She is intrigued by Gandhi and the Congress Party, meetings of which are sometimes held at Aziz's house. Having been born and raised in India and with Indians, Rosalind does not see or partake of the societal strictures that bind and support the British belief in their superiority to the Indian people. He placed them with their bowls at strategic locations in the bazaar, and then late in the day he would gather them up like so many dolls who had lost their stuffing and take them along with all they had earned for him." Rosalind knows that there are people who will bend the soft bones of infants, leaving them misshapen and more pitiful than the rest of the beggars, and she and Isha suspect the Cobra of doing this, which sets off a tumultuous chain of events.Ī bit of a Cinderella story with many twists, turns and reversals, Small Acts of Amazing Courage is filled with small acts of amazing courage. On the days when they can sneak away to wander the aisles, they must first pass the rafts of beggars where they often see a man they have named the Cobra, who always arrived at the bazaar "with three crippled children in a cart. Rosalind and Isha love to visit the bazaar, even though Rosalind's mother has forbidden her to do so. The girls teach each other their native languages, although Rosalind's mother warns her never to speak Hindi in front of her father or he will forbid her to play with Isha. At fifteen, Isha is already married, her husband Aziz has running stall in the bazaar. Having just lost Edward, Rosalind's mother "could not bear for Amina to separated all day from her child," and insists that she bring her daughter to work. Although she attends school with other British girls, she has been raised alongside Isha, the daughter of her ayah, or nursemaid, Amina. Because of the death of her brother at boarding school in England shortly before her birth, her mother's weakened heart after the loss and her father's frequent absences as a Major fighting with the Gurkha Rifles in Turkey, Rosalind has a less than typical upbringing in a river town in southeastern India.
The narrator of Small Acts of Amazing Courage, Rosalind James, is fifteen. With Small Acts of Amazing Courage Whelan returns to India, the setting for her National Book Award Winner Homeless Bird, but this time it is 1919 instead of present day and the main characters are the ruling British, not the Indians.
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