This small volume covers Thrity Umrigar’s childhood, and ends with her going off to the US for graduate school. It’s pretty intense, since her mother was abusive. But she lived with an extended family, so she had some support, and she knew she was deeply loved by many people.

I didn’t really know anything about the Parsi people – a religious sect in India – so that was definitely interesting. They were followers of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by Muslims. Not that Umrigar goes into this particularly, but she mentions that the Parsi people are considered a bit “mad”, and she gets into the spirit of that when she’s a kid, and becomes a trouble-maker.

The memoir also covers the events going on in India in the 1960s and 1970s, and how Umrigar gradually awakens to a political and social consciousness. The writing is heartfelt, sometimes a bit too florid, but convincing.

Some quotes:
< Indeed, I have lived so intensely in the fictional world of small-town England, that I know more about this world than the hot, crowded equatorial city of dark-haired men and women that I dwell in. Nothing that I am reading either at school or at home reflects this world. At home, I read one Enid Blyton novel a day. In my English-medium school, Hindi is taught like a foreign language. My literature textbooks carry poems by Wordsworth and stories by Dickens. Nothing by an Indian writer. >

< Every once in a great while, it occurs to me that I lead a schizophrenic life: I am a Parsi teenager attending a Catholic school in the middle of a city that’s predominantly Hindu. I’m a middle-class girl living in the country that’s among the poorest in the world. I am growing up in the country that kicked out the British fourteen years before I was born but I have still never read a novel by an Indian writer. >