Teatime for the Firefly
by Shona Patel
My name is Layla and I was born under an unlucky star. For a young girl
growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring
day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped
and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us
together—me and Manik Deb. Layla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an
inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric
grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her,
she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor
miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined—if
not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order. Layla’s life
as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where
the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labor and British
efficiency. Fascinated by this culture of whiskey-soaked expats who seem fazed by
neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the
prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants
she now finds under her charge. But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be her
biggest challenge. Layla’s remote home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping
India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial society is at a tipping
point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that
threatens their very lives.
growing up in India, this is bad news. But everything began to change for me one spring
day in 1943, when three unconnected incidents, like tiny droplets on a lily leaf, tipped
and rolled into one. It was that tiny shift in the cosmos, I believe, that tipped us
together—me and Manik Deb. Layla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an
inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independent by her eccentric
grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her,
she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor
miracles in India that spring of 1943, when young women’s lives were predetermined—if
not by the stars, then by centuries of family tradition and social order. Layla’s life
as a newly married woman takes her away from home and into the jungles of Assam, where
the world’s finest tea thrives on plantations run by native labor and British
efficiency. Fascinated by this culture of whiskey-soaked expats who seem fazed by
neither earthquakes nor man-eating leopards, she struggles to find her place among the
prickly English wives with whom she is expected to socialize, and the peculiar servants
she now finds under her charge. But navigating the tea-garden set will hardly be her
biggest challenge. Layla’s remote home is not safe from the powerful changes sweeping
India on the heels of the Second World War. Their colonial society is at a tipping
point, and Layla and Manik find themselves caught in a perilous racial divide that
threatens their very lives.