Chai Garam & Crumpets: Snapshots of a Childhood in India

Chai Garam & Crumpets is filled with insightful and funny personal stories of a girl growing up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the 1950s. Denise's Indian father, optimistic about India's future, returns with an engineering degree from Glasgow University. Her irreverent and hyperbolic English mother follows him at the height of the Second World War. They live in a gothic-style building at a two-hundred-year old engineering college on the banks of the river Hooghly, rumored to be haunted by English memsahibs. Capturing two distinct cultures at a pivotal time in history, this book moves and enchants readers with the vivid memories of a precocious, adventurous girl. Denise is a middle child, displaced by her baby brother who is considered to be a genius, and overshadowed by her beautiful older sister. She tries to fit into a traditional Indian household when she visits her father's family compound, and a typical English home when she visits her grandparents in London. In India her father "crunches on chilies like they are stalks of celery," and the bathrooms have plumbing but the plumber forgot to install the toilets. In London, she observes people walking like zombies, and discovers that each person's position at a dining table is important and preset. She contrasts the restraint and order on the streets of London with the harrowing rides to school in India, where all manner of vehicles, people, and animals do whatever they please. On a family trip to the Continent and a foray into East Berlin, everything goes wrong, with hilarious consequences. Then the Americans arrive at the college, with their cake mixes and cans of corn and Spam, to help Indian students become engineers. This book is a delightful collection of intriguing vignettes and incisive observations from a girl straddling two cultures and trying to make sense of a world changing faster than she is growing up.