In her fourth book of fiction, Once Upon A Summer, Manjul Bajaj has once again created a delicate spindrift of forbidden love, set against the times of the British Raj.
The wonderfully descriptive story moves between New York, Rannpur, Jaunpur, Saharanpur, Nainital, and flows gently over every pebble, path, and emotion contained within it. The characters are drawn with compassion, and while a few of them behave in a heroic fashion, it is interesting that no real villains litter this landscape.
And so, we get a young English girl in Madeline Evans, sweet-natured but also wilful. She has definite views of how the colonised Indians ought to be treated, and will fight quietly for that. We get Azeem, a young man once almost a prince, now a pauper and working as a syce for Madeline’s father. He keeps his emotions under tight control, refusing to let them sway him, walking the thin line between carrying himself proudly without coming off as arrogant. We have Norman Evans, Madeline’s father, who is a PWD officer, and we also get an intriguing character in the form of Mariam Das, maid and companion to Madeline. Mariam is self-contained, cautious, having been burnt by the fire of love, discrimination, and racism in life. She knows an ayah (nanny) needs to find the correct balance between visibility and invisibility—within sight of the immediate family but not overly discernible to their circle of visitors and friends. She is quite ready to keep the young lovers in check, doing her utmost best to make them see sense and behave with sensibility, even though her sympathies secretly lie with the anguished couple. At one point, Azeem muses that the object of his affection, Madeline, is a babbling brook, its gurgle and swift current irresistible, while Mariam is still and serious like a lake.
And then, we sweep out the West, to a stately house in New York, where we get the aged pioneer publisher Alfred A. Allye and his recently deceased wife, Rose. Alfred spearheaded the notion of books as weapons in the war of ideas and published a series of Armed Services Editions, paperbacks distributed to the Allied troops between 1943-47. From there, it was but a step to publish fiction, philosophy, poetry, and translations. Now in the twilight years of his life, Alfred sits back and takes stock, feeling satisfied with everything Rose and he have built from scratch. Alfred and his Rose hold a secret close to their hearts, one which slowly, startlingly unfolds itself to the reader.
The author evocatively shows how India leaches the personality of Norman Evans’ wife, the academically inclined Martha, who is shown to be a totally different woman on her home ground in Middlesbrough. She is a nascent suffragette with a fierce conviction in the equality of women, and raises her young daughter along these independent lines. In India, though, she lives in fear of cholera, typhoid, and snakes. Since she has stoutly refused to learn housekeeping back in England, she finds that she just cannot run the vast household that Norman wants to hand over to her. At one point, Martha observes that she has become the lead to her daughter’s mercury.
Bajaj writes Madeline and Azeem’s story with ease and facility, imbuing this Raj story with rich details and atmosphere. The tidbits of historical detail are all neatly woven into the story. There is a passage where the author relates, in Norman’s words, why the officers of the Raj cobbled together such a strict rulebook for all posted in India to follow: “These rules held the race, men women children, in the reassuring embrace of their own kind, their own food and customs, their own memories of home, their dreams of returning there one day.”
We read of horses, Australian, Spanish, English thoroughbreds; we read of Amiran from Faizabad, who goes on to become the famed courtesan Umrao Jaan, the story Azeem relates to Madeline. We read of a Nainital of a time gone by, where the British went to escape the heat of the plains, to ride, roller skate, row, sail, and amble along the many walking trails.
Bajaj writes that she was inspired to write this story when she came upon the account of a forbidden romance between a real-life English girl, Madeline, and an Indian Muslim, Azeem, on the Nainital Nostalgia Facebook group. The story piqued her interest, and she decided to ‘finish’ the tale, breathing life into the love story of Madeline and Azeem, studding it with descriptions of Indian cities during the Raj, thus creating an affecting Raj romance.