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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. Book Reading Schedule