Author: Jaysinh Birjepatil
Publisher: Ravi Dayal
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 261
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8175300558
Description
Through a subtle interleaving of past ad present, the overlapping narrative of Chinnery’s Hotel traverses two continents and three historical periods.
After spending nearly four uneasy decades in her ancestral England and accompanied by her dead sister’s daughter Camilia, Grace returns to the cantonment township of Mhow where she had spent a much-cosseted childhood and youth in her parents’ establishment called Chinnery’s Hotel. The fictional Mhow, with its polo tournaments, tent-pegging, ballroom dances, Masonic Lodge and whist drives serves s a prototype of cantonments between the Wars, where the resident British live in appalling ignorance of the political realities which would dislodge an transplant them to war-ravaged England in 1947.
The bleak post-War life in London feeds Grace’s nostalgia for her childhood home. However she discovers that, notwithstanding the trappings of order and a disciplined way of life, MHow has not remained immune to the profound and often corrosive changes that a new nation in the making has undergone during her prolonged absence.
Chinnery’s Hotel exists in a moment of time and in its garden gone to seed history’s glimpses and rumour continue to intersect log after its guests have checked out, never to return.
COMMENT
Chinnery’s Hotel is amongst the best works of fiction I have read in many years. It gives a vivid picture of India during the last years of the British Raj, based on a few characters in a small cantonment town, Mhow. The novel is skillfully crafted and beautifully worded, with blissful descriptions of the country and changing seasons. One of its most moving themes is the predicament of Anglo-Indians, who find themselves disowned by both Indians and the English. (Khushwant Singh)
Contents
PART I
UNDERSONG
Ghostly Playbacks
Shipwreck
Who Only England Know
The Flying Dutchman
The Grand tour
The Dak Bungalow
A Right Good Crew
Oh, rose Marie I Love You
The Cherry Orchard
The Cracked Mirror
PART II
Files-On-Parade
An Englishman's Home
The Silver Ghost
Pale Hands I Loved
The Loco Shed
Bedsore Cassandra
The Nymphet
Little Red Riding Hood
PART III
The Lancashire Witches
The Maverick
The Dairy Maid
Protector of Cows
The Ladies of Calcutta
An Old Nag
Chinnery’s
PART IV
The Good Egg
The Baskerville Regiment
The Cumaen Sybil
Hungry Charley's Auckland House
PART V
The Doll’s House
The Tranquility of sycamores
The Fishing fleet
A King in Babylon
The Sherlock Holmes
The Old Bull and Bush
Red Bandanna
Rule Britannia
PART VI
Mother Hubbard
Old Blood and Guts
It Was Roses, Roses-Everywhere
The Christmas of thirty-Six
The Warrior Princess
The quality of mercy
The Secret Societies of St Frank
A Troop of Dragoons
PART VII
Waterloo Bridge
The Trial
The Longest Tongue in the World
The Telegram
The Watchmaker
The English Matron
PART VIII
Moonwater Lake
The Report Doesn't Lie
The Tiger and the Goat
Our Lady of Fatima
Forever Young
The Untouchables
MUFFLED DRUMS: EAST GRINSTEAD 1995
Lame dogs over a Stile