Days of Their Lives

‘‘Village life then was much the same as it is now,’’ writes Janaki drily, ‘‘only there was less malaria and people were altogether healthier and better off.’’ She quickly lists the means of transport the village has seen over the decades: palkies, ponies, elephants, bullock carts, ticca garries, finally the motor car, which, she says, she prefers to all of the above.

While Janaki describes her father Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee and his growing nationalist leanings, she also tells us about her mother Hemangini, transplanted to England at a young age — an altogether more interesting story, adding depth and texture to the tale of this family as it grew, shifting between India and England, making homes in both places, playing out the intimate drama of domestic hopes, aspirations, struggles and griefs, even as the political drama of Indian nationalism was beginning to take shape outside.

Janaki fills her narrative with rich detail, complex family connections, and delightful nuggets about travel and homemaking in those years. It is with affectionate pride that she describes the design of their sprawling houses. She also brings her story alive with warm touches about siblings, relatives and friends; most of all, it is Hemangini who fills these pages with her strength and sorrow. She has not only to adapt to tremendous changes in her lifestyle, dress and food, in keeping with her husband’s wishes that the children be educated in England; she also has to move, with her children, to live with a strange English family and away from her husband; she has to cope with the loss of a child and the chafing adolescence of another.

Never forgetting her mother’s sorrow of exile, and her grief at losing her son, Janaki nevertheless manages to fill the pages with the fun and laughter of the large family as well. ‘‘For my sins, I was saddled with one Indian, one English and one Greek name,’’ she writes, describing how she got her name. Janaki was a popular northern name her father had come across it in Delhi; Agnes Penelope was after Mrs Wood, the Englishwoman with whom Janaki’s mother had stayed in England. ‘‘In addition to this, my father called me Benjamin, as the youngest of a large family,’’ she goes on. Rich in detail and coloured with affection, Family History is important not only as a chronicle of life in British India for a certain section of people, but as a celebration of the family itself.