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The Girl in the Shadows: My Life in a Cult
'I was the shadow child no one ever saw...'
From the day she was born until she escaped aged 30, Katy Morgan-Davies knew nothing but a life in captivity. Her father was the deluded and cruel leader of a cult based in South London who brainwashed those around him.
Her father's paranoia and his need to completely control others led to Katy being imprisoned indoors and denied any kind of love or friendship. From a young age, Katy's father subjected her to violence and mental abuse. She was not permitted contact with anyone outside the house and on the rare occasions she did have to go out, she was always chaperoned.
Katy never gave up hope of one day breaking free from her father's cruel clutches and finally found her freedom. This is her true story of endurance and survival.
Previously published as Caged Bird by Bantam Press in 2018.
406 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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October 3, 2022This book was really horrifying. I can't believe that such a horrific cult was active in modern London. Katy's story of survival and escape was absolutely incredible. I can't imagine living her life and it was amazing to see how she flourished once she managed to escape. The writing in this wasn't anything special but it was clear and got the point across. I'd highly, highly recommend this book to everyone.
(Not rating since this is non-fiction)
(Not rating since this is non-fiction)
July 2, 2019
‘‘This child,’ he began in his commanding voice, looking down into the cot, seeing far into the future, ‘will be my worst enemy.’’
So begins Katy Morgan-Davies (Prem Maopinduzi is her given name) life story in a cot in Clapham, London UK. The year is 1983. I had already seen the documentary, ‘The Cult Next Door’ back in 2017, where Katy, Comrade Bala the cult leader’s daughter, had spoken. It was such an effecting piece of television. When the book came up on the Kindle Daily deal I thought I’d give it a read.
The world he created is weird beyond measure. To give you some context. Comrade Bala ‘was the future leader of the world’. Maybe that does not help so here is what Katy summarises. ‘Beloved Comrade Bala’s full name was Aravindan Balakrishnan; we also called him AB. He lived with me and six adult comrades – Josie, Sian, Aisha, Leanne, Cindy and Oh – leading our Communist Collective (CC) in south London, which at that time was called the Workers’ Institute of Marxism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought. AB’s wife, Comrade Chanda, and her disabled sister Shobha also shared our home.’ I hope that clears things up.
This is no ordinary household. Fascist agents were out to get them from the British Fascist State. This is what Bala would tell the comrades. He had everyone believing it. He had made his own mini North Korea in a terraced house on a suburban south London street. There was to be no laughing in the house or contact with the ‘Outside’. Even talking was frowned upon. The physical beatings he would dish out to Katy for perceived transgressions were just sickening. The mind control and brainwashing even went as far as believing that it was Bala himself causing the world’s natural disasters.
The writing is so lucid. I cannot believe what Katy went through and to write so wonderfully afterwards. It is raw and painful for sure. There is pure unadulterated honesty. I was completely hooked by the story.
So begins Katy Morgan-Davies (Prem Maopinduzi is her given name) life story in a cot in Clapham, London UK. The year is 1983. I had already seen the documentary, ‘The Cult Next Door’ back in 2017, where Katy, Comrade Bala the cult leader’s daughter, had spoken. It was such an effecting piece of television. When the book came up on the Kindle Daily deal I thought I’d give it a read.
The world he created is weird beyond measure. To give you some context. Comrade Bala ‘was the future leader of the world’. Maybe that does not help so here is what Katy summarises. ‘Beloved Comrade Bala’s full name was Aravindan Balakrishnan; we also called him AB. He lived with me and six adult comrades – Josie, Sian, Aisha, Leanne, Cindy and Oh – leading our Communist Collective (CC) in south London, which at that time was called the Workers’ Institute of Marxism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought. AB’s wife, Comrade Chanda, and her disabled sister Shobha also shared our home.’ I hope that clears things up.
This is no ordinary household. Fascist agents were out to get them from the British Fascist State. This is what Bala would tell the comrades. He had everyone believing it. He had made his own mini North Korea in a terraced house on a suburban south London street. There was to be no laughing in the house or contact with the ‘Outside’. Even talking was frowned upon. The physical beatings he would dish out to Katy for perceived transgressions were just sickening. The mind control and brainwashing even went as far as believing that it was Bala himself causing the world’s natural disasters.
The writing is so lucid. I cannot believe what Katy went through and to write so wonderfully afterwards. It is raw and painful for sure. There is pure unadulterated honesty. I was completely hooked by the story.
December 22, 2022
Wild. Katy's strength to continue trying - to escape, to trust, to settle outside the cult - is incredible and commendable. The style of writing was too dramatic at times, nevertheless was an honest account of her life.
It broke my heart when the followers escaped and Aisha said she's too old to start all over again, because I think she was around 70 years old at the time. I really hope she didn't give up trying to enjoy all the world has to offer, as well as Josie.
It broke my heart when the followers escaped and Aisha said she's too old to start all over again, because I think she was around 70 years old at the time. I really hope she didn't give up trying to enjoy all the world has to offer, as well as Josie.
November 11, 2020
Life is too short.
Anyone who knows me is more than aware about how I feel bout the whole misery memoir culture.
When I worked for Waterstones ten years ago, tales of abused children packed the best-seller list in some way or other and even though I worked in a part of London where, perhaps, we were not specifically in the market for those books, they would pour in all the same. They were always either white or pink and had a picture of a child looking sad with their head down in tears, clutching some sort of rag doll. I hated them, mainly because they didn’t sell for us like they did everywhere else and I had to constantly find room underneath a table for them. And I certainly didn’t want to read any of them. My own life was rubbish enough.
This book though, THE GIRL IN THE SHADOWS, is not one of them.
Granted, this is mainly because of one clever piece of marketing. The publisher changed from hardback to paperback and that was the inclusion of the word CULT, in their entire re-marketing from the original title, CAGED BIRD. Because you know Farley likes himself the extreme and nothing interests him more than the very idea that someone could completely give up so much of their entire being to an individual’s singular ethos and point of view, regardless of their own well being. The very psychology of it is just fascinating.
Whether it be the Branch Davidians, Scientology, Heavens Gate or that Japanese lot Murakami wrote about who set off that bomb in the Underground (great book), I loves me a cult. This one being an extreme Marxist one in flavour, backed by a mysterious notion that anything you do against said leader is then quantifiable with a punishment that results in whatever conveniently world event or tragedy was in the news cycle at that particular time, via some mysterious and unexplained force. And let’s face it, that in itself is an easy feat to pull off because, Ding Dong Hello, the world is always constantly fucked up in some way. This ‘messiah’ promised them, as they all do, a seat at the table when they take over in some sort of utopia in the future.
But in all very simplistic essence, it was a steaming pile of turtle shit. Bollocks and toss.
Let’s not let that take away from this author’s journey though. I mean joining and being taken in by a cult is one thing, but escaping one after 30 years you have been in SINCE BIRTH is another and Morgan-Davies has basically one of the most extreme and unique stories out there.
Beaten half to death, subjugated and humiliated on a daily basis along with other enslaved women to a dirty little Indian sex pest who used the cloak of repression, castigation and fear of SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION as a tactic to keep his concubines in nothing but dutiful and subservience, puts a lot of the world’s minor problems into context. Katy, despite all of this educated her fucking self. That’s right. Educated herself, in hiding.
The relationships she has with the other women in The Collective are both telling and intriguing. And also disturbing. They constantly go from friendly to abusive to one another and just seem to never let up. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, but more so here every time she seems to get some sort of leverage with her captors.
But then things changed.
Just imagine at the age of 30, you had the same basic skills as a baby. Not having any concept of money, not being able to navigate the world around you, no education, a childhood spent indoors and unable to go anywhere or have any nurturing contact with anyone around you, what would you do?
The idea that every day of your life you were told you were less than nothing and then one day… BOOM, this is the outside world. That to me in itself is fucking terrifying. It’s really fucked up. The fact that in one little part of London, it was deemed as normal and OK behaviour to do this. For decades. And despite numerous instances where this was reported, the authorities did nothing. Awful. It sounds like the synopsis to the next Stephen King novel.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, despite continued devotion to the end by some followers, will die in prison for what he did. That’s a guarantee and a good thing. If someone hangs him in the shower block before then, even better. He was a racist child abuser, who kept women as sex slaves and lied to them about the outside world and locked them up and smacked them around every day. Including his illegitimate daughter, which he hid and deprived of a life and a childhood. What a scumbag.
Quite frankly, Katy is nothing but a hero and the purest example of fortitude and resilience. Despite the constant neglect of her younger years, she managed to educate herself secretly by reading many of her leader’s books and being a diligent and accomplished diary writer, one of the many rules forced upon her.
This woman has had the strength and guts it has not only turned such a horrible situation around, but to then go and forgive her captor too, once she realized her own peace and sanctuary. That is truly admirable. It’s certainly not something that I, the emotionally barren and irrational husk of a man full of bitterness about my own father that I am, could ever contemplate.
This is a great book. But it is beyond that, it is a warning to everyone.
Life is too short.
Anyone who knows me is more than aware about how I feel bout the whole misery memoir culture.
When I worked for Waterstones ten years ago, tales of abused children packed the best-seller list in some way or other and even though I worked in a part of London where, perhaps, we were not specifically in the market for those books, they would pour in all the same. They were always either white or pink and had a picture of a child looking sad with their head down in tears, clutching some sort of rag doll. I hated them, mainly because they didn’t sell for us like they did everywhere else and I had to constantly find room underneath a table for them. And I certainly didn’t want to read any of them. My own life was rubbish enough.
This book though, THE GIRL IN THE SHADOWS, is not one of them.
Granted, this is mainly because of one clever piece of marketing. The publisher changed from hardback to paperback and that was the inclusion of the word CULT, in their entire re-marketing from the original title, CAGED BIRD. Because you know Farley likes himself the extreme and nothing interests him more than the very idea that someone could completely give up so much of their entire being to an individual’s singular ethos and point of view, regardless of their own well being. The very psychology of it is just fascinating.
Whether it be the Branch Davidians, Scientology, Heavens Gate or that Japanese lot Murakami wrote about who set off that bomb in the Underground (great book), I loves me a cult. This one being an extreme Marxist one in flavour, backed by a mysterious notion that anything you do against said leader is then quantifiable with a punishment that results in whatever conveniently world event or tragedy was in the news cycle at that particular time, via some mysterious and unexplained force. And let’s face it, that in itself is an easy feat to pull off because, Ding Dong Hello, the world is always constantly fucked up in some way. This ‘messiah’ promised them, as they all do, a seat at the table when they take over in some sort of utopia in the future.
But in all very simplistic essence, it was a steaming pile of turtle shit. Bollocks and toss.
Let’s not let that take away from this author’s journey though. I mean joining and being taken in by a cult is one thing, but escaping one after 30 years you have been in SINCE BIRTH is another and Morgan-Davies has basically one of the most extreme and unique stories out there.
Beaten half to death, subjugated and humiliated on a daily basis along with other enslaved women to a dirty little Indian sex pest who used the cloak of repression, castigation and fear of SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION as a tactic to keep his concubines in nothing but dutiful and subservience, puts a lot of the world’s minor problems into context. Katy, despite all of this educated her fucking self. That’s right. Educated herself, in hiding.
The relationships she has with the other women in The Collective are both telling and intriguing. And also disturbing. They constantly go from friendly to abusive to one another and just seem to never let up. It’s absolutely heartbreaking, but more so here every time she seems to get some sort of leverage with her captors.
But then things changed.
Just imagine at the age of 30, you had the same basic skills as a baby. Not having any concept of money, not being able to navigate the world around you, no education, a childhood spent indoors and unable to go anywhere or have any nurturing contact with anyone around you, what would you do?
The idea that every day of your life you were told you were less than nothing and then one day… BOOM, this is the outside world. That to me in itself is fucking terrifying. It’s really fucked up. The fact that in one little part of London, it was deemed as normal and OK behaviour to do this. For decades. And despite numerous instances where this was reported, the authorities did nothing. Awful. It sounds like the synopsis to the next Stephen King novel.
Aravindan Balakrishnan, despite continued devotion to the end by some followers, will die in prison for what he did. That’s a guarantee and a good thing. If someone hangs him in the shower block before then, even better. He was a racist child abuser, who kept women as sex slaves and lied to them about the outside world and locked them up and smacked them around every day. Including his illegitimate daughter, which he hid and deprived of a life and a childhood. What a scumbag.
Quite frankly, Katy is nothing but a hero and the purest example of fortitude and resilience. Despite the constant neglect of her younger years, she managed to educate herself secretly by reading many of her leader’s books and being a diligent and accomplished diary writer, one of the many rules forced upon her.
This woman has had the strength and guts it has not only turned such a horrible situation around, but to then go and forgive her captor too, once she realized her own peace and sanctuary. That is truly admirable. It’s certainly not something that I, the emotionally barren and irrational husk of a man full of bitterness about my own father that I am, could ever contemplate.
This is a great book. But it is beyond that, it is a warning to everyone.
Life is too short.
February 12, 2019
Amasing! My God, what a lesson she teaches us all, she made me feel I'll never moaner
again what a remarkable woman and what an achiever, well done, should make it into a film. Love her, wish i Could meet her.
again what a remarkable woman and what an achiever, well done, should make it into a film. Love her, wish i Could meet her.
April 12, 2019
This is a testament to the power of the written word, the strength of the human spirit, and one girl's determination to seek out truth. Her steadfast courage through years of imprisonment shine through. An incredible story - that this could happen in our civilised society is shocking. Without detracting anything from the story, I think the book could have been shorter - in particular the final part seemed to drag a little to its conclusion, in part because Katy was keen to get her views on justice and mercy clearly articulated, and therefore digressed from progressing the narrative to do so. That said, it's a powerful story, and well worth taking the time to read to the end.
April 28, 2022
It was baffling reading all of this and having the knowledge that it indeed happened to a han being. The brainwashing was absolute for all those women. I can't think of another solution but to end my life than continue living for the entirety ( at that point) of my life under those circumstances and rules and disgusting un humane existance. I applauded you. I admire you. I thank you for being more than an extraordinary human being. For resisting and tolerating the untolerable for 30 years.
The human body and human mind are very powerful.
The human body and human mind are very powerful.
March 2, 2021
I found this book so very touching and couldn't put it down. Although it's an extremely sad story there were times I laughed out loud. I have a huge amount of admiration and respect for Katy. Her strength of character shines through and despite all she's endured she comes across as a beautiful person with a kind and loving soul. I wish her all the best for the furture and hope she has a life filled with happiness and joy
June 25, 2019
Thanks katie
A truly awe inspiring read. Many thanks for your story katie, I feel changed by reading.
My own life is often difficult, but I try to enjoy the small things every day, because that is life. A succession of small things one may choose to ignore it hate it experience with joy.
A truly awe inspiring read. Many thanks for your story katie, I feel changed by reading.
My own life is often difficult, but I try to enjoy the small things every day, because that is life. A succession of small things one may choose to ignore it hate it experience with joy.
dnf
March 31, 2023dnf at page 79, not because the book is bad, but because it's a harrowing read that I just can't get through at the moment. I will hopefully come back and finish this another time. tw physical/mental/emotional/financial/spiritual abuse, cults, violence, child abuse, coercive control, abduction, imprisonment... etc.
February 6, 2019
My life in the cult
Dreadful way to start life, not knowing your parents or family, just so sad, and to see what This lady has achieved since she escaped is incredible, I so hope she goes from strength to strength, Joy Page West Yorkshire xx
Dreadful way to start life, not knowing your parents or family, just so sad, and to see what This lady has achieved since she escaped is incredible, I so hope she goes from strength to strength, Joy Page West Yorkshire xx
December 31, 2019
An incredible story that at times I couldn't believe that it was true. I do remember something about it in the news but had no idea about the horrifying details. Katy is one amazing women to have survived.
September 3, 2022
An amazing true account of the author's survival in a cult and her life beyond it. It was a real eye opener and incredibly sad. However Katy shows remarkable spirit and strength. The ending was truly beautiful and brought tears to my eyes.
February 12, 2019
Incredible!
March 7, 2019
Amazing
Such an inspirational story really makes you think about all the tiny things we take for granted. Absolutely would recommend I couldn’t put it down.
Such an inspirational story really makes you think about all the tiny things we take for granted. Absolutely would recommend I couldn’t put it down.
March 3, 2022
A well written account or how the author fled the cult she was born into. Worth the read.
October 9, 2025
It was ok. Not great, but not bad either.
I felt so sorry for Katy and I understand it wasn't her fault for what she's done, but sometimes I was annoyed how naive she was.
I felt so sorry for Katy and I understand it wasn't her fault for what she's done, but sometimes I was annoyed how naive she was.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews