A novel that is a quirky and provocative account of relationships in a family and outside it, set in the Anglo-India of the sixties, in the Jubbulpore military cantonment.
Maya Wade is the daughter of an Irish Catholic John Daly, a planter from the coffee hills of Chickmangalur, Mysore. She is married to the Indian army s ballistics expert, Major Ted Wade. The politics of the sixties was greatly influenced by trouble on the Indo-Pak border. The Socialists of the Indian republic imported Soviet weaponry. The Commies sold guns for Indian sugar, but they delayed in supplying spare parts. It was Ted s job to use his ingenuity to see that the commie guns performed under Indian conditions, and that the Socialists of the New Republic were not outwitted by the Commies.
His wife, Maya Wade, is a strong person with very fixed ideas inherited from her father. Both parents wish to mould their five children according to their personalities, but it isn t easy. Harsh discipline only serves to turn their children into rebels. As they grow older the children assert their individuality. Much is sacrificed on both sides in the fierce tug-of-war that ensures between parents and children, right to the moment of Maya s death. May gets pregnant at seventeen, Dora becomes a cruel bully, Anna has crushes on older men, Kathy is a tuck money thief in school and Jack the youngest, a comic book dreamer.
Their grandfather Alfie Wade is a freethinker and there are inevitably clashes between him and Maya, an overly religious person on how the children should be reared and how much freedom they should enjoy. Her two younger daughters Anna and Kathy are admitted to a convent, their adventures in school influenced by their grandfather causes consternation all around, in school and at home.
Her two older daughters are admitted to a boarding school. They dislike boarding school and she has to deal with Dora, the bedwetter, and feckless May, when they spend their holidays at home. There exists rivalry between her younger and her older daughters, which she finds rather difficult to handle, in order to reduce the hostility between them.
The novel deals with the last three growing years of a family, from the day Maya gives birth to a dead child, the Sixth Wade, to the moment when he returns to claim his mother.