To mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India, creating the country of Pakistan, and 150 years since the end of indentured labour in British colonies, a writer from Harrow has released a debut short story collection.

The anthology, Sugar, Sugar: Bitter-sweet Tales of Indian Migrant Workers, weaves a web of those who left the country 150 years ago and their descendants living in Britain.

Lainy Malkani, who grew up in Crouch End and went to school in Muswell Hill before moving to Stanmore, sought to learn about her heritage after her mother passed away, having already been aware of the fact that some family members had grown up on a sugar plantation in Guyana (formerly British Guiana).

“I grew up on a diet of amazing stories of the tropics and the adventures there,” Lainy explains. “But within that there was always conversations about what it was like and what the sugar estates were like, how hard the work was. I thought it would be nice to put things down on paper, but also to include other communities around the world.”

Lainy was the first in her family to be born in the UK. She is not sure exactly when her family moved from India to Guyana, but knows her grandmother was born in the Caribbean.

Her father was the first to move and then later her mother and sister, whom she met for the first time at the age of three.

“In indentured labour people signed up for a period of five years,” she explains. “There are two schools of thought, one is whether this is voluntary when you don’t really know what it will be like but then it is a huge departure from slavery of course, there were conditions of work and at the end of the five years they could return home.

“However it would have been expensive to keep bringing people over, for the plantation owners it would have been cheaper for them to retain those people. Some say they were tricked or pressured into staying, there’s a story in the book called Home, based in Fiji, which alludes to this.

“There’s nothing wrong with a contract, but it’s whether those terms are fulfilled and if the reality was very different, such as working hours without healthcare or adequate clothing. They lived in huts that were highly populated, food may not have been nutritious or limited. It was very difficult circumstances.”

Around one million people left India between 1838 and 1917 to work on sugar plantations around the world, Lainy wanted to know more about the kind of life her family and others led as indentured labourers. This led her to set up the Social History Hub in 2013 to bring the stories of ‘unsung heroes’ in society to life.

Lainy, a broadcast journalist, was spurred to write the collection after creating a two-part documentary for BBC Radio 4, Sugar, Saris and Green Bananas. Her work was influenced by historical documents recorded between 1838 and 1917 and the living memories of indentured workers.

One story she discovered in her research stood out to her more than most. “It was in documents from South Africa from 1885 to 1887,” she explained. “In documents you rarely find anything in first person, it’s usually plantation owners.

“I found 300 words of testimony telling the story of a heavily pregnant woman who went missing, she was gone for three days. When she returned she must have had the baby and then two days later a baby was found dead. I was really shocked, as a mum it was horrifying.”

The work has been published with HopeRoad, an organisation set up in 2012 that specialises in writing from and about Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

Despite this being Lainy’s debut work, she hopes to delve deeper into the literary world by organising a literary festival in Harrow. She will be hosting an event called Sugar, Sugar at the British Library on August 16.