Blind Faith and Pantomime

Notes on a show

Hello Dear Reader

It was a silly thing, I thought, when I did it. Not something I had ever done before, and verging on the superstitious. But I was feeling melancholy moments before I went on stage at the London Palladium last week. Melancholy because I already knew the show would go by in a heartbeat, but mostly melancholy because my mother was not there to witness it. Before I left the house that morning, I’d taken the following with me, things I have never taken to a gig before: a pair of my mother’s shoes, my grandmother’s old leather coin purse and a photo of my mother and I taken sometime around 1975.

I thought I might wear the shoes on stage, but they were impossibly high and I have my father’s broad feet. It would have to be the photo then, tucked inside my bra. My mother had been a singer before she had me, but she had never got to play The Palladium and so I decided that in this way she was finally able to.

I was also feeling melancholy because of my stubbornness. While visiting her in Australia last summer, when I’d mentioned this show to my mother, she looked horrified and immediately blurted out, ‘but how on earth will you sell those tickets!’ I’d already been thinking that, and the day that my agent called to confirm that the date had been held with the venue, I’d burst into tears the moment we put the phone down. I was not, shall we say, feeling confident. I was gravely worried, even though you had all responded so positively to the newsletter I wrote to you outlining my plans. ‘It’s because everyone loves a poll’, I thought, ‘everyone loves filling in a poll but when the time comes to buy tickets, that poll will be a distant memory. It will be the exit poll of nightmares, just you wait and see Nerina.’

So I took her concern about tickets as her not wanting to come, and didn’t push it. What I did not bargain for was how much I was regretting this the morning of the gig. I FaceTimed her on the way to the show, just to hear her voice, but she didn’t pick up. ‘Sod it,’ I thought, and felt even sadder, because I knew I had only myself to blame.

What I could not know was that the reason my mother had neglected to answer my call that morning was because she was swanning along Oxford Street with her sister at that very moment and knew that if she was to pick up, the game was up.

When I see all this written down I think two things: how complicated and ridiculous a family dynamic can be, but how profoundly grateful I am that my aunt intervened in the relationship of the two most stubborn women she knows and performed an act of singular magic.

Our first audience when we are children are our parents. They are the audience that shapes us, for better or for worse. You don’t have to be a performer to know that our self-acceptance is so often governed by those who raise us; and I think it’s a very rare individual who does things just for themselves. We are all of us filling in a gap somewhere. Sometimes that gap is simply a breakdown in communication; and then time moves on and instead of water under bridges it is the fear of opening a Pandora’s Box you might never close again.

I have been nursing this melancholy my whole life. I suspect a lot of you do, too. But it brings with it a propensity for self-sabotage - if you expect things to go wrong, you’ll more than likely be proven right. I am not kidding when I tell you that until I walked onto that stage and saw you all there, I had daily imagined that the theatre would be near empty and it was some mysterious benefactor who felt sorry for me who had bought all the tickets. This melancholy has made me a writer, but it has robbed me of so much joy and confidence. What you all gave me last Saturday night was a lifetime of joy and confidence I had never allowed myself before.

I will never, ever be able to thank you enough.

This is not to say there won’t be people in our lives who try to show us what we might be when we can’t see it for ourselves. Also in the audience was my Godmother, who had never seen me live before but has always been cheering me on from the sidelines. After the show, backstage, I looked around the room and saw her, and my mother, and my aunt and felt a deep sense of contentment I don’t think I can remember feeling before. All the women who had loved and shaped me, here for this moment. I thought about their lives, their paths, all of them leaving India as young women; leaving their families behind, with only faith and hope for company, and not knowing what would happen. What courage that must have taken. To think my own stupidity and stubbornness might have prevented this moment.

I thought about everyone in that building. All the journeys made by so many of you from near and far. Just for some little songs.

It was humbling, and beautiful. I got to play these little songs with my amazingly talented friends and stop time for a few hours.

On the drive home, I felt real peace, like if I never played another show again that was fine. I had done what I had set out to do; the songs had finally sounded the way I had always heard them in my head and I could almost touch the connection between you and me with my hands, if only for those few hours. Everything finally made sense.

And then this thought popped into my head: what if the only reason I was meant to play the Palladium was to know in my bones that my mum absolutely does love me, and I have nothing left to prove to anyone anymore?

Thank you all for giving me something more important than you could ever know. I wish the same for you, always.

Love as ever,

Nerina xxx

P.S. I am catching up with all your amazing merch orders and hope to be on top of everything by the end of today or tomorrow.