Bookshelf;

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg 1850

India with its magical colours and gods and stories.

The secret Children is a great book to read, it is about life and death and in between the brittle weaving of a colourful tapestry sadness in the unforgivable way the English Raj treated the native people in their own country. Ts

"From the book;"   tell me the stories about India. The names you have told me so many times. Tell me about being taken by bearers to see the circus, carried high above their heads with the way lit by lanterns. And the woman with her basket of coloured glass bangles, and how they would be broken eventually.

Tell me about your mother, sad and silent with silver bells on her ankles. Tell me about the nights you would get into bed with your sister when the two of you were sent away. Tell me the stories that were told to you. The brothers who eat their sister after discovering the sweetness of her blood, the reeds that whisper her name. Tell me the stories again. I promise I will remember.

Unforgettable...

Assam 1925. In the emerald hills of a tea plantation in northern India.

Mary and Serafina born of two worlds, accepted by neither...

The British Raj , literally, "rule"  was the rule of the British Crown in the Indian subcontinent between 1858 and 1947. The rule is also called Crown rule in India, The region under British control was commonly called India in contemporaneous usage, and included areas directly administered by the United Kingdom, which were collectively called British India, and those ruled by indigenous rulers, but under British tutelage  and called the princely states. The resulting political union was also called the Indian Empire and after 1876 issued passports under that name. 

This system of governance was instituted on 28 June 1858, when, after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria (who, in 1876, was proclaimed Empress of India). As a state, the British Empire in India functioned as if it saw itself as the guardian of a system of connected markets maintained by means of military power, business legislation and monetary management. It lasted until 1947, when the British Indian Empire was partitioned into two sovereign dominion states: the Dominion of India (later the Republic of India) and the Dominion of Pakistan.