Like a snail, I will carry home on my back, find it where I happen to be, make it from what I bear inside me.'

I was both the parent and the babe, and I was resolved to make a success of it.' He confesses to a fellow indentured servant and friend that such rebirthing is 'hard labor.' Still, this inner struggle drives all of Tony's actions, decisions, and emotions.ĭespite never finding sure footing, he is determined: 'I would thrive wherever the wind laid me.' When he discovers that he will never be able to return to India, which is still home to him, he declares, '.I will be my own shelter, my landing place. Tony East Indian - laborer, adventurer, and now physician's apprentice. That healing art, much-feared by others, is also the beating heart of this story because it fuels Tony's deep desire 'to give rebirth to myself, yet once more. But, as he soon learns, this brings even more complications at a time when people resist or lash out against the unknowns of science and medicine. Eventually, he manipulates his way into his dream physician apprentice job. So his journey to adulthood is filled with adventures and tragedies, gains and losses, love and longing. This otherness gives him a unique perspective on all the sociopolitical goings-on but often puts him in the most precarious position with whites, Blacks, and Native Americans.

Being the only East Indian among various groups of white and Black people, he is more the lone stranger than anyone else. He's kidnapped and put on a ship sailing for the New World. Despite the kindness of some other Indian immigrants there, things do not go as planned. Her British patron sends the boy to London to start a new life. And this is where Tony, the eponymous East Indian, finds himself in 1635, working as an indentured servant on tobacco plantations.īorn with unclear paternity to a Tamil courtesan, Tony's comfortable life on India's Coromandel Coast ends soon after he loses his mother. The first permanent English colony in America was founded in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. With The East Indian, Brinda Charry aims to do just that by recovering, reclaiming, and reframing the little-known, barely footnoted history of the earliest Indian immigrant on record to what is now the United States. Often they are driven to embrace this challenging mode of being because specific gaps, omissions, and conflicts in historical record trouble or fascinate them - and the only way they can address these aspects is through fictional invention and intervention. Historical fiction writers live in three time zones simultaneously: The past is what they aim to interrogate imaginatively, the present is what they seek to interpret through that recreated past, and the future is what they hope to influence through a newly interpreted present.

The adventure of the beryl coronet