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All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India

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"All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India" is Rachel Manija Brown's enchanting chronicle of growing up in an ashram in India. In 1980, when she was 7, her hippie parents moved her with them from Los Angeles, Calif., to Ahmednagar, India, to worship a deceased Indian guru named Baba, whom they referred to as "God." (Baba's the one who coined the phrase "Don't worry, be happy.") In Ahmednagar, she tells us, "the seasons consisted of Unpleasantly Hot, Unbearably Hot, and for two months every few years, Soaking Wet." Her parents sent her to a Catholic school, where she was forced to endure punishment at whim from the sadistic, "ruler-wielding nuns." Add to that the unending poverty in India and the constant dangers from the hostile environment - including king cobras - and there was plenty for a young girl to find disagreeable.

Brown describes her travels with her parents around the countryside and introduces us to the eccentric disciples of Baba and their bizarre rituals. She talks about Indian religion and history and has an interesting insight into Hindu mythology. I identified with the young girl who, from a very early age, found companionship in books. In the funny coming-of-age memoir, she reveals honest feelings: "I took malicious pleasure in things that freaked out Mom. It was nothing personal. I would have also enjoyed things that freaked out Dad, except that nothing ever did." It reads like a novel because of her easy writing style, and she often comes up with strange but lovely phrasing, as when, after a big rain, she says, "The air smelled of fresh water that is still but not stagnant, a green smell touched with blue." She made me laugh out loud, and several times I audibly gasped at the surprising, even shocking, events.

It has instantly become one of my favorite books. As soon as I?finished it, I wanted to call the author and thank her. Visit www.rachelmanijabrown.com and you can read the first chapter. Brown's account of her family's vacation at a hill station reminded me of "The Great Hill Stations of Asia" by Barbara Crossette. In that travel book, the author visited hill stations - basically, a throwback to colonial times - which are resorts built atop mountains to let the people find relief from the constant heat and humidity of the plains.

Sometimes cliches come true. I simply couldn't put this book down. I had laundry to put away, chores to do, and kept saying "Just one more chapter."

I'm slightly internet acquainted with the author, so when the book came out I bought it here, to support someone I "know" -- an interesting and increasing phenomenon -- and then let it sit on the shelf for several weeks. Yesterday afternoon I picked it up as I was cleaning the house, and read the first chapter.

And was riveted. Brown's eye for detail, her use of language, her humor and candour make this a pleasurable read. The circumstances she describes make it gripping. I'd cruise along, snickering at the eccentricity of the people around her, and then be stopped in my tracks, sometimes by horror at the things she and the children around her endured at school, and sometimes by the beauty she managed to find in a distinctly un-beautiful landscape.

What struck me in retrospect, after reading comments here and elswhere on the net, was something I didn't really recognize as I read it, though it was in front of my eyes. Brown doesn't ridicule the people who surrounded her at the ashram, she views them with the ruthless logic of a child, and all the while looks at the adults around her with the unspoken question "Don't you people see that this is seriously screwy? Is it just me?" The question is there in the book -- Brown was clear from the start that she got that things were skewed and that the adults didn't get it -- but I didn't recognize the voice and mindset of that questioning until I thought back. Brown was a rational seven year old set down in a completely irrational situation. That she was able, twenty or so years later, to write about it with humor as well as horror is a testament to her resilience.

This is an unforgettable read. Highly, highly recommended.

Brown wreaks a cathartic revenge on her self-involved hippie parents in this mordant, laugh-out-loud memoir of her formative years in an ashram in India. She was a precocious seven when her parents announced they were moving from Los Angeles to backwater Ahmednagar.

It was there that the guru they had been devoted to since their drugged-out Berkeley college days, Meher Baba (who Brown credits with the saying, "Don't worry, be happy), had established an ashram. "Its residents usually explained where it was by saying, `Get on a train in Bombay, and go east for nine hours.' "

From the start, Brown was appalled. "I didn't care about Baba....But I knew there was nothing I could do. There was already an envelope in Dad's dresser drawer containing three one-way tickets to India." Over the next five years a deep component of sheer misery would be added to that feeling of shock and helplessness.

She opens the book with an account of one of their rare vacations. The ashram "was located in what I had previously thought of as the most desolate place in India. But the expanse of brown-baked weeds about a hundred miles west of Ahmednagar was giving it some serious competition."

Stranded, Brown reads a fantasy novel while her parents squabble about whose fault it is there is no train to their mountain hotel.

"The novel's heroine, Harry, was a foreign girl who gets kidnapped by desert nomads and learns to ride bareback and do magic.

"Certainly I could identify with the `kidnapped and taken to a foreign desert' part, though I wished I were enjoying my experience as much as Harry was enjoying hers. I also wished three of her magnificent desert steeds would appear, so we could ride them up the mountain.

"Mom poked me. `Don't just sit there with your nose in a book. Pray with me.'

"On second thought, perhaps only one steed."

This pretty much sums up the family dynamic. Brown spent as much time as possible buried in a book, while her mother's response to everything was to chant, "Baba, Baba, Baba," and her father kept clear of the fray as much as possible.

Even the escape into books was made difficult. The ashram librarian was an unkempt, irascible Indian who took immediate exception to the compound's only child snooping around his tiny, dusty domain and began screaming at her to "Get out!" before they were even introduced.

School was even worse. A Catholic school where Brown was the only foreigner, it had English textbooks but classes were taught in Hindi. Brown, who had been an exceptional student, was soon failing. She might have overcome the language barrier if not for the sadism of her teacher, a type (not rare enough) whose professional zeal seems focused on the opportunity to bully those who can't fight back.

On her first day Brown took comfort in the thought that "Manija," the hated name that set her apart in America, would not be a problem in India and neither would its diminutive, "Mani," which rhymes with money. But after Mrs. Joshi introduced her to the class, she had the students open their books to a comic rhyme that poked fun at "Mani Mao," baby talk for "Mrs. Cat." Brown was thereafter known as Mani Mao and pelted with stones in the schoolyard and whenever spotted alone on the streets of the town.

As for her name, Brown changed it to Rachel the minute she graduated high school back in America and now delivers a word of warning: "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."

The ashram itself seems primarily populated by misfits and the mentally ill, whose ranks are routinely swelled with pilgrims from America. In all her years there Brown made only one friend, a boy who stayed for some months and whose father was one of the deranged visitors. Her accounts of their role-playing adventures are the only carefree, unfettered moments in the book. The adult she most admired was, in the end, responsible for the most harrowing, disillusioning and cruel incident in her childhood.

Although the life she describes is miserable, Brown herself never appears pitiable. Although resigned, she remains full of spunk and spirit, saved by her imagination. She never connected to Baba or spiritual life in general and comes across as practical, independent, driven and engaging. These qualities, along with her writing skill, came in handy at age 12 when her father left India and didn't take her with him. It took her six months of daily letters to persuade him.

Brown interrupts her narrative several times, giving the reader views of her adult life (she's now an award-winning playwright and TV writer) and relations with her parents. She includes an account of her decision to confront the ashram years by writing about them, and her parents' reactions and input. This leads to a last page that is so perfectly apt it could have been fiction - but you'll know it's not.

Funny, brave and sharp, Brown gives us a heroine and a writer to root for.

--Portsmouth Herald

This book has everything one could hope for in a memoir: information, entertainment, and enlightenment. The author's childhood in remote India would be horrifying in anybody else's telling; she manages to make it both horrifying and funny. Unlike many modern memoirists, the author manages to come to some peace with her past and with her family.

This book kept my interest from the first sentence to the last. It's a total cliche, but it really did make me laugh and make me cry, all while painting a vivid and engaging portrait of a childhood both foreign and fascinating.

I just couldn't put the book down. I consider this one of the best books I've ever read and certainly one of the funniest. Rachel is obviously insightful as well as brilliant. I plan to buy a few more to give away as Christmas gifts.

The author's childhood in All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India was distinctive indeed: not only did she come of age in India, but she was the youngest resident of an Indian ashram populated by hippies and fanatics. Her memories of her childhood there are permeated not only by cultural observation of India and hippies alike, but by humorous notes on a child's-eye view of a culture we rarely get to see: hippies overseas. A fascinating memoir emerges which is hard to put down.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The author is so very descriptive that you almost participate in her childhood with her-Yikes! She has a great sense of humor that softens some of the more traumatic experiences. You laugh while at the same time thanking God/Baba/Whoever/Whatever that you did not grow up with similar experiences. She gives you great visuals of life in rural India. The book is a fascinating read.

I loved this book and could not put it down. Beautifully raw and an insightful true story from an inspiring warrior child.
I too was there(as a young adult)little Mani. Thank you for sharing your memories.

Congratulations Rachel!

Rachel Manija Brown, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India (Rodale, 2005)

I'm not a big fan of memoirs, but I have to admit, once this one gets rolling, it's a great deal of fun. Brown, who grew up on a backwater ashram in India among what Nicholas Basbanes has called (referring to book collectors) the gently mad, writes of her formative years with an incisive wit and a truly twisted sense of humor. Any book that makes one chuckle and cringe simultaneously is doing something right. This book does it all too often.

More than anything, I find it unfortunate that I found nothing here hard to swallow. Religious wingnuts worshipping a dead guy in a diaper? Check. Pervasive physical and emotional abuse at a Catholic school? Check. Rampant prejudice? Check. Crazy drivers? Check. (Though it is tough to believe that there are worse drivers than those in and around Boston.) Adults who treat kids like they're idiots? I remember that one all too well. Brown reminds me of me as a kid, in many ways. Early and voracious reader, picked on a lot, much preferred being alone to the company of others. My parents were less crazy, but it's not too hard to extrapolate.

Because of this, and because of some of the less glowing reviews of the book I've seen, I wonder if there isn't more of a vertical market for this book than one might expect in our current memoir-crazy society. If you, too, are that kid, then I can't recommend this book highly enough. If you were the person who picked on that kid... eh, maybe not for you. *** ½