Boarding School Boy, set in the days of the British Raj in India.
The book is about:
- A gifted boy, physically and intellectually blessed by nature, traumatized by events of his early youth—an unwilling witness to an incident evoking powerful human emotions he did not understand; abandoned as a child in a boarding school and left to grow up on his own for eight years, with little guidance through puberty, which predictably left big gaps in the structure of his persona.
- A dedicated priest, masterful in his role as teacher and mentor, tormented by questions of his faith and the sacrifice of an abandoned love.
- On the periphery, the laundryman’s daughter, a wisp of a girl, who haunts the pages of the book with her exotic allure.
- Five boys of varying circumstances, each with their unique blend of character and magnetism, drawn by Fate into a brotherhood whose lives intertwine in a complex filigree of events that hurtles inexorably towards its unexpected conclusion.
The book uses the British Raj as its backdrop—the last of the great empires in world history—when the people of one small island strode the earth like giants, masters of all they surveyed. In their supreme confidence they assumed it was their god-given right that it should be so, and because of their audacity the world let them get away with it.
America was yet to rise from the rubble of a world war that would rock the planet and disrupt the balance of power. But that was still in the future and till then Britannia ruled the waves and the sun didn't set on the British Empire.
This story is about the unsung heroes of that era—the descendants of the British and other European colonizers, who became the Anglo Indian people. Through the two-hundred-year period of British rule in India they grew in numbers and made the sub-continent their home. They became the bricks and mortar of the complex mechanism that was The Raj, running the basic infrastructure that made the country tick—the railways, police, post and telegraph, military, customs, and so on. This story is about them.
