Hearts Divided In the Raj

From the barren plains of Central India, living hard-by the railway tracks in her stationmaster grandfather's home, along the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, to an island home in Southern India with her naval officer father, Patricia McGready-Buffardi presents a colourful kaleidoscope of her "mixed-breed" family, before and after The Raj; the turbulence within the Anglo-Indian community; her father's career in the fledgling Indian Navy and his agony over the division of it at Independence; and the division of Anglo-Indian hearts throughout the subcontinent. Moving from port to port with her family, she provides comic relief in the form of an old English Vauxhall, their travels across the vast subcontinent frustrating but wondrous. Spanning four generations of the McGready family her memoir, although intensely personal, is a historical tour de force. Growing up in India for two decades she jumped the prickly fences of two societies, British and Indian. Like "pish-pash," a mushy but tasty mix of over-cooked rice, lentils and left-overs, popular with Anglo-Indian children across the country, she enjoyed a delicious concoction of both cultures. As a child, her grandfather told stories of his boyhood and his own father's passion for the railways, an intimate portrait of a simple pioneering family. Rich in detail, the memoir is a prism of days lost forever on the subcontinent, since the Anglo-Indian race is fast dwindling...with the inter-marriages of the new generation around the globe. In short, a race that is almost extinct.