The East Indian by Brinda Charry is both a historical adventure novel and a coming-of-age drama, featuring a boy bought to 1630s colonial Virginia from India by way of England and his improbable rise from indentured servitude on a tobacco plantation to a respected medical practitioner and healer. Seen through the wondrous large brown eyes of its charming, youthful protagonist, Tony, Charry's U.S. debut is a dazzling first-person account of a reluctant traveler destined to a life of movement, displacement, and persistent reinvention.
The story begins in a salt-encrusted Indian coastal town where Tony lives with his doting mother, a courtesan known for her graceful, stunning beauty. After she succumbs to cholera, Tony is sent by his mother's lover, East India Company man Sir Francis Day, to London to work for a wealthy merchant. Things do not go as planned for the boy. Homesick for his mother's warm embrace, he treads a rocky path toward adulthood, with several spectacular twists and dark turns leading eventually to the joys of first love and a coveted job as a physician's assistant.
Tony, known simply as "Tony East Indian," is the namesake of an obscure historical figure Charry discovered in the American colonial archives, a long forgotten brown-skinned man documented as the first South Asian person to set foot in America. Charry's bold, imaginative storytelling makes The East Indian a tender tribute to the earliest laborers who survived by their wits as servants and enslaved, fated to build new lives far from home. It bears all the markings of a well-loved classic. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer