Sandy Thakur, Indian aristocrat and Anglophile, falls in love with Emma Franks. Her mother is against them marrying, but her brother, Ted, who knew Sandy as a boy during World War II, is an ally. Beginning with the deaths of Sandy and Emma, the novel recalls events leading up to the violent incident that forces them to leave England for India, there introducing Sona, a Tibetan refugee; Bill Clayton, a missionary and Dinesh, Sandy s ward. Dinesh disapproves of Sandy s love for England, but grows to regret his hostility. Later, his decision to divorce his unfaithful wife reaps a death threat...
Sandy Thakur, Indian aristocrat and Anglophile, falls in love with Emma Franks. Her mother is against them marrying, but her brother, Ted, who knew Sa...
India 1940: An army nurse gives birth to the son of a British soldier killed in Burma. The child, left on the steps of a Hindu temple, is rescued by an old woman, who names him Bal and believes he is Lord Vishnu's gift to her, but she dies, and the unwanted orphan falls to the care of a low-caste Bhil woman. Apprenticed to a herdsman, Bal and two older boys dream of a better life. They escape to Bombay, where he comes to the notice of Parsee philanthropist, Sam Dastoor, who adopts him. Bal, now Dusty, avoids an Englishman claiming to be his uncle, and opts for an army career. As a cadet, his...
India 1940: An army nurse gives birth to the son of a British soldier killed in Burma. The child, left on the steps of a Hindu temple, is rescued by a...
India 1940: An army nurse gives birth to the son of a British soldier killed in Burma. The child, left on the steps of a Hindu temple, is rescued by an old woman, who names him Bal and believes he is Lord Vishnu's gift to her, but she dies, and the unwanted orphan falls to the care of a low-caste Bhil woman. Apprenticed to a herdsman, Bal and two older boys dream of a better life. They escape to Bombay, where he comes to the notice of Parsee philanthropist, Sam Dastoor, who adopts him. Bal, now Dusty, avoids an Englishman claiming to be his uncle, and opts for an army career. As a cadet, his...
India 1940: An army nurse gives birth to the son of a British soldier killed in Burma. The child, left on the steps of a Hindu temple, is rescued by a...
In 1881, in the village of Pali, a seven-year-old boy, forced to make sense of his father's desertion and mother's early death, finds himself expelled from family and community. An outcast, he is taken on a bullock-cart journey to an orphanage, where Das Gupta, its clerk, aware of the boy's high-caste, takes him to meet Jacob Rivers, Agnes, and their daughter, Esther. Soon he learns that as an infant, he was secretly baptised and named Michael and that Rivers knew his father. Esther tutors Michael in English, while her father, aware that British Rule in India must in time end, prepares his...
In 1881, in the village of Pali, a seven-year-old boy, forced to make sense of his father's desertion and mother's early death, finds himself expelled...
