Status Updates From Climbing the Mango Trees: A...

The book just sort of ends.

Switched to the audiobook to multitask and not feel trapped by this book. The reader’s pronunciation of Indian words is inconsistent. Some sounds like the Indian dh seem hard for her. The a/aa vowels, she pronounces the same. Worse, however, she pronounced the English word agape as if it were Greek- perhaps understandable if this were not her *job*.

While I didn’t expect this book to be an account of the freedom struggle or the partition, it’s astonishing how little there is about both.

I cannot imagine how much more tedious this book is for people who have no connection to India. I can’t remember the last time I kept calculating how far into a book I was and being disappointed each time. It’s actually surprising how someone can take such interesting matter and make it uninteresting.

‘All the short ladies of the house- and they were all short- “
What an odd and useless thing to say. If she had to bring in their Heit, I’m not sure why it was here and now and why like this. And no, although she mentions the short ladies again one more time, there is no punchline. It is possible that being annoyed, every annoyance is amplified.

‘As a “loyalist” [he] suffered great losses during the Mutiny.’
Translation: When people found out that he was giving information to the British, they were very unhappy and showed their displeasure by plundering expensive items and damaging his gardens, ~ Rs.7000 worth. Using online calculators for historical currency, it appears that this is about $90,000 today.

‘Eventually, the colonial rulers prevailed, though not without the reliable help of “loyalists” like Jeewan Lal.’
I don’t think she put loyalist in quotes for the same reasons that I would.🤢

They had bacon??

They did NOT call it cilantro. Come on. If you can call scrambled eggs rumble rumble eggs, you can call coriander coriander.

Been looking forward to this book, but starting to get concerned. The mention of an Indian receiving a CBE stirs up feelings. Is it appropriate to accept an award with the words British Empire in it when the empire included your own country that they colonised and exploited? That’s not the only thing but there’s a character limit. Is this going to turn out to simply be the story of a privileged childhood?