Fishes Roosting – or Not

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in Indiaby Rachel Manija Brown

I picked this book up at the BEA just because of the title, figuring anything with fishes “roosting” had to at least be interesting. I hadn’t noticed the subtitle at the time, which gives much more of an indication as to what the book is about. This is a memoir of an American child whose parents decided, when she was seven, to move to an ashram in Ahmednagar, India. As a seven-year-old, who was already reading at college level, she was a bright child, so knew what she would be missing. Her parents were followers of “Beloved Baba,” and her mother’s seemingly never-ending quest for happiness prompts the move.


“Mani,” as her parents call her, writes a very interesting memoir of her life from that point forward. If you ever had any daydreams about how wonderful and simple life would be in rural India, this will disabuse you of that notion pretty quickly. The authors is a sharp observer of everything around her, and as the only child in the ashram, is even more of a misfit than even her parents.


And if she left the compound, the local children would throw rocks at her, so her only solace was the Catholic school she attended, but even there, as the daughter of a mother who constantly chanted to “Baba, Baba, Baba will help us,” she found the mandatory religion class puzzling. She struggles as all kids do, figuring out her place in the community and the world, even as her parents’ marriage falls apart, and she and her father (and, it turns out, her future step-mother and her father’s business partner) move back to America when she is 12. She spends enough of her life in both places to never feel quite at home in either. As an adult she returns to India, and tries to figure things out.


All in all, it is a fascinating book, though one is glad not to have lived her life, though it is not as horrifying as I may have made it seem, more confusing and frustrating. And there are no “fishes” in the book at all, the title comes from something her step-mother says, and the step-mother doesn’t even “get” her protest that “fishes don’t roost!” or care.


The last paragraph of the book is really the best, and why I gave a copy of the book to my journalism/communications major niece. If people interest you, you might enjoy this memoir as well.