Coolie

Munoo, in the touring car heading out of Bombay, is not entirely sure where he is going. He feels “mentally and physically broken […] sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man” (250). In the front seat, May Mainwaring directs the driver to head north. The young Mrs. Mainwaring, an Anglo-Indian by birth, has schemed most of her adult life to be accepted as a “pukka,” that is a genuine Brit, despite her darker-colored skin, which she once tried to bleach, and her distinctive Indian hair, which she tries to straighten and dye. She is tormented by her biracial identity and restless in her Indian home. She drinks when she is alone, and she happily uses her family and friends to network with expatriate Brits, desperate to be taken to England. She uses sex, her promiscuity another effort to make the right connections. She married first a German, hoping that the marriage to an Aryan might establish her as white. When Germans were interred in government-run camps during World War I, however, May divorced him to marry Guy Mainwaring, a much younger British Air Force officer. They quickly had a child, whose distinctive dark skin color indicated that May had the child by a lover.