The Spell of the Flying Foxes

Sylvia Dyer

Penguin Books India, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 254 pages

Champaran, 1845. Drawn to the rich, fertile land to farm Blue Gold, indigo, Alfred Augustus Tripe settles by the river Baghmati. A whole village of workers emerges nearby as Tripe starts a family with an Indian heiress. Nearly a century later, Tripe's sprawling home and most of his family are destroyed in the devastating Bihar earthquake of 1934. Now his only granddaughter, Gladys, must find a way to stop her unscrupulous cousin Harry from usurping her entire inheritance and turning her young children destitute. A formidable dacoit leader miraculously comes to her rescue, India gains independence, and the flying foxes, the bearers of good fortune, disappear.

In sparkling, lyrical prose, Sylvia Dyer, Gladys's daughter, brings to life a world of picturesque beauty, love and hope intertwined with social ills, and a time when the passionate freedom struggle threatened the very existence of Anglo-Indians in India.

Contents

• The Flying Foxes: 3
• Home Sweet Home: 20
• The Aftermath: 40
• The SugarCoated Days Of Parrot and Pig Tea and Its Discoveries 51 60 66 71 75 80: 51
• Moving: 60
• Evenings at Home: 66
• Harrys Soft Spots: 75
• A Man and a River: 85
• The Khariyan: 93
• The Merry Days of Winter: 101
• Spirits: 114
• Coming Events: 120
• Our Bovine Creatures: 126
• A Grave Tale: 135
• The Monsoon: 156
• Games of Chance: 162
• Bachoo the Barber: 168
• Lust for Land: 182
• Christmas Time: 191
• Shikars: 200
• The Great Change: 213
• Comings and Goings: 220
• A Festival of Affliction: 238
• Mother: 246
• Acknowledgements: 255

About the author

Sylvia Dyer was born in 1928 and grew up in the wilds of Champaran in north Bihar, on a plantation pioneered as an indigo estate by her great-grandfather, an Englishman. She spent ten years of schooling at St Helen's Convent at Kurseong, Darjeeling, was married twice, and widowed both times, to Indian Army officers. There were two sons from her first marriage and a daughter from the second. She now lives in Pune and her two surviving children have settled abroad.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Spell of the Flying Foxes
• Author: Sylvia Dyer
• Publisher: Penguin Books India, 2011
• ISBN: 0143065343, 9780143065340
• Length: 254 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; History / Social History