posted on 14 Aug 2022

Letter from a Tea Garden by Abi Oliver

Like many people, I suspect that my idea of India has been shaped by reading various novels and watching films. For this reason, this novel feels pleasingly familiar in the way it describes a country that I am unlikely to ever visit for real.

The narrator is Lady Eleanora Byngh who we first meet living a pretty unsatisfactory life with her former nanny, Persi in a dilapidated country mansion that once belonged to an eccentric uncle. Eleanora is lonely, sour tempered, drinks far too much whisky and has no interest in her own appearance or socialising with anyone. When a letter arrives from her long lost nephew, Roderick inviting both women to spend some time with him and his wife on the tea plantation in India where they both lived for many years, they are tempted to return to the country where they feel most at home.

This trip provides the opportunity for reflection on the many difficult experiences in the past lives of them both. The story takes us back and forth from the present day set in mid 1960s to various key points in her busy life moving between India and England. This us allows the reader to soak up a variety of very well described atmospheres and so to begin to understand the background to these two complex women.

The exotic stillness of the bungalow garden in Assam is beautifully conjured up :

‘ I relished the girth of the giant banyan at the edge of the garden, the ants building giant nests among its leaves. I took in the soft sounds of workers calling to each other, the sight of saris spread flat on the grass, each a flag of colour, held by stones at the corners; by the sight of a cow standing in a low, watery spot the other side of the fence, stalked by its white egret companions’.

Sitting in the garden stirs up memories of her often unhappy childhood and teenage years. We have a glimpse of her parents very troubled relationship and her reluctance to be sent to school in England, as was the custom with colonial families. She was close to her brother Hugh but it is clear that this had later become fractured. The overriding motive for inviting his aunt and her companion is soon revealed to be that her nephew is desperate to find out more about his father who had abandoned his family.

Eleanora remembers the awkwardness of being presented as a marriageable young woman ‘round the Bombay circuit’. She slowly reveals how she has grown to be such a cynical and spirited woman who has learnt to navigate her way through life without getting trapped into a marriage that she can’t stomach. Similarly her old school friend Jessie has managed to stay single into old age as a matter of choice. Yet E has had one disastrous love affair with a married man that has forever scarred her and a brief marriage of convenience to an ‘absolutely bonkers’ titled man that she escaped from after only six weeks.

This short review cannot do justice to the sweep of this extraordinary story that includes the experience of living through London in the blitz, India during a devastating cyclone in 1921, the terrifying Bengal famine of 1943 and then the years leading up to partition in 1947. All of these dramatic landscapes are background to some powerfully bleak personal experiences.

Despite many sorrows and frustrations, Eleanora comes across as a wry and often witty commentator of her own life and the wider political situation. Based on painstaking research and several personal links to India, the author has succeeded in writing an interesting and poignant page turner. 

Without giving too much away, I would also like to reassure you of a relatively happy ending.

 

Karen Argent

August 2022