Chinnery’s Hotel

Through a subtle interleaving of past and present, the overlapping narrative of Chinnery’s Hotel traverses two continents and three historical periods. After spending nearly four uneasy decades in her ancestral England and accompanied by her dead sister’s daughter Camilia, Grace returns to the cantonment township of Mhow where she had spent a much-cossetted childhood and youth in her parents’ establishment called Chinnery’s Hotel. The fictional Mhow, with its polo tournaments, tent-pegging, ballroom dances, Masonic Lodge and whist drives serves as a prototype of cantonments between the Wars, where the resident British live in appalling ignorance of the political realities which would dislodge and transplant them to war-ravaged England in 1947. The bleak post-War life in London feeds Grace’s nostalgia for her childhood home. However she discovers that, notwithstanding the trappings of order and a disciplined way of life, Mhow has not remained immune to the profound and often corrosive changes that a new nation in the making has undergone during her prolonged absence. Chinnery’s Hotel exists in a moment of time and in its garden gone to seed history’s glimpses and rumour continue to intersect long after its guests have checked out, never to return.