Publisher's Synopsis
Description
The hills of Nandagiri,1920: the Irish Kildare Regiment is part of the vast
machinery that holds together the British Empire for the Crown of England.
Back home in Ireland, the Irish War for Independence is raging and is met
with a ruthless backlash; the Black and Tans-an English paramilitary force
set up to crush Irish dissidents-spread death, indignities and destruction
wherever they go.
In Nandagiri, Rose Twomey, an Irish-Indian, and Michael, a soldier from
the Kildare Rangers, fall in love, defying the social norms of the time that
disapproved of such unions. As news of the Black and Tans' atrocities reach
India, anger brews among the Irish soldiers against the Crown they've sworn
to serve, leading to mutiny, arrests, court-martials and executions. Rose and
Michael are helpless in the political maelstrom blowing around them that rips
through their lives and dreams.
Sixty years later, in those very same hills, families torn apart by those
turbulent decades are forced to reckon with the horrors of the past,
heartbreak, loss and alienation, but they may yet, perhaps, finally find healing
and belonging.
Through a love story spanning an era of Indian and Irish history, The Tainted
describes the continued disconnect that many Anglo-Indians live in, unable to
come to terms with being unwanted in the country they consider 'home' (the
land of their White fathers), the bitterness they pass down to their children
and their mutually conflicted relationship with a country they are unsure
whether to call their own.
