pound in her pocket. As I dug deeper, I realised how little history talks about the ayahs, especially considering how many Indian women served British families during colonial rule.

There is research that tries to preserve their stories, and I found something so poignant in the way Anglo-Indian children spoke about their ayahs—with tenderness, even reverence. Some saw them as second mothers. Kipling wasn’t the only author who mentioned his ayah in his writings.

At the time, I was a new mother. When the idea struck home, I could only write frantically in snatched pockets of time, juggling research and attending to my eight-month-old baby. But no matter how hectic the days, the story wouldn’t leave me. It was like carrying someone else’s memory alongside my own. And slowly, as I researched more, the characters began to appear—like figures emerging from a fog.

Reconstructing Asha: Research and Discovery  

Your novel draws from the unsettling history of ‘baby ayahs’—young girls who were taken to Britain as maids during the colonial period. The idea of children being employed—and then discarded—as caretakers is both horrifying and tragically under-documented. What did your research process look like? Were there specific sources, testimonies, or archives that shaped Asha’s world?

I relied heavily on whatever scholarly research was available. Rozina Visram’s Asians in Britain among others was one of the most important sources that guided my vision. The movement to procure a blue plaque for the Ayah Home building in Hackney, London, led by Farhanah Mamoojee made several people from across the globe come out with stories and photos of their grandparents or great-grandparents with their ayahs. Eventually, more and more material was uncovered on the Internet about the Ayah Home and the journey of these ayahs.

The women themselves left behind very few written accounts—most of them were illiterate, and those who weren’t had no access to publishing or preservation. But there were some exceptions. An ayah, Minnie Green from India, sued her employers for her wages and won. A Keralite ayah, Mrs Anthony Pareira, travelled from India to England no fewer than 52 times. If you read their story carefully, ayahs can be understood as courageous and enterprising women who travelled across the seas for employment at a time when societal norms would have forbidden it and they did so while handling their own place in a complex societal hierarchy where their role was without precedents.
To show this duality, I didn’t want to frame Asha only as a victim of empire. I wanted her to eventually protect someone else in turn. Her arc mirrors the colonial one in reverse: from abandonment to responsibility, from being unmoored to anchoring others.

Colonial narratives often erase or flatten the voices of the colonised. In this case, the baby ayahs were quite literally shipped away and forgotten. Was fiction a way to reclaim their agency, to let them be seen?

Absolutely. Historical fiction, when written honestly, allows us to imagine the emotional truth that the official records omit. Fiction lets us say: you were here, and we remember. For ayahs, I didn’t want to romanticise their pain or turn them into saints—but I did want to give them names, thoughts, desires, even mistakes. I wanted to bring them to life—sympathetically, but without exalting them out of their ordinariness. Asha’s power isn’t that she was an extraordinary individual from the start—it’s that she survives, perseveres, and thinks of the best way forward in whatever situation life places her in. I hope her story makes this history a little more real for us.

Imagining Asha: A Hybrid Creation

In Asha, we see a character who is poor, vulnerable, but also intelligent, observant, and quietly resilient. How much of that characterisation came from historical accounts, and how much was your own imagining of what a girl like her might have needed to survive?

I think she’s a hybrid—part history, part possibility. From what little I could gather, these girls had to grow up quickly. They needed wit, emotional flexibility, and an immense, stoic strength to endure the fates they were left to deal with. But I also didn’t want her to be only a symbol of strength or suffering. Asha’s intelligence is not just about survival—it’s about imagination, the ability to dream beyond her circumstances. That part of her, I think, is fictional—but maybe that’s what keeps the historical reality from being entirely despairing. Asha was stitched together from facts and also from their absence, from the spaces where history had gone silent on the human cost of this displacement.

Asha is a nuanced character. How did you find her voice?

Asha came to me not as a voice but as a feeling—of watching the world from the outside, of having to grow up too fast, of wondering what life is for and what one’s role in it is. I didn’t want her to be saintly or performative in her suffering. I wanted her to be real—sometimes brave, sometimes uncertain, often angry, but always reaching for her own kind of dignity.

The prose of the novel is emotionally restrained. Did you always envision the book in this style?

I wanted the writing to reflect Asha’s inner world—poised but turbulent, suffering yet defiant. I admire writers like Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh who allow the rhythm of language to carry both pain and beauty. So yes, I always imagined it would be a quiet book that lingers rather than one that announces itself.

Can you talk a little about the title—The One-Way Ships?

It’s both literal and metaphorical. Many of the girls were sent on ships with no return passage. But the title also speaks to irreversible journeys—of growing up, of leaving home, of becoming someone you never expected to be. Once you cross a certain threshold in life, there’s no going back.

Weaving Timelines: Framing the Narrative

The One-Way Ships employs a framing device—a story within a story. What prompted you to choose that narrative structure?

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that memory isn’t linear—it loops, it circles back, it waits for us to be ready. Framing Asha’s story within Rashmi’s allowed me to explore how history lives on in the present—not just as a record of events, but as something that moves through generations, often quietly, often in fragments. The structure mirrors the way trauma and strength are inherited—sometimes consciously, sometimes unknowingly. Rashmi becomes not just a listener, but an active participant in the act of remembrance.

The novel moves through richly drawn historical settings—from the winding lanes of 1930s Simla to the vast Bombay Port and even aboard the SS Ranchi. How did you approach building these worlds?

Research was essential—but I didn’t want the research to sit on the page like a paperweight. I wanted it to animate and inform characters and situations that felt real. As I started to read more, my characters seemed to come alive in the historical backdrop, which is when they started to make sense to me as real persons. All I had to do was walk with them and let the story unfold.
I wanted the reader to walk the streets of Simla, to feel the damp salt air at Bombay Port, to feel SS Ranchi cutting across the Arabian Sea. I read a lot of travelogues and colonial-era memoirs. For life in colonial hill stations and Simla in specific, I pieced together the details from books such as Simla, Past and Present by Edward John Buck, various writings by John Lang, and A Handbook for Travellers to India, Burma and Ceylon by John Murray. I referred to the celebrated Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management to get a flavour of how English households are run.

SS Ranchi was an actual steamship that carried British officers and families between England and India. I found passenger lists, cabin layouts, and even dinner menus from the British Library online archives. All of that helped me anchor the emotional story in tangible, grounded spaces.

Many might say that the story ends on a rather pragmatic note. Was that always the plan?

Yes, I could only see the story ending that way. The climactic hours at Brabourne were frantic, and the narrative urgency mirrored the situation that demanded quick action. There was no time for goodbyes, as is often the way in life. I’ve always perceived Asha as someone who acts quietly, doing what is needed without much spectacle or fanfare. The fact that she does so in the end too—stoically—felt true to her character. As far as the ending of the story with Asha and Rashmi is concerned, I felt the story called not for a dramatic conclusion, just an honest one. Sometimes survival, letting go without ceremony, and passing on the story to someone else to learn their own lessons, is the most powerful kind of closure.

What’s Next for Uma Lohray?

Which other genres do you see yourself experimenting with next?

I’m very drawn to stories that linger in the quiet corners of memory, and how the invisible fingers of the past pull and mould the fabric of the present. In terms of genres, so far I’ve found that the bildungsroman affords the best opportunities to explore these themes.

While The One-Way Ships rooted itself in historical fiction, my next work deals with two time periods: the near-present and also the 1980s in India. Part of the novel is a campus novel set in 1980s India, a time when young people were wrestling with identity, belonging, and self-expression in a conservative but rapidly changing world. The other part is the homecoming journey by one of the characters and explores themes of closure, friendship, guilt, and healing—how we carry things from our youth that continue to shape us as adults.

I’ve also always loved playing with structure, and this novel uses a narrative device that flips between timelines, revealing key emotional truths through the reader’s experience rather than direct exposition. More than the genre, I was keen to explore the architecture of a story—how form can amplify feeling. I hope readers will find it enjoyable!

Who is The One-Way Ships for? Who do you hope reads it?

I hope that everyone with an interest in colonial history, or those who enjoy a bildungsroman, will derive some pleasure from this book. But I also hope it finds anyone who has ever felt invisible. I hope it speaks to people who’ve had to carve space for themselves in systems that weren’t built for them. I hope it reaches those who feel they’ve had to grow up too soon. I hope it reaches those who have been forced to say goodbye to their parents before they were ready.