Chitra Ramaswamy

I GOT a telephone call from my sister the other day. "Oh my God!" she screamed.

"What? Is someone dead?" I whimpered, ready to bawl like a baby. I can be a little dramatic, you see.

"No, it's Mummy's house. It's tidy!"

Allow me, briefly, to digress at this point because I sense judgmental eyes boring into these words, scoffing at the thought of two fully grown women referring to their parents as 'Mummy' and 'Daddy'.

Well, it is not because we are posh, English or annoying (though we are English, and can be annoying). It is because we are also Indian. In India there is no system where you start out as a nipper crying for 'Mummy' and then graduate to 'Mum' or 'leave me alone', or whatever. It is Mummy, for life. Whenever I answer my mobile in public, and say, "Hey, Mummy, how are you?" to an audience of tittering strangers, I wish I could explain that it's not that I'm a fool… It's, like, a cultural thing, man.

Anyway, back to the tidying revelation. Since January, my mum(my) has been tidying her flat. Every day. For four months. It has been something of a badly kept secret in my family. We all knew it was happening but weren't aware of the extent: new carpets, curtains, sofas, fresh paint and around 400,000 bin bags of all of our stuff skipped. It's big news, you see, because there hasn't seen a clearout chez Ramaswamy since I, Claudius was on the telly (which is why we still have the BBC series on VHS stacked away in a cupboard).

I've received the odd telephone call from Mrs Ramaswamy that has raised my suspicions that she might be getting rid of my things. "I was just wondering whether you still want your old Malory Towers and Sweet Valley High books," she says, casually, on a Saturday morning.

"No, of course not, Mummy, I'm 29 years old!" I reply, incensed.

"So, can I chuck out your Just William books, too?" The very thought. How dare she?!

I instructed her not to read my teenage diaries, and to keep my old school books, though it turns out they were already in the bin. Why she phoned to ask whether I want to keep my soft toys, and not my old essays and the stories I wrote about Solly the long-nosed fisherman, remains a mystery.

It must be a momentous and rather emotional occasion when you finally get rid of your children's belongings and claim your home back as your own. At least, I like to think it is, though it doesn't seem to have affected my mother in the slightest. In fact, I'm getting the sense that she has done the mummy thing and is already on to the next phase of the big clear-out.