Life In A Tea Garden

There is a certain elusive charm about Burner Godden’s “ Thus Far and No Further”—although people who like their i’s dotted and their t’s crossed will probably be irritated by the fact that it is about as endless, beginningless and formless as one of l peak '° UdS ° n ° ne ° f her Himalayan UNDER the title of Rungli- Rungliot, the book (a “distillation” from her private diary) was first published in 1946. Both titles mean the same thing.

Tn, , , . . , Th e whole action of the book—if you could call it action—takes place on a tea estate on a spur of the Himalayas near Darjeeling, but why Rumer is there, the reader has to work out

for himself. She may have been run ning away from her husband (she had her two infant daughters with her); or from the war (one feels instinctively that she is agin’ war in any shape or form). Or maybe she was just a poor mixed up kid at the time Whether the few months in the North Bengal mountains straightened h . e . r 9 ut ’ [t woul . d be hard to tell— -1! j - 1 . 8 an ,j X^sc^ e delicate prose and d would be foolhardy to take it ln ,f T ny 8f h i er Wa T • Nonetheless, it still manages to B lv e an excellent account of pre-In dependence life on an isolated tea estate that peeped into both Nepal and Sikkim. F

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