First Darling of the Morning: A poignant and brave exploration of childhood's less lovely spaces, First Darling is a sensitive, vividly-relived memoir that captures the innocence and confusion of a small Indian girl struggling against the paradoxes that rock her life. Told with startling honesty, the memoir paints an unforgettable picture of middle-class life in contemporary Bombay.
Recent Reviews:
Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 28, 2003
An Indian writer and her homeland struggle together
There's a moment in Thrity Umrigar's memoir, "First
Darling of the Morning," when she recalls herself as a child standing in
the bathroom, contemplating whether to stab her eardrums out with the
pointed edge of a steel compass.
Doing so would allow her to escape the
noise of her family's constant fights, but she decides that giving up the
joys of her father's voice and music would be too much to lose.
It's a
harrowing passage, but it conveys Umrigar's frustration and desire for
escape that remain constant throughout the book.
Driving much of the pain
in Umrigar's life is her mother, a woman whose cruelty evokes conflicting
emotions of revulsion and pity.
She "has long, thin, crooked fingers, and
most of the time they are curled around one of her many switches," and
although her wrath has no specific target, Umrigar is a frequent victim of
her malice.
These stories, along with others about Umrigar's extended
family, are engrossing, but they are standard components of a childhood
memoir.
She recounts punishments, dreams, her struggles to develop a sense
of self and her eventual arrival in the United States, but what makes her
account compelling is the way her search for identity parallels that of
India.
While Umrigar's anecdotes and stories may be about her and her
family, they help reveal the absurdities of a country in transition from
colonialism.
Now a writer in Cleveland, Umrigar recalls India as "a country
still recovering from the national inferiority complex that was a leftover
from British colonial rule," and her experiences only prove this.
In a
country of extended families, the Von Trapp family of "The Sound of Music"
becomes the ideal, and she finds herself part of a society that knows "the
words to Do-Re-Me better than the national anthem."
Perhaps nothing
emphasizes this disconnect between her culture and her society as vividly
as her school, where she encounters little that reflects the world she
knows, to the point where she has a better grasp of quaint fictional
English towns than "the hot, crowded, equatorial city of dark-haired men
and women" in which she lives.
Thus, in a way, Umrigar's stories of an
Indian childhood become much more, as her experiences form the fascinating
backdrop of an account reflecting modern India's childhood, as well.
Akron Beacon Journal, Dec. 21, 2003
Thrity Umrigar's First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an
Indian Childhood is a mesmerizing, vibrant account of a middle-class Bombay
upbringing (in a culture where middle class means having household
servants).
Umrigar tells of her childhood in a home with a loving father, devoted
aunts and uncles and a cruel, often sadistic mother. She joins her fellow
students in driving her Catholic-school teachers to distraction, but her
rebel posture is only a cover for hypersensitivity.
Interwoven with mundane activities such as a trip to the beach and sneaking
cigarettes are insights into the shattering poverty that surrounds the
girl. She has epiphanies during a labor strike at her father's lumber
factory and when she learns that the family's maid has a first name.
Young Thrity, when given permission to host an after-school party at the
bakery her family runs, chooses street children instead of classmates as
her guests. Her social awareness grows as she listens to American music,
and culminates in a narrow escape at a demonstration that turns violent.
Despite Umrigar's masterful descriptions of her feelings about caste,
privilege and guilt, First Darling is not a book about the ills of Indian
society. It's a growing-up story about a pet bunny, the death of an uncle
and the unrealized longing for a loving mother.
The narrative takes the reader through Umrigar's college years and her
decision to further her education at Ohio State University, which she chose
because of a song playing on the radio while she studied American college
brochures.
Umrigar, of Cleveland Heights, is a former Akron Beacon Journal reporter
who has earned a Ph.D. in English literature.
Akron Beacon Journal, Dec. 28, 2003
WORTH A SECOND LOOK
First Darling of
the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood takes readers to the
other side of the world, the Bombay of Thrity Umrigar's youth. Some of the
references to Indian culture may seem tantalizingly exotic, but much will
seem familiar to American readers who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. First
Darling is available for $14 from some local bookstores and Amazon.com.
Sahara Time, Nov. 2003
EVOCATIVE ACCOUNT: A vividly recounted, poignant memoir of childhood
The songs of the sixties and seventies hum through this poignant memoir of
a Bombay child growing up in a cloistered, privileged middle class Parsi
family. It is Do-Re-Me that echoes through Thrity Umrigar's rememberances,
not the hits of Lata Mangeshkar or Kishore Kumar. This is an urban, Indian
childhood replete with Catholic nuns, pink jeans and pop records.
Yet it is also sharply sensitive, as only a child or adolescent can be, to
the everyday cruelties of a stratified society where servants eat on
separate plates and beggars stretch out scrawny palms to receive small
change.
Thrity's return flight to childhood zooms us into life as a six-year-old
watching The Sound of Music at the Regal Cinema with the family . . . The
flight to university in the USA signals the end of a brilliantly etched,
vividly recalled Indian childhood.
INDIA TODAY, Oct. 2003
RAGE OF MEMORY: A return journey to the cries and confusion of an urban
childhood
I was drawn into the story of this young, confused Parsi child growing up
in Mumbai, trying to understand first the stresses and strains in the
family and then those of the great, jostling city outside. Thrity
Umrigar's moving account of her childhood begins with a family outing to
see The Sound of Music at Regal Theater. It ends with her leaving for Ohio
for studies.
Between these two events lie the long and not-always-happy stretches of
childhood. With painful honesty, Umrigar tells us about her family.
Memoir details life in a little-seen India
By Lylah M. Alphonse, Boston Globe Staff May 19, 2004
Thrity Umrigar has a knack for capturing people's quirks. In her second book,
"First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood," she
unflinchingly takes on her own, as well as those of her family, giving
readers a vivid glimpse into an unfamiliar part of India's population.
Even now, the popular view of India is one of dusty villages, fiery curries,
and religious struggle. But India is much more than that, and Umrigar focuses
on the part into which she was born: the Parsi community, descended from
people who fled Persia to avoid religious persecution under Alexander the Great.
Though many of them today live in diaspora, Parsis form a curious and obscure
middle class in Bombay that prides itself on its education and exclusivity.
In her memoir, "First Darling of the Morning," Umrigar details the clash of
cultures and contradictions that surrounded her as she grew up in 1960s Bombay,
now known as Mumbai. "I am a Parsi teenager attending a Catholic school in
the middle of a city that's predominantly Hindu," she writes. "I'm a
middle-class girl living in the country that's among the poorest in the world. I am
growing up in the country that kicked out the British fourteen years before I was
born but I have still never read a novel by an Indian writer."
Growing up steeped in Western books and music, Umrigar is confounded when a
teacher tells her to write a story using only Indian characters. Though she
struggles with the assignment, she is never in doubt of her own identity -- this
book does not document a search for self as much as it details a teenager's
discovery of the world around her. Her memoir is studded with bits of Indian
history and colorful descriptions of Bombay. She captures perfectly the singsong
mixture of English and Gujarati spoken in many Parsi households, so different
from the butchered grammar of stereotypical Indian stories. Umrigar candidly
portrays herself as a selfish, petulant only child, and recounts a childhood
that is at times lonely and brutal -- her mother invents sadistic punishments
for the smallest infractions, nuns discipline their charges by digging their
fingernails into the girls' throats. She lives in a modest apartment with her
extended family: a devoted maiden aunt who sacrifices herself for her relatives;
a loving but harried father who escapes each day to the office; a harpy of a
mother who is scarred by her shattered dreams; an aunt and uncle who are
surrogate parents; a cousin who is like a sister; a handful of servants. Meddling
neighbors and gossipy aunts abound, but no matter how viciously they turn on one
another, to the public they present a facade of calm gentility.
The Bombay of Umrigar's memories is a place where privilege is supposed to
bring with it the ability to ignore poverty -- only she never quite manages to
do so. She invites the beggars of the neighborhood to lunch at her father's
pastry shop. She throws the family out of balance by insisting on calling one of
the servants "aunt." Visits to her father's factory and trips to a popular
city beach force her to acknowledge the inequity: "At home it is easy to ignore
them but here, out in the open, there is no turning away from these dark and
hungry eyes and from the questions about the accidents of birth and the
randomness of privilege that they arouse in me."
The key events in her life are not the typical milestones of a typical girl.
Her doomed romance is with activism, not boys. Her idol is a nonconformist
older girl named Jesse, who shocks Umrigar by saying she doesn't believe in God,
then leads her to worship at the altars of Vincent van Gogh, Don McLean,
Hermann Hesse, and, finally, an Indian writer, Salman Rushdie. Her coming of age
centers on politics and the death of a beloved uncle. She finds it more and more
difficult to conform to her society's idea of a respectable girl "who accepts
without question the authority of their priests, parents, and teachers," and
she rebels, first by cultivating her image as the "Mad Parsi" at her Catholic
school, smoking and drinking with flunky friends, and later by joining the
protests against Indira Gandhi's country-cleansing emergency rule.
Her epiphany comes as she is sitting on the steps at Bombay University, two
weeks before graduation. After a college career dedicated mostly to fighting
the establishment, "I am nowhere close to being ready to be anything but a
college student," she realizes. Economics and social convention mandate that she
live at home as long as she is unmarried, a prospect that fills her with dread.
Salvation comes in the form of a dream and a Joan Baez song -- "Banks of the
Ohio." Umrigar decides to apply to graduate schools in America, "the land of
self-invention," gaining admission to Ohio State University and leaving India
and its complexities behind. She is now a journalist, still based in Ohio.
Filled with poignant stories and awkward moments, Umrigar's memoir may seem a
little melodramatic at times, but "First Darling" offers readers a rare
glimpse at life in a country that is constantly changing, and a look at a
little-known culture.
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