“The Mission House” by Carys Davies

Carys Davies (photo: Jonathan Bean)

Hilary Byrd is a depressed and disgruntled English librarian from Petts Wood in southeast London. Frustrated with the changes in his library over the past twenty years—digitalization and moms’ groups that take the focus away from print books and exacerbate his depression—he plans a trip overseas to clear his mind and to show himself and his sister, Wyn, who has become his de facto caregiver, that he can forge out on his own. India is relatively inexpensive, so Hilary chooses it on the basis of affordability. India also exudes a certain romanticism for travelers of a nostalgic disposition.

But Carys Davies’s new novel, The Mission House, is neither a throwback to the exoticism of the Raj nor an escape to modern-day ashrams and yoga retreats. Her story begins as Hilary arrives in Ooty, a hill station in southern India where A Passage to India was partly filmed; like Forster’s novel, it’s a critique, yet not of the colonial Raj but of contemporary religious nationalism.

Hilary has already touched down in several places in India when he learns of Ooty from the Padre, an older Protestant priest who discloses that the mission house behind his presbytery has been rendered vacant. A Canadian missionary who worked with leper colonies and helped feed the poor had occupied the mission house before returning home to attend to his visa issues. Hilary could stay for a small donation. He accepts the offer and finds that he enjoys the town for its cool climate and its familiarity.

 

The order of his day varied, but in general he stopped off at most of the same places: at the Botanical Gardens to stroll beneath the trees; at Modern States to do his grocery shopping. At the market, in the little café at the south entrance, he bought himself a cup of sweet milky tea and bought his fruit and his vegetables and sometimes a piece of chicken or fish; at the King Star Chocolates shop he called in for his chocolate, and at the bank when he needed to change a little more money; at the post office and the Global Internet Café to send a parcel or email to Wyn; at the Nazri Hotel for his lunch.

 

This was all possible thanks to an auto-rickshaw driver named Jamshed, an older man Hilary meets the day he disembarks at the Ooty railroad station. Hilary is not used to living with anyone but his sister Wyn and had been engaging in social distancing before it became a thing. When he is greeted in Ooty by touts, he feels uneasy and tries to flee the crowds. In doing so, he runs over Jamshed’s exposed toe (the one in a flip-flop; the other was protected in an old clog) with his wheelie suitcase. Jamshed feels slighted and unseen by this haughty Brit, but notices the ample money belt under Hilary’s shirt and becomes determined to locate Hilary the next day for another chance at a high-paying fare. This time it works and friendship between the two men grows as they meet each morning for Hilary’s shopping and sight-seeing excursions.

 

The Mission House, Carys Davies (Scribner, February 2021; Granta, August 2020)
The Mission House, Carys Davies (Scribner, February 2021; Granta, August 2020)

He gets to know Priscilla, a young woman the Padre employs as a housekeeper after his wife passed away. Priscilla grew up in an orphanage and was born with no thumbs and one leg longer than the other, which gives her a limp. For the first half of the book, Hilary worries the Padre only invited him to stay at the mission house to marry Priscilla off to him.

 

Byrd expressed a rush of horror, not unlike but at the same time more intense than the feeling he had when he was being pursued by the auto rickshaw drivers: a feeling of fear mixed with guilt. The Padre was smiling happily at him, and Byrd had the impression—fleetingly to be sure but no less appalling for that—that somehow, crazily and without being aware of it, he had made some sort of overture with regard to the unfortunate girl, Priscilla, and the Padre was now going to talk to him about it.

 

The story is filled with other colorful characters, including Jamshed’s nephew Ravi, a barber and country western music aficionado who dresses in full cowboy attire thanks to his uncle’s earnings from driving Hilary around each day, in addition to a lackadaisical dog named Ooly and Stephen, the nag Jamshed buys for Ravi to complete his cowboy persona.

Although it isn’t central, Davies wraps her story up with the religious nationalism of the Modi government. Intolerant of Christians in Ooty, Hindu nationalists wreak havoc in a community that has long been home to Hindus, Muslims, Zoroastrians, Protestants, and Catholics. At the same time, Davies shows that the “eager do-gooders who came up into the Indian hills, who ranged in age from their late teens to their early seventies” are just as human as the rest of us. This message of tolerance is just as important today as Forster’s was a hundred years ago.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.