Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden (Viking, out of print)

“When Sophie had an idea, her child Teresa trembled.”

Sophie is a young British widow in India, with a very small pension and two equally small children. She is adventurous, sentimental, and in love with the Vale of Kashmir. Brought up as a sheltered English girl of good breeding, she is insouciant, viewing the world around her with “superficial eyes.” To Sophie the place she chooses to make her home is a haven surrounded by mountains, perched above a lake, picturesque as are the peasants who live nearby. 

“We shall live a poor and simple life. We shall toil...we shall grow our own vegetables and keep hens and bees, “ she tells Teresa, who has unfortunately been born with common sense and the gift of realism. Teresa observes and puts puzzle pieces together while Sophie is in love with beauty and crippled by her idea of what is necessary to live a basic life.

Her passion for lovely objects leads her to Profit David, a man who deals in beautiful expensive things and Sophie soon goes into debt buying a lamp with a shade that blazes painted kingfishers into light, a gleaming carpet, a Kashmir shawl. The villagers take note of her extravagance and deem her rich. Even the furnishings that Sophie’s upbringing leads her to regard as essentials are thoroughly luxurious to her neighbors: “A bed each. Even for  the children...Aie! She is rich!”

And she is inexplicable. Sophie and her children wear shoes in the house--”dirty!” and she has no husband. In India ladies do not live alone, unless they are “saints or sinners.” Sophie, living with only two servants and her little children, is neither and to her neighbors she seems mad.

Every community has its own politics and in the village near Sophie’s house the two leading families are wrapped in bitter competition. The village children are almost feral, spending their waking hours in the mountain fields, herding cattle. Sophie urges Teresa to make friends with them but Teresa knows better. For her and her little brother Moo, the herd children are dangerous.

Sophie moves in a graceful world of her own, unsettled only by the shape of a compass carved into the floor of her new house. While she works at settling in, blindly and blithely, the compass calls to her with its promise of places still to be seen. Her ignorance of the world around her is a path to disaster and when it hits, it focuses upon Teresa--and, less violently but with equal danger, upon Sophie.

British author Rumer Godden was taken to India when she was an infant, grew up there, and returned to it after completing her education in England. She embarked upon an unsuccessful marriage and when it disintegrated she moved with her two children to the Dal Lake in Kashmir at the start of World War Two. She stayed there for three years, starting an herb farm and “living, thinking and perhaps dreaming.” She left, as Sophie did, because of a disaster that was directed at her and her daughters. But before that occurred, she “wrote endlessly,” and like Sophie, she was obsessed with the beauty that surrounded her.

Godden’s love for India and her knowledge of it lifts Kingfishers Catch Fire well above the customary expat fiction, while gently excoriating the point of view of the customary expat. She presents a classic dissection of the dangers of romanticism and selective blindness, wrapping it in a mixture of the passion and unvarnished realism with which she saw the country she loved and eventually had to leave.~Janet Brown