This is an engaging story about a young girl's questioning of the racist and colonial world she is part of.. Dindy lives with her tea planter parents and younger brother Pog, in isolated grandeur, with a beloved ayah and many servants in pre-independence India. When she and Pog venture into the forbidden and dangerous world outside their compound, their lives are saved from a rogue elephant by a local boy. On another occasion their mother's life is saved by a new doctor - who to her horror is Indian. That the established order is changing is even clearer to Dindy when she discovers her friend Nikhil, the ayah's son, no longer needs her father's charity to fulfil his ambition to become a doctor. The uncomfortable nature of Britain's colonial past is not shied away from here but this is ultimately an uplifting story in its picture of a society on the cusp of change.