The Asian literary phenomenon of the 90s.

The classic Number One bestseller from award-winning author Vikram Seth.

After backpacking her way around India, 21-year-old Sarah Macdonald decided that she hated this land of chaos and contradiction with a passion, and when an airport beggar read her palm and insisted she would come back one day - and for love - she vowed never to return. But twelve years later the prophecy comes true when her partner, ABC's South Asia correspondent, is posted to New Delhi, the ...

Casting an analytical eye over Indian attitudes, the author further investigates the feelings that the vast, mysterious and agonised continent has previously aroused in him. What he sees and what he hears only reinforce in him his conviction that India, wounded by a thousand years of foreign rule, has not yet found an ideology of regeneration.

An account of the author's first visit to India. This book describes the author's arrival in prohibition-dry Bombay, bearing whisky and cheap brandy, when he began to experience a sense of cultural estrangement from the subcontinent. It provides a revelation of India and of the author.