Friends and family who were generous in their support include Dee Aldrich, Rupayan Bhattacharya, Urvashi Butalia, Harry Davidar, Ruth Davidar, Nirmala Lakshman, Vijit and Divya Malik, Suketu Mehta, ‘Mooma’, Bipin Nayak, Aggie Perilli, Monisha Shah, K. D. Singh and Nini Singh, Pia and Mallika Singh and Pavan Varma.
I am grateful to Prabuddha Das Gupta for taking the author photograph, Dinesh Khanna for shooting pictures of mango trees, Tanthoni for his photographs of blue mangoes and Sunita Kohli for ferreting out the owners of whitewashed bungalows in Delhi. The wonderful map of Kilanad district and Pulimed at the front of the book is the creation of Uma Bhattacharya, P. Arun and Benu Joshi. Thank you very much.
I would like to thank Nasir and Parul Prakash for their hospitality in Peermade, my aunt Shakuntala and Erik Carlquist for giving us the run of the house in Puthalam, Aradhana Bisht for drawing my attention to the poem from which the epigraph is extracted, and Gillian Wright for insisting the rosy pastors return to the wild guava tree.
Finally, it is my deepest regret that my mother Sushila is not alive to celebrate the publication of the book. She was the best writer in the family and her stories and insights have filled my head for as long as I can remember. I can only hope The House of Blue Mangoes does justice to her memory.
About the Author
David Davidar is the author of the international best-seller, The House of Blue Mangoes, which was published in sixteen countries, and The Solitude of Emperors.
By David Davidar
The House of Blue Mangoes
The Solitude of Emperors
Copyright
A Phoenix ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
First published in ebook in 2012 by Phoenix.
Copyright © David Davidar 2002
The moral right of David Davidar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 7802 2540 1
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