Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White and Blue Universe, is a new collection of thirteen stories set in India, many of which tackle the issues of belonging.
The first story, “High Ideals”, reads like Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil. A newly-arrived British woman named Louise feels out of place in her new home of Mumbai when her husband Will leaves for business in Bangkok almost as soon as they move out of a hotel into their new flat. On her own, Louise wants to learn about her new city, but finds the poverty daunting. It’s not what she expected.
After working in London at Aid to Millions, a global relief organization sending support to destitute peoples around the world, she could not confess, even to Will, the shock she felt at observing abject poverty for the first time. Whenever she ventured outside the hotel the rutted, filthy pavements were filled with beggars whining for alms. The dispensing of coins only encouraged the crowds to grow; children, old men, nursing mothers, lepers and vagrants with amputated limbs came at her from all sides.
Louise is taken under the wing of another British couple in their building. The Carters bring her to their exclusive club that only fairly recently allowed Indians to join as members. Louise doesn’t like the Carters’ entitled mindset and tries to form her own views of India, yet it’s not easy as she fends for herself the days and evenings Will is out of town. After late night prank phone calls and uncomfortable stares from strange men, Louise starts to think the snobbishness of the club isn’t so bad after all.

In “Monsoon Interlude”, an elderly man named Arvind is on his deathbed and thinks back to years earlier when his children were young and his wife would take them away from Mumbai to see her mother for a month in Delhi. One year she was too busy and needed to stay in Mumbai, so he decided to travel to a hill station for his much-awaited month of solitude. Chand writes about the hill station in a beautiful way that shows why Arvind was set on getting away for that month.
His freedom was superb. Whenever the rain eased, he took a walk and the wet mists soaked deep into his jacket. Approaching the house as he returned from these rambles, he embraced it for its unadorned simplicity. It was a single-storied stucco building in the middle age of dilapidation, with a red-tiled roof and wide veranda. His parents had built the place, and visits here were part of his childhood. It was deliciously wet, wild and disordered, a world away from the precise regulation of that other life he lived.
Arvind, like other male characters in these stories, makes some poor decisions that may not directly affect his family because they don’t find out, yet weigh on his mind for the next several decades.
The story that lends its name to the collection centers around a British woman named Marie who is searching for belonging and gets sucked into a cult run by a guru named Narayan Maharaj. Marie learns about the guru in England and is the first foreigner to travel to India to join him in his ashram. “The Pink, White and Blue Universe” refers to the colored chalk Narayan uses to draw diagrams about his thoughts on spiritual evolution.
As the days passed Marie learned that those within a close orbit of the guru were regularly subjected to ego-crushing ordeals. Extreme fasts of several days were a frequent order from him and at these times a disciple’s physical labour would be significantly increased. Equally, a vow of silence could be imposed for weeks. The guru’s orders must be carried out promptly. A summons from him must be immediately obeyed regardless of what a disciple was doing when the summons came.
It’s obvious almost right away that Marie is being duped by Narayan, but she still finds happiness at the ashram and when she leaves she promises to find more disciples back in England.
The other stories feature Indian and Anglican characters trying to fit their new home in India or England.
Chand writes with great humanity about her characters, flaws and all. One can, reading between the lines, get a sense for some of the difficulties she experienced living in India as an adult so many years ago.
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