The East Indian by Brinda Charry

The East Indian by Brinda Charry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Bildungsroman par excellence – rawer than The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, more macabre than A Catcher in the Rye, more mystical than A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: 1916 Classic Novel and more racist than To Kill a Mockingbird. Written in an engaging manner with a lot of allusions from Shakespeare (after all, the author is an authority on The Bard), but is marred by a couple of glaring medical errors

Ganter’s face fell slack, his pupils became pinpoints, he whimpered
And
…the ship doctor grunted and spoke for the first time: “Aye, I witness it at sea too – men turned to drooling idiots by the jimson and a few of the dead by it.”

Actually, Datura stramonium toxicity leads to dilated pupils and a dry mouth!
The rampaging reaving murdering Europeans Britishers, Spanish, Portuguese, French ruined two Indias, South America and the African continent

Mary (Bengal) was telling me that the English also took tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. How they ate the entire world, it seemed, and hungered for more.

And
How death had walked in the wake of the English settlement of Virginia – how the Indians had perished in shockingly large numbers of new and unexplained diseases at every village the English stopped at and began to believe that the white man shot invisible bullets into them…

Some memorable extracts

Love Potions for Men, Cold and Impotent; and Women, Prudish and Overmodest. The concoctions could be delivered in cakes, syrups, plasters, pomades, pills. They could be rubbed in, poured over, smoked, or swallowed. I was dismayed at some of the recipes: they required the use of assorted ingredients such as a deer’s heart, human bone, spleen, pubic hairs, rose petals, and consecrated host – of all these only the deer’s heart and pubic hair seemed remotely obtainable. And then I came upon an Aphrodisiac Pill Following an Old English Recipe, which required nothing more than asafoetida or stinking gum, extracted opium, the women’s menstrual blood, and something called castoreum, which I assumed was castor oil, till it turned out to be an odoriferous oily secretion found in two sacs between the anus and external genitals of beavers...

“I heard of one fellow stricken with the ague who was so heated up that he turned to smoke,” Flynn informed me one day. “A gray wisp – that is all that was left of him finally.”
“Black man or while man?” I asked. I was skeptical (sic) of the tale.
“Tawny moor like you.”
…So, the first East Indian I had heard of in Virginia in six years was a dead one, one who micht have spontaneously combusted.

It was a coincidence that I came across the following quote, just when I read the Hindi version in आर्यभटAryabhat

The physician treats the wounds: it is God who heals, Monsieur Pare also wrote.

Aryabhat’s physician father Udaybhat, on being lavishly praised for his skills, modestly claims

"उपचार हमारा कर्तव्य है, परन्तु रोग से मुक्ति तो ईश्वर के कृपा से होती है।"

Simply unputdownable. A rather abrupt ending, but this book that cries out for sequel(s)

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