REVIEWS FROM UK, INDIA, CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, AND AUSTRALIA
DNA India
Reviewed 2006-7-01
When she was seven, in the early 1980s, Rachel Manija's parents left Los Angeles for Ahmednagar. This hot and dusty town in Maharashtra is no tourist attraction. But it was the spot the spiritual guru Meher Baba had chosen to set up his ashram. Manija's parents, especially her mother, are "Baba-lovers".
Meher Baba "dropped the body in 1969", four years before Manija was born. While he was in the body, he was famous for his very long vow of silence. His philosophy, if it can be called that, is an eclectic mix of various theologies, laced with platitudes. It includes all religions and none. His motto, however, is more famous: Don't worry, be happy.
For a young American girl, even if she is used to the eccentricities of her somewhat unconventional parents, the change from LA to Ahmednagar is stupefying. The ashram is full of Baba-lovers, mainly white Americans.
Most, if not all, seem to be a fine collection of nutcases: Malik the Mast, an old man who walks around searching the ground for "deesh" (some unknown stuff connected to Baba); the librarian Ratanji, who hates anyone coming anywhere near his books and specialises in strange sounds; Coconut, who insists the young girl is his "mummy".
Then there is the Baba Tree where devotees can see Baba's face on the bark. And finally, you have Manija's mother Da-nonna who chants "Baba baba baba baba" at moments of crisis, and often at all other moments as well.
Manija starts school at the local convent and finds that the children hate her. It seems to her that all the children in town hate her as well. At any rate, they greet her by throwing rocks at her whenever she passes by.
This, then, is the story of a little girl who finds herself living in an ashram full of loonies and goes to a school where she is an alien. Her parents do not seem aware of her plight, and her only recourse to sanity are books and her love for nature.
Yet, this is by no means a weepy, feel-sorry-for-me book. Most times, it is wildly funny and a very honest insight into the world of cults. It is also a very straightforward look at India from the point of view of a child. Manija, for instance, thinks that her name will be accepted at last, after it was made such fun of in the US.
But the first day of school, in Marathi class, the teacher reads a poem about a cat called 'Mani Mao'. So that becomes her name right away.
Manija, not one to feel overly sorry for herself, seeks solace in the derring-do of Shivaji and the Marathas. She reads up on Maratha history and as she grows older, visits the important Maratha forts.
Through this diversion, she is able to create an escape route for herself mentally, and eventually, an actual escape from Ahmednagar back to the United States.
It takes her several years and a change of name to finally come to terms with her life, with her mother's personal history that led them all to Baba's world, and to write this book. Reading it is nothing but an unalloyed pleasure, and a laugh-out-loud feast.
- "It's all about Mani," Ranjona Banerji |
Telegraph
Reviewed 2006-06-21
Brown's upbringing in an Indian ashram stretches the definition of an unconventional upbringing. At the age of six her parents moved from LA to a small Indian town where they were followers of Meher Baba, who coined the phrase "Don't worry, be happy".
Her time in the ashram was juxtaposed with days at the Bleeding Heart School, where she was taught by nuns who did not subscribe to Baba's philosophy: Brown's punishment there took the form of being kept in the midday sun until she fainted. The fact that she managed to maintain her sanity when growing up in these extremes of environment is a testament to her strength of character, and this plucky and witty memoir reads like a compelling novel.
Extract
"As if Hindi and Marathi weren't hard enough, I had to relearn English as well. Erasers were now rubbers, soccer was football, and you thrashed people instead of beating them up. It had been 40 years since India had been a British colony, but it still conformed to London Times standards.
The nuns at Holy Wound scolded me for misspelling "color" and "honor", mispronouncing "schedule" and using the word "bloody" (in reference to a skinned knee.) Though my parents tried to be sympathetic, they had to stop laughing first."
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Independent
Reviewed 2006-10-4
"Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu," says Rachel Manja Brown firmly in All the Fishes Come Home to Roost (Hodder, £12.99). Her jaunty and, at times, poignant account of a childhood in an Indian ashram boasts an array of eccentrics that are clearly more fun to read about than to live with.
-Christina Patterson |
Calgary Sun
Reviewed 2006-2-36
At the tender age of seven, Rachel Manija Brown's hippie parents uprooted her from California to live in a remote Indian ashram and follow the religious teachings of a guru called Meher Baba.
In this memoir, filled with bittersweet stories, Brown writes about her unusual, painful and confusing childhood in which she was regularly bullied by her fellow students at a strict Catholic school, stoned by other kids when she stepped outside the ashram and neglected by her parents.
Her mother, who still lives at the ashram and thinks Baba is God, and her father, who remarried and took his daughter back with him to America in adolescence, either disbelieved or took no notice of her complaints, so Rachel developed her own survival mechanisms.
She writes about the eccentric characters who surrounded her - holy madmen, a psychotic librarian, middle-aged male virgins and a delusional Russian, among others. Even as a child, Rachel was too cynical to follow her mother's passionate embrace of Baba (best known as guru of The Who's Pete Townshend and for coining the insipid phrase, "Don't worry, be happy").
She kept her own counsel, kept her eyes open and in a witty, irreverent but bitingly honest way, wreaks good-natured revenge on her misguided parents who robbed her of a normal childhood but also helped create a gifted young writer.
-Yvonne Crittenden |
Marie Claire UK
Reviewed June 2006
Three stars.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Rachel Manija Brown knew she was different. Her parents were devoted Baba Lovers, followers of the Indian guru best known in the West for his motto 'Don't worry, be happy'. At the age of seven, Brown's parents whisked her off to India to live in Baba's ashram, where she was the only child. What with the rat-infested toilets and the brutal nuns who ran her school, it was all pretty grim. Somehow, though, Brown escaped with her sense of humour intact, and this memoir is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
- Tracey MacLeod |
Notebook Magazine
Reviewed September 2006
Rachel Brown begins her engaging memoir with the perfect quote from George Bernard Shaw - "If you have skeletons in the closet, you may as well make them dance". This book is all about her efforts to expose the family skeletons, while also coming to terms with her very unusual upbringing.
Rachel's parents, Dan-Anna and Joey Brown, first met in the late 1960s while attending Berkeley university, where they eagerly embraced the hippie counterculture. Joey's father was a Communist union activist, while Dan-Anna came from a controlling and unhappy Jewish family that disowned their daughter for her seemingly outrageous lifestyle.
By the time Manija was born (she assumed the name Rachel when she became a teenager), her parents were living in a redwood forest north of Santa Cruz, California, where her mother taught natural childbirth and her father worked at a school for the blind. Extremely intelligent and self-sufficient, Manija taught herself to read by the time she was three.
In 1980, when she was seven years old, Manija's parents decided to move to an ashram in Ahmednagar, India. It was one of three compounds in the town built to house the followers of the late Meher Baba, an Indian guru who her parents believed was God. Outside India, Meher Baba is probably best known for having been the guru of Pete Townshend of British rock band The Who. Not only did Meher Baba keep a vow of silence for 44 years, he also coined that much-used phrase "Don't worry, be happy".
The ashram consisted of some 30 middle-aged Western residents, 20 elderly mandali (disciples), 50 servants, hired help and a number of itinerant hangers-on, many with dubious motives for being there. Manija was the only child and she quickly had to discover ways to cope with her new situation, and protect herself from those who wanted to pinch her checks, embrace her or much worse.
Despite being Jewish by birth and a Baba devotee by parental decree, Manija's parents sent her to a Catholic school called the Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Saviour Convent School. Physically abused and persecuted by both teachers and students for being 'different', Manija's school days were a nightmare. And while she was given a great deal of freedom to run wild at the ashram, there were times when Manija felt threatened by some on the other dwellers, a number of whom suffered from mental illnesses.
When Manija was 12, her father returned to San Francisco to set up an import/export business. Six months later Manija followed, only to discover that Joey was living with another former ashram dweller.
In the last third of her memoir, the author writes about her experiences as a teenager and young adult, revealing the impact her time at the ashram had on her personality. She also reveals the real skeletons in her family closet, which she discovers after researching her mother's childhood in an effort to determine what had driven her parents into the arms of Meher Baba.
All the Fishes Come Home to Roost is both a comedy and a tragedy, as Rachel Brown delves into a curious childhood she was lucky to survive.
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