So, that evening, after dinner, he began to teach her. Preston sat on the sofa with a book of his own, looking up now and then and idly studying the pair. Suddenly, he got up and went to his room. Chanda felt like she had been slapped in the face. Was he so offended by her lover’s attempt to teach her their language? However, much to her astonishment, he returned within a few minutes with a few books [for her] under his arm.
The chronology and geography don't always seem up add up but the book contains what comes across as a realistic, if somewhat superficial, portrayal of life in tea gardens before white people left. No snippets of mesmerising text but character sketches of two women. The first: Chanda born to a coolie woman whose father sold her to a white man to use, who then fell in love with another white man who was some form of manager at the tea garden where she found herself. He, of course, wouldn't marry a brown woman and, so, acquired a white one on a trip to England. His wife, Amy, bore Chanda no ill will once she found out about her but became increasingly bitter. The man they shared had five children between the two women, and didn't do well by any of them. Oddly, it refers to tea garden managers (not owners) as planters although that could well be because it's told from the perspective of a manager's wife. The tale might as well have been nonfiction.