Nayantara Sahgal has written another gem of a book. The author has captured the horror of our times in a story where ordinary people become victims of nationalist fervor. I only wish she had spent more time in the heads of the main characters as they undergo and are forced to live with the aftermath […]
I first travelled to India in 1971 as a participant in the University of Wisconsin’s Junior Year in India program. A propeller plane trudged across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe and the Middle East on it’s way to the Subcontinent. My ultimate destination: Varanasi (then, Benares) in northern India, the holy city on the banks of […]
While I agree with many of the reviews that the book is thin on plot, for me the characters came to life and the relationships were heart-felt and extremely human (I’m tempted to say menchlich!). I refer not just to the relationship between characters, but also those of characters to country (the local scene and […]
At first, I thought my novel would be a thinly veiled autobiography. After all, wasn’t I Simon, the green architect who lands up in India? I dragged all the journals I had written during my years there and more or less envisioned the novel as a 350-page string of journal entries. But five years later, […]
Last week I was driving from one New England town to another with my wife and younger daughter, a junior in high school. During our gazillion mile tour of small liberal arts colleges, I was beginning to get desperate for Indian food – none was to be found anywhere. But it wasn’t just the lack […]