A House Called Askival

I was born in this former palace in Kathmandu, just minutes after my mother ran up the stairs into the delivery suite, already breathless from shouting at the night watchman to open the hospital gates. One likes to make an entrance. I spent most of my childhood in Nepal, shuttling between the ancient capital, the lakeside town of Pokhara and a village at the foot of Fishtail Mountain where my parents were studying the language and culture of the Gurung people. At age nine I joined my big brother and a pack of other kids (and one harried chaperone) on the two-and-a-half days of overland travel to our boarding school in north India. The journey did not demand riding on the top of buses and racing around Lucknow in cycle rikshaws but would have been very tedious otherwise.
As my parents' work had them zig-zagging across Nepal, India and Pakistan, holidays could be anywhere from the beaches of Visakhapatnam to the wilds of the Khyber Pass. I continued at Woodstock School, 7000 feet up in the Garwhal Himal, till finishing at age 18 with an enduring love for South Asia, an address book spanning the globe and a wardrobe that can best be summed up as Bollywood meets Missionary Barrel. Thus equipped, I returned with my family to Australia - the country of our passports - to work out what to do at University and how to survive a supermarket. (Still haven't mastered that)

Disappointing millions of hopeful fans by not becoming a screen goddess, I went to teacher's college. My majors were English, drama and dance (in which I demonstrated that my movement influences did not extend far beyond Hindi movies). I spent a year travelling around the world and met my future husband - back in Kathmandu, of all places - and ended up moving to Scotland to be with him. I set up shop as a freelance community artist doing everything from dance with pre-schoolers to theatre workshops to reminiscence with the elderly. We returned to work in Nepal for four years, my husband as a doctor, myself as a teacher, and now live in the Highlands of Scotland where we raised our two sons, revel in the great outdoors and retreat to the warm indoors.

James Connor, burdened with guilt from a tragedy during India and Pakistan's Independence and Partition, has dedicated his life to serving India. His estranged daughter, Ruth, believing she came second to her American parents' missionary calling, rebelled as a teenager. This triggered her own devastating experience during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. After 24 years away, she finally returns to Askival, the family home in the northern hill-station of Mussoorie in Uttarakhand, to tend to her dying father. There, both must confront the past and find forgiveness if they are to cross the chasm between them and be at peace.
In this extraordinary and assured debut, Merryn Glover draws on her own upbringing in South Asia to create this sensitive, moving and panoramic journey through the turbulent history of India from Independence to the present day.