The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark
Publisher: Atria Books
Publish Date: April 5, 2011
Hardback, 368 pages
Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 978-14165-9059-0
*** My review will be coming later today. ***
About Elle Newmark
Elle Newmark is an author whose books are inspired by her travels.
Her work has been published into 16 languages and she lives in the hills
north of San Diego with her husband, a retired physician. She has two
grown children and five grandchildren.
To find out more about Elle or learn about her books visit
http://ellenewmark.com
About The Sandalwood Tree
From incredible storyteller and nationally bestselling author Elle
Newmark comes a rich, sweeping novel that brings to life two love
stories, ninety years apart, set against the rich backdrop of war-torn
India.
In 1947, American historian and veteran of WWII, Martin Mitchell,
wins a Fulbright Fellowship to document the end of British rule in
India. His wife, Evie, convinces him to take her and their young son
along, hoping a shared adventure will mend their marriage, which has
been strained by war.
But other places, other wars. Martin and Evie find themselves
stranded in a colonial bungalow in the Himalayas due to violence
surrounding the partition of India between Hindus and Muslims. In that
house, hidden behind a brick wall, Evie discovers a packet of old
letters, which tell a strange and compelling story of love and war
involving two young Englishwomen who lived in the same house in 1857.
Drawn to their story, Evie embarks on a mission to piece together her
Victorian mystery. Her search leads her through the bazaars and temples
of India as well as the dying society of the British Raj. Along the
way, Martin’s dark secret is exposed, unleashing a new wedge between
Evie and him. As India struggles toward Independence, Evie struggles to
save her marriage, pursuing her Victorian ghosts for answers.
Bursting with lavish detail and vivid imagery of Calcutta and beyond,
The Sandalwood Tree is a powerful story about betrayal, forgiveness,
fate, and love.
Book Excerpt
When I found the hidden letters, I had just finished an assault on the
kitchen window. I squeezed out the sponge and stood back, squinting
with a critical eye. A yellow sari converted to curtains framed the blue
sky and distant Himalayan peaks, which were now clearly visible through
the spotless window, but the late-afternoon sun spotlighted a dirty
brick wall behind the old English cooker. The red brick had been
blackened by a century of oily cooking smoke and, just like that, I
decided to roll up my sleeves and give it
a good scrub. Rashmi, our ayah, deigned to wipe off a table or sweep the
floor with a bunch of acacia branches, but I would never ask her to
tackle a soot-encrusted wall. A job like that fell well beneath her
caste, and she would have quit on the spot.
The university chose that bungalow for us because it had an attached
kitchen instead of the usual cookhouse out back. I liked the place as
soon as I walked into the little compound full of tangled grass and
pipal trees with creepers twisting around their trunks. A low mud-brick
wall, overgrown with Himalayan mimosa, circled our compound with its
hundred-year-old bungalow and vine-clad verandah, and an old sandalwood
tree, with long oval leaves and pregnant red pods, presided over the
front of the house. Everything had a weathered, well-used look, and I
wondered how many
lives had been lived there.
Off to one side of the house, a path bordered by scrappy box-wood led to
the godowns for the servants, a dilapidated row of huts, far more of
them than we would ever need for our small staff. At the far end of the
godowns a derelict stable nestled in a grove of deodars, and Martin
talked about using it to park our car during the monsoon. Martin had
bought a battered and faded red Packard convertible, which had been new
and snazzy in 1935 but had seen twelve monsoons and too many seasons of
neglect. Still, the jalopy
ran, I had a bicycle, Billy had his Red Flyer wagon, and that’s all we needed.
The remains of the old cookhouse still stood around back, listing under a
neem tree, a bare little shack with a dirt floor, one sagging shelf, and
a square of mud bricks with a hole in the center for wood or coal.
Indians didn’t cook inside colonial houses—a fire precaution and some
complicated rules having to do with religion or caste—and it must have
been some very unconventional colonials who decided to attach a kitchen
to the main house and install
a cooker, bless their hearts.
I hired our servants myself, choosing from a virtual army that lined up
for interview. They presented their chits—references— and since most of
them couldn’t read English they didn’t realize that the bogus chits they
had bought in the bazaar might be signed by Queen Victoria, Winston
Churchill, or Punch and Judy. The only chit I could be absolutely sure
was authentic said, “This is the laziest cook in all India. He strains
the milk through his dhoti and
he will rob you blind.”
In the end we had a scandalously small staff—a cook, an ayah, and a
dhobi who picked up our laundry once a week in silent anonymity. At
first, we’d also had a gardener, a sweeper, and a bearer—a more typical
arrangement—but that many servants made me feel
superfluous.
I particularly disliked having a bearer, a sort of majordomo who trailed
around after me, doing my bidding or passing my orders on to the other
servants. I felt helpless as a caricature of a nineteenth-century
memsahib, swooning on a daybed. Our bearer had been trained in British
households and would wake Martin and me in the morning with a tradition
called “bed tea.” The first time I opened my eyes to see a dark, turbaned
man standing over me with a tray it scared me out of my wits. He also
served our meals and stood behind us while we ate; it felt like sitting
in a
restaurant with an eavesdropping waiter, and I was painfully conscious
of our conversation and my table manners. I found myself delicately
dabbing the corners of my mouth and keeping my spine straight. I could
see that Martin felt it, too, and meals became an uncomfortable chore.
I didn’t want “bed tea,” I didn’t want a bearer—always there, always
hovering—and I enjoyed feeling useful. So I kept our little house clean
and watered the plants on the verandah myself. I liked the natural
jungly look around the bungalow, and the notion of having a gardener
struck me as absurd. Martin told me the expatriate community was
appalled by our lack of servants. I said, “So?”
I kept the cook, Habib, because I didn’t recognize half the things in
the market stalls, and since I didn’t speak Hindi, the price of
everything would have tripled. I kept Rashmi, our ayah, because I liked
her and she spoke English.
When I first met Rashmi, she greeted me with a formal bow, her hands in
an attitude of prayer. She said, “Namaste,” and then began giggling and
clapping, making her chubby arms jiggle and
her gold bangles jangle. She asked, “From what country are you coming?
I said, “America,” wondering if it was a trick question.
“Oooh, Amerrrica! Verryy nice!” The ruby in her right nostril twinkled.
Rashmi deeply disapproved of a household with so few servants. Whenever
she saw me beating a rug or cleaning the bathroom she would hold her
cheeks and shake her head, her eyes round and alarmed. “Arey Ram! What
madam is doooiiing?” I tried to explain that I liked to keep busy, but
Rashmi would stomp around the house mumbling and shaking her head. Once I
heard her say, “Amerrrican,” as if it were a diagnosis. She started
sweeping up with neatly tied acacia branches and taking out the garbage.
I had
no idea where she took it, but it seemed to make her happy to do it.
Whenever I thanked Rashmi for something, she would waggle her head
pleasantly and say, “My duty it is, madam.” I wished Martin and I could
accept our lot so easily.
My beautiful Martin had come home from the war with a
shrouded, chaotic underside, wanting everything as neat as an army cot.
It was about control, I know that, but he drove me nuts, picking at
imaginary lint on my clothing and lining up our shoes side by side on
the closet floor, like a row of soldiers snapped to attention. At first I
complied and kept everything shipshape, simply because we didn’t need
yet another thing to argue about. But I soon discovered that ordering
furniture and annihilating dust gave me a fragile sense of
control—Martin was on to something there—and
I enjoyed imposing my antiseptic standards on India, keeping my little
corner of the universe as predictable as gravity. When this altered
Martin came home from Germany, straightening books on the shelf and
buffing his shoes until they screamed, he often complained of a metallic
taste in his mouth, rushing off to brush his teeth five times a day. I
didn’t know what he tasted, but I did know he had nightmares. He
twitched in his sleep, muttering disjointed bits about “skeletons” and
calling out names of people I didn’t know. Some nights he’d shout in his
sleep, and I’d spring up,
shocked and scared. I’d dry the sweat from his face with the sheet and
kiss the palms of his hands while his breathing calmed and my heart
slowed.
His skin would be clammy and he’d be trembling, and I’d rock him and croon in his ear, “It’s all right. I’m here.”
After a while, when it seemed safe, I’d say, “Sweetheart, talk to me. Please.”
Sometimes he’d talk a little, but only about the language or the
landscape or the guys in his platoon. He said it bothered him that
German sounded so much like the Yiddish of his grandparents; then he
shook his head as if he was trying to understand something.
He told me that Germany was littered with castles and fairy-tale
villages, all blasted to hell. He said the soldiers in his platoon were
an unlikely bunch thrown together by war, men who would not otherwise
have met. Martin, a budding historian, bunked with a fast-talking
mechanic from Detroit named Casino. Also in his barracks were an
American Indian named William Who Respects Nothing, and a Samoan named
Naikelekele, whom the men called
Ukulele. Martin said they were OK guys, but a CPA from Queens named
Polanski—Ski to the guys—had the wide slab face and flat blue eyes behind
too many of the pogroms mounted against the Jews, and Martin had to
keep reminding himself that they were on the same side.
But Ski cheated at cards and had a nascent anti-Semitic streak. Martin
said, “Of all the decent guys in that platoon I had to haul Ski back to a
field hospital while better men lay dead around us.”
His ambivalence about saving Ski haunted him, but it wasn’t the thing eating at him like acid.
One night, in bed, after having had an extra glass of wine with dinner,
Martin knit his fingers behind his head and told me about a mess sergeant
from the hills of Appalachia, Pete McCoy, who made a crude liquor with
pilfered sugar and yeast and canned peaches. Pete had served an informal
apprenticeship at his father’s still, deep in the woods of West
Virginia, and in a rare, lighthearted moment, Martin did a skillful
imitation. He drawled, “Ah know it ain’t legal.
But mah daddy’s gonna quit soon as he gits a chance.”
I said, “The nightmares aren’t about Pete McCoy’s moonshine.”
“Hey, you didn’t taste that stuff. Burned like a son-of-a-bitch going
down.” His voice became abstract. “But sometimes the moonshine was
necessary, like when Tommie . . . Well, anyway, McCoy was like the medic
who brought the morphine.”
I said, “Who was Tommie?”
Martin looked away. “Ah, you don’t want to hear that stuff.”
“But I do. Talk to me. Please.”
He hesitated, then, “Nah. Go to sleep.” He patted my hand and rolled away.
World War II veterans were icons of heroism, brave liberators, and most
of them were glad to leave the ugliness buried under the war rubble and
get back to a normal life, or try to. But Martin had come home with
invisible wounds, and our normal life was as ruined as the German
landscape. I wanted to understand. I’d been begging him to talk for two
solid years, but he wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t let me help him, and I
felt worn to a stump from trying.
That business of rolling away from me in bed hurt, but by
the time we got to India, I was doing it, too. I was becoming as
frustrated as he was tormented, and we took our pain out on each other.
We hid in our respective corners until something brought us out with
fists raised.
I couldn’t fix our insides, so I fixed our outside. I prowled around the
bungalow searching for dust mites to exterminate, mold to slaughter, and
smudges to wipe out. I vanquished dirt and disorder wherever I found it
and it helped, a little. The morning I found the letters, I’d filled a
pail with hot soapy water and pounced on the sooty bricks behind the old
cooker with demented determination. I described foamy circles on the
wall with my brush and . . . what? One brick moved. That was odd.
Nothing in that house ever rattled or came loose; the British colonials
who built the place had expected to rule India forever.
I put the brush down and forced my fingernails into the crumbling mortar
around the loose brick, then wiggled it back and forth until it came out
far enough for me to get a grip on it. I teased the brick out of the
wall and felt a thrill of discovery when I saw, hidden in the wall, a
packet of folded papers tied with a faded and bedraggled blue ribbon.
That packet reeked of long-lost secrets, and I felt a smile lift one
corner of my mouth. I set the blackened brick on the floor and reached in
to lift my plunder out of the wall. But on second thought, I went to
the sink first to wash the soot from my hands.
With clean, dry hands, I eased the packet out of its hiding place, blew
the dust from its crevices, then laid it on the kitchen table and pulled
the ribbon loose. When I opened the first sheet, the folds seemed almost
to creak with age. Gently now, I smoothed the fragile paper out on the
table and it crackled faintly. It was ancient and brittle, the edges
wavy and water-stained. It was a letter written on thin, grainy
parchment, and feminine handwriting rose and swooped across the page
with sharp peaks and curling flourishes. The writing was in English, and
the way it had been concealed in the wall hinted at Victorian intrigue.
FTC Information:
I received this book from the publisher through Pump Up Your Book Promotion for an honest review. I have Amazon
links on my review pages but I do not make any money from
these because of NC laws. I put them solely for people to
check out the books on a retail site.
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