Chinnery?s Hotel
By Jaysinh Birj?patil,
Ravi Dayal, Rs 275

Jaysinh Birj?patil is an ambitious man, and given the accolades that have come the way of Indo-Anglian writers, he can hardly be blamed for pitching his sights high. His choice of setting is unerring ? the raj, which refuses to be done to death; his subject ? the heart-rending tale of the Anglo-Indian community ? is convincing. And yet, like the unexpectedly ordinary, if not ugly, cover of his book, his narrative lacks the finesse, or call it the edge, that could have made it remarkable.

Birj?patil locates his story in Mhow, the quaint cantonment town that even today remains a relic of the colonial past, with its large population of armymen (now brown), a small Parsi community, a smattering of Goans and the almost ghettoized Anglo-Indian community.

The author, in fact, alternates between a post-independence Mhow, whose army officers quell insurgency in the North-east and go on peace-keeping missions in Africa, and the turbulent Mhow of the Forties when the social message of Gandhi had just begun to disturb the equilibrium in this once-sleepy town, and when the spotless white sahibs suddenly found themselves in a desperate hurry to leave the mixed-bred ?chi-chis? behind.

The Chinnery?s Hotel provides the occasion for this time-travel. Grace Studegynski?s parents once ran this spacious, porticoed, well-serviced establishment for the small number of guests who turned up in Mhow. But the hotel also became the watering hole for the uppity Brits in the town. A longing for those forgotten days, together with a sudden surge of remorse for her long-dead sister, Jo Anna, forces Grace to go back to Mhow after four decades of a rather uncomfortable stay in her homeland. She is accompanied by her daughter, Camilla, to whom she has just made a confession. It was Jo Anna, and not she, who was her real mother.

For Camilla, this is only the first of a series of more shocking discoveries ? the horrible death of her mother, the identity of her father, her love for the ill-fated Anglo-Indian army officer, Ross Harrison, and her understanding of the way unabashed racism destroyed, and continued to destroy, lives.

Birj?patil very ably portrays the predicament of the Anglo-Indian community, treated as pariahs both by the British and the Indians, and robbed of any sense of belonging. There is another set of people whose position, he shows, is no less unenviable ? the pure-bred Brits, brought up in the colonies, who hate the ?dings? but find that they too are misfits in the homeland they had longed to return to.

All the ingredients of a good story were already there in Chinnery?s Hotel, but Birj?patil, for some inexplicable reason, decided to throw in some shikar, witchcraft, intrigue, a whiff of nationalist politics, teenage lust, a paraplegic aunt, a dog lady and some sentimental hogwash for effect. The result is another hackneyed tale of the raj that fails to make a tragedy appear tragic enough.