The Tainted

Description

The hills of Nandagiri,1920: the Irish Kildare Regiment is part of the vast

machinery that holds together the British Empire for the Crown of England.

Back home in Ireland, the Irish War for Independence is raging and is met

with a ruthless backlash; the Black and Tans-an English paramilitary force

set up to crush Irish dissidents-spread death, indignities and destruction

wherever they go.

In Nandagiri, Rose Twomey, an Irish-Indian, and Michael, a soldier from

the Kildare Rangers, fall in love, defying the social norms of the time that

disapproved of such unions. As news of the Black and Tans' atrocities reach

India, anger brews among the Irish soldiers against the Crown they've sworn

to serve, leading to mutiny, arrests, court-martials and executions. Rose and

Michael are helpless in the political maelstrom blowing around them that rips

through their lives and dreams.

Sixty years later, in those very same hills, families torn apart by those

turbulent decades are forced to reckon with the horrors of the past,

heartbreak, loss and alienation, but they may yet, perhaps, finally find healing

and belonging.

Through a love story spanning an era of Indian and Irish history, The Tainted

describes the continued disconnect that many Anglo-Indians live in, unable to

come to terms with being unwanted in the country they consider 'home' (the

land of their White fathers), the bitterness they pass down to their children

and their mutually conflicted relationship with a country they are unsure

whether to call their own.