Thrity Umrigar

First Darling of the Morning

Thrity Umrigar was born into a middle-class Parsi family in cosmopolitan Bombay (now Mumbai) and brought up in the Zoroastrian (an ancient religious philosophy) faith. As a child, she was deeply affected by the plight of beggars in her city, but was told the condition was inevitable; by her teenage years she realized she could be an agent of change.

From First Darling of the Morning: Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood:

“I am of that generation of middle-class, westernized, citified Indian kids who know the words to Do-Re-Me better than the national anthem. The Sound of Music is our call to arms and Julie Andrews our Pied Piper.”

Umrigar attended a Catholic school in a mostly Hindu city, where the atmosphere was one of inclusivity. She wrote incessantly as a means of expressing her complicated feelings: Thrity’s father was gentle but absent. Her cruel, mocking mother beat her with switches. Her earliest poems took the form of anonymous notes to her parents. By her teens she was committed to writing.

Reading Midnight’s Children—Salman Rushdie’s remembrance of Bombay on the cusp of Indian independence—was both revelation and inspiration for Umrigar. She was also deeply struck by Lust For Life, Irving Howe’s biography of Vincent Van Gogh, which inspired her to reject her parents’ bourgeois existence.

At twenty-one, she left India to study at Ohio State University, and was an established journalist when she met her agent-to-be, serendipitously, at a college lecture; they clicked, and Umrigar began writing chapters that eventually became Bombay Time, her acclaimed debut novel of 2001. Having since written four novels and a memoir, she works as a journalist in Cleveland, her longtime home.

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The Space Between Us. A portrayal of two women who discover an emotional rapport as they struggle against the confines of a rigid caste system in modern India.

Sherry Alexander

In The Space Between Us, after a warm but misguided moment of love expressed, Sera’s husband Feroz takes her out for a drink and she has a Kingfisher (Indian beer) and he has a glass of sherry.

1 oz. brandy

1 oz. medium dry sherry

1 oz. brandy cream

Splash of heavy cream

Freshly grated nutmeg

Rim a martini glass with grated nutmeg. Combine all remaining ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a martini glass. Serves 1.