City of Palaces

Sujata Massey

Description

An orphaned girl. A cruel twist of fate. A spectacular adventure. Bengal, 1930. Young Pom s life changes forever when her family is wiped out in a devastating flood. She becomes a maidservant in a British boarding school where she discovers her gift for languages. Amidst the drudgery of her duties, she finds unexpected friendship and experiences the stirrings of first love. However, tragedy strikes and she is forced into hiding. Alone and desperate, she is recruited into a brothel for English officers. She hopes this secretive, decadent world will shield her from the demons of her past. But fate intervenes, and our heroine is on the run again to Calcutta, the city of palaces, where she finds herself caught up in the rising tide of Indian nationalism. Changing her name to Kamala, she creates a new life for herself, one that holds the promise of happiness and true love . . . until her past returns haunt her. Filled with romance, danger, intrigue and betrayal, The City of Palaces is a lush, sprawling saga about a feisty young heroine and her struggle for survival. Sujata masterfully weaves her heroine s life with India s struggle and fight for freedom and gives us an elegant piece of Indian history wrapped beautifully in Pom s story Amulya Malladi, author of The Mango Season

Sujets

• Historical romance
• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351186670
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sujata Massey

The City of Palaces
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the Book
Dedication
Fragment of a Letter Found by the Arjun Cleaning Agency in 1947 at 22 Middleton Street
Book One Johlpur Spring and Summer 1930
Chapter   1
Chapter   2
Chapter   3
Book Two Midnapore Summer 1930-Summer 1935
Chapter   4
Chapter   5
Chapter   6
Chapter   7
Chapter   8
Book Three Kharagpur 1935-1938
Chapter   9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Book Four Calcutta 1938-1947
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CITY OF PALACES
Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany, and grew up mostly in St Paul, Minnesota. She holds a BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University, and started her working life as a features reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun . After leaving the newspaper, she moved to Japan, where she studied Japanese, taught English and began writing her first novel, The Salaryman s Wife . This novel became the first of many in the Rei Shimura mystery series, which has won the Agatha and Macavity awards, and been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards. Sujata s books have been published in more than eighteen countries. Currently, she is based near Washington, DC.
Praise for the Book
The writing is lush and sensuous, with colors, smells, flavors, and just the right amount of exotic and foreign words that don t weigh down the narrative . . . [A] suspenseful adventure with elements of romance and espionage that will appeal to a large audience and is perfect for book groups
Washington Independent Review of Books
[A] riveting historical novel. The award-winning author of the Rei Shimura mysteries turns to 1930s-40s India, with the British in control of the colony as Gandhi and others fight for freedom. The setting gives new life to the familiar story of an orphan girl struggling to make her way in a cruel world. Clever Kamala is front and center throughout, as Massey builds her coming-of-age tale around India as it moves toward independence, effectively combining personal narrative with the grandeur of a sweeping historical epic. The characters are easily categorized, but deft storytelling prevents them from being predictable. The book is also notable for its detail-driven depiction of the limitations imposed by caste and colonization . . . An utterly engrossing tale of love, espionage, betrayal, and survival, [it] is historical fiction at its best, accessible to all audiences
Booklist
Sujata Massey has created a marvelous multi-named, warm-blooded heroine who is strong willed and loving; smart and cunning; charming and intelligent; naive yet worldy. Sujata masterfully weaves her heroine s life with India s struggle and fight for freedom and gives us an elegant piece of Indian history wrapped beautifully in Pom s story
Amulya Malladi, author of The Mango Season
A love story richly woven with India s history and struggle for independence . . . [It] took me on a captivating journey through one woman s devastation, resilience, truth and triumph
Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice and Love Anthony
[A] book that Sujata Massey was meant to write-an ambitious story of suspense and love and identity, rendered in lush, captivating language. To read it is to step into a fast-moving time machine that delivers us to places and events that will be new to many readers. An exciting, bold work
Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of And When She Was Good
At surface level, The Sleeping Dictionary is another rags-to-riches story; between the lines, it s a celebration of the common ground between superficially disparate cultures and personalities
Missing Slate
The broad scope in years and decades, history and politics of Massey s saga will remind readers of Michener, Uris, and Clavell . . . Massey s heroine . . . eloquently, slowly, and sometimes painstakingly relates her journey from child to revolutionary and lover. There is sadness, tragedy, joy, love and triumph-everything saga readers enjoy
Romantic Times
This book is for my father, Subir Kumar Banerjee
Fragment of a Letter Found by the Arjun Cleaning Agency in 1947 at 22 Middleton Street
Middleton Street, Calcutta
. . . concerning a long-running rumour that I know to be fact: your hiring of a native female as your assistant. Several colleagues have already called into question her background. The young lady may speak four languages; that is not unusual in this land of polyglots. As Mr Pal has explained, it is highly unlikely that any upper-caste Indian would permit his daughter to work. Another on staff has ascertained that the boarding school from which your assistant claims to have matriculated does not have any record of past enrolment.
The women of Calcutta are alluring. It is easy for a man to lose his head. I recommend that you terminate this employee if, in fact, she has been hired for pay. And . . .
Book One


JOHLPUR
Spring and Summer 1930
Thunderous clouds loom in the sky It s the middle of monsoon, I wait anxiously on the riverbank As rain has come too soon.
Rabindranath Tagore, Golden Boat ( Sonar Tori ), 1894
Chapter 1
The Flower says I was born from the dust. Kindly, kindly Let me forget it Let me forget it Let me forget.
-Rabindranath Tagore, The Flower Says , Chandalika , 1938
JOHLPUR, WEST BENGAL, 1930
You ask for my name, the real one, and I cannot tell. It is not for lack of effort. In a proper circumstance, the narrator must give her name. In fact, one of the first English phrases I learned was What is your good name?
Over the years people have called me many things. Not all of them are repeatable.
But in the early days, I was always called Didi or Pom, the last being a village nickname you will not find in any book. To me, Pom sounds hard: a hand on a drum, or rain pounding on a tin roof. Both are sounds that I remember from the Bengali village where I was born: Johlpur, the Town of Water.
Pom, Didi, Pom! Those who shouted for me the most were my younger sisters, Rumi and Jhumi, twins who looked as similar as grains of rice. But what a difference between them! Rumi was the easy one: quiet and helpful. Jhumi cried more and always demanded to be carried, even when she and Rumi were big strapping girls of six. Double curses was what my grandmother Thakurma called them. But when our father, who we called Baba, was alone with us, he would sometimes say that a daughter s birth lengthened a father s life and that for having three strong girls he might live to one hundred.
I tell you this only so that you will understand how rich I once was. But nobody in my family understood that those days were perfect ones. Most mornings when my mother made her prayers, she whispered her hopes for a son. If Goddess Lakshmi would bring one, my mother was willing to give her a goat. Or five rupees. Anything, for the boy everyone wanted. Then, in the spring of 1930, the flatness under Ma s sari rounded. Thakurma and Dadu-my grandparents-were suddenly happy with everything she did, and my father sang songs every evening.
As summer came, my mother s belly expanded to the size of a good pumpkin. I marked my tenth birthday, and we ate sweet payesh pudding to celebrate. It was the same time that the daughter of Jamidar Pratap Mukherjee, the landed aristocrat who owned all the rice fields, was studying with a foreign governess. The jamidar s daughter had long been my object of fascination because of her lacy pastel frocks and the white-skinned doll she carried. I did not know the little girl s name then, for we could not ask such a thing of our superiors. In my mind I called her the Princess; and that was not out of envy but amazement that another little girl could be so different.
My acquaintance with the jamidar s household formed at the time I was about seven, old enough to walk distances carrying a bundle of home-made brooms that Ma and I sold throughout the villages. When we reached the jamidar s estate, the ritual was always the same. A servant would call for the jamidarni to see us; she would come out with her daughter hiding behind the folds of her shining silk sari. Then our two mothers would examine the brooms: hers looking down, and mine squatting on the stone veranda, turning over each of our brooms to find her the best. The jamidarni would suggest that her sweeper didn t really need a new broom, then my mother would counter, Jamidarni-memsahib, the rains are coming and with them, mud! Or, if it were a few months earlier: This is a frightfully dry season, please look at the dust on your veranda; it s a shame that your sweeper missed it. Not the woman s fault, just the broom s.
On our last call to the estate, my mother was heavily pregnant and could not make her usual bright banter. Perhaps because of my mother s condition, the jamidarni gave me a gaze that seemed especially soft. This gave me the bravery to ask where the Princess was hiding herself. The jamidarni replied with a word I hadn t heard before: school. Two Ingrej women came to the house to teach the Princess reading and writing and numbers-all in English! The Ingrej had turned a parlour into a proper schoolroom with a desk and chair and a blackboard on which they wrote with a short white stick.
Would you like to see her? the jamidarni asked in her gentle voice.
As I was nodding my head, Ma said no. Disap