My Passage to India: A Memoir

About the BookI am both very ordinary and a bit different.Annabel Mehta is known to many as the force behind Apnalaya, a non-profit organisation committed to empowering Mumbais urban poor. She is known to others as the mother of Anjali Tendulkar, wife of Indias favourite cricketer, Sachin (God!) Tendulkar.It was not the life she was expecting.In this book, she tells her remarkable story for the first time, from her early beginnings in wartime England, through to her arrival in India in 1966 to visit her Bombay boyfriend, Anand Mehta, and on to the roller-coaster ride that followed: marriage, motherhood, bereavement and grief, and the difficulties of inhabiting two starkly different worlds: the upper-middle-class South Bombay milieu of friends and family, of music, cricket and holidays with her grandchildren, and the dire poverty and deprivation of the slums she encountered in her work life.As told by journalist Georgina Brown, My Passage to India is a candid, elegant and effortlessly engaging account of the changing fortunes of a family and a city.About the AuthorsAnnabel Mehta was born in Solihull, England in 1940, the youngest of four children. She was sent to a girls boarding school at ten. After leaving school at eighteen, she went to the Royal College of Music for two years before changing course to become a social worker. She met her Indian-born husband-to-be Anand Mehta while at the London School of Economics in the sixties and married him in I966 in Mumbai, where she has lived ever since.In the early seventies, Annabel became a volunteer with Apnalaya, an NGO working with the urban poor to improve challenging conditions in the slums, first as Treasurer and then as President, for which she was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) by the Queen.Georgina Brown is a British journalist and theatre critic. She worked for The Independent and The Mail on Sunday for more than three decades. Between 2017 and 2020, she lived in Mumbai where her husband was British Deputy High Commissioner and HM Trade Commissioner for India and South Asia. It was here that she met Annabel Mehta and became fascinated by her story. Whilst in India, Georgina was on the board of Literature Live! the Mumbai literary festival. Having returned to Britain, she is back in the stalls, reviewing plays for The Daily Mail.