Servant Master Mistress

The Sanjanas has planned to enjoy the tiger cub and surrender the adult to the zoo, but no plan had been made for the adolescent. The family is breakfasting in the compound of their bunglow when the cub gets its first taste of blood from a cut on Sohrab Sanjana’s hand. Also in attendance are Daisy (Sohrab’s English wife, married when she was stranded by World War II in India): Rustom (Sohrab’s brother, infatuated by Daisy, challenging his brother for her affection); Dolly (their mother, afraid the rivalry between her sons may erupt into voilence echoing the rivalry between two brothers whom she had married in succcession); and Savak (Dolly’s husband, still paying the price for his own infatuation thirty years earlier). Their story spans the years from 1910 to 1945, encompassing scenes in which a yogi’s ‘Spirituality ‘ is exposed by a monkey, a ten-year-old English girl seduces an eight-year old Indian boy, and a young English woman meets her first lover at the Silver Joblee of George V. A family secret lies at the heaart of the story, but the periphery is no less thrilling: two lovers escape from Stalin’s Soviet Union to India and a soilder meets with tragedy during the Kut-al-amara campaign of the Great War in Mesopotamia.