Those Women of the Coromandel: a Novel

Those Women of the Coromandel brings toife the eclectic, intertwinedives of three womeniving in Coromandel in nineteenth-century India. We meet Miss Beston who is known as the Boat Woman, a Briton who has gone native.iving in her boat (that grows into a chain of houseboats, each housing a different area of heriving and working quarters) she is an entrepreneur, hunter, and host and guide to every British official who passes through the Coromandel. Deeply interested inocal culture, she befriends people around her, both Indian and British. Appachchi, known as Granny, is aover of nature, mangoes, and the monsoon. An early encounter with a spiritual man, the Guru of the Stream, guides her to a divine understanding that underpins herife. Worker Aunt, Appachchi’s sister-in-law, who endures successive personal tragedies with the utmost dignity, is her close confidante andifelong buttress. Also deeply influenced by the teachings of the Guru of the Stream, she undertakes a trip to Kasiater inife that establishes her as a spiritual fulcrum for the villagers.

Peopled with characters who are eccentric, interesting, and pragmatic, such as the scholarly BA Garu, Appachchi’s husband and Worker Aunt’s brother; Mr Blotton, the Brahma of the Godavari anicut; Nephew, the first to welcome the Guru of the Stream, and others, Those Women of the Coromandel is a story of people trying to find their place in the world as it turns and changes around them.