Synopsis – Koftas and Yellow Rice
Seventeen-year-old, reluctant A level student, Stephen, loses his domineering father, Ronnie, to cancer. He discovers Ronnie concealed an Indian childhood, his mixed-race ethnicity and his brother Lenny. Stephen uses his new freedom to explore a social life with his British Asian friend, Jay, and Mimi, a left-wing revolutionary, with whom Stephen becomes obsessed. He also, with Lenny’s help, discovers more family secrets, including a gold watch that was taken from Yasmin, a refugee of the Indian Partition violence. In trying to retrieve and return the watch, Stephen has to learn to confront challenges and make his own choices about where his life should go.
Book Excerpt
‘At stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’
came the scratchy voice through her red leather Roberts.
Yasmin Lal was chopping onions in her kitchen, and on hearing the Received Pronunciation
of Jawaharlal Nehru froze, sliced her finger with the knife. Yasmin normally liked listening to
Radio 4 when she cooked. But not today. Not that. Nehru’s speech on the eve of that first
day of Indian independence in 1947 marked a severing for her. A cutting from which she had
never recovered.
Yasmin reached for a cloth to staunch the flow of blood dripping from her finger. Then she
reached for the knob on the radio to stop the words, as if she could stop what had occurred
on that night all those years ago. Finally, she reached for the gas, turned off the simmering
lentils, and sat down, squeezing the cloth against her throbbing finger, feeling the pain
reaching sharp into her chest.
